Blizzard dropped Diablo 3 profiles today. The profile for my most recent character, a Barb by the name of Discipline is shotted above.

Here is the profile for my account:

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/profile/jdodson-1332/

This is my highest level character, Snuggy Bunny a Witch Doctor:

http://us.battle.net/d3/en/profile/jdodson-1332/hero/3331502

Snipped from the D3 site:

"View your heroes’ gear, stats, and skills. How high have you raised your characters’ attributes? What are they wielding in each slot? What are their most prominent gear bonuses? What skills comprise their current build? Nuance awaits you in the Heroes tab.

Track your game progress. How many acts have you cleared? What bosses have you shredded in each difficulty? How far have you leveled up your hardcore and normal artisans? Find out in the Career tab. You can also check your play time (by class) throughout your entire Diablo III career, and learn how many monsters and elites you’ve slain.

Share with your friends. The Friends tab lets you check out your BattleTag friends’ characters, so that you can quickly compare notes on gear, skill & rune choices, and everything in between. You can also click on a BattleTag in the Diablo III forums to go directly to that player’s profile."

Share your Diablo 3 profiles in the comments!

Also heard about a Diablo 3 player that made over 10k in the Real Money & Gold Auction house. If this is real is and interesting development.

http://i.imgur.com/Zc4A6.png
http://i.imgur.com/fiWAa.png
http://i.imgur.com/tbeiV.png
http://i.imgur.com/YisJk.png

Finished John Carmack's yearly Quakecon keynote today. It comes in a little over 3 hours and is jam packed with information about all things gaming and tech related. The video is linked above and I took notes on the things I felt were interesting.

• First part of the keynote he talks about Rage and apologizes for the PC launch.


• He talked about Doom 3 BFG Edition and that it will run at 60FPS on consoles and higher on PC.


• He wants to Open Source Doom 3 BFG Edition but its unclear if thats possible. Might be able to just release parts of it.


• Talked about what part of the Doom 3 codebase has changed. Much is similar in Tech 5.


• The rendering engine was improved over time.


• Carmack wants to port Doom 3 to the Wii U, Vita and iPhone. Development and time constraints won’t allow it.


• Doom 4 will be done when its done, no date to announce.


• People felt Rage would be like Borderlands or Fallout 3 and that wasn’t what they were trying to do. People understand Doom, so Doom 4 will be an easier sell.


• iD is closing down its mobile development.


• Doom 3 BFG Edition is less of a survival horror game and now an action shooter with the recent changes:




• They brightened things up.


• The flashlight is attached to your gun now.


• Less ammo stinginess, more liberal amount of ammo.


• He thinks its more fun now and less masochistic as gamers are much less hardcore these day.


• Recently he played Super Mario 3 and it was pretty hard, newer games are fun, but not really challenging.




• iD games can’t take 6 years to create anymore. Hopefully Doom 4 won’t.


• Feels like he has grown a lot in the last year as a software engineer.


• NASA’s software engineering reports are not too useful to Carmack.


• He is doign much more software engineering stuff like code reviews and helping the team learn best practices.


• Carmack thinks Cloud Gaming is the unquestionable future of gaming. When he sees Gabe Newell he tells him this.


• Its faster to send a packet over the web to Europe than it is from the back of your computer over a cable to your monitor. He thinks that is wrong and we shouldn’t put up with it.


• Carmack is very interested in head mounted displays.


• Doom 3 BFG Edition will work with head mounted displays and 3D tvs.


• He doesn’t care about Windows 8. XP and 7 are just fine for him.

Here are the rest of the Quakecon panels featuring people from iD, Bethesda and Valve:

http://www.bethblog.com/2012/08/04/quakecon-2012-keynote-panels/

Mindwedge, an indie game company recently released its first game called Monster Minis Extreme Off-Road and I was able to virtually sit down with Dave and ask him a few questions about it all. You can easily snag the demo for Monster Mini's on the website and the full meal deal is available on Beamdog and Desura.

jdodson: What was the inspiration for Monster Mini's?

Dave: For inspiration I look to my creator first. It's my feeling that I can do no greater honor to him than to emulate him by being creative.

But on a more practical level, I think that there were a few influences in play. I really enjoyed off-road ATV as well as off-road truck racing games. One day I was toying with a very rudimentary game engine and was working with a futuristic style miniature vehicle I had modeled, and I stuck huge wheels on it just for fun. Then it struck me that I had hit on something I really liked. Not the car, but the huge wheels on it.

I wanted to make a racer though, not a stadium showpiece. I have always liked the monster truck shows ever since the early days of Bigfoot, but a 'proper' monster truck wasn't right for racing outside of an arena. By combining the ATV with a truck frame of sorts, I came up with a new hybrid - the Monster Mini.

As for making racing trucks as SUVs, I've owned a few and they seem to be very popular still. So I guess I have a special attachment to that. Though to be honest, our SUV right now is a Mini Cooper S hatchback, and I have a 4x4 pickup for bigger jobs and off-road excursions.

jdodson: What was the muse you followed to start Mindwedge and make video games?

Dave: That's kind of a different way to ask the first question perhaps, but If I had one thing to point to it would be RC truck racing. My first RC truck was a Tamiya Midnight Pumpkin. It wasn't a racer really, but the proportions of the monster Minis emulate the Midnight Pumpkin more than any other. Later I went on to race more capable RC trucks at indoor and outdoor tracks. RC trucks at the time were really just conversions of RC buggies. I still keep those race trucks on the hutch of my desk to this day.

I had also worked at a stretch limo manufacturer in the early '80s, and that is probably the inspiration for the limo style trucks we included later in the game.

Overall, it's about doing thigs you can't do in the real world. That's the great part about games - they don't have to follow reality.

jdodson: How long has Mindwedge been making games?

Dave: As I mentioned, I had been toying with a rudimentary game engine. That was in 2003. Then I ran into Chris Robertson who was at the time working beyond the norm with extending the abilities of that engine and I asked him to join me in making some Monster Minis. It turned out to be more of a toy than a full game really, but we had great fun with it. Then in 2004 we came across a more capable game engine and realized that we could make a really decent game with it. As we were getting up to speed on the new engine we ran across another engineer who was also working beyond the norm at the time - Ed Phillips, who was very interested in getting under the hood of some of Chris' work. I knew we needed to bring him in. The rest is history. We're still working as a team to this day.

Mind you, the early years were as much about learning how to make games as they were about producing a final product, and we did accomplish both. The learning part is never really over, and that's the great part. There's always a new challenge around every corner.

jdodson: Looking to the future, what do you see as a game genre youd like to do something in?

Dave: Well, my other favorite genre is the FPS. The first game I ever played on the PC was Wolfenstein 3D. That's when I was hooked on 3D games.

But I like that racing games are basically non-violent. I hear from parents all the time that say they need more non-violent games for their kids. We have several other racing game concepts we want to work on. We already have our game systems in place for racing and can continue to refine them as we go along. So as a practical matter, we'll be doing this for a few more years at least.

jdodson: What are you most proudest of in Monster Minis?

Dave: Through the thick and thin, I'm most proud of the quality of the people I get to work with. It's very rare to have team mates that stay with it for as many years as we have. I think that speaks to the basic values everyone on the team has. Along with that, I get to work with some of the most intelligent people I've ever known.

Going forward, I know it's going to be a challenge to find more team mates of this quality as our team grows. But we have a good foundation to build on now.

-
http://www.mindwedge.com/
http://www.monsterminis.com/ (go here for the demo)
http://www.beamdog.com/products/monster-minis-extreme-off-road
http://www.desura.com/games/monster-minis-extreme-off-road

I have wanted more major players to port games to Linux for years. For along time iD was the only AAA developer that ported its games to Linux. Occasionally other companies would dabble in it but it was largely ignored.

As Windows 8 is nearing release some people are not happy with the direction Microsoft is headed. Gabe Newell recently called Windows 8 a catastrophe and make no secret that they were going to be porting Steam to Linux in response. Valve has stated the first game they are porting to Linux is Left for Dead 2 and have posted an update about it.

Snipped from the Valve blog post:

"After this work, Left 4 Dead 2 is running at 315 FPS on Linux. That the Linux version runs faster than the Windows version (270.6) seems a little counter-intuitive, given the greater amount of time we have spent on the Windows version. However, it does speak to the underlying efficiency of the kernel and OpenGL. Interestingly, in the process of working with hardware vendors we also sped up the OpenGL implementation on Windows. Left 4 Dead 2 is now running at 303.4 FPS with that configuration."

Really excited to see this happen. I hope more developers follow suit because it would be nice to not have to dual boot for to play games.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2012/07/26/windows-8-is-a-catastrophe-according-to-gabe-newell-valve-hedging-with-steam-on-linux/
http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/linux/faster-zombies/

New trailer released for Quakecon 2012 about the new missions added to Doom 3: BFG edition. I can't wait to go back to the corridors of Doom 3!

To celebrate Quakecon 2012 iD Software & Bethesda are both kicking in to bring you the most kick ass gaming deal of the year folks. For $99 on Steam you get practically all the titles from both studios. But I won't bother you with any more details than the actual games you will get. *Ahem*

Oh right and Dawnguard is now available on Steam for download. Its $20. Yeah so I bothered you with one more detail. Totally worth it.

Quakecon Pack contains:

BRINK
BRINK: Agents of Change
BRINK: Doom®/Psycho Combo Pack
BRINK: Fallout®/SpecOps Combo Pack
Call of Cthulhu®: Dark Corners of the Earth
Commander Keen
DOOM 3
DOOM 3 Resurrection of Evil
DOOM II
Fallout 3: Game of the Year Edition
Fallout New Vegas: Dead Money
Fallout New Vegas: Honest Hearts
Fallout New Vegas: Old World Blues
Fallout New Vegas®: Courier’s Stash
Fallout New Vegas®: Gun Runners’ Arsenal
Fallout New Vegas®: Lonesome Road
Fallout: New Vegas
Final DOOM
Heretic: Shadow of the Serpent Riders
HeXen II
HeXen: Beyond Heretic
HeXen: Deathkings of the Dark Citadel
Hunted: The Demon’s Forge
Master Levels for Doom II
QUAKE
QUAKE II
QUAKE II Mission Pack: Ground Zero
QUAKE II Mission Pack: The Reckoning
Quake III Arena
QUAKE III: Team Arena
Quake IV
QUAKE Mission Pack 1: Scourge of Armagon
QUAKE Mission Pack 2: Dissolution of Eternity
RAGE
Return to Castle Wolfenstein
Rogue Warrior
Spear of Destiny
Team Fortress 2 - Quakecon Bundle
The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind® Game of the Year Edition
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion® Game of the Year Edition
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Ultimate Doom
Wolfenstein 3D

The only thing the Quakecon Bundle doesn't include is Dawnguard. But its such a sick deal already I don't really count that as a negative.

Oh and there is also an Elder Scrolls pack for $64 that includes:

The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind® Game of the Year Edition
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion® Game of the Year Edition
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Buy The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - Dawnguard

Seriously people, the sickest deal of the year is right here. I imagine it will only last while Quakecon is in session from August 2nd-5th.

http://store.steampowered.com/sale/quakecon2012
http://www.quakecon.org

Also waiting with anticipation for the entire John Carmack 2012 keynote to drop. His keynotes are epic and ive heard this one is 3 hours long! Can't wait.

Been playing a brand new iPhone game called Jurrasic Park Builder. Its essentially a My Town 2 or Farmville type freemium game. It follows the same freemium tropes in that you have limited resources, things take time to build and you wait. Like many freemium games you can pay if things progress too slowly.

I picked up the game because I have a special place in my heart for Jurassic Park. In the end the game is fun, but like all other freemium games it won't hold my fancy for long. That said this game is a bit different as it is much faster paced. For instance, I can collect the money from my Dinosaur exhibits much faster and have more than other freemium games(see screenshot above for my accumulated game wealth). I guess I could spend it all on shrubs and decorations but I want more Dinosaur exhibits. To that end the game does limit you on getting one exhibit per level so if you want to unlock more you need to grind time or pay.

This game seems to pull a play right out of all the other "freemium waiting games" in that roads seem to be something they want you to think you need, but you don't. For instance, I have a road leading into my park(because I just haven't demolished it yet) but haven't built any others. Many of my exhibits don't have a road, yet the game doesn't penalize me for it. On the flipside, Simcity would p0wn me for such a mis-step.

They just added a new feature that you can use once a day where the "Dinosaurs go Wild!" and they can possibly escape(its the red Jurassic Park logo button in the bottom left). Essentially they just put a count down over the cages and you have to tap it before it fills up. The longer you wait on the timer the more money you get. Haven't seen what happens if I let on of my Dinosaurs escape. "Oh, yeah. Oooh, ahhh, that's how it always starts. Then later there's running and screaming."

That all said, the game is fun and its free. If you have an iPhone and want to build up a Dinosaur park, get it. Well that and it helps me check off a bucket list item of raising a pet Triceratops.

Disney released Fix-it Felix Jr. today for free on iOS. Fix-it Felix Jr. is the feux movie game from the new Disney movie "Wreck it Ralph." Awesome they are releasing this for free as a movie tie in. Typically, video game movies are senseless tie ins to cash in on the movie craze but this is more fun than that.

The sounds and graphics are retro and the premise is awesomely familiar to Donkey Kong. That said, after I heard about it I downloaded it immediately and its quite fun. Unfortunately its iPhone only at this point so Androids are out of luck. But look on the upside you can still watch the video!

As I was on YouTube finding the clip to put on this post I read a fairly apt comment from RossEStern I felt was worth sharing:

"How dose a hammer fix windows"

Good point, ill bring that up with the video game reality discussion committee. First order of the day, "How is it that all magic is tied to a replenishable bar. Oh and how is magic real?" That said, excellent point Ross that never crossed my mind when I played the game. I think my "is this possible" brain shuts off when I have fun playing video games.

That all said, Wreck it Ralph looks like one of those rare films I will see in the theatre.

As I was playing Skyrim for a bit last night I found some Giants. After dying twice by a giant clubbing to the head(apparently they don't like it if you shoot them with arrows) I decided to just explore the countryside. As I was exploring, a Mammoth dropped from the sky and died. It was an odd sight to behold. I wonder if skydiving was the Mammoth's dream and it forgot to wear a parachute? Maybe it was being ejected from an Alien spaceship? Perhaps it was catapulted by Giants?

Either case it was awesome and random. Oh and I found a cart on a road with cabbages spilled everywhere.

What kinds of strangeness or general awesomery have you experience in Skryim? Catapulting Mammoths? Strewn cabbage?

Tungsten recently mined out the ground under the new user house in our Cheerful Ghost Terraria game. WhiteboySlim, panickedthumb and I are marveling at its awesomeness.

Check it out for yourself, in the caverns under the newb house. Thanks Tungsten, its rad.

For more information on how you can play Terraria with us:

http://cheerfulghost.com/jdodson/posts/421

Happy Retro Tuesday!