With A Vengeance

Friday

1. VASSAL 3.1.20 Installed. Check.
2. VASSAL 3.2.8 Installed. Check.
3. VASL 5.9.3 Installed. Check
4. VASL 6.0.0beta2 Installed. FAIL.

Saturday:

• Arrange ASL ladder challenge with Blind Sniper (Ale) for FT196 Spittelmarkt from LFT 13.
• Hang around on VASL looking for a pickup game. No luck until...
• After finish of All Blacks vs Australia:
• FrF62 Dryga Larpengar - Finns vs Soviets - vs MrP/Ian Percy.

Friendly Fire Pack 8 has only been out a few weeks and already the scuttlebutt is that this pack could be one of the best they have produced. Seriously high praise indeed after the showing of Friendly Fire packs 6 and 7.

I didn't get to play any of these previously at ASLOK unlike many, so Dryga Larpengar is the first chance I've had to see the scenarios for myself. So far so good. Small, vicious and with a tasty wee hook to the scenario that requires reading the aftermath to understand the impact of the VCs in the game.

If this is the weakest of all the scenarios in the pack, then Friendly Fire pack 8 may well go down as one of the strongest ever produced, rivalling the Windy City Wargamers' offering. If one of the best ASL players was heard to say something along the lines of Friendly Fire are good enough that he would be happy to dice for sides sight unseen, then you just know there's not much on offer that approaches that, let alone coming close.

Sunday: 

• Play John Knowles (German) as Soviet in J146 Ragnarok from Journal Nine. I lose but it's another from the talented Martin Svard.

 So all in all a very good first weekend back on ASL active duty. All I need to do now is restart those few PBeM games that were so cruelly interrupted in February. Emails are being drafted now.

Pete

Six Days in Spring...

This coming Friday morning will see the arrival of the newly refurbished computer. Eight months of exile in tablet hell will come to an end with a vengeance. All caused, not by a power surge as I had thought and dreaded due to the cost of replacing the Solid State Drive, the graphics card and power supply, but by a single failure in a $5 SATA cable connected to the OS drive. So much of my exile was avoidable if I had any kind of computer clue. But then the cable failure was probably caused by me opening the case the last time anyway.

The good news is indeed good, no data loss.

So what is my ASL schedule going to look like? Well, as I only work Mon-Thurs, I intend to get back on the horse that is VASL as soon as possible. I intend not to focus only on pre-arranged games as I was wont to do, but from now on I will have a short list of on call scenarios with associated defensive setups for those times when an ad-hoc game is called for.

I'm hoping to at least start one live VASL game most Thursday evenings Australian time,  as that will mesh well with the North American and Asia Pacific community. The three day weekend also means I will be able to play some of the GB/Euro ASL active players as waking up at 6am to play equates to a 2 hour sleeping for me.

All in all, I am looking at hopefully playing three completed games on average per weekend, and that will still give me the two days per month I need for attending the war games clubs for miniatures. I do know that I am seriously looking forward to being able to post screen grabs and photos on this blog rather than the walls of text I have been restricted to.

Steve Linton from Canberra very kindly sent me two scenario packs from the Break Contact series. Now PTO is very much an acquired taste of mine, if only recently, so the opportunity to look at some new scenarios was always welcome. There are some big scenarios in the two packs I have, but thankfully the new multi-monitor set up makes these doable now. A notable design in the latest pack features the LFT I beach landing board so it will almost certainly make the playlist. I just have to find some one also keen on doing seaborne assaults and evacuations.

All in all, lots to look forward to and lots still to do. 

The Time is Rapidly Approaching...

...When I will be able to rejoin the active ASL online community:

• The rebuild of the PC is almost complete, and should be home by this time next week.
• The  final pair of monitors will be here by October 17th and set up by the 18th.
• I should be able to retrieve all my VASL games by the end of the month which means I will be able to get started on the visual AARs finally. (Trebled 24" 1920 by 1200 screen real estate will allow much multi-tasking.)

Still have to buy a decent headset/mic combo and sort out the archived data, but all that costs is time rather than $$$ which has been the bottleneck until now.

Time to look at an updated playlist and then post a few challenges, particularly for my UK and Euro ASL brethren as the time zone difference is much less of a hindrance with a three day weekend.

It has been a very long and frustrating seven-and-a-half months, in which time I have truly come to loathe tablets and the iPad as the only conduits to the Internet available for me. This is why the current plan is to have a second PC dedicated to gaming ready and available by the end of the year,
just in case.

ASLOK with net capability

With ASLOK fast approaching, I really needed to find a solution to my lack of portable computing - I don't need a great big powerful laptop just something that will play media, do some office apps and above all be highly portable - so I went for a netvertible - I've already installed VASL, my eASLRB and some useful pdfs - I really have to minimise what I'm taking to ASLOK.

The Netbook o' Doom

It's a bit sluggish at times, but it's only got 2 gig of ram. It plays video nicely (I use Media player classic with Klite codec pack to avoid ruinous resources consumption à la media player 11/12) - Battery life is pretty good, around 5 hours so far and it's only a week old , so I'm bedding in the battery which should reach 6-6.5 hrs - the real test will be on the flight to the USA.  

Not Really ASL

After 5 years of working with this same PC setup of 1gig of RAM, 120Gigs of storage and a 128meg graphics card, I've hit the wall. I needed to do something to tide me over until I get a new PC post ASLOK (see, there is ASL content) so I went for the easy option. Keep the case, Mobo (Gigabyte K8fn7) and CPU (AMD 3200XP+), but upgrade the RAM to 4Gig, replace the scabby 300W PSU with a decent one, add a 512meg Geforce, and replace the very old HDDs with a 500 and a 320. I already have a couple of TB externals waiting to be used to archive all the data off my collection of drives that date back to 1995 (I think I've got the ASLML from 1995 to 2001 archived amongst them).

As I'm not into PC gaming at all these days (CivIII, Quake 1-3 and the original 5 Close Combats are the entirety of my gaming library), I can easily make do with an FFR for this machine. As long as I can get decent speed VASL/VASSAL using dual monitors I'll be happy. Bought myself a new Samsung colour laser printer so I can print out some winterised boards for ASLOK.

Of course I couldn't spend money on the PC without more catching up on ASL stuff, so I picked up Boards 49 and 51 from Scott B @ Gamer's Armory, along with a few scenario packs I just had to have (Melee Pack III, Friendly Fire #1, Bracchi Hills, Purple Heart Draw and Rally Point 2). I grabbed Fo3R: Berlin from Aaron @ Noble Knight and OC/BTB2 plus that damn elusive ASLRB2 from Stephen @ warchest. Almost there now, just have to get Mounted boards 48 and 50 for AOO to have complete mounted set pre-Hakka Paalle.