DannyboyO1

I live, and work.

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 03:10:42 GMT

I'm most of the way through training for APAC. Woot. Call center work, again.

On Writing

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 04:27:00 GMT

Well, I'm going to call a quit to the novel I've been writing. If you check the dates of the posts on http://dannyboyo1.blogspot.com you'll see that I've been posting on it very very infrequently for over a year. I'm maybe 8% into a novel. If you squint, and it's a thin one. Sure, I took a break in the middle when I needed to, yanno, work for money. But, being honest, even with my sleeping habits, 9 hours spent working each day (I do count transit time and lunch.) isn't what keeps me from writing a kick-ass novel.

I've been struggling with every element of this from day one. I hate coming up with names, I hate writing notes, I constantly come up with ideas that undermine my own narrative structure. Some of it's the very thing that I decided at the outset for the project. I wanted something interesting to think about, that I wasn't going to fall in love with. I didn't want to burn out on my own project. So I went with superheroes. It's a cliche that, I've noticed, you almost never see done with an eye towards how the real world gets changed by the presence of supers.

I don't care about comic books. They're generally not well done. They're guy soap operas. Hell, if there were a plot involving two characters minds getting swapped, and their best friend was falling in love with the wrong one... all while their worst enemy unveiled a scheme to take over the company they all work for... but it turned out the whole time that it was just a coma dream one of them had of an alternate universe version while hooked up to a mind-altering... you get my drift. I wanted a realistic treatment of superpowers. Heroes and villains are very dramatic. But what if, say, Braniac took over the electoral college and named himself president... and actually did a pretty decent job? What if Cyclops was a construction worker? He'd be a natural welder. Forget the extremes of heroism and villainy that most people think of for comic books. What goes on in the grey middle area?

Trouble is, even when focussing on low-level superpowers, you have to address a slew of questions. How many people are "special"? How does the public react? What's this doing to the job market? If the Flash builds an entire house by himself in an hour, is the union upset? How, what, where? And the point where I realized this wasn't going to ever really STOP so that I could finish my story was when I had to try and fit mind-readers in. Legal issues, ethical issues... and most importantly... insider trading. Mind readers would do very well in business. You'd know if the other guy was trying to cheat you. And you can't cover that with legislation. You'd never be able to prove an unfair advantage like that. Not without some sort of detector for the talent.

I started this project to teach myself how to structure a novel. I wrote a plot outline for a trilogy, and, quite frankly, I think I might even be able to someday finish it if I want.

But I don't want.

It's painful, and I really don't think it's got the potential to become worthwhile anytime soon. It did fulfill the bare minimum for my expectations. I did manage to figure out a plot outline. I did get more than one chapter written. I made notes on characters, and I didn't give up right away.

I'm giving up after a couple years.

I still lack the determination to make visible progress daily. I hit a roadblock, I walk away for a bit, and my subconscious hands me a solution a couple days later. So I can steam ahead into the next roadblock. That's... a really bad rate of progress. I should be screaming at the top of my lungs and actually, like, solving my problems as they come, but I don't quite know how, and I'm never confident of what I come up with on the fly. Probably because I come up with much better solutions when I have a few weeks to select the best brainstorm from. That's... not going to work as a career though.

I don't want to give up on writing, and I think I can force myself to keep producing... something. What I really need now is a project I can love. I know what steps to take on an emotionless level of craftsmanship. (Maybe. If I did things right with my abortive fetus of a trilogy.) I just... need something I want to do. Something I can be eager to finish making, instead of eager to stop dealing with.

In the mean time, I get to hunt for a job in the current market. Sure, there's always great turnover in customer service... but I refuse to work a job where I am asked to lie in order to keep a job that nobody sane can truly enjoy. It's not enough to refuse to be a salesman anymore. My last job, I was temping for a place that leases office equipment. Copiers. The leases are guaranteed to cost the customer about twice as much, and it's a retail price that's heavily inflated. So, my job is to find diplomatic ways to say "You guys should have read that contract. Man. You have to pay us a lot more than that piece of shit's worth. It exploded? Bummer. Now you not only owe the remaining months of payment, but you're going to buy it on top of that. Hope you had it insured so you can pay us. What? You thought you were on a dollar buyout lease? Doesn't say that on the contract. You are SOL."

So, yeah. A job for scum, as a shark's smile... not happening. I'm going to try and find something a bit better, but... long hours and low pay on a job I don't love versus no pay on a novel I don't love...

Writing blocks

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 01:09:48 GMT

Like building blocks, I guess. Anyway, some of you know that I have been working on not totally fucking up a story I've been slowly putting down at dannyboyo1.blogspot.com It's been... interesting. Also very very painful. You can see from the update dates, I am slow at this. I get bursts of motion and then have a problem I can't quite solve. I usually figure it out when I stop to complain about it, but not always the first few times.

If you didn't know, well, it's a plot about a guy's journey into a realm of superheroes and his eventual return to reality to take over the world as an evil overlord. I've been toying with how to write it for a while, have a whole arc that should stretch into three books pretty nicely. But I don't really have the main character fleshed out, because... of course, there's some author-insertion going on there. I've gotten this far, and I'm realizing that while I can maybe avoid making it into an obvious Mary Sue, I've kinda got nothing up my sleeves for an enthralling narrative voice and...

well...

I have a real hate/love affair with the whole damn thing. I keep wanting to fail, to fuck up, so I can stop, and try something else, but whenever I do, I get an idea, I solve a problem, and it becomes just barely possible again, and I drag a few more pages out until the next logjam. I've been doing this stop-go process for a few years now. Mostly stop. I did pick a project initially that was compelling to the imagination, yet did not totally absorb me, so I could, in theory, remain objective about it... and treat it like a job.

Well, I have a shitty boss when I'm working for myself. And the worst employee on record. There is no motivation. I don't feel like I'm expressing my own voice, or doing anything really kickass with whatever I have that passes for talent. I feel like I'm making something that's actually aiming to be second-rate.

So, I'm asking... I'm begging like I've never begged in my life (aside from when I was six and wanted that Transformers toy... but I digress). I want you to tell me something. I want to know if this project is worth carrying out. I want to know if there's a better idea out there... I want a little guidance from the people I consider friends. Tell me if I suck. Tell me I need polish (I know, it's a rough draft there.) Tell me you already read that idea somewhere before. I'm trapped in my brain here.

If you don't respond to this... well, that too sends a message. A really big kick-in-the-crotch one, if you think about it. But one that is likely to have me asking the question "Do you want fries with that?"

Pun alert.

Thu, 23 Oct 2008 23:44:39 GMT

I was noticing... I'm keeping at the temp job for a financing company, and I turned down a sales job I was approached for. I'm sticking with the *lessor* of two evils.

Warning, brain injury may result from pun.

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 05:19:33 GMT

So, I've been trying to hodge together a novel featuring a world of superheroes and some of the more bizarre issues that really have to come about. Like, if there's a batmobile, is it illegal, or is the license plate registered to Bruce Wayne? Or is this guy actually going to face down a DMV bureaucrat and say "I'm Batman." (Ok, yes, county clerk has a separate office for the license plates, I don't think it'll make a huge difference.)

I also note that you never ever get a comic hero team with similar powers. Maybe they have an elemental theme and one's water, one's fire, one's earth, and one's heart... or spleen or something. Maybe they're all young, Teen Titans being the muppet babies of spandex. Most of the time, you've got a couple flyers, a bruiser or two, someone agile, someone mechanically inclined, a weirdo, and a sensitive. There's some mix and match, as you could have a flying weirdo, a cyborg that's got big fists and wifi... plus instruction manuals. But you never see a super team that's got a vast degree of overlap. You don't have a brute squad that's got three golems, the Hulk, Thing, and Mike Tyson. You never see a firing squad of ten guys who just have flight and blasting powers. And if you ever have six magic characters in the same place, they're working together to produce one big effect that just happens to leave them all tired and vulnerable so someone else gets to do the really dangerous part they found or forged a viable weak spot for.

Having played City of Heroes, I can vouch... most missions there, if you have a full team of blasters, you will roll directly over the opposition. You may be weak individually, but while you can concentrate your fire, the opponents can never concentrate their hit points.

Some of this is just logical diversification. If you mix the group, you mitigate their weaknesses, and there's always someone who can figure out a good way to take down whatever they're facing.

But, what if there are some other reasons?

I mean, if a team of shamen are calling on air spirits to guide their blows... you may either get some severe synergy, or they might interfere with one another. It could take a lot more coordination for them to avoid stepping on each others toes, or redundantly boosting a companion's speed... through a wall.

Telepaths, however... I can get behind keeping separate. These are folks who pick up on the thoughts of those around, and who are able to speak to nearby minds. It's what they do. But if you think about it, it's an amplification. If Ordinary Joe stubs his toe, and Psi Guy is nearby and picks up on the pain... Telepathic Teri now has to wince because she feels it from both of them. So a number of potent (useful) telepaths in proximity is likely to result in a feedback loop. Probably originating in the thought "Gee, this spandex is uncomfortable." That's a phenomenon that's blisteringly obvious, and I'll have to refer to it in the story. I figure the standard term for it will have to be Psion's Friction.

And if you read that aloud and it hurt, look around quick, if someone's wincing, they might be a telepath!

Moment of Zen

Thu, 17 Jan 2008 04:53:40 GMT

[10:23] <Ryo> That love sucks. ;P
[10:23] <DannyboyO1> meh.
[10:23] <DannyboyO1> life sucks.
[10:24] <DannyboyO1> love's just a high point you have to pay for.
[10:24] <DannyboyO1> with pain.
[10:24] <Ryo> ... that's a good one.

No Budging!

Tue, 01 Jan 2008 21:10:10 GMT

"Great Googly-moogly."

"Yeah, Bruce. Quite a line."

"I just wasn't expecting quite so many people." He apologized to the sexagenarian who bumped into him.

"Well, that's why the real brainiacs were here before they opened."

I could see Bruce thinking, trying to adjust. "This is going to take hours, isn't it?"

"Always has." I replied.

"Really? That seems... even with all the extra..." His gloved hand gestured at the various figures waiting for their numbers.

"We just didn't have to deal with it before. Federal employees, tax-exempt status, vehicle exemptions. Hell, you knew what you were lobbying for."

"Karl, you know damn well..." He adjusted his hood a bit. I never did understand how he kept sweat out of his eyes in that heavy thing. "I just wanted to clear up the corruption."

"Sure, sure. And now, you wait at the DMV like everybody else."

"Look, this is ridiculous. The whole time we've been here, they haven't moved more than two people. This is going to take hours."

"Yep." It wasn't like Bruce to repeat himself. "You, ah, need to be somewhere?"

"Of course, I have to res... um." He paused as conversation died abruptly, interested parties eagerly waiting for the next words. "Damnit. I can't say with all these contractors around, someone will... will undercut me."

That pretty well cost him the last shred of respect I had for the man. "All this time, 'it's not about the money, it's doing the job and doing it right!' Hah. Well, what could it be, anyway... guarding the body of the mayor's daughter? Where is that boy of yours, anyway?"

You could feel the chill radiate from Bruce, silently ignoring that stab at an old wound. He hissed, "Karl.... You...." And that was it. His rage as impotent as our collective frustration at the line's pace.

After a while, Bruce spoke again. "Dammit, if I miss my contact, I just know I'll be too late to stop The Vacillator's latest plot."

"Hah. You worry too much." I pulled my cape out from under the chair's leg, wondering if they need extra starch or if I'm shopping at the wrong costumer's.

"How can you say that? It's always a race, once you get the first clues. And if he thinks I have started and I'm actually here..." He nearly brained a rather scantily clad sorceress with his emphatic gesture. "It might not be almost too late."

I looked at Bruce. Really looked at him for the first time since privatization. "Seriously, you don't have to worry about that."

He grabbed me by the collar then. "You muscling in on me Karl?"

"What?" Yeah, not about the money, right. "Of course not."

"Then how, might I ask, do you know?"

"Well, he's been standing in line behind you for about 20 minutes."

:D

Fri, 14 Dec 2007 17:05:53 GMT

We've got power again! ^-^

Yep, this has been a week.

Fri, 14 Dec 2007 15:08:25 GMT

No reviews this time, just an update.

It's not been a fun week. If you missed the news, the midwest got hit by freezing rain this week, tuesday. I tend to rank these things by danger and inconvenience. Couple dozen roadway fatalities, but after the storm, the road crews got sand and salt and plowing where needed. Honestly, driving around my neighborhood was worse before the storm. Damage to trees and power lines was a bit more severe.

The power company has just now gotten to us.

The rest of the neighborhood has been under power for over a day. We're just the lucky folk with a line that comes through the middle of the block... county block, so it's over a pasture, through the woods, and there's a creek in the middle. They can't get a truck back there with anything like ease. Typically, they bring out about three trucks and just seem to manpower it. Gotta be miserable work.

There's still 243 unpowered homes, including ours. They seem to get through 90% per day. Hey, if you've ever done a major project, the first 90% takes 90% of the time, and the last 10% takes the other 90% of the time.

Pops got a generator on day 2. Given the level of disruption, and the liklihood of pipes freezing if the power wasn't on by, like, last night, it seemed a good investment. 10°F ('cause it got COLD) is not a good time to do without. It's given us heat, then with a bit of wiring work, water, modem, and intermittant microwave access. Priorities. :)

The weather didn't do much damage to my car. 'Course, I'm told there were a couple dozen fatalities from the storm, mostly roadway. The driver's side mirror was a bit crusted, so I did my best with it... and I broke it. Doesn't stay pointed anything like up. It's now at a perfect angle for someone who can't actually see over the steering wheel... and it will point further down for some bizarre reason. No offense to any midget auto enthusiasts reading this... but you need a booster seat in this a lot more than the transparent door either of us would need to see that mirror at the extremes. I'm pretty sure it's just a spring inside the housing that's slipped, and not bent metal, since there's quite obvious stops to the mechanism to prevent such. There's not, however, an obvious way to get at the innards of this overengineered device, so I'm holding out for a warm day.

Which should also clear up the stuck windshield wiper. Black car, so any snow on it melts. Well, if doesn't totally melt, you get ice all over the windshield. And a dam of ice around the wipers. Looks like the ice got in the hole where the motor should sit. Pretty non-accessible. But we had good sunlight yesterday. May be clear by now.

Ooh, outtage is down to 217! Still not on here. And one of the trucks left, leaving... huh, 3. Well, that's the usual number. Not that this comes up that often, it's just that there's nothing else to remember when it does. As for my numbers, I've been tracking the county's stats at http://www.alliantenergy.com/docs/groups/public/documents/pub/pregion_details.hcsp?region_id=4 for Linn county. Speaking of overengineered... I mean, an online power outtage reporting and summary service. Still gotta be cheaper than telephone support. And gosh darned if it's not good comfort to know that they have not given up. Also handy to know the rate at which repairs were slowing. I've been boring the #haven-ites with my tracking data. Hey, mIRC lets me timestamp, so I could go back real easy and see all my lovely data points. Check the average rate for each hour, compare...

Yes, I AM a geek.

I'm also really not liking this enforced bedtime of dark + no power. Been a little insomniac. So when you can't sleep and can't do anything... it's boring. And cold. And boring. And I couldn't even stay asleep 'till the power came back, for some reason. So, six hours sleep... that's why I'm cranky! Also, I'm hungry. I really want to fix a pizza, but that takes an oven. And that sucker's electric. Which'll be on "soon". Gah. Well, hope you are all having happy days.

Assassin's Creed

Mon, 19 Nov 2007 15:59:55 GMT

Ahh, it's always nice to get a chance to play a decent singleplayer game. This much-hyped game about murdering tyrants in the war-torn region a heck of a lot of religions call "the holy land"... for peace. You take the role of an assassin, as you might expect from the title, and, well, I could give you the whole bog-standard review crap, but if you need me to tell you what the game is about, you haven't heard of it, and probably don't care enough to finish reading.

First impressions are good. The game is beautiful. The cities are enormous and you can't miss the gorgeous vistas... literally, you can't miss them as the game grabs the camera as you first enter each and makes it very hard to keep steering your horse until the view returns to normal. "Fortunately", you can't quite get lost in these moments as the loss of camera control puts your character on a leash, unable to wander too far away.

This leashing technique is also applied during the rare odd jobs of investigating your prey prior to actually getting to start the mission. More on this in a bit... but first I want to bitch about a breach of the first sin of gaming here. Cutscenes that are repeated verbatim when you start a minor task... and cannot be skipped. This is a bit of a problem later in the game as the player gets jaded over the gameplay elements and the challenge starts to kick in. I was asked by a supposed assassin to basically do his work for him, killing 5 templars without any guards getting suspicious. And on a timer. In exchange for a fortune cookie tip on how tackling an entire funeral procession of armed men would be a bad idea. As silly as this setup sounds, that's not my complaint. It took a few tries to avoid leaving dead templars anywhere that a guard would get suspicious and start looking for the guy with the bloody swords, and every single attempt was prefaced by a total replay of the pointless exposition.

If you're ever designing a game and you ponder whether or not there should be an option to skip a scene that doesn't, say, further the plot, or provide essential information that you can't glean from the targets on your map and compass, the answer is yes.

Failure is a punishment in and of itself. You have to try again until you get it right. That's fine. But sitting through the elite killer complaining about a bad back so, before he'll give you the information you might find useful, he'd like you to fulfill his mission for him... for the fifth time... that's not adding insult to injury, that's pouring salt and tobasco in the wounds.

Back to the rest of it then.

The game's one claim to uniqueness is the ability to climb almost anything in order to escape pursuit... or just to avoid the need to find a ladder... or if you're bored. And for the first few hours of the game, it really is a treat to sprint up the side of a small building, or free-climb a tower or three-story building... but it's the central gameplay element, and the only way it really differs from walking is to muck about with the topology.

In addition to being able to reach impressive heights after climbing for a minute to get a fabulous view of the terrain... and often to fill in parts of the map, you have to get down again. Since the game withholds the ability to catch yourself on a ledge for about the first third of the game, the primary method of descent is 9.8 m/s^2. A "leap of faith" from a high point to land in a pile of hay. Now, when you drop from about 50m up into 2m of loosly piled plant cellulose, there's a bit of cognitive dissonance.

These leaps of faith are marked by, I could not make this up, pigeon shit on the edge of a roof. Usually accompanied by pigeons. Well, they needed to have some sort of visual element to steer towards when you're fleeing for your life from the guards... but somehow, having your salvation be a slippery line of excrement takes a bit of heroism out of what's already a distinctly cowardly retreat.

Not that there's anything wrong with this. It's rather more subtle than a large sign saying "hiding place here", and when you ARE running full tilt over a city that's beautiful from a distance... and made up actually of a surprisingly well-done bit of copy/paste, it's very easy to get lost, and the rare time your mad dash takes you past one of these roosts and the pigeons go flying... you'll be glad to have them.

The gameplay consists of well disguised minigames, combat, and running away to hide. The combat is actually quite well done. Although I'm rather at a loss as to how being demoted as an assassin causes your hero to forget how to counter-attack, dodge, and throw off a foe's defenses, I have to admit, learning one trick at a time does work fairly well here. Your foes get tougher and more numerous, and I actually did, by the game's end, find myself using more and more of the techniques in order to level the playing field. It's terribly rare of a game to hand you multiple useful techniques... there's usually a dominant strategy. Instead, you have a very flowing combat. Counterattacks are lethal and easier to pull off than combos. Later on, you get a few more options, including a neat counter to being grabbed and thrown. The enemies also use a lot of these abilities... although without any finishing moves, even without massive health, you'd have a good advantage. Dispatching a foe is a matter of style... and even the hidden blade used to kill an unwary foe can be useful (critical for ending a boss fight) simply by throwing your opponent to the ground, switching weapons and pouncing before they can finish rising. Although, throwing someone off a three story building is also fun.

Running away is... almost done right. You have to accept that the guards find the concept of searching hay to be pretty foreign. And the rooftop "gardens" which are like telephone booths with blinds pulled down to make the middle... pretty dark... no one looks in those. Now, I will buy the trick of sitting down on a bench and just watching your foes come around the corner and keep going. But as the game progresses, I find the trick of joining a group of monks to be steadily less plausible. Mostly because you're increasingly obviously armed. None of the actual monks have a sword at their hip, a small sword at the back, and a few throwing knives in a belt, on a boot, on the shoulder... Especially when it's 4 monks with you in sort of a plus sign formation. The nature of the hiding places is such that I found myself wanting to shout out "olly olly oxen free-ee" while waiting for the alert to die allowing me to break cover again. (Thankfully, this takes a lot less time than a cutscene instruciton for a minigame.) The hiding places only work if you're not actually in sight of a guard. This makes cornering tightly a bit of a plus, makes the flight about as challenging as the fight, and ensures you will not be turning this into any more of a keystone cops routine than necessary. (But feel free to play some benny hill.)

Now, prior to your main targets, the game has you do some background investigation. Six clues per. You can pickpocket a courier, eavesdrop on a conversation, beat up a town crier in their pay, and do favors for your fellow assassins in exchange for what they've uncovered. Other than the implausibility of spotting the first two from your tower spying, the fellow assassin's are the most worthless lot I've ever had the misfortune to see. Suddenly, it makes sense that you and you alone get to eliminate the game's high-profile targets... "I dropped some flags, can you get them?" "Oooh, show me how fast you can do my job for me!" "Um, I think these guys are going to kill me for being an assassin, which means I was found out and probably deserve death for disgracing the order... could you take care of this for me?" The game doesn't require you to do all of them, and their value is pretty random. Some give plot information in letters, some give maps indicating where the guards will be, where an unguarded entrance is... and some just say where it is that your attempt will take place. All of this information is, ultimately, pointless. Rooftop travel takes care of the need for sneaking around patrols, and since archers can be killed without raising alarm or being noticed by the rest of the town... there's not really a huge benefit to these questionable scraps, although the plot-relevance is quite interesting.

The running around has a few hickups to contend with. Often, when cllimbing, you'll find yourself stymied for no obvious reason. You'll be shimmying your way around a tower to get to the beam you can view from before taking a victory plummet... and you'll be stunned to find that just holding right doesn't have your guy continue moving his hands that way... as he goes under it. So you back up and get a bit more insistant about going up and right... and then when you get to the right spot, he hops and grabs the beam. Quirky. But consistant every time that particular building gets copied in the world. Another one, by the waterfront, although there are handholds on two sides... only one set works, in spite of both being practically identical. I suspect the design of each building includes a very detailed map of routes for the myriad climbing options... explaining why one little vertical "hop" could go missing on the tower that's used only twice.

The copy & paste scenery also provides a few useful tips. When you find something that's unique... you know that's where the showdown shall hide.

Oh, yes, I almost forgot... the most fiddly bit of the movement controls. Jumping.

For 99% of the game, you will not give a single thought to how you are going to jump from one building to the next. We've come a long way from tomb raider, and now we get to have the player character's AI determine how far to jump. You hold down the "high profile" button and the "legs" button to set yourself into the right sort of adrenaline-soaked frenzy needed to scale a vertical wall in seconds, while rocks are thrown at you.

It's that remaining % that mocks you like the final hidden collectible flag in a city the size of a CITY. The issue is, the game keeps jumping managable on an analog stick by not having it be anything resembling 360 degrees of motion. It's more like chunks of 15-20 degrees. This isn't obvious for the most part, as the cities have mostly everything in good positions for jumping from one awning's edge to someplace useful... and if you end up on the street, it's correctible, and may even have landed you by a good hiding place.

But it's a "can't swim" game, and there's posts that stick out of the water... and the game has no qualms about letting you drown in eerily calm liquid death because when you thought you were pushing the round stick perfectly straight up in the round socket of your controller, you were actually off by 5-10 degrees so you clearly intended to commit suicide instead of jumping to the nice dry bit of wood placed as a proper boating hazard and assassin's highway. Granted, the one area where I was approaching the mark's ship by the waterway, there was a point where I goofed, and was spotted, and a quick death was the easy way to get a retry without spending 10 min trying to not die and not let the target escape... and the other 10-15 tries were exercises in severe frustration as I somehow nail a jump to a 6" post from a 25' platform 10' away... but miss the next one in a line that's only an 8' jump. This is an amazingly poor setup considering how polished the movement is in the rest of the game. I actually couldn't jump off a castle wall anywhere but the safe place... so I know the game was capable of it, but the designers chose to be dicks. I can't imagine this watery grave issue never came up in testing.

Lets see, I've covered the running, the jumping, the climbing, the fighting... the investigating... what else isn't obvious from the hype? Oh, right, the sidequests.

There's a few collection quests that run through the game. Kill all templars. Collect all flags. (awkward pause) Oh, that's about it. There's 60 templars and 420 flags. And the reward for completing these... um. There doesn't seem to be one. I guess you could count the gamerscore... if you're high, or stupid enough to care. Look, we put up with this pokemon crap in GTA games because they unlock weapons that make it more than slightly worthwhile. A frustrating search in exchange for something to take out frustration with, and to make the rest of the game a lot smoother. Not to say there's no in-game benefit here. The flags do seem to count as one-time checkpoints and health-restoral. Of course, you normally regenerate health, so this isn't a really big deal except in very special emergencies.

The voice acting is... decent enough. As you run around, you get to be cursed at in french, russian, german... etc... not all things are translated into english, which gives you a nice feel as you are around different types of troops in the world and cities. You also get to hear the town criers trying to recruit people to the armies... stirring but three-statement speeches that repeat indefinitely... but you'll never complain much about them. Really, they're more like a landmark. "Ah, I must be near that square, I hear an orator." Just as "I hear chanting, I must be standing on a church"... but you will consider massive acts of violence against the beggars, and the beavis & butthead impersonators (drunks & madmen who push you around a bit).

The plot goes a long way to explaining a fair amount of odd gameplay elements. You're not playing the part of the assassin, you are playing the part of his descendant, caught by a covert group, strapped into a device that allows replaying of genetic memories. But it's in beta, so to view the memory of a very important map your ancestor saw, you have to relive a significant chunk of his life. So you're playing a game, as a character forced to play a game. It does explain why you can't get to certain areas before it's time... and there's a big blue wall in place to represent this computer's inability to load that terrain. You're not the assassin, you're approximating his memories to prompt the next memories. While this setup goes a long way towards explaining away the staples of gaming, it's a bit of mixed bag for immersion. Still, it's honest about what's going on, and it works more often than not.

The chapters are broken up by getting to interact in the "real world" with your captors. As you learn more about the ancient events, you get told a little more about current events. The plot is decent, but it's also very obviously intended as the first part of a series.

I hate that, because it means the metaplot is going to take a VERY long time to go anywhere, at the rate of game development, we could see the next installment sometime around when the mayan calendar rolls back over to zeros. It's also the type of metaplot that doesn't necessarily go anywhere. There's artifacts hidden around the world, with great power to them. Some want to rule the world with that. Reminds me of a number of tv action serial plots. It's the sort of plot that can be drug out if the game gets popular, to milk it to death, so that you don't get real resolution until the last half-hour of the last of the series. It's not bad, by any means, but it's not special... and the "current events" were kept so damnably vague that future installments can take whatever direction they like.

The events in the holy land were well strung-together, in spite of half of the revelations delivered by dying men taking their sweet time at croaking. That part is exactly as advertised... and includes hiding the background completely, so that you're not interrupted. The guards evidently let you have a nice chat with their boss after you've fatally stabbed him before charging in for revenge and justice and whatnot. There were some very good moral arguments presented and I do enjoy some thought-provoking discourse instead of pure congratulatory ego masturbation. Of course, you get some that too as you rescue townsfolk so they'll abuse guards you trail through their neighborhoods to give you a short headstart on a hiding place.

And, of course, the advertised bit about taking down your mark any way you choose... is a total fabrication. You cannot even get close to the memory of the assassination while pursued. You cannot throw a knife from a distance and be done with the fight. You cannot pick the location of the fight worth a spit. You can choose whether to be sneaky and clever or bullheaded. And you can choose your weapon. You are boned for pretty much the rest of it, getting one cutscene beforehand and then being permitted to move into position. You have discretion over your route after the cutscene... and that's about it for choice.

To sum up: It's pretty until you've played a few hours and see how much set reuse they got away with. It's still got pretty damned good level design, as you have a lot of options for how you leap about, and you never "just miss" a jump in town.

The metaplot is interesting until you discover that there's no real payoff. There were a couple of hidden messages, and if you worked at it a bit, you could get into your captor's e-mails for some information about the world. The ancient plot is much better written, acted, and doesn't rely on future installments that may never come and could be less enjoyable.

The combat and running around is good, even enjoyable. Pretty intuitive interface, although I had some problems with having the sword equipped from the last fight when I wanted to make a stealth kill with the hidden blade. The icons there just are not different enough.

The gameplay doesn't have you worrying about pickups for anything non-plot related... with the exception of throwing knives. But since they're one-shot kills, and you pickpocket large angry men in towns for more, it's really not a problem, and not tracking that would be too imbalanced to be fun as you would simply snipe everything.

However, in addition to the world being made of copy&paste buildings (although artfully placed for maximum utility and least obvious copying), the challenges themselves are really heavily repeated. Tower climbing in every area to fill in the map and find investigation points and folks in need of rescue... "Ah, you saved someone! Now do that about 25 more times in *this* town..." "Oh, you liked climbing that tower? We've got about 80 more just like it! Well, actually, three precisely like it, the rest are just thematically similar." Once I got 99 flags out of a hundred for a town and could swear up and down that I'd not really missed any, I stopped merely questioning why I was trying to get them at all, and gave up on them entirely... dropping the time taken for a given area from a matter of hours to a matter of hour. This explains why this stupid flag quest is in the game at all, it's to pad out the content into a more solid length than the modern game normally bestows on its purchaser. Still, it's stunningly optional, so I've none to blame but myself for trying.

The first two days I played this game, I thought it was excellent, with forgivable and understandable design choices and interesting gameplay. The last day... I was just going through the motions for the sake of the story, and finding some of the design choices a lot more bland and boilerplate than when I started.

The areas in which the game excels are the plot of the ancestors, which is the meat of the game... the running, and the combat. I can't give full marks to the running not only for the fiddly jumps over the H2O lava, but also the inability to adequately handle running to a usable hiding place. At one point, with the city after me as a result of a successful mission, and needing to hide before getting into the safehouse undetected... I discovered I'd actually traversed the entire map before getting far enough ahead of pursuit to get into a decent hiding spot. The blue dots for hiding holes on the compass don't help because they lack height information. And they don't show on the map. The compass doesn't show anything about terrain. So you can either memorize the city layout or run like hell 'till you get lucky. Or stand and fight. The combat, again, is pretty well balanced, considering that you're one man taking on a dozen soldiers at a time and thinking it's fair odds.

I'm certain this isn't for everyone, and I'm going to recommend renting before buying. If you can tolerate the flaws, it's got a rich, thought-provoking story in there, in spite of having a wrapper that smells like neverending schlock sci-fi adventure.

Changes, they be a comin'

Sat, 06 Oct 2007 13:22:58 GMT

Will wonders never cease? http://www.rgtr.com/community/community_news/operation_0_fair_trade.html Looks like my notion for making the crafting system... fun... will happen.

Yaaaay.

Of course, I still don't think I'll be falling in love with this game. It's not bad, and I'd probably enjoy playing through to the end-game once. But after that?

I'm an old-school gamer, and I like meat on my character systems. Tabula Rasa has 3 main stats that don't have direct value, they just overlay the health, mp, and regen rate stats. The rest is skills. Most of which are worthless. And almost none of which are essential. I've gone for a distressing number of levels without spending a skill point. And not regretting it. There's only 2-3 low-level ones that matter, anyway.

And there's not much sense of accomplishment. You're doing low-level quests to open up chains, which there's nothing wrong with, but when the end reward is a wholly useless bit of armor and a mumbled "thanks"...

Not that I expect a lot better of Age of Conan. But there's a level of roleplaying available in that universe that I can't subscribe to in a near-future military wartime climate. All I can do in Tabula Rasa is to be myself. Which gets stressful as heck when 500 people in the course of an hour individually request in the main chat, a little advice on how to do something that the game itself just told them how to do in the intro.

It's the fact that good roleplay would, socially, be a method to build empires... that I like. I can picture running an org in character. Couple characters, really. Maybe I just feel more comfortable with what is good in life. ;)

TANSTAAFL

Thu, 20 Sep 2007 13:23:18 GMT

My nose plugs up only in the worst of illnesses. Been that way since I finished up puberty. This means those little colds and flus we all get leave me pretty functional and breathing clearly. Granted, I'm blowing my nose a lot, but I think most of what makes you utterly miserable during a cold is that inability to breathe.

Of course, this makes it just a bit hard to tell when I am sick. This is the tradeoff. I do tend to have low moods now and then, but they don't usually last more than a couple days.

So, I feel mad when I discovered, after a fabulous teriaki shrimp meal, that I was sick. Biiiiig blob of phlegm slid out of the sinuses, and towards the taste buds. Salty. More than you wanted to know, I bet. But I knew right then, most of my symptoms the last couple days... I wasn't losing my mind, I was just catching something. And I felt mad because I feel like I should have known better... but how was I going to spot it, really?

Of course, this particular revelation came after I'd walked across half the mall's parking lots for my errands. Gorgeous day, I need the exercise...

But I didn't know I was sick.

Joint pain will be my day's companion... but I know I'm not losing my mind, and I can live with that. So, weird as it is, it's an improvement.

Tabula Rasa revisited

Wed, 19 Sep 2007 09:24:34 GMT

No major changes yet to the game model, I'm afraid. But I have gotten a few more levels, and bought the bigger armor... and can say a lot of my balance dissatisfaction has been with the advertised "flatter" power curve. As soon as I accepted that this is a total lie, I started figuring out how the system actually works.

Basically, as far as your ability to take damage goes, there's not a lot there. You have hp, determined by your stats, but since everything goes through armor first, and you have a few times the armor that you have health... it's not terribly important. Your armor points are based on your equipped armor. Simple enough. There are 2 restrictions on armor. 1) Your level must meet minimum requirements. 2) You must have 1 point placed in the relevant armor skill, mostly separated by class. Thus... it is your equipment that does the fighting, your character is just along for the XP to unlock the better gear. Well, mostly.

Levelling up and buying new gear is actually quite cost-effective, in terms of the upgraded damage and endurance, although gear acquired this way does lack any enchantment bonuses.

Now, to recap, it feels like the balance point is "I can kill something [my level +4] or less." That's a grotesque oversimplification, but, barring complications with boss mobs, it'll do.

This means the game is playable, with some detours to perform about every sidequest, so you can get the xp and level, to wear the gear that can fight the menace.

I hit level 10, which brought on this particular need to update. This grants permission to use the lowest set of modification recipes. It's not entirely clear from the tooltips how this works, and the tutorial is presently placeholder text. But I've listened a lot on the general and global chatter. At first glance, it looks like a robust system, you get a modification recipe, it says what type of item and what the upper level bound it works at is... which, unfortunately, is also the level you can use it at, and it looks like they are in 5 lv groupings. This is silly, of course, and likely to be changed within the first year. It does state clearly that you can modify equipment ONCE. That's fine. The cost to beef them is more than purchasing a vanilla model at the shops anyway.

Except that you cannot *add* a bonus with this system.

It only modifies existing bonuses.

Granted, the improvement you get out of this is really quite nice. Took an armor regen bonus from +8% to twenty-something. That's one of the more useful bonuses you can get in this system. But this means that after 10 levels of collecting recipes, I could only use about 10% of them. I couldn't add functionality to any of my gear. I could only take 1 of up to 4 existing benefits and improve that... if it was the right type of gear. But it's such a nerf of what could be a fun system to work with, with the entirely sane "one-modification per item" limit.

Penumbra: Overture...

Mon, 10 Sep 2007 12:40:25 GMT

I've just played through Penumbra: Overture against my better judgement. The gameplay did exceed my expectations.

The box tells me it's a horror adventure game, with the first person perspective. So immediately, I think of Call of Cthulhu and think it will have fewer weapons. The designers seem very proud of their physics engine. Suggests some interesting puzzle styles will be possible. The thing I fear though, on this box, is where it is the first of a trilogy.

Some of you don't immediately leap to the same conclusion I do. Some of you don't overanalyze your fiction. In a horror tale, the first part is the setup. In which things start normal and get worse. In which NO answers are given, only questions. The aim of the first part is to set you up, and get your attention.

Now realize, in the game industry, sequels normally come out every 2-3 years. You can maintain interest in some genres that way. In horror, you forget things. A little distance makes for a lot less impact. Pacing is everything in horror.

I was skeptical of the physics engine's benefit to the story. Boy oh boy was I ever wrong. You pick up something heavy and you move slower. Objects have weight, and inertia. Woo hoo! To open a drawer, you grab it with the mouse and you slide it open. Doors swing the same way. Levers that most games just have you poke, this one, you grab, and you pull.

Puzzles are based on physical issues. "How the heck do I get over there?" One sliding block puzzle was using a ramp to stack a couple crates I couldn't lift (but could drag) to reach a ladder... well, part of a ladder I'd managed to hook back into place. In a couple places, I had to drag things to obvious locations where they'd snap into place. My favorite would be wrestling barely movable boulders to block off spider-infested tunnels. When slid home, they very nicely indicate this with a bit of dust around the edges.

The graphics are not as stellar as some more robust powerhouses, but the ambiance is extremely effective. Some spots have barely audible whispering... which grows louder throughout.

As with most adventure games, there were points where I did have to look up a little help. To operate a heavy machine, I needed to give it some gas. When I used the tank, it said no, the gas cap was rusted. So I'm trying everything on the machine to unstick the cap... I was certain I'd not missed anything, so I check gamefaqs... turns out, the text was referring the gas can's cap.

The writing in the scraps of text you find is, as one would expect for folks working and/or trapped in wonky surroundings, a little disturbed. It works nicely to tell you that the place is dangerous.

And... it is, too. You're pretty squishy. Spiders and dog-beasts can kill you in about 3-4 hits. Not counting very lethal environmental concerns. But you do recover over time. There's also painkillers to take you back up to tip-top shape in a hurry. Good idea to load them in your toolbar, along with what passes for weapons in this game.

Nothing brings home the nervousness like a total lack of real weapons. Of course, improvised weapons and heavy hurled objects do seem to work decently well. The fact remains that everything in the game has an easier time killing you than you would killing it.

The closest thing to ammunition you find in this game is beef jerky. But throwing around pungent meat products is a nice way to herd prawling critters. In the mid-game, there's large storage containers you can lure them into... and then push a crate up against the door to seal them in. This never occured to me after the first one in the game broke down an extremely flimsy door and the barrel I dragged over to block it.

For good gameplay, while the game doesn't give you total control over save points, they have very creepy arifacts that function as save points, and your character gets glimpses of events that may or may not have happened already. And a sense the device contains a piece of him. A copy. A bad copy. Many of them. I'm amused by his worry around them. The game also autosaves at very appropriate times. Entering a new zone, getting through a particular dangerous part... right before you inadvertantly stumble into the deathtrap... one spot, I'd set up a fairly tricky stepping stone involving a crane, to reach a vent, to go around a deathtrap. The autosave in there made me realize that it was possible to drop down to another vent, which would force me to backtrack and be annoyed. Also, the game autosaves (with a white and orange fullscreen flash) when you snag a vital tool in a location nowhere near a save point. Thus, while you may be killed in such an area, you have no worries about leaving a vital tool behind due to save/restore alzheimers. (That's the gaming condition where you saved the game, explored, found a secret stash of goodies, got killed, and when you reloaded, went after the monster, and forgot about the stash.)

There's decent stealth elements here. And your character is not a fearless person. You crouch in darkness to be stealthy. You hide behind things to keep patrolling monsters from finding you. However, if you look at the monster walking past your position... you're going to freak out a bit and make noise. So you need to look away. It's terribly effective at immersing you in a sense of horror. Because you don't know if you're safe and you're afraid to look.

However, being me, I swiftly discovered that while the weapons are a bit clunky to swing, you can throw barrels, small boulders, and propane tanks with remarkable effectiveness. Injury stuns your little monsterous opponents and when they get back up, you can hit them again. May take 5 applications. Exploding propane or dynamite sticks are slightly more effective. I believe there may be three sticks of tnt for this sort of use. In the entire game.

Granted, there are a bit under 30 spiders. And maybe 10 of the dogs. Less than 15, I'm sure. Actually, you don't face all the spiders in the game. Most are in eggs, and if you wake them, you get hit with several. And, really, any number of foes greater than 1 is really not very survivable.

Still, my pulse was pounding in many segments, and most of it didn't require me to seek assistance (breaking me out of the whole "enjoyment" and "immersion"). Some came close. One segment involved a series of escapes in a spider warren. You crawl past a nest, and block it off with a boulder. Find next nest, run away, light a spilled lamp for a flaming death barrier. Watch spiders run in, laugh... good times. 'course, one did make it across, on fire, and that make me jump... but it died. Then you cross a pit with a couple planks... and I kept dying at the bottom of the long ramp-y tunnel... I eventually found out what was killing me. Indy-jones rolling stone trap! Which wakes the spiders at the bottom, and you run, break down a flimsy barrier, then there's a room, with a support colum, and the path ahead... also blocked by flimsy wall. But this wall is thicker than the last. Turns out, to avoid dying of spiderbites, you need to trigger a cave-in. I did figure this out, but only because nothing else was in the room, and the theme of the area was "cut yourself off to survive going forward." And the little barrier had ensured you'd already have your pick-axe at the ready.

So, the combat was nicely imbalanced, but since it wasn't impossible, and was really quite simple once you figured out the rules of engagement, I found the actual presense of monsters to be far less spooky than their absence. I'm hoping the next game gives more variety, and a little more mix of them with searchable areas. As it was, you had a pretty clear either/or. One section did have you go through a spider zone to get around a barrier, which you could then reposition over the hole to safely check out the area. I like that. Solve the puzzle/combat to get time to slip through. I also had been using the flashlight to deter the spiders in there... which is hairy, but beat fighting something small without throwable weapons. It's good to have options.

Speaking though, of things I'd like to see in the sequals... I come back to my original problem. I was right about the game not actually explaining a damned thing. The whole mining complex you just came through was actually irrelevant. There's some sort of facility in there, established after things got weird. But you don't have clue one about what's down there. Other than a few notes from researchers from there. They're not government. The best bit was the note dated Anno 9000 (anno dominus 1990). Which implies an organization predating the gregorian calendar. But the game ends rather predictably, just past the mighty macguffin door. In a corridor with a shadowy figure at the far end. Your flashlight goes as the lights do, and you get blackjacked.

I did try running down the corridor, switched to the glowstick when the flashlight went out, and was able to determine the shadowy figure... was a one-armed 3d humanoid shape with no features whatsoever.

In the end, I loved the immersion you get with the physics engine. Being able to move things around was a treat. I picked up a corner of a mattress near the end of the game, and it deformed properly. Beautiful, if functionless. But the ambiance is the only truly stellar thing about this game. As I review it mentally, I realize the monsters were dogs with glowing eyes. I remember the silly puzzle of the frozen lake (you just need to move a couple boards around and jump on them to not touch the ice. Yes, that does spread out the force you apply to the ice... but jumping magnifies that. Bad designers, bad!

Many areas are betrayed by a lack of visual polish, although the lighting is quite good... your character does not cast shadow, yet all other objects do.

The worst of course, is that the next 2 in the series aren't out yet. :( Because it was fun for an afternoon, and I didn't spot most of the sillier points 'till after. (Push-button bulkheads only in the one area where you need them? Hmmm.) Either they did the ambiance very very well, or they figured out some impressive tricks with subsonics that get my heartrate up and at the end, gave me goosebumps.

Tabula Rasa's NDA is lifted!

Sat, 08 Sep 2007 06:42:25 GMT

Huzzah! Now I can complain publicly and take no flack! Woot.

Well, let's start with the obvious. It's an MMO. It's set a little ways in the future, after an alien invasion lowers real estate values on earth to the negative. The best and brightest leave, through a portal somewhere in the solar system. We're still fighting the same enemy in a war that's probably outlasted most civilizations. Quite literally, when some worlds get squished.

Kinda bleak, really. But you do get extremely fashionable superhuman powers from, well, alien artifacts. And whatever training you go for. You could have literally... Ten of powers winding from the everyman lightning bolt to cloning yourself and having him fight with you.

So, sci-fi + magic, military culture... although you're more of a special agent than anybody's raw recruit.

Quests range from fetch to find to kill... same ol, same ol'. Although setting up a sonic pest-control device to move a few house-sized herbivores off of an area your people are "mining"... cool. 'cept that there's 2 people in the mine, and one's a forman, one's a surveyor. And the mine is riddled with flying squid they understandably want eliminated. Typical MMO, really. But it's nice to see the NPC herbivores shuffle away from the danger point.

There do exist quests that are exclusive. You have choices to make once you've taken these quests. One guy is running stim powder to some friends. You do this, you get paid. And these guys with long shifts, or just plain joneses (you try getting a coffee bean extract on an alien planet) are quite appreciative. Or you hand it over to the guys commander, and the fellow's in KP for pinching medical supplies. Talk to him after, and he's quite certain the stuff went to the officer's mess.

A draft-dodging alien was another quest. I let him go. The alien who sent me on the quest wrote a nasty letter for me to take to the CO. Who said "Yeah, I'd have done the same. Good work. We're not their police, and our alliance really doesn't need the stress."

Supposedly, these will come back to haunt you later, one way or another. No way to tell as of yet. But it should keep things interesting.

That's the good. There's a good setting, and the quests are fairly interesting. One instance had a smashed research center you needed to clear out and recover the data from. Had an intro video and everything. Beautiful.

Now the not-so-good.

It's unplayable. Gameplay balance is horribly broken. You wade through tons of mook soldiers, no fear whatsoever for your health from anything normal. Then you hit some mortars. They do no more damage to you than a normal mob, but they're heavily armored. The fastest way to kill one is to walk up to it, crouch, and stick your EMP rifle down the barrel while it's filling your screen with the direct hits it's sorta plinking at you with. Fire about 30-40 times. Switch to lightning mostly to keep its armor from regenerating while your barrel cools. Then crouch and finish the job. I wish to god I was joking.

There is supposed to be some eight types of damage. You will, initially, be incapable of doing much with regards to half of them. There are grenades, and they can do whatever type of damage you need. But they're expensive, and they're not a lot better.

Everything in the game has health, and nearly everything has armor. In prior beta, the armor was complex. It had a pool of "health" that could be depleted, leaving all further damage to health. It had bleed-through, meaning it didn't stop the first few points. It had max absorbtion, indicating that if you got hit by a tank, it'd soften the blow, but you would be feeling it. I liked this system. It felt mostly realistic. Although it did make the chaingun a bit powerful, since the bleed-through and rate of fire meant armor was largely irrelevant.

Bleed-through was removed last patch. This means, this close to release, they're cutting features that will take too much time to properly implement. Unfortunately, this means you have the fast-regenerating armor pool that's about 3-10 times the health of the critter... and you have to get through ALL of it. It's a little wierd to smack a shield bot with an emp rifle... and basically blow its armor off.

But, if the mortars weren't enough of a pain to take down, there's overseers. Boss mobs by any other name. Heck, they've actually got names. And they have slightly less durability than an entrenched mortar. But they also have better guns. Ones that can wear you down a bit faster than they can be killed.

Scaling doesn't feel right with these guys. And it gets far more obvious when you stumble upon the lv 13 overseers having a party along the north edge of the first map. A 200+ point shot is... absorbed. Their armor bar takes a tiny nibble and recovers pretty quick. I was shooting at one with another fellow and together, before it was able to kill us, I think we'd gotten its armor down a quarter. Which would seriously leave it feeling vulnerable for... gosh... seconds, really.

So there's that wierd imbalance. There's others. There's a flying attack bot. "predator" class. Most effective thing against it is definitely lightning. But only from behind. Yep, positional modifiers. It's the difference between almost tying the regeneration and taking a third of its armor out. Which means they're not hard to kill if you have a teammate. But solo, they're impossible. Joy.

Combat really feels like an intense chore. And this is while paying no attention to the fact that the enemy often teleports into position whether or not they dropship animation runs beforehand or not. So, it's futile, but it's also a lot of work. Most weapons don't have a percievable effect on large nuisances. I know, MMO, "Thou Shalt Team"...but that doesn't stop those fights from being work.

There's also some severe camping issues, in spite of the instancing. Recent reset of all characters gave a fantastic example of what opening day will consist of. Past the training instance, you're sent into a cave to get one of the logos characters... imprinted or whatever. They unlock abilities, they give you backstory elements, they presumably give you hints later on... good stuff. But they can also only be used by one person at a time. Having 8 instances doesn't really fix the issue if they're all half-full of people who need to be in the same place. There's still a line.

Thankfully, the group showed marvellous skill at queuing. lined up around the corner in that tunnel, full of jokes and humor and sending the devs a screenshot or two. But then, we were on the UK server for the stress test, and I think this maaaay have indicated a problem with that stupid one-at-a-time rule on those devices. 'course, the effects also play twice. And are audible at solid volume for quite a distance. But those are bugs I know they will fix, so I don't fret much.

The world's nice, the interface is a hair rough. The profanity filter defaults to "on" but, military speech sometimes gets a bit blue. The filter works on the mission descriptions. And that level of censorship feels awfully... well, Paranoia. This amuses me, but it just means you have to turn it off to enjoy the game.

Well, as much as you can. In the long run, the devs have five weeks to take this nearly-finished game and achieve some semblance of game balance. I don't think they can.

Weapon and armor are equippable depending mostly on level. You can get another +40% power out of them by training them all the way. That sounds good, but remember, if it taks you 90 shots to drop a rhino, and you got +50% damage, it'd take you 60 shots. But with regen being what is in this thing... it could certainly take you over the threshold of ineffectiveness and take the ammo required for some beasts from infinity down all the way to a hundred. Too bad your gun will overheat.

And that's really my problem when playing this thing. I feel like all the improvement just gets you past that threshold of being able to wear down a regenerating foe. It sucks. It's amazingly painful. You hate the one critter in a playfield of most MMOs that has vast regeneration, and understandably so. Now just up that % drastically, and you'll see my displeasure.

And, really, it bugs me that this is where the game is at. The graphics are fantastic. Being in a gawdsawful line of PCs didn't induce any serious slowdown whatever hiccups are occuring with the last patch appear to be independant. The story is decent, the mission names adorable (kill the egg-laying miasma squids in the cave... "Mama Miasma!") and you can earn titles from little accomplishments. Kinda hard to see 'em tho. You actually need the subject in your sights, as this system doesn't do floaty-names that I can see.

But the gameplay. The core balances of combat... this is the area where they're down to the wire and cutting features like bleed-through, and need to tweak like hell to get something workable by release. And this is the least polished element. This worries me. Frustrates me. I don't think I will bother playing 'till they patch it again, because it's Not Fun.

Two things are key in all MMOs. Walking and combat. In that order. There are waypoints and dropships... basically functioning as the usual MMO subway systems. They're fast, but they only work if you've walked to the other one. And you have to walk to the nearest one to hop a lift to another... so while they save you some time, you walk to them, you walk from them. You walk like a mofo. You can sprint, but that's fueled by adrenaline, gained from killin'. and it's short burst only. Well, you can dump skill points in it. And improve base speed with motorized armor, and points in that to get the benefit up from 1% per gear to 5%. So, 25% speed increase for 15 skill points. Yeah. Can't wait. But it's not bad, normally. It's hostile territory, and there's not really that much terrain. It's far from claustrophobic. I ain't complainin' about this specific one, just saying walking kinda blows in pretty much all MMOs.

So, the combat is poor enough to erode the success of most of these elements. What else was there... oh, right, crafting.

Crafting sucks.

Oh, you want more, of course. Well, there's crafting skills needed to use recipes from certain fields. Medical, optics, forcefield, explosive. That's it. Anything else is an everyman item. You pick up recipes very frequently. Usually for paint colors. In case you wanted to adjust your color scheme a bit. Recipes are one-use. So, while you have a recipe to turn 250 1-credit nucleotides into 100 3-credit purine nucleotides... I have enough basic math skills to know that what I picked up is a goddamn coupon for 50 credits off of purchasing 100 of these worthless pieces of scrap. They power an ability, but it's not a common one. It's stupid, because you can buy these anywhere.

You can also get recipes to modify gear. Make that shotgun armor-piercing... however that's supposed to work. These recipes make sense to be one-shot. You put it together at the crafting table, and you pay a lot of money, and your temporary weapon ('cause who's going to keep it more than a few levels anyway?) has a permanent boost. Nearly all quest rewards have some + to something. So, really, it's like paying 1-2x the going rate for the plain vanilla version in order to get the added juice. Too bad 90% of it has almost no useful effect. But, like I said, there's no game balance yet.

Ah well. If it doesn't pick up, I just won't buy it. I figured the $5 pre-order would be a dandy price for what amounts to a game rental. :)

Con pics!

Wed, 05 Sep 2007 05:59:21 GMT

http://www.flickr.com/photos/12715864@N06/ :) Gee. And I got the photos handled the day I got back. Well, actually, it's past midnight. I'm still counting it!

Con Cluded

Wed, 05 Sep 2007 01:02:58 GMT

Survived another Dragon*Con. But with about half the usual group. And without a cellphone, kinda hit & miss for being able to hang out while attending things. Ah well, got some good swag, learned some good tips, met some nice peeps. Acquired some nice pics too. And I will gladly post them somewhere, once someone recommends a spot. Hah, I bribe you to comment! :D

Wed, 25 Jul 2007 17:53:05 GMT

Ok, I've just about finished up the 10-day trial on D&D Online. Time to put down some of my thoughts in writing.

I've done a little research, and found out the game has improved significantly since its inception. I'd had some trouble initially figuring out how to reply to a tell. I wound up finding a couple ways. If the subject is in sight, and you target them, there's a /tell button. You can click on the name in the chat window. You can type "/r " when you hit space, it'll say "/tell namehere " and you can get on with typing your message without having to stop and doublecheck if Brunhildegartenvaard used two As or three. Looks like the click option wasn't there from the outset. Clever thing, expecially if two people /tell you at once and you want to reply to the first one.

Especially with fantasy naming conventions.

The naming in this game is predictably bad. In my case... I just shouldn't have access to surnames. My cleric is Lastin Fiirstought. My thief (I am NOT calling them rogues. Why is another rant.) is Nohai. Nohai N'teem. Why do I have these names? Because the first 15 I thought up were taken.

The easy names are gone. So when I see a guy that's playing a lv 8 paladin "ineedtodance" I can't automatically assume that he's a fool. You pick your name at the beginning and end of chargen in this game, and that's bad. Either way. But it doesn't check if you got a unique until the end. It's the final choice. And the first unique entry you make is what gets taken. If you were kidding, well, your choices are "delete" or "play".

I just find it stunning that there is a surname option, but it's window dressing. Your first name is all that will matter, it's the username.

If you play a game that's been around long enough, you'll even find that the random name generator, if it has one, while able to give you something appropriately close to pronuncibility, can no longer give you a unique ID in ten tries. After all, there's not only one username to a player... there's 5-12 characters to the account. And most of these games keep inactive accounts on file for years.

The LFG options at this point... work about how I expect. The who panel shows you everyone and lets you set yourself a comment, including the option to be anonymous. I found that quite nice when I was trying to make a few decisions about enhancements to load after conducting a test on a bit of language. "+1... but I don't have the proficiency... does it give proficiency? Evidently not. Respec!" The comments section for most here seems to be a fairly constant netiquette reminder. "/tell before invite". As if this is going to stop the sort of person so uncouth as to suggest that interpersonal interaction take a backseat to recruiting warm bodies as fast as possible.

Another tab has friends, one for the org, and the group looking for members panel. So if you want to find a group in your range that has open slots, you can send the leader a /tell. Woot. Comments here are quite informative. "Running low-level quests in harbor on elite for the favor." "Tanglewoods dungeon." "Necropolis, full run."... which, if you know where those locations are... is useful info.

My usual method of joining a team is to be trying to figure out what I *can* do next and getting a /tell. "Want to do sjk?" "Sure! Sounds fun. Whazzat?" "Uh, seal of jorak-krull" "Hmm, where at?" "The sewers, southeast marketplace." "Ohhh! Be right there." And everybody in the conversation knows I'm a noob.

The quest system... mixed bag. And part of the reason I come across as a bit underinformed. You can take every quest. At the same time. Some are chains and you pretty much have to run them one stage at a time. Like a series of dungeons. Or one dungeon you visit about five times with further doors accessible, and varying victory conditions. More on this in a bit. But the main method of looking up where you are on a quest is a screen that divides up the quests by the location of the NPC you get them from. This is painful if you're trying to browse. It's also where you find the names of quest chains. The one that you can arrange alphabetically, by level, by faction, or by highest difficulty you personally have completed it on, has the individual dungeon quests. Most annoyingly, "The" isn't skipped in the alphabetical listing, so you have to look twice to be sure.

Gods, that offends my inner librarian.

Last group I joined up with for a full chain... gawds. "Where are you guys?" and no less than three people said "In the inn."

Now... this is a very D&D world. Like, it's got... uh, taverns. 2-3 per zone in town. The areas centered around quest chains like that one each have one. This isn't like WoW where you can say "I'm at the train station" and the worst anybody will misunderstand is to go to the wrong end.

But I've had more good interactions with people than bad. I've also been on the UK servers. Which seem to get patched when a major content update comes out, but not the minor ones. :\

Now the wierd stuff.

You cannot solo in D&D. There's quests with solo difficulty settings all lowbie quests, which may or may not be possible to get through with a given character. I got a cleric through a thief-tailored one. The idea was to steal a gem from a warehouse full of kobolds. One enemy type was off-limits for killing. They're the guards. I... being me... quickly determined this was not strictly speaking a stealth mission. There just happened to be 10-15 weak kobolds that you couldn't kill more than 5 without failing the level. Bunch of switches to flip tho.

Shields up. It's a training exercise. Down the hall, flip the lever, run through the sleeping kobolds, flip that lever, down to the end, flip the last one. Back in main hall. Left, run full tilt to the next intersection, get the door open... stun the shaman, pop that switch, back the other way... my but that is a LOT of kobolds I'm pulling. Back to the loop near the entrance to get a little headstart back. Flip lever... now it's easy. I just have to flip two switches for *that* gate. Jump down, run back, flip one... ok... there's 4 violent ones down there interrupting me... loop back, jump again, AI won't jump if it'll get hurt. Primary law of AI coding for self-preservation. I've got a one-way barrier that buys me TIME. Flip flip, grab... say, now I've WON. I can teleport out if I can get about 10 seconds... and now that I've hit victory conditions... game doesn't care if I massacre the little guys.

So, "winning" gets a bit iffy. Not all scenarios are even possible to beat tho. One area, you have two paths. One's a locked door. The other's a valve that takes high strength to pop open. Bull's Strength buff, but... man. That's my first clue that some things just cannot be done.

Most missions have things that can't be handled at all by most players. There's the valves that take strength, runes that take intelligence, locks that take rogues... traps that take rogues... there's NPCs (rare as hell) that take social skills. I've only seen one of those tho. Kobold leader you had to intimidate.

The really wierd thing, given all this? I haven't had a really bad teaming experience. Only a couple points got kinda hairy. One was my fault, I confess. Another in the same dungeon, I pulled bacon from fire.

Part of it's the loot system. Everybody wins. Part of it's the XP system. Everybody wins. So, staying close to your party members and keeping them alive... keeps you alive. Going solo isn't really an option. So even a slow party is faster game progress than no party.

I do like the way the updating seems to be going. The company is making no secret of the fact that it's trying to add content almost monthly. Not just patches. New areas, quests, the whole nine yards. Makes it feel like you'd be paying for more game every month.

Ugly things here... D&D itself was never supposed to be a perfectly balanced system. But the dice used were appropriate for their purpose. Monsters had a constant hit dice that suggested how nasty they should be in a straight fight. It was their level, their hp... vital figure. It was also appropriate to the weaponry. Small weapons did d4. mediums for d6. Hefty single-handers kinda stopped at d8, larger were two-handers. But the idea was, with a d10 hit die, you could pretty readily state how many blows a critter could withstand.

D&DO... has broken this. Just a tad. The players have 20 bonus HP just for being such fun-lovin' guys. The monsters have, at the higher difficulties, a hundred bonus hp. Not kidding. I've counted up the damage during a zombie fight on the higher difficulties. On normal difficulty, couple levels above the dungeon difficulty, I could destroy undead with my turning. Not the tough ones, just the cannon fodder. That's about right. Hard mode. The cannon fodder can be turned. Nothing can be outright destroyed. Ok. Elite, which raises the difficulty 2 levels... I'm still 1 level over the adventure. I can't turn anything. I've got nine charges of "pretty light show". I did specialize so I could damage any undead with a turn undead charge. I hit that nine times and the cannon fodder that was adjacent to me is dead! And anything else is... well, mostly dead. And has finished chewing up my pet. And is headed my way. Gulp.

It's a scaling problem, and it looks like they've erred. These areas should really have more undead. Bigger undead are supposed to be a serious problem. Ordinary zombies scale by applying them in greater numbers. It's zombie horror, you use large numbers. If you want to make it really interesting, take a horde of normal zombies and throw in a few really nasty specimens among them. Then, when your cleric wades in and blasts away, he gets surrounded by the nasties. Now your healer is in trouble. That's drama.

So... right now, this game has the casters very gimped. Crowd control works pretty well, and I save my groups massive headaches by keeping an aoe stun equipped. One large crowd or two small ones? For the cost of one healing spell?

It's also wierd to have the favor system reward someone the most for doing the same job multiple times with a large group. But if one guy pulls it off solo, there's almost no credit given.

And, in violation of convention, I'm going to end with miscellaneous tidbits, rather than the big scaling thing that will be chasing me off of paying money 'till this game gets overhauled. Probably in about nine to fifteen months.

XP is given for quest completion, it's also given for optional goals, but these minor rewards are given on the spot. The quest reward is modified by certain percentages. Like, highest level character in party vs quest level. +/-10%/level difference. Critters: 0 slain gives a 10% bonus. Usually impossible. Slaying vast amounts can yield up to a 20% bonus. I think we're all cool with this proposition. Secret doors: up to 10% for finding all of them. Traps, up to 10% for disarming... most of them. Breakables, up to 10% for smashing them.

Ok, slaughtering the denizens of these cavernous crawlways and getting rewarded more... cool. None of these are really kid-safe. You're cleaning up the neighborhood. Secret doors, you're making sure you're not missing parts of the dungeon... plus, they usually have rewards inherant. Like another rest shrine, or a treasure chest... or the off-switch for that trap that's about to spring. Or a mini-boss and his pet lackeys. Maybe all of the above. Ok, I can see making a larger reward for that level of thoroughness. And disabling traps helps anybody else... it's the moral thing to do.

But crates and barrels.

Giving XP.

These things contain, so far as I can tell, some silver coins... copper, rarely a potion... occasional stacks of vanilla missiles. Oh, and 75% of the time, or better, they have nothing. Why would decreasing the number of usable storage containers in the world grant xp?

But they don't fight back, and while they could alert nearby enemies with the noise... they're nearby, they already heard you. So, no risk, +10%xp reward... most teams will smash these things like OCD patients whose parents got eaten by mimics. Not a bad backstory, but silly. I'd rather play A monk than play Monk.

Tue, 17 Jul 2007 17:56:39 GMT

So, my buddy sheerdark pointed out the free trial on D&D online. Obviously, as a veteran junkie of MMOs, and being an RPG geek, I had to join in. Of course, first try, I get the US version, and he's in Europe, where there's another version. Not a big deal, I guess. Fixable, with another 1.7gb download, and another hour of patching after. And sacrificing another e-mail to the great gods of Free Trials.

So, once on the right server, I take advantage of my first two characters and forge a human cleric. The dwarven one wasn't bad, but I figured out how to get more milage out of the extra feat than any minor racial modifier. But I'll get to that.

First, if you've no idea how d20 D&D works... um. Wow. Why on earth are you reading my LJ?

d20 is based on rolls from a twenty-sided die. This means all modifiers translate to 5% per point. +3 = +15%. This covers skill rolls, attack rolls, and "save" rolls. The latter is when you are trying to resist an effect.

Damage uses different dice. It varies by weapon.

If you're very familiar with d20, great... but your only real advantage is knowing the feat system. And knowing what you need to look for when you start figuring out what to customize and what direction.

There are some differences. Quite a few. Big ones. First off, enhancements. These are like feats. Only easier to come by, and point-based. 4 times per level, you get a point to spend on these. Some cost only 1. Some cost up to six. They can be un-equipped... for a price, but it seemed to be less than a good suit of armor. It's the 3-day waiting period before you can do it again that's kinda steep. Similar issue with feats, they can be exchanged at a level-based sum of money best described as exorbitant. Aaand they also require a very valuable tradable rare. And they also get a 3-day waiting period after. Although, a level 1 quest gives you a freebie... so it's not unworkable.

And consider, in the game, the cost of respec doesn't involve bribing the GM with pizza or fellatio. Big plus over the... uh... "Real Life" pen and paper version. Wow. Now there's some recursive abstraction.

So, what the enhancements actually do? They let you customize a LOT more than you'd normally manage in the system. You can grab a couple more points in vital skills, flavored abilities, new powers, and even a couple of modifiers to primary stats. Yay. Some have prerequisites... and of course higher versions require the previous versions... so, technically, almost all of them have prerequisites. Wow fans will get the concept, as it is not dissimilar from the talent trees there. However, it's thinner, and you don't need calculus to figure out the benefits. There's no "% chance to enter Clearcasting state after a critical hit with arcane bash. This makes the next froob missile instant-cast and at no mana cost. Offer void where prohibited, void may swallow lawyers and the remainder of this tooltip."

The most complicated enhancement I've seen? "3% chance for a critical effect of 1.5x damage on elemental spells." It's a pre-req for two lines of enhancements. Its own line adds another 3% each time. The other boosts the multiplier by 0.25 each time. Caps out at 9% and 2.25. You know exactly what it does, and how often it does it. IF you bother with it. There's a few 10% effect boosts to pretty broad categories. For wizards, "Elements (fire/cold)" "Energy (acid/electric)" and "Force". For clerics, heal/harm and light/good. woo.

Now, being me, I did the research and figured out that everybody can, by picking a feat that favors repair skill in some fashion, buy a two-point enhancement to pull out an "iron defender" pet. Yeah, metal doggie golem/bot. According to the interface, it's CR 3. It's also a bit messy. It sprays the target in oil, making it quite likely to fall down... but that's an area effect. Tends to make me fall down too.

I let it solo a few adventures for me. Worked nicely. One was protecting a chest. 15 bandits come over the course of a couple minute to try and smash it and take the item within. Thankfully, they don't swarm all at once, but the pet can handle it quite nicely.

So the system will let you do things that give you pretty spectactular benefits. Of course, there are downsides. I left a mission before Ryo... and it ate him. Bad doggie!

Other changes from stock D&D, while spells *do* have to be memorized... at inns or rest points in dungeons, they're cast with spell points. It's more like if you had a hotbar limit. A starting cleric has 14 lv 1 spells. One, cure light wounds, is pre-loaded. That leaves two spells to load up. Some of these are nice. Some are pointless. Like, inflict light wounds. 1d8+caster level damage... save vs. will for half. 10 spell points. Compare that to Nimbus of Light, which does 1d8+caster level points of light-based damage. No saving throw.

Some are sillier. Like Doom, which, if successful, leaves the target shaken and at -2 on most rolls. It's right next to Cause Fear which, if successful, make the target run away, and if it fails... it leaves the target shaken.

Both are single-target, first level spells. Classic D&D, really.

First level spells cost 10 spell points. Second level is 15. I'm betting 3rd is 20. I started with about 170 spell points. Got another 29 when I levelled. Bought another 20 with an enhancement. That's rather a lot of spellcasting. Everybody seems to get max rolls on hp, and a bonus 20 points just for being a player.

The HP is where this game starts to really differ from "normal" mmos. If you weren't counting the "memorization slots" already. In D&D, if you get hit for 10 points, you say "Ow." Because you are probably starting with under 30, and you MAY eventually get up to 100. Luck pays a biiiig role in combat. In a few fights, I had on very good armor, and was very hard to damage. I was fighting something that was pretty hard to hit. So we'd stand toe to toe and not do a dang thing. It wasn't really a contest tho. I was playing a cleric. I can cast heal on myself... so if I got hit badly, I could recover. Took less than a minute to resolve the fight, and that was mostly due to the number of misses on both sides.

Incidently, I strongly recommend using the auto-attack feature. You can right-click to swing, but for maximum effect, auto-attack will have you swinging about twice as often. Also lets you brace for a fight. I'd seen a spider coming for me, had auto-attack on, targetted it, and then just waited for it to approach. Before it could attack, it was hit, and a small spider doesn't really take two hits from a +1 mace.

Now, a lot of these differences in the game are because you're creating an MMO. Some margin for error is absolutely required because you're not saying "I approach the beast and start using my vorpal salad fork to remove its teeth... rectally." No, you have to actually walk all the way there. When everybody has to do this, the first one into a fight is in for a very painful moment of having the undivided attention of the monster. There is no "I'll cast cure moderate right after I grab some Dew and hit the can." Your healer must be swift.

Now, even if you go to negative HP, death doesn't hit 'till -10. Healing can be done. Almost any player can use a healing kit and get you back on your feet. After that, you need some ressurection. Either hit the button and live again in town, at your "home" tavern, or wait. Even if there's no high-level clerics to ressurect you, your teammates can drag you to a rest point. These have 2 statues. One does ressurections, the other does recharge. So the game is playable almost regardless of party composition. If you're patient, or prepared.

Nice. Now for the pure MMO bits. There's unlockable content. I like that. The least of it was something fairly recently added. A quest to unlock dragonmark feats. A skill bonus and a spell-like ability. Nice stuff. You just have to take a quiz. Get 4-5 questions right, (or try again, no penalty for failure) and you get one feat respec and ALL characters on your account get the dragonmarks unlocked.

You also get to unlock extra character slots for the account, and the Drow race. Glad that's initially reserved. Cuts down on drizzt clones.

Most of these are based on the level of favor you have with the various houses, *cough* *cough* *faction* *cough* Ahem. Sorry, bit of flegm. Favor is based on quests, and their difficulty level. There's 4 difficulty levels, solo/normal/hard/elite. Some quests are solo-only. Some quests don't have a solo difficulty. Finish on normal to unlock hard. Finish hard to unlock elite. Each time, the favor increases.

This does make it a lot more likely that you won't miss any content. However, you're actually obligated to play each adventure about three times, unless you teamed up with someone who'd unlocked elite. This also means that it isn't possible to enter a mission area on the high difficulty level without someone who knows the way. Interesting.

XP is from quests. Complete quests, get xp. Some have optional bonus conditions that give some more xp. And the more stuff that gets done, % modifiers. Mostly, kill a LOT of the enemy, smash anything breakable, find the secrets, disarm the traps.

Some areas, like the sewers, have encounters in set locations. Wipe out the monsters in that encounter, get some xp on the spot. There's also some outdoor exploration available. The one I poked my head into immediately gave me a list of places to find for xp, (with completion bonus), a # of monsters to eliminate for xp (promptly replaced with a higher limit right after) and a few special encounters to try and find. I suppose this is for A) Fun. B) if you'd managed to get a very high-level person to blitz you through a lot of missions, and needed something to do for XP to make up for the XP penalty of overlevelled adventuring.

The whole thing seems built for you to blitz many missions with full groups. Every chest in every mission has a number of items rolled up for each character. No ninja! Well, maybe ninja. The only corpse lootable are collectibles. 3 lousy whatever is worth 1 lousy prize from the collector. Then again, maybe not so lousy. I got a good 12 healing potions that way. 2 mediums is a mid-range item. And a good rare one is something kinda sweet. A rare mushroom got me masterwork chainmail. A friendly kobold is swapping for missiles. 20 masterwork (random type) for the low, +1 for the middle, and +1 anti-reptile for the top. With an extra die of damage and +2 to hit, I'm thinking this is intended to curb the local kobold problem VERY thoroughly.

Only other thing you can snag seems to be a few coins and a few regular missiles from the odd crate. Really worthless stuff in this game's economy.

The economy works, but it feels broken. It just feels wrong to be level 1 and holding plat. I think the plat is worth 10 gold. But... exchange isn't automatic. So you could have hundreds of gold, and a few plat... and need a calculator to figure out exactly how much "money" you have. Copper and silver... anybody's guess. You will never worry about them. You will buy your thieve's tools, or spell components, and stick 'em in the back of your pack. You will buy food and drink at the inn after you get your rear handed to you by a larger number of monsters than you expected. And while they've got their costs... and they do speed recovery... we're talking pretty negligible expenses. It's nice to not sweat the small stuff.

Item repair... not everything gets damaged. Depends on what you're fighting. Badly damaged items seem to end up permanently weaker when repaired. So you will eventually wear out that +1 item. Minor dents get buffed out tho. 3/70 points of durability gone makes me sad, but I still calculate having a +2 or even just a different +1 mace WELL before it goes away. Even if I had to buy a replacement, I could.

Item acquisition... chests, shops, quest rewards, auctions... and something called a pawn shop. It's a store you sell things to for a better price than a normal shop. Only the item then goes in the store's inventory. For another player to buy. It's like an auction-house, only it's game-run, and no-waiting. Interesting idea.

The last thing I want to bring up is probably the best thing about the game. The quest trackers. That's right. Plural. You have two of them. One is the normal sort, which tells you what stage you are at for a given quest, what zone it was assigned in, and what you do next to advance it. The other is special. It has 2 tabs. One tab shows your faction... er, favor with each house or organization. Yeah, ruling factions. The other... shows you EVERY quest you could concievably access at your level, and every quest you've done, and at what difficulty. Also how many points of favor and for what faction. So if you were 2 points from the next reward with the Coin Lords... you could instantly see what quests would help. So maybe you help another guy get through one you've done before, at a higher difficulty level, and you get what you need.

Most games, this sort of database is only available on a website. Never one made or operated by the company. As soon as a game is announced, there's a warcry site created for it. This just cuts out the middleman.

Almost cuts out the middleman. The quests are very nearly inventive, as far as their goals go. Sure, most of it's bog-standard enter the crypt, hit the switches to open the grate to kill the foozle and raid the chest it was guarding. One warehouse, very interesting puzzle. The scroll you are after is in a glowing sphere. The floor around it is a bunch of panels with lines etched in. Using a panel rotates it. One is glowing. You need to turn the panels to make the corner runes all glow. It's not bad. Dead easy, and I'd hate to run it with a large group all trying to... "help". But not bad. Being asked not to destroy the coffins in a spider-infested crypt... also interesting. Trying to get an armored cleric through a stealth mission without killing more than a handful of guards? Uh. Wow. That sucked. I ended up dragging them all around the map in order to have the seconds I needed for the switches.

One mission actually had no combat. Pack of dogs in a sewer had evicted a friendly kobold. Your task, lead 'em to the exit without killing any. It's a whole mission based on PULLING.

So, while not all of the game makes sense, and it's not all fair, it's not extremely solo-able, and it's d20 based... It ain't bad. Heck, if you do ALL the quests on their hardest level, max out favor... you get the 7th character slot and you can gen characters with a larger point-buy. Just a few points, but that's... well, see the earlier point about 5%.

Of course, you're probably sick of the game at that point, too. Ah well, maybe there'll be some crafting by then...

Tue, 17 Jul 2007 13:00:14 GMT

Been reading a book. "Game architecture and design". Presented as a how-to for game designing. Over eight hundred pages, and it's not fast reading. Partly becuase I keep stopping and thinking.

Was playing Overlord while reading the chapter on gameplay, and about when I finished, I'm getting into interactivity...

Now, this sort of thinking tends to warp my viewpoint for a little while. Accentuates a few vital and not-so vital points. Thankfully, I typically regain equilibrium after a bit.

Here's what I noticed. One interesting point in the design book... is about evaluating options. If a tactic is something that a player will always do, given the option... let the AI handle it. If it's something that the player will never do... don't waste dev time on it. Let the player worry about things that are relevant.

In Overlord, I find great examples of this in the minion AI. You don't give them very specific orders most of the time. It's usually quite sufficient to tell them where to go. I don't have to tell them to bring back anything useful if they don't run into something destructible or dangerous first. I don't have to tell them to equip any gear they find that's better than what they previously had.

Unfortunately, unless they're carrying something, they can occasionally run headlong into something lethal. Like magma, poison, or water. Still, they're slightly demonic minions. They aren't supposed to be long on survival instinct.

Once you get your forge operational, you can smelt down minions for magical buffs to your gear. You actually see them gleefully running up and cannonballing into the hot metal. And it takes a lot. The highest-end equipment takes several hundred minions to fill up. The highest helmet takes two thousand.

Now, the effects of this upgraded gear is pretty spiffy. You do have to choose what type of improvements you want. Weapons get +damage, +fire damage, +"critical" (%increase in power to last hit in a combo.) and knockback. I think this is the first game where knockback might be considered an advantage, because your minions can and will attack the helpless before they get up again. It does more than just cause you to waste time walking over to the foe. But technically... you're shooting them with minion bullets.

Obviously, your choices here are not equal. For one thing, different things take different amounts of minions. Knockback is listed as +% and increases pretty 1:1. All the others have much lower ratios. But in spite of not being able to determine a baseline, the advantage of occasionally lighting a foe on fire and doing an extra 60-120 in damage is Not Small. If I had to do it again, with the sword, I'd have skipped knockback altogether, and may have upped critical a few more %. For a hammer-wielder, it might make sense to give knockback a boost. Make it into a "get back!" weapon.

Armor... less choice. This tickled me. +defense. Of course. +mana. +regen. +health.

Ok, 3/4 of those are just different ways to extend your ability to take a blow. Regen of any % gives you infinite health. Just, yanno, not all at once. +health gives you... more hp. +defense makes your hp more valuable. These are lousy choices. Especially since nothing in the game can kill the overlord quickly. He gets worn down if he doesn't have minions or regen. First priority is going to be regen rate. Get that to a tolerable speed, pile on the defense. By the end, I could go toe-to-toe with a troll. And generally had to, since I couldn't find a "safe" strategy to annihilate them with the minions... short of having a lot of them and getting the drop on them.

Now, the problem with this setup... there's 3 types of metal usable. Steel, durium, arcanium. And the only difference (other than appearance) that I can see is higher caps on how many minions can be added.

But adding minons to gear is a sunk cost. They don't come out. And evidently you cannot choose to reforge gear to just up the limits, or pour even some of the old power into the new one. No, you start from scratch with each. Or you just switch back to the old armor until you can afford to spend enough minion to make the new stuff worthwhile.

And it's not essential for you to even bother with forging. Your minions do far more than you ever will.

Which results in there being no reason at all to upgrade until you get the 3rd smelter and can become a bit godlike... so why bother having three smelters? Well, they do give you some customization. You can go with the other weapon types, and you can look more imposing. Maybe there's an inherant benefit to the better gear, but it's very well hidden.

Granted, nothing actually stops you from either returning to an old level for more minion power or even hitting your tower's dungeon battles to get a lot... but it's slow. Even cheating so I could use magic in the arena, and flame-broiling masses of massive bugs, sending my minions to grab chunks of lifeforce from the charred remains... Each step of the grind, battle took about 2 min, netting 75... and the helmet took 2k. This would take hours the long way.

The tower upgrades, amusingly enough, beyond the merely functional. Your mistress opens up... interior/exterior decoration. The interior upgrades are always visible. The exterior ones... never visible. Well, when you are loading a game, or changing floors, you get a quick view. But it's not the whole thing. Bit of a missed opportunity, not having a view you could control.

Playing through on evil, you do get a quest to recruit some eye candy for the throne room. So there's a little bonus content. Interesting.

All in all, it's a fun game, but I can't help but feel that you're not exactly an overlord. You're more like a "Trusted Lieutenant". After all, the evil minion advisor keeps telling you what to do. You manage minions but... you're really more of an Underlord. ;)

Daystar adventuring

Tue, 26 Jun 2007 21:52:57 GMT

I was feeling a shortness of vision, which is different from a shortness of breath, or of time, though it can lead to those conditions if left untreated.

I went out to recapture my horizons, but I live in Iowa.

I live in a valley of trees.

If the horizon is where sky starts, I have to get out from under a tree and look up. If I walk a ways, to a field, I can see across that. Nothing more, nothing less. If you want to see the horizon, where the earth stops and curves around... only the highways and interstates go there. No other options. The hills are covered in trees.

So I took off my glasses. I'm nearsighted, and this lets me strain those peepers a tad. Plus, it calls so much attention to the distance I can see, it doesn't feel so claustrophobic. Plus, for me, it's a 3d experience like no other.

Sure, I spend my days near computer screens. But the difference isn't just that. I have very different focal lengths on each eyeball. The net effect is that not only do I get blurry shapes superimposed... the degree of blurriness is different for each eye... and that makes it VERY easy to tell how far off an object is. It's still triangulation between two points a few inches apart, but I get to use focus to augment my depth perception. Or fake it.

Which also tells me how wildlife gets by with lousy vision. You just need to avoid trees and see things near you... the bonus 3d effect can be a bit of an aid too.

Then a guy bikes past me, and I realize I couldn't tell you his age, if he had glasses... a face... details. So vision helps a lot with social identification. At least when you can't go by smell...

Nature decided to give me a couple things to see as I walked through muggy shade, avoiding direct starlight and solar radiation... mostly. Sweat will be hosed from my body by the time you read this.

At the river, I saw a fish eat a tree. Well, not quite. Little feller couldn't get the whole thing. But I saw this black shape resubmerge and the limb shake... guess that one spindly stick poking the surface of the water got the feller riled up.

But long before that was the unique bit, where a deer was napping by the driveway. Neighbor's "front yard" is uncharted wilderness, and in the country, that's fine. Their real yard is by their house, and this is like having a hedge about a hundred feet thick before the treeline.

I didn't know there was a deer in there. The deer didn't know I'd be walking on the path. I think I woke it, because I don't usually hear deer scream.

So much for our natural world being observant.

My dad, meanwhile, picking raspberries, trumps me. Two little things had been running full tilt in the yard, and one stopped, and the other ran into his foot.

The one that stopped was a cat. Some of 'em around here are leary of people.

The one that didnt, that was a very young rabbit. Ran smack into his shoe. And sat there. 'till the cat lost interest. Then *bam* gone.

Dunno if there's a trend there, or a lesson to be learned.

But I got some exercise, and need a shower. Yaaay.

One more, then I stop.

Mon, 25 Jun 2007 21:08:07 GMT

Lord of the Rings Online has a class called "Captain". They're the buffing class. They're also a pet class. They have a human follower, bearing a standard. They get to wear armor, swing nice weapons, buff their friends, even bring them back to their feet from the point of defeat. Sort of like a paladin with a pet.

A pet that's... ok, when these guys are running around on foot? Following the captain? I keep thinking "Monty Python and the Holy Grail". I want coconuts!

They get a few shout powers... one from the very start that does actual damage. "Ni!"

They also have several powers that activate on defeat of an enemy. Like a victorious war-cry urging your fellows onward in the face of success. Or... concievably, channelling the deaths of the enemy into power for the party. Like a necromancer.

Actually, if you didn't change any of the abilities, and just gave the guy and his follower a skeleton model... I guess it'd be a death-knight.

That's gotten me thinking about how things can appear to others. Could an MMO be made where each side sees the other as the bad guys? I think the "America's army" one already showed it could work as a co-op shooter. I mean, if you can hide a death-knight under a monty python warleader...

Still ranting. LOTRO Burglar

Mon, 25 Jun 2007 20:30:41 GMT

Now, the other class I don't have a lot of joy with, is the burglar. Many MMOs have stealth options. City of Heroes has the most useful, since (especially with superspeed) you can scout ahead and tell the group the lay of the land. Anarchy Online isn't bad, but really takes too many skill points to make useful. Although there's always been a brisk trade in max-level blitz runs through the mission system. (Instanced dungeons, created on the fly... with loot in.)

Most aren't so lucky. They're WoW rogues and LOTRO burglars. Slow-movement stealth is annoying if it's not done right. It worked well in Thief, but that was single-player, and you just needed one good swing at the head of your target. MMOs don't do that. They do have flanking and surprise. Surprise is simple. You sneak up to the target, ideally from behind, and you whack it. You get bonus damage. Or bonus effects. One strike got to be more effective than normal.

Unless you have a buddy. Someone to keep the monster pointing away from you, so you can keep on hitting as hard as you can.

Of course, those improved strikes, for this very reason... aren't all that effective. They're better than normal, but not so good that you overpower in a group, or take out critters in one swell shot solo.

So... you compare well to the other classes when grouped, and you're nerfed in solo. Lotro goes the extra step and makes Burglars able to start "conjunctions" almost at will. Translation: Team combination attack... requires team.

So you'd be a good choice to lead a group, being squishy and stealthy and able to make the group perform these exalted signature maneuvers. But solo, you are a corpse-in-training. For god's sake, the healer is more playable. Same lousy damage output, plus healing.

But in LOTRO, few would think to name you leader. Because there's a "captain", a class titled as a warleader. This is wrong but that's another rant. :D

Tanking TANKS!

Mon, 25 Jun 2007 19:58:49 GMT

Hey, I'm a geek. Big on game theory.

So, I've been test-playing a few character types in LOTRO. I'm worried. I rolled up a dwarven guardian. That's a melee tank class. I never play tanks.

Not that there's anything wrong with playing a tank. Er... wait. Yes, yes there is.

MMOs have a few key elements. LOTRO is the first one I ever saw to put them in the manual. You've got CC, crowd control, which is about keeping monsters from killing you while you kill their friend. Debuffers, keeping the enemy weak enough to kill. DPS and Nukers... killing the enemy. Buffers and healers to keep your guys strong and healthy. The tank, however, does not do great damage. It has the largest hit points, the best defense, and some annoying airhorn power to keep the enemy attacking you and only you.

Your job on the team is... take a beating. Whatever the enemy has to throw at you, you're wading forth to take it on the chin, so that everyone around you can feel really special as they can wield all kinds of abilities and powers without needing to defend themselves.

You're the first in, and if you do it right, first to die.

You are support. You are roadblock.

Ok, so it is, by definition, hero work. Unglorified, necessary, and allowing others to live, allowing others to take the glory. Allowing everybody to win.

Why don't I like it?

Because it's customer service work. This is supposed to be escapism.

:D You're picturing it now, aren't you? Hordes of goblins as your customers. You're taking complaint after complaint, the healer brings you a coffee or soda and maybe a look of sympathy to keep you going. The phone system is keeping them from getting to you too fast, and you're grinding away while the techs are fixing the actual problems unhindered.

And while you could do nothing and screw up the whole mess... nothing *you* do makes it go any faster. You're not in control. You're not in charge. You don't believe what you're hearing... it's just sapping your will to live a few hp at a time.

Thu, 21 Jun 2007 18:06:34 GMT

Yep. Played another game. Reviewing it.

Call of Juarez. A western based around... well, ok, it's a western. It's not the deepest of genres. Slightly more seriously, the "Call of Juarez" is the name of a particular brand of insanity. Trying to find a treasure horde of spanish/mayan origins hidden away near the border.

So... same overarching plot as in Gun. If I were a more professional reviewer, I'd try to judge the game on its own merits... but this is more fun for me. Plus, it illustrates some differences in design choices.

Gun, for those who don't remember, or didn't happen to have one of the half-dozen (ok, quarter-dozen) systems it would run on... was a western. Where your character was one of the few who was able to track down a neigh-mythical city of gold. So, the nasty boss running the show in the area killed your adopted father, and your revenge takes a while, as you learn your origins and that the same nasty guy was responsible for your actual father's death too. Fun.

Juarez, you play two people. One who has the clues to find the treasure, one who'd found it and decided not to keep it. The bad boss who'd been searching for the treasure in its vicinity for 17 years had the boy's stepfather and mother killed. And the boy dang near takes the fall for it. But over the course of the adventure, he discovers what his potential is, and who his real father is. And the heroes vengance is well-deserved and leaves a pretty good trail of bodies in its wake.

Now, that's pretty much spoiler-free. And if you don't see why I'm going to just keep comparing these two games to each other, you probably also think there's a difference in how sitcoms set up dumb characters to be in laughable situations, and you may be entertained for the rest of your life by the brilliant writing of soap operas.

Sorry, that's a little harsh. But then, this is read primarily by my friends, who may get a chuckle out of it.

What I'm getting at, is that the plots aren't really different. However, for Juarez, I think they did a better job on the writing.

***SPOILER A-FREAKIN'-LERT***

There's not a lot more to the story of Gun than my synopsis. The lead is indian born, raised by a frontiersman by way of atoning for not stopping the big bad from killing the kid's parents. Your big brother's idea. He's an indian chief. He and your dad had the widget big bad wanted to show the way to the hidden city. Indiana jones moment when you put the two devices together forming a large gold cross-y thing. Which your bro had bound up into an axe. Ahh, ancient surveyors tools used for generations as a blunt instrument. That should be quite accurate. So you head up to the... plain rock with the hole to find that the mining operation the baddie started, well, he's been digging into the mesa and down. The hidden city is actually about halfway up, once you get the sights aligned with the two peaks on either side of it.

[Because, of course, whoever these guys were, they'd want to have giant golden crosses identifying the people who could find their hidden city. Streetsigns weren't really invented yet. Begs the question of how these travellers were supposed to find the right rock to stand on to sight with. Only concievable advantage, you could watch the rock and see who was going to visit you in a few hours. The whole concept is silly.]

the bad guy has on some spaniard's brestplate. Which, of course, since he's a boss fight, makes him immune to small arms. Explosives at least bruise him, although you end up just dropping the entire mountain on the guy. And, of course, leaving. You don't bother, say, acquiring the rights to mine the ancient ruin that's now got a mountain caved in on it.

I can't remember a single character in Gun by anything but their job. Well, the tavern girl who helped out in saving her bar... and who got her throat slit before your eyes when the mid-game bad-guy showed his true colors and, after questioning her, knew she was a bit too dangerous to let live. The acting was good, and most of the activity makes sense. I like it when bad guys do sensible things. Rotten, despicable, evil things... but not stupid. But it never really extends beyond cliche.

Juarez does a great job on the main characters. Most of the rest have about 3 lines and will be on your screen for up to two minutes. Whether they're trying to kill you or not.

The big difference between these two games, Gun gives you villains that are mostly competant... machiavellian, and with pretty established power base. You mow through the cannon fodder by the hundreds (believe I had a kill count over a thousand last time I played through... so I depopulated a territory). And you engage in pretty decent plot moves, taking any and all weapons at your disposal and putting them to effective use before the bad guy can actually bring an army on top of you.

CoJ gives you villains that didn't really plan too terribly hard. And neither do you. Now, since this entire game had to be scripted to death in order to get the voicing and game mechanics to operate... all the improv is an illusion.

In Juarez, we've got Billy, main character. Mexican blood. Stepdad's a dick, town hates him, he left home to look for the legendary treasure, failed, worked a ranch for a while, fell for the rancher's daughter, and got canned for that. So at the start of the game, he's coming home for a visit, not sure what he's going to do after. His folks are killed, "Call of Juarez" is written in their blood on the barn. He runs away... but eventually falls in with a shaman who gives him a task that makes him overcome his cowardice. Then the baddies kill him and take you to Juarez himself. The man, the myth, the town... he says they call him Juarez because that's where he's from. A madman, who lies to you constantly... but when angry, blurts out the truth of his crimes.

He's Billy's father. Crazy mexican gang leader. He's been after the little gold medallion you had around your neck for your whole life. But... ya lost that while nearly drowning in a river before the shaman found you. But you remember what it looked like, so after he beats you up for a while, unable to believe you're telling him the truth, because it's not what he wants to hear... he's got yer girl, and if you don't find the gold TODAY, he'll turn her over to his men.

The Preacher is Billy's step-uncle. He'd been a stone-cold murdering sonofabitch. His siblings and Billy's mother did find the treasure. The youngest brother was trying to keep things from coming to blows, and reached into a pocket... and the Preacher shot him before discovering it was a bible he was reaching for. So he put up his guns, and switched to the cloth. The brothers couldn't bring themselves to profit from the death... But did take the medallion.

Juarez is a crazy, evil, and damn mean SOB. Baking in the sun for a couple decades didn't help his mood at all. Not really deep enough to deserve a lotta mention, but he did have the most lines of a non-player character, and mostly managed to be believable as a leader of some very dangerous bastards.

Gameplay depends HEAVILY on which character you have control over.

For the bulk of the game, when you are playing Billy, you are skulking. The first area, you're not allowed to fight back. Granted, you'd be killed if you tried. But seeing as how you're on the run from the whorehouse... you'd stopped in to "see an old friend" and "steal her derringer"... actually, you did go there to get a gun after yours was taken by the sheriff. For some reason, he thinks you're trouble, and being armed trouble is just bad news.

And you locate a whip, which is your special weapon and grappling hook. To take the window entrance to the boudoir. Steal the gun, almost recieve fellatio, and get chased out by the owner for being broke and sneaky. He offers a freebie with the lass as a bounty, and you're kinda stuck skulking your way out of town. Couple physics puzzles and a lot of "Ok, guard NPC, turn the other way... turn... now don't watch as I race-crawl." You steal some ammo from a crazy guy who talks to his shotgun. And run from him... so at the end of the first level, you've got a whip, a derringer, and 30 rounds. Man, if only my family reunions requires so little preparation. :\

Later levels involve skulking past a group of bandits set to rob a train. Skulking to the ranch you used to work at, and sneaking inside and up to see your ladyfriend. Sense the theme yet? There is combat though. You do fight off the bandits by the train before jumping on and riding off. You do fight through some indians. Bad ones. They A) Shoot on sight, and B) were burning a wagon when you first bump into 'em. But you can also skulk around 'em, steal horse, and ride off. Scaring off their horses and riding off on the last one is supposed to be a viable option too.

Most of it works. The challenge when you are Billy is mostly "getting there". The 2nd area with him, there was an odd tooltip telling you that you could use the thunder to disguise the sound of the whip. What they didn't tell you was that the whip, other than range, is as lethal as a pistol.

Of course, since he's got a whip, when he find the spot his mom's nursery rhyme indicates is the hidey-hole leading to the treasure... and goes through a cave system to find the only actual path... he gets to dodge indiana jones traps. Best part is after, when he runs for the last time, he finds the preacher. In the wee church perched on the untrapped mineshaft of a path to the treasure. He just had to bust a few boards, not spelunk through a couple miles of spider-infested and trapped tunnels.

But that fits the style of the Preacher. This guy is tough. He gets to kick down weak doors. He is John Wayne and Clint Eastwood. And he's wearing a breastplate that seems to deal with about half the incoming bullets. He has a quickdraw, where he has both guns holstered, and when triggered, you get bullet time while each gun's crosshair moseys from the corners to the center of the screen. You wind up wiggling the camera around a LOT to get shots to lines up, but it is incredibly useful. It's not powered by death, as the one in Gun was. It's either available or not, and just requires you to put your guns away... in a firefight. And you have to wait about 20 seconds after the last use before it's up again. Pretty quick, pretty potent. Granted, probably induces a bit more nausea, as you're correcting for the fact that the guns aren't fully drawn as you are firing them.

Unlike Billy, he's got no problem coming by guns. They're all over the place... everybody's got one and they drop 'em when killed. Ammo too. Mostly, you get 2 pistols and a rifle/shotgun. There's sawed-off, regular shotgun, rifle, and sniper rifle. The sawed-off can be wielded with a pistol in the left hand.

The guns in this... I liked. There's not a huge difference in terms of punch... and I couldn't figure out how to tell what gun would be more dangerous. Usually it's obvious, but this game does something you hardly ever see.

The enemies die from 3 shots. Yep. 3. One in the head will do too. Two in the chest works too. Ok, it might take 4-5 if you're just shooting them in the foot. But for the most part, if you don't have time to aim, or you can't be sure you're going to hit the head... maybe they're backlit so you're aiming on a sillouhette... maybe three guys are coming up on the right and you need this guy down so you have cover... shoot them 3 times, center of mass, and move on. 'course, when your pistols hold 6 shots... that's a pretty significant investment.

The shotgun, in this, is, of course, lethat at short range. What's surprising is that at medium range, it's almost as deadly. The dispersal is far less than the FPS industry average. Still, while it was a thing of true beauty in the mine, I didn't bother with it most anyplace else.

Everywhere else, the rifle ruled. Which is about right.

That's the thing I liked about most of these weapons. The feel was right.

There were a few exceptions to the general uncertainty in the pistol category. For some strange reason, most pistols were "rusty". I don't know what the difference is between rusty and not in game terms, but thankfully, I didn't keep anything rusty long enough to find out if bad weapons go boom as implied. What I noticed most was the reload. "Quickshooter" pistols reloaded all 6 rounds at once, rather than one at a time. Two of those meant I could just tap reload twice and be at full ammo in about two seconds. Five seconds would be enough to reload and holster for for a quickdraw maneuver. You can't do that with the others. Only in the end-game did I learn there is a downside to these pistols. They can overheat. Swap with the last guy you shot and move on.

Last level did give you some... unique ones. A chest held a 6-shooter that took rifle ammo. Not notably more potent, but I took it so that with a sawed-off and a regular pistol, I'd have something to shoot any type of ammo, and thus be hideously unlikely to run out in the push for the finish. Billy even got a couple 10-shot pistols from confronting Juarez. He didn't have the quickdraw feature... so I stuck with the bow, that gave it to every shot... and the arrows are pretty re-usable.

The preacher is the ass-kicker. Billy's the outlaw. Different motivations. Both good people, and initially, misguided.

One thing both do, end of most levels, is enjoy a duel. You move the mouse down, and up, and then try to get the crosshair over the enemy and fire. You don't get to run for cover, but you get to lean to the sides... which makes it a scene from the matrix, as it's in slow mo. The game interrupts the flow to tell you how to do a duel every time there is a duel. By the fifth or sixth, I'm feeling insulted. But then, at the very end of the game, they don't tell you it is a duel. You've got one chance for success, and you don't know that the control just shifted to using the mouse to draw, instead of the # keys. Bad.

It's a scene where the bad guy makes one last attempt on Billy, and you're the dying preacher. And you see the bad guy stand unnoticed by the mooching couple. And draws a knife. It glints. The rest of the game, the cue to fire was a TIMER counting down. Which changes the tension of a duel from "when's it start?" to "can I get aimed in time?" This final bit, there's no indication that you're in duel mode. Ticked me off when I looked up the answer online. From my perspective, the controls were dead and I was watching the bad guy kill the survivors.

Both CoJ and Gun have a health system based on whiskey. CoJ has a 100 point life meter, and whiskey restores about 40-50. Gun gave you a flask. 3-5 sips to the flask, each was a full recharge. And when you found a bottle, you got a sip back in the flask.

The difference in health is a big shift in the pacing. In Gun, it's ablative. You have a margin for error, and if you don't need any in an easy part, you'll have some when it gets tough. In CoJ, it's feast or famine. You might occasionally backtrack slightly to get the most out of what drops in the level, but the only time that you're really... yes, screwed, is a sequence on the stopped train as the preacher. You reach a point where a car has a gatling gun. Taking out the gunner is top priority and he drops 2 bottles. That's a full health there. It's also all you get for the next few minutes. You have a few waves of bandits rushing your machine gun nest. Then you get to help a couple soldiers clear a barricade between you and some riflemen harassing the engineer. Then to a ledge on the other side of the tracks to snipe out a board holding a door shut. It's another car after that that you next get any more health. And there's about 20+ enemies. That's a bit of a challenge.

[Of course, I did find that it was possible to pile up a few boxes by the gun, get on top of the cars, and just bypass the whole mess. Almost certainly an unplanned alternative. I didn't continue with it, since I ended up triggering a cutscene from the wrong direction... walked through an empty car, opened the far door, and then it's full of people behind me. Still, would have rocked if that had been an acceptable alternative solution.]

The GUI is pretty decent, although I wouldn't have picked it for a western. There's a compass in the corner, pointing to the end of level, and what's nearby. But you don't look at that most of the time. You look at the crosshairs, and around that, taking up much of the screen, damage/noise indicator. Basically, any time someone shoots, you get a green arc suggesting distance and direction, based on how far from the center of the screen it is. If they're doing damage, it'll tinge to yellow, then red. It's a highly intuitive system and it works extremely well, especially as it's a full 360°. Covers your inability to accurately hear and feel what's going on around the character... as well as the massive tunnel vision problem of the FPS viewpoint.

The AI... I couldn't tell you if it was any good or not. It tended to use cover while reloading, and I tended to kill it before it got a chance. Game had one non-duel boss fight. That guy loved to use cover. You had a few seconds to get off a headshot before he'd move. You'd miss a lot. And, as a boss fight, he'd take a few to the FACE before dying. I should point out, like many games, a headshot only increases damage. It never has a bearing on a cutscene. "Hah. Like your friend, I too wear armor. So I survived our little duel." Regardless of the blast to the face. I think this was a reason the game disallows shooting at corpses. Also, the invalid target symbol is handy when you don't know if you killed the guy you could barely see.

The game I played through was an interesting western movie that felt like it had a game tacked onto it. The story and the setting obviously came before the gameplay. The gameplay was predictable as heck. Half action-adventure, half FPS. Each half above average. Plot, predictable, although Juarez himself was a bit of a refreshing bad guy. Nothing more or less than a dangerous man that you couldn't really call sane. 'course, when he said "I... am your father."... I kinda expected the character would be losing a hand, rather than getting a savage beating for a few minutes.

The style switching had another interesting effect, the same level would be played through by each character. A few elements would change, but the basic structure was still unchanges. You could look over to one side and go "I went through *there* as Billy. Er, but they removed the barrel." This meant that the map design went twice as far for the levels that this was applied to, and since Billy would always go through first, sneaking through... as the Preacher, you would know where the cover was, and where snipers would be. Which helped you be a tactical bad-ass in addition to the armor and quickdraw... and, heck, just using a rifle before anybody gets close enough to aim.

Another effect of this, when you were playing a Billy level, and Preacher Ray (finally remembered the name) walks onto the scene, not only does he look good... you know exactly what he is capable of and why Billy does a mach three exit.

In the end, I gotta say the game is above average.

And that pisses me off.

There was not ONE element of this game that went above and beyond. Just a hell of a lot of work to make it competant in gameplay and story. No choices to make beyond what order to shoot your targets and which weapon to use. Oh, except for the places that you think you could go another way, but you're wrong and just don't know it's a dead-end yet. No replay value. There are secrets to collect, but they just give you wanted posters of the designers, blaming them for creating the game. Get 'em all and... uh, you have 'em all. Nice that they tell you how many are in each level, but... :\ This was the first game I ever played to have secrets, and I said to hell with collecting them.

The level re-use was sort of clever, but all they were doing was mitigating the problem we've had with games for the last ten years. Each time the graphics jump up in detail, the levels shrinks. Anyone else remember when 3d came around? Games that used to stretch for days across a hundred maps... replaced with tiny little closed-in... glorified hallways. Often with less attention to prop placement than the top-down 2d TILE-based efforts of our youth. CoJ does have a lot of clutter in the right places. I have to give some credit for that. It looks right. It isn't necessarily fun clutter or useful, but someone cared enough.

Then, near the end, they give you two big maps... with nothin' in 'em. Wide plains that you can ride across... maybe not at full gallop in case there's a drop-off instead of a slope... a genuinely huge area, like Oblivion outdoors. And there's streams and hills... and the point of it? There's a shaman, some bunnies he wants you to hunt waaaay in the distance. And then he'll send you waaaay over to this cliff to climb. A real ordeal of scaling a cliff. And at any point, you can look out over this gigantic area. You can see the smoke of the shaman's fire. And that's it for civilization. And they don't let you do this at any other time in the game, the bastards. Bunnies are the only thing you get to choose what direction to approach from. Everywhere else, it's like you're in a tunnel.

The other big area, adventure game segment. Find the gold today or the girl is doomed. But you can't leave the damned valley. There's guards in the few passes that might go someplace.

You have to find the game's only NPC you can interact with meaningfully. A child needing help burying his papa. He gives you a key to the beat-up church overlooking the graveyard... and it's on top of the dang treasure. 17 years and the crazy shithead never looked under the only manmade structure that wasn't his fort.

The game is fun, but it teaches nothing. It gives the player no choices. And it's not a limitation of the system, it's a design philosophy. The only time you get to roam at all, it's because there's only 2 things in the damned area, and making it a tunnel would look stupid. Almost as silly as the fact that you've had a compass pointer aiming you at the end of the level the whole game, but it's LINEAR. You shouldn't need a compass for that. It's just there for one level. Like the bow.

These days, I know a little more than I used to about large project planning. I know that it's a question of priority. You determine the features you want, how much time each takes, and you figure what's important to the project and what can be left out if necessary. That's how you ship before funding runs out. You include time for testing and error correction... and looking at this game, I really think... they did all of that.

The feature in there that's actually least used is your player's ability to throw dynamite. I only found a couple sticks in one level, and they didn't carry over. Everything in the game has a point where it's important. And used more than once. Other than a couple rough spots, the whole thing seems pretty well ironed out.

So, if it doesn't feel like there was a lot of compromise... and the system was built able to handle a lot more than the game asks for... that means that the game is what these guys were aiming for.

Competance.

I'm generally pretty pro-competance. I like competant repairmen, services, doctors... competance is relative. A competant general practicioner is NOT going to attempt to be a competant brain surgeon.

Brilliance, in many cases, is desirable, but not necessary. I don't need the worlds best MacDonalds cashier. Competance would be adequate.

Games are different. I don't want a competant game. I have a finite lifespan. I want to be stimulated. Challenged. I want to make choices and I want to experiment. I want to explore. I want to learn useful things, or at least something I can pretend is useful. Something to keep my brain from atrophying. So, like Gun, CoJ is merely competant.