After a six week absence, due to extreme work conditions, the AR Drone makes a re-appearance Sunday morning at the Steussy Ranch.

I was very excited by the advent of Civ 5, as I have been for all of the Civ reincarnations. It was a let down. Gabi and I both played it a couple of times, saw the relatively dumbed-down interface and options, then started new games of Civ 4. Very upsetting.

On a blog note: sorry for not updating more this Fall. Life has gotten a little busy here at the Steussy Ranch. Nothing I’m willing to broadcast about yet, but I hope to bring everyone up-to-date sometime in the near future.

The highlight of my trip to GDC in San Francisco was flying the AR Drone. Wow! It flies like it’s on rails. Completely smooth controls. And you control it with your iPhone, which has a live video camera feed from the cockpit of the plane/helicopter/thingy. Great fun!

I blogged about this earlier here, and included the marketing video the company made to promote it. It’s a really cool video, particularly now that I know it’s not hype.

And I’ll be seeing him when he gives the keynote at GDC (Game Developers’ Conference) this March in San Francisco.

Link for the game’s website is here.

I will personally attest to the Xbox problem. My 1.5 year old Xbox is now out of warranty. While Microsoft will offer service after that period for some failures, it won’t for what I have (DVD drive failure). Further, rather than make the DVD drives easily replaceable, there is an absurdly complicated system of DVD drive identity matching. I’ve worked for three weeks now to replace or repair the drive on mine with no luck at all.

I received a copy of Dragon Age: Origins for Christmas. It is now the 15th of January, and I haven’t played a minute of it because of the Xbox. Every other digital piece in my house (and there are a lot of them) has been kept up-to-date either with warranty repairs or my personal service. Not the crappy Microsoft Xbox 360. I’ll keep that in mind when I look for a replacement.

Full copy of the poster this comes from is available at my professional blog, here.

I’ve read longer, more insightful stories on the back of a Cracker Jack’s box. Fun shooting zombies, though.

I just finished Bioshock, one of the two games on the Xbox 360 I was interested in. The other one is here.

I had them pretty well pegged. Mass Effect was a better game for me (great plot, good writing), Bioshock was more of an elegant Doom-style first person shooter. Both of them took about three weeks to finish.