Author: Jason

The Walking Dead

Reviews

For Christmas, I was given a book that I asked for, The Walking Dead. Its a comic book about people trying to survive in a world of zombies. Yesterday, on a drive to North Carolina with my wife, my brother and his girlfriend to visit his girlfriend’s family, I re-read book one, and read books two, three and four.

The Walking Dead is, quite simply, the best zombie stories I have ever read. A while back I posted about Brian Keene’s books, and those were very impressive for horror books, but The Walking Dead, which is a comic book series and not novels, deals more with the people than the zombies. They aren’t zombie stories, they are people stories where the setting happens to be a world full of zombie like you might set a drama with a backdrop of World War II or the Depression Era US.

I recommend these books, and Amazon has a very reasonable deal for buying all 4 collections for $33 right now. The rest of this review is going to contain some spoilers, a little plot revelation, so avoid it if you want the books to remain secret until you page through them. Read more

Can Someone Really Do That?

Gaming

One thing that irritates me in games is the lack of reality in certain aspects. Don’t get me wrong, I think being able to carry a half dozen backpacks loaded with gear is actually a good idea because reality in this care would impeed fun since you’d have to keep running back to town and dropping off loot instead of playing.

However, in combat, I am annoyed with people who whiz around running at full speed and jumping like they are on crack.

In reality, if you tried to attack someone with a sword while you ran around them in a circle, sidestepping, while jumping every second, you’d be fairly inaccurate and your swings would be pretty weak. In order to get good power into a swing, either you have to be charging, using your momentum to push the blade, or you have to plant your feet on the ground to support the muscular force you wish to bring to bear.

So, to that end, I wish to introduce a little reality into the game. Movement in any direction other than toward your enemy should have a negative impact on accuracy and power (damage). Moving toward an enemy should increase power based on the distance travelled (makes horseback lance fighting a possibility), and standing still should positively impact accuracy (chance to hit). Jumping should pretty much destroy accuracy and power. However, on the other side, if you are moving any direction but toward your enemy, your ability to dodge should increase. Jumping will actually make you harder to hit.

Now the question is “Well, I could just be jumping when I’m defending and stand still when attacking. Right?” No, not with any noticable effect. The jumping, or moving away from an opponent, would cap fairly quickly and be only a small modifier. The attack bonuses would be greater the longer you stayed still (or charged). So the end result of the proposed scenario would be “You’d be a little harder to hit, but have almost no attack bonus.”

It makes the combat engine very complex, and means that reduction of client/server lag is of paramount importance, but I think it would make for a much better game, especially in PvP.

Last Sons

Reviews

I hate Lobo. In the DC Universe, which is my preferred major comic universe (Marvel and their Million Mutant March with Wolverine on every team can go su… I won’t get into it right now), there is no character that I loathe more than Lobo. He is a childish excuse for an anti-hero. See, the idea of an anti-hero is that while they may be a bad guy the story you are reading places them in a situation where you feel for them and begin to root for them to overcome the larger evil even though you understand that the “good guy” here is actually evil himself. Contextual goodness. Lobo, on the other hand, is a guy who likes to blow stuff up unnecessarily, smoke, drink, womanize, etc… basically every bad quality you can imagine in a person. His one redeeming quality is that he is a bounty hunter who hunts down bad guys, but his good quality is overshadowed by the fact that he will wantonly kill hundreds of innocents to do his job. That combined with the dick and fart joke mentality of his character makes him an absolute bore to read.

Despite this, I actually enjoyed Last Sons, but I’m fairly certain its because Alan Grant is a great story teller. The story is this… Lobo is sent to arrest J’onn J’onzz, the Martian Manhunter, for some unnamed crime. So he does, and J’onn, being the good guy that he is, goes along because it is a valid warrant even though he can’t remember doing anything wrong. Superman is suspicious, and he hates Lobo, so he decides to go look into this whole thing. In case you missed it… Lobo is the last Czarnian, J’onn is the last Martian, and Superman is the last Kryptonian… Last Sons. So, Lobo takes J’onn and heads to Vrk, and Superman heads off to get more info on the warrant. Vrk is a little backwater planet in a system that hasn’t invented space travel yet. Its people, if they can be called that, are a barely sentient race of beings who excel at digging in the rocky surface of their planet, completely subterranian. But an artificial intelligence calling itself the Alpha has come and taken over their minds and is using them to turn them in to an army with which it will destroy all life in the universe. Much genocide, violence, and sleuthing ensues.

It was a good book, and as much as I hate Lobo, his introduction to the story lead to one of the more interesting facets of the story: Bounty Hunters double-triple-quadruple crossing each other for money. In the beginning of the book, Lobo is on an assignment to capture a gang headed by a guy named Xemtec or something like that. During the fight with the gang, his space bike, a Spazz-Frag, is damaged and the semisentient computer system (SSCS) is broken So Lobo cuts out Xemtec’s brain and installs it in his bike (one of the things I hate about Lobo, aside from being an unkillable monsterous lout, he’s also a technological genius… *sigh*). For the rest of the book, the arguments with the bike and the plotting of the bike to meet back up with the remnants of his gang and double cross Lobo for the reward, first on J’onn and later on the Alpha, makes for entertaining stuff.

All in all, I think Grant has written a solid story that despite the crapfest that is the character of Lobo manages to rise above it and be fun and enjoyable. Yeah, I’d recommend it.

Non-MMO Gaming

Gaming

A while back, some friends and I started up some old fashioned pen & paper gaming. It started out with an AD&D (original rules) campaign, and has since turned into a rotating two campaign (two different DMs) 3.5 ruleset playday.

I had forgotten how fun face-to-face gaming can be.

Its refreshing to know that content won’t be broken (or “working as intended”), and there will be no farming or camping, unless we want to grow some crops or tell stories around the camp fire. There will be no lists, no looking for a group, no raid attendance or DKP. There will be no spam of Chuck Norris jokes (though jokes and puns are numerous around the gaming table), and one begging people to join his guild that plans to do end game raiding and be the most uber guild ever in under a month if people will just join he’s offering a gold for every person to sign his guild charter come on!

The feats of our characters are limited only by our imaginations, the will of the DM, and the luck of the dice. Death is a real threat and not a feature of the game mechanics. Losing is losing, not thirty seconds of downtime.

Currently, in the first of our games, I play a fighter. The band of adventurers I’ve fallen in with consist of a ranger, a paladin, a cleric, and two scouts *cough*rogues*cough*. Well, one scout. Last session, one of the scouts was turned into pasty goo by a giant. In the land we find ourselves in, I have taken over a garrison outpost of the local lord. We reclaimed it from the evil that had infested it and have now restocked and restaffed it to help hold against the wilds of the forest. Unlike most MMO games, or even single player games, here I feel like a hero. While trying to retake the outpost, we’d gotten inside and an army came to take it back from us. Suddenly the tables had turned, and while we had stealthily fought our way inside, now we had to repell invaders. Most armies of foot soldier are made up of level 0, or at best level 1, fighters. I was level 5. I also had a potion we’d recovered on an earlier adventure that could make me invulnerable to non-magic weapons for a short time. Long enough though to drop to the outside and wade into the army while my friends supported from the walls with bow and crossbow. Damn, that felt good.

In our second game, well, we haven’t gone too far, but I’m a mage this time, a sorcerer of dragon blood. I expect no less joy from these adventures.

I suppose one of the better parts is the limited nature of the game. Everyone who plays honestly wants to play. There is roleplay, not sissy “thee” and “thou” garbage, but people actually playing roles… the rogues are sneaky, I command armies, the paladin does the right thing even when it may not be the best thing. The game has no end, so there is no end game. There is no level rush, or gear to get. The game just is.

Oh yeah… I had forgotten how much fun this could be.

Graphics in Games

Gaming

One of the things that continues to baffle me is the push for more intense, more realistic graphics in games. While I’m sure that focus groups have show that people respond to the “better” graphics, and that shelf sales increase based on graphics buzz, every game I’ve ever played, and every game everyone I know has ever played, gets played longer based on the game play and has nothing to do with the graphics.

Seriously, if the game sucks, you put it down. In MMORPGs while box sales are important, continued subscribers and word of mouth are what make a game a long term success. World of Warcraft doesn’t have the best graphics in the world. Sure, they are highly stylized and pretty, but the fact that my 1GHz, 1GB RAM, 256MB ATI 9800 machine runs it great is just awesome. Other games that have come out almost refuse to install on my computer at all. And while I don’t want to put down WoWs graphics, its clearly obvious upon long and repeated play that Blizzard spent alot more time on game content and less time on the graphics than some of their competitors.

At arcades all over the world, despite their being a number of “better” games graphics wise, people still continue to put quarters in games like Pac-Man. Simple graphics with immediately engaging game play. City of Heroes grasped this concept well. With its fast paced wham-bang superhero action, its almost pure fun. Its only real flaw is that the snail’s pace at which later levels progress will make any but the more hardcore gamers and diehard fans stop logging in to play.

So, for me, the perfect MMORPG would have “good” yet not overly expensive or time consuming graphics. Less polygons and shaders, more variety of color and style, and with the millions being saved not being spent on a AAA graphics team, I’d be able to hire a few more content designers to help keep the game exciting to play even if its not the most exciting to look at.

Alliance: Good doesn`t mean Nice

Gaming

Ishiro and Lorilai head to Winterspring to do battle with demons in the south because Ishiro needs some felcloth. Unfortunately, seeing as we have gotten all our gear doing quests and picking stuff up as we go, never in the auction house, we are poorly equiped to handle level 60 elites as a duo. So after getting our spirits crammed back into our bodies, we decide to do something else instead. Quests in Silithus.

Seems some of the guys there want us to kill more of those Twilight Hammer guys, so we are off to do that. Sadly, the pages they drop are a repeatable quest that people farm for faction to be able to complete other quests. First camp we hit, the one in the far southwest, a group of 60’s are pummelling everything in site. Second camp, just west of the town, also camped by a group of 60’s. Third camp, ah-ha! Only one rogue here. Of course the rogue spots a priest and runs up to me and says, “++”. I ignore him, assuming he doesn’t speak English. “zu” he says. “++”. He keeps running over, helping us kill stuff and repeating “zu” and “++”. Now, at this point I assume he wants something, but I have no idea what. Finally I say, “Sorry, I don’t understand you.” He stands silent a while and then says, “hp”. Hmm… I guess he wants a stamina buff. So I relent and give him one. He then proceeds to steal kills from us, and when he gets caster mobs with pets, he continually dumps the pets on us after he killed the casters. An interesting way to say “thank you”.

Lori and I are happily grinding away. We kill the 10 Geolords they wanted us to kill, and we are now collecting pages for the hermit. 77 kills in total and we got 7 pages. A 1 in 11 drop rate for an item that is also used in a repeatable quest that everyone and their brother appears to want to farm. Ugh. However, prior to the end of our evening, a raid force shows up. We are wondering what is going on, they are Alliance which means I can talk to them, so I ask. No reply. Ask a couple more people, ask in general channel. No answers. Without warning they trigger some god awful boss mob that blasts some area affect poison crap that nearly kills us. We scramble to survive our fight (3 mobs at once, that Keeper bitch keeps showing up at the most inopportune times), and then scramble to heal up. Then we get splattered again with the poison ooze and start healing and running.

After they kill the thing, I ask what it was, what it was for… no answers. I mention it would have been nice to give people a warning before spawning a boss like that… no reply. Then the raid group decides that with the boss dead, they all need faction and pages, so the 40 of them descend on our little camp and make everything dead. Nice.

So we pack it in for the night, still needed 3 more pages for Lori to complete the hermit’s quest. I really want to finish this crap so I can get away from Silithus. The place has been good to us, but there are just far too many wackjobs and assholes running around.

Poker Face

Reviews

So the book is called Poker Face with a subtitle of “a girlhood among gamblers” and it is written by Katy Lederer, sister to world famous poker players Howard Lederer and Annie Duke. You would think the book would be about poker, or even gambling, but it is not.

Basically, the tale told in these pages focuses more on the “a girlhood” than it does the “among gamblers”. Yes, her family gambles. And yes, she does too. But the book is more about Katy’s life that happened around and outside and because of the gambling, not of the gambling itself.

Was it a good book? Ehh… it didn’t suck, but from the book jacket I was expecting there to be more gambling and the gambling life. However, I did pick this book up the lofty price of $1.98 in the bargain resale library book bin down at the local Books-A-Million, so I really can’t complain. I don’t really recommend it though, unless you want to read about a girl whose family breaks apart and then mostly reforms in Las Vegas, but very little about the actual gambling.

Stuff on the Net V

Stuff on the Net

Its not new news, but EVE Online has proven to me again that it is a place where anything can happen if the players want it to… including theft and assassination.

Do you think you could be the next Mistress of the Dark?

I never think of the great ideas first. From big red paper clip to a year free rent.

Of course, even great ideas can be dwarfed by combined genius and stupidity. I leave is to you to determine which one is the genius.

I don’t bowl enough to have an average, but if I did, I might consider entering this tournament where the winner gets to own the bowling alley.

While looking up stuff to educate myself on the woes and advantages of hybrid cars I stumbled onto this enthusiastic yet disgruntled hybrid owner’s blog.

Crisis on Infinite Earths

Reviews

It has been a very long time since I read through the 1985 DC Comics event, but last year Marv Wolfman decided to write a novelization of the comic. Crisis on Infinite Earths tells the same tale of the original comic, only this time largely from the point of view of Barry Allen, The Flash.

If you’ve read the original, or if you read the first chapter of this book, you know from the get-go that Barry Allen dies. If you have followed The Flash comics since the original Crisis series, you also know that Barry didn’t really die so much as join the Speed Force (well, first he skipped off into the future, had a couple kids with his wife, Iris, and then permanently joined with the Speed Force, but that’s not really important right now). So from the first pages you know Barry is dead, but somehow and for some reason, the Monitor and the Speed Force are keeping him around in some sort of super accellerated ghost state. Appearantly he has something important to do.

The story is fairly confusing as it leaps from Earth to Earth and through time all over the place telling you things out of order and upside-down. But the snippets are still interesting, and the end of the book ties everything together nicely, adding a new dimension to the old comic book without destroying it.

If you liked the original Crisis, then I recommend this book.

However, I do have one complaint. The original series was published in 1985. This book was published in 2005. Twenty years. Alot has changed in those twenty years, and Marv lets slip in a number of current and recent pop culture references that simply didn’t exist then. Then again, comics have always been a very weird art form since their characters tend not to age while their world usually stays fairly up to date with the times, so I can overlook it a bit but I strongly feel that every one of those references could have been removed form the book and it would have worked just fine. It didn’t need pop culture. Still, it was a good read.