Twenty Sided

By Shamus Posted Thursday Apr 24, 2008

Filed under: Tabletop Games 41 comments

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.

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Meet Singles

By Shamus Posted Thursday Apr 24, 2008

Filed under: Pictures 44 comments

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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.

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Doom 3: Muhahaha

By Shamus Posted Wednesday Apr 23, 2008

Filed under: Game Reviews 42 comments

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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.

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About the mini-comics

By Shamus Posted Wednesday Apr 23, 2008

Filed under: Projects 15 comments

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Several people said they liked the recent little comics I’ve been doing. I’m glad they’re going over well.

Someone suggested doing a regular comic along these lines, like a Deus Ex comic. That sounds amusing, but I don’t really have time to take on (another) full-blown comic project right now. Even if I had the time, I’m not sure I’d want to make that commitment. These little ones are fun and easy. They take about twenty minutes. Unlike my other comics, they don’t need to stand on their own, so it’s okay if they aren’t terribly funny or well done. It’s kind of nice to be able to slap something together without worrying about continuity, characterization, joke recycling, or layout. I can just dump any pseudo-humorous exchange into a vertical strip of panels and call it done.

The comics are basically just there to keep the front page from looking like a wall of text. In the past I’ve often tried to start posts off with some stock photos or screenshots or something visual, and this is another way of accomplishing that. Screencap comics are sometimes less time consuming than fishing around for just the right photo.

You can see a list of all posts with a comic in them if you search for the comic tag. There are only a handful right now. Maybe there will be more later. Maybe there will even be one later today.

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.

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Wavatars: Deprecated

By Shamus Posted Tuesday Apr 22, 2008

Filed under: Projects 26 comments

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I read on the Gravatar blog that several popular icon systems have been simply built in to the Gravatar system. This means my Wavatars plugin is now superfluous. Instead of installing Wavatars on your blog, you can just use the built-in support for Gravatars and set the default code to “&default=wavatar”. This means that Gravatars.com will handle the storage and CPU load of all those icons. This also means that WordPress.com blogs will be able to use wavatars, as well as people who just don’t like mucking about with downloading and installing plugins. Good deal all around.

The existing Wavatars plugin will remain, but I have no plans to update it in the future. I’m glad to see that the plugin was popular enough to merit inclusion in the Gravatar system. Always nice to see an idea you nurtured grow to the point where it goes and lives on without you. (Not that I was the first to think of procedurally generated avatars, just this particular set of cute little faces.)

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.

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26 comments

No Sharing

By Shamus Posted Tuesday Apr 22, 2008

Filed under: Pictures 15 comments

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While reading a news story on this news site, I noticed this at the bottom of the article:

Now, I realize this isn’t a complete contradiction, but it is amusing to see this notice telling you not to spread the article around over a panel of icons encouraging you to do exactly that. Even the text which warns that the article is not to “broadcast” or “distributed” is at odds with the fact that this is exactly what is going on here: Their webserver is sending their articles all over the planet, where each reader reproduces a local copy for themselves.

I don’t think this is insidious or anything. It’s obvious they just want to make sure you don’t swipe their stuff and pass it off as your own content. It’s just amusing to see old-school print and media outfits trying to adapt their copyright-driven media to the world where you live and die by sharing. A copyright forbidding reprints next to an icon which will send the article to a friend. You are not allowed to share this article and please do so.

Maybe it’s just me, but I got a laugh out of it.

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.

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Deus Ex – Invisible War:
Poor Choice

By Shamus Posted Monday Apr 21, 2008

Filed under: Game Reviews 45 comments

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I found Friday’s skewering of Deus Ex Invisible War to be quite satisfying. So much so that I thought I might just indulge in it again. I’m not trying to be a bully, I just find it interesting that so many things that looked good on paper wound up falling so short in practice. The people behind the game are talented, so we can’t blame the failures on simple ineptitude. Certainly the console-itis (the miniscule levels and the harsh simplification of gameplay) crippled the title for fans of the original, but that doesn’t explain everything that went wrong.

This is going to have endgame spoilers, so choose wisely.

The one gameplay aspect that they retained from Deus Ex to Invisible war was in offering lots of choices in how your character can behave. The sad thing is that in Invisible War the choices you get just aren’t satisfying. They’re just little detours where you choose which of the two or three factions of idiots and bastards you want to side with temporarily. No matter who you’re working for, you’ll usually travel to the same locations and do the same mission, but when you get to the end you can choose to do A or B. Perhaps A is “kill somebody” and B is “don’t”. Your choice will earn you a reward from a faction in the game and scorn from the others, but down the road it doesn’t make any difference. For the most part other characters don’t seem to remember which side you’re on. You can call this “branching gameplay” if you like, but meeting the requirements of a definition while not meeting player expectations is a cunning way to disappoint the audience.

In the past I faulted Jade Empire (an otherwise flawless game) for having some unsatisfying choices. Like many of the Star Wars Jedi games, it supposedly presents you with moral challenges between “good” and “evil” but usually end up as a choice between “good” and “jerk”. Invisible War is slightly worse, in that you usually aren’t given choices which might somehow be related to a particular philosophy or worldview. You just choose what kind of jerk you want to be. Do I support the murderous religious zealots or the murderous bureaucrats? The game repeatedly asks the player to make distasteful yet ultimately meaningless choices. (And of course the game is always filled with the meaningless faux-choice to gun down irrelevant NPCs.)

Consider the following scenario, which was offered in the original Deus Ex:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Deus Ex – Invisible War:
Poor Choice”

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.

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A Disappointing SuccessPrevious Post

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