Tag: protection

Blog Banter: The Box versus the Digital Download

Gaming

Always looking for sources of things to talk about, I’ve joined up with a group of other bloggers to do a monthly blog banter topic where we all post on the same subject.

Welcome, welcome to the 6th installment of Blog Banter, the monthly blogging extravaganza headed by bs angel! Blog Banter involves our cozy community of enthusiastic gaming bloggers, a common topic, and a week to post articles pertaining to said topic. The results are quite entertaining and can range from deep insight to ROFLMAO. Any questions about Blog Banter should be directed here. Check out other Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!

Topic: Digital distribution of games vs. buying physical boxes and discs, which do you prefer and why?

If you had asked me this question years ago, my answer would have been physical boxes with no hesitation, as my closet full of game boxes will attest.  But then again, years ago, digital downloading could be iffy. Downloading a game once from some random website wouldn’t guarantee that you could get the game again later if you needed to.

That’s the main reason I always went for the physical box.  Once I have the box, as long as I don’t lose it, I can install and play that game whenever I want.  Every once in a while, I’ll pull out one of those boxes even now and throw down with an hour or two of Myst or Evil Genius or some other game you may not be able to find in stores anymore.

Of course, many of those games I own boxes for are available on GameTap now, so I don’t need my box, I just need to keep my $59.95 a year subscription active and I can play any of their 1000+ games whenever I want, on any machine I install the GameTap client on.  I’m a proud user of Steam, where I get my occasional fix of Half-Life 2 and Team Fortress 2 (games I don’t own boxes for) among others.  And with my Xbox360, well, I don’t fear Microsoft going out of business anytime soon, so I buy downloadable content through them, which I can always redownload.

But back to that main reason… being able to install and play any time I want.  If EA has their way, that’ll be a thing of the past.  SecuROM is actually going to make me not purchase Spore, a game I have been dying to play, because its some of the most idiotic copy protection I have ever heard about.  Similar problems crept up when Bioshock was released, the copy protection invalidating the game, which could be avoided by either getting the console version or by going through Steam.

I guess in the end, what I am saying it… assuming the source for the digital distribution will stick around, or that I can burn my own copy of the download for safe keeping, I don’t mind not getting a physical box anymore.

Check out these other Blog Banter articles! Living Epic, Silvercublogger, Mahogany Finish, Video Game Sandwich, thoughts and rants, XboxOZ360, Zath!, Delayed Responsibility, Gamer Unit, Hawty McBloggy, Triage Effect.

Paladin

Gaming

When I run pen and paper compaigns, one thing I hate most is people who want to play a paladin. This is partly due to the the fact that most people really suck at playing a paladin, and partly due to the preconceived notion of a paladin.

The white suit of armor, lance, flag, holy, goody-goody… the restrictions set forth in the book descriptions and the fairy tales… its just… boring.

To me, a paladin is simply a devout warrior of the faith, and its that second part that is the rub. What if you are a devout warrior of a god that desires the subjugation of all people under his will? Under those conditions, would lying to someone be against your faith and cost you your powers?

This is where the true essence of roleplayin comes in. A good GM, in my opinion, will work with his player to outline the tenets of his faith and determine the shape of the paladin’s persona. From this, the GM will be able to extrapolate what constitutes challenges to the faith and what would cause the paladin to lose the favor of his god.

Now… you may be wondering why the heck this even comes up. Over an EN World, someone posed the question: If Dudley DoRight is entering the city of an evil overlord, and at the gates the guards are asking people if they are paladins, would the paladin lose his god’s favor for lying in order to get into the city?

Really, its a stupid question involving a contrived situation created by a lazy GM who simply wants to trap and torture his paladin player. What reason could an evil warlord have for instructing his minions to ask “Are you a paladin?” of each person who enters the gate? But further, this whole situation would only work if the player was indeed a Lawful Good paladin who followed a god that holds honesty in high regard. It would be better if the warlord instructed his people to keep a lookout for certain crests denoting paladins and their deities. Even better, if its just the Lawful Good Dudley DoRights that he fears, would be to hire a spell caster to guard the gates with Circle of Protection from Law and Circle of Protection from Good spells, preventing the DoRights from even approaching the gate.

There are just so many better ways to handle every aspect of this.