Author: Nimgimli

Brian Fargo on The Bard’s Tale

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Brian Fargo visited G4TV.Com (G4’s weekly gaming ‘talk show’) to talk about his new company, inXile (warning for folks at work: the site makes noise), and more specifically their upcoming remake of The Bard’s Tale. Since I had the ep Tivo’d I thought I’d transcribe a couple of Q&A’s for you folk.

G4: What is the storyline, and what genre is the game?

BF: Well, its a role playing game, and certainly thats a genre that I’m well known for, and its an action-rpg, so anybody familiar with say, Dark Alliance or Champions of Norrath would know the style of gameplay, but at the same time its more like my old PC games and I’m bringing a deep, non-linear PC mentality to the console world.

G4: What characters are we going to be playing as?

BF: Well you’ll be playing as The Bard, which is not your typical RPG hero. In fact he’s not a hero at all, he’s more like Han Solo in the fact that he’s really not interested in saving the world. He’s interested in ‘coin and cleavage’ as we say and that’s about it. If there’s not something in it for him…tch, no interest.

G4: What makes this a new adventure, what kinds of things from the original game are in there, and what kinds of things are completely different?

BF: Really most of it is completely different. The thing that made the original Bard’s Tale work back in the 80’s…what made that work has nothing to do with today. I’ve been playing and making role playing games now for 20 years and so, I sorta looked at the genre and I thought “We gotta do something completely different.” And so, for us, I’m just tired of breaking open barrels to find the skeleton key. We can’t stand that stuff anymore. So we came at it with a very mature sortof perspective on it. It parodies, in fact, many of the old rpg… some of the conventions that we actually helped create.

G4: Tell me a little bit about the RPG genre. Obviously there are millions of RPG gamers out there. You’ve obviously made some of the best. What is it that sets RPG gamers apart from the regular kind of shoot-em-up crowd?

BF: Hmm. Well, I think they’re looking for a deeper experience, really, for the most part, you know?. More of a narrative experience. Action games are just purely a function of beating it and getting to the next level, and there’s a certain amount of that with RPGs but you know we focus on looking at the human side of things. And on sortof good and evil, and in our case humor, and human motivations. And so I just think they’re looking for a deeper experience.

I have to say that the idea of combining the fun and fast gameplay of action-rpgs with a storyline with some meat is pretty intriguing to me. I’m looking forward to this one!

XBox Live Upgrade

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Reuters has an interesting article up: Microsoft Planning New Xbox Live Features. There’s some talk of server-side data storage, and speculation as to if or how that interacts with the rumors that XBox Next (or whatever the next console ends up being called) won’t have a hard drive.

I dunno, I’m skeptical. I’m not going to rip songs for a custom soundtrack and store them on MS’s servers! Nor would I save my games there. And to rely too much on server-side storage would be to cut out all the people who don’t have their XBoxes online (which is probably most of them).

I just hope MS rethinks this. Not including a hard drive just seems like a huge step backwards…

Next of Kin

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So my latest Britcom ‘discovery’ is Next of Kin starring Penelope Keith (To the Manor Born) and Richard Gaunt (No Place Like Home). They play an older couple whose son and daughter-in-law were killed in a car accident. Now their three grandchildren have come to live with them.

It’s a comedy with a definite dark edge. First, the basic premise…here’re 3 orphans, after all.

Second is, the couple, and especially the wife, really aren’t thrilled with the arrangement. They’ve been living the good life: weekends in France, lounging about drinking wine with friends…just a comfortable life of idle retirement. Now they’re going to football matches and cleaning up after kids and pets and frankly, they resent it. Continue reading “Next of Kin”

Alcohol 120%

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One of the few things I’m not liking about my new system is the CD/DVD drives. They’re LOUD. Incredibly loud.

So, inspired by Kevin Rose of “The ScreenSavers” I bought a copy of Alcohol 120%. This is CD/DVD copy software, make no mistake. But it also handles the creation of virtual drives.

So I can put a game in, rip an image of it, and mount that image as a virtual drive, which is of course silent, and also very very fast! Plus I can put the CDs away somewhere safe and sound.

There is one more piece to the puzzle, and that’s determining what kind of copy protection the CD uses. For that, I snagged a freeware program called ClonyXL.

For more info, go to the source and read Kevin’s article on the topic.

Its funny how I still feel guilty about doing this, even though I’m just ripping the games I own onto the hard drive I own in order to play them! (I’ve got enough friends in the business that I don’t pirate game software.)

There are probably cheaper ways to do this. I used to have a thing called Daemon-tools that set up the virtual drives, and used a trial copy of CloneCD to rip the images, but Alcohol 120% is a fairly complete all-in-one package, only costs $50 and has some nice convenience features, like multiple virtual drives and loading an image by double clicking it. There’s a 30 day trial version if you want to see for yourself.

I just got this all setup so don’t consider this a mini-review. I’ll have to see how it all works for a couple weeks before I pass judgement one way or the other.

More on Battlefield:Pirates

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So I finally got around to installing BF:1942, patched it up and installed Battlefield: Pirates today.

What fun! Zipping around in sloops firing broadsides at each other, or manning the shore batteries (cannons, of course) trying to fend off a cutting out expedition (and getting hacked down from behind my a cutlass wielding mad man!).

Honestly I didn’t play for long since my BF 1942 skills are so horribly rusty. I can’t remember any of the basic key commands and I was costing my team in a big way. At this point there’s no single player game available.

So I think I’d best play some straight BF 1942 in single player mode to get the controls down again, then head back for some more Battlefield:Pirates. Well worth a look!

Norton’s not on the phone

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So I must be getting old. A few months ago I bought a new pc and it came with Norton AntiVirus pre-installed. Not only did I leave it running, but I just decided to renew it since the free 3 month trial was up in March. The old me would’ve snorted at NAV and continued to live life on the edge…taking the ‘eyes and ears open to signs of trouble’ approach to fighting virii, rather than put up a sturdy (I hope) fence.

But now I’m old and tired, and the the $30 for a year’s protection sounded a lot more appealing than a weekend spent rebuilding my system because I slipped up and let one of the little varmints on to my system. (I should note that my PC is a gaming machine…I do my ‘real work’ on a Mac and I’m not so cavalier with that machine.)

All of which is totally tangential to the point I wanted to make. So I’m filling out the web based form to get my $29.95 yearly renewal to NAV, right? And I get to the screen where I enter my credit card and I noticed something. They give you the option to call up and give someone (presumably a warm body, but maybe a voice mail system) your credit card info over the phone, but they add a processing fee. I thought that was kind of odd…I mean isn’t customer support part of the cost of doing business? But what staggered me was when curiosity caused me to click on the link. The processing fee was $10!!! A $10 processing fee on a $30 item, just because you’re uncomfortable entering your credit card number into a web site…damn, that’s harsh. $2-$3 I guess I could understand, but $10 seemed really steep to me.

But then, I never call anyone if I can possible avoid it, so now I’m wondering if this is a common practice, or is Symantec just being brutal?

Battlefield:Pirates

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I was going through my email and saw in the Fileplanet weekly newsletter mention about a new mod for Battlefield 1942. Talk about original! This one turns BF:1942 into a game about pirates!!. You get stuff like sloops and galleons, coastal mortars, and ‘turtles’ (little submarine things) and balloons.

I haven’t played it yet, but I’m going to have re-install BF:1942 and check it out. BTW, the lead developer worked on the XBox version of Crimson Skies as an environmental artist.

Comments

Posted on by Nimgimli

When I first started writing this blog, I never got any comments posted. I sorta got used to that idea and frankly, stopped checking.

But now I have two orders of business regarding comments.

First, for you folk who’ve taken the time to leave a comment, I’d like to say thank you, and to apologize for taking so long to acknowledge your efforts. It’s a real thrill to see that there are people reading the blog!

Second, you may have noticed a good bit of “spam” comments showing up. The damned spammers ruin everything they touch, don’t they? While I can go in by hand and delete them, its a bit time consuming with b2. The problem is that they don’t just show up on recent posts, but apparently they’re stuck in via some kind of script or something.

I could turn off comments altogether, but that’s kind of giving in to the spammers. I could require ‘registering’ to post a comment, but that really is asking a lot of a person. Someone must have a solution to this problem; I just need to do a bit of research.

If anyone reading this has any suggestions, I’d love to hear them.

And please accept my apologies for any offensive spam comments you might come across in this blog.

Weekend Wrap-up

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I don’t know where this hit of gaming goodness came from. I mean, its February, not December. E3 is still a ways off. Its supposed to be a quiet time for gaming, and yet there are SO MANY great games laying around my house.

I spend a LOT of time this weekend playing Champions of Norrath on the PS2 (exclusively on the PS2). Its a fairly basic hack & slasher a la Diablo or the console versions of Baldur’s Gate. I enjoy this type of game on the PC, but I love ’em on the console. Kicked back on the couch, a bottle of Woodchuck Amber close at hand, the home theater system lending power to every slash of the sword…it’s just a wonderfully visceral experience. I played a bit online with a friend, and that worked well too, once I took my router out of the loop. Its nice to see the PS2 getting some online cooperative love.

Besides CoN, the Unreal Tournament 2004 demo was out this weekend (you can get it for Windows, Mac OS X or Linux). Good lord, what fun. I’ve always preferred Unreal to Quake, and UT was one of my favorite and longest lasting games. UT 2003 was good, but this version really breaks loose. There’s a new game mode called Onslaught that has teams having to control linked nodes in an attempt to assault the opposing base. These nodes act as ideal choke points and really keep the action pumping. And the even bigger change is the addition of vehicles, both land and air. Finally a game that makes Halo seem dated. I loved this demo so much that I already pre-ordered the Special Edition.

But wait, there’s more! I’ve also been sucked into Harvest Moon: Friends of Mineral Town for the GBA (though I play it on the excellent Game Boy Player accessory for the Gamecube. This isn’t a new game, but I was just turned on to it. Yeah, its a farming sim…but its incredibly addictive.

And still NFL Street and Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles await my attention. The first is a really fun arcade football game that I really enjoy. FFCC though, I’m still deciding on. Its another action-RPG but I’m not sure the single player game will hold my attention.

Anyway, even with all this gaming I found time to watch a whole bunch of A&E’s Horatio Hornblower movies. I loved the HH books, and I’m loving the movies, too. I bought all 8 at Christmas, and watched the last 5 or so this weekend. Very nicely done and highly recommended.

Thank goodness for 3 day weekends, eh? Of course, I still wasn’t ready to come back to work…. 🙂