pyat | Entries tagged with review

The Flippant Fandom One-Liner Review

velvetpage and I have just returned from Avatar, James Cameron's rather shallow remake of the classic 5th Doctor serial, Kinda.

"Why do you think the plants are hostile?"

Look out! It's the evil-shouty colonel in his power suit, rampaging through the forest he does not understand!

More seriously, I very much enjoyed it, and will review properly later...

You all knew this was going to happen, right?

You've seen my reviews of Roller Coaster Tycoon and the Conan MMOPRG.

You saw that I'd been playing Sim 2.

You knew what was coming next.

Let me tell you the story of Sammy Slan.
( Sammy Slan, Friend of Every Sim )

Um, just to explain, I walled in the party guests in tiny rooms without toilets or chairs. And left them there for several days until they were passing out at random and really needed showers. Then I let them out. I've not starved anyone to death... yet. I added the glass panels so you could see them in their little niches.

I think I dislike this game. Seriously, most of my fun in games comes from finding interesting ways to do pointless or dangerous things outside of the intended playspace. That's the whole point of Sims 2. The entire game is one big sandbox where you can do almost anything... but the only fun things to do are hit other kids in the head with your shovel.

For me, it's sort of like the video game equivalent of that Twilight Zone episode. Sims 2 is A Night Place to Visit, but I think I prefer the honest sadism of a first person shooter.

My dad bought me a used IBM-XT clone for Christmas, 1989. Around that time, Omni magazine was carrying ads for dial-up MUDs, multiple-user text enviroments where you could hang out and pretend to be a dwarf. I loved this idea. I imagined making a con artist in one. I'd describe him as a wise old man, and he'd sit outside the town gate and sell bogus treasure maps to people. Indeed, when I eventually got onto MUDs and MUCKs, I did this sort of thing.

It's frustrating that I can't do that sort of thing in a much more advanced game, like the Conan MMORPG. I can't, because every character in the game is clearly marked as a player or computer character. And, no one talks to the other players, if they can help it.

I gave up on the Conan MMORPG about a day after my last review. I don't know whether this game in particular is just really badly flawed, or whether I'm simply not constitutionally fitted to play MMORPGs. Certainly they seem to require an investment of time over and above anything I'm willing to commit. I got to level 11, and the quests did not get any more epic. They just got longer, or more unrealistic.

At one point, a blacksmith asked me to fetch a crate of steel from a ship at the dock, in exhange for a pair of boots. I got there, and found the crate stuck in the crane. The crew told me I could have it, if I could get it down. I poked at the crane, and the crate fell to the deck and crashed open. The captain was displeased, but let me take the ore, though I'm not sure where I put it. But, this seems to have been an unavoidable scripted event.

_{Oops! Butterfingers! Can I still have my steel?}

It also explained the pile of broken crates on deck. Every few minutes, another player comes along to do this quest, and a broken crate is added to the pile. Presumably, they vanish after a while, or the ship would be nothing but a pile of broken crates. Also, that seems like an awful lot of steel for me to be carrying on my own.

But, really, this is just an example of how the MMORPG works against any kind of immersive experience. How hard would it be to designed a quest that doesn't end up with a stack of broken crates piling up in the same place? It's like everything in the game is designed to remind you that you are playing a game. It's like watching a movie in which the boom mic is constantly visible, or reading a book filled with editing markups. It's like playing an RPG in middle-school with guys who make fun of you for trying to act in character.

_Tortage

It almost makes me angry. Here they have created this enormous, beautiful world, with an engine for adjudicating relationships between players, with three dimensional cities and wilderness. This is precisely how I imagined computer games would be someday! Except, the reality is clunky and non-engaging.

You'd think I could wander through this world experiencing wonderful adventures, and meeting interesting people. But the game is specifically designed to defeat that. You don't go into the tavern and swap tales of treasure, or seek adventuring companions. You run pell-mell from place to place, following little arrows on the map and killing things when you arrive. The game does not encourage interaction. If you stay and chat, you get left behind.

The last quest I accepted involved killing 20 snakes, and 20 scorpions. I didn't even start on it. The one before that required me to kill 30 Pict tribesmen. Except, instead of killing 30 of them, I killed the same two guys, 15 times over... because they respawn in the same spot after a couple of minutes.

How is that fun? How is that immersive?

_{Darn those updrafts! I feel like Marilyn Monroe!}

Yesterday's journey to Hyboria started as my visits usually do; with a good solid session of evangelism atop the ol' Preachin' Rock. This prominence is located right at the gates of Tortage, allowing me to holler at passing adventurers without distracting them from their questing. Dancing attracts the most attention, I find.

_{You can tell the new players, because they're dressed like gay disco pirates.}

Business was slow, though I did make one short-term convert when I moved a bit away from the gates. My conversation with him actually attracted a little knot of newbies who seemed interested in what I had to say. The player, who is located right in front of me in this screenshot, wasn't terribly eloquent, but he got into the spirit of the thing, and even went back to the Jungle. Later, I saw him in the city and he complimented me on my dress.

_{A face you can trust.}

Following this success, I was heartened enough to make a new attempt on the "Get me Four Fish" quest. This time, I took time to survey the pirate encampment from the water, and noticed a single fish hanging from a pier. I was able to reach it without getting out of the water. I sat there for a few minutes, considering my next line of action.

And then... a miracle occurred.

There was a faint glow of blue light, and a new fish appeared on the rack. I took it as well. And waited... and a third fish appeared! And a fourth! Praise Mitra! I'd found a Drying Rack of Infinite Fishes!

Or, possibly, I just learned how to take advantage of respawning points in quests. I am going to try very hard to pretend it was an in-game miracle, though. I'm working hard to suspend my awareness of the game structure. And frankly, it feels like cheating, somehow. In any case, I hurried my armload of fish back to the starving fisherman who'd begged me to bring him food.

_{He needs to eat a lot to maintain that beard.}

He was suitably grateful, and in return for me dying several times, he presented me with a fish fillet knife. It's worth 5 pieces of tin, or enough to buy 1/5 of a frayed glove. Golly. As I turned to leave, I noticed something odd. My fisherfriend was standing in front of his house, next to a table...

_{The mugs appear to be full of lead.}

... that miserable, duplicitous dog. Starving in the midst of plenty, it seems. If indeed he was starving at all. I believe he is working for the Red Hand, the wicked criminal league who runs Tortage. They are angry with me for warning people away from the city, and are trying to kill me by playing on my sense of charity.

That is the only explanation that makes sense.

After this unpleasant realization, I tool up in rawhide armor and killed a bunch of panthers. Made level 8!

I think the most successful RPG campaign I've ever run, by several metrics, was The Voyage of the Riddock's Dawn for Ironclaw. This game, if you didn't know, features animal people living in a fictonal world with society and technology vaugely akin to 15/16th century, with magic. And... yes, animal people.

Listening to some music just now got me thinking about the campaign, and future Ironclaw adventures, and the media that inspired elements of how I run the game.

First, Umberto Eco's novel, The Island of the Day Before. This was, undeniably, the largest influence on the game. Several bits were taken directly from the novel, such as the diving bell, the race to find a means to determine latitude, and little throwaway bits about homeopathic magic. It's a very dense book, but well worth reading. The last several chapters grow more and more insane as the narrator succumbs to hunger and thirst, and contain wonderful speculation about the theological implications of the international date line.

The Mission. A 1986 film. Everyone knows the soundtrack, which has been lifted for numerous TV shows, movies, and weddings. It's a beautiful film. A little plodding here and there, but full of incredible vignettes and dramatic pieces. It's one of the few pieces of modern media that actually recognizes the fact that slave trade was always controversial, particularly in the eyes of the church. The game featured the uneasy conflict between the realpolitik concerns of the nobility and more venal clerics with the The interaction between

velvetpage's priest and

wggthegnoll and

redstorm's more earthly characters coincidentally resembled the scenes between Jeremy Irons' Jesuit and De Niro's ex-mercenary on more than one occasion. And, of course, the images of uniformed men slipping through jungles, fighting each other and Native tribes.

Not as clearly sourced in the game, but certainly inspiring some of my writing for the sourcebooks was Franco Zeffirelli's Brother Sun, Sister Moon, a perplexingly earnest, beautiful, silly, boring, twee and charming movie about the life of St. Francis of Assisi. It highlights the conflict with the established temporal and spiritual power, and the actual words of Christ. Interesting clip, by the way, with Alec Guiness as the Pope, willfully returning to his earthly trappings of wealth and power as St. Francis leaves.

Before bed, I fired up Conan one more time, and took on an additional quest. I went back to where I'd found the tailor and blacksmith who'd given me the dead-simple quests. There was a fisherman, and he was starving to death. He'd been chased away from his fishing gear and catch by pirates. His quest?

Bring him four fish, so he could eat.

I had food on me. Specically, bananas, dead rats, and a piece of carrot cake(?!). The game did not provide the option of giving him food, or money to buy food. He didn't ask me to retrieve his fishing rod, or his nets. He wanted me to go to a basket of fish he'd abandoned days ago, and bring back four of them.

I agreed to this rather short-sighted request, and ambled over to the lighthouse. There, I was horribly slaughtered by the band of 10th level Pirates who were guarding the fish. Maybe they had another reason for being there, but they were also attacking me for approaching the fish.

I came back and tried to sneak up on the basket of fish, using an Apocalypse Now-style approach, and sneaking up under the docks. I crouched low and hugged shadows, and came in sight of the fish... and got shot dead by a dozen arrows. At that point, I decided the fisherman could just jolly well starve to death.

Also, consider the moral implications. He wanted me to go and kill six or seven men, in order that he could have breakfast. I suspect the fisherman was actually evil. I should go back and preach at him. Seriously, though, if that scenario arose in a tabletop RPG, players would walk away from the game

_{All Creatures Will Make Merry Under Penalty Of Demonfire}

I made level 7 today! I spent several minutes dancing a grim little jig along the main path in celebration. I did a couple of quests today. But first, I had to deliver my Evangel, Unto Them Who Had Ears.

( A preachment, dear friends, you are about to receive... )

So, the quests. Those were epic.In the first quest, I ventured into the wilds (50 feet outside the city gate) to retrieve three spools of non-magical thread from a shack for an out-of-work tailor. In return, I received a pair of shabby pirate pants. I only had to kill 8 people to get the thread! I'd say that was a win-win for everyone.

_{I'm telling my grandchildren about this day!}

Next, I took on a quest for a blacksmith. He wanted me to scavenge a meat cleaver, a bundle of leather, and a rolling pin from some abandoned market stalls on the waterfront. Man, if I'd known cleavers were going around spare, I'd have ditched the hooked stick a long time ago. Alas, I was not able to use the meat cleaver, as it was a "quest item." As an aside, the smith said he needed these things for his work. Blacksmiths are always using meat clevers, right? And rolling pins are great for flattening out sword blades.

In return, the blacksmith gave me five dead rats. These are, apparently, intended as comestibles.

With these two glorious adventures under my belt, I decided for something a little more exciting. I went out to recover two barrels of stolen goods from a camp of pirates. I'd already killed about 20 of them while preaching at people and retrieving thread, so, hey, what's one more encampment?

_{Ow. Ow! OW!}

_{On the plus side, I found a piece of carrot cake when I came back to loot the corpse. No, I'm not kidding.}

Man, those pirates were a lot more dangerous than I remembered...I did get the barrels, in the end. And, I had my first positive interaction with another player. I wandered into a basement full of 18th level prison guards, and a wandering adventurer who was there on a quest saw me hiding, and led me out to safety. That was nice.

He did not, however, Repent.

DAY THREE: SCORECARD
Jeweled Thrones Crushed under My Sandaled Feet: Zero
Lamentations of Women Heard : Zero.
Rowboats Stolen: One
Number of Converts Recruited into Impromptu Apocalypse Cult: Zero. But working on it...

Other Highlights...

Housecats Threatened with Hellfire: One

Bottles of Rancid Wine Purchased: Three

Mysterious Women Glimpsed by Moonlight: One.

I went on two solo quests, which involved delivering a bottle of healing potion from a healer to a spy on an island, and returning to her with a message. At this point she tried to recruit me to pick herbs to heal some grotty NPC I didn't care about. I decided to get down to serious roleplaying, and stood in the town square, warning everyone of the coming Volcanic Apocalypse. Whenever a new player came through the gate, I would try to attract their attention with a dire warning along the lines of:
"Do not trust the town crier!"
"Doom!"
"Death is coming to Tortage!"
"Turn back to the jungle, this city is doomed!"

I didn't get any nibbles, though a 65th level guy with a small army of monsters offered me a guild membership, which I declined.

Day two of the Conan MMORPG. I played for about 90 min, after the girls were in bed.

I had to fight my way past a herd of murderous gorillas before I actually got to the city gate. Every single one of them was carrying a bunch of bananas.

Now I, Pyatt, Priest of Aquilonia, carry many bananas.

I arrived at the gate and was informed that I cannot enter, since I am marked as a slave by my manacles. A kindly guard suggested that a blacksmith outside of town could help me. I found the blacksmith with a line up of escaped slaves waiting to get their manacles knocked off. He was quite happy to knock off my manacles, provided I went the quarry and brought him three bricks.

I got to the quarry and found bunch of other players fetching bricks. This marked my first in game interaction with an actual flesh and blood player.

"Huzzah, bricks!" I said.
"lol" said a thinly clad sorceress.

At that point a giant demonic bat appeared and tried to kill me for stealing his bricks. I killed the bat, returned triumphantly with the bricks, had the manacles bashed off, and returned to the city gates...

Tortage! City of Pirates and Mystery and Adventure! What wonders await inside?

Except there was a level 80 Jackass with a horse parked sideways across the gate, effectively blocking access for all the new players. In this screen shot, Pyatt, Proud Priest of Aquilonia, is lost amongst a bunch of skinless monsters who seem to follow around some of the evil wizard types. They're harmless, but they can clutter up the screen a bit. You can't see my character at all, but he's the one saying "Swell."

The Jackass on the Horse seems to have been bisected by the gate.

"lol just courch" said the Jackass. I think he meant "Crouch." And indeed, some more experienced players were able to crawl under the belly of his horse while the newbies milled about aimlessly, cursing.

Pyatt, Priest of Aquilonia, does not crawl.

No, really, he doesn't. Cause, like, I don't know how.

I wandered away from the gate and looked up the in-game manual, the control settings, and so on, and none of them told he how to crouch. I went back to the gate to, like... kvetch... or something. The Jackass had left in the meantime, happily.

Now, the adventure begins in earnest! Tortage! City of Delights! City where I can perhaps sell off all this crap I picked up in the jungle! And buy some trousers! It took me ages to find someone who sold clothes, and I had zero interactions with other players. They just seem to run from place to place, and did not reply to my Bronze Age halloos and "Hail Fellow'ing".

I sold my "Flaking Crocodile Skin Loincloth" and "Slippers Retrieved From a Pile of Elephant Dung," pawned the bag of gold teeth, and bought a frayed robe, frayed belt, a wooden buckler. Now I look more priestly. Or sissy.

I kept the bananas.

At this point, I quit the game. Thus far, the game most closely resembles that scene in the Conan the Barbarian film where he's chained to a mill wheel and doesn't talk to anyone for ten years.

Yesterday, while visiting my parents, my father presented me with a World War I U.S. Army entrenching tool. The canvas cover was marked with the date of issue, 1917. He’d found it among my Uncle Frank’s things. Uncle Frank died last year at the age of 99. I presume it’d been a piece of surplus he’d picked up, since he’d been too young for WWI and too old for WWII, and wasn’t American.

The blade has a lot of surface rust, but is actually quite solid. It’s gone to live in the trunk of my car for the time being, for digging out of snowdrifts.

**

I picked up my very first MMORPG at the game sale. It was marked down to $3.95 (from $59.95) and Rose threw in a 60 day time card for free. The game is Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures, and apparently it was released in 2008 and met with a combination of indifference, anger, and angry indifference. In fact, the game was sent out for free with copies of a gaming magazine earlier this month. Still, I like Robert E. Howard, and most of the reviews I’d read seemed to be complaining about things I didn’t care about. So, I played it for a couple of hours on Sunday morning, and worked my way up to level 5.

Some observations:
I really liked the character appearance editor. You can adjust your facial features to a great extent, allowing users to create a very distinctive character, and not merely a generic bland pretty boy/girl. You can make a fat ugly guy, if you want. I made a bald man with a wild fringe of hair, deep-set eyes, a large nose, and a long beard. He looks a bit like José Ferre, if José Ferre had been a Mexican wrestler. He had a sort of fanatical cast to his features, so I decided he should be a priest.

The opening scenario, which establishes you as a slave washed up on the shores of an unknown jungle island, was fairly effective. It explains why you know nothing about the world, and why you’re wandering about dressed only in a loin cloth.

I was expecting a lot more freedom. The first five levels involve a series of minor quests required to get into a pirate city. The jungle looks dark, deep, and mysterious, but there’s only one path through it. You can’t sneak around things, or get lost. You just keep walking. It may be that the game opens up after the introductory levels.

There seemed to be a small knot of people every ten yards. Just, you know, loitering out in the jungle. And they all hated me and wanted to kill me.

The bad guys (Jungle Picts, Scroungers, Poachers, etc.) are depicted as attacking you with swords or spears or bows. They have on cloaks and bits of armour. Yet, when you kill them and search their bodies, you only find things like “a dirty bandana” and “boots discarded by a hobo.” I thought perhaps this reflected a really quick and dirty search of portable property, until I pried out a couple of gold teeth. Consequently, I spent the first two hours of the game dressed in various kinds of unflattering rags and carrying a broken bottle. I have no idea where I was carrying all those gold teeth.

Later, I battled a camp full of poachers and other murderous sorts, and acquired a piece of wood with a hook on it. It looks rather brutal, I admit, but, really, is there anything more hardcore than killing ten men with a broken bottle? While dressed in a diaper and a filthy bandana?

I arrived at the city and found my old slave master at the gates. I killed him with the hook-thing, and an enormous treasure chest appeared. It had a sword in it. “Hooray,” I thought. But I have to be level 50 to use the sword. I can carry it, sure, but apparently murderous proficiency with broken bottles and hooked-sticks doesn’t translate to the capacity to swing a sword.

I didn’t meet any other players. I suspect you don’t enter the larger shared world until you get into the city. I couldn’t get into the city, because a demon had stolen the key. I could see people walking around, but none of them seemed interested in me. I killed the demon and got the key…

I stopped playing because the game crashed before I could walk back to the city, and I didn’t feel any urge to restart it. The crash was likely because I have a cheap graphics card and just barely met the hardware requirements.

Summary:
It was okay. I’ve played worse games. I didn’t get as far as the actual “MMO” part of the “MMORPG,” but I’ll try again when I have a free hour. I don't know that the MMO part will interest me much, judging by the inane chatter on the open chat line. Most of the solo games I've played were much more immediately gripping, certainly.

commanderteddog has returned from her remarkable sojourn amongst the Yangs (E plebista!) Like most world explorers, she has returned to her native land bearing the exotic bounty of foreign realms. In my specific case, she returned bearing candy.

The Sky Bar, and Chocolate Necco Wafers! Both products of Necco, the oldest candy maker in the Western Hemisphere, founded at a time when wig powder was still being sold at Ye Olde General Store. Their candies do have the feel of a simpler time, and it's not just the retro packaging.

The Sky Bar was introduced in 1938, and it definitely has a sort of pre-War feel to it. It's not a half-pound of wax for one thing, but a small sticky bar, filled with gooey pockets. It's the candy bar you can imagine one of the younger Little Rascals eating, and getting all sticky-faced, then swallowing soap powder when they try to clean him in the wash tub, and hiccuping bubbles.

As for Necco Chocolate Wafers...

I poured some out on the stovetop for the photo, and they made a sound like poker chips, a sort of hollow rattle. They're covered in a dusting of sugar that comes off in your hands. They feel light and slippery, and when you eat them they shatter like bits of chalk. They also taste like chalk. Chalklate!

Necco wafers were invented in 1847, and it shows. They're like some kind of patent medicine that ended up just being eaten because it had a dusting of sugar - "Yes, Doctor Isambard Necco's Patented Wafers! For treatment of Female Hysteria and Colic! (Medicinal use only, not to be taken internally)"

Also, they are horrid. Also, I seem to have eaten them all, and want more.

So, the Kodak Easyshare I picked up on Thursday was not resolving the SD card recognition issues. So, I returned it on Friday afternoon and traded "up" for Norcent DCS 760. Normally I would have been very leery of a Norcent anything, as Norcent is a low-end Chinese manufacturer best known for cheap LCD monitors and digital keychains. However, most of the reviews I'd seen in advance were positive, and it seemed to have fewer angry reviews written entirely in lower case.

Alas, the Norcent had an issue with the battery mmeory or power switch that meant that it could be turned on and off... but then would not turn on again until the battery had been removed and replaced. So, off to XScargo again this morning for my third camera in two days.

Lesson:
DO NOT TRUST XSCARGO FOR ANY HARDWARE MORE COMPLICATED THAN A HAT.

Though, I mean, really, with a name like "XScargo", you can't really expect high-end stuff.

That said, this third camera seems to be working fine. Indeed, it takes photos that are generally superior in colour and resolution to my lost Pentax Optio S. The colour is very good, and I got some excellent shots with and without the flash. The following shots were taken in "auto" mode, without a flash. My only concern is that the camera, when used without a flash, requires full outdoor light or the images are slightly blurred. Also, there seems to be an odd "glow" to some of the colours, which is not entirely unpleasant.

I'll see how durable it is over the coming weeks. The following sample shots have been cropped, but are otherwise as is.

Last night at sunset, on the returned camera.

This afternoon. Two features I really like are the quick turn-on time (under a second) and the rapid shot times. A lot of cheap digital cameras have a 5+ second warm up, and take more than a second to respond to the shutter button. Elizabeth threw the paper airplane without warning, and I was able to catch it in the frame every time.