Sorry gamers, this is an off-topic post.
Had the guinea pigs out running around and caught Mona, the baby having a bad fur day, and I had to share. I guess static cling electricity isn’t just a problem we humans have to deal with.
And as long as I’m off topic and posting images, here’s a few more of her being goofy.
If dragonchasers is displaying wonky, please do a shift-refresh and see if that fixes things. I asked Angela to tweak the theme a bit, removing the left sidebar so the text isn’t so narrow, and it seems like the old stylesheet is cached or something. Rather than fix it, I’m taking the lazy way out and asking readers to refresh. 🙂
Hopefully the new layout will give me a bit more freedom when it comes to laying out posts with images, as well as cutting down on all the scrolling the old version required. Next time, I’ll take the designer’s advice and get things right the first time!! 🙂
I was doing a bit of blog surfing tonight and happened to notice someone who had Dragonchasers in their blog roll. Someone who wasn’t in my blog roll.
I fixed that now.
But please, I don’t want to be what Ysh an unnamed blogger calls a link leech!! If you’re linking here and I’m not returning the favor, just give me a shout. You can comment here or nudge me on twitter.
Last night I finally finished Steven Savile’s Vampire Wars: The Von Carstein Trilogy
Savile strikes me as a pretty good author in search of a pretty good editor. Lots of what he writes is really well done, but you’ll hit some real clunkers now and then, mostly when he tries to work some historical quote into the book. At one point late in the book, a swarm of bats block out the sun and one of the officers confidently quips “Good. We shall have our battle in the shade.” We are still reeling from that groaner when Mannfred, being harried by the Grand Theogonist (a high ranking official in the order of Sigmarites) suddenly shouts “Would someone rid me of this damnable holy man?”
The other main problem is that the books are disjointed, and I’m guessing that once again they started as a series of short pieces published in (or meant to be published in) White Dwarf. So characters appear and disappear almost randomly. Sometimes they vanish for good, other times they’ll suddenly pop up again 300 pages later. It prevents the book from ever getting into a smooth flow. It doesn’t make it bad so much as it makes it unusual.
On the other hand, these are bad vampires. These days it seems like the focus is on making vampires some kind of tragic figures, but not the ones in these books. This is gritty, gory book full of ghouls and zombies and dire wolves (and vampires, of course!). None of the three vampire Counts’ features are tragic, though there is one brush with vampires more like the ones that Gotrek & Felix encountered.
Lots of fighting, lots of heroics, lots of death. One of the benefits of the willy-nilly coming and going of characters is that really bad things happen to characters you’ve come to care about. Savile will spend enough time on a character that you start thinking “OK, this is a main character, he’s safe.” and then BAM! something terrible happens.
At 766 pages, its a *long* volume and I think if I had it to do over again, I wouldn’t have read all the volumes in it sequentially, because after a while you do get kind of desensitized to it all. There’s only so many ways to depict corpses clawing their way out of their graves to attack the living, y’know? But the book isn’t too long, because it covers a lot of time and a lot of campaigns and a ton of characters.
By the time I started reading Vampire Wars, I’d pretty much finished playing Warhammer Online, and the focus on vampires, men and dwarves did nothing to remind me this was a Warhammer novel. Orcs and goblins are mentioned only tangentially, and the elves had not yet revealed themselves when these events took place. Chaos doesn’t feature in the books, either. This isn’t good or bad; I’m just conveying the info that if you’re playing Warhammer Online, don’t expect these books to tie into that too much.
On a scale of 1-5, I’m going to give Vampire Wars: The Von Carstein Trilogy, 3 stars. It was good, but had some rough spots and was a bit disjointed. It probably would’ve benefited from one more edit/rewrite cycle. Still, a fun book to read.
So I went to log into Star Wars Galaxies today and the world my new dude is on was down. Harumph. So I logged in one of my old characters. And I do mean old; I last played this character probably 4 years ago.
He woke up sitting on a hillside in some woods in the middle of nowhere. Why had I logged off in this spot? No idea. I had no clue what planet he was on, or where he was. I start walking aimlessly and as I came over a rise, I saw buildings in the distance, so I headed towards them. It was a decent sized city, player made. And all the homes were abandoned. I walked into a few of them, and all the former residents’ stuff was there, but no people. I fancied I heard the wind howling through the dusty streets as I entered building after building, but never met another soul.
It was kind of creepy, in a kind of cool way. I wondered who these people were, who had banded together to build this city in the wilderness. Had it been the home of a guild, or just an organic gathering of random adventurers? Things weren’t laid out in an orderly manner, so I don’t suppose the city had been laid out in advance, which makes me think random adventurers.
I found myself wishing that SWG modeled housing decay…these places shouldn’t have been so pristine. But at the same time, I’m really glad I logged that guy in. I wonder if he, and that city, will still be there in 4 more years.
This isn’t new, but someone in the TwitterStream shared it the other day and I just got around to watching it.
It’s a fascinating talk by Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor about the two sides of our brain, how they see the world, and what that means to us. Her revelations came during the process of having a stroke. Talk about lemonades from lemons.
Anyway, I just wanted to do my part to spread the word on this interesting and powerful talk. Get a cup of coffee and make yourself comfortable, as the video runs about 20 minutes.
Rather than embed, I’m going to link to the video so you can get all the additional information contained in links off the page that holds the original embed.
Until 1o minutes ago, I hadn’t given Demigod, the upcoming Gas-Powered Game, a second thought.
And then I read this:
It was in this climate of despair that a man came to offer his services to the Fathers of Belrond. Fifteen hands across at the shoulders, tall enough to fill the garrison’s archway, and carrying a mallet the size of a birthday breadloaf, he called himself Mard Hammerhand. He was not a native of Belrond, nor were his features familiar to anyone who had traveled abroad, but his ready smile and booming laugh dissolved all barriers of mistrust.
Demigod Origins: The Rook
And now suddenly I’m all excited about the game. Hook me with good fiction/world building, keep me with great gameplay. Now granted, it remains to be seen if the latter will be delivered, but at least this piece was enough to get my attention.
Is it just me?
Since the dawn of electronic gaming, I’ve been on a quest for better graphics in my games. I don’t think I’ve been alone in this quest. Games have continually improved, graphically speaking, from 4-bit color to 8-bit color and on up to whatever bits we have now. More than enough, I’d say. Marketing hype for new consoles is based on graphics quality while on the PC, new video cards are coming out all the time offering better resolution, higher frame-rates and more realistic imagery.
But suddenly, I don’t seem to care as much. Yes, I still take some pleasure in seeing a graphically impressive game, but I no longer buy a game just because it looks amazing. I thought about this when I realized I’d been playing Sonny for about an hour this morning, totally sucked in. Here’s a flash game with simple 2D graphics that I’m finding compelling. (Thanks to Tesh for bringing it to my attention, btw.) Last night I spent a good deal of time playing Mount & Blade, another game with graphics that are “fine” but certainly not stunning. And perhaps most significant, I recently was trying Star Wars Galaxies out again (free period for ex-players). I remember the last time I tried going back to it, I couldn’t get past the graphics since the game had “aged” since its initial launch. But this time, the mediocre graphics just didn’t factor in to whether or not I was enjoying the game.
Now normally I’d just assume this was totally a personal thing. Our values change a lot as we march through life from cradle to grave, after all, and I’ve been doing this gaming thing for closing in on 30 years now.
But what about this rebirth of “Indie Gaming” that we’re seeing? Most of these smaller games don’t have cutting edge graphics. Remember, I’m not talking about style here. I’m talking in terms of technically advanced graphics. And what about the Nintendo DS? That system still sells like crazy and the graphics it can push are mediocre at best. People don’t care. I could arguably throw the Wii in here too, but I think it sells on the strength of its “fad” quotient in a lot of cases. People who don’t buy games run out and buy a Wii, play it for two weeks and put it in a closet… but that’s another post altogether.
So *is* it just me, or have we, as “Gamers” (is that even a relevant tag anymore?) broken through some graphics barrier where, sure, cool graphics are nice, but what *really* matters is cool gameplay?
Today Mythic announced “Call to Arms” which they’re dubbing a “Live Expansion”. Whatever that means.
Details here, but what intrigues me most is the new dungeon called Land of the Dead, which is supposed to be similar to the mucho-fun “Darkness Falls” dungeon in DAoC.
Sorry so brief, but I’m at work. 🙂
It’s always interesting to talk about solo mmo players since the concept seems oxymoronic to some, while absolutely normal to others (I fall into the latter category). The oft-heard comment from the former group is “You should just play a single player game.”
Last night, I was playing Warhammer. I’d just jumped to a new (to me) tier and was loading up on quests, and I had a couple that took me out into the oRvR Lakes. Now I’ve pretty much accepted the fact that PvP isn’t my thing, but I went out there anyway. I got to the first quest objective and there were a bunch of friendlies there, capturing a Battlefield Objective. So I hung out to help defend and get some Influence after the 3 minute timer counted down, then I headed to my next quest objective…and noticed that everyone else was running that way too.
Turns out they were headed off to take out the next Battlefield Objective, so I joined in the fight, helped them kill the guards (Destruction opted not to defend), hung out and got the capture after 3 minutes. Then I ran with them to the Keep, which was already under attack, and soon after we arrived it, too, fell.
Not once did I talk to these people. I wasn’t Grouped with a capital G with them, but I was working with them on a common goal.
So here’s my question. Was I, or wasn’t I, soloing last night? In my mind, I was because I was doing my own thing, which happened to coincide with what some other people were doing, and I never had to make any kind of social commitment to them. But you could argue that I wasn’t soloing because I was working with others, in which case I can somewhat see the “go play a single player game” argument. If you think of soloers as people who determinedly ignore other players, I can get behind your argument (to a limited degree). To me, a soloer is someone who resists making a formal commitment in terms of Joining a Group for the purpose of some united goal (but who will happily work alongside others for a common cause if the circumstances arise).
That kind of circumstance happened a lot more often in the old pre-everything-instanced days…I wonder if we’ve lost something there?