Eldest (Book Review)

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Eldest (Inheritance, Book 2)
Rating: 2 of 5 stars

Eldest by Christopher Paolini

It’s been a while since I read Eragon, but I remember enjoying it quite a bit, so I was really looking forward to Eldest. And I think I would have enjoyed it if it’d been 400 pages instead of 650 or so. But as it stands, there’s just not enough plot to carry the length of this book.

It felt a *whole* lot like Paolini opened a word blender and dumped in equal amounts of LOTRO and Star Wars and added a pinch of Pern and hit the BLEND button. And that still would have been OK except he got a huge clump of Degoba in the Star Wars material. Hmm, perhaps I should stop torturing this metaphor. Put another way, imagine if two-thirds of the original Star Wars was Skywalker being trained by Yoda; watching someone going to class everyday gets boring fast.

Riders = Jedi, the bond between Eragon and Saphira comes from Pern, the language, races and tone come from LOTRO. Although the tone comes and goes…Paolini’s characters drift between fairly modern dialog and “come hither” and “I know not why” and other ‘pseudo-medieval’ phrasing. He even manages to riff on “Treasure of the Sierra Madre’s” ‘we don’t need no stinking badges’ quote, swapping in “barges” for “badges.” *sigh*

Anyway, intertwined with Eragon’s story (which can be summed up as “Eragon goes to train with the elves for 300 pages, then heads to a battle) this time out is Roran’s. Roran is the cousin Eragon left behind in Carvahall, and *he* has quite an interesting and fun plot in Eldest, which is what saved the book from being just plain bad. I would’ve been happier if most of the book was about Roran, with Eragon’s training being a minor subplot.

As this volume of Inheritance closes, Paolini redeems himself somewhat, as Eragon *finally* stops training and starts doing, and we get some good action and strong plot developments in the closing chapters of the book.

This isn’t a bad book; it’s just much longer than it needed to be. I’ve heard Book 3 of Inheritance is even worse in that respect, and I’m not sure I’m willing to stay on this ride any longer.

View all my reviews.

EDIT: Here’s another look at Eldest that brings up some interesting observations about the message Paolini is sending to his young readers (Eldest is technically YA). Eldest review at PixiePalace

Re-Imagining Dragonchasers

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Regular readers may have detected a change of tone around here lately. I hadn’t detected it until my last post, after which I scrolled back and saw a lot of ranting and a few brief news items.

At which point I thought… “Yuck.”

This might be a good time to explain where the name of my blog comes from. Feel free to giggle, but one of my favorite movies is George Romero’s Knightriders. It’s about a traveling troop of modern-day knights that roam the country re-enacting jousts, only on motorcycles rather than horseback. Their King is played by a very young Ed Harris, and he is an idealist. He really is trying to recreate Camelot, while some of the other members are just having fun doing stunts on their bikes. Anyway, not really the point. But in one scene, Harris is trying to explain what he’s doing and how much it matters to him and he yells “I’m chasing the dragon!!”

I always interpreted this as ‘chasing a romantic [in the classical sense of the word] dream’. Chasing adventure, wonder, heroics… So that’s where dragonchasers comes from. The tagline (which no longer displays) is “A thoroughly mundane fellow’s quest for adventure.” And of course I chase adventure through games. 🙂

Two notes: 1) Harris might actually say “I’m fighting the dragon.” but when I created the blog I hadn’t seen the movie in years. 2) I’ve since learned that “chasing the dragon” is a heroin user’s term!! No correlation to drug use is in any way implied!

Recently a friend of mine told me he’d formed a WoW guild called DragonChasers and he felt a bit weird about it since he knew that was my blog’s name. He’d decided on his own what the term meant, and his feelings (I don’t think he reads this blog) were right in line with mine, so I guess the term does evoke what I originally meant it to invoke.

Anyway…I’ve been struggling lately with getting anywhere close to this theme. I’m conflicted in a lot of ways. I’ve been writing a tech blog for IT World (and I think that’s going really well… my posts have made the front page of Google News and Slashdot and traffic is really good, I’m told) and enjoying it so much that I start to daydream about those days when I was writing for a living. And I’ve been sort of enviously watching other bloggers getting noticed by PR people from various companies. Y’know, the Warhammer Valentines are one example, and folks getting review copies of games and stuff are another.

And I lost my way at some point, and started quasi-writing Dragonchasers in a more controversial way. One thing I know well is that pissing people off gets a site page views. [My 9-5 job is working as a web developer in online publishing.] At the same time, I’ve been making half-hearted attempts at being more ‘newsy.’ But not really committing enough to that to make it matter.

This is getting wall-of-text-y, sorry. Add to all of this some personal stuff going on with my mom, who seems to be rapidly slipping away from us, and I’ve just been being very unpleasant in a lot of my posts, and for that I’d like to apologize.

It took the comments in reply to my sneering last post to make me take a look in the mirror and see where I’d wandered to. I’d really like to thank Tipa, Werit, Green Armadillo and particularly Scott — who took a good chunk of his time to give me some solid advice — for helping me see the blog through the eyes of readers. And of course, to thank Angela for always having my back.

So I think it’s time to step back from this blog for a little while, and rediscover the magic of chasing dragons before I start posting again. When I return, I hope to once again be sharing my love of ‘adventures through gaming’ with whomever happens to come by to read me.

In the meantime, I’m pretty active on twitter (pasmith) if you feel like chatting. There’s a pretty nice community of gamers there, having an ongoing and slow paced conversation about the games we all love. Please come and join us!

Blogger flockers

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I find it interesting, and by that I mean sometimes fascinating, other times depressing, how MMO bloggers seem to travel in packs at times (and I’m pointing at myself just as much as at others). The past week or two, Runes of Magic seems to be the place to be. For a while it was Wizard101. Then of course it was the WAR -> WOW transition.

Why do we travel in packs like this? RoM isn’t news…it’s been in open beta since December. The WAR thing made sense; it was a brand new game and everyone was curious. Ditto those in Darkfall now. And the bunch of folks going into CoX to play together is different, too. That’s a bunch of friends looking for a game they all feel like playing.

I’m talking more about this hive-mind mentality that suddenly some MMO that’s been cooking along is the kewl place to be, even though the various bloggers playing don’t seem to be actually playing together.

It’s just weird, and for some reason tonight, it really kind of bugs me. I guess because I don’t understand it..it’s a mystery I can’t unravel. Why Runes of Magic, now? The game’s been in open beta since December and no one deemed it worthy of a second glance until the last couple of weeks. Now suddenly its The New Thing. Why? What changed?

It baffles me. I hate stuff that baffles me… 🙂

Peggle mania

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Peggle, the PopCap pseudo-pachinko casual addictive-as-heck hit, has been available on the PC for a good long while, but last week it came out on the Nintendo DS, and this week it hits XBox Live Arcade.

It’s an incredibly fun game and I urge everyone to give it a go, but is it a casual game, or is it hardcore?

Wired asks just this question in Getting Lucky: Hard-Core Gamers Penetrate Peggle’s Physics.

It’s an interesting read for both Peggle enthusiasts and armchair (or for-reals) game designers. Quick quote to get you warmed up:

For a casual gamer, Peggle seems too heavily based on luck. You aim the ball, but once you’ve dropped it and it hits the first peg, all bets are off: It bounces and careens through the forest of pegs in crazy, zigzagging patterns. For casual players, there doesn’t seem to be a clear enough correlation between how they aim and the results.

But hard-core gamers see the game quite differently. When they look at the Peggle board, they see the Euclidean geometry that governs how the ball falls and pings around.

Time to retire guilds?

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A lot of bloggers spend a lot of time talking about how the mechanics of MMOs need to be refreshed. The level grind, the loot systems, the payment model, whatever… basically a lot of thought is put into how these games might be improved by the enthusiasts who play them.

I wonder if its time we look at the social aspects. Particularly, guilds. Depending on the MMO, being in a guild can range from pretty helpful to crucial. And on the face of it, guilds seem like a good thing, right? A way to meet people and make friends.

But the flip side is the guild drama. In the past few weeks I’ve heard from several different friends about guild drama implosions in each of their (different) guilds. In all cases this has created a lot of bad feelings for the people involved. In each case, these have been guilds of mature, lucid people who I know to be good-hearted individuals. And yet their guilds fractured amid much drama.

Why do these games try to force us into large guilds? Such groupings aren’t natural. We live in a culture of small, liquid groups. Outside of our jobs, what other activities do we, as adults, partake in that requires us to bind ourselves with large groups of people to work shoulder to shoulder with them? The only think I can think of are team sports, and those are generally small groups of people.

Outside of a game, when’s the last time you gathered in a group of 25-100 people to the extent of labeling yourself as a Member of this group and interacting directly with all members of that group. I’m not talking about “joining” a gym or a church. In instances like those, you aren’t directly interacting with all members of that group.

Guilds were a fine idea when we were all 15 or 20 and had endless time for playing games and no other pressures on us. But as the gaming population gets older, we by nature get less flexible as the matrix of our lives grows more complex. Free time grows more precious to us. Political views solidify. We develop Ideals.

The idea that I can find a group of 25-150 people that I can get along with day to day in a specific leisure-time activity is, frankly, ludicrous. I’d feel really really fortunate to find a dozen such people. I’m not saying there aren’t 150 people I can get along with in my social circles. I’m saying there aren’t that many people doing the specific activity (ie, game) in the specific place (ie, server) that I am.

I’m not talking about abolishing grouping or raiding. But I think a better system would involve allowing players to form small-scale long term groups (essentially friend-lists on steroids) and then allow those “micro-guilds” to come together for the purpose of accomplishing a specific task, then going their separate ways.

I realize nothing prevents this from happening now. But game developers could build in better tools for aiding this kind of short-term aggregation. It might be as easy as re-working the “looking for group” into a “forming a raid” system where you could list your group in the window and a raid leader could build a raid by inviting a selection of groups that fit the raid’s needs.

I admit I’m pretty biased in this, as I’m not very social to begin with. But it bothers me to see my friends being upset because of guild drama/implosions, and I don’t think we’d have this kind of drama if games weren’t developed in such a way as to favor large guilds over small ones. Let people form Friendships based on, well, LIKING each other’s company rather than on needing more warm bodies to fill out a raid.

Let’s place the value on the strength of the relationships between players, rather than on numbers alone.

Breaching the gap

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So it’s Friday. My daily post for IT World is written. Guinea pig houses are cleaned. Shopping done…in short, all my chores are done. Time for some gaming. But what to play?

I have no clue. And this has become a pattern in my life; one that I’m not sure how to break.

There’s a kind of inertia to my game playing, I’ve found. Once I pick up a game, I can enjoy the heck out of it as long as I keep playing it. But once I take a break, my focus drifts and I start gazing at new gaming horizons with a feeling of longing. And that’s a problem these days.

Let me back up a little. My fulltime job runs 36 hours/week these days. I divvy that up as 4 9-hour days, Mon-Thursday. Then I have my blogging job, where I’ve committed to 1-2 posts/day for IT World during the week. So in theory, Friday I have a couple blog posts to write, but otherwise Fri-Sun is me-time (of course that isn’t always true…both jobs sometimes slop over into weekends)

So assume I’m really enjoying a game over a weekend. Then I hit Monday when I have both jobs to do. By the time I get to the gaming part of the day its often after 10 pm and sometimes as late as 11. I still squeeze in a bit of whatever game I’m playing though. Ditto on Tuesday. But usually by Wednesday and Thursday, the fatigue of the work week has built to the point where I just don’t have the energy to keep going so late, so I don’t get any gaming in on those days.

By Friday, it’s been a couple days since I’ve done any gaming, and four since I’ve really been deeply immersed in the last game I’m playing. My inertia is shot to heck as I’ve been hearing all kinds of interesting gaming news for a week, while not ‘reinforcing’ my habit of playing my current game. Does that make sense?

So I’ll feel like starting something new, but at the same time I know I have 2-3 days before the cycle starts all over again. And I find it really hard to return to a game I’ve started and put down in the past. That shiny new game smell has worn off (I’ll be past all the tutorials but won’t really remember all the nuances of how to play, or in the case of an RPG I won’t remember the story or what I was supposed to be doing to finish whatever quests I’m on.)

Often I’ll end up watching TV or reading rather than playing. And then at the end of the weekend feel like I’ve squandered my time because I didn’t get any good gaming in.

I’m not sure what the solution is to this problem, but what’s more interesting is wondering if this “gaming inertia” is something unique to me, or if others experience it too. I kind of think they do, because I’ve seen people who’ve been fanatical MMO players forced to take a break for a few days (for a business trip or family holiday, say) come back and no longer have any urge to play the same game that was driving their lives before the break.

I guess what I need is for developers to start designing ‘bite-sized’ games that still offer a lot of depth. I know there’s a big debate over game length, but frankly I’d rather have a great 15 hour game that I could finish over a weekend, than have an 80 hour epic journey that I’m never going to finish, or even get into the real meat of.

What about you? Can you set a game down for a long period of time and pick right up where you left off, or do you suffer from a gaming inertia problem, too?

Dollhouse – Why All the Hate? (TV)

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I interupt this gaming blog to talk for a minute about TV, and in particular Joss Whedon’s new show, Dollhouse. Warning: The post contains broad spoilers of the first 3 episodes.

Now I’m just an ordinary viewer watching the show as it airs. I haven’t had any sneak peeks or read any spoiler sites or anything like that, and I’m going to share some assumptions here. I may well be proven wrong. but I’m willing to risk it.

So first of all, I’m enjoying the show so far, and hope that it makes it for a long run. But if you don’t like it, I can respect that. Everyone has different tastes, and in particular this show lacks the humor that most Whedon shows contain, which might put off some Whedonverse fans.

What I don’t get, though, is that section of the audience that seems to actively hate the show. Not only do they not want to watch it, they want it to go away; they don’t want anyone else watching it, either. 

That puzzled me so much that I’ve been trying to understand why. Most of the hate seems to surround the way women are treated in the show. One comment I read said “Every time Echo sleeps with a guy, I feel like she is being raped.” A few other comments reflect the same feelings to a greater or lesser extent; that what happens to the “dolls” here is really uncomfortable, and most of them that we’ve seen so far have been women. 

I don’t disagree with these feelings.

But I think what these viewers don’t understand is that Dollhouse HQ (the organization) are -not- the good guys here. They are at best morally ambiguous, and more likely just plain evil (that remains to be seen). The fact that Echo does some good while she is out on a mission is more or less a side-effect of what the company does. We see the ‘good’ missions but the bread & butter of the firm seems to be prostituting these “dolls” to the filthy rich. Yes, it’s dehumanizing, criminal and uncomfortable. That’s the whole point. We’re supposed to hate Dollhouse HQ and want it to be brought down!

My guess is that Echo is going to be the rogue agent that eventually hooks up with Alpha to try to tear down Dollhouse the Organization.  She’ll have help from Dr. Saunders (Amy Acker’s character) and the protection of Langton, her handler. The “good guys” in the show are Ballard (the cop trying to expose Dollhouse), Echo as she starts to retain her memories, and Boyd Langton. Maybe Sierra as well?  

I just think the viewers who actively hate the show somehow think we’re supposed to be rooting for Dollhouse HQ and that seems like a vile thing to ask us to do, and so they attack Whedon and the show. But that, to a certain extent, exposes the problem with TV these days. No one has any patience. Everything has to be explained in the first episode or else people form assumptions that they are unwilling to let go of. If you watch the way most of the Dollhouse staff treat the “dolls” it is really clear that these are bad, or at least heartless, people. I guess Whedon needed to spell that out in the first 5 minutes of episode 1 in order to avoid offending viewers?

I wonder if these same people wanted The Sopranos taken off the air? Probably not, because it was immediately clear that the Soprano characters were criminals and so viewers knew what to expect. 

Dollhouse has the potential to be a pretty complex show. Imagine Echo, having her memories wiped over and over, but learning somehow to hang on to some piece of herself, and struggling to figure out what’s happening to her and how to escape. Imagine Langton growing more and more attached to her and trying to operate from the inside to help her, while Ballard gets closer and closer to the truth. There’s a lot of good material to mine here, if viewers give it a chance.

But I don’t think they will. Which is a damned shame.

Ys Online – Call of Solum (MMO)

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Years and years ago, I popped a CD — very cutting edge technology for gaming at the time — into my TurboDuo and thus discovered the magic of Ys.

Now mind you, that was in 1832 or thereabouts, so I don’t remember it well (OK actually it was 1992 or so) but I remember loving the game. Since (and before) then there’s been a bunch of Ys titles (including a current version for the DS, Legacy of Ys: Books I & II) but up until now I’ve never gone back. You can’t go home again and all that…

So maybe that’s why I was totally unaware that there was an Ys MMO: Ys Online – Call of Solum. It has apparently been live in Japan for some time, and is now being brought to Europe by KeyToPlay, where it has just entered closed beta.

Unfortunately there is no indication that anyone has picked up the title for a North American release. If any of my European readers gets a chance to play, I hope they’ll share their thoughts (assuming any NDAs allow that, of course).

Maybe I need to order that DS version. Or just dig out the old TurboDuo!!
yso_logo

More for Spore: API now available

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How’d this one slip past us all?

Maxis releases ‘Spore’ API, contest

Electronic Arts has released a “Spore” API, which for the first time will make it possible for fans of the hit evolution game from legendary game designer Will Wright to create their own applications.

And if you’ve got a hankering to get started making some neat new Spore apps, Maxis has you covered: Spore API. Or you might even want to enter into a contest to win fame and fortune (actually, an unspecified NVIDIA graphics card).