T w e n t y S i d e d
It’s time for an unfocused tirade! Whoopie.
(Deep breath.)
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Scaling the Low Wall”
DM of the Rings LVI:
He’s Going to Tell
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Players usually get their quests from very powerful NPCs. If the NPCs weren’t powerful, then players might just be tempted to save themselves some trouble by killing the NPC and taking the reward. Besides, who wants to work for some weakling nobody?
But since quest-dispensing NPCs are powerful, it naturally leads the players to ask them, “If you’re such a badass, why don’t you go do it yourself?”
Good question, really.
PC Games: Hunting for Treasure
I am, by nature, a non-gambling man. I have severe risk-aversion. So it is very rare that I’ll run into the software store and get something without first playing a demo, asking around, or reading a review. However, every once in a long while I do make an impulse purchase. Whenever I do this I rarely end up with something mundane – it will either be a favorite or (more commonly) utter crap. Still, I’ve found enough gems doing this over the years to encourage me to keep doing it.
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What followed was several weeks of near obsession. The game seeped deep into my pores and eventually infected me to the point where all other games were judged through my myopic System Shock lens. It instilled in me a love for “open-ended first person roleplaying”, a genre so small I doubt there have been ten titles that could be described this way since 1994. From there I went on to play System Shock 2 and then the various incarnations of the Thief series. (Which are close cousins to System Shock gameplay-wise.) Eventually I wrote a novel based on the game.
I think I got my $40 out of it.
I picked up Planescape: Torment in the Bargain Bin for $10. It was pretty old by the time I tried it. It was already considered a “classic” by some, although I’d totally missed it. I had no idea what I was getting. In fact, I thought the game was called Planetscape: Torment. I thought it was sci-fi. I only got it because it was $10. I didn’t love it as much as some, but it was still an excellent and interesting RPG, and a steal for ten bucks.
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To this day I don’t know why the game sold so poorly. The graphics were amazing. The voice-acting was excellent, in an age where programmers all too often did their own voice work. The game was stable. It was long. It was imaginative. The AI was good enough to keep up with games of today, and was way ahead back in 1999. The music was of stellar quality, recorded by the Moscow Symphony Orchestra. The dialog was lots of fun.
Consession: The quests got a little tedious late in the game, and parts of the game were a little cliché. Still, that is hardly a reason for the game to wind up where it did, which is in with the dregs of PC software.
Master of Orion was a good one. I’d just installed a CD drive into my computer, and was looking to build my collection of CD games and move away from floppies. MOO was one of the only CD titles in Wal-Mart that day, so I bought it. This was a silly reason to buy a game, but it worked out.
I also want to mention that 1999 was an incredible year for PC gaming. Planescape Torment. Unreal Tournament. Quake III Arena. Starcraft. Age of Empires II. Everquest. Homeworld. System Shock 2. I think I’m forgetting a couple, but you get the idea. I don’t think we’ve had a year like that one since.
Ten Years Ago Today
January 25, 1997. A really good day.
Ten years and three children later, I’d say this was about the best move I ever made. I was nervous at the start of things. We are both more or less surrounded by friends and a few family members who are divorced or otherwise coping with failed marriages. I’d heard about all the troubles that hit married people as they “get tired of each other” and “get bored of the relationship”. I’d heard of the seven year itch. In the back of my mind I thought it was going to be this tough fight to hold the marriage together. These warnings built up in my mind, and I guess I thought being married would be this burden that would overshadow our feelings for each other.
Of course, it was nothing like that at all. I don’t pretend to be a better person than those who have divorced, but I never saw any of the stuff I was warned about. The following is a cliché, but true: I’m even more in love with my wife today than I was in 1997. I’m crazy about her. I still think she’s beautiful. I still love having her around. I still love to make her laugh.
And she still laughs at my jokes. She still makes a fuss over even the smallest gift. She still looks for excuses to get me gifts. She’s still a source of inspiration and encouragement.
Ten years of married life is a good start.
Five Things You Don’t Know About Me…
…and probably don’t want to.
A meme, eh? Just the thing for a day like today, when the sum total of what I got is nuthin’. Still, this is a little tricky, because I have the most “insteresting” ones already listed on the About Me page. So now I need five more.
Okay, five stuffs you don’t know about me:
- I have almost no sense of smell. In my formative years, I had severe allergies and my nose was always running. Because of this (I suspect) my sense of smell was greatly retarded. Once in a while I’ll catch a whiff of something, but mis-identify the odor by a mile. My wife and I have these sorts of conversations all the time:
ME: Hey, did somebody burn some toast?
WIFE: No, but I just used Lysol and sprayed the trash cans.
ME: (sniff sniff) Oh yeah. That must be it.
I don’t know how to explain this. Yes, I know the two smells are different. I have no idea why I’ll smell one thing and think it’s something else. Sometimes it works in my favor (bad stuff smells nice) sometimes it works against me (good stuff smells bad) sometime it doesn’t work at all (what do you mean? You can’t smell that, Shamus? How could you miss it?) and sometimes it works as it should. I can’t identify any pattern to this. Most of the time I smell nothing. That’s just the way it is.
- I live the life of a shut-in. I work from home, and I usually don’t like going out. I’ve gone for weeks at a stretch without leaving the house, pretty much without noticing. Once in a while someone will ask me, “When was the last time you went outside?” Sometimes I can’t come up with an answer, and I’ll realize that I need to get out of the house just to see if any new building or roads have been built since the last time I drove. I also don’t listen to the radio (not even in the car) and I never watch TV, so the intersnizzle is pretty much my only link to the outside world.
- I’ve wanted to program computers since I was ten. I always had a facination with computer games (arcade games, Atari, Pong) and once I saw that you could program them (you could buy a tiny keyboard and a “Basic” cartridge for the Atari 2600) I became obsessed with the idea. I would feel ill – kind of anxious and sick to the stomach – when I thought about the fact that this thing was going on and I was missing out. It took me a few years to get my hands on what I wanted, but it eventually worked itself out.
And now that I program computers for a living, I find I enjoy writing more than programming. I haven’t tried it professionally, but the grass over there sure is green.
- I can pull my right wrist out of joint at will. I had an accident on a swing as a teenager that really screwed up my wrist. It was a pretty stupid blunder so I didn’t make a big deal about it and tried to downplay the injury. I never went to a doctor or had it looked it. It took a long time to heal. Now I can tug on my right hand and yank it out of place. My hand slides down and a little back towards the forearm, and you can see all the tendons on the back of my hand stick out.
It makes a nasty popping sound when I snap it back into place.
See, now that is something you really didn’t want to know.
- I was very unpopular in High School. I sort of have a reputation now as a humorous person, but in High School I had a repellant and cringe-inducing sense of humor. I didn’t know how to relate to people. Once I graduated and started knocking around in the real world I started to grow up for real. It happened very fast. In High School I was a “loser” acording to normal social calculus. I went from that to being very popular and pretty much universally respected in Business School. It was very strange, and it took me a while to figure out how much of it was a change in environment and how much was a change in me. It was a little of both.
Jay posted the lineage of this meme. I thought it was really interesting, so I’ll do the same. The history goes: Susan Wu » Raph Koster » Broken Toys » Mythical Blog » MMODig » Gaming Bitch » World IV » Jay Barnson » Me.
LATER: I’m supposed to tag others. Um. If this looks like fun, then consider yourself “Tagged”. Get to it.
DM of the Rings LV:
Does That Seem Right to You?
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In the book, Gandalf acted much as he always did in this meeting: Annoyingly Mysterious. You can’t really fault him, that’s his style. In the movie, it seemed like he was just being a jerk. I can’t fault him there either. If I came back from the dead as a nigh-invincible super-wizard, I’d probably run around doing this sort of thing to everyone.
Warning
Upgrading to WordPress 2.1 right now. Pardon if the place blows up or stops working for a bit.
LATER: Done. That was a little hairy. I didn’t realize what a big leap that was going to be. Lots of new files all over the place, a database upgrade, different admin pages. I guess I should have read the readme first. (Although I DID do a backup. I may be reckless but I’m not a fool.) Still, it was pretty painless as far as these things go.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to poke around in the upgraded admin pages and push all of the new buttons. Whee.
From The Archives:
Trusting the System
How do you know the rules of the game are what the game claims? More importantly, how do the DEVELOPERS know?
Shamus Plays LOTRO
As someone who loves Tolkein lore and despises silly MMO quests, this game left me deeply conflicted.
Please Help I Can’t Stop Playing Cities: Skylines
What makes this borderline indie title so much better than the AAA juggernauts that came before?
What is Vulkan?
What is this Vulkan stuff? A graphics engine? A game engine? A new flavor of breakfast cereal? And how is it supposed to make PC games better?
DM of the Rings
Both a celebration and an evisceration of tabletop roleplaying games, by twisting the Lord of the Rings films into a D&D game.
MMO Population Problems
Computers keep getting more powerful. So why do the population caps for massively multiplayer games stay about the same?
Could Have Been Great
Here are four games that could have been much better with just a little more work.
Tenpenny Tower
Bethesda felt the need to jam a morality system into Fallout 3, and they blew it. Good and evil make no sense and the moral compass points sideways.
D&D Campaign
WAY back in 2005, I wrote about a D&D campaign I was running. The campaign is still there, in the bottom-most strata of the archives.
I Was Wrong About Borderlands 3
I really thought one thing, but then something else. There's a bunch more to it, but you'll have to read the article.