Happy Birthday, Game Central!

Today marks two years since the site's debut on May 25, 2006. I remember how much work I put into the creation of the site. It took many months to prepare the material for the original publishing date. Over the last two years, I kept the site active with updates on my personal gaming activities. Most of my gaming nowadays is with computer games. However, I wanted to publish something a little special for today, Game Central's two-year anniversary.

I undertook a major project, the completion of the super-hero character summaries for the Protectors and Retribution. Much of that material hadn't been updated in 15 to 20 years. It involved a lot of work but I'm happy with the results. That section of the web site is now much more useful as a reference for the longest running campaign in our club's history.

For the site's two-year anniversary, I wanted to include some additional D&D material as well. I decided to devote a new page to the Eveningstar campaign. That was a fun campaign that renewed our active interest in role-playing again.

Enjoy the new material. Here's to another year of great gaming memories.

- Kevin

I added a page for Eveningstar, another of our D&D (AD&D, actually) campaigns. That campaign was a memorable one from our post-college years. At the time, we hadn't played D&D for a while but managed to recruit enough players to make it possible. We enjoyed ourselves so much that weekly gaming sessions became the norm again.

It has been a long time coming. I finally updated the character summaries for all of the Protectors and Retribution characters. I wrote the summaries in the style of the Marvel Universe handbooks years ago. I called it The Official Handbook of the Protectors Universe. Up until today, the entries were only partially complete. Basic information was included but there were no character histories in the bios. After many weeks of researching, writing, and editing, that has been rectified. Now, much more history of our club's favorite super-heroes has been preserved.

I installed Age of Mythology yesterday. Created by Ensemble Studios, it wasn't an Age of Empires sequel but it was certainly done in a very similar style. The game features Greek, Norse, and Egyptian mythologies plus historically accurate units as well. Overall, the controls and concepts are close enough to Age of Kings that I didn't have much of a learning curve. There are some new wrinkles with myth units and gods to worship but I picked them up easy enough. I started the campaign and completed 8 of the Greek missions thus far.

I look forward to watching the story of Arkantos, the Atlantean Admiral, unfold. It's been well worth the wait. This is a great game.

Luxor 2 is addicting. Actually, it is extremely addicting. It is similar to that "one more turn" feeling made famous by games like Civilization and Heroes of Might and Magic. I really have trouble putting the game down. I have devoted many hours to it by now. I started on normal difficulty and played it for quite a while before I realized that there was no way I was going to get through all 14 stages. I began again on easy difficulty and fared somewhat better. Instead of stage 7, I made it to stage 10. Unfortunately, I can't make it through the stage to progress any further. Stage 10-4 absolutely killed me. I went 0-14 on that level until I finally beat it on my 15th attempt. It was an exciting moment but I perished on stage 10-5 so my joy was short-lived.

I will play Luxor 2 when I have a spare 30 minutes and the urge to tackle stage 10 again. For now, I must simply say "I surrender" and move on to another game.