… There’s only one more sleep ’til Dragon*Con.
The next 4 days of posts will be coming from the Marriott Marquis hotel in the heart of Atlanta.
Author: Jason
Scamazon.com
Over at not much’a nothin’, Cliff has run into Amazon.com’s price scam.
It’s simple. If you shop there often, they build up a database of the things you buy, the things you look at, and the things you store in your wish list. All of this is supposedly aimed at focusing your shopping experience. If you buy lots of DVDs there, you’ll find that DVDs start getting recommended to you in the genre’s you shop most. Buy a TV and the next time you log in you may find yourself looking at a screen full of TV accessories… DVD players, VCRs, TiVo units, stereos, etc.
But they are also doing something else… the more you buy with them, the more likely you’ll get what Cliff got, a small price increase. Yes, I said increase.
Now, if the only thing you buy there are paperback books, DVDs and pre-orders, you aren’t likely to run into this much, but don’t be so sure. What you need to do to protect yourself is before buying anything, log out and check the price again. You could easily save yourself hundreds of dollars depending on what you are buying and how often you buy there.
You’d think that a company would reward long term patronage, but that’s just not how things work any more. The new customer is king, a returning customer is someone whose business you already have, and it is all about broadening the client base. So, shop safe, shop blind… don’t let them know who you are until you’ve already got your items in the cart. Remember, its your money, not theirs, so keep your eye on it until its time to pay.
Playing God
It has been so long I had forgotten how much fun it is to be God.
For years I have been spending my time in online games, MMOs, and as a creative individual it has taken over my thoughts on gaming. Inside I have been designing an MMO of my own… but its never going to work. What I really want in an MMO just can’t happen. Maybe someday someone will figure out a way, but I really doubt it.
But what is it I want?
The personal touch. And what does this have to do with being God? Have you ever tried to seriously design an RPG game and have it service a hundred people? two hundred? a thousand? five thousand? If you have, have you ever taken that step back and looked at what you have done with new eyes? As rich and inviting as the World of Warcraft appears on the surface, if you spend any time there the trappings fall away, and the game is… well… bland. Pretty much all games are. They can be boiled down into a half dozen quest types, and if you pay attention to the game mechanics at all, 99% of all fights are a foregone conclusion, you either know you are going to win or you know you are over your head. Rarely do you really go into the unknown, rarely are you truly surprised at the outcome, and if you are its likely because you don’t really understand as much as you thought, it was your miscalculation, not the game’s.
I’ve mentioned before that I’ve been pen and paper gaming with some friends. We started doing an old school AD&D (1st edition) campaign, but eventually we converted over to 3.5 because it works better and flows easier, less looking up stuff in tables. Then we started interweaving two campaigns. In the first, we’ve all hit 10th level and things have been getting easier, but I suspect only because the DM has been a little hesitant to throw hard things at us since the behir encounter back when we were level 5. We lost nearly half the party in those tunnels, and unlike MMOs the dead are dead and the players roll up new characters. The second game is going along swimmingly, I think we’re all teetering around level 6, maybe 7, and the real story is beginning to unfold. Both of these games have been far more engaging than any MMO and even any single player RPG. Computer canned responses just feel flat, but a DM who can roll with another one of your crazy schemes… oh yeah.
So back to the God bit… a couple of our group has asked me if I wanted to start running a campaign. And I do. So I’ve been digging out my old notes and pulling together a world I originally created fifteen years or so ago, and filling in the gaps, and expanding. I am molding the world, shaping the societies, and setting up what could be a legendary adventure and hopefully will be. I am God.
Does this mean I’m giving up on MMOs? Not likely, but hey, with my aging PC and my mortgage, I’m probably not going to be playing any of the graphics card busting, memory and processor hogs that are coming down the pike. I’m also not likely to stop thinking about game design… I’m a programmer by trade, so that’ll never change.
Poison in Concert
I am a giant 80’s music whore. So it should be no surprise at all that I went to the Poison/Cinderella show last night, and it was awesome.
I have seen Poison in concert three or four times now, and they put on a great show every time. They take the stage, play all the hits you love, and thank you for being fans. This being the 20th Anniversary of the release of their debut album ‘Look What the Cat Dragged In’, there was more thanking than usual.
Cinderella gave a similar performance, taking the stage and laying out the hits.
I still think its surprising that these guys still put on such a great show. Twenty years of Rock and Roll and these bands seem genuinely grateful that people still come out to see them, unlike some newer bands I’ve seen. Poison is a band that I will go see in concert again and again.
Stay Classy
Over at the Zen of Design, a post has been made and hopefully a violent and bloody discussion will ensue. The post is about Classes in MMOs.
Somewhere around my room I’ve got a document I started about class design. See, I really hate the way many games implement classes. You make one choice, at creation, and you are stuck. A warrior is a warrior, a cleric is a cleric. You are what you are and so is everyone else. Basically, EverQuest. World of Warcraft managed to do one better and essentially each class is actually three classes since you can choose to focus your talent points in one of three trees. I like this flexibility, so much so that I play a shadow priest in WoW… that’s a priest who is okay at healing, but better at dealing damage. I love it.
Back to my document. The idea I had for class design involved giving the players more on an illusion of control. What you would do is group skills together into sets, or schools as I called them. All melee weapons would be in a melee combat school, wearing armor and armor types falls into the defence school, healing arts both magic and non-magic fall into a healing school, and so on. In the end I had 6 or 7 schools that covered most things. Then each player would choose the ranks of his schools. They could put defence first, and melee combat second… making them a warrior… putting healing third might make them a minor paladin type, if they went defence then healing and melee combat third that would be a major paladin, healing first then defence then melee makes them a cleric, healing/melee/defence makes them a healing monk, melee/healing/defence makes them a fighting monk… and so on, involving all the schools. At first glance this looks like a ridiculous amount of freedom for the players, but in reality it is a very finite number of “classes” and all balance can be approached from that angle. No need to worry about someone maxing healing and melee and defence and damage spell casting because its not possible, if fact the ranking can inherantly reduce the effectiveness of the skills in that school, and since everyone will have to place one school at the lowest rank it means that everybody will suck at something.
Essentially, all I’m really saying is… totally unrestricted skill systems are bad, and totally rigid class systems are bad. A good system is just floating somewhere in the middle, a nice balance between player freedom and developer control.
A Game Design Tangent
I was reading a post over at Broken Toys… here… and the topic is interesting, but something in one of the comments caught in my brain, and its been knocking around all day, so I decided to poor it out.
Wanderer said:
A lot of people play golf.
Yes, alot of people play golf. And it stands to reason that someone who has played golf for three years is going to be better at it than someone who just picked up his clubs (barring natural talent and people who never learn). MMOs with level disparities can’t be compared to golf unless you segregate golf courses so that only people with certain handicaps, lifetime averages, or particular sets of clubs can play on them. If that were true, then a guy who just bought clubs won’t be able to play on the same courses his new friends who’ve been playing for three years can play on.
Golf isn’t like an MMO because it is inherantly designed on different fundamentals, and in most (if not all) MMOs, there are time consuming or otherwise daunting barriers between people who have invested time and people who have not. Even “casual” MMO players will eventually achieve a position where the barriers between them and new players is too big for them to comfortably ignore (I don’t care how nice and giving a person you are, if you are level 60, sitting around “helping” a level 10 eventually gets mind numbingly boring). Unfortunately, most (if not all) of these barriers are the rewards of playing the game… so the game is designed to divide players. Sure, it may encourage them to work together in small groups (anywhere from 2 to 200), but overall the rewards of them game serve to divide those that succeed from those who fail or have not yet tried.
Back to golf… yes, a lot of people play golf. But on the flipside, a lot more people don’t play golf. The rules of golf do not change to try to lure in more players (club regulations maybe, but I haven’t seen a golf course set all its holes to par 15s just to make people feel better about their golf game). Game designers need to take that approach. You are designing a game for a certain group of people, the people who enjoy the kind of game you design. That group might be huge, or it might be tiny. The goal of funding a game is to only spend money in proportion to the size of your intended audience. You don’t spend $300 million to build a game that 5,000 people are going to play, and if you manage to spend $4 million and 6 million people show up… well… you win. But more important than the money is to define your audience, design for them, and release a game.
Once the game is out there, you have to observe what people do with the game you made. Some of them are going to silently enjoy the game. Some will loudly complain that it sucks. Some will find ways to “break” the game. Some will loudly praise it as the second coming. Overall though, to some degree, you have to ignore the people who are angry and playing your game wrong, but don’t ignore the people who are having fun and playing your game wrong because even if its not what you intended, they like what you did and it may be time to learn from them instead of trying to tell them how to play. But above all else, don’t try to make everyone happy. You will fail. Just accept the fact that some people will play your game, and some people will play golf.
Blade: The Series – Revisited
I have never been someone unwilling to admit mistakes. Over a month ago, closing in on two, I put up a little review for Blade: The Series.
From the perspective of the two hour pilot, I stand behind my review. It was crap. However… as the show has progressed, the creators of the show did something interesting and unexpected: they pushed Blade into the background. Now, the show is still about him fighting vampires, trying to foil their nefarious plans, but they realized, as most people have, that telling that story from Blade’s point of view is boring. He finds vampires, he kills them. Dull as dirt. Instead, the show introduced a young woman who was turned, but Blade got to her and has put her on his serum. She’s not a daywalker like him, but the serum keeps her mind clear of the hunger for blood. Blade then sets her the task of infiltrating the vampires to get him information, to destroy them from the inside. And she’s got good reason, the vampires killed her brother.
At this point, the show becomes more about the vampires, interactions among the clans, the divide between then infected and the pure bloods (born as vampires)… in other words, it actually becomes watchable, even enjoyable, and in some episodes it is down right good TV. It harkens back to Kindred: The Embraced in some ways, and I’m certainly getting a kick out of it.
And thankfully, Randy Quaid hasn’t returned as of yet… Let’s hope it stays that way.
Snakes on a Plane
Where do I begin?
When I first heard of this movie, I was excited because I love monster movies. A true monster movie is one where something, not human, shows up to kill people and the people try to kill it. No trying to save it or understand it, just survival. I also liked the concept, that airport security has become so tight that a man who wanted someone dead would have no viable way to sneak a weapon on board, so instead puts a giant crate of venomous snakes in the cargo hold timed to be released at a certain point during the flight.
And then you have Samuel L. Jackson, a man who excells at doing action flicks. By far, my favorite performance of his is in Deep Blue Sea. If you haven’t seen that, go see it. In fact, see it first, because his role in that actually makes one scene of SoaP (the stupidest shortening of a movie name in history, by the way) funny when it is not really supposed to be.
So… what went wrong?
First, there was the Hype. Originally the hype did nothing but make this movie better. The rating went from PG-13 to R, ensuring a bloodier and scarier movie. And it kept the name. At one point, as I’m sure you heard, there was a plan to rename the movie to “Flight 121” or something like that, but Sam Jackson actually threatened to quit, so it stayed “Snakes on a Plane”. But then the hype went too far… t-shirts, blogs, everything… just too much. The hype blew its wad too soon, and left its date unsatisfied. If the hype would have just coincided with the release of the film a little more, it would have worked so much better.
Next… well, I’m not going to spoil it, but… crappiest ending ever. Seriously. It was a good monster movie right up until “the line”. Yes, that one you’ve heard about when Sam drops two MFs in one line venting his frustration with the snakes. After that the movie went down hill. It had potential, all the right elements were there, but Kenan Thompson just totally blew it.
The movie, overall, was worth seeing… it is a good monster movie. But its not the end all be all of cool like the hype wants you to believe. See the movie if you want, or wait until DVD (3 months, tops, and maybe they’ll have a half dozen kickass comentary tracks). In the end, I enjoyed Deep Rising alot more than Snakes on a Plane.
Hellboy: Unnatural Selection
Man… I really am digging these Hellboy books. They sort of take a stab toward horror without getting into any of the cheesy melodrama that some horror has. Writer Tim Lebbon takes his shot at Hellboy with Unnatural Selection.
The story here is that someone is bringing back all the monsters of legend, pulling them right out of the Memory. He’s setting them loose on Earth, and its up to the BPRD to find out why and stop it, because the dragons and sea monsters are starting to eat lots of people.
Like other Hellboy books, its one part horror and one part action, with a dash of comedy. The blend is so perfect that the pages pratically turn themselves. The writing was good enough that I’m going to seek out more Tim Lebbon books. Thumbs up for the lastest Hellboy.
Happy Birthday PC!
Sure, personal computers had existed before, but today marks the 25th Anniversary of the melding of Microsoft and IBM in the form of MS-DOS.
I’ve always liked computers, and seeing as how I was not quite 7 when this monumental merging occurred, and 11 when I got my first PC, its no surprise that MS-DOS is a huge part of my computer history. It seems unfathomable now, but when I took my first job working with computers, Windows 95 was out but wasn’t the standard yet. I was still installing MS-DOS 6.22 on machines, and Windows for Workgroups 3.11. I had a briefcase (and I used to wear a tie to work every day) and inside was always stashed my trusty copy of 6.22, and a few cobbled together boot disks for diagnostics and virus scanning (DOS had no “Safe Mode” to load into to hunt down spyware -of course, there wasn’t a whole lot of spyware- you can to book from a floppy disk and scan from there).
Long before getting a job though, back when I was 11, my parents brought home our first family PC, a Leading Edge IBM PC Clone. It was an 8088 processor, 8MHz, with 512k of RAM. Yeah, that’s a “k” there, half a megabyte. It had a 20 megabyte hard drive in it, and it seemed like we’d never fill it up (20MB these days is about 4 or 5 MP3s). There was a switch on the back where you could set the processor speed down to 4.77MHz, just incase 8 was too fast (and it was for some games). It didn’t have Windows, it booted into DOS and then from the autoexec.bat file it would load up a program called PCMenu, where you could get to the Leading Edge Word Processor, Lotus 1-2-3, and a few other applications. All games were played from disk. We spent a ridiculous $350 to upgrade that machine to 640k of RAM, and another $200 or so on a modem, I think it was 1200 baud, maybe it was an early 2400. And for $50 of my own hard earned cash (you have no idea how hard it was for me to save that and not buy other stuff), I bought an AdLib soundcard from a kid named Ari at school so that our games could play a little more music instead of just beeps through the PC speaker. Not music like you hear out of PCs today, but hardly more than synthesiser, it was awesome. Through the modem I discovered BBSs, back when you’d have to pick up a local trade magazine, or in my case a MicroCenter sale paper, to find the numbers. That’s right, we dialed up the BBS direct on the phone and logged in. There was an Internet, but at that point only schools, the government, and few businesses were really on it. I even ran a BBS for a while, one summer, and only at night when no one else wanted to use the computer.
Eventually we got a new PC, a 386. It was either 16 or 25 MHz, and it had 1024k of RAM, a whole megabyte. This one came with Windows 3.0 installed. And it had a SoundBlaster sound card and a VGA video card. Finally, games played in 256 colors! Well, when they supported them. My parents let me keep the old 8088 in my room, even got me my own phone line, and that pretty set me in with PCs for the rest of my life. Of course, even with a computer in my room, I still used the 386. I mean, the 8088 couldn’t play games like DOOM, Warcraft and Lemmings. Then one day, my friends and I all chipped in and bought network cards (co-axial, naturally) and would get together and play games of DOOM and Warcraft against each other. And when I say “get together” I mean that we would disassemble our PCs, and take them over to one person’s house where we’d put them back together, install network cards, hook up and play into the wee hours of the morning. It would still be a while before ISPs showed up in our area.
After that, when we bought the Pentium 90, the computer history gets a little less interesting (to me anyway). We put Windows for Workgroups on it (made the networking LAN parties easier), and eventually upgraded to Windows 95. It was another PC that saw Windows 98. And since then I’ve gotten a new PC every couple of years, each one at least twice as good as the last. Now my laptop PC, that I’m writing on right now, has double the horse power of my desktop, and my desktop is old enough that it can’t play any new games anymore, except World of Warcraft and other games that go for style over pushing the limits of your machine. My network has gone 100% wireless. And instead of using my phone to connect to the internet, I now connect to the internet to use my phone.
Well, this trip down memory lane was fun. But now its done, and I have boxes to unpack. Feel free to share your own memories of PCs gone by and raise a glass to MS-DOS… I still have my disks of 6.22, its just a shame that PCs don’t come with 3.5″ floppy drives anymore.