HBA - Jamestown: Delayed

The gameplay video of Jamestown is complete! However, it's going to require a second take which I probably won't be able to do until Monday, as today is my wife's birthday and we have plans for tonight. I'd do it now, but I'm currently at work.

In the mean time, check out this video of people playing cabbage basketball in Skyrim. If you don't want to watch it, at least skip the 3-minute mark and watch from there.


A big thanks to my friend Evan for bringing it to my attention!

Something new!

It turns out that screen captures take up a ton of space (over 1gb for just under 10 minutes) and it takes a long time to upload 1 gig onto YouTube. How have I learned this? Because I've just finished recording the very first video of myself playing a game and talking directly to you, the reader! Everyone knows of course that the only person that reads this blog is my wife, Aubrey, and she sounded pretty impressed with the idea, so I went ahead and did it.

The video itself and an accompanying post will appear a little later today. Be ready to be shocked and amazed at the wonderful feats of my incredible game play. And be ready to not be very impressed on a technical level. Turns out it takes more than one try to get up to professional level production quality, even when using free software! A second monitor wouldn't hurt either, but I'm not sure they make laptops like that. And who wants to pay for a docking station with two monitors? (Ooooh...that sounds nice.) However, I think it was a pretty good first shot and I'm excited to move onto a new phase of the blog where the readers get to see the game I'm covering in action, complete with commentary.

LawLS. Or LoL. Or League of Legends.

As the big mess about DOTA 2 and Blizzard Dota goes on, my only memories of playing the original DOTA in Warcraft 3 was playing a few times against bots and being told that if I played online people would be super rude and probably kick me out of the game. That wasn't very encouraging. So while I wait for the new versions to come out, I decided to check out League of Legends. It's free, so there's nothing to lose.

If you're unfamiliar with the gameplay, it's a hero-based RTS wherein your team of heroes (or champions) tries to kill the opposing team's buildings while they try to do the same to you. If you understood the jargon there, it's really not any more complicated than that. The "free"-ness only extends so far, however, as they obviously want to get some money out of you. But you can play almost comfortably with just the free currency you earn by playing and winning matches. Otherwise, you can buy points to get more playable characters, runes, etc.

Anyway, I'm having a pretty good time with it. There's some good tutorials in place and you can play against bots (for points) to practice up and try out new champions before going against real people. I've heard some horror stories about the community, but so far I've not had any problems at all (except for people with "Penis" in their nickname. What's up with that?). There's also a refer a friend program too, so if you want to try it out you should click on the link on my sidebar to join up! My nickname is MikeyH, friend me!

So yeah, I'm still not sure if I'll be picking sides with the whole Blizzard Dota/DOTA2 debate. Blizzard Dota will be free, so that's awesome, but it'll probably have less support and added features later on as well. DOTA 2 will be out sooner with more support and will probably be taken much more seriously in the esports community overall, but I hate how they stole a lot their character models right from Warcraft 3. That's kind of cheap. Either way, I'm sure they'll both be lots of fun. Here are some videos for them too:

I may have already posted this trailer here, but I love it so.

I wasn't able to find a trailer that had real gameplay in it, so here's a short gameplay clip of DOTA 2.