emptying my brain onto the internet since 1998…
for the heartwarming joy of kids being kids
A small British film made by the same guys who brought The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy to the screen, Son of Rambow, is a comedic look at two boys in the 80’s who try to make their own action film.
It was great fun to watch.
One thing that has always bugged me about MMORPGs is that in order to play the game, mechanically, to its peak, I must relinquish control of certain aspects of my character.
As far as spells, skills, talents, etc are concerned, that I don’t mind because those are the mechanics of the game. If getting skill X makes me better at dealing damage than skill Y and I have chosen my role to be damage dealer, there is no choice. I pick X. Picking Y would be self defeating. Sure, the idea of Y might be cooler than X, but mechanically, to maximize the efficiency of the game, I have to pick X.
To a degree, the same goes for items… except often times the best items don’t look the best. Ask any WoW player if he enjoys the water cooler shoulder pads of some of the highest level loot and you’ll get a mixed response… on the look. When it comes to the math, you can’t argue, much like skills, item X is better than item Y for reason Z. Period. The math doesn’t lie. The problem comes in that the axe you got a couple of weeks ago has the really cool look, and it is dripping fire, and the new one that just dropped, which is mathematically better than the axe that drips fire, just looks like a typical hand axe, one that doesn’t drip fire. Or perhaps you have this wicked cloak with a pattern of a bat on it, and you like bats, but now you are presented with a cloak that is much better statistically but is has a pink butterfly on it… ick.
For that reason, I fully support any design that allows for the separation of form and function. Recently I’ve been fooling around with EverQuest II and I just hit level 20 which opened up a second “paper doll” (i.e. – slots for items) that was just for the visible look. That way, the robe I had that I really liked the look of for my monk I can keep wearing for the appearance, but I can slip on the chest straps in my normal equipment spot for the stats. This is a concept that should be implemented into every single game that uses gear as progression… stat!
Thinking on this concept though, and knowing that I love it, I wanted to be sure I had considered all the possible “down sides” to it, and my thoughts on how to deal with them. So, let’s go…
1. PvP.
Problem: In Player versus Player combat, the fact that certain gear has a specific visual look can be an asset to sizing up your opponents. If he’s got on the water cooler shoulder pads and the unique dark blue chest plate from that super elite raid dungeon, chances are the guy is going to be decked out in awesome raid gear, so you’ll need to approach him differently, more carefully, than you would some poor schmoe in head to toe rags from random outdoor adventuring.
Solution: Gear from raid zones (or as PvP rewards) generally has designated “tiers”. In fact, World of Warcraft openly supports this idea of tiered suits, especially in rewarding players with bonus stats and effects for wearing pieces from the same tier. I’d suggest supporting this idea from day one, even at the lowest level. Design all gear to be handled in tiers, and then provide next to a character’s name (both floating and on player listing pages) they tier average of all their gear. If a player has 14 slots for gear and currently the game has 200 tiers of gear, a player with a tier average of 200 would be fully decked in the best gear possible. Of course, players could try to “cheat” by equipping lower tier gear, for example dropping a tier 1 piece of just in, say, the ring slot would drop a 200 tier player down to 186 (200 * 13 + 1 = 2601 / 14 = 185.78…, round up), but in doing so, he’d be robbing himself of an entire slot worth of stats. While this might be an odd concept at first, I think it would fairly rapidly become second nature to players. Games could even help out by providing the number for the current max tier rank, so you’d see a player as 191/200 or 185/200 as a quick judge of their gear.
2. Nudity.
Problem: Sometimes the problem isn’t just the look of a piece of equipment, but that you don’t want to see anything in a particular slot at all, and if you allow people to turn off the visible graphic for slots, you are going to end up with “naked” characters running around.
Solution: While I would support some form of “disabling” visibility on slots for most locations (gloves, boots, helmet, etc), I cannot think of any reason I would support disabling the visibility of the chest and pants slots on a character, and I would be perfectly happy leaving those two slots as forcing a graphic, either from the equipped stat item or from the visibility override item. If a player really wants to be “naked” back to the fully unequipped graphics of a new character, they’ll have to have nothing equipped, at least in those two slots. Besides, as far as I am aware, Age of Conan is the only game I’ve heard of that is going to have any real nudity anyway, most games already don’t allow true nudity.
…
And that’s it… I tried really hard to think of a 3rd problem with separating the form and the function of items, and I even feel number 2 there is a stretch. If anyone else thinks of a reason not to divide form from function, or any other problems, please, let me know. I’d love to discuss it.
To me though, it seems almost like a no brainer, especially to extend the accessibility of any game to role players and women. And I’m not being sexist there… its from experience, almost every woman I know who has played an MMO, one of the first things they want to know is how to turn the camera and see how they look. Women, in general, care more about how they look than men do, even in a game.
My wife took one look at Team Fortress 2 when I got it and immediately wanted to play. She took a second look at it, and hasn’t played it… her one complaint, “There are no females.”
Looking out across the FPS landscape, its usually generally a safe bet that my wife won’t want to play them. First off, she doesn’t like PvP in most games. Secondly, the grim and gritty realism that many games try to attain just doesn’t interest her. But when she saw the outlandish graphics of TF2, she was willing to put aside the dislike for PvP (“I think I want to play a Medic.”) and give it a shot. But without being able to play a woman, she lost interest again.
Just this week I was reading Games for Windows magazine’s March issue and perusing the article on the new Battlefield game: Battlefield Heroes. Once again, she saw the stylized graphics and immediately wanted to know more. So I showed her the article and dug around the Internet for more info. Not one single scrap mentions female characters, likely because there aren’t any… no more interest in the game.
I’d really like to play some FPS games with my wife, so, please, could someone put a game with really cool stylized graphics AND have female models in it? Please?
This week’s Zombie Wednesday is going to stray, just a little, from my thoughts on the Zombie MMO I would design, and take a look at one of the best Zombie games I’ve seen in a long while: Dead Rising. Taking a look at this game shows alot of the play style elements that I want in my own game, minus the shady organization giving you missions. If it can be picked up, it is a weapon or it is food.
One of the things that I love most about it is the variety of zombies. Some almost run toward you, some shamble, some barely even notice you at all until you get right on top of them, some grab at you slow, some lunge quick once you are in range, and more, and any combination of those. It shows that much can be done without breaking the traditional zombie standards.
Personally, this is the first time I’ve encountered the “Save progress but Start over” type of game. As you level and learn new tricks, you can save your game and keep going, and if you die you have the option of loading that save and losing everything you’ve done since then, or saving your character progress and starting back at the beginning. This method results in some odd happenings sometimes. My brother, for example, was playing and got to a point where the main character is kidnapped and all his possessions, including clothes, are taken. The result: when he started the game from the beginning, all the opening cut scenes featured our hero wearing only his boxer shorts.
All in all, the game is great. The only thing it lacks is multi-player, but rumors abound that it might be coming in the Platinum Edition of the game or as downloadable content. If you love zombies, the game is worth it, even at twice the price.
I am always on the look out for stuff to read, but browsing the bookstores sometimes just isn’t enough. So, I want you (yeah, all like five of you that read my blog) to recommend a book to me. There are some requirements and limitations, so if you want, read on:
A) The book needs to stand alone. Don’t recommend me anything other than part one of a series, and don’t recommend a book that starts a series but doesn’t itself contain a full story.
2) I like Sci-Fi, but not real dry science Sci-Fi, not hard Sci-Fi. I like Fantasy, but not real crazy out there Fantasy, I like it at least partly based in reality in the sense that it has humans or human like people and not everyone is slinging magic all around to solve everything. I like Horror, I prefer my vampires un-gay (Anne Rice, I hate you). I don’t like “sex” books, if the plot revolves around people having sex and contains repeated descriptions of engorged members and the like, it is just not a turn on to me. And while I like superhero books, don’t suggest them unless its really cool because, as you can see on my library, I have a few of those in my future reading stack already. I also like funny, but not really politics-funny.
D) I’d prefer books that aren’t new releases, if only because I plan to look for them at used book stores or in paperback. I don’t want to spend a fortune.
So, with that in mind, if you feel like it, reply with a book and the reason you liked it (don’t spoil it, of course).
I read on the bus to work every morning. This week I’ve been reading ‘Lamb’ by Christopher Moore, an excellent book thus far (about half way through) and its looking like it will get a very good recommendation out of me. The book happens to be a semi-satirical look at the life of Jesus Christ, Joshua, through the eyes of his never-mentioned-in-the-Bible best friend Levi, who is called Biff. Anyhow, as I’m riding the bus, I notice the guy sitting next to me. He looks ‘normal’, and I mean that in the “We never suspected anything because he was just a normal guy” sort of way. He wore typical business casual clothes, khaki slacks, a polo shirt, and nice shoes. His hair was an average short but not too short guy hair cut. He wore glasses, had a watch on (a nice gold colored one that may or may not have been actual gold) and a wedding ring. As he sat, he was flipping through some papers and highlighting as he went.
A brief aside here… If curiosity kills the cat, then I’m glad I’m not a cat. I have an insatiable appetite for looking at things that I shouldn’t. As a child, one of my favorite pastimes was sneaking into my father’s closet to take a gander at the Playboy magazines that he kept hidden there. I was like eight years old. Eight year old boys don’t really understand looking at naked women, but I did understand that I wasn’t supposed to look at naked women, so that’s why I did it. At jobs, I’ve always poked around the networks to find files I shouldn’t see, also because I believe that if you really want to keep something secret you should take the proper precautions to ensure that it can’t be seen. So back to where I left off, a guy sitting next to me highlighting papers.
I’m pretty good at misdirection and that sort of thing, so I’m pretending to read my book and stealing glances with my eyes only over to his work. This ‘normal’ guy is reading through and highlight passages in satanic texts. He’s flipping through pages of books by Crowley and others, making special note of referenced texts. Of course, you might be wondering, “How do you know what satanic texts look like?” And I might answer, “Umm… because I’ve read most of them myself.” but you might think less of me, so instead I’ll say, “Because all the pages were printed from a website, and when you print from a website the URL appears at the bottom (unless you disable that in Internet Explorer) and it has ‘satanic texts’ written in it!” But even if you choose to believe the former, at least I have my head shaved and sport a goatee, and have had a number of people tell me I look evil (when I’m not, I’m really a nice guy), while this man looks like the poster boy for Suburban Living Monthly (which, ironically, is the same look and acronym for Sociopathic Lunatic Monthly, both of which I’m pretty sure you can pick up at your local Kroger). I can only hope that he was doing research for something he’s writing, like a novel or a screenplay, which, I assure you, is what I was doing when I read the same books, and not researching quotes for his manifesto swearing his faith to the one true lord which he’ll have on him as he sacrifices teenage girls and he’ll include copies of with the video tapes he sends to the authorities of his deeds.
Some days I wonder if my imagination is too active, or if I actually see things that other people don’t… Time will tell I suppose.
So I’m picking up a Creative Loafing as I do every Thursday, and while I’m standing there, a hawk lands on a near by phone wire hanging above the street.
Honestly, I was much closer than it appears in this picture… about 10, maybe 15 feet. But the picture makes the hawk look small and like I was much further away.
Anyway, the bird looked cool, so I snapped a picture with my phone.
I picked up the DVD for 28 Days Later… last week and watched it a couple nights ago.
Wow.
I had heard good things about this film, but actually seeing it I was blown away by the simplicity of the look and feel of the film, it just draws you in.
If you don’t know, the story is about a man who has been in a coma who wakes up 28 days after a bizarre virus has been unleashed in England. The virus infects people and makes them “rage”, forgetting everything else except an unbridalled hatred for everyone they see.
I think the best part of the DVD though is they include the original ending, the alternate ending, an extended version of the alternate ending, and an ending they never filmed. That last one is really the coolest part as the writer an director show the story boards and read the script explaining what would have happened if they had filmed it. Most importantly though is the point where the description pauses and the director states something like “and right here is why we didn’t use this ending, its very cool, and I really liked it, but this one point right here just isn’t possible, it goes against things we’ve already established in the film.”
Definately worth the money to pick it up.