John Zeitler

Folks, I like me some hockey. While I’m a little disheartened that the Penguins’ season has been cut short this year (even though it was one hell of a series until they just ran out of gas), I happened across some really interesting news last night: Electronic Arts has signed a four-year deal to include teams and players from the Canadian Hockey League. The CHL is basically the training league for the NHL, and its teams are comprised of players 17-20 years old. Most are high-school or college students hoping to get picked up by a major league team, and the odds are in their favor.

I’m excited about the opportunity for the players to get some exposure and a little bit of fame before they hit the big time (because, let’s be honest, everybody wishes they were in a video game– think of this like your high school team getting to be in Madden NFL), but there’s another reason. The Erie Otters are in the CHL (actually the Ontario Hockey League, one of the CHL’s divisions), and I’ll be straight with you: no team in that league works harder than the Otters. They’re one of three US-based teams in the CHL, and they’ve won the OHL championship once– in ’02, while I was actively going to the games.

Keep your sticks on the ice, boys. Lord Stanley’s goblet of glory is waiting for you.

Warhammer 40,000 has been around for the better part of two decades now, and its players are varied in their ages. Having just turned 30 myself, I’d have to guess that I’m about in the middle of the pack in terms of age, even though I’ve only been in the hobby for about a year, and only seriously playing for eight months or so. However, there’s something universal about the game that appeals to a wide range of folks, and even though the crowds I hang out with tend to skew a little bit older, once in a while, I’m not the newbie.

Roughly three or four months ago, I took part in a “new players” tournament, the second time I’d been playing, and the first time I’d brought out my Space Marines chapter, not even half-painted at the time, but at least colored almost in my team hues. At that time I met Luke, a kid of about eleven or twelve who was bringing out his Orks for the first time. (Due to his age, I’m going to use an alias for him.) He’d conviced his parents to let him participate in the tournament, and there was a little friction when he explained to his mother that the event would run five or six hours. I was matched against Luke in the first round, and as a result I overheard everything.

There’s a bit of a stereotype of gaming and comics shops being seedy joints in darkness where youths waste days at a time, accomplishing nothing and possibly using the shop as a cover for less wholesome activities than, for example, tabletop warfare. I can say with conviction that I have never encountered one of these kinds of shops in reality. My current haunt, Legions Games, is probably the most well-maintained shop I’ve seen, and the players and staff are to a man among the nicest people I’ve ever faced. So, I felt it necessary to step in and let Luke’s mom know that he was perfectly safe in the store, and that if there were any problems, he could use my phone to call her. It took a little more discussion, but eventually, she relented, and the match went on as scheduled.

I won that round, but if you think I went easy on him, you’re wrong. He put up a good fight, and the scenario was the standard Assault on Black Reach setup (Orks vs. Space Marines, pretty much a wash if all else is equal), so there weren’t any inherent advantages or disadvantages to either of us. We were learning our armies as well, and I had the slight tactical avantage of having played as the Orks before. The point being, we had a good match, and Luke was really enjoying himself. I came away with the thought burning through my brain: “Luke’s a good kid.”

Flash forward to last night, then. My Imperial Guard army’s been assembled for weeks now, and painting it up is a slow but steady process. I went to the shop last night to try to get a couple short games in for the escalation campaign, when Luke saw me and said hello. I hadn’t seen him since the new-player tournament. He was eager to get a game in before he had to go home, and so I obliged him. We set up, and I saw that he was playing Space Marines this time around… kind of a reversal for us, really. He hadn’t played against the Guard before, so I gave him a few tactical pointers here and there (“Are you sure you want to shoot those? This tank’s a far more dangerous target for you right now…”), but again, I didn’t go easy or let up at all. He didn’t either, though it still felt like he was getting used to his army and their style; the Space Marines are average at everything, really, so tactics for them boil down to “know your enemy’s weakness and exploit that”. Again, we had fun, and this time it came down to a draw– a very, very narrow draw, as he got luckier with some rolls than I did.

And again, as I was driving home, the thought came to me. “Luke’s a good kid.” He was polite, amicable, and a little on-edge but still okay– I think he was just nervous playing against older opponents, which can be intimidating to anyone. When his dad came to pick him up, the two of us were going over the battle, noting what we could have done better and what worked well for us. He also signed up for the escalation campaign, so we’ll likely be playing more often– but as allies, since we’re both on the Imperial side.

It can get a little discouraging at times when all you seem to hear about is gamers going nuts or people doing stupid things over their games. I’ve lost track of how many dumb crimes were committed over XBoxes, or cards, or other amusements. But, knowing that people like Luke are playing, and learning good sportsmanship and good thinking skills– that makes me smile every time. And if I have to lose a thousand matches to get more players like Luke into gaming, then I’ll lose a thousand, and a thousand more for good measure, because in the end, everyone wins.

Had a great day, and a good evening that ended with a really interesting situation regarding Warhammer 40K. It’ll have to wait for the morning, though (I’m such a huge tease).

Also, go read Winter Melody. It bears repeating.

Playing against the computer, Split/Second is hard. It can be, at times, a cheap kind of hard (getting blown up instants before overtaking a bot, who sails through the explosion with nary a scratch), but the times when it’s not cheap are the times when your skill really comes into play. I’m not the best racer in the world by any stretch of the imagination, but I’ve had some races come down to one one-hundredth of a second in my favor.

Playing online, however, is an exercise in how NOT to do day-one DLC for a game. BlackRock Studios offered an “unlock everything” DLC key for $7 on launch day, allowing players who wanted to skip all that actual earning your rewards nonsense to have every track and car unlocked instantly. It should be noted that the key doesn’t give any exclusive cars or tracks, nor does it say explicitly that everything available via the key is earnable in-game without additional expenditure. About the only thing the $7 waste doesn’t do is earn the achievement points for you. This wouldn’t be so bad aside from the fact that you can only use unlocked cars in online play, and someone (like me) who’s using the Live play to blow off some frustration or try something different than the single-player campaign is going to be repeatedly stomped due to the fact that the other players have all bribed their way into cars that outclass everything else.

I’m not saying fourzerotwo did that– he’s good enough that he probably earned the cars the legit way. No, what I am saying is that now, I don’t feel so bad about losing constantly, and that I hope BlackRock and Disney patch the damnable matchmaking so I don’t have to play against the cheaters every single time.

So last night’s little soiree with Split/Second (also known as Concerto for Eight Automobiles, With Explosive Accompaniment) was notable, to me at any rate, for two reasons. The first was that, obviously, I managed to reach the long-hovered-over 15K mark for my Gamerscore. The second, though, was that it was a minor little brush with fame. See, Robert Bowling, the community director at Infinity Ward, is a well-known figure– he was just on Major Nelson’s podcast, and given the high-profile status of the Call of Duty games, he’s been in the public eye a bit recently, particularly in regards to Modern Warfare 2′s multiplayer. So imagine my great surprise when I happened to stumble upon him in a random matchmaking lobby.

Yeah, he blew me up. Repeatedly, I might add. I think I got him good maybe once. But I managed to lose two races in a row. Not just lose, but come in dead last. The closest I’ve come to gaming with a quasi-celebrity, and I blew it badly.

Oh, you bet I still tweeted about it, and I’m still excited that I even had the opportunity (there’s, what, two zillion Xbox Live players out there? the odds were flagrantly against me ever seeing his gamertag, let alone playing against him). But, as far as introductions go, I kinda wish things had gone differently.

Incidentally, and I say this now with more conviction than ever, you want to play Split/Second. I mean it.

Tonight, my Xbox/Games For Windows Live Gamerscore exceeded 15000 points. The achievement that put me over this plateau was “Qualifier (10G)” from Split/Second. My current count for achievements is 855 individual achievements across 102 games, totaling 15015 points. The average value of each achievement is 17.56 points, with an average count of 147.21 points per game (Xbox.com reports 21.28% gamerscore completion and 26.55% achievement completion, with five fully-completed games). It took 84 days to reach this point from the previous plateau of 14005 on February 24th, 2010. 78 achievements were collected in this time, totaling 1010 points, with an average value of 12.95 points, and a collection rate of one achievement approximately every 26 hours.

Yesterday was rough, due to work and recovering from my birthday trip. However today should be… okay, just as long. I am upset that I missed two posts in the last few weeks, but I’m still committed to this whole one-a-day thing as best as I can. So, I suppose we’re just going to see more brief posts until I get back to something approaching normalcy.

(I missed this day, too.)

I hereby declare that today is a day in which I shall exhibit a flagrant disregard of numbers, as well as basic mathematics. For example, 29 + 1 is undefined.

So far this weekend I’ve introduced my mom to Can’t Stop and Ticket To Ride.

So far, I’ve not won either of those games. There’s a connection there.