I’m kicking myself right now. I walked past a demo station for Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet about 10 times during PAX East and never stopped to check it out. Now I see this video…10 minutes of gameplay, and I really wish I’d paid more attention!
Sci-fi art imitates life
This post includes spoilers for the new V series, in particular the episode that aired on March 8th in the US.
So in-between walks around the PAX show floor this weekend, and into yesterday evening, I’ve been watching the situation going on with Japan’s nuclear plants in the wake of the earthquakes, and hearing politicians start to call for an immediate halt to work on any and all nuclear plants currently being built.
Last night we watched Fringe from last week (it aired a few days before the quake hit). In it, the Visitors are building bases on earth. They’re disguised as buildings to benefit mankind, but the resistance (the Fifth Column) realizes they’re landing platforms for hidden motherships. The problems for ‘The Fifth Column’ is how to take out hundreds of installations around the world to prevent the motherships from landing.
Their solution is to destabilize the “blue energy” power source in the local construction site. The idea is to cause an accident which in turn will cause people to worry about how safe blue energy is and thus create a popular sentiment to halt progress on all the blue energy sites being built around the world.
I tell you, it was pretty eerie watching that episode after seeing the same thing happening in real life, substituting nuclear power for blue energy…
Note: This isn’t a political blog and I’m not meaning to comment on nuclear power, either for or against. I just found the timing of this particular episode kind of interesting. Art imitates life and all that.
PAX East 2011, Day 3
Ah PAX 2011, I hardly knew ye and now you are gone… so sad.
We had a pretty short PAX day today, to be honest. The only panel we were really interested in was at 3 PM, but we had to be back home in time to pick up Lola from the Puppy Hotel by 6 and I was worried about cutting it so close (one good traffic snarl and she’d be stuck there for another night).
So we just wandered around the exhibit hall one last time. Angela made it a game to snag as much swag as possible today, so that was fun. I finally found Guild Wars 2 and watched some of that being played.
Overall seeing the “big games” at PAX wasn’t a huge deal for me. These games get so much coverage online, and I know I’m going to wind up playing them all anyway, so it’s nice to see them, get an idea of what they’re like, but I don’t hover much (plus those booths are always mega crowded).
I enjoy looking at all the rest. For instance I’m a huge hack & slash action-rpg fan so I’m stoked about LOTR: War in the North (developed by Snowblind Studios who are great at this kind of game, and published by WB) and Hunted: The Demon’s Forge by Brian Fargo’s inXile Entertainment (published by Bethesda).
FireFall still looks awesome but it’s a team-based shooter and sadly I don’t really do those. Unless they add bots. 🙂
Orcs Must Die from Robot Entertainment…think I mentioned this already…is a day 1 purchase. Oh and both Child of Eden and The Michael Jackson Experience may threaten us with actually using the Kinect. (CoE for both of us, MJE for Angela).
Anyway, we were pretty tired (hey PAX, next year don’t have the show on Daylight Savings Time weekend!) and anxious to get home so we left early. By the time I was unloading the car I was kinda wishing we were still there. 🙂 Now I have post-PAX melancholy. It didn’t help that I opened the mailbox to find claim forms for my mother’s life insurance policy and emails in my inbox from family members about how we’re going to settle her estate.
Yeah, back to real life. In my head I was anxious to leave so I could come home and play games, but in practice I just came back to catching up. Oh well.
I did, in a moment of temporary insanity, buy a $250 set of headphones for my PS3. Set those up and wow do they sound great but..what was I thinking? They’re wireless RF for audio and bluetooth for voice, very comfortable and all that. But I tell you, a few days living in a conference environment and money starts to lose it’s value. (Two nights in the Westin Hotel, at their $179/night rate, managed to cost just about $500 once they added parking, internet, and a skillion taxes, and there’s nowhere near the center with cheap food, really.)
Oh well it’s once a year and now the “Pax credit card” goes in a drawer until next year, though I’ll be paying off the hotel and those silly headphones well into the summer!!
I’m already looking forward to next year, but between now and then I’m really looking forward to keeping in contact with all the folks I met via twitter and hopefully in-game.
PAX East 2011 gets a big thumbs up from us!
PAX East 2011, Day 2
The sun came out in Boston this morning, both literally and figuratively.
All of my frustrations from yesterday kind of melted away. I found out that the lines I was bitching about yesterday were only really bad for 1 particular theater, and that was because the people running the convention center wouldn’t let the line stretch where the event planners had intended it (along an elevated section of hallway). So they had to really cram people in to make up for the lost space.
Other lines were long, but more relaxed. A good thing, though in the end I only went to one panel but it was a good one; a Q&A with a group of MMO big-wigs. At 1:30 in the morning I’m not even going to try to remember everyone’s name, but 38 Studios, Turbine, Trion, Bioware, ArenaNet and other MMO dev companies were represented. Most of the panel was Q&A and there were some pretty good questions and lots of good discussion among the panelists.
The show floor was *packed* today but having got over our travel-induced grumpiness, Angela (@g33kg0dd3ss) and I dove right in. We saw a lot of interesting games; I’m now looking forward to Dungeons from Calypso, Swarm from Hothead Games, Smuggler Truck (??) an iPhone game, Orcs Must Die from Robot Entertainment, DragonNest from Nexon, Faxion (the last two being free-to-play MMOs) and Slam Bolt Scrappers from Firehose Games.
Yeah, there were a lot of “big name” games there too but their booths were still a bit too crowded for me to deal with. Specifically I didn’t play SW:TOR or Guild Wars 2. But in the end that didn’t matter.
In the evening was our Tweet-up, Jazz (@girl_vs_mmo) was there. She’d had the chance to play Guild Wars 2 and had gone to a panel on it as well. I’m not a fan of Guild Wars and have been turning my nose up at Guild Wars 2… but after hearing all about it, now I want to play! Ditto SW:TOR… @MMOGC had a chance to play that one, and now I’m excited about it, too. I think it might be more fun to listen to friends talk about a game than it is to test it your self.
We left PAX at 6, freshened up a bit then went out for a quick meal which took forever… really the eateries around the convention center were over-whelmed this weekend. We got back to the Tweet-up location right at 9 to find the bar we’d planned to have it in packed. We had to improvise and I was fretting about how lame the whole thing was turning out, but then everyone pitched in, we grabbed tables and scoured the lobby for chairs and pretty soon there we sat, a dozen gamers, most of whom only knew each other previously from twitter or reading blogs, having a few drinks and yammering on about the show and games and Star Wars and Star Trek and Munchkin and on and on… I had a great time (and remember, I can’t stand people) and I hope others did as well.
List of attendees of our first PAX East tweet-up: @Scopique, @adarel, @sera_brennan, @kylehorner, @girl_vs_mmo, @MMOGC, @Hawkinsa1, @_jwgoodson & of course @g33kg0dd3ss, plus some spouses/relatives/friends who aren’t on twitter. Thanks again to all of you for making the effort to fit this little sojourn into your packed PAX schedules!!
OK the clock just sprang forward an hour… I better get to bed. We’ve still got another day to get through!
PAX East 2011, Day 1
So I guess day 1 of PAX is over for me. I’m back in our hotel room, rolling around the idea of prowling the halls to see what late night PAX is like, but while the mind is willing the flesh is weak and the idea of putting my shoes back on…not appealing. 🙂
We didn’t get to do a lot today. We started late because we were watching coverage of the horrific earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Then it took longer than expected to get Lola into her DoggieHotel, and then we hit traffic on the way into Boston. We arrived about noon, just when the first panel I wanted to go to was starting (38 Studios showing off their new RPG).
Since it was too late to catch that, we grabbed some lunch at the temporary food court and then headed off to our next panel on dialog in gaming. The panel itself was ok, but I was disappointed that Emily Short didn’t make it. But I was more disappointed with the experience of the panel. The lines were awful last year but the show is in a much bigger venue this year. But it seems a much larger number of people came, and the lines, or at least that line, was awful once again. It isn’t the duration of them that bugs me, it’s the way they cram you together while you wait. They want the lines as compact as possible so they’re constantly urging you to move forward, and they stack the lines side by side. So I’m standing there with my nose in the hair of the person in front of me, and if the guy behind me gets an erection he’s going to have to buy me dinner, and I’m rubbing shoulders with the people on either side. It’s hot and claustrophobic and terribly uncomfortable and you’re gonna be standing like that for 30-60 minutes.
Last year, before they got the system dialed in, they’d just let you stand in line. People would just sit on the floor and play cards or video games or chat and it was fine. Towards the end of PAX East 10 they got the cramming system perfected and they rolled it out on day 1 of PAX East 11. Boo! I say!
We’d planned to go to another couple of panels today but I just couldn’t face that experience again. Instead we finished checking in (the hotel had stored our bags until 3 pm check in time) and got the laptops and stuff set up (internet: $12.95/day for the slow package) and then went for an early dinner in one of the pubs in the hotel (hamburger: $14)
Then we kicked around the exhibit hall for a while. I watched a lot of SW:TOR being played, peered over someone’s shoulders as they messed with a 3DS, snooped around Bethesda’s booth looking for new Skyrim info (nope, but lots of workstations running Brink and Hunted) and loitered around a few smaller or indie dev booths. Orcs Must Die looks real fun, and Slam Bolt Scrappers is pretty as hell but still confuses me.
I didn’t actually play anything. Waiting in line for half an hour to play a game demo for 15 minutes just isn’t me, really. I like to savor my first moments with a game and would rather just watch now and play when I have time to explore at my own speed.
PAX East 2011 Day 1 was feeling a bit melancholy. And then we hit the Rift party that Trion was throwing. Great shindig. Open bar, free buffet, hot apps being passed around by friendly waitstaff. And then we started meeting people. People we’ve only known from twitter & people we didn’t previously know and really should have. And we started talking about the show and the game and this and that and finally it clicked.
PAX isn’t about games. PAX is about gamers.
Now I can’t wait for tomorrow night’s TweetUp. Currently the plan is to meet at 9 pm at The City Bar which is right in the lobby of the Westin Waterfront. The City Bar itself is pretty small but essentially the entire Westin lobby is a bar of sorts, or at least it is this weekend. I don’t think we’ll have any trouble finding a spot to gather, have some drinks and put faces to names. We’re using the hash tag #paxeasttweetup11 or you can just follow me (@pasmith) or @Scopique and we’ll guide you to us.
If you’re at PAX East and have some time tomorrow evening, I hope you can stop by.
Rift: Relax people, they don’t stay dead
Just a quickie before I hit the sack before PAX.
So some Defiant ?? types were in Argent Glade tonight, nuking the NPCs. The locals (myself included) were spread too thin and too low level to do too much about that. So I just ignored them. Yeah, it was slightly annoying when they killed the tradeskill vendor that I need to buy supplies from, I’ll admit.
But a few people *seemed* to be really upset (and full disclosure they may have been RPing but if they were I can’t use my catchy title so I’ll assume they were genuinely mad). Like I said, they killed the tradeskill guy I needed to talk to but by the time I’d typed a scathing remark into chat, and before I could hit Return, he popped back into being. So I sheepishly erased my scathe and went back to tradeskilling.
So things I learned:
- Townie NPCs repop really quickly.
- You can chat between factions. I assumed that would be impossible based on games like DAoC and WoW. My bad.
- If these guys had wanted to, they could’ve made a real nuisance of themselves by standing there and chain killing NPCs
I think they were just gathering up server firsts… they got one for each NPC they killed. Which tells me Trion approves of their behavior. And I do too. I’m looking forward to more open world PvP as I ‘grow up’ in Rift.
And I’m hoping Trion was clever enough to put in balance systems. Like if these guys had chain-killed NPCs and never were attacked by players, I’d love to see some high level guards spawn to run them off eventually. (I just worry about days when low level zones are pretty deserted and some player is trying to work on tradeskills and enemy players chain kill the only vendor that low level player can utilize, and he can’t find high level player characters to help.)
For the record I did try to spawn a Flare but I guess you can only do those on enemy wardstones. Damn!
Rift: Zone-wide invasions and rewards
So back in beta (I know, bring on the hate) those zone-wide invasions — y’know, the ones that pop a quest into your log — used to give quest rewards. Then they were taken out because, really, the system was kind of borked. You had to do very little to ‘complete’ the quest and you’d get the same rewards as someone who’d fought constantly to drive back the Rifties.
I was working up a good rant about these invasions… how winning them got you nothing and losing them cost you nothing and so they seemed pretty pointless to worry about unless you were in an RP mood. (Hold your hate and corrections for just another moment, please.)
Then the other day I was bashing around with a new character; a cleric. I fly in the face of logic with my characters…this dude is (for now) Shaman/Cabalist/Warden and at low levels he’s a total hoot to play. So I’d just gotten into the real world (Guardian side) and was doing that first quest hub (putting out fires, fighting wanton destroyers and those ember dudes). I was level 7 or 8. And one of those zone-wide events started up.
Then I heard Rudi’s Wagon was under attack. “Poor old Rudi!” I says to myself, “He needs help!” So I jumped on my turtle and took my lowbie self into the fray.
And OMG what a fun fight that was! We had 3 invasions hit at once. I was healing (OMG #2….me healing. I’ve been playing MMOs since there’ve been MMOs and I never heal) which worked pretty well considering both our raid and all the invasions were level 8 or so. And we prevailed! Rudi’s Wagon was saved, and my Rift goody bag was overflowing with knick knacks and planerite. I collected it all, disbanded and went back to questing (at my level there was no sense trying to help the rest of the zone). Just a few minutes later the call went out that the Guardians had prevailed. Huzzah!
And I noticed my Rift goody bag was lit up again. I opened it to find a blue sourcestone item; a reward for taking part in the event.
Call me a nub, but I’d never put 2+2 together like this before, because generally when one of these events happens I either jump in for the duration or ignore it completely, so I’d thought whatever rewards I was getting was for the “local action” that I was taking part in, not the greater event (since I’d be fighting when the event completed). This is the first time I’d seriously fought through part of the event and then disengaged and been able to notice the reward for completing the event. I don’t know what the threshold is for you to get it, but (for my level) I was chain-healing (plus tossing out the odd nuke) for probably a solid 5 minutes of chaos. It felt more like an hour. So (again for my level) I’d contributed a significant amount to that particular battle.
Anyway this was news to me and I figure somewhere out there is someone else who didn’t realize there were zone-quest rewards. So I figured I’d share.
While I have your attention, I also wanted to belated point out a good Rift post at Massively. Karen Bryan offers some good tips on buffing Wardstones and public groups. I always buff Wardstones…I think there should be an achievement with a title for doing it enough times.
Anyway one tip I wanted to add, sort of related to public groups. People talk about forming groups to take on a named mob so that players don’t have to queue up to wait for respawns. I’ve found that as often as not you can get credit even if you don’t form a group. Just attacking the mob during the fight is often enough. Also lots of times the quest isn’t to kill the mob but to do something heinous to its still-warm corpse, and again you seem to be able to do that even if you weren’t the one to kill the mob. So check it out. It doesn’t always work, but it often seems to, at least at low levels.
Prepping for PAX
OK, it’s time to turn the tone of the blog around once again.
PAX East #2 starts on Friday and against all odds, we’re going. I’d all but written it off this year what with everything happening with my mom. Once she passed I thought funeral plans would conflict with PAX. Well, my brother suggested to me that rather than have a funeral, we’d wait until a bit later in the spring and have a memorial for her. A kind of celebration of her life, at her house…everyone together probably for the last time. Since my mom wanted to be cremated, and that actual process happened yesterday, there’s no time pressure for when we honor her. And this makes it easier on people who have to come from far away. She has a sister in the DC area, and one of my step-sisters lives down in Alabama and wants to drive up.
Anyway, long story short, nothing having to do with my mom’s death is going to conflict with PAX. At first I still wasn’t going to go because it didn’t seem ‘proper’ but then people told me I was being silly, and besides ‘losing myself’ in PAX for a few days seems like great therapy. So, plans were back on!
Then Monday I bent down to pet the dog…something I do probably 50 or more times every day because she’s so darned cute. But this time… *crunch* my back went out in a bad way. No idea why. (Stress maybe?) I shambled, bent over, to the bedroom and collapsed on the bed and there I lay for most of Monday. I could barely roll over on my own, the pain was so intense. So I wrote off going to PAX once again.
Luckily I had taken some days off from work anyway, and through lots of heat, muscle relaxers and anti-inflammatories and just laying there like a sack of meat for the remainder of Monday and all of Tuesday, I seem to have more or less cured myself. I’m still twingy and I’m worried about those long lines and sitting on the floor while waiting in them (I still don’t think I could manage to get down onto the floor or up off it) but we still have tonight and all of tomorrow.
So PAX is back on again!
As soon as I remember where I put the badges. /facepalm
They’ve got to be around here somewhere. And we’ve got hotel reservations at the Weston for Friday and Saturday nights, and doggie-hotel reservations for Lola (who is going to be spoiled to death I think…this place offers doggie ice-cream)!
I still haven’t had time to really look at the schedule but last year, when PAX East was smaller, the problem was more about what to give up rather than what to do, so I’m pretty confident we’ll find plenty to occupy our time.
Of course Saturday night at 9 is the PAX East Tweet-Up at MJ O’Connors. Assuming Irrational gets the heck out by 9 pm. We’re using hashtag #paxeasttweetup11 to communicate about that.
Next step for me, is to talk myself down from bringing every piece of hardware that can play a game with me. I really don’t need a laptop and iPad and PSP and Nintendo DS and Android phone to keep me occupied. In particular it’s hard to resist installing a boot-camped Windows partition on my work laptop and installing Rift on there. If last year is any indication by the time we get back to the hotel room at night we’ll have just enough energy to flop into bed, and Saturday and Sunday mornings will be about showering and getting back to the show floor ASAP.
I think I’ll just bring my iPad and phone and call it a day.
So one day back to work tomorrow and then Friday morning we’re off to PAX East! Woot!
So who else is gonna be there?
The end of suffering
Note: Not a gaming related post.
My mom, who was born in 1928, didn’t even really understand what the internet is, yet it was the source of so many good thoughts and kind wishes directed her way.
Her struggle ended this morning at 10:20. Unfortunately she was alone at the time (or maybe she planned it that way) but the nurse on duty said it was very quiet, very peaceful. She just slipped away. Yesterday she was lucid, or at least semi-lucid, and insisting that we not hook her to any machines or take any further action to prolong her life. She was ready to go and just wished it would all be over. And now she has her wish and I’m refusing to look at this as bad news for her, even if it’s bad news for us. But we knew it was coming…
It’s always awkward knowing what to say in times like these, so I’m closing comments on this post. So many of you have already sent along prayers, vibes, good wishes and just a general wave of positive thoughts. I really appreciate them and I still have them; there’s no need to reiterate and they get me all choked up anyway.
So I’ll just say thank you one more time. You’ve all meant a lot.
Now I’m going to lose myself in virtual worlds for a while. The arrangements are such that we can still attend PAX and I’m looking forward to that escape/distraction.
Dying and the kindness of strangers
Note: Not a game-related post.
A few weeks ago I wrote a post about getting old and the ordeals my elderly mother is going through due to illness. It has obviously been a difficult and painful process for her, and it’s been a confusing, frustrating and sad process for the family. Since then I’ve sent a few updates via Twitter.
In response to the post and the tweets I’ve received a lot of support and advise from established blog readers, twitter friends and complete strangers. A lot of it has been carried out through private channels. People I really don’t know have contacted me and offered professional advice that has been very helpful. Other people have offered support and sympathy which has also been very helpful.
I’ve been moved more than I can say by these responses. You’ve renewed my faith in people, a faith that has really taken a beating over the years. Granted I generally lose faith over silly things, like trolling in MMO message boards, but I’d started to assume that was just how people are. But now I am reminded that when the topic turns serious people are inherently good.
For all the advice, support, positive vibes and restoring my faith in people, I thank you all.
Yesterday we put my mom on Roxinal, which is what they call an end-of-life tranquilizer. Its purpose is to take away her pain and distress during her last few days. On Thursday the hospital discharged her to the care center she’d been at since they couldn’t do anything for her the care center couldn’t do, and she’d be more comfortable there. Unfortunately we took that as a good sign, not understanding what they meant was that she was dying. Friday afternoon the nurse at the care center called to tell us she was in a very bad way. They could send her back to the hospital for “aggressive treatment” but the chances of a recovery were very slim. In the meanwhile my mom’s mental state had deteriorated to a point where she was terrified, not knowing where she was, crying and screaming in fear. Her physical state was continuing to deteriorate as well. My brother made the call to go with the Roxinal, supported by myself and my mom’s younger sister. The process my mom is going through is very similar to the process her mom went through and she made the same call in her mother’s case.
So now we wait. She isn’t on feeding tubes or anything of that nature (she always told us she didn’t want to be kept alive via machines) so I don’t expect it will take long. I can only hope that her end comes quickly, but if it doesn’t we at least know her fear and pain has ended.