Angelina Jolee and Brad Pitt are interested in doing a movie version of Atlas Shrugged*. I’ve commented on this sort of thing before. I’m sure she is capable of doing a fine job (part of being an actress is being able to play people different from yourself) but still, it’s a bit like Hugh Hewitt deciding to star in The Motorcycle Diaries.
Does. Not. Compute.
* I’ve never read the book in question, and know it only by reputation.
Most current readers probably don’t realize this, but this blog started out as a log of the D&D campaign I was running. It began in Sept 2005, and ended a couple of months ago. Some of the guys you see in the comments were players in the campaign.
The campaign blog fell by the wayside when I got too busy to keep it all going. For a few weeks it came down to a choice between prep time for next week and blogging for last week, and of course the prep time had to come first.
Now the campaign is over and I have 80% of it here in the archives. The blog has expanded and now covers a lot of geek-ish subjects. I assumed that for the most part people who didn’t play in the campaign wouldn’t want to read it, but I’ve gotten several comments and emails from outsiders and total strangers who expressed interest in the thing. Now I’m wondering how many of you out there have actually read the campaign so far? Anyone keen on reading the rest, or just curious how it all turned out?
A few days ago Steven posted a picture of where he lives, as seen from Google Earth. I was playing around with GE last night, and took the following:
Which is of my former condo in Amesbury, near Boston. I lived there back in 2000. This is what it looks like from about 2500ft. I lived under the red dot. Now here is my current house, taken at the same elevation:
But I’m from a part of the country nobody cares about, so the images are so low-res that you can’t see anything useful. I’d put a red dot there, but I can hardly tell what I’m looking at. My neighbor and I share a pixel for crying out loud.
To get any sort of meaningful detail…
…I have to go to an elevation of eleven miles. When Google Earth was new I figured they were still working on it, but it’s been ages and I now strongly suspect these are the most detailed pics they have available. So sad.
Heading south, I eventually get close enough to Pittsburgh and run into the border where it shifts to high detail.
Disappointing.
You know how some bloggers start posting excuses when they lack the time to post? Like, “I’m having double bypass heart surgery tomorrow so posting may be light for the next couple of days”. That kind of thing? I don’t see the point of it. If you have nothing to say, then don’t burden the audience with guilt for liking your stuff. Just don’t post. Sheesh.
On a totally unrelated note:
I have a really big project going at work. It’s already eating into my precious Final Fantasy time, and is now chipping away at my blogging time as well. I have a lot of work to do, and so I think posting may be light for the next couple of days.
Glad I could get that off my chest.
If you has asked me, the first time I beat Final Fantasy X, how long the characters traveled together and how much time passed in the game world, I would probably have guessed several months. It’s a huge, epic game and when you’re done it feels like the end of Lord of The Rings: The whole world is different, and ages have passed.
But on subsequent plays I noticed there is an implied day / night cycle. We can judge where one day begins and another ends by keeping an eye on the lighting and the sky. Using this as a guide, how many days pass within the game world between the opening credits and the final scene? How long does Tidus spend in Spira? Let’s look:
Play blitzball in Zanarkand at night. Get attacked by Sin. Team up with Auron and then get pulled into Spira. Wake up in the ruins. Build fire. Meet Rikku. Get Kidnapped. Salvage Airship. Get attacked by Sin and knocked into water.
This is a very slow-paced day. Tidus wakes up on the Besaid beach and meets Wakka. Travel to the village. Enter temple, do the trials, and then end the day at the campfire.
Wake up in Besaid village. Leave town. Fight Kimari. Take the boat to Killika. Fight Sin on the boat. Arrive at Killika at sunset. Yuna does the sending and then everyone calls it a night.
Wake up at the Killika inn. Visit the temple. Meet the #!$&ing Goers. Get back on the boat and set sail for Luca. Spend the evening talking to everyone and learning the Ject shot.
Wake up on the boat. Arrive in Luca. Meet Mica and Seymor. Rescue Yuna during round 1 of the tournament and then compete in Round 2. Humiliate the #%@!ing Goers. Fight Sin in the arena and reunite with Auron. Then travel the north road to Rin’s Travel Agency. Talk with Yuna at sunset and then sleep at Rin’s.
(The entire tournament in one day? If all these people from around Spira travel for days to get here, they ought to expect more than a day of entertainment. However, we never see the sun go down, and there is no break in the action, so I guess this all really was supposed to happen in a single day. What a ripoff!)
Wake up and fight the Chocobo eater. Travel the Mi’ihen highroad. Take part in Operation Mi’ihen. Fight Sin. Lose badly. Travel to D’jose temple and do the trials.
Wake up at D’jose temple. Travel road to Moonflow, and then ride the Shoopuf. Rescue Yuna from the extractor and reach the other side. Reunite with Rikku, and have her join the party. Visit Seymor at Gaudosalam and see the Zanarkand recordings. Then Seymor proposes to Yuna. They discuss it, and then cross the Thunder Plains to to Rin’s Travel Agency.
Cross the second half of the Thunder Plains. Go through the woods. Stop at Rin’s. Get attacked at the lake and fight the Al Bhed tank. Go the the temple and Fight Seymor. Do the trials. Escape the temple and confront the Guado at the lake. Fall into the abyss under the frozen lake.
The is no explicit day / night change, but we get moved from one area of the world to another. It seems to be about the right time for a night to pass.
Wake up, mysteriously, on Bikanel island. Cross the island and find the Guado attacking. Head through the complex. They have a key turning point in the game, where Tidus finally learns what’s going on. Get on the airship. Blow up the Al Bhed home. Fly to Bevelle. Fight the Guado onboard and then fight Everae. Crash the wedding, help Yuna escape, and then head for the trials. Get captured.
They stand trial and are tossed into Via Purifico. While Yuna faces issaru, Tidus faces Everae. (again) They escape in the evening and fight Seymor (Again!) just after sunset. Then they meet in the woods outside Bevelle at night. Tidus and Yuna meet at the lake and have their moment together.
Wake up at the campsite in the woods. Optionally get a chocobo and visit Reminem Temple. Then trek all the way over the Calm Lands. Fight the guados at the bridge. Optionally detour into the sunken cave to visit the stolen Fayth. Then head for Mt. Gagazet and and meet with the Ronsos to get passage up the mountain. Kimari must fight his brothers. Then climb all the way up the mountain. This is the densest fighting in the game, and the climb takes a while. Reach the top and confront Seymor. (Again!) Then head through the caverns, open the way, and reach the Zanarkand summit. Fight the guardian. Tidus has his encounter with the Fayth. Several conversations and cutscenes follow.
Finally, reach the base camp on the outskirts of Zanarkand at sunset. The party rests until nightfall, talking. Once it is dark, they set out into the ruined city.
They fight their way in and do the trials. Then they fight the Spectral Keeper. Finally they reach the inner chambers and meet Yunalesca. Things go sideways and they kill her.
Talk about long days!
At sunrise they emerge from the place and see the Airship waiting for them.
All the rest of their efforts seem to happen during one day. It stays daytime until the very end, when we see them gathered on top of the airship at sunset for the final scene.
So there it is. The whole thing takes 11 days.
So, the game has cost us $0.018 an hour. Nearly two cents an hour. However, that copy got scratched and I had to get another copy, this time for $12. This greatly devalued the game for us, since now the game has cost us an astonishing four cents an hour!
Compare to Doom3, for which I paid $50 and which offered perhaps (I’m being really generous here) 40 hours of gameplay on all of my play-throughs combined. This comes to $1.25 an hour, or about thirty times the cost of FFX.
Starcraft would be a bargian similar to FFX, but I’ve purchased about six copies over the years as I’ve loaned out copies that were never returned. They also got used a lot at LAN parties, which seems to be the most common way to end up with a scratched disc. Even now I only have one copy, and that one is a backup. (I still have a couple of original cases, though.)
Unreal Tournament is another astounding bargain. Once you apply the patch, you no longer need the CD. So, if you have several computers everyone can play from the same copy. (Note also that since the game doesn’t nag for the CD, my original copy is still in good condition even after 7 years.) I probably paid $40 for the game, and if you add up all the time my friends and I have spent playing the game over the LAN, PLUS all the time I spent online and in single-player, AND all the time I spent making levels like this one, then we’re talking about about hundreds and hundreds of hours of play. The game doesn’t clock hours the way FFX does, so I can only speculate at how many. Let’s say 600, just so we’re not here agonizing over numbers all day long. That puts UT at an affordable $0.06 an hour.
My brother and I played Diablo II for a long, long time, but the game was expensive ($50) and so was the expansion ($30) so the game isn’t that cheap, per-hour. Since we each needed our own copy, I’ll just calculate my side of it. I probably played for (total guess) 300 hours, and a paid $80. So Diablo II cost $0.26 an hour.
Half-Life 2 was by far the most expensive. Take the 45 hours I’ve spent playing the game, then SUBTRACT the three hours of my time the game wasted because of Steam. I pre-ordered the game for the very painful price of $60, which brings us to $1.42 an hour. This is being generous. I value my time quite a bit, and if I were to add the value of those three hours onto the purchse price instead of just subtracting those hours from the playing time, this game would cost more per hour than going to the theater.
I doubt I’ll ever see a game that is as much of a bargain as FFX, even though we bought it twice.
And no, I don’t have a point to all this, why do you ask?
Since this is a blog about Anime from last year and videogames from last decade, it’s safe to say this thing has a narrow audience. So, I try to keep this thing running smoothly to avoid driving off what few people are generous enough to show up. So the following is interesting to me:
Via Mark I find Jacob Nielson’s Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes. This is interesting. I try to run a nice blog that’s easy to read, comment, and link to, simply because I know how annoying it is when I’m using someone’s blog and it doesn’t work right.
So Nielson has ten things that he thinks are design problems on most blogs. Let’s have a look:
Sigh.
Probably. Who cares? I can’t bear to even care about that sort of business anymore. The point is, unique viewpoints interest me a lot more than the viewpoints of unknown people. We’re used to knowing the gender and age of the people we’re talking to, and I take those expectations with me into the blog world. It’s entirely possible that the next generation won’t care about stuff like this.
If the thing I’m linking is the foundation for my post (if I want to build or add to what another blogger has said) then I usually mention them by name.
I would also note that as helpful as this is, none of this is a ticket to a successful (traffic-wise) blog. Steven Den Beste ignored almost all of this, as well as eschewing even basic weblog mechanics like comments, trackbacks, or even the most basic of them all, permalinks. Despite this, he was in the Technorati top 100 for a long time. For those of you keeping score at home, that’s like winning the bronze in the 100 meter dash – on a pogo stick. Sure, he didn’t get the gold, but… on a pogo stick?
The comments on most sites are a sewer of hate, because we're moderating with the wrong goals in mind.
A breakdown of how this game faltered when the franchise was given to a different studio.
Raytracing is coming. Slowly. Eventually. What is it and what will it mean for game development?
From the company that brought us Fallout 76 comes a storefront / Steam competitor. It's a work of perfect awfulness. This is a monument to un-usability and anti-features.
This is a massive step down in story, gameplay, and art design when compared to the 2014 soft reboot. Yet critics rated this one much higher. What's going on here?
Cities: Skylines is bound to have a sequel sooner or later. Where can this series go next, and what changes would I like to see?
This series explores the troubled history of VR and the strange lawsuit between Zenimax publishing and Facebook.
This is it. This is the dumbest cutscene ever created for a AAA game. It's so bad it's simultaneously hilarious and painful. This is "The Room" of video game cutscenes.
A music lesson for people who know nothing about music, from someone who barely knows anything about music.
Crysis 2 has basically the same plot as Half-Life 2. So why is one a classic and the other simply obnoxious and tiresome?
T w e n t y S i d e d
