Memed!

BullCopra decided I was scrap-worthy! Huzzah!

honest_scrap1

“This award is bestowed upon a fellow blogger whose blog content or design is, in the giver’s opinion, brilliant.”

I’m pretty sure that Copra and I have very different definitions of the word brilliant, since I generally feel like I’m flailing around like a noob on these pages. But thanks, Copra!!

So here’re the memeRules:

  1. When accepting this auspicious award, you must write a post bragging about it, including the name of the misguided soul who thinks you deserve such acclaim, and link back to the said person so everyone knows she/he is real.
  2. Choose a minimum of seven (7) blogs that you find brilliant in content or design. Or improvise by including bloggers who have no idea who you are because you don’t have seven friends. Show the seven random victims’ names and links and leave a harassing comment informing them that they were prized with Honest Weblog. Well, there’s no prize, but they can keep the nifty icon.
  3. List at least ten (10) honest things about yourself. Then pass it on!

Rule 1, check.

Rule 2:

Actually before I get to Rule 2, let me preface this list. I know for some people getting meme’d is like being sent a chain letter. But I love the spirit of this meme, and I’m picking 7 bloggers that really have affected me in positive ways. I hope no one feels a sense of obligation from being on this list. Forward the meme or don’t; it doesn’t matter to me. What does matter is I get a chance to call attention to some very cool people.

  1. Stargrace at MMOQuests, because she’s always celebrating the fun that comes out of the games we play. I’ve gone on more vicarious adventures with her than with anyone else.
  2. Tipa at West Karana. She’s done a lot for the blog-o-sphere, but I’m including her this time for the work she did on the XFire WordPress Plug-In that I’m running over on the right.
  3. Angela at G33kG0dd3ss for having the hardest-to-type blog name of them all, and because she did the design for Dragonchasers. And she puts up with me every day. I have no idea how.
  4. Wiqd at iMMOvation, because he makes me think a lot about the games we play, and tends to spin it all in a pretty positive light. Reading him tends to be very relaxing and thought-provoking at the same time, which is (IMO) quite a feat.
  5. Tesh at Tish Tosh Tesh for constantly challenging me. We often don’t see eye-to-eye, but I always feel like I’ve improved myself a wee bit after we debate a topic.
  6. Ysharros at Stylish Corpse. This one is a bit of a ‘cheat’ because Copra already tagged her, but she invites us in time after time for long, rambling discussions that she starts and then guide the conversation as the day passes. She just has a knack for picking topics that folks can build a conversation around.
  7. DM Osbon from Construed, for his infectious enthusiasm from both games and (sometimes more importantly) other pop culture. It’s good to be reminded that there’s more to life than computer games: there’s comics and movies!

Rule #3

Finding 10 things about me that anyone would find remotely interesting will be a challenge.

  1. I’ve been involved in online communities since the 1980’s. My first gig was as an assistant sysop for Scorpia (older gamers may remember her from the pages of Computer Gaming World) on GEnie. It wasn’t a paid gig, but she did send us a Holiday Bonus. She signed her checks “Scorpia.”
  2. I was an Associate Editor of Strategy Plus Magazine for a few years. My beat was strategy and wargames.
  3. I once spent a very pleasant day at Derek Smart’s house in Miami, looking at Battlecruiser and thinking it was awesome. And it was, when Smart was at the controls. He was a charming host and it was a really enjoyable time. (For those who don’t get the reference, Smart is infamous for taking part in online flame wars about his game.)
  4. I took part in a focus group for the crafting aspects of LOTRO. If you hate how crafting works in that game, I have to take a very very very tiny bit of responsibility for it.
  5. My first MMO (although it wasn’t call that at the time) was Megawars III on CompuServe. I spent $300/month on access fees (they cut you off at $300) and another $150 or so/month on phone charges.
  6. Even though I’m a pasty-faced geek now, there was a time when I was a total beach bum. I grew up in The Hamptons and worked nights. Every day was spent lounging at the ocean, soaking up the sun and body surfing.
  7. My first Virtual Reality experience was Dactyl Nightmare. I happened to be in an arcade when they were setting it up, and the tech just let me hang out in it for about 25 minutes, noodling around while he got everything in order. After taking off the head-mounted-display, I proclaimed it Electronic LSD and predicted it would take the world by storm. It didn’t.
  8. I ghostwrote a chapter of a book called “Secrets of the Videogame Masters” by Clayton Walnum. My chapters was a walk-through of Bionic Commando for the NES. I was 28 at the time and had chicken pox as I was playing through the game. I think it was the only thing that kept me sane from that ITCHING!
  9. The first computer I used was actually a paper-teletype machine with an acoustic coupler.  You had to call up the PDP-10 at Stony Brook University, listen for the *screeech* that told you the PDP was talking, then shove the headset of the phone into a couple of rubber cups on the back of the teletype. Programs were store on paper tape with holes punched out. Getting your program ‘roll’ squished often meant re-keying.
  10. I dated a pretty serious activist in my youth. That led me to being at the big No Nukes Rally in Battery Park, Manhatten, in 1979, and I marched in Washington DC against registering for Selective Service  after the USSR invaded Afghanistan that same year. I was something of a hippy back then. I think maybe I still am.

Whew. I think my job here is done…

Star Ocean: First Departure Review (PSP)

Doing a review for a game you loved is easy. Doing a review for a game you hated is easy, too. Reviewing Star Ocean: First Departure, for the PSP, isn’t going to be easy. For the first 10-12 hours I was playing it, I was considering quitting; it just wasn’t grabbing me. Then I started digging into some of the ‘extras’ and treating it almost like an MMO, my focus turned to building strong characters efficiently rather than driving the storyline forward, and then I was really enjoying it. But that could only carry me so far, and when the game finally ended I was both satisfied *and* relieved.

So let’s break it down a bit. This is a pretty typical linear JRPG. There are some side quests but mostly it’s a straight shot from unknown farm boy to hero of the world. And honestly the story was pretty average. It started interesting, with some time travel and the ultimate goal being to cure a disease; surely a noble cause. But really that boiled down to having to kill Foozle, and in order to kill him you first needed to find the 4 Widgets of Wonder to access him. It at least made sense, and if you pay attention there’re ties into real world legends and so forth, but it just didn’t really draw me in, and the only real ‘twist’ felt like something stuck in to bloat the length.

As for characters, you have a core of 4 characters plus 4 open slots to fill with extra characters. There are more than 4 of these so if you want to play them all you’ll have to play through the game at least twice. Only 4 of your characters are active in combat at any time. You can swap them out at will. When I was enjoying character building I was trying to keep everyone an even level, but when I started my drive to finish, I picked 4 characters and relied on them alone. At the end of my play through, my ‘core’ characters were level 72 and my extras were still in their 40s.

Combat is action based, which would be fine except the camera (which you can’t control) is usually too low. When you have a bunch of baddies and 4 of your characters on screen, it can be really hard to figure out what’s going on, and I spent a lot of the game button mashing my way through. You can change which character you control by tapping the circle button, which pauses combat, then the “D-pad” lets you cycle to whomever you want to control. Pressing Triangle pauses and opens a menu for using Items, Fleeing battle, and so on. Pressing the Square pauses and lets you change your target.

And that’s cumbersome: that you have to pause and cycle around to get the target you want rather than just running up to it. Combat also pauses when big spells go off in a classic Square Enix style of flashiness that you’ll get *incredibly* sick of by the end of the game.

The three characters you aren’t controlling are AI powered. I spent 99% of the time running the ‘main character’ and letting the AI do the rest of the work, and it does an admirable job. The healer in particular was great at healing just enough, just in time. She also knew to run away when she got aggro. My mage was ok, but was prone to unleashing a big, slow attack when the battle was almost done, which just wasted mana and slowed things down. Still, the AI was pretty good; no complaints there.

It took me 25 hours to play through the game, and as mentioned, by characters were in their low 70’s. You level *frequently* in Star Ocean: First Departure, and when you do you get skill points to spend. Skills are used both to build up ‘crafting jobs’ like alchemy or blacksmithing, and (for some of them) to add to your stats. So Smithing adds to strength plus is required for the Blacksmithing ‘job’ (which is actually called Compounding). There are also combat oriented skills like fast spell casting or defense breaking. So there’s a lot of decision making about who is going to do what job, and what percentage of skill points are going into combat vs crafting. With the right materials, a character can write a book about one of his skills and pass it to another character to read in order for them to raise that skill without spending points.

To make a finely honed party you really need to plan this stuff out. There’s no reason to have, say, two alchemists. However Compounding only works on the weapons you can use. (Generally you combine a weapon and a mineral and hopefully get a better weapon, but you might end up with junk.)

The crafting system is pretty deep and pretty interesting and was my favorite part of the game. (There’s a music system, some kind of art system, systems that require the whole party to join together to work on a project..lots of stuff.) That said, I’m told the game has a level cap of 250 (!) and a hitpoint cap of 9999 (my dudes had 5000-6000 HP by the end) so if you’d rather grind levels then mess with Crafting you probably could do so.

Sometimes it’s hard to avoid grinding levels due to random encounters. You know that old school vibe…walk for 3 seconds, have a combat encounter. Walk another 3 seconds, have another. There’s a skill called Scouting which is supposed to help you avoid random encounters (or, heaven forbid, get more of them) but I didn’t have much luck with it.

The Save System is a little annoying. You can save anything on the world map, and here and there in dungeons. You can’t save in towns, not even at Inns (where you can sleep to regain HP and Mana). That meant a lot of time running out of town to save before trying something crazy.

All in all, I’d give Star Ocean: First Departure about a 3 on a scale of 1-5, but it is definitely a game only for fans of JRPGs. I ended up higher level than most, from what I’ve read on gamefaqs, and I’m not really sure how or why, but because I did the game was never very difficult. There were lots of parts of the Crafting system I never really had use for, and I rather wish I would’ve been ‘forced’ to either use them or deliberately grind levels. I do like that the “I’m going to grind until I’m uber and can mop the floor with the bosses” option is there for those who enjoy playing like that, but I think you should have to deliberately attack the game in that fashion for it to work. That I ended up over-powered “by accident” indicates a bit of a balance problem, IMO.

There’re apparently multiple endings depending on how well your party got along (there are certain opportunities for ‘special events’ in most towns that’ll help there) and there’s a post-game dungeon in case you want to keep leveling, but for me, one time through the world of Star Ocean: First Departure was plenty.

Syp’s other blog

/PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT

I’m probably the last one to learn this but just in case….

Syp of Waaaaaaaaaagh fame (is that too many “a’s”?) has a non-Warhammer blog, Bio Break, where he talks about games beyond Warhammer. He must have started it after I stopped reading Waagh! and all the other Warhammer blogs.

/END PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT

Golden ages & game design

Thanks to Stargrace for pointing me at this post on Of Course I’ll Play It!

I wasn’t at GDC and didn’t hear the Paul Burnett lecture that Dusty Monk (author of Of Course I’ll Play It!) refers to, so I can’t comment directly on that. But from what I’ve read, the quick recap is that Burnett suggests that we all have a ‘golden age’ of gaming that influences our likes and dislikes. Simple enough.

Monk adds his own thoughts to this when he says:

No matter how utterly convinced you are of how fundamentally fun something is, there is always someone else whom is just as equally convinced it is the worst thing in the world. And no matter how absolutely terrible you think something is, there will always be people that think it’s the best thing in existence.

And that, to me, is a golden nugget and something I really need to keep in mind. I should print it out and paste it on the wall behind my monitor, for when I’m arguing with all these crazy kids (git out of my yard!) who think that games shouldn’t have levels or loot or travel times or obstacles or rats or fighting or whatever the next sacred cow they start tearing down is. (Bless ’em for their energy and constant thinking outside the box!)

The timing is kind of funny because I’ve been playing a certain game a lot, and wasn’t really enjoying it until I got out a pad and paper and started taking notes and planning out character development and stuff. And a few times I almost posted about it, but then didn’t really want to have to get into a big debate about how if a game forces you to take notes it must suck. Because I can see how people would think it would suck, and honestly I wouldn’t want to have to do it very often. But for me, for now, it’s kind of a neat feeling of nostalgia.

Sometimes I miss the days when there was *always* a pad of graph paper sitting next to the keyboard. It was as essentially a gaming tool as the monitor, really.

Anyway, thanks to Stargrace for pointing out the post! And I should ask Monk if he ever played Megawars III.

Crafting and Creativity

There’s been a lot of crafting talk lately. And a little bit of discussion around how rigid (my term) MMOs tend to be.

Angela was checking out this thread on the EQ2 boards and I asked her to send it to me. It’s a guild hall turned into a circus, built of crafted and collected items. The ‘figures’ are all quest rewards, I’m sure. But the structures are all creations made of crafted items.

I realize to a lot of people stuff like this is “pointless” but to another lot of people, stuff like this is what makes MMOs magical. Preemptively cutting off the nay-sayers, the point isn’t about quality of graphics or that the elephant’s foot doesn’t intersect perfectly with the ball he’s standing on. The point is the ‘sandbox’ aspect that allows people to come up with original crazy ideas, and execute on them.

Anyway, here’s the link:

http://forums.station.sony.com/eq2/posts/list.m?topic_id=446678

New Widget curtesy of Tipa and XFire

Over in the right column you’ll see a new widget I just added: “Playing on PC”. (It’s the 4th chunk down as I write this, but I move stuff all the time.)

That’s a widget that Tipa from West Karana coded to import data from XFire.

Installation is a snap and it works as advertised! Obviously you need to be an XFire user to put it to any use. 🙂

Thanks Tipa!!! Very much appreciated!!!

The Emperor Has No Clothes! (OnLive)

Lots of gawking and fawning about OnLive coming out of GDC and from folks on Twitter. People who I usually feel are pretty lucid are buying into this product in a way that startles me.

(On the off-chance you haven’t heard about OnLine, I wrote a post about it for ITWorld.)

OnLive sounds to me like a really neat tech demo. A system that works wonderfully under ideal circumstances.

And OK, it might even be a neat system for non-twitch games. Board games, RPG’s with turn-based systems, and things of that nature. But FPSers and driving games? No way. At least, not in a way that is going to be dependable all the time.

Just think about how often you’re sitting at home and you hit a site that feels slow. Now it might be that the server that hosts the site is bogged down. But it could be any of a number of other reasons between you and them, too. I work on the web. I spend a lot of time tracking down “the site is really slow!!” problems, and about 70% of the time, it isn’t the site itself. It’s a router being wonky or DNS being sluggish or our local connection being bogged down or something else.

If any of those things happen while I’m playing Need For Speed over OnLive, my experience goes right into the crapper. And for most of it, there’s nothing you can do but wait.

If OnLine launches and becomes popular, we’ll be back to the old “bandwidth hog!” jokes of a few years ago. If you want to play a game and someone in another room wants to stream video, you’re screwed. You may even be screwed if your next door neighbor is bit-torrenting his porn collection to the world. Got an VOIP phone? Well don’t try to play while someone is talking on it!

And then there’s the question of bandwidth caps from your ISP.

Here’s what Brad Wardell of Stardock has to say about the server. Now granted, he isn’t exactly objective… but here ya go: Stardock CEO speaks about OnLive.

*Maybe* all of this will work out and OnLive will do great. Would this be a good thing? They want to replace both hard media (ie, disks) and digital downloads. In short, they want to have a monopoly on how we play games. They’ll know what we play, and how long we play for, and who we play with. If they decide your favorite game isn’t right for their service, bam, it goes away. There’s nothing you can do to keep a copy for yourself. It’s just gone. Poof.

Granted, the chance of them taking over like that is slim.

But people, remember the Phantom! Be skeptical! I signed up for beta; you should too. Let’s see how this service really works before we start chittering away like happy mice over it (I don’t know where that came from, sorry).

At *best* I think it’ll be a system you’ll use to supplement your consoles and gaming PCs, not replace them. You don’t want to be without any games every time the net goes a little wonky, do you?

[UPDATE: Lloyd Case has a nice article on the service (more balanced than my rant) over at Extreme Tech]

Time, value and scorn

I argue with MMO bloggers a lot. Maybe I’m just old and set in my ways, but so much of what these youngsters say just rings so false to me…

One topic to always get me embroiled in an all-day rasslin’ match is this concept that most MMO publishers are just out to fleece their customers and they make MMO’s full of un-fun time sinks so that people will play longer and so keep subscribed.

I don’t agree with this argument. If the activities that bloggers refer to as “time sinks” aren’t fun to the players, then why don’t the players leave the game? Why stick around if you aren’t having fun? Anyway, I’ve argued that argument until I’m blue in the face. Not going to do it again, life is too short.

In fact, I’m throwing in the towel and I’m going to AGREE with these bloggers, but on condition that they cast their nets wider. It isn’t the MMOs are full of time sinks. GAMES are full of time sinks.

This struck me when I was reading In Praise of the 3-Hour Game (doh, no stretch there.. I sure can make mental leaps, eh?). In it, Wired’s Clive Thompson suggests that most (narrative driven) games are bloatware and shouldn’t run more than 4-5 hours. The argument goes that games cost a lot to make, so you have to charge $60 for them, so you have to fill them with time sinks to stretch out how long they take to play so that players feel they’ve gotten their money’s worth.

For the record, I don’t totally agree with Thompson either, but I agree with him more than I do with the bloggers. When I’m grinding levels in a Final Fantasy in order to take on the next boss, all I’m doing is grinding levels. Nothing unexpected is going to happen. Nothing else in game is going on. Compare that to grinding levels in an MMO. I never know what’s going to happen next. Maybe someone is going to come running past any minute, in need of help or something. And I’m probably talking with guildies or friends while I’m grinding, so even if nothing unexpected happens I’m still having a pleasing conversation.

In either case, people are paying to do time sinks. Either at $15/month, or with that big fat $60 fee up front. If the basis of the argument against time sinks is that time sinks aren’t fun, and we’ve established that both single and mmo games are full of time sinks, then why do we find games fun in the first place?

I mean, any non-gamer would tell you the entire game is a waste of time and a ‘time sink.’

I could do into this some more, but I have to go grind a couple more levels in Star Ocean: First Departure before I can take on the next boss. And y’know what? I’m really looking forward to playing after the day I’ve had.

# # # End gaming discussion # # #

To my friends: A while back I was apologizing about being so negative and all that and mentioned that my mom wasn’t doing too well. A few of you expressed concern, and that was very much appreciated. I just wanted to post a quick update. It’s been an on-going struggle since, as we’ve tried to motivate her to take care of herself. Funny thing I’ve learned. If a person is lucid, you can’t force them to help themselves. We’ve been trying like crazy to get her to check herself into the hospital but she wouldn’t. Then today she fell (not for the first time) and hit her head (the first time). Thank goodness someone happened to be there, and an ambulance was called, and now mom is *finally* in the hospital getting some medical attention. Tests will be run; they think she may have pneumonia, or worse (her white blood cell count is way low – she’s smoked like a fiend for close to 70 years…draw your own conclusions) but at least they have her eating and drinking.

I know it sounds weird to be ‘celebrating’ my mom landing in the hospital, but it feels like such a relief. She’d gotten to where she would choose not to answer the phone, and every time I called I’d get to worrying that she’d fallen or had just passed away and was laying there, or hoping she’d just decided she didn’t feel like talking to anyone (you wonder where I get my crankiness…the apple don’t fall far from the tree!) Thank goodness an old high school friend lives across the street and he’d check on her for us. I’m far less worried with her IN the hospital than I was when she was OUT of it.

Dragon Age: The Stolen Throne Review

Dragon Age: The Stolen Throne
Rating: 4 of 5 stars

Dragon Age: The Stolen Throne by David Gaider

Wow. What a surprise.

This is a prequel novel to the upcoming video game Dragon Age: Origins, by Bioware. I was reading it more to ‘get in the mood’ for the game than anything, and I had very low expectations, to be honest. And I was blown away.

I’m giving it 4 stars, and that is judging it against all fantasy, not against “pre-generated world” fantasy (novels based on games, movies, tv series, etc). Within that sub-genre it’s a 5 star book, easily.

As the story begins, a cruel usurper sits on the throne of Ferelden, and the Rebel Queen has been betrayed and murdered. The only member left of the royal family is young Maric, a charming but slightly inept princeling, now on the run for his life. He soon teams up with a young commoner named Loghain, and the two set off to reunite with the rebel army, and begin the daunting challenge of trying to push the usurper from his ill-gained throne.

There’s a bit of game-ness to the book here and there as character classes are mentioned, but it isn’t very intrusive and if you didn’t know it was a game-prequel novel, you might not even notice it.

The story has everything you could ask for in a fantasy. A noble, seemingly impossible quest, great battles, characters who feel very real, and who interact in ways that also feel very human. A smattering of magic and strange creatures. Joy and pain, victory and defeat. All written with genuine emotion.

A nice change of pace is the way elves are handled, who are definitely second class citizens in this world, scraping by working as servants and living in squalid quarters of most cities.

All in all, a very, very enjoyable read, and a very ‘self-contained’ novel. You aren’t left with a cliff-hanger ending that is going to require you to play the game or read another novel. You can download a sample chapter from http://dragonage.bioware.com/noveltst.html

I hope the author, David Gaider, focuses on more novel writing, and less game writing. I’d love to read more from him!

View all my reviews.

Spellborn Quick Tip: Chat Filters

If you’re anything like me, one of the first things you do when you start an MMO is turn off the “General” chat channels. Nothing breaks immersion like the on-going bitch-fest that is General Chat which happens in every single MMO I’ve ever played. In Spellborn, this constant bitching and epeen displaying happens in Zone Chat. Getting rid of it is a little tricky.

To the right of the chat entry window is a little ‘bubble’ icon. If you click on that you get a bunch of chat options, including filters. You can untick Zone chat, and you’d think you’d be done. You’d be wrong. What you’ll see now is the same chat with a warning:

[POST EDITED BECAUSE PEOPLE TAKE THINGS TOO LITERALLY]

Zone: Player1: So psyched for BSG finale tonight! (warning, channel not active)
Zone: Player2: I love that show! (warning, channel not active)
Zone: Player3: Where can I find Young Bears? (warning, channel not active)
Zone: Player2: I need Young Bears too! (warning, channel not active)
Zone: Player4: What’s BSG? (warning, channel not active)

And so on. Clearly the game REALLY wants you to see the Zone chat. So what you have to do is, under that same pop-up chat widget, pick “New Channel” (which really means “New Tab”). On the old tab, re-enable Zone Chat, then move to that new tab, and set your filters accordingly (ie, untick Zone Chat there). Your preferences will be respected in your new chat tab, as long as “Zone chat” is un-filtered in another tab (which you can blissfully ignore).

Now you can enjoy the lore and the magic of Spellborn without all the asshats breaking your immersion!