News Flash: People Are Supposed To Work For Free

This just in! Businesses aren’t supposed to be paid for the services they provide!

Or, at least according to one of my clients, they aren’t.

For over a year now I have been dealing with bullshit from one of my clients. I work for an independent design studio, and we have a client who treats us as his internal design department, flying in the door unannounced spouting off about his latest project that has to get done yesterday. He seems surprised when we don’t have his projects open on our monitors, as though he doesn’t understand that we have (gasp!) other clients. Say it ain’t so!

On top of that, we also have to put up with his belief that if he asks us to do the work, and we do the work, and then the project falls through on his end, that he doesn’t need to pay us for our time. The latest hullabaloo from him is that we’ve charged him for a project that looks similar to a previous project we did for him (silly me for wanting to show some consistency in the work we do for him). He claims that because the projects look similar, we should have only had to have put a few minutes into the job, so why should he be charged?

The best solution is simply to cut him loose, tell him that it’s not a good fit for us, and that we wish him all the best. As easy as that sounds, it’s really not. Getting rid of clients really isn’t a good business practice, but either is working with people who don’t want to pay you.

If I had been bombarded by gamma radiation at some point in the past, I’d be turning into a big green monster and rampaging through the streets right about now.

It’s Official – I’m an Idiot

After my rant about Arkham Horror the other day, I’m both embarassed and ashamed to post here that I totally screwed up the game rules, and that’s why the game seemed so impossible.

You don’t pick up a Mythos card after every player’s turn – you only pick one up at the end of a round. This makes a tonne more sense to me. My only defense (and Melodie can attest to this) is that the rules don’t make this very clear.

So, with egg on my face and all that, this is Rob, signing off.

House-Ruling the Crap out of Arkham Horror

I had always heard great things about the boardgame Arkham Horror. Long to play, yes. Heavy on the bits and pieces, yes. You need to have a 1200 square foot home simply to have enough space to set up the game, yes. But I had never heard from anyone how clearly impossible it is to succeed at the game.

Now, I don’t know if I’m doing something wrong, if I’m missing or mis-reading something in the rules, but it seems to me that the game is set up to make it next to impossible for the players to win. Granted, two of the four times I’ve played I’ve drawn Yig as the Old One that is awakening, which is stated in the rules as making for a shorter game. What they should have said is that Yig makes for a significantly more difficult game because it takes less open gates to awaken the Old One.

Here’s what I’m getting at. At the end of each player’s turn, a gate opens. There are a finite number of locations for gates to open in, and if a gate is already open then there is something called a “monster surge”. This means that out of each gate that is already open, a number of monsters equal to the number of players appear out of those gates. However, if the number of monsters on the board exceed the maximum number allowed on the board (for a four person game, that’s seven monsters), those extra monsters go into the “Outskirts”. If the number of monsters in the Outskirts exceeds the number of players (in this case, four), the “Terror Track” goes up by one. As the Terror Track goes up, shops in Arkham begin to close making it difficult for players to purchase the items they will need to win the game.

In my game last night, we had three monster surges in a row. In less than one full go around the board, the Terror Track rose to 3, meaning that the General Store in Arkham closed. We had a board full of monsters, five gates open, four monsters in the outskirts and two players in the hospital due to poor rolls when combating monsters. We called the game after four rounds due to frustration.

We sat around afterwards and discussed house rules that would make the game more playable. Some of the things we discussed were; allowing for successes on a roll of 4, 5 or 6 instead of just 5 or 6,  halving the number of monsters that appear in a monster surge, doubling the amount of monsters allowed in the Outskirts before the Terror Track begins to go up, and so on. I think one or a couple of these things would help with gameplay, until we’re either more familiar with the game or more willing to allow ourselves to lose the game quickly.

I’m going to spend some time checking out the forums at Board Game Geek to see if there’s some discussion about these things already, and to see if I’m missing something. More to come.

Mario Kart – Weee!

So, I picked up Mario Kart for the Wii a few weeks ago, and other than a short stint of me showing Mario & Sonic Olympics to my brother-in-law on the weekend, it hasn’t been taken out of the console.

I quite enjoy the Wii and the games I have for it; Wii Sports, Wii Play, the aforementioned Mario & Sonic Olympics and now Mario Kart. I think I can say without a shadow of a doubt that Mario Kart is the best video game ever created in the history of mankind. Not since those monkeys saw the black obelisk marking a significant jump in the development of man has such a leap been made. Mario Kart is to gaming what water is to survival – essential. If you have a Wii but don’t own Mario Kart, go out and buy it now. If you don’t own a Wii, get out there and buy one simply to play Mario Kart. It’s also believed that Mario Kart Wii cures the common cold. No, I’m not kidding.

The game allows for solo races in the typical way – the Grand Prix takes you through three difficulty levels, eight collections of tracks each, each collection contains four tracks. To unlock new characters and new vehicles, you need to do the Grand Prix. There are also the Time Trials, Versus races (simply a single track race for the win), and Battle Modes – a coin collecting mode and a balloon-busting last-man-standing mode in which you can play individually or as a team. These modes all allow for up to four players in split-screen format.

For those familiar with the N64 version of this game, the weapons are familiar and nothing new. Red homing shells, green dumb-fire shells, banana peels and time bombs are all par for the course. When you are hit by a weapon, the one you are carrying is dropped on the track for others to deal with. A great tactic? Drop a fake power-up cube right behind a real one. It’s tough to see and when someone grabs the pick-up cube they slam into your trap, losing precious time as well as the weapon they just picked up. <insert Dr. Evil laugh here>

Where MK really shines, in my opinion, is in the internet multiplayer races. You can register your friend’s MK number to race with them directly in private races, or you can join in on group races with up to 12 people from around your region or around the world. A few days back I had a four-player race with two people from the UK and a person from France (I came in second behind one of the Brits). There are also Tournament races in which you vie for points and bragging rights. These are groups of races where you gain and lose tournament points based on your placing – in a 12-player race those who place 6th and below lose points, while those above 6th gain points.

One of my beefs is that while in a private room with a friend, you can only chat with pre-written little sayings like “You’re fast!” and “Here I am!” and “Let’s take a 3 minute break!”. You cannot send your own messages à la the Wii messaging system. Even the ability to send short two line blurbs would be nice.

So yeah, Mario Kart Wii really shines and is proof for me that not only was the Wii a good purchase, but that the WiFi Connect function isn’t a lost cause.

Gamer Dad Weekly…

So I’m going to try this whole blog thing again, because all the cool kids seem to be doing it. I’m going to try to get to this at least once per week (hence “Weekly” in the title) and I’ll be talking about my life as a gamer, a dad and even my career as a graphic designer. The plan that Melodie and I have is to eventually buy a domain and get a host and have our own website for our growing family (which I will get into more later).

I’m going to talk about games I’m playing both on the PC, the Wii and what boardgames I’m either trying to track down or currently playing. I’ll talk a little about the podcast I’m involved in, the local gamers I hang out with, being a father and husband and trying to fit it all in without alienating the important people in my life. I’ll talk about movies, comics, novels, television and anything else that holds my interest. I will most likely also harp about owning a house and all the things that go in hand with that – like the drywalling project that just won’t seem to go away!

So watch this space. Grab the RSS feed for it and put it into your RSS reader so you know when I’ve updated with a new post.

Hopefully this one, unlike my other attempts, won’t go the way of the dodo.