The Dord of Darien

Musings from the Mayor of the Internet

Hey beta beta beta! Swing beta!

So the Dawn of War II multiplayer beta is open. I installed it, and was pretty psyched about trying it out, but it turns out that it’s public multiplayer only — the private and local modes are disabled. And you know what? Fuck public multiplayer.

Now I’ll give you that I’ve enjoyed public multi games when they’re carnage-centric; I had some fun playing Quake 3 with randoms back in the day, for example. But you know what’s never been fun? Playing a head-to-head strategy game online against random people (and what’s even less fun than that is playing a co-op strategy game with random people, but I’m reasonably sure the Dawn of War II beta doesn’t include the co-op mode). If I wanted to hang around listening to trash-talk from teenage stoners all day long, I could just turn the chat channels back on in World of Warcraft. They’re off for a reason.

I was keen to see how the new system would play, with its lower focus on base-building and resource accumulation and greater focus on actual combat and tactics; the sameness of building up your base in every single level is part of what puts me to sleep about typical RTS, so it’d be keen to see if maybe I can stay interested in Dawn of War II the whole way through its campaign. Also, hey, there’s a co-op campaign mode; maybe I’ll play with the wife.

This is a "Games for Windows — Live" game, which I’m given to understand basically means it uses Microsoft’s Xbox Live for the PC setup. And you know what? "Xbox Live for the PC" is a shit name, but it’s about a thousand times better than "Games for Windows — Live." Attention Microsoft: sack your employees in charge of coming up with service names ASAP. I’m also not really clear on why Relic isn’t just using Steam’s own game-stats-and-chat-and-acheivements system, but, hey, there you are.

Still and all, if anybody’s keen to try it, let me know how it is. I’ll probably get it when it comes out.


January 28th, 2009 Posted by | Games, Warhammer 40k | no comments

Ragin’ Cajuns

We went out for cajun and creole tonight, and I have to say, it’s a very unusual cuisine. I’m quite fond of it, but it certainly reflects the peculiar characteristics of the Louisiana region — it’s an odd combination of styles. You get the latin style, with the heavily-seasoned mixed vegetables and rice, topped with mixed meats, but it’s crossed through fancy French cuisine at odd angles. The result is menu descriptions like this:

A delicious spicy combination of crawfish tail meat, shrimp, red peppers, yellow squash, broccoli, green onion in a lobster brandy cream sauce. Served with rice over a puff pastry.

You see what I mean? There’s all this brightly coloured spicy hoo-hah, and it’s accompanied by a brandy cream sauce and served over a puff pastry. It’s just about the weirdest combination of styles I can come up with. It is also, however, really good. Really good. And that restaurant in particular was excellent (which I’m sure will be highly relevant to my mostly-west-coast-and-international readership); it’s not a fancy white-tablecloth place, but the diner ambience and the blues on the radio seems to fit the cuisine better anyhow.


January 28th, 2009 Posted by | Food | no comments