2006 is here. I can speculate about what is coming for the hotel. But I don’t think I really care. I don’t give two shits right now how those idiots run the place. Why you may ask? Because I’m on vacation!

Starting at 7:00 am (or whenever the morning idiot gets in) I am on vacation! 9 glorious days. 216 hours. The place can fall down for all I care (it is), as soon as I walk out those front doors I no longer care.

I’m not going anywhere for my vacation. I may take a day to go into Chicago. But otherwise I’m vacationing in the game City of Villains for the majority of my 9 days.

Getting to level 20 didn’t just get me my cape. It also is the first chance at getting a second costume slot. As seen below with my flying zombies :

It should be noted that the City of Villains branch of the Acolytes of Destruction now are a grand total of three people. Me, Gawain, and good old Kiltorn. As always I miss the old crew. Come play with us damn it!

So this is the start of my vacation officially as I requested it. Once again the sheriff took it upon himself to give me something other than I asked for. Nice of him, but not what I requested. Makes me wonder if this is his idea of kissing my ass so I’ll be the helpful employee. Because that won’t ever happen without a raise and back pay.

So far I spent the morning of the first day of my vacation playing City of Villains with Gawain. We both made it to level 26 and I have six pets now. Here are some screenshots of the highlight of this morning:

The last two pics show the mission we were on. We happened to both lag out of the goddamn thing as we were trying to kill the arch villain that had just killed us moments before. So close. It was decided that breakfast was in order and we would try again at lunch time. What a vacation!

Day 4? Shit I have no clue to be honest with you. Going to Chicago today. My one day away from City of Villains. Which I’ve managed to get to level 28. I’m sure I’ll be playing when I get back. Since it has been the only thing I’ve really been doing while I’ve been on vacation.

Hurray! A quick poke over to the official Doctor Who web site shows that sometimes it’s better late than never for us Americans viewers. The Sci-Fi channel will be broadcasting the Christopher Eccleston episodes starting in march.

Of course we will have to wait for god only knows how long to get the second series. And when I say wait I of course mean getting it anyways via file sharing. Hurray for torrents!

Nothing like getting your ass kicked first thing in the morning. I get home wait for the servers to go up and I get to have my ass kicked by someone 20 levels above me named Pyrrhus! You just can’t understand how excited it makes me feel about the PvP in City of Villains. This roleplaying fuck named Pyrrhus was having himself a field day pounding the shit out of us lower level types. Check his bio and list of powers. His goddamn list of badges goes off the screen.

For an example of some ass kicking in the game be sure to check out Gawain’s video:

(Right Click and Save As)

It also should be mentioned that me and Gawain have joined the Penny Arcade guild Power’s Allegory/Affliction. This being the second guild I’ve been a member of outside of the Acolytes of Destruction. So far they appear to be a nice bunch and I think we will fit in.

Imagine a good Star Wars rts for a moment. Imagine a rts with 3d accelerated graphics that didn’t have fucked up camera control and many other problems. Push back the bad memories of that other one and pretend that this time it will be different. Star Wars Empire at War will be different. The demo is out right now and you can get it at the usual places.

The game is exactly what you would expect. No tricky camera angles and 360 degrees of freedom in the space battles. Which is not a bad thing at all. This is a real time strategy game that has a pedigree that is hard to over look. Empire at War is being made for LucasArts by a developer called Petroglyph. Take a look at the companies about us page to get an idea of what I’m talking about.

The demo lets you try out the set of tutorials and a sort of skirmish mode. You will want to go through the tutorials just to get used to the games way of doing things. The full game will also come with some sort of campaign when it ships in February. It looks good and plays good. It is quite a beast if you try to run everything on high and you don’t have an up to date system. But it does allow you to tweak quite a bit of the details so you can get the game to run good even on the older systems. The readme.txt has all of the details if your interested in the actual system requirements.