News: My Break

Wednesday, June 13, 2012

It seems I finally got around to letting myself take that break I've been really needing to, as evident by my lack of activity the past 2 weeks.

I said I needed to take a break, then went right back to work on ZNI, fixing bugs and trying to make some improvements. I should have released it sooner, but a few days ago I released a bugfix test version of Z-Net I on one of the bug report threads. As soon as I hear back with positive results on that, I'll likely release at least it. But there are a few other bugs I need to work on as well.

During my break the past couple weeks, I've been filling the time playing a couple SNES game on bsnes to give that emu a full try. I've been raiding on WoW just as I have been (4/8 Heroic!). And I've been trying to get back into playing Magic the Gathering again (away 4 years, and so much has changed even in the Eternal formats I play in).

With SNES, I've been mostly trying to get a Megaopolis in Sim City, something of which I never achieved when I was younger. Figure nowadays with the internet and guides being so easy to find, maybe I could do it now. But the guides suck really because they're incomplete and/or inconsistent. And most of the info I already know. I hate constantly restarting a map over, but the best I got recently was around 430k/500k.

With WoW, I have 2 raid groups. The main one with my Rogue, and the alt raid with my Druid tank. My rogues raid was stuck trying hagara for weeks. We had a choice between trying zon'ozz or hagara next. I felt zon'ozz would be easier, and the majority of the rest thought hagara would be. So we worked on her. Weeks and weeks later, after little progress on hagara we try zon'ozz for a change of pace. 3-4 attempts later, we kill him. I was right. It was a relatively easy fight for our group. Our alt group was stalling at 6/8 on normal for several weeks. We have to pug a few to many spots to often. But we did start getting the last 2 done as well the past few weeks. For heroics, all we've done is try ultra a few times, but that didn't go to well. That group only goes 1 day a week though, so we don't want to try to long on heroic bosses.

The Eternal format scene in Las Vegas died a few years ago. I only play that, as in my view playing the more common standard is more expensive, and a waste of all the cards I've collected since '93. Sadly, as far as I can tell, it's still dead. I'm only getting back into it because a friend reopened up a shop a few months ago, and in any variation of the game, I miss playing it. Hopefully I will still get to play plenty of Legacy casually though. I'd preffer tourneys, which I may see one soon, but casual Legacy is better then nothing I guess. Though I can't really expect the best competition with the best decks which is a bummer. Maybe in time something will work out. =/

For now I'm trying to get into various forms of PC based MTG. Sadly though the best program for it is the official MTGO with its unattractive pricing plan, and by some annoying miracle, no emu server has even been attempted for it yet, let alone made. There are other homebrew programs available, but they have a very clunky feel for a PC program due to lacking rules enforcement and automation like that of a game client like MTGO. And they have a bit of a learning curve as well. They seem best used/learned with friends, of which I no longer have any in which I keep in contact with if any would have the desire to try using such a program. Currently, OCTGN and MagicWorkStation seem like the best. I played OCTGN for a few games. It seems alright if I had a friend to play with. I played against someone random who described himself as the Legacy guy, and he played something random compared to my decks that are/were at worst "Rogue". So without finding a friend to play with, I won't be able to expect much from those. If anyone out there is into Legacy MTG and wants to try using one of these programs with me, let me know. Hopefully I will at least be able to setup some contacts with some real life people from my friends store, as I won't be going down there every week.