The Queue

By Shamus Posted Sunday Mar 15, 2009

Filed under: Notices 39 comments

People have been leaving comments, emails, and Twitters, asking me when I’m going to get to one game or another. I do not take offense at this. I’m grateful that lots of people want to read what I have to say, and I’d love to be able to play games and write all day long in an attempt to meet this demand.

But my annoying habit of needing to sleep and pay bills places unwanted constraints on my time. In the interest of letting people know when their game of interest will get its turn, I thought I’d post my current queue. This is the list of games I’ve played and that I plan to write about:

1) This week I’ll be posting about Overlord and wrapping up that series.
2) After that I’ll be doing a special dual review of Saints Row 2 vs. GTA IV.
3) After that I’ll take on Mount & Blade and Left 4 Dead, although I’m not sure which one will come first.
4) I’ve been using WiiFit for two months. I’ve lost a good bit of weight, but the thing has driven me nearly nuts. This potent ambivalence will be expressed in a series of posts at some point.

I also have a running list of titles I plan to buy at some point. This list changes often and titles come and go, so it should be taken with a grain of salt:

  • Madworld.
  • Street Fighter IV. I’m not really a true fan of fighting games. I really only enjoy putting them on easy and button-mashing through the content. DOA 4 was too hardcore and just frustrated me when I tried to do this, but word is that SF IV is accessible to newcomers. I don’t think there’s enough story to yield any comics, but I might find something funny in there. I’m not familiar with the series except by reputation.
  • Gears of War 2. I’m planning to get this one strictly because it’s a popular game with a dumb plot, which makes it prime fodder for comics. I probably won’t write about it here unless it surprises me or pisses me off.
  • Resident Evil 5. This is mostly just comic fodder, but also because I’m fascinated by the racism controversy and want to see how I react to the game.
  • The House of the Dead: Overkill: I might get this just to see what point-and-shoot gameplay is like on the Wii.
  • 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand: I was going to get this, until Penny Arcade spoiled the ending! I’m kidding. I’m just sort of curious why movie tie-ins are all horrible but a gangster rapper tie-in isn’t.
  • Afro Samurai: I played the demo, which prompted me to get the Anime, which turned me into an instant fan. The game looks like light, mindless, eviscerating fun.
  • I’m sure I’m forgetting something.

Maybe I should put this list somewhere on the site so that I can feel guilty for not keeping it up to date.

 


 

Are Violent Videogames Preparing Children For The Apocalypse?

By Shamus Posted Saturday Mar 14, 2009

Filed under: Movies 14 comments

This week’s Unskippable featured no Stephen Blum, bringing their overall Blum content down to a disappointing 37%. (Although I did recognize the voice of Admiral Hackett from Mass Effect, who is voiced by Lance Henriksen.)

So instead of Unskippable this week, let’s look at an issue that affects our children.


Are Violent Video Games Adequately Preparing Children For The Apocalypse?

I stopped reading The Onion a few years ago when it felt like they were in a rut. This new (to me) video thing has really made the humor fresh again.

 


 

Experienced Points: Housecall

By Shamus Posted Friday Mar 13, 2009

Filed under: Column 14 comments

My work at Activeworlds for the past 14 years has given me somewhat of an insider’s perspective on the online virtual worlds business, and in that time I’ve seen a lot of them come and go. There, The Palace, Worlds Chat, and a dozen others have leaped onto the stage with dreams of becoming the Google of 3D, and ended up becoming the Webvan of 3D. (Second Life is still in business, though. Good for them.) It’s killing me to see Sony come onto the scene and make all those same mistakes again, and I thought I’d offer them a couple of million dollars worth of free advice. Hopefully this makes for an interesting read.

 


 

Stolen Pixels #72: Idle Hands

By Shamus Posted Friday Mar 13, 2009

Filed under: Column 11 comments

Saints Row 2 is a toybox full of strange, violent amusements.

 


 

Night Owl Dark Roast

By Shamus Posted Friday Mar 13, 2009

Filed under: Links 36 comments

The ad at Amazon.com proclaims: The world’s first movie tie-in coffee! Nite Owl Dark Roast from Veidt Enterprises.

What’s next? LutherCorp brand toupees? Trioptimum laptops? CyberDyne Self-Aware Can Openers? Umbrella corporation umbrellas? This is crazy. Marketing has now gone too far.

Hang on. I just realized I would actually buy all that stuff if I could.

Nevermind.

 


 

Dapple

By Shamus Posted Thursday Mar 12, 2009

Filed under: Video Games 78 comments

Game: Dapple
Total Development Time: Six Months
Platform: iPhone
Development Costs: $32,000
Response: Favorable reviews, including a positive review on Kotaku
Return on Investment: $535.19

The numbers – along with a chart – can be found on the developer’s blog. After that post went up it was linked on Slashdot, which led to this follow-up post.

I’m just posting this here so that the next time I think I have an idea for an “awesome” indie game I can re-read this and then hit myself in the face with my Xbox 360 power brick until I snap out of it.

Thanks to Jay Barnson for pointing to that.

 


 

GM Advice: NPC Voices

By Shamus Posted Wednesday Mar 11, 2009

Filed under: Tabletop Games 60 comments

A problem: I love writing lots of interesting and varied characters in a tabletop campaign, but I’m not always thrilled with the result when it comes time for me to give voice to those characters. No matter how interesting, imposing, sexy, grotesque, or adorable the NPCs are, the players are still looking at me during the conversation.

Character voices are tricky. Do you do the faux-British thing and risk sounding like Monty Python? (Unless you are British. But then what accent do you use?) Do you just use your own voice, passing up the chance to make memorable characters? Do you try different accents for different races, like Scottish for Dwarves, Irish for Halflings, or Emo for Elves? What about when it comes time to voice the other gender? What about a sexy person of the other gender? It takes real voice talent for men and women to impersonate each other without it instantly becoming comedy.

Warning! Gaming story:

I had a town once where the mayor – a wise and world-weary planner – had vanished. Leadership fell on the shoulders of a spineless, clueless, inexperienced, and mildly effeminate nobleman. This was a mining town. There were a small number of Dwarves who oversaw the digging. They led a handful of Halflings (it’s a long story) who did the actual manual labor. The rest of the town functions – smithing, farming, crafting, and trading – were done by the human population. There was lots of friction between the groups, and the old leader had just the right touch to keep everyone working together.

The new leader was too dense to know what needed to be done, and too spineless to tell people things they didn’t want to hear. He would say anything to appease whoever came to him with problems, but he never really did anything but try to make people happy so that they would go away and leave him alone. He was quite fussy with his own grooming, and took great care to keep his fancy clothes clean – which was sort of at odds with his job leading a bunch of miners. He had a snooty voice and his personality was a blend of cowardice and arrogance that was sure to offend nearly everyone.

Great character. The kind of guy you just want to punch in the face, but know you can’t, because that will cause more problems than it solves. I had fun writing him, but when the moment came I realized I wasn’t so crazy about playing him. I did my best foppish nobleman voice and in the end I had to spend a lot of time at the table making an ass of myself. Hopefully I did him justice. (The players mentioned him a couple of years later when we were taking about the campaign, which is probably a good sign.)

As the early days of videogames taught us, voice acting isn’t nearly as easy as it seems. The average nerd is not going to be able to give Sir Ian McKellen a run for his money, much less voice the population of Middle-Earth from Barliman Butterbur to the Witch-king of Angmar. No matter how masterful your writing is, it’s your face and your voice that drags the character off the page and inserts him into the game world.

My approach:

If I have a character planned ahead of time, I try to Google around and find a suitable picture for them. I play right beside my computer, so it’s easy enough to bring up the picture when the time comes, which gives the players a face to go with the name.

I tend to do voices for men. “Oh, feeling plucky, are you? Well then, you best take a good torch or two with you. Tales say it’s not fond of fire.” On the other hand, I tend to narrate interactions with women. “She tells you that the grue is afraid of light and suggests you take a torch with you.”

If I have to speak in-character for a woman, I simply use my unaltered speaking voice and let the players fill in the rest. (When I enacted Queen Alidia, I just tried to be slow and severe. I suppose I was aiming for the Christopher Lee end of the spectrum, but for all I know it just sounded addled. I’m sure I didn’t sound anything like a woman.) Attempting to adopt a falsetto voice and acting out a woman character is an express trip to Monty Python purgatory – a twisted world of comedic snickering and mockery at the DM’s expense.

This means the men end up being more vibrant and more fun to play, which in turn leads to me using a lot more men than women, which always bothers me a bit.

Do you (or your GM) do voices at the table? How do you handle it and how well does it work?