Greetings to all, here is a quick and dirty preivew from my desk

DHV round 2 is under development now. Still working out Cleopatra's mummy bugs, and rebalancing Lincoln against SintaCLAWs. For those that had seen earlier previews of the round two that included albert einstein,

he has been moved to round three with the gingerbread man or perhaps merie antoinette. Only time will tell on that.

Greets all,

Not exactly a productive or unproductive day. Some advances were made on the admin end of the site by jerry (many parts of product end of the Admin CP were fixed or expanded), Beetle added a drink to the martini roster, the Game and I did some debating over weather or not cleopatra\'s mummy / stripper theme was off base for DHV r2 (that jury is still out), and David Lovejoy and went over wave one of the sushi projects and debated what worked and what really caused trouble during the printing process.

All in all, DHV r2 is coming along nicely. This weekend will see some play testing of the 4 player version of the game, even if player 4\'s cards don\'t actually have a character chosen for them yet. It should be interesting, as DHV first started working as a four player game, and got modified when we decided to release it in 2 player starter packs. We\'ll have to see if the Rupp riders still like it, now that it has been through so many changes.

the Great DHV debate!

of all the characters you can think of from history, who has the wax to stand out and take them all on? There are so many we have thought up, but so few stand among the top. comment away on this post with your ideas.

here are but a few we have considered...

The Ginger Bread man vs. Albert Einstein

Queen Elizabeth or Victoria2.0 vs. George Washington

Benjamine Carver (Doctor Peanut) vs. A Peanut

Marie Antionette vs. Mother Therissa

Titanium Tesla vs. Electric Edison

Lenin vs. Che Guveratron

Solid Shakespeare vs.Liquid Snakespear

a few updates going on today. The events section, which has presented a coding issue from the start is no longer accessable. we will relink it to the site when it actually works.

Jerry is also working on the dumpster tonight. it should be live tomorrow, and have a few files in it for viewing.

lastly in this little news blurb we are testing a mirror wordpress site. when we get the bugs out, it should be more stable, but have fewer functions that what is live now. as always, tough call on weather or not we want to use it.

midnight oil running out,
R3aper

The Dogfighters' PDF, is now available for download. The file contains the full game, with F16s, missiles, and game cards for four players. You will require some experience with Adobe illustrator to hack it into printable pieces, but otherwise should be easy enough to print and cut out.

That said, we never could get the game itself to work in a functional way. there just wasn't enough limitation put on either player for either player to be able to guess what the opponent may be doing, set a trap, or a counter trap. And while I have ideas on how to fix this, the cost of cutting hexagonal cards made it less appealing to develop than Dust and Get Bit.

Anyone is free to post ideas in the comments below. Who knows, maybe you will crack the dog fighting code...

Crank: Jason Statham plays the assassin for hire, who has been berayed by someone, and has an hour to live. Well thats what everyone thinks anyway. Our high strung action craving lunie goes out on a rampage that is followed by the public of his world over TV and radio news reports throughout the film. The side affect of this, besides million in property damage, is that his body is producing enough adrenaline to keep him alive, well beyond the one hour given to him. Death will just have to wait in line till this man slows down.
A cray fun film, where our star trys to one up all his other action adventures to date. Filled with heart pounding action, and near endless amounts of violence, car chases, shoot outs, sex, and or stimulants.
Looking for a story? Surprisingly there is one, still isnt much, but it is actually important to this moive. Well, not really, it just happens to give a validation for the violence, and makes jsut enough sense for the watcher to shurg and go back to mindless enjoyment.
I would say that this film is a good mindless fun run, that if you need seomthing to kill time with, watch it. Not exactly background noise, but if you need soemthing constantly on your TV, this is a good shot. I walked out of the theater literaly exhausted from the film, not cause it was supper long, but the film just takes it out of you as you watch.

Smokin' Aces:
A movie that i really wanted to like, i did, i swear.
Potential movie watchers beware, this doesn't have specific spoilers, but it comes kinda close.
I am a big fan of the multi-arch style that is so well done in "Lock Stock and Two Smokin Barrels" and "Snatch," so when i saw a movie preview that promised a whole mess of sloppy fun, and a multi story arch, i thought this should be good. With a sizable cast, with some big names, there was defiantly a lot of promise. Unfortunately the movie left me un-satisfied.
Your Story: What's left of the mob has been split into two sides, and one side is/has snitching/snitched to the FBI. This prompts the head of the other side to put a 1 million dollar hit on the snitch. He's old Sicilian, and he wants his enemies heart. Now some of his subordinates get the idea to send in a different hit crew, and before you know it, every big name hit squad is in on the deal. Now there are 6 or so different individuals/groups all heading for this hotel, all with one man on their minds; meantime the FBI is trying to do whatever it can to keep them out.
The movie opens in a very split, gather the info from every source, way; which allows for every party to get an introduction. With all the different threads going, you start to see where things are gonna get messy.
From here to basically the end its nothing but bullets and opportunities.
The movie suffers from three distinct pit falls: first it has the unfortunate case that certain story arches just get cut at odd places, second is that there seems to be a loss in the ever important belief of time consistency, and lastly the movie lacks total conclusion.
By the numbers now. The joy in this style is seeing the stories cross and the audience putting 2 and 2 together. Now when you line up everything to converge all at the same place at the same time, and then cut your own lines for no reason, things feel off. This causes a rift that means part of the story being told doesn't matter. You still have the main plot line, then you have this side story that will only lead to one obvious conclusion that just takes you out of the flow of the primary story arch.
2, the time aspect. Probably the most important part of multi part story telling is keeping time with every character. Yes there are places to break and go find out other details, but you cant leave any single thread for to long. Being in a hotel, this movie finds ways of jumping from elevator to elevator where different parties are on hold. This leaves the audience with a split sense of reality, as one group will be stuck in the elevator for a long time, when for the same distance another group is in there for far less time. I know the movie is over the top, but if you are playing over the top in the real world still, you need to keep things consistent. The elevators just happen to be the most obvious time inconsistency, things like air flights across the country are relatively unimportant.
Finally at some point you have to get everything to a close. Yes the main arch is brought to a close, but thats the expected thing to happen, if that wasn't finished the movie would strait suck. I wasn't happy with the end, but the plot twist that is introduced makes sense and feels right. The annoyance comes when the other threads are left dangling. a big gaping "WHAT HAPPENED TO..." seems to fill the final sequences of the movie.
Like i said, i really wanted to like this movie, but i left feeling unsatisfied, and i was the one in the group giving it the most credit. So i think i would have to give it a low C, which in some ways is almost the worse grade you can get. A D you just laugh at how bad it is, an F, well at that point there is nothing to even smile about. C, you sorta wanna like, but you don't.
There you have it kids, a movie that gives the look of having mindless fun and action, mixed in with some cool multi-POV story telling; however, its sorta just takes you along and drops you where it feels like it.
For the Robots and other non-humans out there, There is some pretty tech to look at, and an on look at humans striving for money, but really there are better sci-fi movies to go watch.
Thats all from the Beetle, time to disappear again.

the site went through a few frags this week, as we simplified the layout to implement more functions that we need, ina shorter amount of time. the result is slightly too much white space for my taste, but i can live with it until we release our version 2 site later this year.

quick updates list:

the pages now stretch to fit longer texts, the profiles now upload avatar pics, the dumpster now downloads all of its files, the events section has been deleted, and profiles will shortly accept user comments and their owners will be able to upload text bios.

still a lot to do, but we are getting there
R3