Wherein many many people are killed, and screenshots are taken.

If you haven't read the post below this, do so now, then come back.

So, I'm still fighting a lot of Germans. But first, random screenshots.

Here's Massilia, the biggest city in southern Gaul. It's currently almost being attacked by barbarians, except I kicked their asses so then it wasn't.

Here's the site of a great battle between myself and the Gauls back in the day. Yes, it marks these things. Yes, that's awesome.

So anyway, I fought these Germans. Or rather they fought me. There was a first army that attacked, and note those spears there up front, and I beat that with seriously heavy losses amongst the hastati. And just when I'm thinking "I better retreat that army, it got thrashed," here comes a second army, which proceeds to attack. Well, in the end, I beat it and chased down the survivors, after which my velites were doing ok, but I had maybe 15 hastati and whatever cav you see in that picture. I'd also like to take a moment to point out a particularly awesome feature of the RTW camera, which is that if you press delete while a unit is selected, the camera will follow that unit. This is especially cool when cav charging, as you can see.

Now I'm going to go shoot bots in BFV.

So I'd love to post some RTW screens for you all, since I just fought a most triumphant battle with the Germans, but since printscreen apparently isn't doing screenshots these days, that'll just need to wait. Meanwhile, let's talk some more about the game I'm currently playing as the Julii.

The scene is just outside the walls of Trier, in Germania Superior. The year is 233 BC, and the north is gripped by the icy hand of winter. An army of 500 brave Romans is lined up on a hill overlooking the city, awaiting the sally of some 800 and more Germans.

They are led by Marcus the Infantryman (who has other names, too, such as the Brave and the Mighty), the most legendary general ever produced by Roman arms. By his will, all of Gaul fell to the Julii family, and his leadership sustained the Julii through the darkest days of the German onslaught, when Romans by the hundred fell before the spear warbands of the enemy. Indeed, through his prowess and force of will he has come to lead the Julii family at the young age of 39. His is a promising career, destined to rise farther and farther into the heavens.

His army is a good one, composed of many veteran hastati (infantry) from the Gallic wars, along with many principes (better infantry) and velites (javalin throwers) and even a couple token units of archers and a pair of ballistas. It is perhaps the mightiest army the Julii have ever fielded.

The Germans, too, have a good army, though it is led by some no name captain. They have many spear warbands, a fearsome unit capable of demolishing hastati and principes with ease. The only sure way to kill them is through archer fire, and Marcus has precious few of those.

They march up the hill in an endless line. The ballistas begin firing, then the archers. And still the Germans keep coming. Suddenly, a group of equites (cavalry) charge past the Roman lines into the nearest warband. It is Gnaeus Plinius, another Roman general, and his bodyguard. They meet a heroic end. (You could say that the reinforcement AI is a bit asstastic when it comes to cav.)

And still the Germans keep coming, through a hail of arrows and javalins, until they close to melee with the Roman infantry. Once the spears are occupied, the Roman cavalry goes to work, routing the enemy light infantry (Screeching women. I love it), and then mounting charge after charge into the German rear.

It is here that the career of Marcus comes to an abrupt end. A stray German spearman brings him down and ends the life of the greatest of the Julii. The battle is a crushing victory for the Romans, yet all are melancholy at their great loss.

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And that's about the part where you say "Dude. That really sucked. I mean, that really blew."

OTOH, I won pretty big. The Germans have maybe one army of comparable size left, and it's dancing outside the range of an even bigger army of mine that's just waiting to slaughter it.

Yes, that's a crappy screen. It's the only one I have right now. I'll get more later.

Meanwhile, I suppose I ought to talk about the game some. It's an awful lot like MTW, except for like x10 coolness factor. They took away the province-based campaign map, and now you march armies all over the countryside, which raises the possibility for being ambushed and such.

Which is probably an appropriate time for my ambush story. It's right after the Germans attacked me, and I just got my ass kicked hard. While my hastati had been pretty much sufficient to rampage on any and all Gauls that so much as came near me, even at 3:1 odds, German spear warbands were doing about that same thing to me, and it was sucking a lot. Fortunately, my Italian cities were just then starting to pump out some archers, and a really really big army with lots of archers marches north to bring the hurt to some Germans. And they're marching through some forest, and get ambushed. And yes, we fought in a big forest, because where you land on the campaign map determines the terrain you fight in, and yes that's awesome. But in addition to putting me in a big forest clearing, it put me on a big big hill. In almost perfect order. So the Germans come charging up, and I cut them down with mass missile fire. I end up losing like 30 guys, and most of that's to my own arrows. Pure slaughter.

Anyway. Also, fleets matter more now, especially since the Senate keeps giving me missions to go blockade random ports, which I do, and then get paid for. This is good. Think of the Senate as kind of like the Pope in MTW, except they're not assholes (yet - We get to have a civil war later). Too, you don't need to fill the ocean with boats to get trade, which is really really cool.

And now that you've heard both Marechal and I mention random besiegement of Carthaginians, I suppose I ought to mention that particular fight, because it was one of the awesomest things I've ever done in an RTS game. The whole exercise was one of those birds with stones things - I had a bunch of spare troops sitting around on some island I jacked from Carthage eons back, and it just so happened that the Senate wanted me to go blockade Carthage. Even better, whatever army Carthage formerly possessed was pretty much dead at the hands of the Scipii family. So I load up my troops, blockade the port, seige the town, and once I get some seige weapons built (you build seige weapons like rams and ladders and towers at the seige now. It's sweet.) I begin the assault.

A pair of seige towers goes rolling up to the walls of Carthage. They come under some flaming arrow fire, but they shrug it off. The ramps go down, hastati begin climbing ladders, and suddenly we're fighting on the walls of Carthage. ON THE WALLS OF CARTHAGE. How sweet is that? In short order, we're not so much fighting on the walls of Carthage as we are in the central plaza of Carthage, because when you've got 400 guys and they've got 50, this sort of thing happens. In any case, I take the city. Lots of city fighting in RTW. For me, it's mostly ramming down the gates of some crappy barbarian settlement and running in, but Carthage had some real defenses. So does everybody in Greece, which is why the Brutii are currently sucking - Macedon and Greece have a lot of cities, and they're all well defended. Scipii are sucking even worse, because they had to do in Carthage, and Carthage is buff. Or was, until I kill stole them. Which reminds me of that last bird - they set it up so you have to play as one of the Roman factions first time through the campaign. Once you kill off an opposing faction, you can play them. So by killing Carthage, I can now play Carthage, as well as the Gauls, and pretty soon the Germans.

Anyway. Back to smacking down barbarians. Strength and honor, boys and girls. Strength and honor.

(Oh yeah. The generals give speeches before battles these days. It's very Gladiatorish and cool)

So I'm holding, in my hands, right at this very moment, Rome: Total War. The goodness of this can perhaps be summed up by this Megatokyo strip, and let me say again that there IS a Megatokyo for everything in this life.

Now, before I go off to install RTW, let me point out two things. Firstly, the guy on the cover of the game sure is pissed off and screaming about something. Might I suggest that he's rather displeased at the decision to put a pair of chickens on the visor of his helmet? Just saying.

Also, I'm typing this from the laptop, because the big comp is currently generating terrain shadows for my BFV map, which apparently involves 16,777,216 samples at about 20k per second. And it goes through this process twice. So I could be here for a while.

Or minimum wage and awesome homecooked meals, as the case may be.

For those of you wondering how my weekend went, it was sort of like this. Friday and Saturday, there was much gaming, and it was good. Sunday, I rolled out of bed, and Cole and I went to work ripping up our front deck, which you may or may not know is like 20 years old and made of untreated lumber, which as you might expect sort of rots after 20 years in wet climates, which in turn leads to fun adventures like walking across it and suddenly not having a deck beneath you anymore. So clearly it was time for it to go, and clearly we were the ones to be ripping it apart.

Sunday promised itself to be a nice day, a good day, a day of sunshine and fluffy bunny rabbits and such. But no. Instead we got out there, set up, and started working, and the sky opened up and it rained a lot. Rained beyond the mortal comprehension of rain. So you could say we got sort of wet. But we kept going, pausing only to get hats so we could see what we were doing. And we got going pretty good - front stairs gone, five feet or so of the main deck gone, and...the saw shorted out. Well, that sort of killed that. Because, you know, pulling boards out rusty nail by rusty nail, bolt by bolt, just isn't happening these days. We go for sections around here.

And it all ended up about like this. (I'm me, Cole's Cole, and the tractor is the tractor. And it's a lot wetter than you think it is.)

So, that ended that. And let me tell you, when you're soaking wet and tired and hungry, no other shower in your life up to that time can possibly compare with the shower you take after that, and the food, well, the food will be awesome, and it won't hurt if it's the forementioned homecooked meal.

And then, well, I went and gamed, because we do that around here.

So Monday, we got going again, to a much much nicer day. A dry day. A good day to be working. And there was much ripping up of decks. First we finished with the straight part of the deck, and that wasn't bad. And you will note three things from that picture: First is our friend the saw. Second is that mud pit over at the far end where the stairs used to be, and that fern, which nearly killed me more than once Sunday. Third is the bit under the deck, still retaining marks from whatever made it all smooth in 1982 or whatever, which was much nicer, if still muddy, to work on. There was a bit at the end of the straight part where the deck turns into an angle, and that was sort of a pain in the ass, but we threw it over the front planter, and it gave up fighting.

By contrast, taking out the main stairs wasn't nearly so hard. And actually, the rest of it went fairly well, after we sawed it up into slightly more managable chunks than half the deck sized ones. Not that they were, you know, small chunks or anything. Also, you will note our friend the tea there.

The deck having been dealt with, we got to pile it all on the back of the tractor's little 2.5' by 2.5' carry deck and take it over to the burn pile, Cole riding on the back like, to paraphrase him, "some sort of hick version of Ben Hur."

And that was that. And the shower was Good. And the food was, well, even better. And the sleep, well, I slept for 13 hours, and it was good too. Still sore, but hey.

[edit]

And I forgot to mention half the good stuff, too. Like how, at the burn pile, we got the tractor stuck, and spent like 15 minutes trying to get it out of the muddy pit we stuck it in. Or how the construction of the deck was sort of baffling, ranging as it did from triple-bolted posts and pointless but belligerent tack strips to entire sections being held up by random 2 by 8s stacked on top of each other. Or how, in the salvage operations, we collected the following: Potting soil; a fertilizer spray can; a can of Bud Light from the '80s; a Folger's coffee tin; an old Tonka truck; a toy version of one of the Ghostbusters' guns; and a salamander.

[/edit]

Just for Regina:

Anyway. It's picture day. I came home tonight with Megatokyo Volume 1 and Volume 2, but I won't give you pictures. And they're both really cool, even if I've already read the comics online. But since I'm the only Megatokyo reader in the audience, you probably don't care.

Fortunately, I have squirrel aliens on my side, and you don't.

Also, I played some Mechwarrior, so we'll start with those pictures. The new set came out a couple weeks ago, and Ryan and Luke split a case between them. That's the background of the picture. In the foreground is a tiny fraction of Rema's collection. Rema has a lot of stuff. And my random stuff is all in back by the cardboard boxes, but the point is to say "Dude. That's a lot of stuff from the new set. And you STILL don't have any spare Jade Falcon infantry to trade me."

Also, we played a game. Here is Ryan's Gyrfalcon doing what it can to look menacing over top of that hill.

Also, and I promise I'll stop saying also after this, Mom likes to do puzzles way too much. And her obsessive sorting of pieces and such boggles my mind. So here's a picture of that.

And as it happens, Laurent finally came back from Europe the other day, and we went out and had pizza the other night, which was fun. Too, he passed on a gift from Stephanie, which looks something like this. To quote my mom on the subject, "Rabbits. You've corrupted her!" Muahahahahaha.

And then, you know, I was driving down the road, and I thought to myself "Self, you drive this road a lot. It's sort of cool. People might want to see it. Take pictures." So I did. Here's one from near the end of Cherry Creek a mile or so from my house, here's another from the foot of the driveway, and this is, well, a backhoe. Among other things, it's been sitting in that exact same spot for at least a decade, but that's not really the point.

And last but not least, this.

I swear if I have to type http://dwip.alsherok.net/images/temp one more time, I'm going to shoot somebody.

Whir, get over here.

Well, I thought it was a cool slogan, anyway.

So hrm. I don't think you all really want to hear about how Whir and I shot each other a lot at BF1942, though I ought to point out that the Italian engineer kit gets a bayonet on the end of their rifle, and that's way more fun that is legal. So's the rocket pack in Secret Weapons, for that matter.

Maybe I could talk about how Cole and I played Battletech, and Cole's Goliath Scorpion mech star held off an assault mech star of Hell's Horses stuff, finally retreating before the awesome might of the Dire Wolf Prime, if maybe not the Black Lanner Prime. Ye Olde Custome Night Gyr is, however, a fairly frightening sight, unless you're, well, the Dire Wolf.

Or, just because I haven't for a while, I could talk about Civ, and how I'm in two different succession games revolving around the Napoleonic Wars conquest in C3C. So here's RBC 15d - Austria and RBC 15g - Prussia.

Also, we went to the Rennaisance Faire on Saturday. This was fun, though these things are always better if you have money, which I kind of don't. Nevertheless, there was jousting, people in costumes, people selling sharp pointy objects of various sorts (and a few blunt heavy objects, too, for variety), and things of that sort.

So pretty much the Dire Wolf rocks, Napoleon is a loser for not breaking through our worker blockade in RBC 15d, and used bookstores kick ass.

That will be all.

Strip title courtesy, as always, of Megatokyo.

So the moral for today is to remember a simple lesson. No matter how good of an idea it may seem at the time, accidentally biting yourself in the lip, leaving a nice open wound, is not a good idea.

The reasoning behind this is simple: Dinner that is this well prepared and tastes this good should not bring this much agony.

[edit]

I put salt on the corn. Good move there, self.

[/edit]

We have, on the one hand, a particularly annoying start to the day, wherein I not only sleep for 10 hours randomly, thus screwing my early start to the day where I was going to do last night's work I didn't do last night because I was exhausted, I then get in a fight with Dad about said work.

We also have, on the other hand, my randomly recieving a $109.65 check for being wise enough to buy XP from Microsoft and then them getting sued for some random thing, resulting in my essentially getting a free copy of XP. Along with this, I walk in the house, and the whole thing smells like cooking turkey. So I'm getting what amounts to an early Thanksgiving dinner tonight. Awesome.

Also, random mention of squirrel aliens.

So, while I got what turned out to be the totally wrong router today, I also picked up U2's Slane Castle DVD. This, given my level of U2 fanaticism, might be thought of as a Good Thing, and you'd be right. Because it's good.

But before I get into the details of why it's good, a word on DVD players first.

It turns out that somehow I managed to totally screw up the DVD player in the living room while watching Band of Brothers the other night. Don't ask me how, but it's not recognizing any disc I put in there. That's bad. So there's always my desktop. Unfortunately, the DVD player in there is 6 years old and apparently doesn't work anymore. Well, ok. So I'll just use the laptop. No, the laptop says, you are denied. So there's the one in Mom and Dad's room, but I'm thinking no to that one. Same with the one in the RV. So I end up going downstairs and using that one. Yes, we have a lot of DVD players. No, as of two or three years ago, we had no DVD players. Go figure. We also have an entire mound of VCRs from as far back as the 80s that don't work, as well as maybe two that do. Movies are our friends.

But anyway. Slane Castle and the goodness thereof.

It's sort of hard to know where to begin. I mean, as video, it's sort of a shrug. Four guys jumping up and down on stage, except for the obligatory War-style flag draping and the bit where Bono is like "Look Edge! A beach ball!" and kicks it into the audience, isn't all that exciting. The music, on the other hand...wow. And if you've ever seen anybody live, or heard recordings of same, you'll get what I'm saying. There are a good number of songs on this DVD that I'm not particularly fond of, including pretty much all the singles from AYCLB that I hate, and those were still good. Elevation? Good as usual. Beautiful Day? Good as usual. Stuck In a Moment and Walk On? Still decent. And I REALLY don't like those two.

But we want to hear about the great songs, not just the good ones.

The first of them was a mere three tracks in. Until the End of the World was...damn. Electrifying, perhaps. Dunno. But it was probably the best part of the whole DVD, except for Wake Up Dead Man. You'll understand that Wake Up Dead Man is perhaps my favorite song on Pop, and one of my all time favorite U2 songs.

It is a pale reflection of the emotional awesomeness of the Slane version. Very pale. I'm listening to it while writing this, and I'm like "Enh." Eeeeeeeee. Worth price of admission, right there.

Kite was about as good as Kite can get. The same can be said of Where the Streets Have No Name, and Bullet the Blue Sky was...better than I thought Bullet the Blue Sky could be. I'm a big fan of the Rattle and Hum version, and this one is, say, ten times better.

And let us also mention the greatness of the Mysterious Ways bonus track. And while it's about the same as any other Elevation tour Mysterious Ways I've heard, that's ok, because I really really like said version.

Anyway. U2 fans, to the store. And sorry about the puddle of virtual drool.

And can it be November and the new album a bit faster, please?

As was so aptly pointed out by Laurent in a comment to the last post, I need to actually, you know, reply to my email once every so often. I've been pretty lax about it lately. Sorry. I'll see what I can't do to correct that.

In a more general updatish type sense, I'd love to tell you witty and entertaining stories about my life, but I'm thinking that rather than make up a bunch of shit, I'll just tell you that job hunting sucks, and being micromanaged by parental authority while doing so is even worse by large orders of magnitude. So the end result is that we all get pissed off and nobody acts altogether rationally, and it's just not good. So my message to all you would-be job seekers is this: Sedate your parents.

That having been said, the OTHER reason I fell off the planet this week is because I picked up the Battlefield 1942 WWII Anthology, which along with BF1942, which you may or may not recognize as the predecessor to Battlefield Vietnam but in any case should recognize unless you've been stuck in the Sahara for a few years or something, along with the two xpacks, The Road To Rome and Secret Weapons of WWII, which reminds me an awful lot of this game, which should tell you an awful lot about how long I've been gaming. At any rate, except for the really annoying thing where sometimes shooting people in the head with the sniper rifle just up and decides not to work, it's really fun. I've played all the 1942 maps, all the RtR maps, and enough Secret Weapons maps to know that the Bren LMG is my god. The MP, as you may already know, is pretty entertaining, which is to say that while being the Germans on the Omaha Beach map is much harder when there's one of you versus two other humans, one of whom is way way better than you (and the other is Whir, who as we all know couldn't find me in a bunker and stood there and got shot a bunch by my sniper rifle anyway), clever application of sniping techniques can turn a rout into a pretty close game. Just take my word for it.

Also I've been watching Band of Brothers again. The reasoning may well be obvious.

As to books, I read Bernard Cornwell's Heretic, which finishes off his Grail Quest series and which wasn't as good as you may have hoped, given the awesomeness of the other two (which is to say it was one of those "Well, I could write this, or I could be writing something I care about. Let's rush this one, shall we?" type books). Also I read some Harry Turtledove book that I don't even remember the name of, it was that forgettable.

Beyond those, the reading list continues to mount. I'm halfway through John Julius Norwich's history of Venice, who you may recognize as the guy who wrote some books on Byzantium that I rave about every so often. There's also Band of Brothers, Paris 1919, A History of the Ancient World, and A People's History of the Supreme Court for history reading. For entertaining reading, there's a couple of Bourne books yet to go, the Da Vinci Code because it's just me and that guy in Brazil who haven't read it yet, and Tom Clancy's Debt of Honor, because as I recall that was when Clancy didn't suck. Or I could be wrong about that. My opinion of the man slips more and more every time I think about it.

There's also this History of Naval Aviation that I've been going through. Because the airplane is cool invention. The cow was probably better, but the airplane does well for itself.

Anyway. I probably ought to get some email written.