I picked the Void in response to a thread raving about it on a forum. It’s very much an ‘art house’ video game like the Path and Machinarium, and I’m less than an hour into it.

Brief summary of the gameplay/story so far:

You are dead and in an afterlife that is desolate and surreal. A ‘Sister’ contacts you and tell you that to survive, you have to gain Color, otherwise you fall into Absolute Death. This realm was once full of Color, which the Sisters feed on, but it all withered and waned. Now is a series of chambers surrounded by the Void, which constantly sucks the color from you.

The guardians of this realm are the Brothers, and they are terrifying figures that will toss you into the Void. ‘You’ are a male soul called Doppleganger, and the first Sister wants you to make offerings of Color to the Sisters and protect them, which will convince the Brothers you’re one of them.

The Sisters hide in trees – at least the first one does. When you talk to them, they appear as naked women surrounded by sparkly bits and floating in water. I haven’t met any of the Brothers yet, but they all have names like ‘Ironside’ and ‘Wolfsbane.’ As you wander, you hear various whispers, and the masculine ones are ominous and difficult to make out. I picked up a glowing, gold plant and suddenly heard a man mutter, “You will find no safer place than this.”

It’s a first person view. You interact with the word by painting symbols on the screen with your Color. You have to give Color to dead trees and every turn they’ll give you a harvest of raw Color once a turn. You have to collect hearts that process raw lymphomia into Colors.

It *seems* as though originally the Brothers did the planting, harvesting, painting, and protecting while the Sisters consumed the harvest and… that seems to be it. Something bad happened, and now the Brothers appear to be corrupted and you’re a replacement.

The Sisters/Brothers seem locked into traditional gender roles, but this is a corrupted environment. I assume the male Guardians aren’t supposed to be threatening, so that the Sister seems bound to her Chamber and reliant on ‘you’ might also be a problem.

Have to say though: it’s a tough game. As much as I’m interested in exploring the story and game, the combination of unusual gameplay elements and the difficulty curve doesn’t inspire me to play on despite the very imaginative elements.

I tend to run hot and cold. I tend to obsessively do something until I cannot longer stand it and then I’m indifferent to it. And I don’t mean this in a mild, healthy way. I mean this in a ‘must force herself to stop and do something, anything else.’

This is what causes me to hop onto World of Warcraft every 3 to 5 months, start a new character, rush them to level 58/62/76 and then just drop them. This is how I read a 1,000+ book in a single sitting. This is why on the new BioWare Social Network, I’m the third most active poster with over 700 posts in 17 days.

My gaming happens in spurts and spikes. I played through Jade Empire and both Knights of the Old Republic in a single sitting. I played through Baldur’s Gate II in three days. It’s frightening how quickly I can transform into a creature whose only thoughts are ‘game, shower, game, sleep, game.’ I’m a consumer in the purest sense of the word; not the robotic, rational decision makers of economics, but a person that gorges themselves on a product.

But it doesn’t last. After hitting level 62 in two weeks, I’m worn to a nub. I could not force myself to log-on. After finishing with Risen, I’ve tried to get into Machinarium. It’s a good game. I want to finish it, take lots of pictures, and tell you all about it. Only every time I start the game, I look at the playful and artistic backgrounds, listen to the great music, and start thinking about the interesting puzzles, and somehow will be incredibly, unaccountably bored.

This might be hard to imagine, but if I try to force myself to play a game after I hit my saturation point, I experience physical discomfort. My insides ache. If I’m excited about a game, I crave it. I will find myself obsessively thinking about it while trying to read, write, work, or study.

You might be saying to yourself, “That sounds unhealthy.”

Yeah, that it is. As mentioned above, it’s not something that applies just to games. I once sat down and watched the first three seasons of Babylon 5 in one sitting (66 hours). I finally crashed, and when I woke up, I had no interest in the rest of the story. Two years later, the DVD collection still sits in the back of my cabinet gathering dust.

I desire stability; I’m not fond of obsession or mental exhaustion. I put limits on my gaming, mostly, and push myself to game more when I don’t want to.



As to what prompted this entry, look at the picture at the top. Dragon Age: Origins. I’m an administrator on the wiki. I’ve been on the forums for five years now. It’s my favorite gaming genre by my favorite company and it looks to be one of the best games this decade.

This is me, hands folded in my lap, saying that I’m not that excited about the game. Lies. To say I’m excited would be an understatement. To say I’m foaming at the mouth might be closer to the truth. A month ago, I learned that the game could last 120 hours and my gut churned so hard, I could have crapped butter.

I’ve worked out for about an hour and thirty minutes each day this week, gotten a full nights rest, and will stock up on raw vegetables and fruits to munch on. Thankfully, my cats will walk in front of the screen if they get hungry.

1 day, 19 hours, and 25 minutes. That’s the time it shows on my last save for Risen, it’s entitled ‘Final Boss Fight.’ During that time, I’ve managed to finish 250 quests, but not 2,000 monsters even though I searched the island up and down looking for more stuff to kill.

There’s no time indicator on my Batman: Arkham Asylum game, but on my final save I’ve gotten all the Riddler statues (240), upgrades (20), character bios (42), and am 78% complete. The game has non-story challenge modes where you try to get X score while beating up thugs or various achievements while sneaking around and picking them off, which I’m not that interested in.

Let’s skip back to Saturday night/Sunday morning. I’m playing Risen and have run all over the island twice making sure I have every teleport stone, have killed all the truly nasty creatures like thunder lizards, scorpions, and ashbeasts. I’ve managed to find the two broken swords of the game and repair them as well as search through every temple and ruin I could find. I have on the super-duper armor with the very awesome weapon and shield combo that only comes at the very end.

I have 124 minor healing potions, 73 healing potions, and 53 major healing potions. I have 10 scrolls of protection, 5 scrolls of ashbeast transformation, 10 scrolls of skeletal guardian summoning, and 10 of berserker strength. I also have the highest strength possible and the highest skill in my weapon possible. However, that’s not hard as my awesome weapon gives me +6 to weapon skill.

I am ready to rock.

I rush to where I know the final boss is waiting for me, and first meet the [spoiler], who I bat aside easily. And then I… fail a quest? A quest that I’m just about to complete? Okay, that sucks. You didn’t tell me there was a time limit to this quest, you douche. I’ve only failed two quests in this game, and both times it’s be because of a hidden time limit.

But whatever, eyes on the prize. It’s about 5:30 am, and the sun is rising behind me. I step pass the Great Gate to the fiery hall of the [spoiler].

And I die.

And I die.

And I die.

Why? Because my health potions, strength, weapon skill, and scrolls are utterly useless. The boss battle is basically a giant jumping puzzle in a tiny room against an opponent that is immune to regular attacks. If the player has the right skills, they could beat [spoiler] at level 1. If the player lacks the skills, they can’t win no matter how much time and energy they’ve poured into making the uber killing machine.

I close the game down in disgust, head to bed, sleep, and try again in the morning. Well-rested, my hand-eye coordination is good enough that I win on the first try after about two minutes.

As victories go, it’s not very satisfying.

Now, Risen is a combat centered RPG. The first Chapter has a large number of side-quests, Chapters 2 and 3 are 90% running around and killing things, while Chapter 4 is centered on dungeon delving and killing things. The combat is real time and you control each swing, step, and block.

Despite this, I found the game interesting enough that I finished it. The combat was frustrating at times, but the exploration and secondary skills (alchemy, smithing, and lock picking) all proved rewarding, and the dungeon delving was better than any other game I’ve played. Each dungeon felt like its own puzzle.

My experience playing Batman: AA was similar. I loved the exploration and searching for secrets. The stealth combat (‘predator mode’) was great fun. What did they do at the end? Trap me in a small room with dozens of opponents. No stealth take downs, no using my explosives, or my upgraded triple batarang.

Again, after dying many times, I gave up and started something else. I don’t feel compelled to beat a game, only to play it, and it’s obvious that I’d reached the end.

I think game developers try too hard to make the boss fight the most memorable part of the game, often by changing the nature of the gameplay, making previous skills and abilities useless, or by making the last battle far more difficult than any other.

One of the better end fights I’ve played this year was the one from Prince of Persia. The battle had you utilizing all the skills you’d learned, and was moderately harder than previous fights, but the boss battle was not the emotional climax. The climax came afterward when the Prince decides that there is something more important than defeating the bad guy.

Machinarium is independent puzzle / adventure game about a little robot who’s been thrown out to the scrap yard behind the city must return and confront the Black Cap Brotherhood and save his robot-girl friend.

The demo is out and you can get it here. The game comes out sometime this fall.




The official website. Check out the trailer.

Number of staff employed: over 4,600
Number of computers to run: 20,000 with 75,000 CPU
Amount of memory storage: 1.3 petabytes (over 1 billion MBs)
Lines of code: 5.5 million
Bugs corrected: 180,000
Art assets: over 1.5 million
NPCs: 40,000
Quests: 7,650
Spells and abilities: 70,000

Wow's astounding numbers

BioWare revealed a new character for Mass Effect 2: Subject Zero.

Subject Zero comes off as unattractive*, lewd, crude, and badass. And female.

As a feminist, I consider this a good thing. One of the biggest complaints I have about women in popular media is that they constantly have to conform to notions of attractiveness and sexiness. Here we have a woman with (almost) bald hair, tattoos (and I don’t mean butterfly in the small of her back or the kanji characters for ‘hope’ wrapped around her ankle), and some nasty scars. Excellent.

Another thing is that popular culture prefers ‘strong’ women who are completely non-threatening to the male audience. Again, Subject Zero does not fall into that trap.

I found her a breath of fresh air. And you know what’s just as good as the BioWare making a female character like this? The response on the BioBoards is very positive. Despite what many marketers believe, the average straight male can handle the horror of not being pandered to.

In other news, I thought Batman: Arkham Asylum wasn't out until the end of the month, but I was wrong. I grabbed it today and have played several hours of it so far. It's great stuff.

*Meaning, she does not fit conventional notions of beauty.

There I was, fooling around in World of Warcraft and decided to make a blood elf mage (?) with penis (??). Madness! But I did so and fooled around with him; I enjoyed the goofy ‘kill them before they even touch you’ combat and being able to make my food and water so I could spam spells without worry.

I decided to take a screen shot of my bizarrely masculine self when I realized something was missing.



“My dude has no dude bits!” I said to myself. This is something I’d never noticed before as I’d never played with a masculine avatar. It was a bit shadowy in the inn, so I went outside where it’s a bit lighter to verify, and it turned out I was right: Ken doll smooth. No wonder elves breed like pandas!

I decided to look at the other races, and it was true across the board.



As a comic book reader, I’m familiar with the habit of making female lumps prominent and male lumps non-existent. The idea is, I think, though Superman can fly and toss cars around, if he’s packing more kryptonite than they are, young, male readers might get an inferiority complex. Or something. Several comic fans actually complained about Alex Ross’ depiction of Citizen Steel , calling it ‘creepy’ and complaining about the ‘over-sexualization’ of the character. That’s an issue for someone else to blog about. My question is why this would spill over into video games, specifically RPGs where your avatar is ‘you.’

I’m only a lesbian, but I was rather disappointed to find my guy avatar had effectively been neutered. I mean, if I’m going to play a man in World of Warcraft, I want hulking muscles; cool, shiny armor (with spikes!); a weapon as long as my body (with flames!), and a dick could double as a baseball bat when hard.

I understand that they can’t give me the last one, but would at least a slight bulge hurt anyone?

With this in mind, I decided to go on my own epic quest for a package. First I opened up Morrowind, created a male dunmer, after the intro I stripped naked and – whoa! It’s the full monety. I’d forgotten I had loaded the ‘Better Bodies’ mod along with improved textures. After removing it, I loaded the game, and my dark elf still had a bulge in his underwear. Oh, and a woman walked by me and insulted me. Good work Bethesda!

Thief: Deadly Shadows: This was a hard one (little penis humor there) as Garret constantly crouches; even while standing pressed against the wall, his knees are slightly bent. I spent a little time fiddling with the camera but saw no sign of a bulge.

If not, Gerret, how about the Witcher, Geralt? I don’t have the game installed right now, but I remember that having sex was a fairly prominent gameplay element. As expect, Geralt had a prominent bulge under his leathers.

Guild Wars: one of the few games where the guys are attractive. After playing through the intro with my Dervish, I stripped him down and took a screen shot. The bulges are three for five against the smoothies. I cracked open the Neverwinter Nights Toolset. After looking at my Dervish, my eyes wanted to bleed as the models were worse than even Morrowind’s, but the men were suitably equipped

Batman AA: Bulge. The demo even begins with the camera slowly panning up Batman’s muscular legs and prominent package.

Dead Space: Bulge. Blink and you might miss it, but it’s there.

Mass Effect: No bulge. I have no saves as maleshep and figured the armor might be hiding something, so I played through Eden Prime. It was all for naught; he’s as smooth as a baby’s butt. Good thing asari mate via the Vulcan mind meld. Given that NWN had bulging, the question is: will the bulge make an appearance in Dragon Age?

Drakensang: No bulge. I hear the seduction skill is useless for men anyway.

Devil May Cry 4: Bulge. A shock I’m sure to those who hate pretty guy Japanese characters.

The result is that seven out of the eleven games I looked at had bulges, so I guess the package wins by an inch. Now I’m off to contemplate why I spent the time to find this out, but I’ll leave you with a lineup of the fellows from my survey.

If I’ve been quiet lately, it’s because not much has happened on the game playing front. Batman: AA comes out at the end of this month, and then Alpha Protocol, and Dragon Age, two games I’m all aquiver with anticipation about.

In response, I’ve played a few of the older games I have: Galactic Civilization, Civilization IV, and Outpost are turn-based strategy games, while Civ City: Rome, Children of the Nile, and Startopia are all real-time ones.

I prefer turn-based strategy games as they tend to be more expansive in scope. I’d rather manage a dozen cities/planets and end the game by ruling the world/universe than manage a single city and win by shipping enough barley to Rome. Turn-based strategy games also have their draw back in the form of dead time: long stretches where you’re not doing much in particular save hitting the ‘end turn’ button and waiting for the next technological breakthrough. A large part of this is that I tend to go for cultural domination type victories and so avoid military conflicts.

There’s only one real time strategy game where I experienced real boredom: X3: Something Something. I followed a friend’s suggestion and traded in my original vehicle for a merchant ship so I could ferry cargo and make lots of money. Horrible idea. In the game, you control a single space ship and it took five minutes for my cargo ship to make it from one jump gate to the next.

Five minutes just sitting in front of the computer watching space go by. It was like playing that Microsoft star field screen saver.

Oh, and it had a ‘dynamic economy’ so it was very possible that by the time I left Space Station A traveled four maps to Space Factory B to spend all my credits on Cargo C and then traveled back to Space Station A, a AI cargo ship (all faster than mine) had sold them Cargo C in bulk, so they didn’t want it anymore.

But my favorite of all these games is Startopia. Why? Because it doesn’t take itself seriously. There’s a race of four-armed, purple skinned hippies that I please by planting flowers. High end establishments attract a race of slug people who poop the most valuable substance in the galaxy when they’re happy. If your space station gets dirty, you’ll find cute space kitten frolicking near the trash bins that the aliens love to pet. Each pet results in an egg being placed into them, and a few days later the infected burst open and some cross between a werewolf and the incredible hulk springs out and starts destroying everything.

This is far more fun than watching Egyptians gather clay, Romans cart bricks, or building another cathedral. Only raising your critter in Black and White is more fun.

Next, I’ll play Morrowind.

To the people with PS3s and X-Boxs who keep on telling me how awesome and fun Batman: AA is, you are bad, evil people, because I can’t get the game for PC until September 30th. I might not even be able to get it until *later* as I need to save my cash for Dragon Age: Origins (I want the CE), and Divine Divinity 2, and probably Alpha Protocol.

Thank goodness they delayed BioShock 2.

For those without PS3s or X-Boxes, please hold off buying the game until September 30th, or you might feel compelled to tell me how much fun you’re having.

I'm playing Betrayal in Antara and loving it. It's wonderful how a lack of expectations and choice makes a game enjoyable. This is a continuous statement though ‘RPGs need less choice;’ I can’t get others to agree with it.

Betrayal in Antara is a very basic RPG as it was made back in 1997. I have no idea how it manages to fill my 22’ widescreen monitor, but it does so with only vertical bars on the side. The graphics are crude, the fighting is very basic, and discussions involve you clicking on a topic and sitting back while the three PCs discuss something with an NPC.

The PC’s are all pregenerated: William of Escobar, third son of the noble house Escobar, who’s a warrior, Aren, son of an innkeeper who learns he can use magic, and Kaelyn, the girl who’s a ranger. Their history and looks are totally out of your control. And that’s fine. In fact, that’s great.

I’d say ‘more RPGs should do this’ but there’s a slight problem with this. If RPGs used pre-generated characters then 98% of RPGs would be about straight, white dudes. As-is, Betrayal in Antara has two white dudes who fit nicely in the plot, and a white gal who decided to join them permanently for no particular reason. However, given that Willian and Kaelyn constantly bicker, I assume they’ll fall in love with one another.

Perhaps it’s because I grew up reading books instead of playing games or watching TV, but without a pregenerated PC, I always find the NPCs more interesting than the PC. They have personality, while the PC is this boring glob that I’m expected to project a personality onto. This works fine for some people, but for the majority I don’t think this is the case. If people wanted to play a character who was simply an empty receptacle they could move around, they’d pick up a FPS, and even shooters are moving around from that model.

I’m not entirely serious when I say that RPGs need less choices. What I mean is that the increased choices in RPGs are all about things I don’t care about. Sure, oblivion style facial sliders mean we have a ton of choice when it comes to the character’s face, but does that choice matter? The majority of time, I can’t even see my character’s face, and people in the game world fail to acknowledge that I look just like Angelina Jolie or, and this is far more like, that my face is bizarrely distorted because no matter how hard I try, my create custom face skill is remains at 0.

Mass Effect is almost a parody of weapon and armor selection in RPGs. Five hundred different versions of the exact same thing. I would prefer a game where there is the basic arms and armor, perhaps three upgrades, and a few, unique items that are better than usual. Increased in damage, accuracy, speed or protection would be through increasing character skill.

We have World of Warcraft and Diablo type RPGs where, a character is purely about your class, stats, and gear, and where the main activity is killing stuff for XP. I would love an RPG that is the exact opposite: a predefined character with built in history and desires, little inventory, no attributes, no XP, and very little combat.

Oh, how I miss you Quest for Glory. It’s so sad to have fallen in love with a game design that is completely out of fashion.

The catacombs is the first ‘dungeon crawler’ I experienced in Guild Wars. There were about eight quests in it, and the areas were obviously given more thought from a visual point of view. During the game, you have the pick a second profession, and I ran around with the necromancer trainer before she dropped me off at a small side passage where I had to reanimate corpses and send them into deadly traps before killing a nightmare at the bottom of the passage.



For a reward, I got a grim cesta that I’m still using at level 8. Leveling is very slow in this game, as the max level is 20.

What this area lacked was two things 1) A boss, and 2) a story.

I ran around and killed everything I could find. The quest map – as opposed to the travel map – shows the area you’re in, any NPCs of interest, and places a bright green star where the next quest object is. Very useful for navigating a twisting lair of evil.

The only climax was finding the corpse of the moa bird in a large shrine area covered with candles and symbols on the wall. When I stepped in, a few shadowy things spawned and attacked me. That was it though. No interesting treasure, no powerful creature to beat, and no clue as to who killed the bird or why they needed it when there are tons of other critters running around they could have sacrificed.

I logged off for the night, and the next day start doing the rest of the ‘secondary profession’ quests for the XP they bring before picking my secondary.

While in town, I decide to interact with another human being. This is harder than you’d think as chat is constantly being spammed with WTS/WTB notices. I also encountered some interesting graphical errors. The white boxes below are other players.



I eventually begin a conversation with an actual human being (who writes in correct English and everything!) and learn that the ‘50g for GM’ requests aren’t people asking for a Game Master, but a Gate Monkey. There’s a gate to the north of here you need another player to open for you, and people will pay you 50g to open it for them. She offers to do so for me – for free – and I accept, it turns out I have a quest there. I had written it off, actually, but figured if someone wanted to party with me, I wouldn’t say no.

After opening the gate, we find ourselves again in a dangerous area full of Charr (have no idea what these are, other than ugly and evil). We finish the quest, and then go Charr hunting, which means her attacking them and Maya using spells to heal and protect her.

Yes, I am becoming a support character. It’s not that bad.

When we finish with the last group, she doesn’t suggest we slip into the nearby pond, but she does explain a large number of things about the game that were not in the manual and of which I was clueless about. She also tells me to pick elementalist as my secondary profession.

I do so, and start The Path of Glory.

Yes, this is the experience I was hoping for. The Charr break through the wall and attack the heartland. The area is destroyed, the NPCs I’ve interacted with die, and I’m teleported two years later into the ruined husk of the city I started out in. Unholy magics have overtaken the area. Neat!

But that means Devona is dead! My poor, virginal monk will be devastated when she finds out.

I open up a storage bin, grab a henchman (She’s a monk and her title is ‘healer henchman.’ Do you have to rub it in guys?), and run off to meet the ambassador from Krynn or Kreia or something. At his camp, I find the Elementalist that taught me my powers. Good to know someone survived. Then again, she was far south near Wizard’s Folly when the Charr attacked, so that makes sense.

She tells Maya that she can teach the monk no more, which is odd as Maya knows all of four elementalist spells. The Ambassador and I have a chat, at which point Maya comments that he doesn’t look like he’s from around here. I like that they include actual conversations in the game, but I’d like to think my PC is smart enough to grasp that an ambassador from a foreign kingdom *isn’t* from around here.

I check the ruins of the village where Devona once patrolled, and only find a monk who wants to teach me spells. My henchman proves useful as the monsters constantly run by Maya to attack her. She then flees like the cloth-wearing coward she is, and she’s very quick. As the monsters try to chase them down, Maya damages them with her spells.



While I’ve complained about the game, I’m enjoying myself. I don’t know if I should continue on with Maya or try one of the other campaigns. I’m interested in playing an assassin, or possibly a dervish. Then again, I read that the other campaigns had spoilers for Prophesies, and I don’t want that.

Right now, I am soloing all the content without problem, but I worry that later on I'll need to join groups, and I hate the idea of being someone's healbot.

There are times when you have to admit that you’ve made a mistake. After playing Khnum Maya until level 3, I had collected eight monk abilities and three necro abilities. The majority of monk spells were meant to heal and protect, and they specified that they could be used on allies.

The cloth gear, the healing and support powers, the wand weapon, ‘divine favor’ as primary attribute – it all lead to one unmistakable conclusion. My monk was just Guild Wars’ version of a priest. The game had tricked me into rolling a priest, the only class that’s less appealing to me than a mage. The plate wearing cleric of DnD or a paladin is fine, but I’m referring to the cloth wearer whose role is to stand near the back and heal others.

And I have to say, I’m impressed that they snuck this under my radar. I don’t know why, but I’m just more inclined to play a monk than a priest, even though the only real difference is the flavor. Priest wear dresses while monks where sensible robes that still distinguish them from the common labor, merchant, or soldier. Priests represent converting others to one’s beliefs while monks represent reflecting on their understanding. The power of a priest comes from a calling a specific being while the power of a monk comes from channeling the energy that makes up everything.

These are simplifications – stereotypes even - but conceptually I’m much more attracted to the idea/ideals of an Asian monk over that of a Western priest.

By level 3, I finally figured out how to get the stupid tattoo off my head. It’s the monk version of a helmet and can be disabled in the inventory.

I’d discovered the collectors: NPCs that stand around waiting for you to give them 3-5 of a specific item and in turn will provide access to possibly useful items. I picked up a belt pouch for extra inventory space, and much later (level 6 and 7) handwraps and a chest piece, the only armor I could find in this area.

I complained earlier about the barrenness of the world, so imagine my surprise at level 3 when I stepped from the shared city to the private instance and the world was crawling with mobs. It seems that what spawns in an area depends on your level. Many of the critters didn’t attack me, while a few did, and a few would attack only if others were attacking me. There’s no way to know beforehand which will or won’t do so as they’re all red dots on the mini-map. I am not sure if I like this or prefer the WoW, non-hostiles in yellow style.

Eager to see to what extent I could manipulate the world, I head to Farmer [NPC name] and gave him one of the eggs I’d gotten as a quest reward for smashing beetles. You see, Farmer [NPC name] has giant plague worms popping out of his farm. I’d already killed three of them to get their husks so I could trade them to a collector for my belt pouch. Farmer [NPC Name] says he can use a devourer egg to lure the plague worm queen to the surface, I’ll kill her and then the plague worms will leave the area.

In a regular MMORPG, I’d know this is bunk. Either a mob spawns as part of an event or it continuously spawns. If I’m in Un’Goro, and I have a quest to kill the queen of the hive in order to stop it from repopulating, that queen and those bugs will always respawn because there are five thousand other people who need to kill them. There though, no one needs to kill these plague worms but me.

I hurry after Farmer [NPC Name], kill the queen in a disappointingly unepic battle, and the worms keep popping up. Farmer [NPC Name] then thanks me then gives me a quest to find his bird in the catacombs. I have to say, that’s disappointing. Here’s a chance for Guild Wars to show me how it’s different from every other MMORPG, and it doesn’t even try.

What is the point of having an individual play experience if, like every other MMO, I truly have no effect on the world?

After wandering around the fields as plague worms continuously pop up like crazed whack-a-moles, Maya heads back to the small town Farmer [NPC Name] is from. It’s there that she meets her first real NPC. Meaning, the first non-player character with *character:* Devona. Maya is instantly moved by the way her armor sparkles in the sunlight. The way her strong hands grip the oversized warmaul she carries.



Devona asks Maya to help her defend the village from attacking Grawl. Our humble monk gladly accepts the quest, and together they run across the bridge where a band of the… ugly looking humanoid things have gathered. Maya stands back, healing and occasionally firing bolts of magical energy from her water staff, while Devona charges in, smiting the noxious creatures and their shaman leader. Afterwards, she reassures Maya that the Grawl won’t return for awhile; while violent, they won’t risk their numbers against an obviously superior foe. The group we just faced was a scouting party, sent to see how the village defenses held up as the Charr attacked from the north.

I only half-listen to this as I consider what just happened. I stayed back to heal and support another, and I liked it. Somewhat. It wasn’t bad.

Devona, still sweaty and covered in blood from the battle, and she asks Maya to join her in the pond beside the village for a bath. I imagine them stripping down, plunging into that cool water, and rubbing one another down. Afterwards, she’d wrap her muscular arms around Maya and they’d make love in the shallows, killing the occasional River Skale that wandered too close. While the attraction is obvious, I have to turn her down, as I can’t imagine monk vows allows for frisky business with righteous warrior types.

Instead, I have about five quests in the first dungeon: The catacombs

This sucks.

The continuing adventures of Khnum Maya were going well, and I decided to pick up the expansions to the original game: Factions and Nightfall. Heading down to my local Target, I found the Trilogy pack that I had looked for at Fry’s. As it was the same price as buying the two expansions separately, I snatched it up.

(Note: I’ve spent $73 altogether for this game, but I don’t plan on picking up another game until Divine Divinity 2, Dragon Age, or Alpha Protocal drops in November.)

Tonight, I finish my work and then try to load up the game by entering my ‘Access Key.’ It won’t let me.

I already have Prophecies (the original Guild Wars game) on this account, so I can’t install the trilogy pack. Why can’t it skip adding Prophecies to my account and just add Faction and Nightfall instead?

And, of course, I can’t get rid of my current access key and replace it with this one either. I can’t return the game as it’s opened software. Why NSoft? Why would you do something so stupid?

Edit:

I have figured out a way around this problem. While I can't enter an access key via the game interface, I was able to create a master NCSoft account, entered in my Trilogy Access Key, and then link the master account to my Guild Wars account. This appeared to override the original Guild Wars Access Key though, as I no longer see it listed. My character is still there though, so it's fine.

ALSO. Mass Effect Patch 1.02 is out, which includes this fix:
The issue where PCs with NVIDIA GeForce 8xxx and above video cards were experiencing random General Protection Fault crashes appears to have been fixed with the GeForce 182.06+ drivers. Please ensure when playing Mass Effect that all PC drivers are up to date.

Maybe I can go back to playing the game on high at max resolution.

Edit 2:

I installed the patch, downloaded the newest NVIDIA drivers for my Geforce 8800 GTX, restarted, get the resolution to 1680 x 1050* with high particles and ultra high textures, fired up a new John Shepard and... the computer crashed when I hit the end of the cutscene. Oh well. Can't win them all.

* Someone asked how to do this. Fire up your ME config utility, scan the system, change the aspect ratio to widescreen, and *then* change the resolution.

Proof that randomly bloging about my collection of games has benefits:

Modified Betrayal in Antara Installer for Vista

Sent to me today from Talin, who read about me not being able to play it on Vista. Now I can finally finish one of the games I bought a decade ago. Great!

Today at Fry’s I picked up a new game: Guild Wars. I’ve heard good things about it from people on the BioWare boards. Fry’s only had the original game and one of the expansions. I’d have liked the trilogy pack, but I suppose if it’s good enough I’ll just buy the entire thing bit by bit.


It’s installing right now. I assume this means it’s installing the regular game, and then downloading all the latest patches from the internet. Oh, hey, that took about 15 minutes. Nice.

I’m immediately prompted to enter all of my personal information. As they’re not charging my credit card, I have no idea why they need this. After setting up my account, I'm taken to a set up screen where I’m offered the six classes – warrior, ranger, monk, necromancer, mesmer, and elementalist – the one sentence descriptions offer me little information. I usually pick a warrior for my first character, as they tend to be the same across games, but I decide to try something else. Ranger doesn’t appeal; I don’t want ranged damage and I don’t want a pet.

Necromancer and Elementalist seem like wimpy magic users, which leaves me with Monk and Mesmer. Long ago, I did a image search for female monks and came up with a GW picture where the lady was bald. BALD. That’s awesome so I pick a monk.



I’m then taken to more customization options. I can change the height of my character within a range. I assume this is so guys are always taller than women. In WoW, I always picked a Draenei gal so I could tower over the puny human men I met, but my monk will be tiny. They also allow me to change the color of my character’s clothing and to have a tattoo on her head.

Why would I want a tattoo on her head? Her head is awesome. I also keep the robes orange to show her humility. Lastly, I name her: Khnum Maya

As soon as I create the character, I’m tossed into a cutscene where a king pontificates about the charr attacking. I notice he has a flaming sword and is very white. This is apparently a fantasy setting based on the European middle-ages, so what is my monk doing there?

The king pronounces that the greatest hero in the land must be found and the camera swoops down on… something . Oh, that’s me and three other people standing in the exact same spot. I move forward, click on the NPC with the green arrow, accept a quest (I don’t read what he says, the first questgiver never says anything of interest), and another NPC gains a green arrow over his head. I run all of twelve steps, click on him, and finish my first quest (150xp).

Yes, that’s lame.

The second quest giver then sends me to a third quest giver. During this time, other people have been running around me, and someone is spaming world chat with requests for gold. I pass a guy named 'Bacon Lube.' Then there's the third questgiver who tells me to… run outside and talk to someone else. Okay.

Questgiver three stands beside an archway filled with shimmering mists. I run through, hit a three-second loading screen, and everyone else disappears. I’m in a private ‘exploration’ area.



If you can’t tell from the screenshot, it’s all terribly generic pseudo-medieval fantasy looking so far. Moreover, that damned tattoo is on my head though I specifically unchecked it, and I appear to be wielding a glowy mace. I find both of these facts disappointing. I had hoped to use punches and kicks as attacks, or maybe have monkish weapons like a staff, Chinese sword, or tiger claws. As there are classes instead of races, why not give monks their own Chinese-influenced starting area?

Anways, I have another questgiver so I run up to him and get my first real quest: He gives me two abilities (I have a row of eight possible spells/abilities in my hotbar) and tells me to rescue a little girl from across the river, but beware, there are monsters!

I immediately attack the first red dot on my map… and my mace begins to spew energy. That’s right. It’s not a mace, it’s a WAND. My awesome monk is wielding a freaking WAND. The indignity is almost too much to bear. At the same time, a humble monk like Maya wouldn’t be bothered by using the most pansy of fantasy ‘weapons.’ I try to think of grasshoppers and wrens as I slaughter three creatures I know nothing about, but I assume are evil. (He said MONSTERS. A random guy with a green exclamation point over his head would never lie to me.)

The little girl follows me back to the ability-granting questgiver and I get more XP. He then gives me a quest to hike across the map to talk to yet another questgiver. No, just no.

I decide to explore the area, and quickly learn that the world is barren. After searching for three minutes, I finally find another questgiver standing beside the only mob spawn point in the area: a small cave of giant bugs with eggs. I lead his assistant into the cave and kill two giant bugs. I then encounter one stuck in the wall.

Problem: The assistant won’t pick the eggs unless the bugs are dead, but I can’t attack the bug because ‘Obstructed View.’ I run up to the bug and walk right into it, but still get the ‘Obstructed View’ error when I attempt to attack it. I finally rummage through my inventory and switch the holy wand with a two-handed hammer. Problem solved. With a feeling of great sorrow, Maya pummels the bug into the rock of the cave.

Wand = Crap weapon. That’s all the evidence I need.

Weapons in this game don’t appear to have any speed or strength requirement, and don’t seem to be limited by class. As I continue to smash bugs to a gooy pulp with my giant hammer, I wonder if I’m doing something wrong; I must have started out with a wand for a reason and wand wielders usually don’t benefit from two-handers. Perhaps in this game, weapon utility is determined by magical enhancements. Like wands give you +5 to energy while giant hammers give you +5 to strength, and energy is ultimately more important to a monk.

I have little time to ponder this before I come across the newest bit of inanity…



Large barrels in the middle of a open, well-lit area without even grass to obstruct them are now a 'Hidden Stash.' A can only imagine a game of hide-and-go-seek with the developers of this game would consist of them standing on the coffee table, waving their arms.

Coming Next: I level, and Maya finds true love.

I wrote this instead of playing Mass Effect. I want to play Mass Effect. I wish they’d just hand out a list of stuff that changes your ME 2 play through, as one of my biggest complaints about ME 1 was the lack of consequences for your actions. I’m doing a FemShep, Paragon soldier who romances Liara and sacrifices Ashley.

But, I’m not playing Mass Effect because it crashes my computer whenever a cutscene plays. (The long, unskipable cutscenes that I’ve seen at least a dozen times already) I have no idea what the problem is. I’ve played the game previously on this computer with no problem. I can only assume there’s a conflict with the game and the latest driver from NVidia. Bizarrely enough, when it crashes my desktop, it also cleans out all my cookies.

I was able to make it through the first cutscene by turning all textures and particle effects to low, and setting my resolution at 1024 x [whatever it is], but that’s rather unsatisfying when I can play the rest of the game with settings at maximum at a resolution of 1650 x 1050. Then again, when ME first came out, I played the entire thing at 800 x 600 at the lowest possible settings, and I was glad for it because my computer was woefully underspec.

I even remember the horror of the conduit run. A sequence that CANNOT be finished if your FPS is under 20. I literally went through that one section over fifty times and could not do it. It too featured an unskipable cutscene (We must protect the council!) though never once did my computer crash while I played.

This is, and has always been, the big problem with computer games: they’re just so finicky. I’ve just done a clean install on Vista (goodbye achievements/previous playthroughs) and now I can’t launch the configure utility. I’m sure the available patch will fix this. At the same time, the opening cutscene didn’t make my game crash. Why mess with a good thing?

Of course, that means I won’t be able to play Bring Down the Sky, which is something I’m looking forward to.

I mentioned that the lack of visible consequences for actions in ME was a complaint of mine I hope to see remedied in ME2. In fact, I’d say that a great deal of my eventually evaluation of the second game will depend on how well it fulfills the promises of the first. My other major complaint about the game is the alignment system.

I am not anti-alignment. In a computer RPG, choices are limited, so I think having an explicit ethical system with measurable increases, decrease, and consequences is a fine model to base actions and dialogue on. My problem is when we’re presented with an ethical system that claims to be more than good and evil, but isn’t. I had the same issue with Jade Empire and its Open Palm/Closed Fist. There’s the opportunity to explore issues and values that haven’t been tackled before, and we’re reduced to Be Nice and Helpful or Be a Violent Asshole.

In one of the newly released ME2 demos, we have a renegade option that involves kicking a guy off a roof because he gives you lip. In ME, we had punching out insane people and reporters. I realize some people love it, but I feel cheated when my options are to act like the perfect soldier or an eight-year-old in an adult’s body. Likewise, one of the ‘big choices’ in ME failed to take into account the most paragon of actions. On Noverria, I’m given the choice to kill the Queen or let her go. Garris remarks that we should leave this up to the Council. Er, good point. This is something a soldier who’s interested in protocol and following orders would definitely want to do.

I wish alignment systems in games were similar to the Hierarchy of Sins in Vampire: the Masquerade. The original rulebook gave us one that looked a great deal like conventional morality, but some of the splatbooks presented ethical systems that ranged from eccentric to inhuman. The thing is though that they were all based around an ideal, and when you read them, you quickly understood what that ideal was and why the ‘sins’ violated it.

And I think it’s important that the developers actually have an ideal in mind other than random jerkery. Take Open Palm in Jade Empire. The Open Palm respects harmony and social conventions. In the Jade Empire some people are considered inherently better or worse than others, and slavery has a long history. Therefore, a follower of the Open Palm ought to condone slavery, but if you do so in the game, you get Closed Fist points.

It seems in ME2, they’re abandoning the original notion of Paragon altogether. When asked if you’re going to stop an assassin, your dialogue options are ‘Why?’ and ‘No.’ Where is the ‘Hell, yeah’ option? Last time I checked, assassination is rather illegal; if a Spectre considers themselves an officer of the law, they’d stop an assassination.

I understand that the story is supposed to be darker, and the PC is gathering together a band of scum and ruffians (the most elite scum and ruffians available), but I’d rather have the option to play Paragon and suffer for it, instead of having to play Renegade or Indifferent.

Three pages of games I have on my computer, many of which I end up deleting. Read only if you find the minutia of another’s playlist of bizarre interest. Tomorrow I detail the games coming out that I look forward to.

After deleting the Batman demo from my system today, I realized had icons for 12 games, plus Steam and the NWN Toolset on my desktop.

I went through and deleted a few:
Diablo II – Just can’t enjoy it like I used to. Please implement a regular save system in Diablo III Blizzard
Fallout 3 – Didn’t finish the main story line, but explored a ton of the wasteland.
Mirror’s Edge
Mist III
Oblivion – Only played a little. It’s uninteresting when compared to FO3.
Overlord 2

I checked in my games directory and then deleted them more. When you uninstall a game, it will inevitably leaves files and folders on your computer despite any insistence that yes, you want it ALL gone.

Leaving me with the following on my desktop:

BioShock – I’m a wimp when it comes to scary games, so haven’t been able to finish it.
Dead Space – See above
Dreamfall – Could never get it to work on Window’s Vista
Left4Dead – Play frequently, but suck
Monkey Island (the Secret of) – Was playing and enjoying right before I had my tooth pulled
Mass Effect – This game is the reason I have a new computer. My old one couldn’t play it so I attempted to overclock it, caused it to break down a few times, and so decided to get a new comp. I want to do one more complete play through before ME 2 comes out.
World of Warcraft – Play frequently.

Then I cracked open my LSN/Game folder to find:

Assassin’s Creed – Interesting first part, then you realize the rest of the game is doing that first part repeatedly. (deleted)
Baldur's Gate, Baldur's Gate II, Tutu - I’ve never finished the first game, and finished the first once despite trying several times to get through it. Thank goodness RPGs have moved away from this gameplay style. Deleted.
Betrayal in Antara/Quest for Glory 5 – want desperately to play and finish them, but BiA doesn’t run correctly in Vista and QfG5 has a game stopping bug. (deleted)
Civilization 4 – One of the best games ever made, IMHO. Jump to Desktop
Devil May Cry 4 – Enjoyable game, but must remember to get gamepad the next time I’m at Fry’s, as the controls are poor with mouse and keyboard.
Thief: Deadly Shadows – Great game. Deserves a jump to desktop.
Titan’s Quest with Immortal Throne - My favorite of the Diablo Clones, but could have used randomize maps. I get tired of playing through the exact same areas. Also, it’s too easy on normal difficulty. (deleted – though now that I think about it, I gave the game disks to Max. I’ll probably never see them again)
Wizardry 8 – So much potential, but the constantly spawning monsters that you can’t avoid and are always scaled to your level annoy me. Also, I’m stuck fighting a group on monstrous rat men that I have to kill for the main quest. I just can’t survive the battle. (deleted)

Not finished!

It’s time for LSN/My Documents. Even though I have a LSN/Games directory that Windows created just for game information, companies love to toss crap in My Documents folder. This is usually saved games or ‘user generated data.’ The thing is that I’m obsessive about keeping the My Documents folder in perfect order since I have tons of stuff in there. Seeing an extra folder spring up annoys me, especially when there’s a Game folder, especially as if I delete or move it my game won’t work, and especially as they don’t always disappear when I uninstall.

BioShock Save Games - I hate you now, BioShock.
BioWare, Mass Effect Data - I hate you now, Mass Effect
Capcom, Devil May Cry 4 - I hate you now, Devil May Cry 4
EA Games, Mirror’s Edge -Delete
Eidos, Batman Arkham Asylum –Delete. Seriously? A demo with no save properties and no ability to change graphic settings needs this folder?
Electronic Arts, Dead Space and the Sims 3 Saves - Deleted Sims 3. I hate you now Dead Space.
Neverwinter Nights 2 - Delete
Thief Deadly Shadows – Hate you

Moving on to LSN/My Documents/My Games, which is a holdover from XP.

Sacred Underworld – Hey, I remember you! I was hoping you’d be Divine Divinity, but you were just the ugly, boring Diablo clone people claim Divine Divinity was. Delete.
Dawn of War 2 – When did I get this game? Maybe this was a demo? I remember playing it. A RTS based on the Warhammer 40K universe, and all you get to play is white, male space marines. What a waste. Deleted. (I have the WH40K Inquisitor PnP RPG though, and wish someone would make a game from that.)
Demigod - A boring, shallow game with an interesting premise. Waste of my money. Deleted.
Diablo II, Overlord 2, Oblivion, Titan Quest - Deleted again.
Dungeon Siege 2 - One of the better Diablo Clones. I liked the follower and pet system. The story wasn’t bad, the gameplay was fun, and I like that it tried out a learn-by-doing system. Hmm. I’ve decided this was better than Titan Quest. Deleted.
Enzai - Japanese H-game (that means interactive pr0n story). Never did get any of the good endings, so my waifish, please-don’t-tell-me-what-age-he-is, and wrongly imprisoned hero always ended up a sex slave in prison or murdered. It occurs to me that Americans would never make an erotic game with 15 ending, the majority of which end up with the guy dead or insane. Deleted.
Far Cry 2 - Enjoyable, open world FPS set in warring African states in which everyone is trying to kill you. Could have been improved immeasurably with a STALKER like faction system, and guard posts that don’t magically replenish no matter how many times you wipe them out. Deleted.
Freelancer - One of the better space pilot/merchant/fighter games. Meaning it tried not to be dreadfully boring. Good story and characters. Deleted.
Galactic Civilization II with Twilight and Dark Avatar - A 4x game in which you control a galactic empire. Good AI, rewards different styles of play, each alien race has its own personality, and okay ‘storyline.’ Move to regular Games folder, put shortcut on desktop. Hope nothing breaks.
Halo 2 - I ought to finish this someday. Moved to regular Game folder.
Beyond Divinity - Not as bad as people who liked the first say it is, but still hampered by a milquetoast story and the dreadful Battleground system. Deleted.
Black and White 2 - Why did I even buy this? I didn’t like the first one. Oh, wait, I liked the animals. I raised my giant leopard into a paragon of goodness. Rainbow trails followed him, he’d irrigate the fields, dance for my villagers, and constantly pick up and snuzzle them too. Moved to regular Game folder.
Sierra: Arcanum, Outpost I and II, Quest for Glory Anthology, and Throne of Darkness - I believe Outpost was the first PC game I ever played. That or the original Prince of Persia. (Moved) I didn’t realize Sierra published Arcanum. It’s okay, but nothing compared to Trokia’s last game: Bloodlines. (deleted). Throne of Darkness was a rather mediocre Diablo clone set in Japan. (deleted) Quest for Glory was an excellent RPG series in the mid-90s. I played the second one, which was texted based, without any manual and never made it to the end. It wasn’t until I got my first computer that I played through the series. (deleted)
Beyond Good and Evil - This is only the save file folder. Another game I gave to Max, never to see again. (deleted)

I know I'm late to this ball game, but...



The unlockable tribal skin for Sheva with leopard print, white paint, leaf skirt, and giant knife. I have no idea why anyone thought Resident Evil 5 was racially insensitive. Why this is the most progressive image of African spearchuckers since the 1920s!

In the interests of full disclosure, I hate Batman. Okay, hate is too strong a word, but I dislike the character immensely. Long before I was a video game geek, I was a comic geek. I’ll admit that in the hands of a skilled writer (1980s Frank Millar), Batman can be great, but in the hands of a skilled writer, any comic book character can be great.

My main complaint is that Batman can do no wrong. He’s supposed to be the most ‘dark and realistic’ hero in the DCU, but is often portrayed as a model of intellectual, physical, and ethical perfection who the plot-gods make sure always comes out on top no matter what the situation.

But I’m talking about the GAME DEMO here, so I will attempt to keep an open mind, even though I greatly dislike the main character.

The first thing I noticed was an inability to fiddle with the graphic settings. No changing your resolution, textures, or SFX. It’s very possible this is just because it’s a demo, but if that’s the case in the full game, I wouldn’t complain. I tend to think of graphics settings as either accommodating people whose computer doesn’t meet the recommended specs or massaging the ego of those who’ve have high-end systems. Graphically speaking, I think games would be better if there was a single end-user experience.

The second thing I noticed was the ‘character bios’ section. I love this sort of fluff, so I immediately clicked on it. Only Batman and the Joker are displayed. Batman has an expression I interpret as constipated man stoically going to the bathroom, or five-year-old denied his peanut butter cookie. The Joker has two out of five audio tapes of an interview between the Joker and… Magma from X-Men: Legends? It sounds just like her to me, and she’s apparently a doctor now. While the Joker’s tapes don’t interest me – by definition, his psyche is meant to be impenetrable – I hope we get to listen to/discover those of other villains. It might be a neat way to get into their head and have them portrayed as more than one-dimensional punching bags. (It worked in BioShock!)



We start with a brief cinematic in which Batman rushes through the city in his Batmobile with the Joker handcuffed in the backseat. Gotham looks suitably stylish. Not as impressive as Tim Burton’s Gotham, but not just a copy of New York either. Batman himself is very broad and muscular, moreso than I prefer. While he’s not Spider-Man, his fighting style is fairly athletic and acrobatic, and he spends as much time running and swinging as he does lifting heavy objects.

After the cutscene, we’re immediately tossed into a battle with a group of shirtless thugs who all have the same broad, muscular build. I vaguely point Batman at one, click my left mouse button and he punches. I continue to click the button while sometimes changing direction and Batman performs a wild range of stylish moves, sometimes in slow motion. I’m even graded on my combos. It feels like Devil May Cry 4, but requires far less in the way of timing or chaining together moves. There’s an interesting contrast between the stiff, Dead Space like movement just walking/moving, and the very fluid movements of the combat. One moment, I’m playing a comic book, and the next, I’m back to driving my grandfather’s rice combine harvester.

After the obligatory smack-down segment, the Joker invites me to come and find him. I wander into the nearby cells and find something out of Silent Hill. This pleases me, as one of my favorite versions of Arkham is that of a hellish, cruel pit the uncaring citizens of Gotham toss anyone who can’t handle reality. And that people tend to become more violent and insane after being interred in it for awhile. I get a few new character bios, and discover a fairly obvious secret object.

The corridors are all narrow and the rooms seems very small, possibly a stylistic choice, but it reminds me of too many games developed on the old Xbox that had to have tiny areas because of memory restrictions.

I head down to the patient pacification center, which has a giant electrical chair. Zsasz has captured a guard and strapped him down, and will kill him if he sees me coming. Is it the stealth tutorial? I think so! I’m also alerted to ‘detective vision’ which allows me to see through walls and highlights important objects.



I first try to fail the stealth portion to see how the game deals with my failure. I learn to grapple, then hang upside down on a gargoyle, drop and walk in front of Zsasz. I’m treated to a small cutscene of Zsasz electrocuting the guard (the man dies off screen), then the Joker appear in front of a black background and appears to be taunting Batman’s dead body. It’s game over, would I like to retry?

Now, I could understand if this was a critical situation, but it’s a single guard. Why does his death mean the game has to end? To be sure, I’m not asking for multiple endings or for events in the mission to change. The guard dies, I beat up Zsasz, and I continue on in Arkham. Instead, the game makes me replay this part, and I stealth knock-out Zsasz.

The demo then has me sneak attack a few groups of henchmen, and it’s over.

Thoughts so far: Fairly shallow combat, characters, and story. Being the World’s Greatest Detective seems to boil down to using your X-Ray Batvision and interacting with anything that glows orange.

On the other hand, leaping from gargoyle to gargoyle while people fire at me, and sneaking behind thugs to take them down was fun. They seem to have the atmosphere right, and while a bit of the voice acting is questionable, it’s mostly solid.

An image of the Scarecrow from Batman: Arkham Asylem. Very nice update of the suit. The character designs on this game seem very hit or miss though.

90% of the guys at Comic Con are perfectly normal. 10% have serious personal boundary issue. Every year, there are reports of female attendees being stalked, and booth babes being groped and rubbed against.

Who will this contest most appeal to?

The best part is that they explicitly say you can commit an ‘act of lust’ with any booth babe at Comic Con. Not just those at Dante Inferno, or other EA sites, where the women might be informed of the contest.

You’d think EAs legal department would quickly grasp how this is a bad idea.

I have a list of about twelve LSN subjects in Word doc on my computer, not including various reviews. I figured I’d tackle the most basic one: WHAT IS A GAME?

A game is structured play. (That answer so does not justify the dramatic all caps.)

If a bunch of kids run around and whack at one another, they’re playing. If they create a set of rules –one person whacks at a time, everyone runs/hides from the whacker, if you’re whacked by the whacker then you become the whacker, no whack backs – then they’re playing a game of tag. This structure is usually called the rules, but it might just be a set of guidelines. This structure may be static or dynamic, it might be simple or complex, and it might have a win/loss condition. Win or loss conditions are popular, because they create a definitive ending, and because winning is a powerful motivation.


The human ability to create and communicating an abstract structure is beyond animal intelligence, but there’s definitely proto-gameplay in social animals. For instance, if you wrestle with your dog, they’ll occasionally mouth or snap at you. You can teach them to not do this. ‘Wrestle with me but no biting’ is a form of structured play, as is ‘I toss the ball, and you bring it back.’

Humans like to play and humans like to play games. Games are more important than we tend to give them credit for, but before we talk about that, we need to answer another question: WHAT IS PLAY?

According to Wikipedia, ‘Play is a rite and a quality of mind in engaging with one's worldview. Play refers to a range of voluntary, intrinsically motivated activities that are normally associated with pleasure and enjoyment.’ [1]

If you can parse that first sentence, you are one smart ninja.

I define play an engaging activity that doesn’t matter. Washing your sheets and making your bed matter, jumping on your bed does not. A sudden burp isn’t an engaging activity, burping the alphabet is. Play is innately frivolous, and more demanding than sitting on the couch and watching TV.

Play tends to be associated with children. In many animals, playful behavior happens mostly in childhood and then drops off sharply when it sexual maturity rolls around. Smarter animals tend to play more and play longer than dumber ones. This is because play is a useful learning tool.



A bunch of wolf pubs wrestle, and they learn in a safe environment things like physical coordination, fighting, using their strength, moving quickly, etc. They also start working out pack behavior. Play, like sex, is nature’s way of getting us to do useful activities under the guise of having fun.
Why are games so popular then? Because being a functional, adult human means operating within hundreds of abstract, arbitrary structures. Games teach us how to learn. How to adapt our mindset and behavior to an external rule set, and to internalize those structures and winning conditions.

Monopoly money has no intrinsic value, but neither does ‘real’ money. Value emerges because everyone agrees to operate as though it exists. There’s no reason for soccer/football players to not pick up the ball, and there’s no reason for game reviewers not to take gifts in exchange for good reviews, but these rules still exist, and those who break them aren’t playing fair.

These words that you’re reading, the syntax, associated sounds, semantics, and symbols, all utterly arbitrary, but I have to spend years studying and using the English language if I want to communicate.

A love of gameplay suggests a love of exploring and mastering abstract structures. It can also suggest a desire for simplicity. Games are easier than the real thing. It’s easier to win a game of Guitar Hero than it is to learn to play Stairway to Heaven. It’s easier to get to 450 in Tailoring in WoW than it is to learn how to sew a prom dress in the real world. There are brilliant chessmasters out there, but even a grand master is fighting a battle far more simplistic and easy than any real world general.

Games can be mastered. Real life, not so much.

Humans are messy, and the line between game and reality can get blurred. Professional poker and baseball players make their livelihood off games. A woman has sex with a man after he gives her enough gold in WoW for her to buy an epic, flying mount. A fourteen-year-old in Russia murders his seventeen-year-old Counter Strike rival.

I’d argue (and I might be pulling this from my backside) that like the value of money, and the idea that soccer players who pick up the ball are doing something wrong, frivolousness vs seriousness is a collective illusion. Having sex so someone will by you an epic, flying mount isn’t all that different from having sex with someone so they’ll buy you a new car. Murdering someone because they beat you at Counter-Strike, isn’t that different from murdering someone because they slept with your wife or got the promotion you didn’t.

I’m not about to break out the Nietzsche, but I’m reminded of a review that Yatzee did not long ago for the Sims 3. He complained that in the Sims, the player wasn’t the one in charge, the Sims were. You appeared to be in control – a god of sorts- but in reality, you catered to their every whim. I have to ask, how is that different from every other video game out there?

You’re mastering the system to win, but in order to do so, you become utterly subservient to the developer’s structure and desires. It doesn’t matter how good you are at hoop jumping, you’re still jumping through other people’s hoops. Your ‘winning’ is nothing but an electronic doggy-treat that you pay the developer to give you.

In that light, the massive popularity of games takes on disturbing connotations.

…
…

SHEEP! YOU’RE ALL SHEEP. THE LOT OF YOU!!

See also: Why animals love to play.

This has nothing to do with video games. Though the bottom talks about a computer utility.

Imagine you are a sweet, young, and innocent lesbian stripper ninja. You head to the dentist one day due to a toothache and he tells you that decay has hit the root of your back molar and the best thing to do is extract it. You could also do a root canal + post + crown, but that’s more expensive, would take longer, what’s left of the tooth is like ‘an eggshell’, and there’s a wisdom tooth right behind it that’s starting to press on the roots.

You agree to the extraction, which should take twenty minutes. It took THREE HOURS.

They used dozens of tools on me. They drilled the tooth into parts to separate the roots. Some electrical thing burned away parts of my gum. Dozens of tools went into my mouth and came out covered in saliva and blood. After the first half-hour, the dentist’s hands shook from the effort of just grasping the end of the molar while prying and pulling as hard as he could without anything budging. They gave me so much anesthetic, I lost sensation in my nose, but I was still treated to occasional bursts of pain as they cracked my tooth and tore it out millimeter by millimeter.

Dentist: This is one of the most difficult extractions I’ve done in twenty years.
LSN: hh.
Dentist: But you’re very calm, you’re a good patient.
LSN: *shrug* (there’s not much else you can do after someone’s cracked your tooth into bits and drilled away the pulp)

Apparently, I have strong gums, significant root curvature, and there are bulbs at the end of my roots. At two hours, forty minutes, the dentist yanked out the last root… and then explained that there was a root tips left within. After twenty minutes of digging and scraping within my gum with a series of picks, he took another X-ray and realized that wasn’t a root tip, but my wisdom tooth.

Ha ha?

Since then, I’ve had a slice of bread, two darvocet, a glass of water, and four hours of sleep. I want chocolate or tapioca pudding.



On to defragmentation! It’s important. The people at Priform are wonderful because they give us ccleaner, which I install on every computer I can get alone for 6 minutes. It’s a utility I run on a daily basis. It takes little time to work. It’s easy. It’s free. It doesn’t try to get me to upgrade to the ‘full’ version, it installs only itself, and it never tries to advertize crap I don’t want.

As such, when I updated my copy today and noticed Defraggler – a defragmentation utility by the same company – I downloaded it immediately. I play games. I constantly install and uninstall stuff. I ought to defragment more often, but my internal HD is 586 GB while my external HD is 300 GB. Defragmenting takes too long, and the software that comes with Windows is finky; if I’m messing around with my computer, it slows it down, but if I leave my computer alone, it complains and stops working. It’s like asking a teenager to do the dishes.

Defraggler helps some of the problems but seems to have its own oddities. I downloaded, installed, and ran it on two computers at work – no problem. It seems less resource intensive than Norton or Microsoft’s Defragment program. I used it on a laptop and computer running XP, the laptop is older than 2004 while the computer has those sticks of RAM that are as long as your arm. 2002, maybe? Either way, I was able to work on them while the program ran with no slow down, and for both (26% and 31% fragmentation) it took about 2-3 hours to complete.

The real test came when I got home. My computer had 41% fragmentation. I turned on the program and headed out to my dentist appointment. When I came back this evening… the program had freaked out. I’m not sure what happened. When I clicked it, it filled the screen with a large, blank box, and when I clicked it again, it minimized.

I restarted the computer, restarted Defraggler and... I had 45% fragmentation? I left it to frolic again, went to bed, and after four hours of sleep, I came back to find that it wasn’t running.

The thing is, I’m in pain and grumpy and hungry but can’t eat because of the pain and the bloody wound where my molar used to be. It’s very possible I just forgot to turn it on. I run it again and…

It’s strange, when I first ran it, it said that I had more used space than free space, and now it says I have exactly half and half. Did I delete something? Did it delete stuff in some sort of Hall 9000 mental breakdown? Is it defragmenting AND compressing?

It’s been running fine since I first sat down at the computer four hours ago. Internet Explorer is taking more resources than it is. Now, it’s about half way done. But it just disappeared again. It’s not minimizing to the system tray. It just vanishes.

Other than that, it’s a great program.

Divine Divinity 2 came out in Germany today, and I'm ruthlessly swiping these picures from Morgoth at the Obsidian board. I want this game.







I changed my comment settings, so if you attempt to comment, it will take you to a full page. I hope this will help people having difficulties.

This is part two of a two-part review of Mirror’s Edge and contains many spoilers. Read Part 1 for general thoughts.

And here is where I get nitpicky, mostly about the story of Mirror’s Edge.

Mirror’s Edge’s gameplay is good. It’s smooth, responsive, and the blend of puzzle and combat sections (they’re more racing sections as the eight times out of ten you’ll want to avoid combat) work. The bright environments would have been a great set up for grungy, darker environments later on, but that instead we’re treated to grungy, darker cartoons that aren’t all that interesting.

I can buy into the premise of a totalitarian regime taking control of a near future, first-world nation and using the tools we currently associate with informational freedom (the internet, e-mails, video systems) and using them to monitor and control the populous while replacing news systems with propaganda. Runners are one way that people have learned to get around that scrutiny.

The story itself engages in little political or social thought. Strange for a game that’s premise is so political. Faith seems indifferent to the world around her in anything but the most basic level: She runs because Merc taught her to. She investigates the assassination of a politician because her sister is framed.



This is fine; Faith is not required to be an intellectual character. Though I’d be interested in learning her thoughts regarding government power, citizen responsibility, and the tension between keeping a society safe and keeping it free, this is Faith’s game, and these topics never appear to enter her stream of conscious.

Okay then, perhaps Faith is more of an intuitive or emotive person. The cartoons suggest she’s a ‘survivor’ who’s learned to evade the law and make it on the streets at a very young age. This is a great beginning for a story, but it’s not enough. A good story has the main character changing in some way.

This is why Prince of Persia: Sands of Time is one of the best stories in gaming. In the beginning, the Prince is arrogant, ambitious, and obsessed with earning honor and glory. His actions lead to death/corruption of those around him, including his beloved father (and possibly the corruption of the world, but that’s not the central issue for him.) Throughout the game, he learns humility, he learns to take responsibility for his actions, and he learns to trust others and put them first.

Fiction 101: the protagonist goes through a series of challenges in pursuit of a goal that changes them for better (Prince of Persia) or worse (Scarface.)

Video games have gotten away with ‘Aliens/demons/Nazis attack, you fight them and win!’ for a long time, but Mirror’s Edge is trying hard to be something unique. The bits between chapters are obviously attempts to make Faith and the story’s events more meaningful than ‘Police attack, you run/fight them and win, ‘ but that attempt is a failure.
When Kate, Faith’s sister, is revealed I was thrilled. She’s one of the ‘Blues,’ the police that are the runner’s main advisory. I suspect Kate is a lawful good paladin; when faced with a government that robs people of their freedoms and a corrupt police force, she joins the police and tries to be one of the good guys. I think the story as-is would be better told with her as the main character: she’s a good cop framed for the murder of a rising politician. While running from the law, she uncovers a plot to take over the city, and ends up working with ‘criminals’ she once fought in order to make sure the current Mayor doesn’t replace the police with a private army he owns.

When Faith first leaves Kate, she urges her sister to come with her. To run from the police about to enter the building, arrest Kate for assassination, and find her guilty in a mock trial. Kate’s response? She’s staying there. Faith will run, Faith always runs, but Kate will stand.




And, when you have a story about oppression, then you need a character who will stand for something. Faith never becomes this person. She runs, and saves her sister, but she seems as unconcerned with the bigger problems of the world and the events that led her sister to being wrongfully imprisoned, as she is when the game starts.

“I love my sister and would do anything to save her’ is touching, and a great starting point for the story, but it’s not enough.

That Video Game Blog was cast out, never to darken my blogroll again. I’ve replaced it with gamepolitics.com and rockpapershotgun.com. Thank you deepseasharc!

As you might have noticed, the Mirror’s Edge part 2 never materialized. What you might not have noticed is that my Night Elf warrior made it from level 6 to level 20 since I wrote part one. (The blood-elf rogue is twittling her thumbs at level 23) Tomorrow though, you can expect part 2 and some thoughts on Diablo.

I’d like to know more about the people visiting my blog: deepseasharc and Pai, tell me a bit about yourself. What kinds of games do you play? How long have you been a gamer? If you could change/improve one thing about gaming right now, what would it be?

A few days ago, That Video Game Blog posted an announcement that EA would be hosting a panel on homophobia and virtual communities by GLAAD (Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation). I posted, praising EA for stepping up to the plate as one of the largest publishers in the industry.

My comment never got posted, but several deriding the panel or the idea that homophobia was an issue in gaming communities managed to get posted.

This is part one of a two-part review of Mirror’s Edge and contains no spoilers while part two refers to specific events and situations within the game.

Last night I finished Mirror’s Edge, and I have to say it was an exquisite experience. From the visceral gameplay to the bright, bold aesthetic, from the electronic soundscape to the heroine herself, Mirror’s Edge take us out of the realm of business as usual when it comes to video games.

This isn’t to say that the game lacks flaws. My emotional landscape was like this as I played: Pleasure of discovery –> Comfort as I settle into the game –> Frustration as I am pulled frequently out of it –> Disappointment as the game’s weaknesses mount –> Focus as the intensity and difficulty rises –> And finally, satisfaction as I reach the end. In many ways, the game is like the player/character when you first play; it stumbles into the bright sunlight and can’t quite control itself. The game is polished, but underneath the smooth animations is a constant unease. It’s a game that doesn’t trust its core mechanic of constant momentum, which is a shame as the momentum - the ducking, running, sliding, and leaping as you navigate the environment - is wonderful.

Since Mirror’s Edge came out in December, I’ve read several reviews, professional and non-professional, and I wonder to what extent they suffered from hype poisoning. I recall that when the in-game trailer dropped, people were all over it. When a game fails to live up to one’s expectations, the emotional backlash can be brutal. Mirror’s Edge is not a perfect game or a revolutionary game. It’s a good game with problems. It also delivers a unique experience, and that is something I crave in my entertainment.



Mirror’s Edge does a good job at embodiment. I am both aware of Faith as a separate entity, even as I lose myself in her motions. She becomes an extension of myself, but never disappears entirely. Her feet are right there, as well as her legs if I fall on my ass. I can hear her breathing constantly, the various grunts of effort as she moves. If the ‘sight’ is placed on a close object, the ones far away blur slightly as she focuses. There’s the jerk of her pulling back from a ledge I’m not quite aware of or the slight exhalation of breath she makes right before she drops into a slide.

I’ve played first-person shooters before, and I’ve played third-person acrobatic based games, and I find the blend works. There are times that Faith speaks directly to the player, and I’m okay with that. She’s not me, but we don’t need transplant character e.g., Farrah in the Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. We’re close enough that her stray thoughts make their way to me.

The story works best when it keeps me along for the ride. Between each chapter, there’s an animated interlude, in which everything is inevitably drab and grey. It’s like no one bothered to tell the animation director that the color scheme tended towards white broken up by swathes of strong color. Not only does it take the player out of the action into the role of a watcher, but the muted colors suggest that it’s not as important or interesting as the rest of the game.

During the actual gameplay sections, Faith is oddly silent. Instead, we have Merc (short for Mercury) constantly barking orders at her. This is especially annoying during difficult sections where he’ll make the same useless comment –“Be careful, Faith. Watch out.” – over and over and over. This is especially annoying when I’m being shot at. When bullets are flying, neither Faith nor I need a guy sitting at a computer miles away to tell us to be careful. As I said, Faith’s thoughts make their way to me, but doesn’t seem to do much thinking.



Earlier concepts made her a gang member and gave her a bit of ‘tude. The developers dropped that, but didn’t pick up the slack. What is Faith’s personality? I believe they intentionally made her blank so the player could project, but this was a misstep.

I wonder to what extent the fact that Faith is female played in this. I know some guys decided this was a girl’s game simply because the main character was a woman. I’m not fond of the faceless blob hero: Dead Space, Doom, and Portal come to mind. I’d rather play someone like Dante, Duke Nukem, Sam Fisher, or the Prince. My ability to empathize with and care about what a character cares about is never helped by a lack of personality.



Part 2 tonight.