Twenty Sided

By Shamus Posted Monday Apr 28, 2008

 Serious Sam:
The Mayhem ShooterPrevious Post

Next PostSins of a Solar Empire:
The Part-Time Commander 

Rise of Nations is an RTS game from 2003. Perhaps I should say the RTS of 2003. It secured many awards that year, and its appeal remains undiminished today. It’s featured heavily in our Saturday night LAN games and is the only game capable of displacing Starcraft for any length of time. It would probably have seized the long-held crown from Starcraft if not for the interminable endgame.

Playing a game of Rise of Nations is a delightful and rewarding endeavor. Finishing a game of Rise of Nations is a wearisome test of endurance and patience, a task worthy of Sisyphus. Once you reach the tipping point and the winner is inevitable, you’re about two-thirds of the way through the process and you still have a long fight in front of you before that outcome can be realized. Far too often I’ll find myself in the final stages of a game, ruling a vast empire that blankets the map. I’ll wield the most spectacular technologies and I’ll be awash in resources, yet beating down the last holdouts on the map will still take forever. (Nukes would solve this, but introduce new problems I won’t get into.)

Part of the problem – which is endemic to most Age-spanning “civilization” games – is that the technology levels are designed so that a solid technological lead is hard to achieve and even harder to maintain. At the same time the various technological tiers just don’t offer that much of an advantage on the battlefield. Yes, when tanks supplant knights they are more effective in general, but they are still screwed when they come up against a bunch of pikemen. Aside from the frustration of seeing your computerized steel juggernauts fall prey to guys with sharp sticks, there is the problem that you’re left without a way to quickly crush a supposedly weaker foe.

This is only the beginning of the problem. Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Rise Of Nations:
Neverending Sortie”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

 Serious Sam:
The Mayhem ShooterPrevious Post

Next PostSins of a Solar Empire:
The Part-Time Commander 

49 comments

Wavatars: New Faces

By Shamus Posted Sunday Apr 27, 2008

Filed under: Projects 33 comments

 About the mini-comicsPrevious Post

Next PostChainmail Bikini, RIP 

Rather than trying to watch the last five or six posts for new comments, I usually just follow the WordPress moderation queue. This lets me see all new comments, even when they appear on months-old posts. The only downside to this was that I couldn’t see the avatars for everyone. It’s much easier to remember people and what they’ve said previously if you have a “face” to go with the name, so this was a major drawback for me.

The good news is that now that I’ve upgraded to WordPress 2.5, this moderation queue shows Gravatar icons for each user. The bad news is that I can now confirm that the Wavatars generated by Gravatar.com are different from the Wavatars generated by my original plugin. Which means the faces I see don’t match the faces you see. Sigh.

One of my goals for that project was for people to get a wavatar in a deterministic way, so that your Wavatar at Chatty DM will match your Wavatar here at Twenty Sided, which will match the Wavatars at any of the other 1,000+ sites that have downloaded the plugin.

Now everyone will have two Wavatars associated with their email, and which one you get will depend on where it was generated.

I’m not sure why this change was made. It doesn’t look like they added more parts to allow for more permutations, it’s just… different. I can’t imagine what the benefit would be of going in and changing this. I don’t have access to the Wavatars source being used at Gravatars.com, so I can’t even tell what the difference is.

I realize this is probably trivial to most people. It’s certainly not hurting anyone. This is just one of those displeasing situations that drive engineers nuts. I’m sure I’m being pedantic in worrying about it, but obsessing over details like this and wanting disparate systems to inter-operate gracefully is in the blood of anyone who writes software for a living.

To this end, I might alter my site to use the Gravatar.com versions. This will mean the faces will match again, although it also means the faces you’ve come to know here will all be “re-rolled”.

Phooey.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

 About the mini-comicsPrevious Post

Next PostChainmail Bikini, RIP 

33 comments

WordPress 2.5

By Shamus Posted Saturday Apr 26, 2008

Filed under: Random 25 comments

 Turning GreenPrevious Post

Next PostCRT vs. LCD for Retro Gaming 

If my writing seems unusually witty or incisive, it’s probably because I just upgraded to WordPress 2.5, and it’s got all these cool features which will undoubtedly make me a better blogger. </sarcasm>

This was a big upgrade. I’ve skipped the past couple of updates, mostly because I hate doing it so much. I don’t really feel the need for any new features, so going through the upgrade rigamarole seems sort of pointless. Most new features focus on making the process easier for non-technical people. (In this version, there’s a whole system for uploading, embedding, and managing catalogs of images, movies, etc.) That’s nice for the people who need it, but I’ve already got a system I’m using and I’m fairly set in my ways.

Response to WP 2.5 has been overwhelmingly positive, but for me it was just a pointless shuffle of all the administration controls, so now I can’t find anything. Still, sooner or later I’ll grow attached to this. Probably just in time for the next upgrade. I know I’ll get it when it comes, for the same reason I got this one.

This must be what it feels like to be a Mac user.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

 Turning GreenPrevious Post

Next PostCRT vs. LCD for Retro Gaming 

25 comments

Serious Sam:
The Mayhem Shooter

By Shamus Posted Friday Apr 25, 2008

Filed under: Game Reviews 29 comments

 Doom 3: MuhahahaPrevious Post

Next PostRise Of Nations:
Neverending Sortie 

It has been observed that in terms of gameplay, the true descendant of Doom was not Doom 3, but Serious Sam. In Doom you played a man who could run at something approaching the speed of an automobile. You carried a cache of weapons, ammunition, and armor that would, in a more plausible reality, require a U-Haul truck to transport. You were a bullet sponge of epic proportions and capable of falling any distance without being harmed. Most importantly, you fought multitudes of foes in huge, chaotic, open-air battles. In all of these ways, Serious Sam is like Doom, only moreso.

After Doom, the entire genre of FPS games moved away from this sort of thing. The games slowed down as they fragmented into numerous sub-genres. The Stealth Shooter. Survival Horror Shooter. Tactical Shooter. Roleplaying Shooter. Puzzle Shooter. But Serious Sam embraced its roots. It exhumed the abandoned gameplay of the Mayhem Shooter, dusted it off, polished it, and made it fun again.

It’s all played for laughs, which is fitting. This isn’t a game where you engage in soul-searching and probe the mysteries of what it is to be human. This ain’t Shakespeare. This is a game where you kill an unbelievable number of foes with massive guns and overwhelming bravado. It’s good, mindless fun.

It actually took me a while to get through the game. I can only take it in limited doses. After twenty minutes of holding the fire button down and watching things go boom, I need to sit quietly and let my nervous system recover.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Serious Sam:
The Mayhem Shooter”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

 Doom 3: MuhahahaPrevious Post

Next PostRise Of Nations:
Neverending Sortie 

29 comments

Thanks for coming, now go someplace else

By Shamus Posted Thursday Apr 24, 2008

Filed under: Tabletop Games 41 comments

 Campaign LogsPrevious Post

Next PostHalbert's Mordan 

Several worthy RPG links that I’ve sat on for too long:

Mr. Halbert has a post talking about how he ran the Mordan campaign for his D&D group. This is the first time anyone has run a game based on what I’ve written. It sounds like it went well. Even better is that it sounds like he got to explore some of the ideas that I overlooked or never developed.
Chatty DM asks some profound questions about potions.
It might be a bit of a stretch to file this under “roleplaying”, but Ctrl-Alt-Del webcomic just completed a communal “choose your own adventure” story, where readers got to vote on the actions of the protagonist along the way. The story is complete now, and I think it turned out wonderfully. Aside from the art (which was fantastic) the story managed to be both humorous and compelling. I always like Ctrl-Alt-Del, but this series was exceptional. The series begins here.

EDIT: Oh come on. Some people will fight about anything. I don’t know what the deal is, but someone people can’t stand the fact that others hate their beloved comics, or vice-versa. It’s like we can’t be happy until the entire net is a morass of groupthink where everyone precisely agrees on what things suck and to what degree. This is common in everything from operating systems to movies, but when it comes to webcomics people take it really seriously.

I’m nuking some of the idiocy and closing the thread.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

 Campaign LogsPrevious Post

Next PostHalbert's Mordan 

41 comments

Meet Singles

By Shamus Posted Thursday Apr 24, 2008

Filed under: Pictures 44 comments

 No SharingPrevious Post

Next PostIt's Me 

I’m sure most people have seen those ads for dating sites that proclaim, “Meet singles in your area now!” The ads always show a half dozen pictures of hot women purportedly from whatever town you live in, but the lie is so clumsy and halfhearted that I doubt many men are even able to imagine it to be true. I’ll see the girls supposedly from my little town near Pittsburgh, sitting next to a cactus or a palm tree or at the ocean. More absurd is that the ads always show women. How are these dating sites so chock full of gorgeous girls if they never even bother advertising to them?

The dating sites seem to be in a war of escalating lies. Whoever tells the most brazen fib to the most people, wins. They have been selling the fiction that your town is packed with hot, lonely women who are comfortable uploading pictures of themselves in provocative underwear, and who want to meet “you”. The next step seems to be in telling men that not only do they have women who are hot, young, lonely, and minimally attired, the women in question are precisely of the type you’re looking for! Goths, Republicans, Democrats, Jews, African-Americans, Left-handed Redhead Vegans who enjoy wakeboarding. It doesn’t matter how esoteric your tastes run, they want to assure you that they have an entire database of exactly your sort of woman.

I submit that this has now gone too far:

This was an actual ad my wife saw yesterday.

Pentecostal women, you say? And they want to chat? Sounds good, but what kind of pentecostal girls are we talking, here? Are they Trinitarian, Oneness, or Evangelicals? Are any of them Restorationists? These are things I need to know before I go jumping into live chat with a chick in her underwear. I don’t want to get half an hour into things and suddenly realize I’m dealing with a girl who likes to “experiment” with Calvanism once in a while. I have standards, you know.

The internet is a veritable fountain of silly. It makes me happy.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

 No SharingPrevious Post

Next PostIt's Me 

44 comments

Doom 3: Muhahaha

By Shamus Posted Wednesday Apr 23, 2008

Filed under: Game Reviews 42 comments

 Deus Ex - Invisible War:
Poor ChoicePrevious Post

Next PostSerious Sam:
The Mayhem Shooter 

It’s time to over-analyze a dusty old videogame once again! Why people let me continue to get away with this will forever elude me…

A lot of people have dumped on Doom 3. Certainly no game could live up to the hype that preceded it, but I don’t think the game was quite as brain dead-as some made it out to be. I’ll even go so far as to say that I think it was a fine story, all except for the character of Dr. Betruger. If it wasn’t for him, this game would have been about twenty IQ points smarter.

While many fans have dissed the survival horror aspect of Doom 3, I still think the game had some genuine scares and some good emotional hooks. Maybe I’m just a lightweight, but I thought several of the scenes were handled deftly and with an eye towards restraint. The whispering female voice and footprints leading you to the secret cache of supplies was a creepy moment. The introduction of the spiders was executed with cunning. And the “zombie” levels at the start of the game mostly worked. If you look at these parts of the game in isolation, it starts to look like a game with some subtlety and a good sense of how to manipulate the player. All of which makes it that much more frustrating when the thing spazzes out later on.

The original Doom was about as thin as you can get, story-wise. The introduction to the game wasn’t even part of the software: You had to peruse the README text file if you wanted to put the events in their proper context. The intro wasn’t much, just a basic outline of the situation and a little bit of flavor text, but it at least explained where you were and how you got there. I wonder how many people played the game without even knowing about it.

When id Software went to make Doom 3, they faced the challenge of how to do so without making an unintentional comedy. Videogaming had evolved in the ten years since the original, and plotless games with a procession of mindless foes to gun down were no longer taken seriously. id Software needed to start over. The only thing they could keep – and the thing that would make it Doom – was the premise. So they were stuck with grafting a plot and characters onto the original idea. I actually think the writer did an admirable job, right up until he got to Dr. Betruger. Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Doom 3: Muhahaha”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

 Deus Ex - Invisible War:
Poor ChoicePrevious Post

Next PostSerious Sam:
The Mayhem Shooter 

42 comments

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