City of Heroes:
Costume Contest

By Shamus Posted Thursday Oct 16, 2008

Filed under: Video Games 41 comments

City of Heroes / Villains is having a costume contest. I entered.

I expect there will be tens of thousands of entrants. Many of those entrants are people who have been using the costume creator for years. And those people have access to various costume parts that I don’t. (From veteran rewards, bonus packs, and long-past giveaways.) And of course lots of people are just going to have a better sense of fashion and style.

So I don’t expect to win, but it was fun to enter anyway.

The only thing that I didn’t like was the ambiguity of the rules. Stuff like, “All three screenshots should be the character in the same pose, just taken from different vantage points.” Er. Does this mean the exact same pose? Because their idle animation has a few similar poses that they cycle through. They look around, fold their arms, unfold them, stand with one foot in front, and generally fidget around quite a bit. The wording makes it sound like they need the exact same point in the animation, but common sense suggests that what they’re after is just the character standing and not performing crazy emotes or leaping around.

Another one: “Entrants should crop their screenshots so that only the main character and the immediate background are visible.” Er. Okay. Except: “All attachments must be in 800×600 resolution or better […]” Which seem to be contradictory. A standing character and the immediate background aren’t going to fill 800×600. Should I chop the sides off to meet the cropping rules, or leave them on to keep the size rules? Hmmmm. Again, you can assume that they really just don’t want to have to hunt for your character in a crowd, and that they don’t want some crappy low-res picture.

So, I did my best to adhere to the rules within reason, although you could still make the case that I broke them. As an entrant this is really frustrating. I’m fine with not winning because someone else is better, which is pretty much inevitable. But I want to lose because someone beat me, not because I was disqualified over screenshot technicalities.

My character: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “City of Heroes:
Costume Contest”

 


 

John Riccitiello hates DRM

By Shamus Posted Thursday Oct 16, 2008

Filed under: Rants 49 comments

EA boss John Riccitiello hates DRM? Who knew? In an interview with Gamasutra:

I don’t like the whole concept; it can be a little bit cumbersome.

Yeah. A “little” cumbersome.

But I don’t like locks on my door, and I don’t like to use keys in my car… I’d like to live in a world where there are no passports.

SORE
See? He hates DRM. But we make him do it. He’s like an alcoholic yelling at his wife, “Bitch, why you gotta make me hit you?”

Once again a guy who makes millions a year is too clueless to grasp the most basic and obvious principles at work here. (Note that I’m only calling him clueless because I’m too polite to call him a liar. He can cop to either one as it suits him.)

But let me get out the big purple crayon and draw a picture of how this works for the benefit of the information-bankrupt multimillionaire captains of industry that aren’t reading this: DRM isn’t having locks on your car. It’s having locks on your car to which you do not have the key. The key is in the hands of the actual owner of the car, who (you hope) unlocks it for you. And who can stop doing so at any time. And who must actually spend money to be available to unlock your doors when you ask. And who is occasionally unavailable. And who still expects you to pay full price for a car you don’t own, don’t control, and can’t sell.

Are you sure you wanted to go with the car analogy here, John?
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “John Riccitiello hates DRM”

 


 

GM Advice:
Gaming Systems

By Shamus Posted Wednesday Oct 15, 2008

Filed under: Tabletop Games 166 comments

Talking about gaming systems is a lot like talking about operating systems. There is a certain fervor in the discussion that always seems incongruous to me.

I want to turn the GM advice thing around this time and see what everyone else is playing, and why. I talked about what I look for in a roleplaying game and solicited advice in a post way back at the beginning of this year. That made for fascinating reading, and I kind of wanted to return to the well for another drought of that.

It seems like a majority of gamers begin with one of the major systems (probably a version or variant of D&D) and then graduate to one of the more specialized systems once they learn about the game and discover what parts they enjoy most. Some people latch onto a system and play it until the rulebooks are a part of their DNA. Other people skip from one system to the next with reckless abandon. A lot of this depends on your group, your preferred setting or genre, and (unfortunately) your budget.

So, a few questions I’m curious about. Just answer the ones that are most interesting to you:

  1. What gaming system did you start with when you were learning the game?
  2. What’s your preferred gaming system when you’re running a game?
  3. What system do you prefer as a player? (For some people this is different from #2.)
  4. And because we live in an imperfect world: What system do you actually end up using?

This answer might get kind of long. I know trackbacks are about as reliable as the Holodeck, so if you answer on your own site please send me an email (shamus at shamusyoung dot com) and I’ll add a link at the bottom of this post.

Read more here:
eclecticon.
The Iron Scroll

 


 

City of Heroes:
Gameplay Part 2

By Shamus Posted Tuesday Oct 14, 2008

Filed under: Game Reviews 37 comments

Influence

It’s the classic MMO question: If I’m saving the world, why are people charging me money for gear? Shouldn’t they just give me the stuff?

City of Heroes fixes this nicely with the influence system. You earn influence instead of money for fighting bad guys, and you use that influence to get items from vendors. In essence, they are giving you stuff for free. The system of influence represents the fact that they’re not going to just hand out free goodies to every idiot in tights.

This is another system which nicely merges comic book conventions with MMO gameplay. Continue reading ⟩⟩ “City of Heroes:
Gameplay Part 2″

 


 

Stolen Pixels #29:
The Letter Home

By Shamus Posted Tuesday Oct 14, 2008

Filed under: Column 0 comments

Someday we may meet an alien species. This will no doubt affect our culture. Our language. Perhaps even our music and food. But the one thing that will be truly revolutionized is our pornography.

With that thought, I give you a link to the latest Stolen Pixels.

 


 

City of Heroes:
Gameplay Part 1

By Shamus Posted Monday Oct 13, 2008

Filed under: Game Reviews 38 comments

It’s amazing to find a game which operates using all the common MMO conventions, yet doesn’t feel like one. (At least, not at first.) City of Heroes is a game which lets you feel powerful right from the start. Unlike games where your first job is to kill declawed kittens or brain damaged rats or whatever, in City of Heroes you can jump right in and start punching out pipe-wielding thugs and purse snatchers. (The fact that thirty levels later you’ll still be fighting thugs and purse snatchers is a different problem.)
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “City of Heroes:
Gameplay Part 1″

 


 

Landscaping Tycoon

By Shamus Posted Monday Oct 13, 2008

Filed under: Links 32 comments

In the past I’ve mentioned I’m a fan of James Lileks, so it was kind of disorienting this morning to hit his site and see my quasi-famous RCT3 rollercoaster shtick in today’s Bleat. Hey! I’ve seen that one. Wait… I made that one!

And to comment on his point about using the game for building infrastructure: You know, I realize that’s the point of the game and all, but that’s not how I played it. Also, in spite of my movie of premeditated destruction, I didn’t do much of that either. When I was playing Rollercoaster Tycoon 3, all I ever did was fire it up in sandbox (free build) mode and play the world’s most in-depth videogame about landscaping. You have no idea. Trees, benches, flowers, topiary (in moderation) pools of water and attractive bridges over same. All colored just so. Arranged carefully. Once in a while I’d go crazy and throw in a ride (and then fuss around trying to cover up the ugly queue infrastructure with greenery) but only so I could lure visitors into walking through my meticulously designed gardens.

To grasp how demented this is you’d have to see the condition of my yard. On my block I’m that guy. The dandelion farmer. Everyone else mows and trims each spring, only to have my bumper crop of dandelion seeds float into their yard and try to drag the rest of them down to my lowest common denominator. Then fall rolls around and they rake their leaves, only to be buried under the brown and orange tsunami coming from my yard the next time the wind picks up. I’ll bet they’re praying I have a heart attack and my wife marries a guy more familiar with the basics of lawn care.

Outside, my allotted patch of earth runs wild to the endless vexation of my neighbors, and inside I’m working on a space to make the greens at St. Andrews look like the banks of the Amazon.

If they knew, they’d lynch me.

Added bonus: The video just broke 2 million views in the last couple of days.