Lesbian Stripper Ninja

Currently playing…

2011-01-04T09:32:00.000-08:00

I loaded up Oblivion on the PC, downloaded a dozen mods to 'fix' the game, and it was still barely tolerable. The game feels lifeless, soulless, and meaningless.

The landscape is good looking, I'll give it that. The people, the cities, the armor, the ruins, and the caves range from ugly to boring. Fallout 3 had lots of ugly but it also had some character.

Yet, Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is on my 'to buy' list for 2011. Why? Morrowind.

I loved Morrowind. When I first got the game, it required too much RAM for my system to handle and I still managed to chug through the first part at about 2 FPS. I'd never played, or imagined, a game like that. The concept of open-world gameplay was completely new to me. I recall the first time it rained and I called my mother over to the computer to look at it. I'd never seen weather effects in a game before.

I played through the entire game and I enjoyed it. I played through parts of Fallout 3 and enjoyed them as well. This is all I ask. I believe Bethesda can do it again.

Speaking of Morrowind, the Morrowind 2011 Graphical Update has been released.

As soon as I saw it, I uninstalled Oblivion and downloaded it. I'll probably start with vanilla Morrowind as installing Tribunal means an assassin attacks you as soon as you sleep. I also need to find that 'less hostile creatures' mod. I'm don't want mudcrabs, rats, and raptors chasing me across Vvardenfell.
-------------------

For those of you who like casual, flash games, I have two:

Every Day The Same Dream - Very simple. Listen to the woman in the elevator. You only need to play it once but I played it three times. Also, a bit depressing.

Bloxorz - A puzzle game in 33 stages where you manipulate a rectangular cube and attempt to put it in a square hole. I am currently stuck on stage 11.

Coming in 2011

2011-01-04T06:36:00.000-08:00

Happy holidays to whomever reads this blog. All two of you.

I've caught a bit of a cold and it's almost freezing in Las Vegas, which means I'm miserable, cold, and disinclined to game. However, it's hard not to be excited about the Christmas after Christmas when I opened my spreadsheet, list all the games I hope to buy this year, what date they're coming out, and how much this will cost me.

2011 looks to be a ridiculously awesome year for gaming. 15 games I want, 5 games I might be interested in, and who knows how many titles that I'm not aware of yet because they're not a sequel.

Want:

Q1 2011
Dead Space 2 (January)
Crysis 2 (March)
Dragon Age 2 (March)

Q2 2011
Portal 2 (April)
Witcher 2 (May)
Torchlight II (TBA)

Q3 2011
Batman: Arkham City (TBA)
Deus Ex: Human Revolution (TBA)

Q4 2011
Elder Scrolls V (November)
Mass Effect 3 ("Holidays")
Dungeon Siege 3 (TBA)
Risen 2 (TBA)
Guild Wars 2 (TBA)
XCOM (TBA)
Diablo 3 (Maybe)

Interested in:

Rage (September)
I Am Alive (TBA)
Starcraft II: Heart of the Swarm (TBA)
Defense of the Ancients 2 <- Valve has made the popular Warcraft III mod into a game.
The Old Republic (Q2/Q3)

Austrailia may get adult games

2010-12-02T03:12:00.000-08:00

R18+ Rating For Computer Games Close

The Gillard Government appears to be ready to embrace the notion of an R18+ rating for adult computer games, after a review found there was little evidence of a strong link between violent computer games and violent crime or aggressive behavior.

The Minister for Home Affairs and Justice, Brendan O'Connor, released the review yesterday.

It comes shortly before a standing committee of attorneys-general from across Australia discuss the issue at a meeting in Canberra on Friday December 10.
Under consideration is a proposal to introduce the R18+ classification, restricting sales and viewing of adult games to people aged 18 and over. At present, since they are refused classification, such games cannot be sold in Australia.

O'Connor appeared to be amenable to the new category in his remarks yesterday.

"We need a classification system that protects young minds from any possible adverse affect, while also ensuring that adults are free to make their own decisions about what they play, within the bounds of the law," he said, adding: "I'm keen to proceed with making this important decision, based on solid and robust evidence."

Game Packaging

2010-11-18T21:25:00.000-08:00

From the linkosphere: An Extremely Interesting History of Game Packaging. That's the name of the article. I only found it somewhat interesting.

I've finished with Flame of Vengeance and ought to have the review up tomorrow.

Divinity 2 – The Dragon Knight Saga

2010-11-11T09:31:00.000-08:00

You may recall that last year I picked up Divinity 2: Ego Draconis and considered it 'one-third of an awesome game.' I was thrilled to read about the Flames of Vengeance expansion that would supposedly finish the story of the Dragon Knight.

Flame of Vengeance was to arrive in August but got pushed to November. It then came out as part of the Dragon Knight Saga, which is a graphically enhanced version of Ego Draconis and the expansion bundled together. As far as I can tell, there's no way for owners of the original game to simply buy the expansion pack, but Dragon Knight Saga is only $39.99.

After instillation, I attempted to load up my last save so I could jump into Flames of Vengeance, but the game says my old saves are all 'wrong version.' I can create a fresh, high-level character for FoV, but I might as well replay the original game. It's been almost a year but I do recall I wanted to try out something other than the basic melee build I originally used.

Unfortunately, the 'enhanced graphical engine' still gives me a black screen when I pick my PC's native 1680x1050 resolution and attempts to reset to 640x400. My video card doesn't even support that. Why in the world would a modern game even acknowledge the existence of such a screen resolution?

I do what I had to do in the first game and open: C:/Users/LSN/AppData/Local/Divinity2/Profile/graphicoptions.xml

And manually set my resolution.

The game doesn't support screen capture, so it's FRAPS time.

Despite my issues, I will say that the game itself is already faster. In the original, the main menu would appear and then I'd have to wait 15-30 seconds before I could interact with it. The time to load the character creation screen is also faster.

Dragon Age II Items, BioWare loot, and Blog Update

2010-11-04T10:46:00.000-07:00

Dragon Age II Items

If you sign up for the BioWare/Dragon Age newsletter, BioWare will give you codes for two DLC items in Dragon Age II, the Staff of Parthalan and Hindsight, a magical belt. You need to have a BSN or EA account.

To get the Staff, click here and sign-up for the newsletter. They'll mail you a code but it's taking a month for some reason.

To get Hindsight, click here, click Get Your DAII Penny Arcade Belt, and sign up to the newsletter *again*. This item will automatically appear in your game promotions.

Comments: I signed up and immediately was sent 2 DA II newsletters + EA newletter. Others have not gotten any newsletters. I don't know why they didn't automatically add the Staff of Parthalan to your promotions. I guess Hindsight is 20/20?

The Hindsight belt promotion shows for the X-Box 360 and PC, but not the PS3. That does make me wonder if they're having problems with PS3 accounts.

BioWare Loot

It occurred to me while writing my Fallout: New Vegas review that BioWare sent my current video card. I won it in the community event they had in April, but it seems like something a game review should mention, yes?

Sadly, though I've only had it for five months, light grays have started to turn pink. Whites, blues, reds, yellows, blacks – fine. Light gray? Slightly pink. It's an ATI Radeon HD 5770.

Blog Update

You might have noticed, but I went incognito in the spring and have just resurfaced like a terrible sea creature rising from the irradiated depths to devour the scrumptious inhabitants of New Tokyo.

If you see this as a good thing, thank
1) swirlwind, a woman at the BSN who was kind enough to say she would like to read a review of New Vegas from me,
2) Monster Import, which I devoured an entire can of while I wrote the review, and
3) The Myst Series soundtrack.

Fallout: New Vegas – Journey through the Mojave Wasteland

2010-11-04T09:36:00.000-07:00

Preamble, the skipable part

In May of 2004, I learned that a new development studio, Obsidian, would develop the sequel to Knights of the Old Republic. Like Trokia, the developers at Obsidian were former Black Isle employees. Specifically, they were known for working on two respected games in the RPG field: Fallout and Planescape: Torment.

My perception of their games was as follows.
Fallout 1 and 2 – Never played them
Planescape: Torment – Excellent
Icewind Dale- I bought it when it came out, created a group, got one quest to kill goblins, killed those goblins, and then uninstalled the game. I never attempted to play it again because no gameplay element appealed to me.

Arcanum - Very good
Temple of Elemental Evil – It looked like another Icewind Dale, so I never picked it up
Vampire: Bloodlines – Very good

I looked forward to Knights of the Old Republic 2, got it the day it came out, called in sick to work, and played through in one 26 hour sitting. KotOR 2 was a great game… in places. It was fascinating, interesting, and stylish but some aspects of it were quite disappointing.

I was still a fan of Obsidian and looked forward to their next game. Unfortunately, I found Neverwinter Nights 2 to be more of a disappointment. I've heard praise for Mask of the Betrayer. I ought to play through it someday, but doubt I will do so. I own Alpha Protocol. I even installed it. I never played it and it's currently sitting in a plastic bin with a bunch of other games that I ought to organize.

I did eventually play Fallout 2. There was a great deal about it I liked, but I found the combat cumbersome. I played for 20 some hours before I hit one of the harder fights, and after several tries, and getting killed by my squadmates repeatedly, I set the game aside and didn't pick it back up.

I didn't panic when I heard Bethesda picked up Fallout 3 but I did adjust my expectations. I had played Morrowind and Oblivion, the first of which I thoroughly enjoyed. Bethesda can make good RPGs, they just can't make strong main plots or interesting NPCs. I never 'finished' Fallout 3, but that's because I abandoned the main plot as soon as I could and only rejoined it when I had to or I happened to stumble across the right NPC. I hear it had something to do with my Father and water.

That leads me to…

The Review

Fallout: New Vegas is a great RPG. It's the RPG that I've waited six years for Obsidian to create. I was prepared to like it, but I was not prepared to love it. It's the best open world RPG I've played. (Beats Morrowind) It's the best first person RPG I've played. (Beats Deus Ex) Is it the top of my RPG list? Possibly. Ask me in a year when the luster has worn off.

Two caveats to the above. One, I live in Las Vegas. I live a one block from the strip and there is a certain 'neat!' factor to roaming around a post-apocalyptic version of your own backyard. Two, I haven't played a good game in awhile. Assassin's Creed 2 in March would be my last one.

That's seven months without a good game. It's a bit like being abstinent for seven months and then having sex; I'm inclined to like it more than usual.

Fallout: New Vegas is not the type of RPG I like. In general, I prefer story-driven RPGs like Dragon Age or the Witcher. Open world RPGs are a bit more touchy. I want to explore, but if it's something like Oblivion where I feel I have to hike five miles from one place to the next, I quickly get bored.

New Vegas gives you with the feeling of a desolate wasteland, but packs it with stuff. It's a delicate balance. The only time walking distances managed to make me cranky was when the game kept me up passed 2 am, which is generally when any game element can make me cranky.

The graphics are rough. I am fine with this. If you're not, there are already a number of mods available already to tinker with them. Given the overall quality of the game, I was surprised at all the new art assets. Yes, many objects are the same, but when it comes to the environment, there's a great deal of new content.

There are several new Vaults and all but one is a treat. There's the Science Experiment Run Amuck Vault, the Sinister Moral Dilemma Vault, and the Zombies Attack! Vault.

Bizarrely, many Vaults are flooded with water. This makes no sense because the setting is *a desert*. Rainfall is rare, storms are incredibly rare, and while flooding happens, it rarely lasts more than a few days. It begs the imagination as to how one vault designed to withstand a nuclear bomb might suffer massive water damage underground and remain flooded for years, let alone three.

Combat is much like Fallout 3 though thankfully not every death is accompanied by a gory and slow-mo moment. You get companions early and the humans are well done though the AI can be horribly aggressive. I entered one Vault, stood near the enters and just waited to see what my companions would do. As I stood there, they cleaned out the first floor (even opening doors to do so) and started on the second before returning to me.

Fallout: NVneeds to place a marker on the local map for fallen companions because they frequently run off to battle something you hadn't notice and then die. Several times I would be running along only for the [Cass has fallen unconscious!] message to pop up. I'd backtrack and find her lying among a group of giant radscorpians that she'd taken on with only a 10mm pistol.

Oh, I gave her a shotgun, but earlier I'd used my sniper rifle to take out a large group of Fiends. Cass, bless her heart, had decided to charge them, firing round after round while she was still a half mile away. She possibly did no damage, but she easily ate through the 40 slugs I'd scavenged. After running out of ammo (though still not at their base), she then stood there furiously cocking and reloading her shotgun while going "Fuck! Out of ammo!" "Fuck! Out of ammo!" "Fuck! Out of ammo" (I somehow heard this clearly though she was nowhere near me) until a Fiend armed with an incinerator popped out and fried her.

Screen Note: [Cass has fallen unconscious!]

That said, the companions are likable, interesting and, when the AI works, incredibly useful. If your PC wants to focus on soft skills instead of combat, the companions level up with you and are all designed around combat so you can sit back while they kill shit.

Can I heap more praise on this game? Yes.

The plot is interesting. The sidequests are varied and the minor NPCs well done. I like the various factions, though the game needs to be clearer about the difference between Karma and Reputation. I killed a bunch of Powder Gangers, which lowered my Rep with them but increased my Karma. I then took their stuff, which lowered my Karma because apparently stealing from dead outlaws makes you a bad person.

Speech, Medicine, Barter, and Repair all make frequent appearances in the dialogue, but you'll also see Sneak, Survival, Charisma, and Intelligence on occasion. There's a perk called 'Terrifying Presence' which I've only seen once, and it didn't do anything. There's also something I call the 'I'm a lesbian' perk, which gives you +10% damage to female characters and extra speech options in regards to…being queer. They're not always flirtatious or romantic, and one wonders how liking women helps you do more damage to them. (You're intimately familiar with female anatomy?)

I like the music, though there seems to be less variety than Fallout 3 and I quickly turned off the radio. Mr. New Vegas isn't as interesting as Three Dog though Wayne Newton does a good job.

(On a side note, Mr. Newton agreed to come to an event my company sponsored but didn't show up. I *still* get the occasional angry e-mail from men who came simply to see Mr. Newton and say we lied about him coming.)

I've heaped praises on this game. Is there anything I'd change? Yah. The bug that won't let me finish after 50 hours of playing.

Oh Obsidian. I was waiting for this throughout the game. You've given me 50 hours of interesting, fun gameplay along with an enjoyable story and the feeling as though the world was really reacting to my decisions. Now, however, whenever I step onto the Strip, I'm attacked by a swarm of robots who have missiles and grenades. And my ally, the one I've worked with since the beginning, now will no longer speak with me, and the main questline is marked as FAILED.

Why? There are two possibilities. It seems the turrets of a random Vault are marked as part of the Strip's faction. Therefore, even though they automatically target you, if you destroy them, you're marked as hostile. In addition, it seems that if you tell a companion to return home, they're attacked for some reason when they try to enter the Strip where the home base is. When they defend themselves, again, the PC is marked as hostile.

I've done both of these things in the ten hours since I was last on the Strip. Yes, I have a save, but it's been *ten real time hours* since I went to the Strip last.

For now, I'm uninstalling and waiting for a patch. I know one has come out already. I tell myself that in a month, another will come out, I'll reinstall, and play through the entire thing without a hitch.

Expansion for Divinity 2

2010-03-06T03:05:00.000-08:00

Flames of Vengeance

Hamburg/Germany, March 04th, 2010 – Aleroth, once a war-torn city, now holds the next challenges for computer role playing gamers. Rivellon, the world of Divinity II: Ego Draconis, is still not safe. In Divinity II: Flames of Vengeance, the game’s official add on, players must face the evil once more.

Soon they’ll recognize that many of the characters they met in the main game aren’t who they pretended to be. Divinity II: Flames of Vengeance continues where Divinity II: Ego Draconis left off. "In Flames of Vengeance, the player picks up the story of the Dragon knight and guides him to his ultimate destiny. Along the way several accounts are settled, and the answers to many questions in the Divinity universe revealed. We've also taken the opportunity to give the engine a solid overhaul, improving performance and graphics quality along the way", Swen Vincke, Creative Director and CEO of the development team Larian Studios, explains.

Divinity II: Flames of Vengeance, the official add on to Divinity II: Draconis, offers more than 30 questsand about 15 hours of gameplay.

Coming August 2010. Link to Announcement

LSN: (major spoilers for Divinity II)

Can I get a 'thank gawd?' The ending to Divinity II was pitiful - the entire game felt like 1/3 of an awesome game.

An example of this: When you become a Dragon Knight, your previous mentor, a Dragon Slayer, gives you a sword, tells you to kill yourself, and then orders three veteran Slayers to kill you if you can't do this. She leaves, supposedly because watching her previous protégée die is too hard for her. Instead, you kill the three Slayers. Later, she pops up again, furious at your betrayal and blaming her own weakness for the death of her men. You’re in a major city though and the Captain of the garrison orders her sent to a cell. She leaves, but vows she’ll find you again to avenge her fallen comrades.

Compelling stuff… and we never see her again. Divinity II is fun, but it has about a half-dozen plotlines that abruptly end with no closure.

Which leads to a question: Shouldn't this have been in the game to begin with?

I often think that I'm too easy with game companies. The ending to Divinity II made me unhappy. It's remarkable similar to the endings of the first two games in that 1) your hero's efforts are for naught, and 2) there's obviously more to the story. Moreover, the ending was abrupt. In the first two games, I felt like I’d gotten an entire story, abet one that didn’t end as I’d like.

As soon as I saw the ending to Divinity II, I knew that the next game would be a continuation, not a new story. I sat there wondering if the developer’s funding had just run out – and I still suspect that’s exactly what happened.

So, how do I feel about Flames of Vengeance? I want it. I want the closure the first game didn’t give me, but should have. This makes me an idiot. I should in no way, shape, or form encourage developers to rush a game out the door and then finish the story in an expansion. At the same time, I understand. Making a game is not cheap; it’s very expensive and it takes time. I would rather a developer release half a story with the time and money they have, than go into debt and possibly lose their business.

What *actually* bothers me the most about this is that one of the best elements of the game is now gone. I’m speaking about the Dragon Knight Talana who jumps into the PC’s head at the beginning of the game. She was a helpful companion who I never had to check the inventory of, control in combat, or give gifts to in order to increase her loyalty rating. I consider Talana up there with GLADoS in the acerbic running commentary department, but now she’s gone.

I might as well download the 1.03 Patch and play through with another character. I did a two-handed warrior my first play-though and want to explore the magic spells.

Oh, I could even take screen shots and do a review this time if I were so inclined.

From that other blog: A positive review of World War Z.

All Expenses Paid

2010-01-02T21:55:00.000-08:00

It’s the snowy season, which means LSN spends most of her time huddled under snowy tarps in the forest or running across ice covered lakes. It’s also the New Year despite the fact that it’s the DEAD OF WINTER, and it doesn’t feel as though anything new has begun at all. This is because about two-thousand years ago, the Roman consul assumed their position in January, then the eleventh month. The Romans originally celebrated New Year in the spring and that makes far more sense to me, but I’m not a Roman consul so my opinion on the matter is meaningless.

The best part about the New Year is sitting down and budgeting my expenses for the coming year. When it comes to video games, I like to think of this as listing all the cool stuff I look forward to getting this year! (It doesn’t work so good for utility, rent, and car insurance. )

My list so far looks like this:

January –
Mass Effect 2
Divinity 2: Ego Draconis

February –
BioShock 2
Splinter Cell: Conviction

March –
Assassin’s Creed 2

May –
Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands

Spring –
Alpha Protocol

Unknown –
Arcania: A Gothic Tale
Fallout: New Vegas
Star Craft II: Wings of Liberty
Star Wars: The Old Republic
World of Warcraft: Cataclysm

Mass Effect 2 is coming about twenty days! I just finished a paragon FemShep run to import into the game. I don’t know if I should do another run and try to get to level 60, or if I should dust off Splinter Cell: Double Agent and finish it.

What cool games are you looking forward to playing this year?

Two Out of Three...

2010-01-02T02:09:00.000-08:00

... ain't bad.

From a great tribute to E. Gary Gygax.

"Back before fangirls existed anywhere but our imagination"

Eh, I know fangirls in their early fifties who played the blue box dude.

Female Everquest Players More Hardcore than Male Players

2010-01-01T02:00:00.000-08:00

A new study led by Dmitri Williams, a professor at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication, revealed that in some cases every male geek gamer's fantasy may be true -- some girls really are closet gaming freaks.

The study, published in the Journal of Communication, and available here (PDF), examined the gaming habits of females and males playing the popular Massively Multiplayer Online RPG (MMORPG) EverQuest II.

The sample group was quite large, consisting of responses from 7,000 logged in players. There were many surprises in the results. First, the gaming wasn't dominated by kids -- in fact the average age was 31. More interestingly still, older gamers tended to spend more hours on the game per week.

And female gamers spent, on average, far more hours than their male counterparts. Top female players logged 57 hours a week, while top male players only logged 51 hours a week. And on average, girls logged 29 hours a week versus 25 hours for males.

Age isn't the only thing women tend to lie about, according to the survey. More women than men responded that they lied to their friends and loved ones about how much time they played.

Other dark elf slayers/professors and grad students that participated in the study included Mia Consalvo, Scott Caplan, and Nick Yee.

Original article

LSN: Not that anyone gives a damn about Everquest. But yah! Women can waste more time than men on the monotonous grinding that is MMORPGs.

Squeenix CEO Calls Out Japanese Gamers on Western Bias

The relationship of Japan and the West when it comes to video games is a strange one, and Square-Enix CEO Yoichi Wada has spoken at length on the subject more than once. Wada clearly admires the Western game industry, mentioning that he wants to see his native Japan follow suit with more games made for adults, and - like many other Japanese developers - has obviously been mulling over how Japanese game makers can market their titles to Western gamers more successfully instead of dealing with a relatively small, insulated market.

But for the moment, Wada isn't concerned with how to market his company's games in the West, but with the exact opposite: In an interview with Japanese TV posted to YouTube, Wada expressed frustration with Japanese gamers' resistance to Western titles, in part due to the country's collective "meh" to Modern Warfare 2, which Activision handed off to Square-Enix to publish in the Land of the Rising Sun.

Specifically, Wada has an issue with the Japanese term youge- (洋ゲー), the word used to refer to titles made in the West as opposed to Japanese-made games, or geimu (ゲーム - yeah, it's just the word "game"). By differentiating between the two, Japanese gamers are essentially saying that Western games aren't actually games, and the Square-Enix boss doesn't like it.

"Even now, there have been people in Japan using the label youge- (Western games) with a terribly discriminatory meaning," said Wada. "I'd like them to try it once. If they play it once, they'd realize how incorrect that label is."

There's no doubt that Wada has a bit of a personal investment in the matter considering that strong sales of MW2 would benefit his company's coffers, but considering his previous statements on the matter it's not hard to believe that the man genuinely wants Japan's gamers and game makers alike to broaden their borders in more ways than one.

The Escapist

LSN: And after this fair-minded and progressive message, the Escapist encourages people to play a Ching Chong Beautiful, a really damn racist browser game for the holidays.

The Void: Death, Gender, and Rainbow Power

2009-12-31T17:44:00.000-08:00

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.

Obsession - More Than a Cheap Perfume

2009-10-30T23:47:00.000-07:00

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.

The End Times

2009-10-12T02:30:00.001-07:00

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 Demo

2009-09-30T11:44:00.000-07:00

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.

World of Warcraft by the Numbers

2009-09-29T08:22:00.000-07:00

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

Delicate Feminine Sensibilities

2009-09-26T23:35:00.001-07:00

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.

These Guys are Smooth

2009-09-23T18:13:00.000-07:00

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.

Playing God

2009-09-16T22:59:00.001-07:00

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.

PSA: Batman: Arkham Asylum

2009-08-30T00:53:00.000-07:00

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.

RPGS need less choices

2009-08-30T00:05:00.000-07:00

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.

Guild Wars. Part Three

2009-08-26T13:50:00.000-07:00

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.

Guild Wars. Part Two

2009-08-26T11:30:00.001-07:00

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

Guild Wars Trilogy

2009-08-24T23:35:00.000-07:00

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.

Betrayal in Antara

2009-08-24T15:31:00.000-07:00

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!

Guild Wars

2009-08-22T23:18:00.001-07:00

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.

It's all about ME! ME! ME!

2009-08-16T04:04:00.001-07:00

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.

Trash Bin

2009-08-11T02:31:00.000-07:00

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)

Resident Evil 5

2009-08-10T09:25:00.000-07:00

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!

Batman: Arkham Asylum Demo

2009-08-09T20:35:00.000-07:00

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.

Scarecrow

2009-07-30T03:19:00.000-07:00

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.

What were they thinking?

2009-07-26T17:31:00.000-07:00

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.

gamePLAY

2009-07-26T03:48:00.000-07:00

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.

Dentist and Defraggler

2009-07-24T03:54:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-23T02:52:00.000-07:00

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.

Mirror's Edge, part 2

2009-07-23T02:22:00.001-07:00

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.

What about you?

2009-07-21T17:48:00.000-07:00

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?

That Video Game Blog: Still Douche-Bags

2009-07-18T14:30:00.000-07:00

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.

Mirror's Edge

2009-07-18T06:04:00.001-07:00

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.

2009-07-15T08:02:00.000-07:00

This blog got its first comment today. Hurray! ... apparently the author has deleted it.

We can all speculate on what the comment could have been. It's better this way; now the comment possesses infinite possibilities.

The unchanging mind of gaming

2009-07-15T03:05:00.000-07:00

A cross post from the Bioboard.

BitMob has billed itself as the place 'Where Community Meets the Press.' Lately it has released a couple of articles that are the journalistic equivalent of pond scum. (All provided by community members, of course.)

The latest is, The Face of Gaming Needs a Make-Over. I clicked on it thinking it might relate to the depiction of minorities in gaming. Ha!

The article begins simply enough: “Being a 27-year-old male I am still surprised how consistently I have to defend the honor of videogames. I dream of the day when games aren't looked at as the lowest rung on the entertainment ladder.”

Okay! This is written by an adult who wants one of his preferred entertainment venues to receive the respect he feels it disserves. Now, he’s being a touch melodramatic (“I have to defend the honor” makes it sound as those TV lovers are constantly calling him out in duels) but I also would like video games to get a bit more respect as an artistic medium. Um, well, he says entertainment but I’m sure he means artistic or intellectual respect.

“The gaming industry grosses just as much money as movies or books, yet both of those are seen as intellectually superior. Why is that?”

Huh? Yes, video games are more profitable than films and books, but that hardly seems like a pertinent fact. The amount of money a product makes has nothing to do with its intellectual value. Dumb and Dumber made more money than Pan’s Labyrinth. Harry Potter made more money than The Things They Carried. Halo made more money than Psychonauts. Yet I’ve heard the latter all described as strongly intellectual or artistic works, while the former aren’t.

I’d suggest the answer to the question ‘Why is that?’ would be that video games still largely lack the elements needed to be considered intellectually superior.

“Just as clearly, I remember the first time I knocked out Mike Tyson, and the first time I dominated in a 16-person Halo LAN party. These are all great feelings, but truthfully none of them really accomplished anything. I didn't solve world hunger; I didn't save anyone's life. Just because they weren't actual accomplishments doesn't take from the enjoyment I experienced while partaking in these events. These were legitimate pleasurable moments in my life, and looking back neither making the winning basket or beating Punch-Out!! is better or worse. They are just different.”

And interestingly, the author is back to games as mere entertainment. Games are about ‘great feelings’ and do not make one’s life ‘better or worse.’ I’ve never heard a fan of film or books say the same about their preferred medium. Personally, 1984 did not give me a great feeling, but it did expose me to ideas about language and societal power that have become part and parcel of how I conceptualize the world.

” I've learned that pointing out the inconsistencies in people's beliefs does no good. For instance, whether you are reading a book or watching TV, you're doing the same amount of activity. Yet, I've been told countless times by people attempting to impress me, "I don't watch TV, I'd rather read a good book."”

Watching TV and reading a book require the same amount of physical activity, therefore they are intellectually equal -- At this point, I’ve decided the writer has no idea what he’s talking about. He also fails to point out how preferring a book over TV is inconsistent.

Moving ahead to this man’s plan to save ‘the face of gaming.’

” The only way to make people accept something new is to make them feel that they are stupid for not understanding it.

The next time someone wants you to explain to them why gaming is a legitimate source of entertainment, brush them off. Tell them that they won't understand. Make them feel stupid and inadequate. Say things like, "How can I put BioShock in layman's terms?" and then sigh and stare bravely at the horizon. Or, "Let's see if I can dumb down for you why Final Fantasy is awesome." Maybe leave out the part about how Tifa was the first woman you really loved.“

Wow. Just wow.

Don’t make better games. Don’t promote and support games which expand and improve the medium. Don’t attempt to foster an attitude within the gaming community that values more than mindless run-and-gun with cutting edge graphics. Don’t demand more of yourself as a gamer – perhaps exploring outside your preferred genre or thinking critically about the games you buy.

This man’s plan for saving the face of gaming is to spew BS. Pretty thin BS too, if he thinks Bioshock has elements that would be difficult to put into layman's terms.

I think Derek Amundson should take his collection of games, pile them up, urinate on them, and set them on fire, because that would be the best expression of the esteem he holds video games in. He doesn’t want games to *be* intellectually superior. He wants his grandmother (seriously, read the article) to consider his Halo matches just as good as Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past.

Personally, I’d rather a developer make the gaming equivalent of Remembrance, or Pan’s Labyrinth, or the Things They Carried, and to for enough people to buy it that they can stay in business. The face of gaming I’d like to change is the (white, male) grizzled space marine who solves his problems by killing stuff or Madden MCXXXVI.

The great thing is that I see this happening. The sad thing is the so-called ‘fans of gaming’ whose only objection to the current state of gaming is that Fox News writes mean stories about us.

Back in the shozoko again.

2009-07-15T00:50:00.000-07:00

I hope everyone had a wonderful weekend. I had a birthday, bought a new pair of ninja booties, went dirt bike riding, and puked in the woods. Heat stroke is not fun! And yes, I did drink plenty of water.

Since then I’ve been playing Mirror’s Edge. Remember that game? It was hot stuff in fall/winter 2008. Everyone was talking about the trailer. Then it hit and disappeared.

For some reason, I thought UbiSoft developed it. Possibly because like Prince of Persia and Assassin’s Creed, it’s based on performing amazing acrobatics in order to navigate an area. Possibly because the last time I recall an Asian woman as the lead character of Western video game, it was Beyond Good and Evil.

Interestingly, the game’s writer, Rhianna Pratchett, worked on the last Prince of Persia game, as well as the Overlord II game I talked about a month ago.

Semantic Pedantics : Narrative

2009-07-09T19:26:00.000-07:00

Narrative.

It’s a popular term among those who talk about games in an abstract or intellectual level, but it’s often a misnomer, as in A Word Worth a Thousand Pictures and Narrative Manifesto.

Narrative is not a synonym for ‘story.’ (Nor is story the same as plot.) A narrative can tell a story, but it requires a narrator. For instance, the sentence, “The tragedy of Hurricane Katrina is part of our cultural narrative,” does not mean that Hurricane Katrina is a tragedy. It means that our culture has taken an event and described it as a tragedy. It focuses on the role of culture as storyteller, and the fact that, as a people, we take reality and fictionalize it, often adding a moral or symbolic dimension.

I’m being pedantic about this because I believe having a specific word that emphasizes the narrator and story as artifact[1] is a useful. There are times when you want to focus on the story and times when you want to focus on the telling of the story.

“Schindler’s List is/has a powerful narrative.” – True and accurate, but unless it’s part of a wider context, reads as “Schindler’s List is a powerful movie.”

“In the black-and-white film, the image of a girl in a red coat wandering alone the turmoil of Cracow ghetto is a powerful narrative tool. Like Schindler, the audience cannot absorb the horror of six million people dying, but is deeply affected by the plight of one child.” – I prefer this use.

[1] – Not artifact as in historical relic, but artifact as in the product of individuals, groups, or cultures.

Edanna Age

2009-07-09T16:15:00.000-07:00

I’m taking the Ages in the order their principles appeared in Atris’ journal, so Edanna, the nature age, is next. It’s the one that interests me most conceptually, but aggravates me most in execution. The idea here is to show the player the interdependence within nature both within the environment and through the interaction of the player with the bird (the player first saves the bird and at the end of the Age the bird flies the player to end of the puzzle.) Color is an important indicator within Exile. As in nature, something brightly or vibrantly colored indicates you should pay attention to it.

My first problem is personal, though I wonder to what extent the developers intended this: I have trouble navigating the Age. Many times, I ‘step’ forward down path and am confronted with a wall of green or brown instead of a visible route. I then swing my view around and begin to generally click in the direction I believe the path continues, sometimes this works and sometimes I have to take a ‘step’ back to reorient myself and then try again. This is immensely frustrating, and after awhile I became slightly nauseated.

It’s fine for the game to have difficult-to-find spots and routes, but this felt as though what would be a relatively simple task in the real world became hard because of poor visual design. Then again, maybe the sense of disorientation was deliberate, but if so, how does that encourage the ‘nature rewards interdependence’ theme? If this were a horror game, I could understand – being chased by something nasty while you struggle to make your way through a thick, damp jungle and swamp sounds interesting.

(I assume here that my experience is average. It’s quite possible that I just have poor spatial analysis when it comes to busy 2d environments.)

For a nature age that stresses interdependence, Edanna has a very mechanical feel and there’s little evidence of interdependence. A glowing manta ray moves along a series of sacs on a vine pipeline but… why? How does this benefit the animal? How does it benefit the plant? The player appears to be the only creature who would press the ends of the sac and cause the manta ray to move from one place to another. It would die in the first sac without the player. In the end it, the animal ends up in a small pool of water with no steady food source or mate – I can’t see this as something nature would allow to go on for very long.

The environment exists only so the player can interact with it. The story exists to provide a reason for the player to interact with the environment and to explain how these elaborate environments were created. The problem is that plants and animals, unlike machines, have their own reason for existing as they do. A machine can exist only to provide a charge that causes another machine to react. A glowing manta ray cannot exist only to provide a charge that causes a giant venus fly trap to open.

Anyways, it took me 2 hours and 15 minutes to complete this Age. I began tinkering with the dynamic forces age and so far it's interesting.

Voltaic Age

2009-07-08T07:06:00.001-07:00

Count Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio Volta (CAGAAV to his friends), invented the voltaic pile, what we call the battery. He lent his last name to his invention, as well as the volt, Voltron: Defender of the Universe, and the Voltaic Age in Myst III Exile. We can only wonder which of these he’d be most proud of, though I have to say that Defender of the UNIVERSE is damned impressive.

The Voltaic Age took me two and a half hours of play, not counting the time I alt+tabbed my way to a crash and had to redo fifteen minutes. The majority of this time I spent fiddling with red steam valves and wondering why I felt oddly attracted to the windows.

It’s the energy age, so the dominant imagery is mechanical stuff. How the original Star Trek portrayed future tech is how this portrays a hydroelectric, steam, and lava powered magnetic land floater.

I’m enjoying Exile so far. I’d forgotten that you could look around via the mouse and it’s vast improvement over the still images of Riven. There’s apparently an elaborate back-story involving the D’ni and the collapse of their civilization that I’ve missed – oh well. I vaguely remember reading a book about a woman from our world falling into a pit in the Sahara desert; apparently, the D’ni currently live under the surface of the earth. You’d think if you had magical books that could link you to hundreds of worlds, you might relocate your civilization to an Age that looked like Maui. Then again, this race neglects the use of locks, safes, and guard dogs for guarding their treasures, but instead constructs elaborate environmental puzzles. They’re a sort of dwarven Bond villain.

I talked about lower order vs higher order problem solving previously, and Exile has stayed firmly in the lower order end. One of the first puzzles you encounter is getting an elevator to work: there’s a notebook in the same room with pictures on how to arrange the mechanisms. The next puzzle is moving a giant ball via two levers. Then there’s one where light travels through a series of lenses. Each of these puzzles is a discrete entity – you either know immediately what needs to be done or it makes itself apparent after a bit of fiddling.

In Voltaic itself, I stumbled upon a puzzle that I solved without any thought: I went to one interface, moved a few pieces, then went to another other and while I was moving pieces, wondering if the numbers above the circuitry meant anything, the interface slammed closed and the device powered up. As there were five parts all together and I’d only touched two, I was a bit confused.

That said, the lower order puzzles are better handled than Riven’s. You tackle a series of manageable problems in Exile, as opposed to wandering around trying to get a handle on a few big puzzles while being tripped up by minutia. Neither approach is better, and in a way they reflect the natures of the men who built the puzzles: Gehn is a meticulous but brilliant bastard while Saavedro is an insane Brad Dourif in a bad wig.

Next I tackle the nature Age with the bird symbol.

A few notes

2009-07-08T00:23:00.001-07:00

I was asked about my posting schedule. I don’t really have one. I began this blog because I wanted to write about computer games and while my posting rate has been daily, my interest in the subject wanes and waxes.

My copy of Infinite Jest arrived today and I plan to retool another blog I have into fantasy and science fiction book reviews. Publishers start sending you free books if you do this enough – awesome!

I witnessed a lengthy conversation in World of Warcraft guild chat about how women were all shallow (?), that men are expected to dress like women now-a-days (?!), and lesbians all wished they had a penis (my secret is exposed!) It’s amazing how much the desire to punch your guild members in the face removes the pleasure from an MMORPG. I rolled another toon, and then just decided to install Exile. Hopefully, I won’t have any problems running it in Vista.

The feminine aesthetic series! You may wonder what happened to the third part. As do I…

I began to work on a post about how this feminine aesthetic was based on rejecting realistic principles of design and viewpoint in favor of more emotionally evocative, fluid ones. Games like Prince of Persia and Okami do this visually, while a game like Silent Hill 2 take it further in that the inhabited world was implicitly a twilight reality that each person within experienced differently. I wasn’t sure if Pychonauts filled the bill as feminine, I wasn’t comfortable with the solidness of my reasoning, and I found myself wondering what the implications of calling this style feminine might be.

It was a mess and I’ve set it aside, letting it stew a bit on the mental back burner before I take another whack on at the idea.

What’s bubbling on the front burner?: Not fun (on purpose) games, games seeking cultural legitimacy, and violence in games. Plus whatever comes up as I play whatever I’m playing. At some point, I’ll have to define what I mean when I say ‘game,’ because my previous definition was brief and incomplete.

Interactions and Anxiety

2009-07-07T22:38:00.001-07:00

When game players, academics, journalists, developers, and miscellaneous hanger-ons talk about games, we tend to use absolutes. This ranges from subjects sublime – “Call of Duty 4 PWNS Crysis!” – to the more mundane – “…my last Kotaku feature… asserted that classic buttons-and-sticks work well because it's more interesting to abstract interaction in game worlds rather than act it out literally.”[1]

This is not a conversational feature exclusive to gamers. People like to talk in absolutes, especially when it comes to intangibles. Alexander’s assertion is similar to writing teachers who say that third-person viewpoint is easier for readers to get into because they can step into the character without the clutter of first-person thoughts reminding them this character is their own person. Or Scott McCloud’s comment that simple, abstract representations of faces are easier to plug into than complex, photorealistic representations. [2]

The actual Kotaku article, In Defense of the Classic Controller follows the conceits of modern journalism and in that it provides a ‘balanced overview’ of the ‘issue.’ (It’s also difficult to find. @Kotaku - front page is #navigationfail)

I believe the real issue is that the Wii won the console war. If the traditional controller were inherently more interesting than the Wii-mote, it’s strange that a console whose main draw was the price point and games that utilized a different control method would trounce the PS3 and Xbox 360, established systems with a wide library of games and impressive graphics. One idea tossed up is that mere novelty is behind the success, but while the Wii-mote may seem awfully different to those of us who have been weaned on the two thumbsticks, four buttons, and bumpers mode of controlling a game and the WASDers, it’s hardly a new idea.

I wasted many quarters in the Chuck E Cheese arcade playing whack-a-mole with a physical mallet; Cruise USA with a physical wheel, and gas and break petals; and Duck Hunt with a physical gun. [3] I never found myself longing for the abstraction of a stick-and-buttons controller with these games, and I don’t believe that people who play Guitar Hero, Dance-Dance Revolution, et alii, would consider the games more interesting if control was more abstract.

The first video game system, the Magnavox Odyssey, had a light gun for its Shooting Gallery game. [4] The Wii isn’t a novel concept; it’s technology finally supporting an old (in game terms) concept. Project Natal builds off that. (We’ll see if Microsoft is able to continue its track record of taking other’s successful ideas and striking gold with them.)

The article states: “The more pressing issue is whether or not controller-less gaming will truly make the medium richer. Making something "more accessible" doesn't necessarily make it better.”

Okay, we can have a medium in which there is only the stick-and-buttons controller, or one in which there is the stick-and-buttons controller, the wii-mote, motion capture, and the various guns, guitars, and dance pads. Unless her suggestion is that if we embrace new technologies, we must chuck the old ones out, it seems evident to me that games become a richer medium when we have a diversity of interactive devices.

Alexander is essentially espousing a Luddite philosophy, and like most Luddites, it’s not the change in equipment, but the change in culture it brings. The stick-and-buttons controller doesn’t need defense because it’s going to disappear, but because others find different, newer controllers better. A lot of others! The anxiety she alludes to is similar to that of a dedicated Everquest player watching the membership of World of Warcraft skyrocket. Instead of being the mainstream of a niche culture, in ten or twenty years, today’s PS3 and Xbox players may become the niche of a mainstream culture.

[1] – Sexy Videogameland: Imagination and abstraction, Leigh Alexander
[2] – Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud
[3] – You can’t shoot the dog, but I always tried.
[4] – Wikipedia is never wrong!

WoW! Fatigue

2009-07-06T20:35:00.000-07:00

My Blood-Elf rogue is an inch from level 20. Yesterday, she traveled from the blood elf city to the undead city to the orc city (Ogrammar) to Crossroads to Ratchet just so I could sit on a pirate ship and grind my lockpicking from 1 to 95. As I sat there, clicking on chest after chest for forty minutes I thought ‘This is why I hate World of Warcraft.’

True, single player RPGs can be grindtastic. I’ve heard Japanese RPGs can be especially demanding, though I’m somewhat ignorant of them.

I also don’t care for profession grinding. I was once able to level a blacksmith/miner who managed to always have gear appropriate for her level, but I’d say that meant that at least a quarter of my play time was devoted to the career. There’s a reason many guides suggest you just pick a gatherer profession and then switch to blacksmithing, leatherworking, or tailoring when you hit high levels. Worse, while I managed to get gear appropriate for my level, it was never as good as what could be found in raids.

My biggest gripe with WoW and other MMORPGs is that I never feel as though I’m winning. I can obsessively play Diablo because I do get that winning sensation. Diablo is blatant in its carrot-and-stick approach, but it works because I crave that feeling of achievement. In WoW, the feeling is that you’ll achieve something… soon. That soon is always on the edge of your horizon, but you never reach it.

Which is why I have my World of Warcraft cycle. I play for hours a day until my toon reaches high level and then I sort of falter off. The game stops appealing to me so I put it aside for a week, which becomes a month, which becomes five months. Then I log on and notice my guild has kicked me out, so I reroll another toon and start again.

This will be the first time I've played a Horde and or with Wrath of the Lich King installed.

On the stack:
Myst: Exile – Never finished it and recently found it gathering dust in my CD holder
Abe’s Odysee – Picked this up but never played it
Giants Citizen Kabuto – The same
Trine - Waiting for more reviews before I buy it. Can anyone comment?
Mirror’s Edge – I have a friend who played this and said she’d give it to me a month ago.

Riven

2009-07-04T18:57:00.000-07:00

Last night, I zipped through Riven at phenomenal speeds until the game crashed and I realized I hadn’t saved since the first island. I restarted, it forced me to start a new game, and then wouldn’t let me open the saved game. I believe I’ve had this problem since I bought it as I knew the solution was to go to the saved game file in the Riven folder and double click it. I then played until the puzzle island where you first encounter the grid. In the past I mapped out the location of the golden balls with graph paper – I have no idea why as a simple X,Y coordinate system notation does the trick.

The image to the right is my notes so far.

I’m not enjoying the game: it’s too easy. It’s not so much puzzle solving for me as data-gathering. What I’ve realized is that the reason I’m not enjoying the game is the same reason that it’s such a good game: it’s a series of higher order, or conceptual, puzzles.

Take an actual, jigsaw puzzle. On the box cover is an image and in the box is a set of pieces you connect together to make the image. The process is all lower order; the difficulty is fitting things together bit by bit in order to construct something you already know about. When I say Riven is higher-order I mean that it gives you the pieces and asks ‘What’s the larger image?’ The difficulty is in exploring the world and coming to understand the larger image. Once you get it, the pieces take no time to put together. [1]

I already understand the big picture – the rolling eyeballs represent an animal both visually and aurally, the number on the other side represents what order the animals come in – so I’m not puzzle solving, just picking up the list of animals and numbers.

I will probably uninstall and try Exile instead, which I don't recall finishing.

[1] – There are lower order puzzles in Riven as well in the form of finding the various hidden objects you have to operate, e.g., to lower the telescope, you have to notice the little stop that’s blocking it and move it out of the way. The lower order puzzles are binary though: Do you notice the stop or not? Did you close the doors behind you or not? Did you notice that you go under the locked gate or not?

Currently Playing

2009-07-03T21:27:00.000-07:00

I never played Myst, but got Riven when it first came out and played it once. Three years ago, I played it again and found I remembered the answer to every puzzle. I installed it on my computer today and… I remember everything.

This is incredibly frustrating.

I love Blizzard; they’re one of the publishers I always trust to build a good game. I’ve spent weeks played Diablo and WoW. I’ve played five seconds of Warcraft III and StarCraft. Real Time Strategy is not my cup of tea. Turn-based Stategy, especially for empire building games like Civilization, Alpha Centurai, and Galactic Civilization, are great fun.

Tonight I installed Starcraft and Starcraft: Brood War on my PC. Tastes can change over time, right?

Sporetastic

2009-07-03T05:28:00.000-07:00

I have a head cold and the antihistamines I took keep have me nodding off. I have three different topics I’d like to talk about and hardly enough energy for one. I’ll go with a topical one: Spore.

The Galactic Adventures pack is coming out sometimes soon. I wouldn’t know because EA’s marketing isn’t accurate. For the last two months, I’ve seen banners and ads saying it was ‘available now’ and each time I clicked through I ended up at a pre-order page. (Wiki says it came out June 23 – see, this is kinda, sorta topical!)

This is about original Spore though, and my opinion of it can be summed up thusly: Creativity is no panacea for mediocrity. Just because a game is innovative, genre defying, creative, inspired, artistic – whatever synonym you prefer – does not mean it’s a good game. Even if those same elements can turn a good game into an excellent game.

Which leads to the question, ‘Does a game have to be good to be worthy or important?’ No, not at all. Enter the Dragon is a bad film, but it’s the film that introduced American audiences to Bruce Lee and quality martial artist choreography. Before Enter the Dragon, most Hollywood fight scenes were Western style shootouts or akin to Captain Kirk vs. Gorn.

A c-game[1] is a form of media as well as an art form as well as (sometimes) an interactive narrative form as well as (sometimes) a social experience as well as system the user navigates using heuristic devices. The last is what makes a game a game, and when I say a game is good or bad, that’s major element I’m evaluating.

In a number of reviews, I’ve read that Spore is not one but five games. I’d argue that it’s two games: the pre-space age and the space age. The cell, creature, tribal, and civilization stages [2] are a single game and a bad one at that. The goal in each stage is to grow, you can choose to do so violently or not, and the way you implement your goal is by gathering a resource and buying objects. In the cell and creature stage, these are body parts. In the tribal stage, these are clothing, children, and buildings. In the civilization stage, these are vehicles and buildings.

There are many excellent games built around this core concept: gather resources in order to buy a beneficial improvement. In Civilization IV, a strategy game, I try to gather metals, food, and money so I can by buildings. In Diablo, an action RPG, I kill things to gather XP so I can buy powers and abilities.

The early stages of Spore never go beyond the core concept. It’s about as bare bones as you get and the lack of complexity, of even simple give or take, means you can go through these early stages on cruise control.

I’m not the first view the simplicity of the early sections as problematic, but I’ve notices that many believe this decision was made to appeal to casual gamers. The hardcore/casual schism is ridiculous and mostly perpetuated by ‘real’ or ‘hardcore’ gamers who view the mere existence of games that don’t cater to their tastes as a type of sacrilege. Maxis might have ‘dumbed down’ Spore for casual gamers, but I doubt it.

I play casual games, my mother plays casual games, my mother’s friend plays casual games, and my mother’s friends daughter and *her* daughter both play casual games, often together. Nothing they play is as boring as the first four levels of Spore. Games like Bejeweled or Plants vs Zombies are simple, but still very engaging.

Moving on to the Space Age and we find a semi-decent space civ sim, but still not as good as half-a-dozen other games on the market.

The bottom line is that if it weren’t for the creature/building/vehicle creator, this game would have hit the bargain bin a month after it was released.

Problematically, the creation tool isn’t a game, it’s a tool. It’s fun to play around with. It’s also fun to eat dinner, go to a movie, or doodle on my PC tablet, but while it’s nice when fun and games meet, one does not imply the other. There are parts of the creation tool that relate to the game as you design your creature’s body and pick various parts to buy, but in itself, this isn’t a game.

This makes things difficult for me. If I’m judging a game, do I go by the total experience, or just the game? It’s not that unusual a quandary. If I go out to a restaurant, and get a great view of the ocean, watch the chef prepare the entrée while flames leap up around her, and have great conversation with my friend, but the food itself is lousy, how good was the meal? There are people who love the creation tool. (And not just because they can make a giant dickasaurus) I don’t enjoy it, but I can see how it’s unique and interesting and an impressive feat.

A game does not have to be good to be worthy or important. I’m not sure if this is either of those either. No other developers seem interested in exploring a multi-generational game right now and user-end content creation tools haven’t changed. More accurately, Spore is riding a larger trend in letting users create content.

Ultimately, Spore might be an evolutionary dead-end when it comes to gaming.

1 - Computer or console game
2 - It’s inaccurate to suggest that a tribe isn’t a form of civilization. A bit of unintended ethnocentrism there.

Mighty Jill-Off

2009-07-02T22:41:00.000-07:00

It's a freeware jumping game in which a sadistic queen has her love-slave jump through a huge tower.

Downloadable here.

I assume there's a joke about gamers being masochists in there.

Douche-Baggery: The Video Game Blog

2009-07-02T02:45:00.000-07:00

As I plunge headfirst into the rushing waters of the c-game meta community, I’ve grabbed almost every site and blog I could think of and made an effort to watch, read, and sometimes comment. Yesterday, I left two comments on the That Video Game Blog: one on how exclusive like a new Final Fantasy game is what’s propelling the Nintendo’s DS ahead of the Sony PSP and another in praise of an increase in girl gamers in the last year.

Strangely enough, my comments never made it through moderation. I checked through the (tiny) backlogs of comments to see if what they did allow. Here’s the *first* response to information on L4D2: ‘Cow goes moo.’ Here’s a comment posted to the Final Fantasy announcement: ‘say what?’

Huh, I can see how my post might not meet the quality standards they have on TVGB.

I assume my not making it through moderation has something to do with my handle. BioWare and Blizzard have both previously decided that gay and lesbian are equivalent to the word shit, so expecting a small, independent blog to realize not allowing someone to comment because their handle has the word ‘lesbian’ is kinda homophobic may be a bit optimistic of me. It’s possible that the word ‘stripper’ is what they don’t allow… but that’s discrimination of a different sort.

People rarely treat the word stripper the way they do doctor or lawyer. It’s a dirty word because it’s about women who voluntarily sexualize themselves. Notice there’s no such problem with words like stud or gigolo.

The strange thing is that I didn’t expect this. I tend to move in very open-minded circles both in the real world and online and the majority of people I interact with don’t have issues with words like lesbian or stripper. Moreover, they play PnP RPGs, so they get the joke in ‘Lesbian Stripper Ninja.’

I'm going to try a few more comments. It's possible they just decided I was a trouble maker; if I continue to attempt to contribute, they might decide I'm doing so in good faith.

Splinter Cell: Conviction. Developer video

2009-07-01T14:37:00.000-07:00

Splinter Cell: Conviction. Developer video

The Video Game Blog has a new video up about Splinter Cell: Conviction (due October 2009) and where Ubisoft plans to take the game.

Splinter Cell is one of my favorite series. Its modern world, spy premise is unique, and I enjoy the complex plots, slick production values, and fun stealth gameplay. I played the first three on my X-Box, and when Double Agent came out, got it on PC. Unfortunately, it didn’t have the level of finesse and control I was used to so I quickly set it aside. By the time Conviction gets here, I hope to have an X-Box 360 and to have finished Double Agent.

At this point, there is little they could do or say that would make me *not* buy this game. Still, some of what they’re saying makes the game sound less appealing.

One of the issues developers have to grapple with in a series is what to keep the same and what to change. There’s no right answer as ‘the fans’ will always complain. Ubisoft appears to be deemphasizing the stealth gameplay in favor of action, as well as simplifying the gun battles. One of the developers asks ‘Why would being seen mean game over? Why not let the action evolve to the next level?’ It’s a good question, but there are reasons for this particular mechanic.

The developer is engaging in a bit of hyperbole here; only a handful of times in the Splinter Cell series does being seen once means game over. Usually, it’s being spotted and identified three times or killing someone. This emphasis on stealth helps set Splinter Cell apart from other games on the market.

Game AI being what it is ‘evolve action to the next level’ can easily turn into ‘slaughter everything in sight while taking minimal damage.’ And while I like Ubisoft, I’ve never found the combat in their games particular complex or difficult. Having a pass/fail condition also makes sense in the game-world: you’re a single, lightly armed man in a building full of people with machine guns. In the real world, being spotted would mean death, capture, and/or a failure in the mission. I have no problem with ditching verisimilitude for fun where appropriate - Wolverine can tear through base of super marines and I won’t blink - but Tom Clancy novels and games attempt to be realistic.

I once read a review of horror films that talked about dread versus terror, and how different films evoked those emotions in the audience. Most run and gun games go for terror; they want your adrenaline to surge and your heart to beat at a mile a minute. At its best, Splinter Cell evokes dread. That sensation that someone’s slowly squeezing your heart as a group of heavily armed guard march through a dark hallway while Sam Fisher crouches inches away. The gnawing knowledge that if you’ve positioned yourself wrong and one of them spots you, it’s FAILURE. No taking them all out and then applying a bandage to make everything better.

One feeling isn’t better than the other: it’s all about what form of emotional masochism you’re in the mood for. I play the Splinter Cell series, and other stealth games, for the dread and I hope in an effort to update the franchise they manage to keep that feeling.

Why can't I be that?

2009-07-01T02:17:00.000-07:00

Women gamers had an article about updates to Dungeons and Dragons Online with a neat picture attached:

Sweet! I thought, Can I play that?

I eagerly clicked on the article and read about the blah, blah, blah with her elf blah, blah, patches.

Why don't games ever let me play something cool? I'm always the good-looking humanoid adventurer, never the interesting monster. Seriously, if I had the choice between a four-armed snake-lady and an elf, I'd never pick the elf, even if it meant running/slithering around in a chainmail bikini.

The Feminine Aesthetic and Video Games, part 2

2009-06-30T23:55:00.001-07:00

Yesterday, I gave two examples of what I consider a feminine aesthetic in video games: Prince of Persia (2008) and Silent Hill 2. Today, I’m going to clarify what I mean by a feminine aesthetic, then I’m going to give examples of what is not feminine and why it’s not feminine.

I changed the name of my series from ‘Femininity in Video Games’ to ‘The Feminine Aesthetic in Video Games’ to clarify my intent. This isn’t about how many games portray women or notions of femininity within games. It’s not about how to get more women to play games, or even how women react to games differently than men. However, those are all good ideas for posts… Give me a second while I write them down.

As I related previously, the seed for this series came about when Craig Graff of BioWare posted the Breathe Me trailer for Prince of Persia (2008). It struck me as feminine, as did the game when I played it. This series is my attempt to clarify and define what a feminine aesthetic is when it comes to video games.

Despite my use of the term feminine, I am not suggesting a system in which all games fall into a masculine or feminine divide. This is just one of many. I use the term aesthetic because I focus on stylistic choices as opposed to pure gameplay or genre elements. A first person shooter could use a feminine aesthetic, though I cannot recall any that have.

Lastly, why use the word ‘feminine’ when it comes to this aesthetic? Because I see it as a necessary counterpart to the hyper-masculine aesthetic that dominates many games. There’s nothing wrong with making a video game version of the 300, but there’s nothing write with it either.

(I considered calling this the Persian Aesthetic after the Prince of Persia games and they were the counterparts to the Spartans in 300 and Halo, but that’s too obscure and not evocative enough.)

When I say ‘feminine’ in regards to video games, a few examples might pop up in your mind. These examples might involve large amounts of pink, Barbie, or games about riding horses or vet hospitals.

No.

These are game designed, marketed, and (mostly) consumed by young girls, but ‘feminine aesthetic’ is not about what women (or girls) traditionally like. Moreover, most of these games have a very simple aesthetic at work: cute, cute, and cute. Cute isn’t feminine, it’s infantile. Puppy dogs, kittens, seal cubs, and human babies are cute no matter what their sex. Wikipedia is never wrong.

Feminine aesthetics also has little to do with the common depiction of women in video games, which tends to play up their hotness. Bloodryne or Ivy, for example do not show a feminine aesthetic in as much as a sexualized one. One could even suggest that the imagery here is masculine in style.

There are also games with elements that may overlap with a feminine aesthetic but are from a preexisting style. Some of Japanese and Korean games, such as Ragnarok Online are based on manga and anime, which has its own history as well as refined visual and storytelling elements. Likewise, there are Western games that borrow heavily from cartoons, Clank and Ratchet for example.

I could continue along this vein: the Fallout series shows a post-apocalyptic aesthetic. Many science fiction games envision spaces of the future as an unholy cross between a dentist’s office, a mall, and a trailer house – the main difference between different settings is whether the dentist’s office is a clean and shiny place that you’d take your kids to or some dingy, back alley place where they use a wrench for extractions. So, we could say Halo and Mass Effect have a sci-fi aesthetic. And let’s not forget how much horror games tend to have in common.

After a post in which I explain what the feminine aesthetic is not, I feel the need to add that there’s no reason why these elements and styles can’t co-exist in the same game. While ‘cute and girly’ games are not inherently feminine, mixing in a feminine aesthetic is possible and might improve the games.

First through, I’d have to pin down what I mean by a feminine aesthetic. That's part 3.

2009-06-30T16:23:00.000-07:00

The Intersection of Race and Steampunk: Colonialism’s After-Effects & Other Stories, from a Steampunk of Colour’s Perspective

"Steampunk! Variously described as an aesthetic, a genre within scifi/fantasy that sprouted from cyberpunk, and a subculture vaguely related to the goth counter-culture. Like many other things with vague origins and a tenuous identity that overlaps with others, it is hard to pin down what steampunk is.

The only that we can all seem to agree on is the aesthetic involved. In a way, it’s a lot like the SCA’s medieval roleplaying, trying to recreate the past with all the good stuff and none of the bad. For other steampunks, it’s a lifestyle movement, in which they transform practical items into works of art and live their lives with exquisite manners."

The Feminine Aesthetic and Video Games, part 1

2009-06-30T03:49:00.001-07:00

Femininity is a complex subject. What it means and what it is and how it’s created is a subject women much smarter than I have analyzed and commented on. Feminists are usually portrayed as being against femininity, but in my experience, feminist are against the idea that femininity is essential or ideal for proper womanhood.

Any female gamer who has played multiplayer Halo or Quake can attest to the fact that some men simply don’t believe women can play Halo or Quake. Only men, the argument goes, posses the prerequisites necessary to play these games because the ability to use a keyboard and mouse (or gamepad) while tracking objects on the screen comes from deep within the testicles. If a woman is playing a FPS, it’s because she’s 1) not really a woman, or 2) not really playing.

I’d suggest that femininity isn’t the problem; insecure assholes are the problem. Insecure dudes feel the need to devalue women and femininity, and it’s very easy for non-traditionally feminine women to fall into the trap of blaming femininity when others devalue them. ‘If this standard didn’t exist,’ goes the thinking, ‘others wouldn’t measure me by it.’ True, they’d measure you by a *different* standard and you’d still fail. A woman who plays against an insecure guy will always fail in his estimation whether she wins or loses, whether she wears a pink dress or a t-shirt and jeans. When it comes to those types, the only way you can win is to be sexxxy and not challenge him. (Apply to non-gamer topics as needed.)

As I quoted in my previous post: “When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean--neither more nor less."”

In this post, when I say femininity, I do not mean womanhood (the physical, mental, and emotional attributes of a grown woman). I do not mean being stupid and shallow. I do not mean naïve or suffused with a delicate and virginal purity. I do not mean rushing to the department store to buy pink handbags for your Chihuahua to ride around in.

I want to talk about femininity as aesthetic and feminine elements in video games. What does that mean?

Hell if I know.

I hope you’re not surprised here. I am Lesbian Stripper Ninja not Lesbian Artist Scholar. The newest Prince of Persia inspired this post. From the first time I saw the Breathe Me trailer, it struck me as strongly feminine.

I played the game, and everything felt feminine to me.

Why did it do so? I wracked my brain for another game that felt feminine and it spit out the oddest thing: Silent Hill 2.

Those of you who have played Silent Hill 2 may be wondering where they can get some of the high quality pot I must be smoking. For those haven’t, I pity you but will explain. Silent Hill 2 is a horror game in which a man searches for his dead wife after receiving a letter from her. You don’t gun down zombies; in fact if you want to survive, you quickly learn to run from fights when possible. It’s pure psychological horror.

In order to create an abstraction of feminine aesthetic, it seemed a good idea to compare these two and see where they overlapped. I could also have a few examples of non-femininity in video games. Given enough of these examples of feminine and non-feminine, and I could conjure up a definition, or at least a set of identifiable traits.

Sounds like a plan.

Overlord II – examination

2009-06-29T20:03:00.000-07:00

Overlord II – examination

Note: As of this write-up, I’m 4/5ths through the game and about to begin a section called The Last Battle. This review contains spoilers.

The Introduction:

In 2007, Codemasters released a Triumph Studios game called Overlord. It was a third-person puzzle game in which the PC as the titular dark Overlord, gathered a group of minions and enslaved or destroyed the populous of a fantasy setting. The setting itself was a spoof of stereotypical fantasy settings, and the game had many comedic elements.

Despite this premise, the Overlord is ‘the good guy.’ The antagonists of the piece are the seven heroes who slew the previous Overlord and have since become corrupt with power, their particular vices based on the seven deadly sins.

It was an interesting game. Solid puzzles, a fresh idea, and engaging plot made this one of the best games of 2007. At the same time, it could get a little monotonous. I managed to make it through a single play though, but I only finished because I wanted to see the ending. Sometime after the fourth (or was it fifth?) boss battle I got bored with the gameplay.

Overlord II is set several hundred years after the original. The old Overlord mysteriously disappeared after the magical Great Cataclysm and the world is currently ruled by the decadent and magic hating Empire. I suspect a twist ending, but haven’t reached that point yet. I’ll amend this post when I do.

Other than the plot, it’s the same game: You are an Overlord; you use minions to fight and solve puzzles; you collect a variety of resources so you can upgrade your minions, armor and weaponry, and your Netherworld Fortress; and you have mistresses who give you a bonuses and a sex scene. There are a few additions: minions have mounts now, dominating a town makes resource collection easier, and the graphics have improved.

But, is Overlord II as good as its predecessor? Is it better? Is it worth shelling out money if you enjoyed the original?

The Good:

Yes. Yes. And (you guessed it) yes.

Not only is it as good as Overlord, it’s better. For one thing, it’s more puzzle-centric. In the original Overlord, you could slaughter your entire group of minions in a big fight, run back to the spawn pits to get more, and then finish the fight with fresh recruits. In Overlord II, a fight is either of easy or normal difficulty, or it’s a puzzle. If your troops are being slaughtered, it’s because you’re doing something wrong.

Some players might object to this – what’s the use of having 700 brown minions if there aren’t fights that grind them into ground beef? – but a puzzle game ought to reward problem solving and punish you for trying to just muscle your way through combat. It’s far more satisfying to replay an encounter several times until I get that mental click, at which point things become easy, than to scrape through an encounter with 1 HP and all the minions I’ve leveled up and equipped dead.

Overlord II also avoids the monotony of the original game. The puzzles are much more varied; there are only a handful of sections where you guide your minions through a dangerous maze, which happened in Overlord every 30-45 minutes. Overlord II has sections where you possess a minion, usually to sneak around, places where you take control of catapults and war machines, and even places where you steer a ship. These game play shifts are well integrated into the story and gameplay, so they don’t feel like random mini-games.

The ability to control towns is a smart move. Towns provide you with a steady source of money, equipment, and lifeforce. They also feel ‘right’ for an evil Overlord.

The Neutral:

The story isn’t as interesting as the first game. It’s not bad, but at least with the Seven Deadly Sins theme, it felt slightly cohesive instead of a series of unrelated puzzles in different locations. I don’t care about defeating the bad guy because he’s only a face. I don’t care about saving everyone because I’m an evil Overlord. I have no personal stake in the matter as the main character has all the personality of burnt bread (burnt bread in hulking, evil armor.)

It’s supposedly a comedy game, but it’s a weak form of comedy. It’s sort of like a five-year-old coming up to you and doing a silly dance: it’s not so much funny as something you smile at because it’s cute and they made the effort.

So, the minions put random stuff on their head, drink beer, and piss loudly afterwards. Haha? They club baby seals and the elves talk in a California accent while defending all that’s cute and fluffy. Haha?

Part of the problem is that when it comes to books, their ‘spoof’ is dated. In 1996, The Tough Guide to Fantasyland by Diana Wynne Jones, made most of these jokes about elves, dwarves, and other common fantasy tropes, but even then they weren’t all that common. Overlord II is a bit like a comedian making jokes about big-hair, neon green legwarmers, and Flashdance. The tropes it makes fun of are mostly confined to DnD and a handful of cRPGs.

Someone once said, “Most game developers have read one book – Lord of the Rings – and seen two movies – Star Wars and Aliens.” If you’re like this, you probably believe the Overlord series contains barbed satire of the fantasy genre. If you’re like me, you probably wish the jokes weren’t so stale.

I also find it strange that Overlord II insists you be a hero of sorts, yet again. Dungeon Keeper never told you that while you appeared to be crushing everyone around you, you were truly saving the world from a much greater tyranny. This is the second time the series has you playing a dark savior. Why?

I’d rather the main antagonist was a good, pure-hearted soul that I stomped under my rusty, iron boots.

The Bad:

Overlord isn’t a perfect game by any means. If you want cool stuff, you have to spend hours farming for resources. Instead of having fun, you get to run around areas you’ve already visited to kill gnomes or destroy the scenery with your minions yet again. It’s dreadfully boring. If you’re going to make farming mandatory, at least try to make it interesting.

For some reason, there’s a ‘Kill 1,000 gnomes’ quest in your journal. It’s an achievement and unlike the other quests, there’s no benefit to it. Achievements are not quests. They should not be listed in the quest log. Another tedious ‘quest’ is the kill/dominate 100 townsfolk for two of the towns. At least this one has some benefit, as dominated townsfolk produce weaponry.

But again, instead of solving puzzles or fighting things, I waste my time farming. This isn’t WoW, and the game is long enough without this element. Why not ditch the farming aspects altogether?

Like the first game, you have ‘good’ or evil choices. More like evil and less evil, really. There are times when the ‘good’ choices are difficult to make. For instance, I run around an elven commune attempting to dominate everyone as they toss pumpkin bombs and swear up and down they’re not rebelling. The AI has no sense of self-preservation though, and several times the elves toss pumpkin bombs into a group of elves or into their own house and blow the crap out of themselves. After they do this a few times, the game decides that I’ve subdued the village through ‘destruction’ even though I haven’t attacked or harmed anyone.

Lastly, on a politically correct note, this game hates fat people. It’s bizarre. There’s even a cut-scene where the camera lingers on a naked fat man while Gnarl, one of the minions, rants about how disgusting he is. I’d write this off as a writer missing his medication one day, but it’s not an isolated incident.

When I was in college, I knew a few girls who’d lost a large amount of weight and obsessed about fatness. For them, being heavy was equivalent to necrophilia. Parts of this game makes me wonder if some of them might have made it into game development.

Irony in the Casual Sense

2009-06-29T02:52:00.000-07:00

In my previous post, I said I disliked irony in the casual sense. I used the word sense instead of meaning as words and phrases have no meaning. They have senses – impressions and associations. Words do not denote, but connote. They do not have meaning, but imply meanings.

To borrow from Humpty-Dumpty: "When you use a word it means just what you choose it to mean--neither more nor less."

Meaning comes from the speaker and listener, or if you prefer, from the act of communication, but words themselves are only the medium meaning passes through.

Irony in the classical sense is ‘is a literary or rhetorical device, in which there is an incongruity or discordance between what one says or does and what one means or what is generally understood. Irony is a mode of expression that calls attention to the character's knowledge and that of the audience.’ (I copied and pasted this shit from Wikipedia, so it’s accuracy is assured.) Irony in the casual sense is ‘any comment produced by someone who wants to be witty and urbane without engaging in any intellectual heavy lifting.’

The Write-Up

2009-06-29T02:16:00.000-07:00

You were raised in a tiny village in Japan as part of an ancient Ninja Clan. When you were but a child, a demon came in a destroyed them all. You were taken and sold into slavery. You were eventually sold to an erotic club where they taught you to dance. But as soon as you got a chance you escaped, swearing vengeance on the demons who enslaved you.

You came to America, the land of freedom, but being a Ninja was a hard way to make a living. So you danced the pole some more, eventually getting enough money to have a new sword forged. You met your master, and he is helping you find the demons that destroyed your people.

As if things weren’t complicated enough, you’ve fallen in love with one of the other dancers, who is totally hot. The two of you have decided to leave the dance club forever to hunt the demons, with her by your side there’s nothing to fear.

Quote: "Not only have you dishonored my people and my clan, but you are a lousy tipper. For that, you must die."

From Madman

In regards to the name of the blog, you might be wondering if I’ve titled it ironically. The answer is no, I dislike irony in the casual sense*. However, any reader should keep in mind that like the Holy Roman Empire, Lesbian Stripper Ninja is neither Holy nor Roman nor an Empire.

*See next post