The Gray Gamers

 I think The Gray Gamers has a new writer. This is Mike, and he is a serious gamer.

Mike did an interview with us when we first put the site up and the odds of meeting up with someone from another area of Canada are slim.

But as you can see from this picture, that’s exactly what happened. Jan and Mike met and a conference.  Jan met some other gray gamers also (we are out there!)

This past month our Charity of the month has been Tearfund UK.

We got a nice email from them when we put them up on the sidebar and we thank them.
The Gray Gamer blog made $2.12 for the month Tearfund was the Gray Gamer charity choice I’ll add in $18.88 to make our donation to Tearfund come to $20.00.
It’s my turn to make sure the money order get’s send off.
As yet I don’t think Jan has received a receipt from The Salvation Army in Australia for our donation to thier wildfire disaster relief – I’ll let you know.

This month I’ve chosen the Manitoba Red Cross.  My laptop crashed a couple of weeks ago. The blue screen of death is more of a gray colour actually. It’s is off somewhere getting fixed so I not sure I can put up a Red Cross as yet on the sidebar. Between the laptop crashing, the flu and 500 pieces of spam here in five days, it’s been an interesting couple of weeks.

In 1950, 100 thousand Manitobans were flooded out. In 1997 30 thousand were evacuated. This year nearly 2 thousand have been evacuated in Southern Manitoba and the Red River hasn’t crested closer to large urban centres yet.

Gray Gamers is proud to support the Manitoba Red Cross Manitoba Flood fund.

Other Ocean now operates from the Atlantic Technology Centre, a sleek four-storey building in downtown Charlottetown. Visitors to the studio pass through the entrance area, where producers and designers share space with couches and a big-screen television, and into the dimly lit area for artists. Farthest from the door is the quiet, intense and almost bare space where the coders work.

The building’s tenants also include Longtail Studios and Telos Entertainment, which does computer animation as well. Bight Games is on a nearby street.

In all, more than 100 people are employed in the local industry, its growth helped by tax incentives, loans, rebates for office space and industry-friendly courses now being offered at postsecondary institutions.

“We had an interest here,” acknowledged Deirdre Ayre, Andrew’s sister and Other Ocean’s general manager, referring to their Atlantic Canadian roots. “But we had to make sure it made good business sense.”

Super Monkey Ball helped put them on the map. One reviewer wrote that “everyone wanted this iPhone game, it received almost as much hype as the iPhone itself.” Another noted that it set “the tone nicely for the iPhone as a serious gaming platform.”

The Globe and Mail

The new game for the DS, Puffins: Island Adventures out in April will have a soundtrack by a member of the band Great Big Sea. Along with over 100 events and mini games, the game features pictures and videos of real puffin colonies off the Canadian coast. The company had a big hit with it’s iPhone game Super Monkey Ball.

Other Ocean blog
OtherOcean Interactive home page
Puffins Island Adventure

DS
Action/Adventure
April 2009

 
 
Never one to like performing, I preferred to be part of the orchestra. band, duet, trio or choir.  As a child my sisters and I all studied music, it was our parents goal that we would all go to university to get a Bachelor of Music degree.
 
UGGHHH.  Every time there was a piano recital performance anxiety got the better of me, leaving me in 2nd or 3rd place (behind Pam of course).  Singing was worse.  I remember as a young adult being approached by the choir director who asked me to learn all the solos for the cantatas.  That way, if someone was ill, I could step in.  No one knew and life as a member of the choir was grand.  Then one Easter Sunday our alto soloist got strep throat.  Our director let the choir know that I had the job of learning all the solos and was ready to step in. 
 
Meanwhile, I was in the bathroom puking.  Of course I did the solo, no major goofs, but it was not easy.
 
Same with oboe.  Why is the oboe such a solo instrument?  I love the sound of oboe.  Course, it sounds like a Canada goose when you first start learning.  It can take up to five years to get that wonderful, soul-melting mellow note that makes it such an incredible instrument.
 
Early in my training I was asked to play “O Holy Night” for the Christmas concert.  I had piano accompaniment (sp???).  They wanted me out of sight so they put me in the baptistery (I went to a Church that believed in adult immersion).   As the piano began the intro I prepared for the haunting strains of what should have been a beautiful solo.
 
Course, I was only in my second year of training.  Canada geese would have flocked by the thousands as I honked my way through the first few bars.  At first the laughter coming from the congregation was subtle, by the time I got to “long lay the world” it had erupted into howls of merriment without piano accompaniment (sp???) because our staid and faithful pianist was collapsed over the keyboard.  I would have crawled up the stairs of the baptistery to wallow in humiliation but the person who was at the top of the stairs watching tumbled down in hysterics, landed on me and the oboe and broke my reed.  How rude.  It took years to recover from that incident.
 
Which brings me to why I like Wii music.  Jamming isn’t quite my thing (no oboe) but I love the mini-games and have a secret passion.  Conducting.  Ode to Joy is exilherating, uplifting, exciting.  All by myself, with no one to laugh my Mii stands before the choir of friends and strange Mii’s waiting…
 
As I raise my remote they are expect and attentive.  Conducting them with the proper ’strokes’ (not sure what you call the proper wave of the baton) doesn’t seem to work.  Wildly waving my arms does.  Course, it’s tiring.  If I slow down, they do, if I stop for a few seconds Mii faces gaze up with mouths wide waiting for my cue.
 
It’s so empowering.    Now if only I’d had the confidence Easter Sunday 40 some years ago…