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Blind

Stuff on the Net

I’m not too big on machinema.  It is usually rather goofy, and the repetitiveness of the animations, since makers are limited to what is available in the game, drive me insane.  Which is why I actually enjoyed ‘The Craft of War: Blind’ by Percula.  Rather than just live inside the game, which -don’t get me wrong- takes talent to craft stories out of, he took all the graphics from the game and then used professional animation software to choreograph and render his work.  So clearly, from the start, this isn’t truly machinema.

A number of people on the various places this video has shown up have complained about the music choice, using words like “utter shit” to describe it.  But I think most of that comes from a disdain for the artist or the song without any consideration to how the music complements the piece.  Given that machinema has used all sorts of music, from classic fantasy style music through to Linkin Park, I don’t think any music choice is really out of place, and in this case it fits perfectly with the style, pacing and attitude of the video.

Percula is, reportedly, out of work, having been laid off.  However, if this is a sample of the usual quality of his work, then I don’t suspect he’ll have any trouble finding another gig.  Although, I might suggest he expand his search to fields outside of gaming.  With his sense of pacing and story, he might find work in Hollywood.

Without further ado… the video:

[vimeo width=”500″ height=”300″]http://vimeo.com/2625538[/vimeo]

100 Push-ups

Random Thoughts

As another year draws to a close, I again find myself still not in as good a shape as I’d like to be.  I mean, I’m not morbidly obese or facing serious health issues… and if the zombie apocalypse comes, I am confident that I could fight off the hordes of the undead and be able to outrun them when needed.  However, while sheer will and adrenaline can get you through many ordeals, it would be nice to be in better overall shape.

So, to that end I have (once again) decided to try to get more healthy.  Since many of my previous attempts has failed, I am going to use an approach that has worked in other areas of my life.  See… the problem is that my lack of good health can actually be chalked up to a large number of bad habits, and rather than to simply try to cram a new lifestyle on top of or around my current one, I need to identify my bad habits and break them one by one, and to instill new habits one by one.

About a year ago I broke my habit of drinking sodas.  I was literally drinking a half dozen cans of soda a day.  The first step was to cut out caffeine, so I switched from Coke to Sprite.  After I got used to that, I switched to water, and sometimes lemonade (Crystal Light to be exact).  Overall, dropping soda for water caused me to drop about ten pounds, maybe fifteen.

My next step is to add in a new habit.  My goal is to do 100 push-ups a day.  That is in a 24 hour period.  Right now, it takes nearly twelve hours for me to do my 100 push-ups.  I can do 10 at a time easily, and I can do 20 at a time alright, but beyond 20 in a row my arms get tired.  So I do 20 when I can, and 10 when I can’t, and take long rests in between.  My goal is to be able to do the 100 push-ups in a couple or three minutes.

That’s where I am… I’ll post updates as I feel inspired to.

Proven Guilty

Reviews

[amazon-product image=”51guxQtnKML._SL160_.jpg” type=”image”]0451461037[/amazon-product]After reading the previous Dresden book, I was eager to see where the story was heading.  The events in Dead Beat threw a few curves, and in Proven Guilty some of that gets shaken out.  With Harry now a member of the Wardens, he’s got a few new duties, one of which involves being a part of the executions of people who break the laws of magic… laws that Harry himself once broke, and it quite often skirting the edges of.

Of course, that’s not all, as new baddies breeze in to town and set upon the people attending Splattercon!!!, a horror movie convension being held is Dresden’s beloved Chicago.

Yeah, I like this one as much as I have like the others.  Jim Butcher is yet again able to keep me turning the pages, and turning them quickly as I blow through the eighth book in this series.  The only thing I worry about now is running out of Dresden books to read and having to wait for Mr. Butcher to complete the next one to get my fix.

Vampire Zero

Reviews

Rounding out David Wellington’s vampire trilogy is Vampire Zero.  Unlike his zombie books which were uneven (the three of them were, in order, great, alright and good), the vampire series has been far more consistent.

This time around, our intrepid trooper Laura Caxton is on her own… sort of.  With the events of 99 Coffins behind her, she is now living in the aftermath.  She’s been given her own department within the State Troopers to continue the hunting of the remaining vampires.  She has learned well and knows how to hunt vampires, but these vampires know her as well and they’ll try to outthink her, something vampires aren’t supposed to do.

The body counts here aren’t small, but they are nothing like the last book.  While Caxton tries to tie up her loose ends, Arkeley is trying to tie up loose ends of his own, and its a race to see who gets there first.

I really enjoyed the book, just as much as the previous two, and who knows… there might be a fourth given the way things end.  I know I wouldn’t mind.

The Advertising Twist

Gaming

Assassin’s Creed has been out long enough that I don’t feel any remorse discussing the game.  If you haven’t played it and you have managed to learn nothing about the game, then please stop reading.

When the game first came out, people I knew who played it kept talking about “the twist”.  So, when I finally got the game, in October as a birthday gift, I jumped in and started playing.  As the story unfolded, as it drew me in, I kept looking for the twist… but there never was one.  In fact, I was kind of startled when the game ended because I was still waiting for the twist.

I went looking.  Did I miss it?  Was there an alternate ending that I didn’t get because of some tiny detail I missed in the game?

What I found was that “the twist” wasn’t in the game.  It existed only in the space between the advertising and the moment you booted up the game.  Well, not exactly the moment you booted it up… you had to get through the first tutorial mission type thing and exit the animus once.  Of course, even before then you could see the “glitches”, flags with a glow around them that looked like computer code, people who flicker during dialog.  The twist of Assassin’s Creed was that the advertisements made the game look to be about you as an assassin in the past, but the reality of the game is that you are in the present (or maybe the future) and you are reliving genetic memories of one of your ancestors through the use of a machine in an effort to help some people find out some information.

I really hate when games, or anything really, does this.  Its like when the trailer for a movie makes it out to be a slapstick comedy, but it turns out that all the funny bits were in the trailer and the movie is actually a tragic tale about cancer or suicide with occasional humorous scenes.

As for Assassin’s Creed… I enjoyed playing it.  Climbing all over the city and performing the tasks, I even enjoyed looking for the flags (still haven’t found them all), but I didn’t like the end of the game.  I was waiting for the twist, and in the final moments of the game nothing happened.  Not just no twist, but the story of the game, which had been great until then, had no ending, it just sort of petered out.  I uncovered the conspiracy, found the bad guy in the past which let my future overlords find the information they wanted, and then they walked out of the room, into what I have to assume is going to be Assassin’s Creed 2.

Lame.

I don’t mind sequels.  Telling another story with the same people in the same world can be good.  But breaking one story into two (or more) games is irritating.  I enjoyed Assassin’s Creed, but I’m glad now that I didn’t buy it when it came out, and I won’t be buying the sequel when it comes out.  I’ll be waiting for the discount racks again.

Subscription versus RMT

Gaming

Search around the gaming blogs and you’ll probably find out the opinions of everyone weighing in on SOE putting RMT in the form of their new Station Cash into EQ and EQII.  There have also been announcements that the new Star Wars MMO from Bioware might be a free-to-play/RMT model game.  And SOE does have FreeRealms and The Agency coming.

To be honest… I really don’t care overly much.  About the only problem I have with the whole thing is that I find it weird when a game offers both on the same server.  EQ and EQII both still have a monthly fee that you have to pay to play the game, and now on top of that there is the Station Cash which allows you to buy weapons and armor (nothing great, but definitely a leg up from starting with nothing if you are willing to pay the $10 for it rather than get gear as you play), and experience point bonus potions (where you get use it and for the next 4 or 2 hours you get a 10%, 25% or 50% bonus to your exp earning, again nothing great, but would help you out if you’d rather spend the cash than the time it would take to grind out that exp on your own).  It will be interesting to see where they take it, how much of what kind of items they end up putting on the market, and how much profit they derive from it.  And of course, if they release an expansion that increases the level cap, now that they sell exp bonus potions for cash, will they be inclined to increase the experience curve in new levels making people desire the potions more?  If that is the route they end up going, that’s where I find the problem of using both payments in one game.  So now I am paying my $15 a month to get a game designed to make me want to pay more money…  seems underhanded, if that is the direction this goes.  But for now, its all a “wait and see”.

Another reason I don’t care about which payment model they follow is that neither subscriptions nor microtransactions address the problems that I have with most MMOs.  Let’s take Warhammer Online for example.  I really wanted to play this game, and on some level I still do.  I haven’t played it since beta because my contract job ended and I am out of work.  Its hard to justify paying for a game box and then a monthly fee when I need to be saving every penny until I find work again.  (I am just about the unluckiest person when it comes to unemployment… contract ends right as the economy goes to shit… the last time I was unemployed was in 2001… you remember 2001, right?  That was when the tech field kinda collapsed a bit and then terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center… so, I’m unemployed, sell your stocks and don’t visit any targets of opportunity.)  If I were to play Warhammer Online, sadly, I could only play with half of the people I want to play with.  A bunch of gaming bloggers and readers made up a group called the Casualties of War and picked one server.  I tried to steer my old EQ friends on to the same server, but they ended up somewhere else.  Unfortunately, these two servers were not merged.  So, if I did buy the game, I’d have to pick one group of friends over the other.  This has pretty much been true of every MMO to come out since EQ.  Even with EQ, while I started out on E’Ci with my local friends when I started a new job and found out a couple of people there played EQ too, they were on another server.  Sure, we could still share stories about the game and talk about stuff, but we could never play together… and even more odd, the two servers in question had totally different communities: for example, on E’Ci, player item auctioning was done in the East Commonlands tunnel; on the other server, Greater Faydark.  One server was fairly decent about setting up a raid calendar and people trying not to close people out of content, the other was totally free-for-all.  And while it was interesting to be able to talk about and compare how two groups of people played the same game completely differently, it was overshadowed by not being able to play together without paying fees, leaving behind friends, or playing on two servers (which given the “effort” required to level and raid in EQ, playing on two servers was kind of insane unless you were only serious about one of them).

These days, when a new MMO is launching, I don’t even bother to ask if its a subscription game or a micro transaction game… the first question I always ask is “How many servers do they have?”

Dead Beat

Reviews

Another Dresden book, and another good read.  This time the wizard takes on necromancers in Dead Beat.

I could go on gushing about the book, but if you read my blog you know that I love them.  I will admit that I enjoyed Jim Butcher’s take on necromancy and raising the dead.  It was new to me, the concept of having a “drummer” who keeps the beat that allows the dead to stay under the control of the necromancer.  Very interesting.

Anyway, I do look forward to reading the next book given all the events of this one…  🙂

Concluding the WriMo

Writing

I didn’t win.  I ran into a few obstacles this year.  I fell into the switching stories trap.  I also got sick… nasty stuff.  And I also suffered from a general unemployment malaise.  You know, you would think that with all this free time I’d get plenty of writing done.  But it turns out then when I’m unemployed I spend all my time looking for a new job and worrying I won’t be able to pay my bills.

Anyway… I did manage to get further than I ever have before.  I got just over ten thousand words on one project and probably twenty thousand across all of them.  I’ve never cleared ten thousand before.  So, even though I didn’t win, I managed a milestone.

But now it is December, and the NaNoWriMo is done.  However, I don’t think I’ll stop writing this time.  I’m going to try to block out at least an hour every day for working on something, and I’ll even try to make it the same something as often as possible.