So, today is the day before my birthday (June 26 for those, like myself, who are too lazy to remember what today's date is) and I'm posting about tomorrow. It's odd I know, but I'm probably going to be VERY busy tomorrow (yea fun birthday) and I already got some AWESOME gifts yesterday when I went out with the rest of the Alteil staff and a few other friends for some delicious fud.

First, the fud. Went to a place I had not been before, Daisy May's BBQ, on the west side of Manhattan. NYC is a great place for almost any kind of food you could ever want, but BBQ is kind of a weak spot. There are three places in the city that people seem to debate most often as being the best, Dinosaur BBQ, R.U.B., and Daisy May's. I chose DM's for a few reasons. 1. It's Zagat rated the best BBQ in NYC for the last 5 years. 2. It's the closest to our office. 3. It was recently featured on Food networks "The best thing I ever ate" For the Oklahoma Jumbo Beef rib. The tipping point in my deciding was honestly looking at reviews online where someone referred to the beef rib as "Candy Meat". Not "Candied meat, but just "Candy Meat". I was sold. Now, normally I'm a pork BBQ person. I like pork ribs cause they don't have huge pieces of meat so you get a very high sauce to meat ration, but I had to try this thing. And boy am I glad I did.

HO-LY-CRAP Huge. Thing was ridiculous. Also, magically delicious. Suck it lucky charms!

That said, I felt a bit like I was going to die afterwards. It's hard to really appreciate the scale of the thing in that image but its about as thick as it is wide. Mine (this is actually the one AnnaTheRed and DWildStar Split) was literaly about a 2"x2"x7" brick of meat. The bone, which it was only barely attached to, was about as long as my forearm.

My stomach hurts a bit just thinking about it.

Moving on, I got an amazing card from GGG and the rest of the crew that she drew. Sadly I left it at home and don't have a photo of it handy but I'll update this tomorrow or tonight hopefully.

Next up I was given GTA China town wars for the DS by DWildStar. We sort of have a holiday video game tradition now. I think he might have bought himself a DSi by now if my girl friend and I hadn't purchased him "Guitar hero: on tour" for his last B-day. At any rate. Got about 30 minutes into it on the train ride in this morning and am VERY impressed so far. I used to love GTA II (stupid being old) so this top down perspective is actually great for me. Adding in the map on the bottom screen makes the world a lot more navigable than the originals where as well. The timing was certainly right as I haven't done anything with my DS in months except work on my Japanese vocabulary. I'm a second grader now apparently.

And finally (though I know there is more to come tomorrow :D ) was another labor of love from AnnaTheRed. As most of you now know she is just about the craftiest crafter out there. From her now "world famous" (no seriously, like German magazines and such) bentos to her amazing custom plushes there are a lot of people who would probably offer a rather high price for some of her handy work. That's why I feel incredibly lucky to now be in possession of what has to be one of the most intricate plushes I think I've ever seen her make. And it's one of a kind! Mine mine mine mine!

BLADOW!!! It's chibi chief! Complete with absurdly awesome "My little pony" style feet. Ok, so it's not the toughest looking version of master chief ever, but if you thought that when you saw it, you're just jealous. CAUSE IT'S AWESOME! More examples of the awesome can be found over at the alteil Flickr page (along with more photos of MEAT!).

Anywho, thanks again to my wonderful cohorts for all the great gifts (and to my Dana for buying me dinner). It's been a fantastic birthday so far and it hasn't even started yet. You are all too good to me. :)

So this past Sunday some friends and I took a trip to "Mountain Creek" to do a bit of skiing. I haven't been skiing in roughly 10 years. My girlfriend, when I was a junior and senior in high school, would go once a year with her aunt who worked at a ski resort. The first time I went I took the "class". Walk ten feet up a very, very, VERY mild slope. "Ski" down said slope. Repeat. After doing this for what felt like 3 days, though was probably more like 2 hours, I was set loose on the bunny slope! Now the good thing about where I went was that they had 3 bunny slopes. 1 straight shot, 1 with a bit of hilly-ness and swerving and 1 with moguls. So I messed around a bit on these then went home. The next year I went back and took a little bit to reacclimate myself and stuck exclusively to those three hills.

Fast forward ten years: I went out on Sunday with a bunch of people. Some of us wanted to ski, most of us intended to "tube" for a bit and just hang out. I was leaning towords "toobin'" as I didn't want to slow down the experienced skiers and all the other non-skiers didn't feel like learning that day. (Un)fortunately the tubing was BOOKED SOLID for the entire day. "WTF!?" I say! "ts", replies the man behind the counter. "Fine, I'm going skiing".

Once I recovered from the shock of lift ticket and rental prices (stupid inflation) I made my way to the "sugar slope", Mountain Creek's bunny slope. My friends who are experienced skiers/snowboarders decided to come take a run with me to see how I was. We got off the lift and my friend Athas said to go ahead and he'd follow me down. I arrived at the bottom, turned around and couldn't find him. He pulled up about 10 seconds later, and said "That's it, we're going up the mountain!".

And so our journey began...

For a better view click the "View Larger Map" link above if its to difficult to see the window. The best though is to go to my GPSed link and view with Google earth plugin (not supported yet by chrome, WTF?).
Now, you may have noticed those 3 little tags on the above map, if so, gold star for you. And if you noticed them and said "boy, those are some vague descriptions that seriously lack in context", second gold star for you! If you are now in possesion of 2 gold stars I proudly present you with... a video!

For those of you who didn't get two gold stars skip the video. Hmm, should have posted that before the video. Minus 1 gold star for me. Don't feel to bad for me though, I've got tons of em.

So I was just sitting here flipping around the menu on my xbox when I noticed a "majors minute" about RE5 so I figured I'd have a look.

Now, say what you will about Larry Hyrb, I've had the pleasure of meeting the man on several occasions now and have to say he is an incredibly nice guy. That probably goes a long way towards encouraging me to watch his little videos cause other wise I don't think I could be bothered. At any rate I was watching said RE5 video and it breifly flashed a url, xbox.com/re5, and a the following text "013009 shift 5". I of course hoped onto my computer, proceeded to said , rather boring and plain, site and typed it the diggits. Sure enough the flash banner on the top went a bit odd and became clickable. Cool and all, if I hadn't already been to the ever so secret "http://www.residentevil.com/5/kijuju" before. I mean seriously. Anywho I poked around for a moment and got suckered in to this whole "share the secret video you found and we'll give you more videos thing", so I figured I'd abuse my power here by posting the link.

 http://www.residentevil.com/5/kijuju/index.php?fbid=lC15sIbTBIh

So, um, click on that I guess. I believe if enough of you do it I get to see more videos, which I could probably do with a quick Google search, but wheres the fun in that. Ironically this is the second time I've seen this sort of scheme online, though the last time it was supposedly done by a guy who was getting back at his ex by posting pics of her online and the more people you sent the link to the more pics you got to  see. Seemed absurd at the time but now that Capcom is doing it I can't deny the genius of this particular marketing ploy. Heck, don't be to surprised if you see something similar crop up around here one day. :P

Dear Canadian Iczers: I want your cheese.To be specific, THIS CHEESE! 

Curse you and your "Beyond good and evil" / cheese combo packs. Last time I got a video game out of prepackaged food it was chex quest!
And then I had a box of chex. Who wants that. But String cheese! Oh
delicious string cheese. To be honest I've never played BGE, but I've
been meaning to for years, and free cheese is just like icing on the
cake. Or cheese on the cracker. But not like creame cheese icing on
carrot cake, cause thats the best part and BGE would have to be the
icing in that analogy.

Did I mention Chex Quest?

I watched a friend play RE4. ALL OF IT. Didn't miss a single scene. I tried it out for a few minutes and COULD NOT STAND the controls. There is NO reason, in my mind, why it couldn't work like every other 3rd person shooter in the world. Even the slowing to aim thing has become pretty much standard practice since they did it in Gears of War, so freezing solid in place to shoot just hurts my brain. When so many other games have evolved so much in the years since RE4 came out I figured they must have made some serious improvements for 5, ESPECIALLY considering the world no longer pauses while you sort through you inventory (we shall miss you suitecase of guns ;_; ). But alas, it's basically exactly the same. There are a few layout option for those who prefer to use the "X" button instead of the trigger for attacking and such, but overal it's nearly identical. One nice thing they did was to map your weapons to the d-pad, a la: Gears of War, Oblivion, Dead Space, etc.

That said I did enjoy the bit I played of RE5 in the demo last night. I think the main reason I can say this is because I was mentaly preapred to deal with this, IMHO, archaic control scheme. Now, to be fair, I know there are a lot of folks out there who like the slow deliberate nature of the RE4 system (seeing as this is a site about a card dueling game, probably a lot of you!), but I'm a Quake 3 player at heart. I like the fast twitch action, being forced to think in miliseconds in stead of minutes. I'm not saying one is better or worse than the other, it's just always been my thing. 

One thing about the demo that does really tarnish the whole experience for me however is the way they chose to make up for the lack of an inventory system.  Where as in basically every other RE game you could pop up your inventory brief/suite case and freeze time, even with zombies inches from your tasty brains, to spend some quality time reorganizing your slots, you now have to plan your fits man bag marshaling. For instance the game seems to be very good about letting you kill everything in a given area and then leaving you the heck alone. It's wise to take these oportunities to find every bitten of hidden and dropped goodies you can. Reload your guns and mix your herbs while your at it too because you WILL NOT have a chance once the undead (infected? hypnotized? plaga-ed?) poop hits the proverbial fan. 

On the topic of the inventroy, still, I am curious to see how the puzzles in the game, assuming any exist, are delt with. It was common practice to carry about a few odd tokens or stones or cranks or bits of staue with you as you wondered all the previous games, but your inventory now seems to be limited to a 3x3 grid which holds 4 weapons and 5 other odds and end (ammo, herbs,.. um.... other colored herbs).  Should be interesting to see.

At any rate the game looks phenomonal and if you can deal with the controls should be an absolute blast. I do hope there are some good high tension scares like there where in 4 because this games seems to be even more bright lights and big explosiosn than RE4 and I do still want a bit of horror in my horror games. Now all that's left to do is run through the demo again and wait till the final game comes out. In the mean time, GO PLAY SOME MORE ALTEIL! ;)

Happy New Year!

That out of the way, on to the topic at hand. This is my first, in hopefully a long line of, Monday blog posts. We've tried once or twice in the past to get regular blog postings going, to no avail, but figured with the new year and resolutions and all that now was a good time to try and start a new good habit. With that in mind, I figured I'd list some of my personal resolutions. As a general rule I think they are a bit silly, as you should really fix your problems when you realize they are problems, and not when the calendar tells you too. But it's a good excuse for people to try and makes for easy blogging so I figured I'd give it a try.

1. Blog every Monday:

This is important for a few reasons:

One, because content is good. People like reading new stuff.

Two, it further helps you get to know me, and the rest of the staff and I think it's important to be as personable as possible in this buisness. We won't always make all the right decisions by you, but we do try, and reminding you that we are just a few normal, hard working human beings (nerds) here tends to make you all a little more forgiving when we do flub up from time to time.

Three, because it sets a topic for the week if I do it right. The idea is that, at the moment, there are 5 of us full time on Alteil (me, Logress, GaoGaiGirl, AnnaTheRed and EdgarFigaro) so we are all going to take one day a week that we HAVE to post. We can of course post extra when something comes up. Anyway, if I miss my day, then it's all down hill from there so since I'm "technically" the lead on this game, I felt I should take the responsibility. (even though I spend most of my time coding and Logress handles a great deal more of the planning.)

Four, Because I'm supposed to be some sort of a writer, least I used to be when I had the free time to do so, and I want to stay in practice with this whole blogging thing so I can provide proper coverage when I head of to Game Developers Conference and the like. Game news was really a jumping point for me to get into this business but it's something I found I really love to do and I don't want to give it up fully even if I never do it full time.

2. Bike to and from work (unless the weather REALLY sucks, i.e. below freezing, hail, thunderstorm, locusts, etc...):

So far so good. I've worked 2 days so far this year and rode in both times. While I'm not what ya might call "fat" (though some of you might you judgmental jerks! ;D ) I am not nearly as fit as I would like to be. In classic fasion I never worried about my health till around 25, when it started to become a lot more difficult to stay healthy. Blasted hind sight! Take my advice kids, start now. It doesn't get any easier. You all can track my progress on that here. It should be updated pretty regularly. Infact, if I leave the program running on my phone it shoudl tell you my location ever 2.5 minutes! o_0 This is why I don't leave it on all the time.

3. Keep to schedule:

Confession, I have ADD, or ADHD, or whatever they call it these days. Now, I'm not gonna call it any kind of disability, as I'm still a pretty functional person in most instances, but I am very aware that my mind operates in a certain fashion that isn't what most people would call normal. Now, is this from to much TV and video games as a child? I dunno. Could this have been prevented had my parents been more strict with me and less understanding and easy going? Possibly. Is this the right forum for this discussion? Not really. All I know is that there are things I have trouble doing even though I know I'm very capable of doing them and I've tried medication for it and it makes my life noticeably easier and better. Also, as far as I can tell the only real side effect was a lessened appetite, which helps a bit with #1. Ironically, I need to make an appointment to get my prescription re-uped. I keep forgetting to do this. Vicious cycle. I will do that tomorrow. If you catch me online Wednesday make sure I did that. ;) Oh, right.... schedules. Yea, I have about 10-20 things on the "to do list" at any given time and a very bad habit of skipping around between them and never finishing any of them. Need to work on that.

4. Take on some freelance work:

Now, this may seem counterintuitive after #3 but I like to challenge myself. Also a bit more money is always nice. Truth be told I got this job in part because of my knowledge of the game industry but also because of my mad "web skillz". I love computers, always have, and love learning new things to do with them. I learned to work with SQL databases on the first site I made for Media Blasters. I learned to make Flash play nice with databases on the second. I've done a few that allowed me to learn cold fusion. And the first Alteil site got me started on php and proper CSS. While I'm not master at any of them I do love learning new things and the challenge of trying to figure out how to get an end result with the tools available to me. Now that Alteil takes up almost all of my work time I think I should expand my extra office activities into more productive fields than beer and gears of war 2 multiplayer. I'll be starting this by trying to tie up any projects I've half started for friends. So if your one of the 3-4 people I have in mind right now then start harassing me ASAP to get to the top of the list! Well there it is. One post down, 52 to go. And yes I checked...

This has been GGG's thing latley but I found this and had to share. I personaly think the words "weave bacon" are a sort of poetry. But I understand how the result horrifies some.

To learn the other steps you can click on the image or here. You know that dish you where going to make for that pot-luck holiday party... prepare to change it!

Just fnished a delicious crepe brunch with Arakis who is in town for the day. We figured since, besides GaoGaiGirl, this is our first time ever seeing his face that you all may want to share in the experience...

aaaahhh.... just bask in it :P

Look out bandwagon, HERE I COME!

Like AnnaTheRed i traced on the monitor... unlike AnnaTheRed I traced my left hand, then flipped the image. o_0

Yo, you know what these are? These are my new shoes. You know what they mean? I'm gonna do mad walking tonight!