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White Night

Reviews

Nine months after reading the eighth book in the series, I finally got around to reading book number nine of the Dresden Files.  By now, it should be fairly clear that I love these books.  They aren’t “High Art” (whatever the hell that is supposed to mean), but damn it if they aren’t fun.

White Night doesn’t mess with the formula that works as Dresden gets dragged in to trouble, this time helping out an old flame look into the deaths of some lesser talented practitioners and protect those that are still alive.  We also get to see that Harry has been training Molly, and he’s been continuing his work as a Warden of the White Council and fight in the war with the vampires.  But the kicker here is that someone has been trying to make it look like a Warden has been killing off the little witches, while some other reports put Harry’s half brother, a vampire of the White Court, at the scene of the crime.

While this book doesn’t have quite as many knock down drag out fights as the last couple in the series it certainly doesn’t lack action.  Plus, I don’t mind spending time getting to know more about the characters.

As always, I enjoyed my trip to Butcher’s Chicago.

30 Days of Game: Elements

Gaming

About two months ago, a friend sent me a link to Elements.  I played around with it for a few days to see if it would be something I was interested in, and it was.  So I backed away from it and then came at it fresh for 30 days.

If you’ve ever played and enjoyed collectible card games like Magic: The Gathering, then this is probably right up your alley.  When you begin you pick an element from Earth, Air, Fire, Water, Light, Darkness, Entropy, Gravity, Time, Aether, Life and Death.  Don’t worry about picking wrong, you can change later if you like, or just make a new account.  You’ll be given a starter deck and your first Quest: to defeat a Level 0 foe.  This first quest works like a tutorial, explaining how to play the game.  A coin is flipped to see who goes first, on your turn, if you aren’t first you draw a card, then you can play any resource cards you have and any cards you have the resources to play, and then you end your turn where any monsters you have will attack, any effects you have will process, and you’ll collect a round of resources.  The goal is to reduce your opponent to zero hit points before he does the same to you.

There are too many cards to spend any time talking about there here, but you can go to the bazaar and see them all.  You’ll earn money from winning duels, and sometimes even win cards in bonus spins after a win which you can use or sell, and you buy cards to continue constructing your deck.  If you are worried about spending money on the wrong cards, go play in the trainer that lets you have unlimited money but you can’t save your deck.

I started the game with a Death deck, built mostly on poisons and infections and boneyards (that produce skeletons when monsters die).  If you can survive long enough with this deck, you can kill just about anyone… its the surviving that is the trick.  After a while, I switched to playing Darkness, which I enjoyed more as it was definitely more active.  Basing the deck around Drains (a card that sucks life out of the opponent and gives it to you) I started regularly ending matches with 100 health and earning double the winnings.  I really ended up liking this slim deadly deck, but I felt I should also try out some others.  I played in the trainer and eventually I decided to build a deck based entirely on quantum pillars/towers (random 3 resources instead of 1 specific) and drawn resources (1 of each resource), and even went so far as to look up the ultimate god killing deck which was similar to but much better constructed than my rainbow deck.  Now I take turns playing my god killer for cash and my darkness for fun.

To be honest, this would never be a game that I played “seriously”, as in “for hours straight a day”.  But it is a very nice throwaway game to keep running in the background while you work (if your work doesn’t mind you playing games and they don’t block the site).  As a programmer, I know I occasionally need a momentary distraction from work in order to let my brain wander away from a problem so I can approach it from a new angle later, and Elements is perfect for that.  The only negative I would say exists in the game is that it is very grindy in that it takes quite a lot of time to be able to upgrade cards and build a better deck unless you play a certain way (Google “elements god killing deck”).  One “would be nice” thing is I would love to be able to build multiple decks and switch them out easily instead of having to rebuild them every time.

Overall, the game is very well constructed, it doesn’t appear to have any game breaking balance issues, and since it is free to play there is no harm in giving it a shot.  And if you enjoy playing it, feel free to throw a few dollars at the developers via their PayPal donation link.

The Station

Writing

3979765871_f5e0676fedAs his foot crunched in the gravel between the tracks, Edward stopped and waited.  It had been more than six months since he’d seen another living soul, but he’d run into one of them just a few days before.  He kept his weight steady.  His right palm gripped against the stock of the rifle started to sweat.  He eyed the windows of the building, looking for movement.  Nothing moved.

He quickly took two more crunching steps and stopped again.  Edward was tempted to call out, but voices carried and there was no sense alerting anything that hadn’t already heard his footsteps.  Still nothing moved, so he finished crossing the tracks to the cement walkway.

Everything looked clear and dry.  He carefully leaned the rifle against one of the roof supports and slipped off his shoes.  After tying the laces together, he hung them over his shoulder and picked the rifle back up.  He momentarily juggled it from hand to hand, taking the opportunity to dry his palms on his pants.

The light was beginning to fade and he needed to find a room, preferably without windows and a single door he could lock and barricade, before night fell.  Edward approached the nearest door in sock feet, as silent as he could manage.

It was dark inside.  Electricity had first started failing within days after everything went to hell.  Some places, powered by hydroelectric had managed months of power before their mechanisms began to fail.  The last of Edward’s own working batteries had died out weeks ago, and he hadn’t been able to find any more.  Entering the building took several long minutes as he stepped forward into shadow and then waited for his eyes to adjust.  By the time he was a few feet inside, it wasn’t so dark anymore.

Most of the windows had been boarded up on the inside, which meant that someone had secured it at some point.  But the door had been wide open, so unless that someone had retreated to and was holding up in some deeper room, it wasn’t likely that any living person was inside.

Safety was important, but he didn’t have time to check the whole station.  He made his way down the first hallway and found a supply closet.  It wasn’t big, but he could see a small rectangular shape high up on the far wall he guessed was an air vent, and the wire shelves on the left and right would provide good support for barricading the door.  Opposite his closet was a boarded window, and if he needed he could use the shotgun on his back to blast a way out. He stared into the room for a minute, occasionally looking left and right down the hall in either direction.  Edward shifted his weight to his right foot, then patted his left foot on the floor a couple times.

Nothing moved.

He slipped into the closet, turned and very slowly shut the door.  Carefully he knelt down and placed his rifle on the floor, then unslung his pack from his back.  Reaching in with his left hand he quietly rummaged around for a candle and a lighter.  At this point his flash light was little more than a club, but he’d found a box of fifty disposable lighters long ago and had kept them.

Producing a candle and a lighter, he flicked the lighter to life and lit the candle.  On his left was a shelf of cleaning and janitorial supplies.  Quickly his inventoried it in his head, taking note of there was nothing to eat or drink, but there was a bottle of plain Clorox he could use to clean some water later and number of other chemicals.  There were buckets on the bottom shelf he might make use of tomorrow, and in the corner were three mops he could use to bar the door.  He found a stack of paper cups, possibly for a dispenser next to a drinking fountain somewhere in the station, and took one to use as a candle holder, which he did and set it on the same shelf at chest height.

On the right was a shelf of office supplies.  Some pens, a couple pads of paper, a stapler.  Nothing he could really use.

He looked up and saw the dark rectangle on the wall opposite the door had indeed been an air vent.  There wouldn’t be any heat or air conditioning, but it made him feel better about locking himself in a room if it wasn’t air tight.

Edward grabbed up the mops and wedged them into the wire shelves across the door.  It probably wouldn’t hold long if trouble came, but the noise should wake him up.  With that done, he moved his candle down to a lower shelf, moved his rifle into the corner the mops had occupied, and pulled his sawed off shotgun from his pack and placed it on the shelf with the stapler.

He sat on the floor and leaned against the back wall of the closet, then went searching through his pack for something to eat.  Edward came up with a water bottle still half full and one mostly full that represented the last of his clean water.  He also discovered a granola bar at the bottom, which was a surprise since he thought he’d run out last week.  He unwrapped and ate the bar, as well as a small bag of peanuts, and drank the half full bottle of water.

Less hungry than he had been, Edward blew out the candle and settled on the floor curled in a fetal position.  Using a t-shirt from his pack as a pillow, he closed his eyes and tried not to think too much about tomorrow’s trip in to town for supplies.  For now, he was safe in the station. Still he spent a long hour listening for noises in the night before drifting off into a fitful sleep.

Photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/gali_367/ / CC BY-NC 2.0

A New Project for Myself

Random Thoughts

Not so long ago I started up a project here where I would post doodles.  I did it for a few weeks and then stopped.  I’ve still been doodling, but work and other things have kept me from it more often than not and I’ve found if I don’t get right into doodling early on Saturday mornings, then I don’t produce anything worth posting.  If I start late, I end up just screwing around and trying to learn some of the functions of GIMP and not actually drawing anything.  I’ll still keep doing it when I can, but I’ve missed enough weeks to realize that I’m not going to be regular about it.

Plus, I still can’t draw for shit, so while I’m working at it, I don’t impress myself very often.  I’m more apt to delete an image than share it.  I’m working on not doing that.

Anyway, I decided that I also wanted to start something to work on writing.  So, today, in just a few minutes I’m going to post the first in what I hope to be a long series of posts.  This new project will involve me going to one of the many places on the Internet where you can find photos that people take and allow to be used by others (here is a list of places to look), and finding one that inspires something in me.  I’ll then write what I’m inspired to write and post it with the accompanying photo (and a link to where I got the photo so that credit is given along with whatever text they require for use).  I hope this works out well… if not… well, then I only hope I don’t get sued.

Movie Round-Up: October 2nd, 2009

Reviews

Whip It:

One of my guilty pleasures a few years ago was Rollergirls on A&E.  There is something about people trying to get a sport off the ground, a sport they clearly enjoy and they want to impart that joy to others.  I got that same feeling watching the movie Leatherheads a while back about how professional football wasn’t originally taken seriously.  Anyway, this movie really captures the sport well, and the way many people probably look at the girls who decide to pursue it.  It was fun and funny, and even exciting during the bouts.  Definitely a thumbs up from me.

The Invention of Lying:

If you’ve seen the trailer, you know the premise of the film is it takes place in a world where no one has ever told a lie.  One thing to keep in mind before you go see it is that a lie isn’t just what most people consider lies, like telling your boss you are sick when you aren’t or pretending you have a job you don’t to impress a girl.  Every fiction book ever written is a lie.  Every exaggeration of the truth is a lie.  So now, imagine a world without fiction, without storytelling as we know it, without any stretching of the truth.  This is the world of The Invention of Lying.  A world where people go to the movies to see a man in a comfy chair narrate the factual events of historical periods.  I found this movie to be incredibly funny, and Ricky Gervais pulls off the whole thing really well.  However, I can easily see how some people wouldn’t like it, especially religious folks, because, you see, unless you believe that the Bible is a 100% factually accurate depiction of events exactly as they happened, that make it fiction, and fiction is lying, and lying doesn’t exist until Ricky’s character invents it…

Zombieland:

The only movie opening this week I didn’t see a screening of.  I had the opportunity (Thanks Greg and Neil!) but decided to see Whip It instead because, frankly, I’ll always pay to see zombies.  And this is the latest George Romero “I want to make comments on society and don’t care if my movie is boring or stupid” zombie film.  This is going to be funny, and disgusting, and a blast to watch, I can just tell.  So this weekend, Zombieland will be earning my $10.

Cable TV & Me

Random Thoughts

If you frequent my blog, you may have read about my war with Comcast.  The end result of everything is that I built my father a PVR using digital tuners, and he’s able to record six programs at a time on the channels broadcast in the clear (essentially 2 thru 78 plus a handful of other random channels, plus the HD versions of all the local channels), while I, not able to afford to replace my PVR, canceled cable TV in favor of various streaming sources.  With Hulu, network websites, Netflix, and the occasional torrent, I can watch pretty much every show I care to watch.  Yeah, it is always a day late, but I was recording and watching most of them a day late anyway.

The main reason behind this decision wasn’t just to save the $60 a month that cable TV cost me, although that is nice, but mostly in that cable TV isn’t serving me properly as a consumer.  To me, the single most important thing is to be able to watch the shows on my schedule.  Since networks insist on putting good shows on opposite each other, and I don’t want to not watch good shows, recording shows has always been something I needed to do.  And while recording shows for later viewing meant I could fast forward through commercials, that was always a side effect and never the point.  Time shifting was the point.  Right now, if for that same $60 a month, Comcast were to offer me the ability to watch any program at any time, even if I was forced to watch the commercials and couldn’t skip them, I’d do it.

On Demand programming is where the future is, and networks need to catch up.  And charging me $3 or $5 per episode in addition to my cable bill just to watch it without commercials isn’t the answer.  Leave the commercials in and let me watch it for free, just like when it is broadcast, but on my own schedule.

I want to watch your shows.  I even want to watch your commercials (they help me discover more shows and sometimes even products to buy).  But I just can’t do it on your schedule.

Either the networks need to jump on On Demand, or the cable companies need to invent the 10 tuner DVR that works with ALL their channels  so people can create their own On Demand.

Closing Doors

Gaming

If you spend any time over on the Fallen Earth forums, you might notice that a large number of threads, regardless of where they begin, end up with someone mentioning “respec” and derailing the thread into the same old arguments.  On one side you have people who think there should be no way to respend points and that a poorly made character should be deleted and the player have to start over from scratch.  On the polar opposite you have people who think there should be a way to respend points at any time, or with a very minimal cost (the joke is, they suggest a cost, but unless a game has sufficient money sinks, eventually everyone is rich, just look at a game like WoW where money sinks of 1 gold were put in early in the game but new money sinks are much higher).  In between you have all sorts of ideas, like allowing people to respec once a year or other time frames, or attaching a huge cost to it, or requiring people to re-earn their points, essentially de-leveling to respec.

Where I fall in the argument is that given the design choices they made with the game, there does need to be some option to change your point spending.  Every time you spend a point in Fallen Earth, you are closing a door.  Most games are actually built on closed doors.  In WoW, if you make a warrior, you have closed a door — you can’t be a priest, or a rogue, or a shaman, you are a warrior, forever.  In a game like Fallen Earth, the closing of doors is more subtle.  A point spent at level five may not seem like its doing anything, but when you get to level 45 and you are one point short of being able to buy that one skill you need to complete your character, now you’ve hit a brick wall, one you cannot climb or break through or go around — delete and start over is your only option.  The result is that in order to not screw up a player needs to spend time researching choices, spoiling the game in order to make sure they aren’t gimping themselves by just playing and having fun.

Where I fall in the argument is that the game shouldn’t have been designed this way to begin with.

Anything, not Everything

A player in a game should have the capability to do anything they want.  People, specifically the hardcore players who demand that choices be permanent, will tell you that hard decisions are “just like real life” but they are only partly correct.  Yes, real life is full of things you can’t undo, but in real life you also do not have to lose your entire identity to choose another path.  If you spent the first 25 years of your life going to school, to college and working hard to become an accountant, you are not required to be an accountant forever.  You can go back to school, or pick a new career, and you can do this without changing your name or losing your friends.

Of all the game systems I’ve seen over the years, in my opinion, EVE Online is the only game that has done it right.  I’m not talking about the real time based training system.  I’m talking about the fact that you can start a character and decide that you want to fly Amarr frigates that fire missiles.  You train your skills and fly your frigates and shoot your missiles.  Later, however, if you decide you’d like to fly Caldari Cruisers, you simply start training those skills, eventually buy yourself a Caldari Cruiser and there you go.  The limitation in EVE is that you can learn and do anything, but you can’t do everything at once.  When you step outside the starport in your Caldari Cruiser, your Amarr frigate skills mean absolutely zero.  If your cruiser is armed with cannons, your missile skills mean absolutely zero.  In a sense, in EVE, you are what you drive.

Guild Wars also works somewhat like this.  Yes, you do have to pick classes to level, but for each class you have you can learn tons of skills, but when you leave town you can only have so many of those skills equipped.

I would love to have seen Fallen Earth follow those models.  Let you grind and train an unlimited number of skills, but limit your character’s carrying capacity and make him be what he wears.  Right now in FE you can carry kits for all the trade skills at once, but I’d prefer it if there was no limit to the training of your skills, but you could only carry two “active” kits at any time, so you’d have to choose what tasks you were planning on before you left town.  Rather than force you to pick one kind of combat to specialize in, I’d prefer letting you learn them all, but having to choose primary and secondary weapons before leaving town.

The main thing here is that if I spend the next six months playing this game and making friends and joining a guild only to learn that while I was having fun leveling I was making decisions that would make the game totally un-fun later with no chance at all of correcting those decisions without starting over, that point, the point where my character isn’t fun because of misspent points is where they will lose me as a customer.

I really hope that Fallen Earth can come up with a solution to let players salvage “broken” characters, and I hope more games in the future consider implementing more dynamic character creation paths that don’t so heavily utilize closing doors.

Movie Round-Up: September 25th, 2009

Reviews

Fame:

In 1980, Fame hit the screen with a story that followed four students through the New York City High School for the Performing Arts.  I remember seeing it years later on HBO or Cinemax, sneaking a rated R film while my parents were out.  I watched the TV show too.  Part of me was excited to see the remake, and part of me dreaded it.  This new 2009 version of Fame is fun, but dumb.  Frankly, there are too many characters in the foreground here.  You don’t get to know any of them well enough to care about them, and while the musical numbers are interesting to watch they stand out so much from the bland non-musical parts that they primarily serve to remind you of how lame this new Fame is.  If I rated with thumbs, this would be a thumbs down.

Pandorum:

I love me some haunted house movies.  I especially love it when the house in question is a space ship.  Add on top of that Dennis Quaid and Ben Foster and  I would see this movie in a heartbeat, if not for…

Surrogates:

This is going to be my must see movie of the weekend.  Firstly, its Bruce Willis, and I pretty much love every movie he’s ever done, especially the action films.  Second, the plot here just looks to be awesome.  So, my hard earned $10 will get spent here.  Hells yeah.

Chat Boundaries

Gaming

EverQuest was, as I’ve described before, really just a bunch of chat rooms with this mini-game of fighting monsters strapped to it.  In each room, or zone, there were several chat channels.  Local or say was distance limited, get too far from someone, twenty or thirty virtual feet, and you wouldn’t see their chat messages.  Then you had shout which was zone wide, and ooc (out of character) which was also zone wide, and auction which again was zone wide.  You might wonder why they had three channels that were essentially functionally the same.  The answer is in the second channel, out of character.  Shout was intended to be for things you wanted to say to the whole zone which was in character, or role playing.  OOC was for talking about min/maxing and last night’s baseball game.  Auction was for trade chat, selling items or offering to buy items.

The best thing about EQ was that the players did a fairly good job (on my server anyway) of policing that.  People talking about baseball in shout were asked to move to ooc, and they usually did.  This let players have control over how they interacted with the game.  If you wanted to role play, you simply turned off ooc and all the other players could chat about baseball and you’d never see it.

In recent years, as the MMO genre has grown, with millions of people playing games like WoW, and games dropping the in character/out of character conventions, the boundaries of chat are gone.  Every channel in most games is full of every kind of chat (except role play, which is getting pretty well crushed under the boot of “fun” which an ever growing segment of game populations appear to equate entirely with playing whack-a-mole and collecting loot).  Take Fallen Earth for example.  I love playing the game, but only after I filtered out both the New Player and Region chats to tabs I could hide because it was non-stop streams of spoilers and data and whining.

Of course, I’m not just lamenting lack of channel etiquette, but the loss of the RP in the MMORPG.  Many people these days appear to approach MMORPGs like they are just another way to spend some time.  They log in, they fight some monsters, they complete some quests, they level, and they log out.  Somewhere in there, perhaps, they chat with some other people.  Though with the increasing emphasis on solo game play in modern MMOs, playing or chatting with other people isn’t something most people are doing.  For me, at least, I’d love to see the return of the “out of character” channel, if only as an acknowledgment by the developers that there is a dividing line between in and out of character.

No More Kings

Reviews

I was first introduced to the band No More Kings because of a funny video for a song of theirs.  The song was “Sweep The Leg” and the video is…

The infectious groove of that song immediately had me hooked.  Shortly after discovering the song, I found out the band was coming through Atlanta and playing a gig down at Smith’s Olde Bar.  We went, and there I heard more of Pete Mitchell’s music.  I bought the CD and it has remained a staple of my changer.

Not too long ago, No More Kings put out a second album, which I pre-ordered and it has joined the first in remaining a staple of my CD changer.  One of the best parts of Pete and company’s style is that while many of their songs are littered with and about pop culture (or specifically 80’s pop culture) like the song in the video above they never really come out and beat you over the head with it.  The song is called “Sweep The Leg” and not “The Karate Kid song”.  For another example, take the following lyrics:

there’s no reason to look under the hood
a slight malfunction, doesn’t mean i’m no good
i won’t be shut down, i’m not ready to die
i said that i was sorry, but robots don’t cry

hold on
the very thought of losing out now is making me tremble
hold on
i am alive, i am alive, i am alive
hold on
please just gimme a chance now, no disassemble
hold on
i am alive, i am alive

there’s no reason to take me apart
extension cords and circuit boards don’t mean there’s no heart
i can tell somehow you relate
we’re indifferent to the difference between program and fate

now i know i’m alive
can’t you see i’m alive

i finally know i’m alive
i wanna show i’ve arrived
i wanna stay up all night
set all circuits to jive
i wanna prove i’m alive
do so much more than survive
i’m gonna reach for the sky
and give the world a hi-five
i wanna shout it out, i know what life is about
i wanna laugh wanna scream wanna cry out loud

You might need to read through it a couple of times if it doesn’t jump out at you, but this song is called “Robots Don’t Cry” and is about Johnny 5, the star of the film Short Circuit.  Many of their songs are like this, although they also do a number of fully original tunes that are not about movies and TV shows.

One cut off the second album called “Obey The Groove” is available for free from the band’s website. And you can go to Amazon and listen to samples of everything on both albums, No More Kings and And The Flying Boombox.  I highly recommend checking them out, but then, I’m a fan.  No More Kings has made my list of must buys.

Enjoy!