Author: Jason

Survey: Question Number One

Gaming

Would you rather play an MMORPG with no statistics caps and items overflowing with bonuses or one with finite, even small, caps and item bonuses being rare?

It is actually an important question to consider, both as a player and a designer. First, let’s tackle the player side…

As a player of the first scenario, your character has stats (strength, intellect, stamina, etc.) that start low and have no limit. As you progress through the game you’ll casually pick up items that boost stats, giving you more strength or stamina or intellect or whatever, or a combination subset of them, or all your stats. Then as you reach the higher levels of the game, the items become litered with stat bonuses, and your character sheet is lined with three digit numbers. This is actually the model most games on the market currently present to players. At level 5 you’ll get a “Shard Sword of Quickness” that does decent damage and adds a small bonus to your dexterity. By level 60 you’re drooling for “Mangar’s Mystical Maul of Mighty Mashing” that practically kills anything under level 40 in a single blow, adds more than 40 points to every stat, makes your hands glow blue, and occasionally explodes fire on your target for more damage.

In the second scenario, we’ll take the age-old Dungeons & Dragons model. Stat cap of 25, and anything over 18 is rare and exceptional. Your fighter is a tough guy with a 17 strength, and throughout most of his life from levels 1 to 60 he uses items of varying quality, Rusty Blades to Polished Rapiers to Adamantine Swords of Supreme Quality, each one better than the last, doing more damage, needing less repair, and other more esoteric qualities like the graphics. Then, at level 60, you and a group of friends fell a dark lord in a castle and you are rewarded with a Blade of Might that gives you a two point bonus to your strength when you wield it, pushing your strength to 19.

From the design standpoint… Scenario one leads to the marginalization of statistics. If you are going to be handing out stat bonuses like candy on Halloween, and characters are going to be allowed to climb from a starting point under 20 and finish up somewhere above 200 or 500 or wherever, individual point bonuses have to be tiny, almost meaningless, so that getting an item with 4 strength on it does very little, but getting one with 40 strength on it is noticable.

The second scenario, well, that can lead to disappointed players. Sure, going from a 17 strength to a 19 strength means the player goes from being a well toned human to a small giant when it comes to damage bonus and being able to kick down doors and lift open the lids of stone crypts, but that system, while possibly easier to manage and balance for gameplay, means that bonuses are extremely rare, and many players may never see one at all.

Personally, I’m actually sick to death of the dominant system on the market. I’d prefer to try a game with a more limited stat system where every point means something. So, what system do you prefer?

Final Destination Trilogy

Reviews

Thanks to Allison I went last night to a marathon screening of the Final Destination Trilogy. That’s right, all three movies back-to-back-to-back. Well, with little intermissions as well, but close enough for government work.

The first film plays mostly like a suspense film. If you don’t know the story, a group of students are going to France for a school trip and one kid gets a vision of the plane exploding, he freaks out and a total of seven people end up getting tossed off the plane. The plane indeed explodes, and now Death is stalking the survivors who were supposed to die on the plane. They figure out, too late for most of them, that if they pay attention there will be signs and they might be able to continue cheating Death. I say its a suspense film because there is no physical Death, he’s not hunting them with a scythe or anything, and the weight of the film falls on seeing the signs and wondering from what angle death is coming at them. Its a pretty good movie, though I don’t recommend watching it before getting on a plane. I’m not really scared of flying, but seeing this film originally the night before I got a plane to Mexico made me a little edgy. The crash sequence is that ‘good’.

The second movie plays almost more for comedy. This time, one year after the plane crash in the first film, a girl gets a vision of a horrific car pile up and decides to use her car to block an on-ramp for the highway, saving the lives of a bunch of people. Once again, too late for most of the survivors, they begin to understand the signs… well, they know about it pretty early, but no one believes until half of them are dead. Most of the deaths in this movie are somewhat funny in ways, people actually laughed through a bunch of it, and it even ends with a death that almost fall-out-of-your-chair funny. Once again, a good movie for slightly different reasons even one kinda nifty twist, but I don’t recommend watching it before or while on a road trip. The car pile up is… disturbing.

This leaves us with the new chapter, openning today, Final Destination 3. Once again a girl gets a vision of impending doom, only this time its of a gory roller coaster accident. Ever been afraid a coaster might jump the track? Yeah, well, this is worse. Way worse. Like the previous films, she flips out and ten people get thrown off the ride, which has its accident according to plan. And as usual, Death needs to even the score and people start dying. Of the three films, this one, by far, is the bloodiest, goriest, splatter-festiest of the bunch. Some of the suspense from the first one is missing, and the comedy of the second is gone. This movie is people being viciously brutalized, kinda like at this point Death is very angry that people keep screwing up his plan. It was a good movie for what it is, but similar to the other films, don’t watch this and then run off to Six Flags or some other amusement park. Come to think of it, after watching this movie there are a number of things you might be a tad squeemish about doing again, at least the first time or two.

Overall, the Final Destination Trilogy is good, not-so-clean, fun. Two thumbs up.

Special Treatment

Random Thoughts

One of the things I have come to hate over the years is “equality”, mostly because people just don’t use it right. To me, equality means equal opportunity. The door is there, whether I open it and go through it is up to me, but the door is there. Too many people, however, see equality as meaning true equality. If there is a door, and I make the effort to open it and go through it, they should be allowed to go through it too, even if they don’t do the work.

Tied in with this is the concept of trust. Trust is something you earn by being consistant, and when you are trusted, you will be given benefits that less trust worthy people don’t get. Lots of people see those benefits as being “unequal” because they don’t grasp that if they work and become trustworthy, those benefits will be given to them too.

My rent is due each month by the 5th. If you are late, you have to pay a late fee… fair enough. There is a deadline, you miss it, you are penalized. However, since in the past they have run into deadbeats who bounce checks when they are late, my apartment complex requires that late rent must be paid with a cashier’s check or a money order. I’ve lived there for three years, and in three years I have never missed a payment until now. I’m perfectly willing to pay the late fee. I’m late, I don’t deny it. But I asked if, given my payment history, I could be allowed to just write a personal check. They said no. I asked why and they said it was policy, no exceptions. I could totally understand if they demanded all rent in certified payment, but its only the late rent. I tried to pursue it, since I’ve made the last 36 or so payments on time and never bounced a check, but she cut me off, said no again, told me to have a nice day and hung up.

On the other hand, I went to the bank to get myself a cashier’s check for the late rent and the bank manager said that since I’d been a loyal customer for over ten years, they would happily wave the fee for the cashier’s check. Meanwhile, the guy next to me, who was also getting a cashier’s check and was paying the fee, said he thought it was real nice the bank rewarded loyal customers and he looked forward to doing business there for a long time to come.

So today is a loss and a win. More loss than win though, since the late fee on the rent is much much larger than the fee for the cashier’s check. But hey, I’ll take my wins where I can get ’em.

Artemis Fowl

Reviews

I had heard good things about the Artemis Fowl series by Eoin Colfer, so I put them on my birthday wish list last year. As it happens, I got one. I actually read Artemis Fowl, the first book in the series, a couple of months ago. And it was good enough that I bought the next two, The Arctic Incident and The Eternity Code. This series is fun, extremely well written, and if not for the lack of real violence or dead and the repeated appearance by a character who uses flatualance to get things done you might mistake them for “adult” books.

The recommended reader level of these books is grades 5-7, but I’d recommend them to just about anyone. The plot runs like this… Artemis Fowl is an eleven year old boy genius, son to the head of a long standing crime family. His father, trying to do some legit business may have gotten himself killed, at the very least he’s gone missing in action. In the meantime, Artemis has been running the family business, along with the help of his bodyguard, Butler. Artemis stumbles upon fairies. It turns out they exist, but its not exactly like the story books. There are no leprechauns… instead, you’ve got the Lower Elements Police Reconnaissance, LEP Recon. And other things are different too, but one thing remains, if you can trick them out of their gold, its yours to keep. The family funds have dried up, and Artemis puts into action a plan to win himself some fairy gold. The first book goes from there, and later books deal with Artemis and the People (as the fairies call themselves) and their ever crossing paths.

This series gets my gold seal of approval. Its a good, fast, fun read.

Hollywood and Your Money

Random Thoughts

People often wonder why Hollywood keeps churning out crappy movies. The answer is simple… because you people keep paying to see them!

This past weekend approximately three and a half million people (3,500,000) went to see “Big Momma’s House 2” making it the number one film of the weekend with its $28 million box office draw. It also happens to be the second largest January opening in movie history.

Look people, we have to work together on this. You can not just go spending hard earned dollars on junk like this. You need to support quality films, and I don’t just mean Oscar winning crap, because lots of those films are garbage too. Sometimes you have to stop and think, and if there are no good movies playing, don’t go to a movie. Go home and watch a DVD or play a board game or go out drinking with some friends. Anything. Anything, that is, except settling for some movie that isn’t really worth your $8 but you don’t see anything better playing.

Support quality entertainment, not garbage. At least not at the theaters. Wait for DVD… or cable… or broadcast television… If you go to the movies and nothing good is playing, vote with your feet and walk away. If you stop paying Hollywood for making crappy movies, they’ll stop making crappy movies.

Reign of the Dead

Reviews

Mmm… more zombies. Another Christmas gift this year was Len Barnhart’s Reign of the Dead. First, let me express my disappointment that this is an iUniverse published book. iUniverse is another POD publisher, though its not as bad as PublishAmerica since they are backed by Barnes & Noble it is still paying to be published and it still keeps your book out of most bookstores. That aside, this is actually a pretty good book. As usual for the genre, the dead come back to life and kill people. In this case, any dead person with an intact brain will get back up, but just the bitten. The author skips the gory details of the world being overrun and the first days of the walking dead by starting with a character who has been living in a secluded cabin for the past three weeks. After that it follows what is a fairly typical formula of survivors finding each other and banding together. He throws into the mix a government installation run by a mildly insane dictator type who actually becomes commander-in-chief after the fall of NORAD and all the major political players, at which point he decides that nuking all the cities is the answer. He doesn’t, because if he did it would be a really short story. Instead, there is a mini civil war, and dead soldiers becomes zombies, and only one scientist gets out. After a bunch of other stuff, the book actually ends happy. The zombies are gone and the remnants of humanity start putting the pieces back together.

I had one issue with the book. The first character, Jim, is described as a business man who has retreated to the wilderness to get some much needed rest. He is depicted as an avid hunter, but somewhere during the first few chapters he just sort of becomes this hardened military type that garners respect from the other characters. The thing missing is for him to have actually done something to earn that respect. Sure, in times of crisis, people often will latch on to any leader type, but Jim stumbles in with a group that already had a leader type and the trust he gets just doesn’t feel earned.

On a good note, I did very much enjoy the book’s use of a prison. To me, it has always been something that just logically made sense. A prison is like a ready made castle, and a perfect place to hunker down and try to survive a rising of zombies. Now, its true you could get trapped there, surrounded, but with the proper supplies for planting gardens and whatnot, you could easily survive there for years behind the fences and stone walls while trying to solve the being surrounded problem. So, I liked that they used a prison, especially dealing with the prisoners, guards and what happened after the zombies started prowling around.

Overall, this was a decent book. Definately worth the read. Happier, but not as well written as Brian Keene’s The Rising and City of the Dead (which I reviewed previously).

My Playlist

Site News

I decided to start keeping a list of what I’ve got jammed in my MP3 player. So, over on the right you should see a link entitled “My Playlist”. Basically, I’ve got a ridiculous amount of CDs, many many hundreds, possibly over a thousand, which isn’t much for someone who works in the music industry or at a music store, but its quite a bit for someone who has never worked in either.

Anyway, there you have it.

Enjoy!

Other People`s Heroes

Reviews

Along with my zombie books, I got some superhero books for Christmas too. One of them was Other People’s Heroes by Blake M. Petit. The book is about a world where superheroes exist, and one man has always wanted to be one. As a kid he was saved from a burning building by Lionheart, the greatest hero. As an adult, he finds out that he has powers himself and plans to starting fighting crime when he discovers that its all a sham. There are no real heroes and villians anymore, its like professional wrestling. The heroes all grouped up and put the real hard criminals away, and the other bad guys were offered steady jobs. Fights are scripted, heroes put on a show, real crime is down, and kids get good role models to look up to. But something isn’t quite right, and our hero aims to find out what that is…

Its a good book, a really good book. Blake weaves a solid tale of superheroes with the right amount of humor. It reads like a comic book without the pictures.

That said, I was disappointed by one thing about this book… the publisher. Having gone to a few writer’s workshops myself, and one with A.C. Crispen who co-heads up Writer Beware, I’ve been constantly warned about PublishAmerica (see Writer Beware’s exposure of the PA hoax, and this Washington Post article). Basically, as a Print on Demand publisher, very few, if any, small bookstores and no major national chains will carry the book. POD books are almost always non-returnable, so stores don’t stock them since they can’t return unsold copies. Many stores will let you special order through them, and with online sales picking up every year this is going to be less of a problem (however, for now, the majority of book sales are still done in brick & mortar shops). But POD publishers also don’t do much, if any, marketing for their books. I believe PA offers to do two local press releases, and they will send individual announcements to a list of people that you (the author) provide. Oh, and if you read PA’s contract, they own your book for 7 years. That means for 7 years if you sell the movie rights or get picked up by a large traditional publishing house, they get 50%. All this made me sad because Blake’s book is excellent. Shopped to the right publishing house he could have gotten a good deal and actually gotten paid well (or at least decently) for his book. I may have never known this book even existed if not for Amazon.com.

So, there you have it… good book, bad publishing company.

The Rising and City of the Dead

Reviews

For Christmas this year I asked for a bunch of zombie books and superhero books, and I got some. One of the zombie books I got was The Rising by Brian Keene. Its your traditional “zombies are overrunning everything” story that you see in movies all the time. Or at least so it appears… In this book zombies aren’t the mindless corpses seeking flesh and stumbling around of Night of the Living Dead. They’re not even the beastial “Brains!” zombies of Return of the Living Dead. These are closer to the deadites of the Evil Dead movies (1, 2 and Army of Darkness). They work together, they talk, they plan. They fire guns and drive cars. But they still have only one goal… kill everyone.

The book starts with Jim Thurmond, locked away in the fall out shelter he built in his back yard for Y2K. Jim decides he’s going to head outside and try to get away when his cell phone rings and just before the battery dies he hears his son, who lives with Jim’s ex-wife, plead for help, saying that he’s hiding in the attic, mommy is sick, and Rick (the stepfather) is a monster. This sets Jim off on a journey that takes him from West Virginia to New Jersey to save his son.

Jim isn’t the only character we meet. There is Martin, a reverend, who meets up with Jim fairly early. Frankie, a junky whore, whose trying to survive the living dead and kicking heroine cold turkey. And Baker, a scientist who might just be partly responsible for the whole damn thing. There are a number of other points of view, some very brief, to fill out the tale, and Mr. Keene weave the stories together beautifully (if rather depressingly), and keeps you at the edge of your seat wondering what could possibly happen next.

The book was so good, I ran out and picked up the second (and final) book, City Of The Dead , because I just had to know how it ended.

Now, I’m going to go into alot more detail, so I’ll warn you… ** Spoilers Ahead!! **
Read more

Nobody Gets the Girl

Reviews

So lately I have been reading alot of books, largely superhero books from Marvel and DC, but whenever I can find one I prefer those that did not start as a comic book. Nobody Gets the Girl is one of those books.

The story is simple: Richard Rogers wakes up one morning to find out that he was never born, but somehow he’s still around, and no one can see him or hear him… except Dr. Knowbakov and his daughters, who go by the names Rail Blade and The Thrill. And just like that, he is sorta a superhero trying to save the world from itself and Rex Monday.

This was a good, fun, fast read. It really read like a comic book, only without the art to linger over the pages just flew by. One word: Awesome. I highly recommend the book.