Just got back from bagging some more peaks in the White Mountains, sorry for the delay in the FS tourney. Mode 7 keeps saying they’re releasing the patch soon.

Does anyone care if we wait til this tournament patch, or would you rather just get on with it? I’d actually like to see UMD play and not forfeit due to internet problems. Let me know.

@unmanneddrone You want it, you got it. Dropped 70 million credits on the biggest Argon ship I could find. Praxus Mining Inc. has now begun to outfit its very own M2 Titan Class Destroyer,to be pressed into service as soon as we’re no longer in the poor house.

+50 cool points if you get the reference in the above video I made (1080p!).

Ok, I’m going to postpone the FS Tourney for a week to see what this in-game tournament feature is like. If you are playing any games at the moment, keep playing them. If you have finished any, the results will still count.

@Feenwager Let’s just say that the “village of retards” provides only a brief respite from the politics… well, unless you’re a completionist side quest kind of person.

WITCHMALOL-BOOL

@angryjedi Hey Pete. Not sure if I’m doing this wrong. : / Waiting on you to go in FS. Unless I’ve boned it somehow and me doing my turns hasn’t registered properly or something?

Thanks for the heads up @bigdaddygamebot. You heard the man, all games will now be played on the UK1 server.

@unmanneddrone I’m much less organized than an accountant, my wacky spending binges probably put me closer to Richard Pryor in Brewster’s Millions.

Cahoona’s (love that name) seem kind of weak in this universe, but regardless, I didn’t come to space to BBQ. I came to rip ore from asteroids, like a real spaceman would! To that end, I’m starting to make headway. My commercial agents finally leveled up enough to buy & sell using their jump drives! That was exciting. I’m not a father, but I can only imagine it’s similar to watching your kid ride a bike for the first time. One even ducked into a station to avoid a pirate raid in the sector. I’m so proud!

Also, I thought this was funny. These are the kind of problems space traders have.

@bowlisimo & @angryjedi

Hey guys…apparently we’re all being migrated to Server UK 1. You can start games on UK 2 any longer and all stats are being synch’d and migrated over to UK 1.

Just keeping you lads in the loop.

Pete…turn is in. Waiting on you.

@cmwhittington And thanks for the timely sub, sir.

@bowl Word.

@Angryjedi I’ll make a game and send it to you tonight. I’m commuting to Toronto for four of the five days this week. : / So I’ll only be updating in the evening in my world. (Bed time in your world) It will give you time to buy some tissue to wipe your nose and dry your eyes after I’m done destroying you.

No problem. Bracket updated.

@bigdaddygamebot You’re up. Get your game going with @angryjedi. Note the rules below, thanks.

@bigdaddygamebot Wanna take my slot? I have the dubious luck of having 4 websites to build within a few weeks so it will be really difficult for me to participate in this one. Will that work for you, @bowlisimo?

Howdy Lads.

IF someone drops out of the Frozen Synapse tourney and you need a body, I’ll jump in.

FEEN, you’re killin me here! I never got an email, unless you titled it “Male Enlargement Pills”, but whatever, I’ll allow it, friendly tournament an’ all.

@unmanneddrone If you need some more time, that’s fine. The cutoff is really just for the deadbeats, if there are any. *looks around* We don’t want this thing to take all year. Edit: You’re now up against Mjpilon instead of Pete, btw.

Everything has been updated.

@mjpilon You’re up now, instead of Feen. Just in case you’re angry, all hate mail sent to the Unfair Tournament Committee is guaranteed to be sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public inquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters.

@bowlisimo Thanks for organising that. Turns out this first week is a true blessing, because my modem has subsequently gone into negative death…the connection speed, if it connects, is completely worthless. Thus, upon the 29th day of this month, it shall be kicked to the curb. So, @angryjedi, you may as well send three games my way and wait for the end of the week.

The SoS FSSL 2011 Tournament Bracket

ROUND 1 – THE DREGS

• Start – Sunday 7/24
• Target End – Sunday 8/1 12:00 a.m. EST

(I’m giving this a week at first, it shouldn’t take that long, but let’s see how it goes)

MATCH UPS
Angryjedi vs Bigdaddygamebot

Mjpilon vs Pylon_Command (Battle of the Pylons)

RULES:

1. All games will be played on the “UK1″ server.
2. All games will be played on the Dark Extermination game mode.
3. All matches except for the final round will be played as a best of 3.
4. Players will contact each other and may complete their games on their own time, within the given week.
5. If a player fails to join a game, or complete their turn within said week, that player forfeits the round.
6. Games that result in a draw will be replayed.
7. The winner of each round will report results to christopherjbowley (at) g m a i l . c o m.
8. The winner of each round will upload replays to http://www.youtube.com/user/squadronofshame, which can be done from in-game. A password will be provided by email.
9. Have fun!

So, it turns out that Beige (not surprisingly) and Shingro (surprisingly) smoked us all like cheap cigars in the much loved Nanaca Crash placement round.

THE SCORES!

Beige – 11441.86m
Shingro – 10120.41m
RedSwirl – 1730.41m
Feenwager – 1499.53m
Tomhaley – 1246.16m
Bowlius – 1230.02m
Mjpilon – 1049.51m
Angryjedi – 918.27m
RocGaude – 399.45m
Pylon_Command – 0.00m

So, despite the angry crowds outside my house and the old man who chased me on his bike, yelling “nanaca crash, NANACA CRASH!”, we were able to log 3 more placement scores, and we’d be into Round 1 were it not for a CERTAIN TWO PEOPLE. These two people frequent this page, but I’m a magnanimous guy, so I won’t name names.

Will a Mr. Weenwager and a Mr. Zeige please submit their Nanaca Crash scores to the Unfair Tournament Committee at christopherjbowley (at) g m a i l . c o m? Kthx. Otherwise you might be paired up with @unmanneddrone in round 1 and you don’t want that.

The middle finger and phrases like “bite me!” are also acceptable submissions.

Among the death threats and nastygrams wrapped around bricks that were thrown through my kitchen window, 5 scores have been logged (yay!). I’m going to arbitrarily cut this round off Friday night, so you stragglers still have time to edge yourselves in, and boy, do you lot have your work cut out for you…

Instructions, if you missed it, and are too lazy to scroll down.

@UMD Sorry about that, there wasn’t a way to score people in FS without playing multi, soo…welcome to Round 1! I’ll most likely be joining you, shortly.

@bowlisimo Sadly, I can’t access the prelim thingamy because I’m apparently on the same ISP provided to our ancestors when they began walking upright in the Serengeti. Yeah, THAT bad. Next week, however, it’ll all be fixed. Plus, FS is alright on such pitiful net until then. At least, I hope it is.

So, throw me on the bottom rung or wherever you’d like. To the dogs even. Once it’s all concluded, an email with all the info would be appreciated at unmanneddrone at gmail dot communist.

Regarding the FS placement game: What the heck was that and how can I recover from subjecting myself to that?? I am looking at you @bluesforbuddha and @bowlisimo :p

@bluesforbuddha I feel the same way about Co-Op. The only good experience I have had so far is getting about halfway through Portal 2 with @feenwager (which reminds me that we definitely need to complete that at some point….). Otherwise, I have no desire to play to go out and play co-op with some random person on Xbox Live or PSN who may or not may have the same perspective and ideas what I view as a good game experience. Another issue with me is that I usually play games some time after their initial release (see my recent playthroughs of Alan Wake and PixelJunk Shooter as examples – not co-op but you get my point…) so most people have moved on to other games anyway. I will definitely get back to you if I ever purchase Ms. ‘Spolsion Man but it may not be for a little bit. Hope you don’t mind waiting…

Somehow today, I managed to spend 4 straight hours finishing up Bulletstorm. The dick and sex jokes definitely got old after a while but at least the game doesn’t overstay its welcome too much – took me about 7 hours to get through the whole thing. Truly dumb and mindless fun but that worked for me at this moment. Always appreciated a shooter where the weapons feel bad ass and this game is no exception….

For my next complete 180-style game experience, I will now move on to Flower. Been looking forward to this for a long while now

SoS FROZEN SYNAPSE SCRUB TOURNAMENT 2011 PRELIM!

Official “What is this, I Don’t Even…”, Wait, This Has Nothing To Do With Frozen Synapse, Blame Beige, Bracket Placement Round of Death, GO!

1. Click link –> MYSTERY GAME!
2. Regain senses.
3. Get longest distance you can (note: you can hit whatever that is while it’s still in the air).
4. You’re allowed to play as long as you can stand it!
5. Email your best distance and name to christopherjbowley (at) g m a i l . c o m
6. You are all on the honor system!
7. Direct all hate mail towards @bluesforbuddha

I’ll send the bracket link + youtube details once all the scores are in.

Good luck!

I feel like someone attempts this every two years or so and we are always disappointed. But you know what, I’m just glad someone is still trying.

@Beige Believe it or not, I’ve been agonizing over what stupid flash game to make everyone play. It’s, as Jerry Holkins would put it, a result of my “damage” as a person. Also, I think Nanaco Crash might kill Feen.

I must admit, I’m so rusty you could catch tetanus. As they say Down Under, ahem, no sheep stations are riding on this one. All good fun!

Yeah, don’t worry about it. Most of us have played between 0 and 10 games, hence “scrub league”. I think only Angryjedi and UMD (especially) have played significantly more and are the Cobra Kai to beat in this tourney, but you never know.

@unmanneddrone Want to just go with the crazy 11-man bracket and have a placement round? I don’t think anyone REALLY cares if it’s perfect. I forgot FS has a scoring system, so say we separately play a 1v1 versus the A.I. on Dark Extermination (with a mirror setup?) and relay our scores, starting from a theoretical highest score down you’d get a bracket like this:

*(this isn’t the final setup, this is just in order of how I entered the names)

Another way to do it would just have everyone play one set with everyone else and crown the dude with the highest record. I like the bracket, there’s less games and it’s more fun to follow.

@redswirl Thanks for legitimizing my decision not to buy that game for a while.

@bowlisimo You’re right on the bracket issue. Just tried to make a mock-up in Photoshop. Without having some sort of drawn out round-robin affair, I’ve added myself twice to bring the numbers up to twelve. It then boils down to a top three, which we could either determine a winner via their accumulated point win over the entire tourney for a 1st ,2nd ,3rd tier standing or…I dunno, the player count stops it from being much smoother than that. I’m toying around with the lower-tier/losing player bracket to run from the second round, but the problem is, we’d just end up with a mirrored problem of having three top players – ones that wouldn’t change a thing in terms of narrowing down players even if we fed the top players from the lower tier back into the higher tier brackets to face the reigning champs there.

It’s a tough one. Might have to go with the point system?

Ok, I started building the tourney on Challonge.com. The bracket it generated for 11 people is pretty messed up, so we need a placement round. I’m thinking something with a score. If Frozen Synapse has nothing good, then we can do something like highest score on the first level of Ninja Gaiden flash or whatever. All on the honor system, of course. Any ideas?

Once we figure that out, the top 5 seeds start in Round 2 (The Incompetent Eight) and wait for the rest to duke it out in Round 1 (The Dregs).

@bowlisimo Sir, good stuff with the FS Tourney groundwork. I’m away at the inlaws, but I’ll try and log in and see how it’s all coming along between now and Sunday.

My last little piece of hardsell is via Gamersgate’s Ubisoft Week, as for the next 24 hours, they’ve got RUSE for an unbelievable price of 8 US clams. Nab it there, copy the serial key into Steam and BAM, good to go. Instead of that Ubisoft DRM business, the devs went with Steamworks. Smart folks.

Go on. Operational-level WWII RTS gaming has never been this classy, easy and enjoyable. Your only other option for such a thing is the Airborne Assault games, really. That or tragic misfires like Order of War.

Also note that Anno 1404 Gold/Dawn of Discovery will be on sale on Sunday…just a little piece of insider goodness for all you city-builder fans.

I’ll have to play FS with you guys another time since this is during Comic Con. It’s probably for the best, since I haven’t fired the game up yet anyway and would have no idea what I was doing.

Besides, I already have Magicka. Ha!

@unmanneddrone Let’s start getting this thing together. EDIT: It’ll be a funky bracket, I guess you need 16 to have it work all the way to the end. Any ideas, experienced bracket people?

SoS FS “Brain Freeze” Scrub League 2011 (or whatever you want to call it)

GRAND PRIZE: Brand new copy of Magicka on Steam! (generously donated by Mike Minotti) and/or bragging rights if you already own it.

• Best of three Dark Extermination matches advances. Grand final is best of 5 (or 7 if you want to go nuts)
• Winner will upload matches to a designated youtube account (TBD)
• If a player doesn’t show up to play their match after 2? 3? days, that player forfeits.

The players (not final):
pylon_command
angryjedi
beige
mjpilon
shingro
bowlius
tomhaley
redswirl
rocgaude
feenwager
serwyn

@shingro All in good fun! And watch out for @mjpilon, he’s lulling everyone into a false sense of security! It’s all that grid-iron strategising. Clear sights, full clips, can’t lose.

@shingro Don’t worry about that…other than my initial win against @unmanneddrone, I haven’t won a lick :p

@sinfony Sounds like a plan, man. Each round will consist of three matches, or two if one participant is victorious twice.

Big question is…will we stick to a particular mode – Dark Extermination for instance – for the entire tourney? I’d probably back this motion, just for the direct and savage nature of combat. Either that or light. Would love to run a dedicated Charge tourney down the line, too.

My Frozen Synapse username is tomhaley. Might I recommend that, depending on how many people are involved, we go with a best-of-three format? Seems like sometimes one player gets stuck with a stupidly bad spawn and has no real hope of winning.

My FS name is: mjpilon

Can’t wait for this one…

Let’s do this. Frozen Synapse name: RocGaude

Now that I have a faster internet connection, I’m going to try to download and install the Witcher one more time. If it doesn’t work this time, I’m just going to read the Squad notes about it and dive into Witcher 2 on the 360.

I also agree with @redswir1 that we should limit the Hitman mission (should that be the winner) to just Blood Money. Sure, we can refer to the other games but limitations are a task manager’s best friend.

Don’t worry @bowlisimo, Ms. Love’s mission will live on should you wish to shout in that cavern later on.

Bonjour monsieur Pylon. You know I’m up for it, and you also know my name on FS — angryjedi, unsurprisingly.

Has anyone played Sanctum? It was cheap on the Steam sale. Seems like a lot of fun and ideal for co-op shenanigans. Four player first-person tower defense.

@beige There’s a story in each X game, but everyone I know just pumps the throttle and burns off into the void to do their own thing. It’s one of those games. Kinda like Patrician in space?

@rocgaude Sounds good to me. I’m up for a Hitman mission, on account of not having the other two (really should have rectified those glaring omissions during the Steam sale, but hey). And Frozen Synapse tourney? Let us indeed do this.

For plannings’ sake, I’d like to scrounge up the Squaddie names who’d like to enter the SoS FS Summer Brain Freeze Tourney of 2011, for collating into a roster/league via Challonge and Random.org. We’ll have a week of mustering names, then kick off on Tuesday 18th of July. Rough dates, nothing set in stone. We’ll set a turn limit restriction of two days, with an auto-forfeit for the non-participatory party and that particular match going to the player who uploaded their turn.

The winner will receive a game of their choice from GoG.com from yours truly, as I’m super thrilled the Squad are enjoying it as much as I am.

Thus, if all prospective participants could list their FS names – even if it’s the same as your SoS title, it’d make for an easier assembly, as well as use the tag “FS Summer Tourney” to keep book-keeping easier.

My title within FS is Pylon_Command. Looking forward to being in the crosshairs. No longer are these the lazy days of pre-release, I’ve felt the increasing sting of sharpened talon and the acrid stench of burnt cordite lingering over my aerated corpses.