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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.

Shredded

Random Thoughts

Last week, I finally decided to call in service on my refrigerator. The panel with the water and ice dispenser in it has been loose for a while. So I went looking for the receipt and the service numbers which resulted in my sifting through the piles of papers and junk that has collected in my filing cabinet since we bought the house. After dealing with the fridge (which turned out to be that the panel was never installed properly, not that it was broken), I decided to clean up my files.

Dealing with old papers has always been a thing for me. I’m a pack rat by nature, and I keep everything. Not that I keep it organized so that it is useful or anything, I just keep it all. Since I have had my mail stolen a time or two, and I know there are people out there who go through the trash looking for items to perpetrate fraud with, I wanted to make sure I disposed of everything properly.

This isn’t the first time I’ve done this. About 8 months ago, I did a semi-cleaning of sorts and I threw out some stuff, but not a lot, so I just tore everything up into small pieces by hand. But for this new overhaul, I knew I’d have more to throw out, so I borrowed an electric paper shredder from my father. 🙂 Man, is that thing fun to use. You just drop paper in the slot and it powers up and shreds. It even has a nifty warning label on it specifically telling you not to put your tie in it, just in case you were tempted to try it.

Even I was unaware of just how much crap I had accumulated. Back in 1992 I got my first job doing night stock work at the local Kroger, and after a few paychecks I went and opened a bank account. I actually had in my filing cabinets, 16 years worth of bank statements and canceled checks. Well, almost. The canceled checks stopped back in 2000 and I went to eStatements in 2006. I also had every credit card statement from 1993 to 2006, and some even to 2008. I had warranty cards for items I haven’t owned in more than a decade.

Overall, if makes me proud of myself to know that most of that can’t happen again. I’ve gone to electronic everything as much as possible, and most companies offer to keep PDF versions of your statements and check images and whatnot for up to seven years if you turn off your paper mailings. So I get to keep the same records I had, only now I’ve got them all on a hard drive instead of in a filing cabinet. However, as proud as I am of that, I also now have more than three full thirty gallon Hefty trash bags of shredded documents. I checked, and my local recycle place won’t take shredded paper for recycling, only unshredded. Seems silly to me, but I guess they must have a reason.

Oh well, at least its just a one time thing, dumping this much paper into the regular garbage instead of the recycle bins.

The Signal

Reviews

Normally, Wednesdays are reserved for zombie posts. But this week, I’m co-opting the Wednesday slot for a guy I know, one AJ Bowen.

AJ is an actor, and he’s from the Atlanta area. A couple of years ago, he and a bunch of other people made a horror film for about $50,000. Last year, they took that film to Sundance, where it was immediately picked up by Magnolia Pictures. And when I say immediately, I mean that talk started before the movie finished and, I may be wrong here, it sold that night. This movie is called The Signal.

I got to see it at a film festival in Atlanta last year, and then again at Dragon*Con, and then a third time at a screening a couple months ago around Christmas. Each and every time I’ve seen it, I have enjoyed it. And that’s not loyalty talking, The Signal is genuinely a good horror film.

As with other reviewers who have seen it, there are moments, few and short but they exist, where the low budget nature of the film comes through, but mostly the film just comes across as well made, with some scenes actually falling into the “disturbingly real looking” category, which in my book is exactly what you want from a good horror film.

The setting of the film is that a signal is coming through electronics and it is driving people crazy, acting out on their impulses and urges to deadly effect. I say that is the setting and not the story because it really is, its the backdrop on which the real story happens. The real story is about a girl, her husband, and her boyfriend. The story is told in three parts, each from the point of view of a different character: the girl, her husband, and her boyfriend.

The Signal is not gross out torture porn, like the Saw movies or Hostel. Instead it is a well crafted story with elements of and rooted in horror. If you like horror films, I highly recommend that you find a theater playing this one on its currently limited release.

And no, before you ask, they did not steal the idea from Stephen King, the movie was filmed before his book Cell even came out, and they aren’t the same in any event beyond sharing a basic idea: a signal through technology drives people crazy.

Anonymity and the Internet

Random Thoughts

My name is Jason.  No, really.  I post as Jason here on my website, and on most message boards, though there are still a few throwbacks to my EQ days where I post as Ishiro or other boards where I use other names, but even then it takes only about ten seconds to get from any of those forums to here and find out my name is Jason.  I’m not really scared of identity theft, although I don’t go posting my social security number or anything on the Internet and I use secure protocols whenever possible.  I’m protected, but I’m not hiding.  Mostly its because I really don’t have much worth stealing.  I often jest that I wish someone would steal my identity and pay off my bills.  But the point is, nearly a decade ago when I decided to start posting things to the Internet, I decided to, for the most part, be myself.

One thing that I do enjoy doing most on the Internet is engaging in discussions, and to a large degree, I find that its much harder to have serious discussions with people who are anonymous.  Mostly, I find it hard because anonymous people are more likely to say things they don’t really mean or feel because there are few, if any, repercussions for saying those things.  To put it another way: anonymous people are often dicks.

There are entire communities built around anonymous people being dicks.  Oh, some of them are not anonymous, in fact in some cases there are people who are very well known, but the majority are people who only unleash their vitriol on the Internet because its the only place they can get away with it.  The bigger problem with that attitude is that it spreads.  I generally avoid forums where being condescending is the norm, but when other people go there and get used to it, they bring it with them to other places.  Sometimes I think I’m being overly sensitive, but there really are some people who can’t seem to string three sentences together without one of them belittling someone else.  And its a shame, because anonymous people being dicks don’t stop to think “Hmm, maybe what I’m saying is driving people away.” and people like me often don’t put up with it forever.  Its not that the insults hurt.  The insults often are so childish that its impossible to be hurt, only to feel sorry for the person who feels the need to hurl them.  But after a length of time, you just get tired of reading it.  The person may make a good point, but when every good point is accompanied by a personal jab…

I’m rambling.  Anyway, this comes up because lately one of the places I’ve enjoyed hanging around has been overrun by a product of Internet anonymity.  And its just not fun anymore.  But thankfully, that’s why message boards have features to ignore people.

My Domain

Random Thoughts

The truth is, I chose Probablynot.com after a couple of hours of randomly picking cool sounding words and phrases and finding them all to be taken already.  In the end, it came down to Probablynot.com and Definitelymaybe.com.  I went with this one, obviously.

When I picked it, I never considered the side effects of having this domain name.  The first is that I constantly have to assure people that it is a real domain when I give out my email address.  The second is that tons of other people in the world use this domain as a fake domain name for email addresses.

The second effect is really the more interesting one.  I’m sure it is partly the reason why my domain gets some of the spam that it does, and why I’ve found my domain blocked on more than one corporate network.  But a weird facet of this is that occasionally, randomly, I get people’s passwords.  For example, a few of my more recent ones were logins and passwords for photobucket accounts.  Unfortunately these are never people with cool pictures, just guys selling stuff on eBay who want to host some photos of their crap.

Its a minor ethical dilemma.  They use an email address on my domain as their address… the system emails me a copy of the login and password… does that make it alright for me to log in to their accounts?  I didn’t hack it.  I didn’t steal it.  In fact, the person out there specifically designated me to get email from the website.

Ultimately, it makes me really appreciate sites that require email validation, since they’ll never present me with this problem.

Pyramid Magic

Gaming

This week for my GameTap review, I decided to take a chance and hit the random button.  With 996 titles to choose from, of course, it landed on Sam & Max first.  After that it landed on a couple of educational type titles that I just didn’t feel like playing, until finally it landed on Pyramid Magic.  Originally for the Sega Genesis and available only in Japan, it looked to be your typical console puzzle game so I fired it up.

I’m sure there is a back story for this, but the story page was in Japanese, and while I speak a little of the language, my grasp of it is not enough to dive in and read a story.  I’m mainly limited to asking where the bathroom is and other such travel necessities.  But, its a puzzle game, so who needs a story?  Right?

Pyramid Magic: an enjoyable puzzle game from 1991The game play works like this.  Every board has 3 boxes: a wood crate, a red chest and a green chest.  So, according to the Old Man Murray “Time to Crate” scale, Pyramid Magic rates at 0 seconds.  Anyway, you have to break open the wood crate to get the red key which opens the red chest to get the green key which opens the green chest that reveals the magic piece of burlap which disables the robot.  Yes, the burlap disables the robot.  Take note of this, because after Judgment Day, you better have your stock of burlap ready to fight the Terminators.  Watch out Sky Net, I’m armed with textiles!  I suppose it is worth noting that in the age of KISS video game design, you break open the wood crate by kicking it… and you unlock the other crates also by kicking them.  I mean, if I’m just going to kick them, why do I need the key?  Because kicking it before you have the key doesn’t work, that’s why.  In addition to the crates, keys and burlap, your intrepid robot fighting archaeologist is faced with a problem: he’s got a bad back, or something… what this means is that you can’t duck.  Instead, to get through small spaces you must pick up large blocks of stone to force yourself to crouch down so you can fit into the smaller space, and then drop the block as you enter.  Of course, it is absurd to think of it that way, which is why I did it, but really is just a way to add another dimension to the puzzle solving.

Every level of the game presents you with the challenge of using the blocks of stone to climb or crouch your way through to the crates to release the burlap and defeat the evil robots.  Or at least that’s what the first 15 or so levels are like, then I got stuck and used all my lives trying to beat one stupid level (not the one pictured).  Thankfully, in the style of a bygone era of gaming, every few levels the game gives you a code so you can jump back in approximately where you left off.

Pyramid Magic is a decently enjoyable puzzle game, in fact since graphics aren’t the main draw to casual puzzle games, it actually holds up fairly well given that the game is 17 years old.  And if you like the game, Game Tap also has Pyramid Magic 2, Pyramid Magic 3, and a Pyramid Magic Special which is billed as a 4th game in the series but uses the graphics of the first so it really may have been the second game, essentially the first with new puzzles.