Ok, I consider myself to be a pretty hardened individual irl. I'm not a small guy by any means, I've worked clubs, done martial arts, etc. I got the resume of someone who you'd think has a bit of intestinal fortitude. Well, I've got no fuckin game on this guy.

Ok, you're hiking along and a boulder somehow traps your arm. Days later you're still hoping against hope that you'll be rescued, but you run out of water. That pretty much spells the end is near for almost every one of us. Not this fucker. He cuts off his arm.

WITH A POCKETKNIFE.

You have got to be kidding me. This guy is a goddamn beast. That is inhuman. Imagine having to do it with an axe or something and it'll make you think "holy shit, ow". But with a pocketknife, there's just no words for it. Lets say that there were no muscle, tendons, etc... just cutting through the bone alone had to be sheer agony.

My hats off to ya man. One arm or not, you're a badass.

- Nighthawk

I've been going off on pretty random tangents over the past year or more because I haven't been playing a game that most of you were interested in. So, since my goal isn't to bore you, I've made very few posts that were entirely about AC. Hell, about gaming in general. Mainly, because I don't have anything positive to say. But, I'll lay down my thoughts on the major MMORPGs in order of release.

Ultima Online - There will never be another game that was so completely immersive as UO was in the beginning. However, the glory days have long past for the first major MMORPG. I left UO about 3 years ago and it was none too soon. UO has to be the only game who's GMs primary function was to enforce instead of help. And of course the game is so far removed from what it used to be. I know that statloss is FINALLY gone after being in the game for 5 years, but with Trammel its still a moot point. The pvp now is fair at best and its excellent pvp was what made it so fun for gamers like myself.

Everquest - Admittedly I have never played EQ. The reason simply is that it doesn't appeal to me because the pvp aspect of the game is so weak. I'll do pvm if I have to, but my primary goal is to play against other players. There is so little pvp in EQ that I can barely squeak out 4 sentences about it since it disinterests me so much.

Asheron's Call - I was moderately interested in this game when it first came out, but it was Ron and Nyar (Joe) that convinced me to come over to it "fulltime". Three fateful pool games and a friendly wager and I leave UO and come over to AC. A lot of people tried it but so few ever really grasped the awesome pvp this game had. This is the only RPG that I still play and still enjoy. The downside ironically is that AC is the exact opposite of UO as far as enforcement goes. Exploits are rampant and have of course changed the game irreparably. Well, it IS fixable, but the devs don't seem to care that pvp is fucked up. Their primary concern (like so many dev teams) is the carebears because they make up the majority of the clientele. So, the pvpers get left to exploit, play on an uneven playing field, or leave. :/

Dark Age of Camelot - Good looking game, but it is primarily a pvm game. Leveling is so slow and monotonous I just couldn't stand it. Being forced to have a group to do everything except the personal quests is a severe annoyance. I don't want to be dependant on other people. Hell, there is no pvp in this game - it is called rvr for a good reason. You need mass numbers to fight other mass numbers. There's no such thing as 1on1 or anything resembling a fight where a person's individual skills could make the difference. All you need is a group with varying character types - its as simple as rock-paper-scissors. You attack characters that your character is built to kill. Wee fun. Forced groups is not my cup of tea.

Asheron's Call 2 - God how I wish that this game played as well as it looks. BY FAR the best looking MMORPG ever. The graphics and the 3D engine are beyond reproach. However... the rest of the game is pure garbage. Slow, automated combat. Its way too DAoC oriented with specialty moves/ability and not enough of the original AC's variety. If they had kept a lot more of the original AC's playstyle and kept the AC2 graphics/engine, it would be the best game out there. Sadly, they didn't.

Shadowbane - I played it in beta and it didn't do much for me. I seriously hated the RTS click-where-you-want-to-go type movement. IMHO, that has no place in an ORPG. That started my lack of enjoyment in that game - the interface, the gameplay, the graphics, etc. Almost nothing seemed good to me. Several JoV guys play SB, so I'm constantly hearing about servers being down and how they in general are in dire need of an upgrade. Maybe thats what people mean when they tell me its like UO was back in the good ole days since UO had the worst servers on the planet. However, it has the best massive pvp concept out there right now. Town ownership, sieges, etc. All great ideas. Maybe I'll give it another chance, but I don't see that in the near future. Maybe if Joe can beat me in pool at the Las Vegas JoV gathering....

- Nighthawk

Once again, I will be deviating from the gaming theme of the site in this update. So, my apologies to those who are only interested in that topic.

As you all have probably guessed by my posts, I am a staunch patriot of the United States. I love my country. I don't think I ever went into where this came from, but here's a quick background before I get to the point. Both of my parents were in the US Army. Both of my parents served in Vietnam and my father served in Korea, the Dominican Republic and some other not so fun places. My mother retired a Captain because of me. My father was in the 82nd Airborne and went on to retire a full Colonel and deputy commendant (2nd in command) of the base we were living on throughout most of my childhood - Ft Belvior, VA.

I learned through their repeated sacrifices to respect the people in the armed forces. The all sacrifice. They do it so that the rest of us have freedom and so that we're as safe from outside threats as possible. They risk their lives for ours.

Anyhow, back to the point. My mother, Donna Rowe, was head triage nurse in Saigon in 1969. Yesterday, the Atlanta Journal ran a story on its front page that my mother played a key role in. I happily paid the fee to get an electronic copy of the article so that I could share it.

I understand that many of you won't care and probably an equal number won't get what make this a good story. But, for those of you that are not from those two categories, here is the article.

- Nighthawk

Saw this quote in IRC today and it was so good I had to look up the origin :

You know the world is going crazy when the best rapper out there is white, the best golfer is black, the French are calling the US arrogant and the Germans don't want to go to war.

The original is in the QotD above, but thats not really the point.

My problem is all these war protestors. They call people like myself warmongers. Thats just ignorant. Its a simple fact that if you are going to threaten the US, tell us that you are going to kill us when you can and if you had a nuclear weapon you would drop it on our nation's captial that same day... YOU ARE OUR ENEMY. And not to be blatantly obvious, but there is no fucking way in hell we should sit on our hands waiting for these fuckers to gain access to uber weapons and THEN fight the good fight. We're more advanced than you are? TOUGH SHIT. You want us to be your enemy then cousin, you got it.

I can't comprehend people that tell us that we should sit idle while people plot actively against us. If someone comes up to my house and slaps my face and tells me that when they get a gun they're coming back, that is their ass. No qualms about it, you just started something. This is the same goddamn thing except these people are threatening all of the US.

Fuck these idiots. My guess when this began was the war would be 4 days old before we occupied Baghdad. I'm pretty sure Saddam is wishing he never got our undivided attention. North Korea, watch your ass - my bet is you're next.

- Nighthawk

A couple of people were nice enough to email me a heads up about my guild, Joy of Villainy, being mentioned a couple of times in a magazine this month. So, I headed over to the grocery store today and sure enough in the March 2003 edition of Computer Games is an article on grief playing in online games. So I happily flip to the page I was told our name was mentioned (p.65) and read. Instantly I see the JoV banner and a caption underneath it quoting the old UO JoV page, "This page was created in order to promote evil and crime in online gaming." That seems to be the only thing they got right.

Not only did the writer of the article not have a clue why pks are pks, but they think that killing another player is griefing. Christ, this guy couldn't even get the URL right of the page he was quoting from saying it was wtf.com. Apparently wtfman is too long to remember for such small minded people.

I killed people in UO, looted their houses, and such and had a great time doing it. As a matter of fact, there's no single person that looted more houses on Baja than I did (only guilds came close). However, I never used one house break-in bug, never any kill bugs and to this day JoV is known as one of the more honorable pk guilds in online gaming. Even on Darktide which is filled with exploits, I held my ground and didn't use any except one which was widely used and sadly was still a mistake.

So, if someone is gonna play the evil pk prick, would you rather him be an exploiting idiot who doesn't give a fuck how he screw you or someone who bashes you without being a moron exploiting k3wld00d? Maybe that writer should have taken 10 seconds to email me to get some background. Of course, maybe if he wasn't quoting from a sub-section of wtfman.com that hasn't been updated since November 2000, then he'd possibly have slightly more accurate information. I'm not saying he did everything wrong when it came down to fact gathering, but only because its so obvious that it doesn't need to be said.

At least we were mentioned, I guess...

- Nighthawk

May not be the final thing, but at least I actually did something. Just a little preview of things to come. Call me inspired by the Superbowl trailer. So, if you want to wait for a 3 meg load or so...

View the WTFTrix Trailer.

Let me know of any problems, I am a bit rusty.

Enjoy. -Ron

Dear fuck, I live. Let me first start off by saying that I apologize for such a lengthy absence, I've simply not had anything worthwhile to say. The only difference between now and then is that while I still have nothing worthwhile to say, I might be updating once in awhile to say it. Lucky you. I may actually revamp the site a little with Rich and Bob, as I feel we're a bit outdated and lacking in the substance that we used to still lack to a lesser degree. Might be because some of us haven't been around since Necromancy was patched into UO. Believe me when you see it.

So what have I been doing the past year or three? For the most part, recovering from OSU-victory hangovers and other fun issues of the common life. Until recently I have been away from any gaming scenes to speak of. I hopped in the Shadowbane Beta about two months ago, and have been fucking with it on and off since (see below). I played AC2 for all of about three days before realizing it was a big pile of shit. Other than that I was away from the keys so to speak.

I can't really get into specifics about Shadowbane due to NDA regulations or some such shit, so I guess I cannot comment on it other than to say I feel it's coming along in the positive direction, albeit slowly. Go figure my first night in the game resulted in a conversation with a CCR, this game's acronym for "Customer Cervice Representative" or something of the like. In-game-GM's I suppose you'd call them. I unfortunately couldn't stick with my typical Medieval name of Ronald McDonald for more than about five minutes. Minor annoyance. I went on to go through several name changes due to the cowardly French. Fortunately they laid out the guidelines for me in a way that I could understand:

Hopefully this isn't against NDA. Name removed to protect the innocent.

I ended up going with "Runtime Error," a frequent occurence I may or may not have encountered a time or two in early builds of the game. This, too, evidently will be a name I keep for not too long, as a few days ago I was told I violated something or another again and players were complaining. They have yet to get back to me though, as I am still thinking of another name. I don't get it with some players, I tell you. I can understand fellow beta testers or the developers themselves trying to protect the integrity of their game and all but.. well, what am I saying, no I can't. Compared to other names I see out there, I have absolutely no idea what the fuck is wrong with Runtime. Maybe I'm just stupid. Who knew.

In much cooler news, I hooked up last night in the game with some old friends from Ultima Online Baja. Balinor, Spellweaver, Zacknafein, Carnage, Solstice, Venger, Galen, Obidiah Khan, Blackbird, Stretch, Darken Rahl ..a whole shit ton of guys from LoD I used to fight against / PK with back in 98'-2000. It was some sort of freaky high school reunion. Needless to say I'll be hanging out with them from now on in game, and it should be a blast killing motherfuckers (Beta Testing) with good people I know play a game the way I like to play it.

As far as the Sequel to the W:WTF movie goes (the leading e-mail question), don't hold your breath for awhile. I have been tempted at times to just show you what I have done as is, but I don't want to ruin it and show something incomplete that would be far better completed. I assure you that one day when no one gives a shit anymore, I'll take the time to finish it.

I'm off for now, but I'll be back a lot more frequently, I hope.

I hate mini-vans. - Ron

Good friend of mine emailed me this link. Good stuff.

TechTV Blooper

- Nighthawk