Gladius

I was playing with the demo of Gladius (warning for office workers…there’s music on that site) off a recent XBox magazine cover disk. This is the LucasArts gladiatorial combat game.

It’s really very neat. A strange melange of gaming styles. You have rpg aspects in that characters have stats and such. Some strategy bits in that it looks as though you spend your coin on building a team, with various choices of what type of warrior to hire. Then you get in the arena. Set up starting positions, with height and terrain playing a very real role in combat.

Combat is turn-based…each character moves in succession, based on abilities. You have various movement and ‘spell’ points (I’m guessing at terminology as I had no docs). You have a variety of different attacks that use up these spell points. But here’s the catch..when it comes time to attack, there’s an arcade element to the game. You have a gizmo that looks very similar to the ‘swing meter’ in old golf games. A horizontal bar with various zones in it. An indicater slides across the bar, and you have to tap a button to mark your swing. There’re big ‘normal hit’ zones that are easy as pie to hit. Then there are weak zones (which you want to avoid) followed by a very small critical hit zone, and so forth. The idea being that you can risk the critical hit but you might land a weak hit instead. The normal hit is basically a sure thing.

And that’s the basic attack. For combos you have to hit two buttons. Special attacks are carried out by various “Simon-like” mini-games (ok, miniscule games). It’s *really* fun how it blends character stats with your own abilities. But if you’re a thinking gamer, I’m hoping that sound tactics and normal hits will carry the day.

Nothing here is totally new, but the way its all combined makes the game feel very fresh and fun. This one is now on my MUST HAVE list, to be sure!

EVE: The Second Genesis

EVE is a new space-based MOG. On the surface its similar to Westwood’s Earth & Beyond: you have a ship that you fly around in, mining asteroids, fighting NPCs and exploring. But once you get into the game you start to learn that EVE is very different.

Basically, it boils down to this. Whereas E&B was a MMORPG with ships instead of player avatars, EVE is an alternate universe to make your mark on. There’s almost no hand-holding going on, there are no levels. You choose your own path… you can focus on getting the beset ship possible, or increasing your personal skills, or on getting rich…it’s all up to you.

At the heart of this is a player-driven economy that gives the players the tools to interact with each other in meaningful ways. From your first day in EVE you can start selling items when you’re offline, for instance. Players can hire each other to haul cargo, put a bounty on an enemy, or commission a star ship from another player.

Corporations, which take the place of Guilds, add long-term goals for players. A Corporation can build its own space station, albeit at great cost in terms of cash and materials. This will require all the members of the Corp pulling together to work towards a common goal.

You’ll notice I referred to EVE as a MOG, not a MMORPG. While a major portion of the game is about character development, there’s a solid economic empire building game in here, too. Be a trader sniffing out the best trade routes between systems, or be a miner, or a builder, or a bounty hunter. Or do some of each. Amassing wealth in order to buy better ships and equipment is a big part of the game, and the player-to-player economic possibilities keep things interesting.

The last thing that sets EVE apart is how ‘low impact’ it is. Make no mistake, there’s a lot of downtime in this game. Mining asteroids, or making multi-jump trips, can take a good little while. Oddly though, rather than being annoying I find this relaxing. If I need more excitement I can always hunt pirates for a while. But just as an example, as I write this, my ship is mining an asteroid on my other laptop (which accounts for how disorganized this post is…I had to go kill pirates a few times in the midst of it).

The thing that scares me about EVE is that its starting to remind me of my first online gaming addiction: Megawars III, on the old Compuserve Service. If I get as hooked on EVE as I was on that game I’ll be in trouble, indeed!

Weekend wrap-up

In gaming: I finished Brute Force on Sunday. Very entertaining game. Pretty much straight action; no cut scenes to speak of and a very thin storyline. But still fun. Also got back into EverQuest in a semi-serious way. Had a couple of evenings with a good group of friends that was quite fun, but the solo game is still a bit slow for my tastes. Plus physical ailments make long stretches of gaming on the PC painful these days. Lastly, played more EVE: The Second Genesis. That warrants its own post, I think.

In video: Watched the second disc of Saiyuki. This series continues to grow on me; I really enjoy the bold style of the artwork and the ‘camera work’ that bridges the gap between graphic novel panels and film. Sadly, disc 3 won’t be out until the end of July. Also watched a couple of Tivo’d episodes of the new The Twilight Zone series. Kindof a mixed bag so far. I’ll watch a few more before I decide whether it warrants a season pass or not. Oh, and I saw a great episode of Robot Wars, my current guilty pleasure.

The Two Towers

USA spills the beans on some of the new scenes we’ll get when the Extended Version of The Two Towers hits the stores this December.

Overall, I’m quite pleased. There’s more on Boromir, Faramir and their father, ent draughts for Merrie and Pippin, and some fleshing out of Eowyn’s love of Aragorn. Should make a great movie spectacular.

And, the evil bastards are releasing it the day after Return of the King opens!

Brute Force

Just for the record, I’m still playing, and enjoying, Brute Force on the XBox. I’ve seen a lot of lackluster reviews. Maybe I’m just crazy, but I think its a solid game. Doesn’t push too many envelopes or anything, but its fun to play, and at the end of the day, isn’t that what matters?

Weekend Movie Wrapup

Saw a few movies this weekend: About Schmidt, Chocolat, and Bridget Jone’s Diary.

About Schmidt is the hardest to talk about. I liked it…I think. In a way, it wasn’t about anything. In another way, it was about life itself. Gak, that sounds idiotic. Basically, Jack Nicholson plays a 66 year old fellow named Warren Schmidt whose life is changing drastically, setting the poor fellow more or less adrift. It was worth seeing, but don’t fall all over yourself getting to the rental store. Oh, and contrary to what you might think from seeing the trailers, the bulk of the movie is *not* about him going to his daughter’s wedding. Nicholson is…well, Nicholson, and I mean that as praise. He spends a lot of the movie with that “this guy is searching inward with all his might, leaving no room for outward expression” look on his face, and you’re just waiting for him to explode.

Chocolat was a sweet (sometimes bitter-sweet) story of a woman and her daughter who move into a quiet, deeply Catholic village in France, and open a chocolate shop…during Lent. That puts her at odds with the village’s mayor and young priest. Her chocolate has a faintly magical effect on the people who eat it, and she ends up stirring up the folk of the village in some wonderful ways. Very sweet, sometimes funny, well worth watching…I think I’ll buy this one to have at hand whenever I need a pick-me-up.

And finally, Bridget Jone’s Diary was laugh-out-loud funny. A love story with not many surprises, but you never care because you spend the film worried about Bridget…or laughing at her…or laughing with her. As a guy, I got to peer into the female intellect and the problems girls face where men are concerned. Such as, do I wear the teeny tiny thong panties in case I get lucky, or do I wear the big tummy-control panties that aren’t the least bit sexy but make me look better dressed, and thus improve the chances of getting lucky. Girls worry about this? Who knew? A fine, funny film. I was very pleasantly surprised.

For a laugh, rent BJD. To feel good in your soul, rent Chocolat. And to observe the human condition, rent Schmidt.

Anime

I’ve been thinking about anime lately, and what makes it so special. And what I’ve decided is this: anime gets away with showing us stuff that live action could never get away with. I was watching the series “Now and Then, Here and There” a while back. The star is a young boy who, at times, gets beaten horribly. A young girl gets raped several times and finally murders her attacker. In “Grave of the Fireflies” [SPOILER INCOMING] we watch a very young girl slowly, painfully, starve to death while her older brother does everything he can think of to prevent it. When we see him put her in a coffin and light the pyre…man, its devastating.

Live action could show this stuff, but not so bluntly. And in having to soften it, the imagery loses some of the impact. So that’s part of it of what makes it special. It pulls certain subject matter out of the realm of taboo. But that’s not all…

At the same time anime is showing you these horiffic visuals…they are animated, and that triggers some kind of release in the brain. When Shu is getting horribly beaten by King Mondo, his neck actually stretches, cartoon style, as his head snaps back and forth. Now don’t misunderstand…this doesn’t make the scene funny. Instead, it both intensifies the action and makes it less real at the same time. And I really think that ‘less real’ bit gives us a mental escape valve.

For me anyway, this lets me walk away from “Now and Then…” thinking about the story, but not…scarred. I mean, seeing that kind of violence done to a young boy in live action would just be horrific. I’d feel guilty about watching it as ‘entertainment’ and just deeply disturbed by seeing it at all. That lizard part of my brain the doesn’t understand the difference between fact and fiction would just curl up into a ball.

Contrast “Now and Then…” with “Grave,” which never used any cartoon exaggeration of any sort. Days later, I’m still thinking about the movie and choking up. Since the misery here isn’t due, directly, to violence, the filmmaker didn’t feel the need to give us that kind of escape, I suppose. You won’t wake up screaming from a nightmare after seeing “Grave” and you might have if you saw a version of “Now and Then” where the violence hadn’t been ‘cartoonized’ a little.

Oh, and by the way, if you don’t watch anime, please don’t take this little brain-dump of mine out of context. Yes, there are scenes of great violence and sadness in anime, but there are also scenes of great happiness and love. It’s a medium of extreme emotions, I suppose. But no one needs an escape from too much happiness.

Red Hat 9

I used to be a linux fanboy wannabe, then Mac OS X came along and scratched all the itches that linux was supposed to scratch. But with the aging, not to mention hard disk-filling, of my TiBook I find I don’t “play” with the OS anymore. After going to OSCOM last week, I got all open source stoked again, so this past weekend I installed Red Hat 9 on one of my old machines.

So far, I’m really liking it. It’s almost too easy…I really didn’t have to do any geek tinkering to get it up and running. 🙂 And its really gorgeous, too. Of course, being new, I’m sure it isn’t stable enough to deploy in a serious computing environment, but for me its just a learning toy now.

Oh, and I found a great site to ask questions at: linuxquestions.org. They’re a distro-agnostic ‘help the newbies’ site, and so far have been very helpful indeed!

Grave of the Fireflies

I’d heard about this anime movie for a long time and tonight, I finally watched it. Whew. If you’re someone who thinks that anime is all about giant robots and is just for kids, Grave of the Fireflies will set you straight.

It’s the story of a boy and his young sister struggling to get by in Japan in the waning days of World War II. Their mother has been killed in an air raid and, well, the world is a hard place for them. Everyone is hungry, most of all two children out on their own.

Make no mistake, its a powerful, sad movie. And very much worth watching.