Kaz

I’ve been meaning to have a boring weekend for the past month or so. I had been meaning to stay at my apartment as much as possible, do as little as possible and sleep as best I could (it gets harder once you start working full time, strange, I know). This weekend, with a veritable glut of board games, card games and video games in tow, I embarked on a wonderful journey of self-discovery: I rediscovered how much my ass enjoys couches.

I’ve just picked up a full copy of Carcassonne–several expansions to go along with it as well–and enjoyed the simple pleasure of organizing all the tiles, and meticulously punching them from their cardboard womb. I also snagged a 6 player copy of the seminal German board game Settlers of Catan, which easily transforms into the delightful drinking game “Drunkards of Catan” which was made more delightful when it easily came the closest to being the first board game to list as a cause of death on a birth certificate. I finally have my own version of Munchkin to trick people into playing and got to try some two player rounds of Chez Geek.

But the nerdery didn’t stop there.

I’ve been plugging away at Dead Space, Fable II and Little Big Planet. Dead Space was stopped, well, dead in it’s tracks around the end of chapter 2 mostly at the fault of Fable and LBP. I’ll be picking up where I left off and finishing that game, in fact, I made a pact with Tom that neither of us would take Fallout3 out of the shrink wrap until Dead Space was vanquished. The fear being that neither would return to such a wonderful game in the face of such a massive RPG (plus we both loved the original Fallouts).

I’d expected Little Big Planet to dominate not only my attention, but due to it’s easy to use tools, I expected my girlfriend would love to bounce through the levels with me.

Ironically I found a surprisingly different result. I spent a lot of Saturday in Albion, I was motoring through the story when my girlfriend arrived in the late afternoon. She watched for a while and asked if I had tried co-op yet. I was kind of amazed she was offering to try.

To understand my amazement you have to understand her gaming preferences. She likes The Sims, Time Crisis, Guitar Hero/Rock Band. She plays Starcraft and will play Unreal Tournament, but ultimately doesn’t care too much about action or RPG type games (except for her passing fascination with attempting to play WoW). I would hazard that she represents more average gamers than anyone on the podcast.

So I was shocked that a seemingly hardcore fantasy RPG would make her want to play. So shocked that I assumed she only wanted to play merely to participate in my obsession, doing something with me would be more interesting than watching my slave away as a lumberjack by my lonesome, even if the game wasn’t up her alley. As we played, though, a transformation occurred. She started to care that the gold she earned could be going to her own character. We went so far as to have her play through the childhood opening to have her very own hero to play.

As the night when on she commented on how she liked the game–that the game didn’t intimidate her, that it felt easy to get the hang of combat. Then she divulged that when I wasn’t around she could see firing up the Xbox to play through her character and hoped I would tag along with her, to return her favor. An interesting development to be sure.

So I was happy to see Adam Sessler’s latest “Sessler’s Soapbox” was devoted to how Fable II is a great starter game to get people interested in RPGs. I knew a game like LBP or music games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero could capture her attention. I was just shocked that there was such a phenomenon with Fable and that other people had noticed too!

More to come on this:

This is the last car blog for a while, but it’s a doozy. Next summer when the gaming drought hits I won’t be sad at all. Because summer is when the autocross season starts. Basically I’ll let the pictures do the talking, but I have to say at the outset that if you have a decent auto or know a friend who does makes sure you try going around an autocross course or a road track at some point in your life. You’ll realize just how little you know about driving.

 First of all, here are the two courses I ran at my first event (I went to another one since).

 As is custom at the autocross club I went two, they run a technical course in the morning, then modify it to make it faster and run it backwards in the afternoon. When I showed up in the much talked about turbo Cobalt, expectations were high. Many people had read articles about how fast the car went around the Nurburgring and VIR. In fact, as I rolled into the pit I could hear people talking about the car.

“Did you hear about what cars that beat at VIR in…” they would say. Which was a great feeling, considering I had the cheapest car of the bunch. My class consisted of two BMWs and a Mazda MazdaSpeed3, to give you an idea of the caliber of cars there, let alone the fully modded 350Zs, Corvette Z06s and numerous Miatas.

I got a couple pics of the car from a photographer who takes shots of the competitors. Sadly, no one came with me, so I didn’t have someone looking for my car in particular. Luckily, the club is very welcoming and the guys with cameras make sure to get pictures of everything.

Yes, I have a printout attached to the side of my car instead of real numbers, and a big goofy R to point out that I was a novice. I ended up being ranked in the D-Stock Class instead of the rookie class, which was good for the rookies, as I pointed out on the podcast I might have had an edge on them from my “experience”.

The next event I returned with magnetic numbers in tow.

It’s important to not a couple things here: 1. No “R” on my car anymore, 2. I’m coming out of a hard left hander here, notice the chassis is level and all four wheels are down, 3. You can tell it’s out of a left handed corner because there are pointer cones on their side (I didn’t knock those over). Not shown in picture above: my big goofy-ass smile.

So what have I learned autocrossing?

Well, that it was a ton of fun. That I have a lot to learn…

And that it will shred your tires if you drive as hard as I do. Maybe I need some race rubber…