So I rented the full game when it came out, and I couldn’t even finish the campaign. There are a couple of outstanding issues that made the game not fun to play. All of them come down to the stupid AI of your units.

1. No patrolling. There’s one map where you must defend 2 ships while civilians escape a city. You only really need one ship to survive for a specified time to finish the level. Most of the damaging attacks come from air units. So I spawned about 20 pelicans and placed them right on top of the ship. I then started tooling around with my base and helping civilians. Then I hear squawking about how the ship is almost dead. I flip over to that part of the screen to discover one of my pelicans shooting at 3 enemy ships while the other 19 simply float in place watching. The enemy ships are completely visible to my pelicans, but since they weren’t being directly attacked, they weren’t responding. You have to constantly babysit all of your units because they are too stupid to defend a target.

2. Stupid navigation. I had camped out a unit out of sight and away from attackers. This unit needs to not die, so I placed some protection around it and moved on. Well the protection got killed so I went to the other side of the map and told a Vulture to go and help out. Vultures are the big bad boy air units, and I figured it would be no problem. So I swing back over to the unit being attacked and wait. After about 20 seconds or so, the unit is close to dead and there’s no Vulture. So I scroll over to where it’s at, and watch it repeatedly running into a mountain trying to flip itself over. I had to take command of it and manually steer it to the other location. Ugh.

3. Stupid tactics. On one map I had built up about 7 tanks, and went to attack the enemy base. Unfortunately there was a narrow row to take them through, and lots of baddies on the other side. Only one tank could get through at a time. Mmmm bottleneck. No biggie I think to myself, I’ll just steer them all through and I’ll take minimal damage. Nope. Once the first tank engaged, it wouldn’t move forward at all even when I specifically told it to. So it, along with all my ground units got chewed up while I cursed at the screen wondering why my tank wasn’t moving. I had to pull everyone back and take them around another way.

There’s a lot of other little annoyances, but these were the big things that made the game not fun for me. Unfortunately, many of the campaign levels seem designed to focus on these shortcomings. Some people may really like constantly jumping from unit to unit and having to micromanage every single thing they do, but that drives me completely batty.

Doug rolled into town with his daughter, and I thought it might be nice to just hang out with him and the kid, and take a few days off from everything.

It was nice to have 4 days without responsibilities and feeling “I should be doing something right now”. I rented Dungeons and Dragons – Heros for ye olde xbox, and ripped through it. Good times.

Back at work, my Notes server is dead, which is no big surprise. Man I hate notes.

This weekend is supposed to be cloudy, so I’ll probably do some shooting then. I also have my promotion to green belt this friday. w00t. 14 months until black belt time.

I’m really starting to hate e-mail in general, because no one can provide subject lines that mean anything. Now, I don’t get a ton of e-mail, something in the range of 20 a day, but when you have to reference it, or find older e-mails, “tomorrow’s meeting” doesn’t really mean anything. Especially when you send me e-mails with that same title twice a week.

Couple that with Notes’ lousy search capabilities and it’s hard to find anything.

I’ve taken to tagging all of the files the project is using with spotlight comments. This is a good thing. Now if only I could get people to use standardized file naming conventions. Co-ordinating hundreds of word and excel files with multiple revisions is not fun. I’m intrigued by ShopWiki’s in-house wiki they use for versioning documents.

Here’s the weekend update: Saturday I spent a good deal of time at the dojo helping out with classes and getting in a little of my own training. Afterwards, I sat through a presentation by Market America, which one of the my fellow Karatekas is engaging in. Ended up being way longer than I thought.

That night, we finally went to see Serenity. As an avid fan of Firefly, needless to say, I enjoyed it a lot. Joss did a good job with it. One thing I really like about Firefly is that the main characters are all human, and end up getting hurt a lot. The movie is no exception to this rule. Every character takes a major beating, except for one, who if you’re a fan, you’ll already know about. See it. It’s great.

Sunday I headed out to Surprise, Miami and Globe to shoot some photos. Felt really good to hear the shutter fire. Seems like a long time since I was last out taking pics. I got some really good shots, but being that I was shooting a lot of buildings, a lot didn’t turn out that great. Made me really realize why architectural photographers have movements on their cameras. Perspective shifts can really nuke a photo, and barrel distortion on wide angles has a pronounced effect as well. Also, I need to use a tripod in these situations even when they are well lit. Trying to find level by eye just isn’t very effective.

That night I picked up a game for PS2 called Katamari Damacy. I’ve heard a lot about this game, and essentially it involves rolling around a ball and picking stuff up. As your ball gets bigger, you can pick up more things. It is a lot of fun. I ended up playing it until too late last night. You can get it for $20 these days and I highly recommend it.

I’ll get some of my shots up on flicker this afternoon for your perusal.