This weekend was an interesting one: I was going through a manic bit, and it expressed itself by making me feel very musical, in a scattered fashion. After the previous weekend, I’d bought some Billy Joel sheet music, so as soon as everybody else was awake I went through that on the piano. (With occasional singing and whistling.) Then, to work off some energy, I switched over to Rock Band drums; I was pleased to be able to make it through the Warmup songs on Expert, and while Killing Loneliness defeated me on the next tier, it has the rhythm pattern that I need to work on (regular yellow notes with red and pedal alternating, the latter on the off-beats). So I’ll probably return to that one the next time I’m in a drumming mood, it’s definitely good practice. Also, inspired by Kirk’s comment on the Experience Points Podcast, I gave Vaseline a try; a pleasant challenge on Hard but not quite as good for me to focus on as Killing Loneliness, and way too hard for me on Expert.

After that, Liesl and I did some vocal harmonies; and I put in my Pro Guitar practice, going through (I think) another four songs there. Also, that evening, we went through some recent DLC (me on non-pro Guitar, Liesl on Bass); mostly Yes, which I wasn’t thrilled by, though I’m hoping I’ll like it more on Pro Keys.

We had friends over on Sunday, so I didn’t play any Rock Band that day; I did find time to bang out some Ghibli music on the piano, though. On which note, later that week the song 風の丘 got stuck in my head via the excellent Brasta Ghibli album; it wasn’t in my piano book, but I found a quite nice guitar version, so I’m trying to learn that now.

This week’s VGHVI game was Shenmue II. Which I hadn’t replayed since I finished it almost six years ago; Roger never played either it or the original.

It was very interesting listening to Roger run into the warts in the game; there was a lot of stuff that didn’t bother me but that bothered him, from bad (default) movement controls (I’d completely forgotten the Dreamcast didn’t have a right thumbstick) to strange game mechanics (wandering around trying to talk to people to trigger the next event) to quicktime events to a hard-to-control job minigame. I wondered (and still wonder) how different it would have been if we’d played the original Shenmue instead, because my (perhaps flawed) memory is that that game did a better job of ramping you up; but it’s very interesting to reread my notes and see me complaining about the start of Shenmue II despite my having played (and loved!) the previous game.

That was Roger’s experience; mine was rather more positive. Things I noticed:

• I love the lighting and coloring in the game. It uses sunlight in an unabashed way that I’m not used to in video games, and the coloring is bright without quite slipping into garishness.
• I love the game’s embrace of mundanity: lots of unhelpful people to talk to, lots of stores that don’t serve a game purpose, the fact that you have to get a job, the fact that you have to buy maps (shades of Majora’s Mask…), the divorcing of martial arts training from the traditional RPG combat grind.
• The controls are odd, but get quite a bit better once you realize you can reassign the thumbstick to movement; even so, there are some interesting quirks, like the ability to follow people, the “look around in a room you’re standing in” controls.
• Ryo is rather a jerk to Joy, isn’t he?
• Appropriate that a game set in Hong Kong is so devoted to commerce.

But, most of all: it felt like coming home. I haven’t touched the game in six years, but every street was familiar, every face was familiar. Yet another sign that I should fix my Dreamcast: several games that I should replay, and Shenmue is top of the list.

Well, Shenmue or Jet Grind Radio…

I’m still playing Ascension a fair amount, and still trying to figure it out. I went through a big “trash your cards” binge, and in general that’s clearly a good idea. I had a game recently, though, where I managed to get a bunch of cards that let you draw more cards: after five or so rounds, I had two cards that let you draw two cards, one that lets you draw three cards, and as the game went on I got a few more that let you draw a single card. (And I also got a card that lets you draw two cards and banish one.)

In fact, such a high percentage of cards in my hand let me draw other cards to replace them after playing them that, as the game went on, I ended up going through all of my hand (or almost all, maybe all but two cards in my hand was a little more realistic) in most of the rounds in the second half of the game.

And, as you might expect, I steamrollered my computer opponent—I could buy or (usually) kill whatever I wanted every round, so I ended up with high value card after high value card. If I’m remembering correctly, the final score was 104 to 52, which is a ridiculous total and a ridiculous margin of victory.

Clearly I can’t count on such luck at the start of the game; but at least now I realize the potential when the possibility appears. And it’s yet another reminder of the value of dense hands. In fact, I’m thinking now that I should experiment more with not buying cards even when I have the opportunity to do so: yes, I’ll lose a few victory points in the short term by doing that, but the density benefits could easily outweigh that.

What I don’t have any feel for at all is how to balance profit versus capabilities. In general, I lean towards purchasing power rather than killing power, but ultimately killing monsters is the easiest way to rack up victory points, and they have the advantage that they don’t clog up your hand. Something to work on…

Last weekend I was pretty busy, so no Rock Band. This week, though was different: it was a three-day weekend with no plans outside the house, so I got in some playing every day!

On Saturday, I tried out a few more of the Expert Pro Guitar training lessons. Without a lot of success in general, though I think the alternating strumming ones should be doable and will be useful practice for me. And I went through three songs; I don’t remember the details, but I did enjoy the Doors one. (Not one of the on-disc songs, it was part of the free launch DLC.)

On Sunday, I decided to work through more of the Billy Joel DLC on Pro Keys. And that was super fun: I don’t think that Pro Keys stands up to Pro Guitar in general, but playing through Billy Joel can be pretty amazing. I’m not sure how many songs I went through on Sunday—maybe six or seven?—but I was very glad to have taken a guitar break and gone through those. Liesl started singing along, and that sounded like fun, so we ended up going through some of them on vocals once I was done practicing the keyboards; it turns out that his vocal range even matches mine pretty well! (Though I didn’t get to sing in falsetto as much as I prefer…)

I had two Billy Joel songs left after Sunday, so I went through those two today. And they were both quite something in their own way: Scenes from an Italian Restaurant has a couple of sections that are pretty ridiculous, but the song as a whole was a good deal of fun. (At least when I was getting the timing right on the off-beat chords—that song would be rather different with two hands, one of which was actually playing on the beat…) And She’s Always a Woman was one arpeggiated chord after another, which turned into quite an experience: the structure is there, just a bit harder to see because of the arpeggios than it would otherwise be, and revealing that structure in my playing felt great.

So I am now a complete Billy Joel convert. I’ll stop by a local music store on the way home from work tomorrow to see if I can pick up some sheet music, because I’d like to go through that on a real piano. And the singing was fun, too: I should spend more time doing that than I have been over the last year. Maybe Liesl and I will go through the harmonies for the on-disc Rock Band 3 content?

Last month’s VGHVI Minecraft session had us complete a pretty epic building project, so I was curious what we would feel like doing this month. And the answer is: not so much building.

At least I didn’t feel like so much building! At first, I wandered around, looking at some of the old sights.

Clearly our fences need some work

Midair ice

Skull mountain in snow

But then, once I’d reached the end of the familiar territory, I decided to just keep on going north, taking pictures along the way.

A beach with a squid-filled lake-

Close-up view of squid

Torches on ice

Clearly that last one was a previously-explored area of the world, but that was the last familiar sight I saw.

Looking down into a deep cave

Looking up from the bottom of that cave

Steep cliffs

Overhang, river, and cave

Hazy ocean view

A bizarrely bumpy valley

Bright ocean sun

Ocean stripes

Anybody know what’s going on with the strips in that last one? I assume it’s some sort of chunk-related territory-generation artifact, but I don’t really know.

Sheep in the rain

Sunset and island in the rain

Eventually, the scenery started taking a while to load, so I decided to mark the end of my journey by dropping off my torches and teleport back home:

Chunks are now taking a while to load

The end of my journey

I wasn’t the only person who spent much of the time traveling north; here are some of the pictures that Eric took:

Field with animals

Rain at night

Ridge, trees, and water

Lake with sandy beaches

Lagoon and ocean

Tree-filled valley

Here’s what the world map looked like once we were done exploring: pretty obvious which way we went!

World map

Anyways, enough travelogue pictures, now for some construction. Miranda started off by building another house, though I didn’t manage to get a picture of its completed state:

Building another house

Working inside the house

The beach near the house

Somebody (I don’t know who) also built a diving pool on the Acropolis. If you aimed right, you could go down into it from the skybridge, but if you were a little off, doom awaited:

Diving pool

Roger's remains

I took the dive myself, with a happier outcome:

That's a long way down...

Geronimo!

Sploosh

Miranda decided to build a smaller, less user-hostile pool, with its own diving tower:

Smaller pool

The diving tower

The view from the top of the tower

And Adam decided to smooth out the underwater train tunnel: the floor had been pretty bumpy from all the flood barriers I put in, but it looks a lot nicer now.

Smoothed out underwater tracks

The middle of the tunnel

Finally, a few last bits of scenery:

Tracks near the mega tree

The acropolis at night

I’ll be out tomorrow, but I made sure to get some Pro Guitar practice in today. Nothing huge to report; I did another one of the Expert instrument lessons (two down, I think four to go?) and played through four songs on Hard.

I did the last two Apprentice level songs; they’re probably my two least favorite songs in the game, both to listen to and to play on Pro Keys, but they’re not so bad to play on Pro Guitar. Well, maybe they would be once I got used to them, because they’re repetitive, but right now the repetitive bits are things that I could stand to work on. Antibodies had the surprise that I ended up with not only a higher score than Dan Bruno but a score almost ten times as high as his; I’m used to that happening in the other direction! (I assume he was having very much an off day and that it’s much harder to get a long streak on Expert on that song than on Hard.) And Du Hast had one short repeated alternating strumming bit, which was useful reinforcement for that. (And reminded me that I’ve been lax about practicing outside of game…)

I then moved up to the next tier of songs (I forget the name of that tier, Solid maybe?), and did Centerfold and Twentieth Century Boy. Both of which were pleasant enough to play both muted and plugged in; I still have a lot of work to go on my fast chord shifting, but it could have been a lot worse.

So: slow progress this weekend, but that’s better than no progress. Next weekend will be busy, too, but I should have more free weekends in September, I hope.

I took a couple of weeks off from practice: I was busy playing board games two weeks ago, and I was at Def Con last week. (I did play once at work, which was a helpful reminder that I should give Pro Bass more of a try as well.) I was busy this weekend, too, but I really need to put in the time to avoid backsliding, so I went through four songs on Saturday.

Last time, it became clear that I needed to work on my alternating strumming; I’d put in a bit of time on that with the guitar unplugged, and it started going better almost immediately. I wanted to find out how much of an effect that had had in game, so I went back through Rock Lobster; before, I’d only managed to successfully finish one of the training segments, but this time I managed to finish all but one of them! So clearly my practice had had an effect; I still don’t feel particularly comfortable with alternating strumming, but I’m at least capable of doing it not completely incompetently, and I’m sure I’ll get better as I keep going. (Especially if I continue to practice it outside of game; incidentally, the string mute really does interfere with alternating strumming, I think.)

I can’t remember too many other details of my experience this week, other than that Get Free was a good match for my current skills. I didn’t make it through quite as many songs as I would have liked; and it’s a bit unfortunate that the two Apprentice songs I have left, Antibodies and Du Hast, are probably my least favorite songs on the disc. Though the mercy there is that the reasons why I dislike them aren’t because of their Pro Guitar parts…

I’m looking forward to moving up a tier of songs next week!

I wanted a board game to play on the way to Def Con, so I got a copy of the iPad version of Ascension. Which certainly did its job of amusing us while traveling, and I’ve dipped into it a reasonable amount since then. (Zippy has had several achy nights recently, and Ascension is a nice way to pass the time while cuddling with him.)

I’m still trying to figure it out, though I’m slowly getting better. For a while, it seemed like I had a greater than 50% success rate playing against one AI but a worse than 33% success rate playing against two AIs; this suggests to me that I’m okay at executing on a fixed long-term plan but not very good at adapting to changing circumstances? (Both because you see fewer cards in a larger game and because more changes on the board between turns.) Recently, though, my success rate on matches against two AIs has increased; part of that is that I understand Mechana Constructs better (I’ve started to think of them as monsters that you can beat with the non-attack currency), and also maybe I’m getting a bit better at dealing with different scenarios in the start of the game? Or it could just be luck of the draw…

I’m still trying to figure out the start of the game, though: I like 5/3 starting hands much more than 4/4 starts (and the difference seems more pronounced and more banal than the difference between 4/3 and 5/2 starts in Dominion), and in particular I’m not at all comfortable with either being flooded with Heavy Infantry or with avoiding them and leaving points on the board during the opening. I’ve gotten a lot more comfortable with trashing cards from my hand (these days I generally actively seek out cards that let me do so, possibly more so than is wise), but I’m not very good with cards that let you trash something on the board.

That latter bit also relates to an effect of playing on the iPad: I don’t pay nearly as much attention to what my opponents are up to as I do when playing games with physical cards. Definitely a drawback, though it got a lot better (when playing against humans) when we changed our seating arrangement so we could all see the machine instead of passing it along a row.

Glad to have bought it, glad to have it around, but right now I’m thinking I like Dominion a fair amount more. But, sadly, there’s no iPad version of Dominion, so I’ll make do with what’s available.

Last time, I’d laid down track to my other house; now it’s time to build a train station!

The site for the station

After some pacing around, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with the station. But I’d always planned for it to connect with an eventual second floor of the house (which didn’t even have a ceiling yet for its first floor!), so I decided to start there. I’d already built stairs running up the back of the first floor through the hill near the train station; I dug another corridor next to them, and started putting blocks in place to form the second story.

Trying out options for the roof line and the second story

The first floor now has a ceiling

Eventually, I decided that the second story would be smaller than the first story, with a balcony around most of it, to ease the transition with (most of) the surrounding area.

Putting the balcony fence in place

Starting work on the walls of the second story

The side of the walls near the sand

A view of the moon through the corridor from the second floor to the train station

I decided to put a flat dirt/grass roof on top of the second story, partly to blend with the hill and partly because I couldn’t think of anything fancier that I liked.

A view of the pool from the roof

A view of the tracks from the roof

By this point, I’d already put the train station proper in place; in fact, the above two pictures were both taken from the train station roof instead of the house roof. The train station ended up quite small (and was set back from the tracks instead of enclosing it): large enough to provide a space to enclose the stairs to the first floor and the corridor to the second floor without feeling cramped, but not much larger than that. For better or for worse, I left the sand in place; I’ll have to change that if I end up digging beneath it, obviously.

Inside the train station

A side view showing how the train station connects to the house

Here are some more pictures of the finished house/station combo:

The completed front of the house

The sand side of the house

The pool side of the house

The front of the station

Christening the station

The sand side of the station

Finally, a couple of pictures of the surroundings:

A view of the tracks from the second floor balcony

A mountain in the distance

And with that, this project is done: I have a working train track connecting two house/station combos! Of course, there’s so much more to do: I’d like to put a whole little village around this house, I’d like tracks to go in other directions, I’d like to explore more underground. But, for now, I will instead sadly and somewhat reluctantly bring this series to a close: it’s time for me to spend more time on other things. I’ll write more about that soon on my other blog; many thanks to those of you who have been reading here. (And, of course, the Rock Band 3 posts will continue here, so don’t go away!)

After last month’s VGHVI Minecraft session, our underwater tunnel had finally made landfall! Which was great, but I decided that I wanted to justify that landfall a bit. So I started off by extending the tracks to go across the island, and off of the stone bridge that Eric had built at its end:

Tracks heading across the bridge off the island

Riding the train back onto the island

Once I got off of the island, I put a temporary stopping place, and started to extend the tracks further; Pat took over soon after that, and found a nearby cave to dive into.

Tracks enter a cave

Looking back out of the cave

Inside the cave

We made it out of that cave after not too long (David Sahlin had joined the fun by this point, I believe), at which point we dived into a second cave. And that cave was very deep indeed: it took a few tries to get enough booster rail to successfully navigate several of the sections. But eventually we succeeded and made it out.

Tracks going down

And down and down

Now we're heading up again

At about this point, I took some pictures of Jonathan blowing things up; I think it was in the second of those caves, but I could be wrong.

Preparing for an explosion

Boom!

Once we got out of the second cave, we were starting to get close to our inhabited area; the tracks went past the super tree, and ended up near the temple.

View of the super tree from the tracks

The end of the new tracks near the acropolis

The track had a couple of interruptions; we decided to turn it into a continuous run. But it was a long run (I think Pat timed it at over three minutes), so we needed to fence it off to avoid interruptions from livestock; we did that via a mixture of fences and glass.

Fencing off the track

We used glass to fence off this section

A sheep surveys the glassed off track

Taking a ride through a glassed-off section

A rather amusing chunk loading error during this process

Miranda’s main project this month was a shipwreck:

The island that the ship would run aground against

Half the hull is in place

Working on the sunken part

Now both halves are in place

The finished shipwreck

Inside the hull of the shipwreck

Eric worked on a project that was at least partly a Myst recreation; he’ll need to explain it more, because I don’t understand all of it. In particular, I don’t remember what was going on with this huge hole (maybe Jonathan did that? I don’t think so, but I could be wrong):

A huge hole, formed by TNT

The explosion site from a distance

Some mysterious square platforms

A library with a switch

And finally, a couple of pictures of the apartments from last month lit up at night:

Apartments at night

The other side of the apartments, from a distance