Lord of the Rings is more or less the foundation of modern D&D. The latter rose from the former, although the two are now so estranged that to reunite them would be an act of savage madness. Imagine a gaggle of modern hack-n-slash roleplayers who had somehow never been exposed to the original Tolkien mythos, and then imagine taking those players and trying to introduce them to Tolkien via a D&D campaign.
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Comic Book Creator is a lot of fun. In fact, it’s responsible for the total lack of posting here on Monday. It’s a handy tool for making making comic pages, arranging images, adding text bubbles, and so on.
Back when I was writing The Lemon I found that making comics was my favorite part of the site. At the bottom of this post is a comic I did back in 2003. I had a blast with it, but making comics using Paint Shop or Photoshop is a major pain in the butt. The comic below took me the better part of a day to put together. I think it would be a one or two hour job using CBC.
I enjoy making these little comics, although my desire to make them exceeds my ability to fill them with interesting content.
Oh yeah, the comic is huge so I’m not going to put it on the front page. Read on to see the whole thing: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “My new toy”
Gothmog and ARJ mentioned that my hotlink protection image showed up while viewing the site feed on Bloglines. I’ve fixed this, but I just want to ask that if anyone else sees that thing that they let me know. Nobody who reads this blog should see that thing by accident. If you’re using another bloglines-like setup and the evil flashing hotlink image shows up, please tell me. It’s only there to fend off the MySpace leeches, who have a ravenous appetite for other people’s bandwidth and images.
(What I WISH I could do is blacklist certain domains. Right now the hotlink protection bans all hotlinks, and then has a whitelist where I can add domains to allow. I wish I could just ban myspace and a few of the larger forums. That would solve 95% of the problem without affecting the performance of the blog in any way.)
Also, while viewing my site via bloglines the images never work. Bloglines is just convinced that my images directory is parallel to the blog directory, and I can’t find any way to tell it otherwise. It wants to draw images from:
shamusyoung.com/images
Instead of:
shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/images
The latter is correct and makes the most sense to me. I have no idea what Bloglines thinks it’s doing. I just can’t find the controls anywhere to fix this. Anyone have any suggestions?
Way back at the end of May I mentioned that I broke my ribs. Then a couple of weeks later I left a cryptic comment in this post that things “didn’t go my way”. Since everyone was nice enough to put up with my complaints, I thought it would be fitting that I let everyone know that I’m doing quite a bit better.
And about that bad weekend…
What happened was this: My back went out. I’ve been typing more or less since I was twelve, so my back is really messed up by now and it goes out from time to time. Well, I was already dealing with pain from my ribs when suddenly the muscles in my lower back spasmed and I couldn’t hold myself up any more. Unable to use my arms properly (in this case, quickly) because of the ribs, I managed to fall face-down on my left side, which is where my broken ribs were. This set the healing process back quite a bit. I didn’t mention this at the time, since everyone had endured enough complaints already. But now that I’m better I feel okay talking about it.
I’ve since recovered fully, although with a new appreciation for how devastating simple mishaps can be. The worst part of this is that I seem to have inflated a bit. A few months of no exercise whatsoever has caused my physique to expand to Jabba-like proportions. Time to do something about that. I may even resort to the drastic measure of direct exercise. I try to keep my exercise limited to manual labor projects or mowing the lawn. (I actually really enjoy mowing.) I need all the exercise I can get, but I hate exercise for it’s own sake. I have a treadmill, but using it feels dull and pointless. I’m using electricity to help me burn energy? How much sense does that make? If I’m going to burn energy, I feel like I should be accomplishing something.
But this is all good. When you have the freedom to choose what sort of elective exercise you want to engage in, it means you are living better than most of humanity. So I’m not complaining. Life, while not perfect, is still pretty darn good.
Thanks for the well-wishes everyone.
The big twist of Quake 4 is that your character is captured by the Strogg and gets turned into one of them. This is very much like being assimilated by the Borg, except you get rescued just before it finishes, so you get to keep your free will. This is one of those things which should have been a surprise, but every article, review, and preview of the game made a point of announcing it. They gave it away in great big block letters and gigantic screenshots. Nobody treated like a spoiler, and it should have been.
While playing through the game, I knew it was coming. Instead of feeling panic and shock, I thought, “finally!” This took a lot of the impact of the event away and ruined the most powerful moment in the game.
But I want to talk about this a bit, because a lot of thought went into this. Read on for more spoilers. Note that I’m going to have some gross (violent) screenshots, so you might want to steer clear if you dislike that sort of thing:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Quake 4: Stroggification”
The remnants of Ernesto have been sputtering all over my labor day weekend, turning the world into something the color of a Windows dialog box: A dull, joyless gray. It started out as a hurricane, downshifted to tropical storm, ran aground and turned into a pathetic shadow of its former self. It’s not so much a storm as a meteorological complaint.
Dangit, if you’re going to ruin my labor day, the least you could do is be spectacular about it. Let’s see some wind! Some downpour! You’re wasting everyone’s time!
I can’t think of another PC videogame franchise where the various titles are as unrelated as those in the Quake series:
The original Quake was mostly a technology demo. It was the impetus of online deathmatch, and it was a showcase for a new kind of graphics engine. The story was thin even by 1996 standards, and there were no characters at all. There was just the nameless player and miles of disjoined scenery. Some levels were arcane runic castles, some were military techno bases, and others were just rock tunnels. The game had no unifying theme or look. The story was a dead end.
Quake 2 was a bit deeper. They tossed out the “plot” of Quake and made something totally different. It was the story of the invasion of an alien homeworld. It seems the Strogg invaded Earth, ravaged it, and our only hope was to push them back and then cripple their capacity to make war on us. The player is part of the initial invasion force, but a mishap causes him to be seperated from the other soldiers and land some distance from the target. This is good, since an unknown anti-air defense sysem wipes out just about everyone else. The unexpected landing trajectory lets the player survive. He must then march through military bases, waste dumps, processing stations, and just about any other type of industrial setting you can imagine. At the end, he fights their leader and kills him. Game over. Not exactly Shakespeare, but it was a nice improvement over Quake.
Quake 3 was a multiplayer deathmatch and had nothing to do with either of the previous two games. So now we’re onto the third game in this franchise, and yet none of them are really sequals.
Quake 4 is a direct sequal to Quake 2. This is an interesting challenge. It’s been about nine years since the previous game, and the “lone soldier fights through the enemy robots and defeats the big boss” is now the plot of Gamecube titles for kids. Adult gamers expect something more now.
This is tough. They must make a sequal to the previous game, even though the plot – which worked well enough in 1997 – is now so stale and cliché that it would be viewed as a comedy if used today. So, instead of re-hashing the previous game they used it as a starting point. They mention that a lone marine assasinated the enemy leader without getting into too much detail. You do not play that lone marine. Instead you are (more reasonably) part of a large invasion force engaged in a straight-out ground war on the Strogg homeworld. This time around, there are lots of things going on and lots of characters to meet. As I mentioned before, the NPCs are now smart enough that they don’t ruin the game when they fight alongside you.
Continuing the tradition set by Doom 3, every fourth person you meet in Quake 4 is voiced by Steven J. Blum.
What I find odd is that he does many voices in both games, but doesn’t play any major characters. As the English voice of Spike Spiegel, you’d think they would hand him some real characters to play instead of a long list of unrelated lines for a dozen minor characters.
The rest of the voices in the game – including the extras – are also well cast and well performed. I think the days of programmers and level designers adopting preposterous accents and doing their own voice work are behind us at last.
With all of these posts about Quake 4 I suppose it must sound like I’m really into the game, which isn’t the case. The game is fun and diverting, and shows a lot of polish, but I’ve probably spent as much time writing about it as I have playing it. I picked it up for $19.95, and so I’m happy with what the game has to offer. If I’d paid full price I would probably have expected more and wound up disappointed.
I enjoy writing about these “hardcore” first-person shooter games a lot more than I enjoy playing them. My own passion lies elsewhere, but they are a good indicatior of where technology is headed and a nice peek at the latest graphics engines.
I'm not surprised a fighting game has an absurd story. I just can't figure out why they bothered with the story at all.
A video discussing Megatexture technology. Why we needed it, what it was supposed to do, and why it maybe didn't totally work.
How do you know the rules of the game are what the game claims? More importantly, how do the DEVELOPERS know?
There's a wonderful way to balance difficulty in RPGs, and designers try to prevent it. For some reason.
A game about the ghost of an underwater football player who travels through time to save the world from a tick that controls kaiju satan. Really.
What did web browsers look like 20 years ago, and what kind of crazy features did they have?
A game I love. It has a solid main story and a couple of really obnoxious, cringy, incoherent side-plots in it. What happened here?
Finally, the age-old debate has been settled.
Here is a long look at a game that tries to live up to a big legacy and fails hilariously.
What was the problem with the Playstation 3 hardware and why did Sony build it that way?
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