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Does He Enjoy the Irony?

Random Thoughts

After Jeff Freeman linked to this site, I read through a bunch of it.  Most of it is bile.  The author loves stringing together insults, an equal opportunity hater, because he does, in point of fact, hate everything he writes about.

The bulk of his reviews of webcomics boil down to “that’s not funny” although most times he does make comments about the art as well.  The irony I speak of in the title comes about in this post, a mere 15 posts in to his run.  He takes a moment to explain that the people who think he isn’t funny just don’t get it because he writes the site to entertain, “Like, seven or eight people.”  The irony is that most webcomics actually start the same way.  Looking at many of them now, you might not be able to see their more humble beginnings, before they got enough traffic for ads to matter, before they put up message boards, or ran charity drives.  Everyone starts somewhere.

If the author keeps it up, he might one day sell out just like Maddox, someone who probably started his website to entertain, like, seven or eight people.

Saving Daylight

Random Thoughts

Why is it that when I gain an hour in the fall, I never really notice, but when I lose an hour in the spring, it hits me like a ton of bricks?

I would go on with a diatribe about how I think Daylight Saving Time is stupid and we should just pick one, or split the difference and shift half an hour one way and be done with it… but I don’t have the energy.

The Sarah Connor Chronicles

Reviews

11 out of 13 nots
for Terminator fighting awesomeness

When I first heard about the new TV show The Sarah Connor Chronicles, I was excited.  I love the Terminator movies, and I always wanted to know more about the points in between, particularly the gap from Terminator 2 to Terminator 3.  However, after watching the premier episode, I was left with a general “meh” attitude.  The show certainly didn’t suck.  It wasn’t garbage, but it also lacked a certain pizazz I was hoping for.

I’m glad I stuck with the show, because in my opinion it got much better… more after the break.

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WordPress Theme: Options

Random Thoughts

I’ve been using and playing with WordPress for quite some time now.  I’ve tried dozens of themes and have looked at dozens, if not hundreds, more.  While I’m fairly settled on my current theme for the weblog (I still might make some tweaks here and there, and new banners), I’ve always been looking for something for the main website.

It doesn’t help that I really don’t know what I’m going to do with the main site.  However, I have stumbled upon what is probably one of the coolest themes I have ever seen for WordPress.  It is called Options.  Here is a link to the demo site.  Its the first theme I have seen that really manages to take WordPress and leverage it as a Content Management System instead of just a blogging tool.

Anyway, unless something much cooler comes along, I’ve finally settled on a theme for the site (though its likely to get a little tweaking).  Now I just need to decide what the content is going to be.

Gygax is Gone

Gaming

Yesterday I learned about Jeff Healey… today its Gary Gygax.

In 1983, I moved from Jacksonville, Florida to Plumsteadville, Pennsylvania. Technically, I think we lived in Pipersville, but we had to drive to Plumsteadville to get our mail from the post office. Or it was the other way around. That’s no important. What is important is that our new house was just down the street from another family that had two sons, Charlie and Keeley. Charlie was my age, and along with a few other neighborhood kids, we were friends. Keeley was older, several years, and he had a fascinating hobby: painting lead miniatures.

The work he did was very detailed. He would spend hours working with brushes that had very few bristles, sometimes just a single bristle, getting the crevasses between armor plates and the coloring of the eyes. I still have a few that he sold me. But the miniatures weren’t just for painting and for show, they were for role playing games.

Keeley introduced us all to Dungeons & Dragons. He started us on the Red Box, and later segued us into Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, where I became captivated by the Fiend Folio. His love of Mack Bolan books lead us into Top Secret, and his love of the Alien and Aliens movies lead us into Star Frontiers.

Needless to say, Gary Gygax, his creations and his legacy, have had a major impact on my life. Twenty-five years of gaming joy and heartache. My hat off to you, Gary. I hope the afterlife holds up to the fantasy worlds you created.

The Looking Glass Wars

Reviews

Frank Beddor has written an interesting retelling of Alice in Wonderland called The Looking Glass Wars.  The angle he takes is that Wonderland is a real place, Alyss Heart is its princess, and she has to flee it to our world when her aunt Redd kills the king and queen and takes over.  The story follows both sides of the looking glass, as Alyss tries to grow up in her new world and as the resistance fighters try to keep the old ways alive under the boot of Redd.

I picked up this book at the request of my wife, who really loved it.  I, on the other hand, didn’t.  I also didn’t hate the book, I just found it to be predictable.  When the book was described to me as “a darker retelling of Alice in Wonderland if Wonderland was real” I had a pretty good idea of what to expect.  Not all the details, but a general sense of where the story would start, where it would go, and how it would get there.  In the end, though, it was the details that made the book worth reading.

I wouldn’t give the book two big thumbs up, but it was an enjoyable read, and good enough that I’ll keep reading the series as it develops.

Seeing The Light

Random Thoughts

It isn’t often I take the time to mention the passing of individuals on this website.  My mother, of course… Stanley Kubrick, because I loved so many of his films… Pope John Paul II… Christopher Reeve, because he was, in so many ways, Superman…

I spent most of the morning heads down on some work, barely noticing the world at all, but a few moments ago I broke away and opened a browser to CNN to get a peek at what was going on with the rest of the planet.  Amid the usual political posturing and Middle East happenings, I find out that Jeff Healey died.

In 1988 I didn’t have a CD player yet, only this tape playing monstrous boom box.  That Christmas, one of my gifts was The Jeff Healey Band’s See The Light.  I must have played it a thousand times.  And while my first car didn’t have a tape deck, my second car in 1992 did, See The Light became one of the treasured few that would be played until it broke.  By then I had a CD player for home and I rushed out and bought it, and I’ve had it ever since.

I wouldn’t say that JHB was one of my favorite bands, I only own one other album by them, but they were a band I would never turn away from if the song came on the radio.  But See The Light has always held a special place for me, and it always manages to find its way into my play lists and my CD rotations.  If I feel like bringing down a night of karaoke or serenading my wife or dancing one last slow song before hitting the road, Angel Eyes from that album is the song I most often choose.  Jeff’s music has been and will forever be a part of the soundtrack that plays in my head as my life unfolds around me.

Thank you, Jeff.  You will be missed.

The guys at DICE get it

Gaming

While my wife may lament the exclusion of female character models in the upcoming Battlefield Heroes, I can’t wait to give it a shot.  This video trailer for the game just shows me that the guys at DICE really do get it.  To have a great game you don’t need gritty realism with guts spraying the walls with every gunshot, you just need to have a game that is fun.

Damn that looks like fun.

Vanguard

Gaming

No, this is not Brad McQuaid’s failure of epic proportions Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, GameTap doesn’t have that.  Instead, they have the 1981 side scroller Vanguard.  Perhaps Mr. McQuaid’s game would have done better had he not lifted his title from a previous game.

Vanguard - Not a Saga of HeroesVanguard is… fairly awful.  Its typical, side scrolling and shooting while avoiding stuff.  The game has one minor twist in that its not all side scrolling.  It is also diagonal scrolling and top scrolling.  As you progress through the level, sometime it changes direction.  And then at the end of each level, it stops scrolling so you can fight the boss.  The controls are as you would expect, using a dual stick game pad the left stick is movement and the right stick is shooting.  Oh, because you can shoot in 4 directions.  If you do decide to play the game, I give this advice: Ignore the North, South, East, West options for firing, instead use North-East, North-West, South-East and South-West.  Hitting these will fire two directions at once (North-East will first North AND East).  Seeing as your goal is to kill everything, there is never a reason for you to not be firing in two directions at once.

All in all, the game is a bore, and I found myself thinking that I’d rather be playing Defender.  However, I did find the game to be more fun when instead of being some valiant soldier fighting for survival I imagined myself as the invading force.  This was made easier through the sections where you are blowing up alien houses, people and their pets, none of which fire back at you.  To paraphrase a film that does not deserve the indignity of being associated with this game or its review: Anyone that runs is an alien hostile! Anyone that stands still is a well trained alien hostile!

… and… I’m out.

Form versus Function

Gaming

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.