Getting started in FF XIV

Posted on by Nimgimli

I thought I might share a few tips about Square-Enix’s Final Fantasy XIV, now that it’s in Open Beta. I am NOT an expert on the game but I’ve played enough to figure out some of the frustrations newbies have.

First let’s talk about pacing. FF XIV is 1 part MMO, 1 part adventure game. The pace of it is pretty slow, there’s lots of text to read, lots of in-engine cut scenes to set the mood. Lots of conversations with NPCs, plenty of story to uncover. If you’re looking for a fast-paced game, FF XIV probably isn’t right for you. On the other hand, if you love single player Final Fantasy games, FF XIV will be right up your alley.

Second, interface. Hot topic. FF XIV uses its own interface. If you’re used to mouse-driven MMO’s you’ll hate the interface here. You will use the mouse, but the primary control device is the keyboard. Tab will select a target and Enter will interact with that target. (You can click on a target if you prefer.) To progress a conversation, hit Enter again. F toggles between fighting and passive stances. 1 on the numeric keypad toggles between walking and running. R toggles auto-run. – on the numeric keypad opens the main menu. Spacebar opens the chat input window. Basically it’s worth having a look at the keyboard bindings in the configuration menu.

The mouse is mostly used for camera control. At least, that’s how I’ve been playing.

[The following assumes you’ve started as an adventurer class, not a craftsperson.]

OK so you finally start the game, create a character, enter a city… the first bit you’ll go through is like a prolog that sets up how you’ve arrived at this new city. This is an instance and no other players are in it. It’ll end with a battle. Once you finish that you’ll zone out of the instance. There’ll be some NPCs nearby (green names). Talk to them. No, they won’t have ! over their heads. One will offer to escort you to the adventurer’s guild (I’ve done 2 of the 3 [?] starter cities and am assuming they all start the same.) Accept and a cut-scene will show you arriving at the destination.

Once you get to the Adventurer’s Guild, talk to the nearest NPC. He/she ought to give you the option of “Small Talk” (back story, basically) or a quest name. You can always open the main menu and check your Journal to find out who you need to talk to. Once you engage this person (and yeah, you might need to talk to a couple NPCs before you find the right one) s/he’ll chat you up and then send you out to a camp in the wilderness. This is the start of a chain of quests that teaches you the game.

Finding your way might not be easy. There’re two maps you can check. Hit M to see a generic map of the area, and check your quest journal to show a map localized on your destination. Step 1 is getting out of the city. I’ve been in two starting cities. The one that’s a port town was a bitch to get out of. The desert town was much easier. Anyway, finding your way around the city is part of the game; there’s not a lot of hand-holding here. Once you get outside it should be relatively easy to find the camp you’ve been directed to. Look at the Quest Journal’s map and compare the landmarks with your ‘big’ [M] map. Off you go.

When you get to the camp you’ll find a big crystal in the middle of it. When you get near it you’ll notice (or not) an icon floating near the top of your window. What I do at this point is open the main menu (- on the numpad, or click the icon) and at the top of the list you’ll see Aetheryte or whatever this crystal is called. At about the same time you contact from the Adventurer’s Guild will be talking to you via text chat.

Bottom line is, you’ll get a bunch of options off this crystal. First pick the Tome one…that’s a quickie user manual. Take the time to read it. Yeah I know, you want to kill. Read it anyway. Once that’s done, initiate the levequest from the crystal. You should be offered a buff. Accept that too. You’ll be prompted for a difficulty level. Pick Solo. The levequest will be to kill a few mobs…and now you’ll see a glowie arrow on the edge of your minimap. Follow that to the area where the mobs are. You’ll see them as pulsing orange circles on the mini map when you get near.

Time to fight! Target the mob, then hit F to go into Attack Mode. Right now you have 1 attack, bound to the 1 key. So hit it and you’ll attack the mob. Hit it again and again. You’ll see there’s a stamina meter that goes down but I’m not sure it’s possible to run out of stamina at this point. There is no auto-attack; you have to spam that 1 key. Position counts and if you really want the practice you can try to circle-strafe behind the baddie but it probably won’t be necessary.

Between fights if you need to heal, hit F to go out of attack mode.

If the mob drops loot it’ll go into your inventory. Don’t bother trying to click on the corpse. As far as I can tell that does nothing (maybe later you might be able to harvest from it?).

Once you’ve killed your requisite # of mobs a glowy spire will appear next to you. Interact with that (Main Menu, top choice) to reap the rewards of the levequest and teleport you back to camp.

OK you’re done here, time to run back to the city, to the adventurer’s guild. Your contact will tell you about actions. Yup, you weren’t paying attention but you earned some new skills.

Setting up skills is obtuse as hell.

1) Open the main menu, then Actions & Traits
2) On the right panel you’ll see an empty dropdown menu. Drop it down to reveal Sword, or Axe, or Bow, or whatever your weapon is.
3) Choose that weapon and you’ll see you’ve got 2 or 3 new skills that aren’t slotted
4) On the left side, click on the box next to your default skill. We’re going to bind a skill to the 2 key, that’s the second box
5) Now click the skill you want to bind over on the right side.
6) A pop-up window appeared, outside of the Actions & Traits panel. Awkward! Click “Equip in Main Hand” to bind the skill to the 2 key

Well, unless you have a shield skill or something, then I guess you’d equip it in your off hand.

Now talk to your Adventurer’s Guild contact, and s/he start you on a series of quests to explore the city.

I guess that’s enough for today. Hope this helps you get started and helps you avoid some of the frustrations that you might encounter.

Note: Final Fantasy XIV is not going to be for everybody. In fact, it isn’t going to be for most people. If you tried it and hated it, that’s fine, but don’t post a comment here. I’ll remove it if you do. There’re plenty of places on the web to bitch about how much FF XIV sucks.

I’m trying to put together a place where people (like me) who are enjoying the game, or are willing to give something different a try, can come and get a bit of help and/or ask questions. I don’t mean to come across as an ass but, well, I just want this to stay on topic, and the topic is helping other fans of the game learn to play.

Dead Rising 2: Day 0 – Brilliant marketing or major stumble?

Posted on by Nimgimli

So yesterday the mini-prequel for Dead Rising 2 went on sale for $5.00. At least I think that’s what 400 points equates to. I hate MS Points, but that’s a rant for another day.

I’ve heard people criticize this game as being a paid demo and you can certainly look at it that way (though curiously enough, there’s a trial version… which would be a demo of a demo) but I guess their intent was to deliver you some unique content that would get you psyched for the game. At $5 that seemed ok and I liked the idea that I wouldn’t have to replay this content in the full version. And after an hour or so of playing I felt like I had a really good idea of what the full game would be like (though since I played a bit of the first Dead Rising, I had a good idea anyway).

So maybe this is brilliant marketing. They get a few bucks out of us, we get a fun experience and excited about the game. And it was fun, though I felt the rather heavy storyline (your 6-7 year old daughter has been bitten and you need to keep her from turning into a zombie) kind of jarred against the campy fun of jamming a traffic cone over a zombie’s head and then bludgeoning it with a purse. The voice acting of the little girl is what made the difference I guess..she sounded really cute, though the Dead Rising engine can’t actually make anything or anyone LOOK cute.

Still, I had fun and don’t regret the purchase at all. So, marketing thumbs up!

But then there’s the flip side. Dead Rising is kind of a 1-trick pony. You kill zombies with any and everything available while playing what’s essentially an adventure game of sorts. Find hidden items, escort people. There’s a bit of level-up goodness, too.

For me, Dead Rising 2: Day 0 really scratched that zombie obliterating itch. I liked it! But I felt like it was enough and that I really didn’t need to run out and spend $60 for more of the same in the full game. Admittedly I wasn’t 100% convinced to buy before I tried Day 0, but it was within the realm of possibility. Now it isn’t. Dead Rising 2 is now on my “grab it on sale for $20-$40 sometime in the future” list.

I guess you could point at a demo and argue that it is the same double-edged sword, but Day 0 has to be a bit longer and more engaging than a typical demo in order for them to justify the $5 cost.

I’m just wondering if Capcom will generate more, or fewer, sales by putting this out there. I guess we’ll never know for sure.

Incoming nerd rage

Posted on by Nimgimli

So there’s a certain MMO launching soon. It recently left closed beta and was intended to start open beta tomorrow (though that’s been delayed).

I was able to squirm my way into closed beta for the last weekend it was open. I only spent 3-4 hours playing (had I realized the beta was about to close I would’ve concentrated on playing more) and that was enough to cause me to pre-order the full game.

In fact I’m not sure I want to play open beta very much. I want the game to be ‘fresh’ when it launches. I really liked what I saw; it felt very story-driven and of my 3-4 hours I spent about 20 minutes fighting things and all the rest of the time exploring and talking to NPCs about the world and what’s going on.

Now that feeling might evaporate in hour 5…who knows? But I was enchanted by the little bit I played and I’m looking forward to playing more.

That said… the nerd rage against this game is going to be through the roof. Heck, it’s already pretty loud due to a certain system that’s been talked about. And that’s before people find out how thin the questing is, how manual the process of finding Point B from Point A, realizing that the few quest givers that are around don’t have ! marks over their heads. And how brutal the game is on your PC. My fans go into overdrive and stay on overdrive the whole time I’m playing.

Many of the ‘convenience’ factors of mainstream MMOs won’t be found here (unless things change…they might).

It feels really old school to me. It feels really story driven. I don’t plan to play with anyone else; I just want to explore the world and read everything the NPCs have to tell me. I don’t expect it’ll be a game I play for more than a month or two, but while I am playing I’m going to want to shut out the world.

But I’m always drawn to controversy, particularly when I’m on the underdog side of things. Assuming I continue to like the game I suspect I’m going to be in a minority. It’s going to be a real challenge keeping clear of threads that are warning people away from the game.

I know there are other narrative-driven gamers out there with the patience to play a game that spools out story the way this one does. But the ‘typical’ MMO player is going to be clicking through text looking for the big action component, not finding it, and ranting online about how awful the game is.

I’m not sure where/how to find like-minded gamers in a case like this.

Game reviews and power plays

Posted on by Nimgimli

So I was reading a gaming site this morning and a game journalist mentioned that he hadn’t gotten an advance copy of a game so he had been playing the game basically non-stop so that he could get a review ready for the readers.

What does everyone think of this?

While I admire the person’s work ethic, I’m not sure how fair it is to the game. Imagine someone forcing you to play a game for 18 hours straight whether you wanted to or not. How likely is it that you’d come away with a warm and fuzzy feeling about that game?

I’m not faulting the reviewer; don’t get me wrong. S/he doing the best job s/he can in this “Publish first or don’t bother” environment we operate in.

And this is me picking at problems without offering any solutions.

Here’s another example. Deathspank. Now I love Deathspank! Jeff Gerstmann doesn’t. But here’s the thing… I play Deathspank for an hour here, an hour there, sometimes I get on a real roll and I’ll play for a few hours straight but after I do, I’ll leave it alone for weeks after. Gerstmann, according to what he said on the Giant Bomb podcast, sat down one morning and played it straight through, finishing sometime later in the evening.

If I’d played Deathspank like that, I’d probably give it a 3/5 star review too. The jokes would run together and lose their humor, the game play would start to feel really repetitive and I just don’t think the game would be as fun.

Again, not faulting Gerstmann; he had a review to finish and he was getting it done. And for people who tend to marathon-play every game, his review was absolutely valid. If your plan is to wring every achievement point out of Deathspank over the course of a day, you’re going to come away feeling pretty sick of the game.

For that matter, I like cotton candy. About 2 bites of it. If I ate 2 bites of cotton candy I’d give it a big thumbs up. If someone brought me 10 wads/spindles/whatever-you-call-them of cotton candy and I had to eat them all at once, I’d probably tell you cotton candy was the most awful, wretched food ever invented.

I just wonder if we need reviewers to offer more disclosure over *how* they played the game. Something like “Play time 10 hours, played over a weekend”. I just think the experience of spending 10 hours in 1 day with a game might be much different than the experience of spending 10 hours with a game over the course of the week. Some titles are just not meant to be gorged on.

Or maybe the easiest solution is just to ignore professional reviews and go by what friends think of games. Actually, that’s probably the best plan.

Sony considering an iPad app for PSN digital comics?

Posted on by Nimgimli

I just was asked to take a survey about my experience with digital comics from the PlayStation Network (currently for reading on the PSP). Reading between the lines, so to speak, it sounds like Sony is judging user interest towards accessing their digital comics on other hardware besides the PSP. Specifically mentioned were a PC, the PS3, and the iPad/tablet computers.

There’re already several digital comics sellers who’ve set up house on the iPad so it might be a tough nut for Sony to crack, but I’d love to be able to buy a digital comic and read it on my PSP or my iPad, depending on what was handy.

Again, this was just a survey so there’s no telling how seriously they’re considering the idea. I just found it interesting that they’d even think about jumping to Apple hardware.

Shameful behavior on the part of PC Gamer

Posted on by Nimgimli

So a little set up. Stardock Software’s Elemental game launched on Tuesday. That was the official launch date, anyway. But some retailers started selling it early. Stardock proved the old adage “No good deed goes unpunished.” by deciding to let anyone who’d pre-ordered the game download a late beta copy and start playing it at the same time.

It was probably a misguided idea, because you only have one opportunity to make a first impression and beta software won’t do that for you.

Anyway, that’s kind of neither here nor there. Elemental is out, for good or bad. I’ve had fun with it, other people call it unplayable. So who knows.

PC Gamer’s Tom Francis had bad luck and wrote a post entitled Elementals disastrous launch: stay well away in which he basically said the game doesn’t work and you shouldn’t buy it. Fair enough so far: he reported his experience with the software. His experience was *vastly* different from mine, but whatever. The game didn’t run on his two systems and it ought to run for everyone, so his criticism of the game was valid, assuming he was running the final version and not that pre-release version (which I suspect he was, but again, I’ll leave that be).

Had he stopped there, I wouldn’t have reason to complain, but he used his criticisms of the game as a launch pad to attack Stardock’s Brad Wardell, twisting words and taking quotes out of context. Now, my sense is that Brad Wardell is not a person I’d want to sit around having a beer with. He’s shared some views over the years that I don’t really agree with. Not, y’know, Orson Card level stuff, but just things that gave me the sense that he’s a difficult guy to be around.

But I’m playing a game that he and a bunch of people made…I’m not dating the guy and I don’t think his personality is relevant when talking about a game.

Francis says:

Theyre not even apologetic: CEO Brad Wardell says on the games site that theyre definitely glad people played the pre-patch version because of all the useful crash reports they got.

What Wardell said was:

As some of you know, some retailers broke the street date and to make sure our beta testers and pre-order customers didnt get the short end of the stick, we released an interim build of Elemental (internally called Gold Edition++).

It turns out that this was a blessing in disguise because we have gotten a tremendous amount of useful feedback from those of you who got the game before release. The results of this comes in two parts.

…

The day 0 version, as most of you know, is the version that was originally expected to be the first version most people would ever play. Were definitely glad, however, that people got to play the pre-day 0 builds because we got a lot of very useful feedback and some crash reports that were not known about.

In context is sounds quite different, doesn’t it? No, they aren’t apologetic…they’re grateful that fans d/led the early version and helped them identify some bucks that they could squash for the launch day patch.

But Francis didn’t stop there. Oh no! Instead he went to a 3rd party forum (quartertothree.com) where Wardell hangs out, singled out 1 post from a long and heated thread and used it to back up his attack on Wardell. Wardell has 2,272 posts on that site…clearly it’s his hang-out spot. It’s a damned shame that a game developer can’t use his real name on online forums without fearing someone using anything he says against him.

So the reaction to this post was pretty much the same reaction you’d get by throwing bloody chum into shark-infested waters. Stardock has now displaced Activision as The Ultimate Evil of Gaming and people are saying they’ll never buy another Stardock game because of Wardell’s attitude.

So great, everyone who works for Stardock loses because Francis has a stick up his ass about Brad Wardell. Oh, and Rock, Paper, Shotgun jumped in on the action too, doing what they could to fan the flames.

Now Wardell’s outburst on QuarterToThree wasn’t the smartest thing a person has ever done. But he did man up to it and issued an apology. I’m not sure what more you can ask of a person than that they apologize publicly, in a case like this.

Hours later, PC Gamer did add, without comment, a link to Wardell’s apology post. Rocket, Paper, Shotgun couldn’t be bothered, apparently.

Y’know what? Gaming is a fucked up industry. Francis’s post is irresponsible and unfair, in my opinion (again, not talking about his criticism of the GAME here). But what’s sadder is how many gamers, or at least commenters, jump right into the mayhem without pausing to try to learn the whole story. How quickly the mob turns. How fickle we are.

The whole issue has been incredible disappointing to me.

But I guess this is what gamers want. The other day on Twitter someone accused gaming journalists of just being there to provide free marketing to game companies. I tell you what, if the other option is this kind of hatchet job against individuals, I’ll take marketing. At least it focuses on the games.

Also check out Darren’s take on the situation at Common Sense Gamer.

Update: Looks like Rock, Paper, Shotgun finally caught up with events. Not that it’ll undo the damage they’ve already done.

The hypocrisy of gamers

Posted on by Nimgimli

So it looks like RealTime Worlds is going belly up. And everyone seems so sad about it. I’m sad about it. I really had fun playing APB and was looking forward to playing it some more once they got a few patches into it.

Sure, the game wasn’t perfect…what game is? But it was fun, which at the end of the day is all that matters to me.

Of course when it launched, gamers and gaming journalists were gleefully taking all kinds of dumps on it, treating it like some kind of Daikatana-style train wreck. Gamers, as a breed (there are of course exceptions) take an immense amount of joy from tearing a game apart, spreading it’s entrails all over the internet, then posting pics of the mayhem to Facebook.

So that’s cool and all. Everyone is entitled to an opinion, even if it’s a horribly uninformed opinion. Like all the people who bitched about the payment model without stopping to think about it. How many games do you spend $50-$60 dollars on and then play for 15-20 hours? APB gave you 50 game-play hours with the box. That’s not time spent socializing, that’s essentially time in combat. Imaging what your WoW character’s /played time would be if you didn’t count time spent traveling to quest locations, fiddling at the bank, searching the auction house, talking to your guildies, waiting for a raid to form… 50 hours of actual combat is probably 200 hours of playtime. The fact is, most users would never hit that 50 hour limit in APB. It never was a game you were going to play as a replacement for your MMO of choice. It was just a game, not a lifestyle.

Anyway I digress, but that’s an important point. So many people reviled the game, without even trying it, due to the payment model…it just seemed unfair to me.

“So yay! APB sucks! RealTime Worlds can’t make a game that isn’t total crap! We’ve hardly even played it but we know it sucks, and if someone tells you they had any fun playing, it’s just because there [sic] a noob who doesn’t know what’s good! Let’s kick its corpse all over the internet!”

And now RealTime Worlds is going under and what do we hear?

“Oh, what a shame!” “I feel bad for those affected.” “Hope those guys land of their feet!” “Wow, the gaming business sure is brutal!”

When the same person that was ‘piling on’ to the flaws in APB turns around and tries to act all sympathetic about these guys losing their jobs… wow, I just find it an unbelievable display of hypocrisy.

People need to learn that their words have consequences. If you hated APB that much then you should be glad these people won’t be making another game; you should be happy they’ll now get a chance to go into a line of work they’re better at.

Now if you tried APB and didn’t enjoy it and said as much, while listing real reasons that you didn’t like it… I’m not talking about you! Quite the opposite…constructive negative criticism can help a development team get better. You gave the game a fair shot, didn’t like it and moved on. I totally respect that and again, I’m not talking about you in this post!!

I’m talking about the people who played for 10-15 minutes, didn’t take any time to learn what was going on, and then used their influence with their friends, or worse, with their readers/listening audience, to trash the game to an extent that the people they have influence over were never going to even take a look at APB.

All I’m asking is for people to stand behind their words, and stop being so wishy-washy. When a developer has 1 current game out, trashing the game is trashing the developer. You helped put RTW where they are today. At least take ownership of that fact.

Transitioning from Comcast to FIOS

Posted on by Nimgimli

So we switched ISP & TV providers today, going from Comcast to FIOS. Now a lot of people hate Comcast, but I don’t. Our service has been very reliable over the years. We switched to save money, and for better internet speed.

We had an appointment window of 8 am – noon today. At about 11 we got a call saying the tech was running late and he’d be here by 1. He got here about 1:20. Installation took until just about 5 pm. The tech was friendly and pretty helpful. In fact he was a little too helpful in some ways.

We still have Comcast service active and stuff on our Comcast DVR we wanted to watch. The FIOS tech disconnected the Comcast set-top box and tucked the Comcast cables inside the wall. This makes sense, really, but I wish he’d let me know he was going to do it. When the Comcast set-top box loses power for a length of time it sort of resets. When I hooked it back up, it didn’t have a signal back to the Comcast mothership and so couldn’t re-initialize the DVR features. So we lost all the stuff we had on the DVR (unless I want to remove the wall plate and fish around in there for the Comcast cable and drag it out). That was a bummer.

Anyway I’ll take all the stuff back to Comcast’s offices tomorrow and have them shut down my service immediately, I guess.

On the internet side, the FIOS Actiontec router replaced the Comcast cable modem and my LinkSys router. The technician dutifully transferred all the ethernet cables to the FIOS router, including an uplink to a hub I have. He pulled out all the now-superfluous equipment, leaving things neater than when he arrived.

However, in initializing the router he had to use my computer, and while doing so he installed some Verizon software without telling me what he was doing. I later had to reboot and had a EULA for this software pop-up when my system started. I declined to accept the EULA and removed the Verizon software. So far that doesn’t seem to have hurt anything.

I asked for the admin password for the router. The Tech was willing to give it to me, but we couldn’t get it to work. He called FIOS HQ and even with their help, the ‘correct’ password wouldn’t work. In the end he did a hard reset of the router and we logged in with the default admin password of password1 (in case you have a FIOS router, that’s how you get in… do a hard reset and use admin/password1).

I started asking him about changing the SSID and going from WEP to WPA and he pretty much admitted I was now talking over his head. He left me to “knock myself out” in setting up the router the way I wished, and headed to his next job. Yeah, he was going off to start a new install at 5 pm!

The ActionTec router has a clunky UI. I changed the password, switched the security to WPA, changed the SSID and started adding MAC address filters. Every time I added a new MAC address to the filters, it seemed to turn off security. Happily I noticed this and could turn it back on but had I not, I would’ve left the wireless network totally open.

The FIOS TV Guide/DVR is a horror show. I really hate it. Everything feels like it’s 5 menu options deep. The search kind of sucks and they overload you with information. When I’m looking for a show, I just want to know when it’s on and what channel, I don’t need a link to search on everyone who is a cast member.

But what really puzzles me is that the tv guide seems to be showing me information from last week. So the episodes of Eureka and Haven that are on tomorrow night have the descriptions from the episodes that were on last week over on Comcast! Maybe the guide just needs time to update.

With the Comcast DVR now dead and nothing on the FIOS DVR yet, I fired up the Roku…but it wasn’t getting an internet connection. Hmm. Tried the PS3 and again got an error. Oddly it was getting an IP address but having DNS issues. After some fiddling around I just ran through the network connection wizards on both devices, essentially setting them up like they were new. That seemed to clear up the problem on both of them. But it was weird.

In the end we turned to Hulu Plus on the PS3 for some dinner TV watching. The first attempt, the Hulu+ feed started jerky and then just slowed down until we were getting an update about every 5 seconds. I exited the application, re-entered it and had better luck. I never saw this problem with Comcast, FWIW.

After dinner I decided to fire up OnLive to see how well that worked with my supposed 25/25 FIOS internet service. OnLive ended up giving me a warning that my network connection was dropping frequently and my experience might be sub-par. I went ahead anyway, started playing. Gameplay was jerkier and laggier than I’ve ever seen it while using Comcast, and eventually OnLive just gave up. It told me my internet connection wasn’t good enough to support OnLive and dumped to desktop.

I rebooted my PC (which was when I saw that EULA and subsequently removed the Verizon software) and tried OnLive again. It was better, but still didn’t feel as solid as it did on Comcast.

That’s how far I’ve gotten. Compared to Comcast, FIOS has an uglier user guide and less reliable internet, at least so far. InternetFrog says I’m getting 22 Mbps down and 8 Mbps up as I type this at 10 pm. So sheer download bandwidth seems fine but it seems like packets are dropping somewhere when using Hulu+ and OnLive. And 8 Mbps up? When I’m paying for 25? That’s pretty bad.

I probably won’t be truly happy with FIOS until I get the first bill and save money over Comcast. Right now it just feels like we’ve undergone a lot of headache for no real benefit. So far, I’m not a fan of FIOS. I’m hoping that changes.

The iPad is turning me into a cheapskate

Posted on by Nimgimli

So I’m a gamer, right? You’re probably a gamer too if you’re reading this blog. We’re used to spending $60 for a new console game, maybe $50 for a new PC game. Every so often Steam has a big sale and we all start buying games just because they’re marked down to $10: “I’ll probably never play it, but at $10 I couldn’t NOT buy it!”

Enter the iPad (you could sub in iPhone or to a certain extend, an Android phone). Suddenly our sense of values get thrown all out of whack.

Angry Birds is all the rage on the iPhone and iPad these days. I finally got around to downloading the Lite (ie, free/demo) version. It’s basically Boom Blox without the Wii controls. In other words, it’s a hell of a lot of fun, very addicting, with irreverently cute characters (you use a slingshot to project the titular birds at pigs who’re protected inside structures of varying degrees of flimsiness. Why? Because the pigs stole, and presumably ate, your eggs).

The Lite version is only available for the iPhone. Of course it runs on the iPad, either at actual size or blown up 2 times to match the size of the iPad. Because the graphics are pretty simple it looks fine at 2X.

Anyway I decide this is enough fun that I want the full game. At least I’m pretty sure I do. I think a lot over whether its worth investing in the full game. Will I really play it enough? Once I decide I will, I have another decision. The iPhone version is $1 while the iPad version is $5. I’ve heard that the iPad version is identical to the iPhone version, just with crisper graphics.

Hmm, is it worth paying FIVE TIMES as much just for slightly better graphics? I spend a lot of time thinking about this while I sip an iced coffee and munch on a donut. Total cost of the snack I’m consuming while I ponder? About $5.

And suddenly I realize how weird it is that I’ll spend $60 on a console game that I know lasts 8 hours or so, but I’m agonizing over spending $5 on an iPad game. If a console game drops to $40 that’s cheap as heck, but an iPad game at $5 feels expensive. But will the console game over you 8 (or 12, at full price) times the enjoyment? Who knows? Enjoyment is really hard to quantify.

In the end, I splashed out the big bucks for the $5 iPad version of Angry Birds and the crisper visuals are well worth the extra money in my opinion. But after all was said in done I just felt bewildered by my own behavior. Why was I stressing out over a $4 difference in price? What is it about the iPad that the perceived value of games is so much lower than the perceived value of games on the PC or consoles?

An expected non-adventure

Posted on by Nimgimli

So here’s another side of EQ2 (yeah, I’m on a bit of a kick). Last night, after a crappy day at work, I was able to get job #2 done pretty early and by 9 pm I was ready for some relaxing gaming. And when I say relaxing, I mean just that… I wasn’t in the mood for stress or excitement.

It was the last day of TinkerFest in EQ2 and I had an incomplete quest, so I logged in to finish it up. All I needed to do was collect some gnome grease and then craft a battle-bot, so no fighting. Finished the quest (my bot lost 🙁 ) and then wandered around GnomeLand Security picking up quests and taking the time to read the quest text (or listen to the NPCs) as I did so. There’s some amusing stuff there if you take the time to appreciate it.

Then we had a surprise visit from a GM in the guise of a semi-broken tinkered robot named Firstaidomatic. It was attempting to repair itself and needed spare parts. I hesitate to call this encounter a quest, but it was a fun diversion and after we satisfied the robot’s needs we each got a personal light and some level 100 food and drink for our troubles. One of the strengths of EQ2 is that they do a lot of these micro-events where a GM controlled character just appears at a focus point (ie, the last day of TinkerFest, at the hub of all TinkerFestivities) to interact with the players.

Having finished with TinkerFest for this year, I headed to Kelethin for the City Festival, and took a quest to harvest ingredients for the troll that was running things. Remember how I’d been intending to level up harvesting the other day? Yeah, I was getting back to that. I spent the next hour and a half or so just roaming around the outskirts of Greater Faydark. Everything was quiet; I never saw another player out there. But that was ok. I just kind of flowed into the world, letting real world stress drain away as I fished and chopped wood and got really good looks at the creatures that I’d always had to fight during prior visits. It’s amazing the detail you have time to notice when you aren’t swinging a sword. And the ambient sounds out there just kind of drew me in. It was all very soothing, and I got all my harvesting skills up to where I can go harvest Tier 3 next, as well as completing the harvesting quest a few times and getting tokens for Kelethin City Festival goods.

I played until midnight, never drew a weapon in anger, though I was tempted after a Fae played a practical joke on me in the guise of teaching me her language. I didn’t do any serious crafting. Basically I just roamed around while my real self unwound.

I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop and for me to ‘go off’ EQ2 again. I always do eventually. But for right now I’m really enjoying the game a lot (again). I’m taking care to only do things that are fun and to not pressure myself. For instance Angela asked me if I wanted help in doing all the TinkerFest quests I hadn’t done, since it was the last night of the Festival until next summer. My first instinct was to say yes, not wanting to miss out on anything. But then I caught myself because I knew I wasn’t in the mood for trying to pound through quests, and just let that content go until next year. Basically the way I look at it is this: I have two real jobs. I don’t need my games to become a 3rd. Everything comes ’round again eventually, right? And if not… well there’s more than enough content to keep me happy for years at the pace I play.