Organizational Origami

Leave a reply

I talked Lister into helping me pick up a bookcase from Ikea over the weekend. We set it up in the dining room area and managed to put pretty much all of our spare books into it which cleared out not only the random piles of reading material we had lying around but also one whole older bookcase and another tightly packed shelf on a third unit. Plus we still have some room left on the new shelf, which speaks to how inhumanly massive this thing is. 72 inches square sounds pretty big, conceptually, but in person it is really stinkin’ huge.

So our somewhat tardy spring cleaning is pretty much done at this point, having now cleaned out three of four closets, re-shuffled our various media (the old bookcase is now exclusively a DVD holder) and gotten rid of lots of old stuff. We do still have one unsightly pile of stuff that we need to decide what to do with (eBay, donate, toss, etc) but generally speaking the place looks a lot nicer and we can actually find stuff we’re looking for on occasion now.

Also, I am prepared to go camping at a moment’s notice. That fact is neither here nor there, but you can consider it a public service announcement. Besides, I bet none of you could go camping in five minutes flat. Hmph.

So’s You Knows

Leave a reply

Two short links, one short announcement:

  • Next Gen has an interesting article about Nintendo’s role in the video game market. I don’t necessarily agree with their positions, but it’s good food for thought anyway.
  • Opera-based browser for the DS, anyone? Interesting as a novelty, but I’m not sure how much use I’d really get out of it… especially not when they’re charging as much for it as they would a regular game.
  • You may now access any/all Game topic entries from http://games.ironsoap.org/. By popular request. Yeah.

Entwined the Story Be

Leave a reply

Reading a discussion about Indigo Prophecy on Slashdot today, someone brought up an interesting perspective:

Man, when will these game developers get the idea that *story is not the point*.

Now I backpedal. I realize that some people enjoyed this game, and some *would* like a larger helping of narrative in their games. But every time I see another article talking about narrative as if a lack of it is the one thing holding games back, a little bit of “twitch” gamer in me feels like it’s been kicked in the crotch. There are many of us who don’t want a game whose purpose is to funnel us through a story.

Despite all the talk of cinematic games and making writers on video games a more integral part of the process instead of some hack they hired to slap some cockneyed drivel in an instruction booklet, perhaps it might be worthwhile to step back for a moment and consider if this is something we really want to happen. Using Indigo Prophecy as an example, this was a game that was supposed to be all about the story and the end result, strictly on those merits, is a shoddy shell of a plot and some weirdly unsatisfying gameplay. Maybe we’ve been barking up the wrong tree?

It doesn’t help when people start making Matrix parallels and pointing out that not even strictly narrative mediums like film are always so great about bringing the story in full force. In movies the only thing that can really get in the way of the story is whiz-bang special effects that are expensive and oftentimes repetitive save for those exceedingly rare leaps forward in effects technology. Yet even something as ultimately pointless as that can serve to distract from a lack of serious writing effort. How can it be reasonably expected that game designers will ever look at all the effort that has to go into making a game actually fun to play and say, “No, let’s spend more time on the script instead”?

Then consider the “good ol’ days” of 8-bit NES and even earlier Atari games: Most of those had barely passing nods to storylines and yet are revered in many cases as being spectacular games whose legacy cannot be denied. Can anyone say that Super Mario Brothers 3, as fun as it may have been, was delivering anything remotely resembling a coherent plot? If anything it had an identical plot to the original Super Mario Brothers… and one that can be summarized in half a sentence. Would it have been a better game with a rich and compelling story? Is there such a thing as a gameplay-only video game masterpiece?

Perhaps SMB3 would have been even better with some immersive story elements. It hardly matters: Pure game experiences are not exempt from excellence the same way that a special effects extravaganza is not exempt from being an enjoyable moviegoing experience just because it doesn’t deliver Shakespeare-quality writing. Visceral entertainment has its place and some great games are either purposely or inconsequentially devoid of backstory and linear narrative progression.

What really matters then is when a game tries to bring a story aspect to the table and in doing so fumbles the execution, usually through incompleteness. This is the same valid criticism levelled at the Matrix sequels: Where the first was full of intriguing and well conceptualized plot hooks and ideas, the latter showed a decided lack of follow-through on the part of the writers to have anything beyond a few well conceptualized plot hooks and ideas.

So to a certain extent the Slashdot poster is correct: The story is indeed not the point. A game need not have a bestseller-ready plot to be great, so long as the gameplay compensates for the lack of immersiveness and depth with its own strength. But games that use a narrative device to propel the action forward need to make sure that they don’t fall into the trap of thinking that narrative as just a mechanism whose internal consistency and completeness is secondary to its function in terms of the game. The two aspects must be correctly woven together to create a stronger whole and while perhaps not as strong separately, at least capable of standing alone apart from the other. Consider two opposite examples: Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic has some good gameplay and a solid storyline that remains well executed throughout. One could novelize the plot and come away with perhaps an average book and one could use the game engine without context as a sort of bland role-playing adventure. They exist semi-effectively alone but together create one of the best games of the last five years. Now consider Indigo Prophecy: Without the game, the story would be just as inane as it stands today leaving only the game itself as motivation to compel the progression of the plot. Yet the game mechanics themselves are drab and uninteresting when removed from the context of the game so they don’t provide enough incentive in and of themselves to encourage continuing. Separately weak, combined they are just as weak if not weaker. In fact the only real reason the game is finishable is probably due to its remarkably brief time investment.

It isn’t that stories aren’t important to games, it’s merely that stories aren’t treated as important. Gamers like the Slashdot poster who balk at being pushed through a story because they would prefer a more pure gaming experience are not wrong for wanting such, but there will likely always be the types of games which don’t lend themselves to narrative. And when they do pick up story-driven games you can’t blame them for being dissatisfied at the result, especially when it doesn’t seem compelling enough to have interrupted their game-only experience anyway. The solution is not less story in games, but rather better integration and above all, more respect for what positive effects quality writing can have on the finished product.

RSS > Email

Leave a reply

I used to think Jakob Neilsen was really on to something. And don’t misunderstand, I still feel that his robot-like usability/simplicity mantra has some merit, but I think he’s getting to the point where he’s no longer really understanding technology and is instead stuck on a 1994 version of the usability meme and stubbornly refusing to budge.

Witness the latest interview on the Wall Street Journal where he discusses RSS. He says that email newsletters are better than RSS feeds because people look forward to them and they can be targetted at specific time periods. He also says that we shouldn’t use the ‘RSS’ moniker because people don’t know what it means and we should say “news feeds” instead.

First of all, go ask Richard Stallman about retroactively re-naming technology. GNU/Linux anyone? Anyone? Yeah, that’s what I thought. Perhaps ‘news feeds’ is a better term. In fact, I’d submit that he’s absolutely right since RSS is only one type of feed and it’s like saying “Kleenex” when you mean “facial tissue.” Still, RSS is easy to type and there are a lot of people who are already really used to calling it RSS. Chances are, the term won’t go away and it almost sounds like Neilsen is rejecting the technology because he doesn’t like the name.

What’s even more insane is that he goes on to trumpet the heavens about the benefits of email newsletters instead. Check it:

With the best ones, it’s like a service you are waiting for and expecting. The email newsletter comes to you; it arrives in your in box, and becomes part of the one place you go to get information. That’s the great strength.

Okay, let’s compare and contrast. I have about 35 news feeds on my Netvibes page. I also subscribe to about six or seven email newsletters including the iTunes weekly, TiVo’s newsletter, Ticketmaster’s events calendar and GameSpot’s “targeted” weekly. Of the newsletters I probably only ever really find anything of value in Ticketmaster’s and even then it’s probably on the level of one out of every three contains a listing for a show I’m interested in seeing and wouldn’t have otherwise known existed. My least favorite is GameSpot’s because no matter how much they try to cater to my preferences, it’s still fluffy, week-old cruft that I either don’t care about or already knew.

Of my 35 feeds, however, I probably read about 25% of the articles that come through. That’s a lot more value to me not because I get that much content from them but because I skip the other 75% not based on time-wasting skim-throughs to get to the good stuff but based on clear information gathered from the linked text and blurbs or fed articles that I can examine one at a time. Take for example my feed from RPGNet: There are probably ten to twelve articles that come through per day and many of them don’t interest me in the least. Yesterday a column came through with the headline and preview text: “Behind the Counter: A Busy Season. Origins, Sales Analysis, Online Sales, and GAMA.” No click. I don’t care about the details of distribution methods for gaming shops. It might have been an interesting article, but I didn’t feel like spending the time finding out, it didn’t sound interesting and I didn’t have to read more than 13 words to determine that. On the other hand the article whose feed read “Keeping Kosher: Balancing Characters and Stories. Character-focused and story-focused players in RPGs.” got a click. I didn’t have to run my eyeballs past the four screens worth of text on the distribution article to get to the character/story article like I would have in a newsletter. That’s great strength, and Neilsen is missing the point.

Vids

Leave a reply

New Resurrected rumors about the XBox 360’s price dip started in again today. Now they’re saying that the 360 will drop $100 by Christmas. That would put the good bundle at roughly $300 (actually closer to $325 with tax). I’m not going to suggest that’s cheap in any way, but it is about half the price of the high end PS3’s MSRP.

So will Microsoft actually do this? I mean, as it is your options are to get the feature-complete 360 set for $400 or drop an extra $200 and get the comparable PS3. Maybe Microsoft decides to say, “We’re comfortable with that.” Why not? They’re still ahead of the Sony in terms of game library and price point. Why push it?

I think if MS does go this route it will be because of the psychological marketing concept of “Half Price.” But MS needs to be a little careful here so that “Half Price” doesn’t translate into “Half as Good” when they do their holiday commercial blitz. Which is actually why I think they’ll wait until sometime in early 2007 to drop the price. Their options would be to drop the price and say nothing, letting the comparison shoppers make the realization themselves or to trumpet the price differential. On the one hand you may have a situation where people aren’t aware that the XBox is that much cheaper than the PlayStation and won’t comparison shop at all to figure it out (perhaps choosing instead to go off of a child’s wishlist) but on the other hand you could have people saying, “Why would it be that much cheaper? Is it that much weaker?” Consumers—especially around the holidays when they are buying stuff for other people that they may not be very knowledgable about—can’t always be relied upon to make the smart decision based on the limited information available to those who don’t already know and don’t really care to find out.

And MS would really be better served by waiting a few months to drop the price anyway: It’s almost guaranteed that the PS3 will sell out badly in its first few months of release leading up to Christmas. MS can rest assured that they’ll sit back and sell plenty of units with their stockpile ready to go, filling in where Sony can’t match demand. After Christmas when Sony catches back up and stock comes in, then Microsoft can drop the price reduction axe on Sony. I know if I had $600 to spend on video games I’d rather buy a $300 XBox and $300 worth of games than just a PS3 and some crummy launch title. Not everyone is going to be as flexible as me (and unlike some people, I actually like the original XBox and would probably consider a 360 based on that merit alone) but I bet there are enough people that feel the same way that it has to be a real concern for Sony. Or at least, it ought to be.

Elsewhere, someone has written a pretty amusing list of stuff that has happened while people were waiting for Duke Nukem Forever. I suppose you could do this with any decade-long-or-longer wait (the fourth Indiana Jones movie, anyone?) but it’s pretty funny anyway.

Meanwhile, The Escapist’s 50th issue deals intelligently with women in gaming and suggests that perhaps the gender barrier is more of a feedback loop of media perspective than an actual barrier plus argues that non-sexualized female protagonists (such as young Alice-style girls) might be the correct way to get females to identify with game characters.

It’s a fascinating issue and generally speaking I think the gender barrier is mostly hype because it makes a good common wisdom type hook for fluffy magazine articles (the kind that The Escapist mostly tries to avoid). Women play games quite a bit, I think that they simply tend to be more picky about what they play. Whimsy is spending the last bit of her pregnancy playing Monster Rancher; Dr. Mac reports that the Mrs. is enjoying some of the minigames on the DS and Nik has been known to play plenty of Tetris and Kirby’s Avalance (Puyo Puyo). Video games tend to be defined by the fanboy hype machines like Halo, Madden and Half-Life but excluding the twitch games there are a lot that appeal to women, I think they’re just less willing to want to spend the effort to find something they’ll like.

As an Aside…

2 Replies
  • I picked up Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow used this weekend. Man, I love this game. Castlevania has been sort of reinvigorated on the GBA but I never got around to trying any of the Aria of Sorrow/Harmony of Dissonance/Orchestra of Discomfort whatever they are. Now I kinda wish I had because Dawn of Sorrow is awesome with a capital Sweet.
  • My Hori screen filters also came in. They are very nice but I put them on wrong because I figured they would be either perfectly sized for the screens (they aren’t) or run slightly large (they don’t) so in both cases the filter comes up a couple of milimeters short on the right side. It’s not a big deal and I should be able to reapply them if necessary but I don’t want to risk messing them all up just now since I just got them put on and for the time being they’re doing the trick.
  • We totally cleaned out our computer/game room this weekend. I think Nik was less than thrilled with the project since it took up most of Saturday and a big chunk of Sunday afternoon, but the end result is that all the piles of paper and other assorted junk are gone from the floor (Mobility: It’s gonna be huge!), my gaming area is actually useable, we have two pretty organized closets, we threw out a slew of random stuff that I have no idea why we were keeping (broken computer parts, non-functioning hair styling products and—I’m not making this up—silverware and cooking utensils that had been packed unwashed two moves ago) and we have a table covered in stuff to trade in/sell/donate. Once all that is gone, we’re about 94% clutter-free.
  • Except for the books. We have a stupid amount of books. I guess in the grand scheme of things there are worse things to have too much of than books. But it’s getting out of control because we have no place to put them so they stack up like modern architectural experiments designed to give engineering students word problems to solve such as “If Nikki has 463 books which weigh between 1 and 3 kilograms, how many can she stack on her nightstand made from particleboard whose maximum load capacity is 100 kilograms before they crash through the floor and kill her downstairs neighbor?” Hopefully we’ll rectify the situation in the next couple of weeks as we’ve picked out an Ikea bookshelf that is 72″ square which is like 18 feet of book-storin’ area that will probably still not hold everything. But it will be better than being convicted of negligent homicide on our neighbors. I mean, I’m guessing.
  • So we’re running through The World’s Largest Dungeon every other week with Lister, Strahd, Fwaaa, Skorn and a few others. Of course, by every other week I mean “We did it one week and said we’d pick it up again in two weeks but then half the party flaked so we just played Magic all night instead.” But whatever.
  • We tried a new Magic tournament type since we were unable to continue the D&D adventure where each person opens a booster pack, chooses one card and then passes the rest to the next player. They do this until all the cards are gone and then go again, switching directions for the pass. At the end you flesh out the decks with some loose land cards and play a best-of-three tournament. It was kind of fun although we were using Mirrodin block boosters for the most part which meant we all had a crazy number of Artifacts and, as usual, I picked Blue as one of my colors so of course my deck was dog slow and I got trounced, eventually being the Ultimate Loser. Still it was fun.
  • Next session (two more weeks… sigh) I’m bringing my new Shadowrun adventure, On the Run so if people flake again (I hope they won’t and that it was a one-time thing due to lots of people being out of town for Father’s Day) we’ll have some kind of cool adventure to try.
  • I must be getting lazy. I used to spend hours and hours working up my own homebrew adventures for all sorts of games. I made adventures that I didn’t even ever plan to run because I knew no one else wanted to play the game. Now it’s so much effort that I’d almost rather run a pre-made adventure and pay the few bucks for it as a trade-off.
  • Want to know why I was nearly crushed by the weight of pretentious poo spewing from Metal Gear Solid 2’s postmodern dialog diharrea and why I couldn’t get more than a few minutes into MGS3 and why I’m wary of MGS4 like a recently-bitten child entering a yard with a sleeping doberman? Because Hideo Kojima is flat out nuts, that’s why. Seriously, does anyone understand what he’s talking about? Ever?
  • I know admitting this marks me as a terrible son, but my dad wrote several books and while I read most of them I didn’t get around to reading one of them (maybe because it was billed as sort of a romance and… well, you know… romance. Gah). Anyway I actually did finally finish it and it was good. One thing that struck me was that in the book there are a couple of scenes where a rapist attacks a college co-ed. In both scenes the narrative voice delivers powerful judgement on the perpetrator by referring to him as both a “coward” and a “fiend.” It struck me mostly because, stylistically, it isn’t something I see very often. I think that usually judgement is left to the reader based on character actions or dialogue but in this case it was specifically necessary that the attacks be described briefly (this is a Christian book after all—detailed descriptions of brutal rapes would fall outside the comfort zone for the audience) and that there not be a lot of dialogue since it comes up later as a plot point. I just thought it was interesting.
  • I went to the doctor on Friday for my stomach issues. He basically gave me some high-strength Pepcid and told me to take it before dinner and to pretty much go on a diet (no fatty foods, no spicy foods, etc.) since he suspected that I might be creating too much stomach acid which was why I felt like junk most evenings. They also took a blood sample to test for ulcers. But what was really amazing was that the lady took two vials of blood in roughly 27 seconds, didn’t hurt me a bit (even when she swapped the vials) and left no discernable bruising. I felt like asking for her autograph.
  • I went for a run on Saturday since my doctor was griping about me slipping off the health wagon. I may have overdone it a bit, as evidenced by the fact that I’ve been walking like I have some sort of mild palsy ever since due to the severe soreness in my legs. Stupid exercise.
  • I finally got Mayfair Games on the phone Friday. We picked up a copy of Settlers of Catan around Christmas time and unfortunately we found that the game was missing all the red road pieces. I sent Mayfair a couple of emails and got form replies back saying they would “contact me shortly.” They must live in some sort of temporal vortex because six months qualifies as “shortly” to no one on this planet. But they have weird office hours so it’s always been a pain to get them on the phone. Having the day off Friday as I did, I finally caught up with them. They promised they would ship the bits out to me today. Forgive me if I don’t hold my breath.

Blog Smog

Leave a reply

I don’t necessarily want to suggest that there is something inherently wrong with Gawker Media and their stable of oh-so irreverant ad blogs, but they do have some issues.

As a matter of fact, I think any blog that exists primarily to gain audience so that the site owners can show them ads and only secondarily exists to entertain either reader or writer(s) is going to have some problems. Not mere conflict of interest problems, either, although those will likely crop up—I’m talking more about problems due to the requirements mandated by the owning body’s policies and the general problems coming from blogger tendencies that, frankly, give everyone a bad name.

Consider the recent snipe at Kotaku on Metafuture. Kotaku’s Florian Eckhardt linked to an article with a game designer and summarized it falsely. You can see, occasionally, Gawker-style ad blogs post something of questionable relevance or interest simply to meet quotas or deadlines. Clearly there is a demand to have X number of articles posted per specified time period and I suspect the relative quality requirements for these postings are loose, at least.

But X may actually be a pretty high number. If so that could suggest that these blogs get by because they have something new most of the time that readers log in but not necessarily something good. And in fact since most posts are links to other locations, that simply means that the quality of the on-site commentary is largely irrelevant; the implication is that readers are letting Gawker sites act as link filters (I’ve discussed being a link filter for friends and family before) and don’t care so much about what these sites actually have to say.

Given that perhaps it isn’t so surprising to find a Gawker poster getting the facts on a fairly dense and lengthy interview wrong. But it certainly isn’t good. I’m not suggesting Eckhardt needs to be dragged into the street and shot, but I would seriously consider some sort of repercussions from his employers for misrepresenting (sensationally I might add) someone else’s words.

And here’s where it gets worse: Since the speed and quantity of these types of sites are what seems to matter more than anything else, other sites will pick up the story as gospel truth withouth any fact checking or any research of their own. Consider Slashdot running the interview as a Kotaku story. Clearly the original story came from a different site (Evil Avatar in this case), but rather than bother following a link trail, the Slashdot story poster assumes that Kotaku should get the hit because they linked it.

I know bloggers like to think of themselves as the new face of journalism and all that crap, but it is exactly stuff like this that proves how very wrong they are. And the sad part is that the fix isn’t too terribly difficult anyway: Just click a few extra links to determine where the content originated and never link to or post anything that you haven’t actually read. I imagine it would be immensely frustrating to me if I wrote something and some Gawker-style blog picked it up and then everyone and their cat carried the link but attributed it to the Gawker blog and not me, just because they were the highest traffic site to run the story. It’s basic journalistic integrity and it is basically absent online. So much for ‘New Media.’

With a Cold Sense of Recognition

1 Reply

In in full Short Attention Span Theater mode this day. Forgive.

  • ‘Twas not a good weekend for movies, it seems. We watched March of the Penguins—a film lavished with priase by one and all—and came away from it going, “meh.” I mean, it was a nice nature show and all, but why it was a feature film and not a regular Animal Planet special escapes me.
  • We also tried to watch The Break-Up as it was Nikki’s turn to pick a theater experience. I understand her choice in a way, she likes Jennifer Aniston, she likes comedies and she enjoys romance stories. You might infer from the title that this isn’t that romantic of a movie but then again it was advertised and billed as a romantic comedy. It isn’t. What it is most closely resembles a 105-minute torture session for humans claiming legitimate ownership to more than four brain cells. It isn’t exactly the worst movie I’ve ever seen, but it is quite high up there among the most unpleasant movies I’ve had the displeasure to experience. Among the movie’s primary sins was that it was ostensibly a comedy that utterly failed at any point to be amusing (let alone actually funny) and the one part that could have been comedic was stretched on for ten times longer than the joke had steam to push through. Sad.
  • Got the DS Lite Sunday. After all my yammering about trade-ins and what not, I ended up trading in nothing except some recycled cans for about $25 and then GameStop had a “Buy 2 Used Games, Get 1 Used Game Free” promotion. Since they had Mario Kart DS, Advance Wars Dual Strike and Metroid Prime Hunters used, I got those.
  • Never did get a case or any screen protectors, but I’m ordering the screen protectors online and I’ll probably just do without a case. That’s roughly typical.
  • I like all the games but I have a hard time with the control scheme in Metroid because it involves the stylus, the D-Pad and several of the buttons and triggers and whatnot. It probably takes some practice is all, which I haven’t put in because I’ve been too preoccupied pwning Black Hole forces in Advance Wars.
  • As for the hardware I’m impressed with the unit as a whole. Good battery life, brilliant screens that make good-looking games (Mario Kart DS) remarkable and okay-looking games (Advance Wars) good, and reasonably comfortable. I must confess that I avoid the touchscreen business when possible, perhaps because I lack screen protectors and I don’t wish to tarnish a handsome new electronic device, but more likely because I just don’t dig on it as an improvement in terms of control over regular ol’ D-Pad and buttons. Also the DS Lite is heavier than I expected; it’s far lighter than the brick that was the original DS, but compared to the featherweight GBA SP it’s a beast. I suppose that’s the price to pay for sweet 3D graphics and WiFi capability.
  • My backpack that I carried my work laptop around in ripped last week. It was a really ugly carrying device but I liked it because it had a spot for my little fold-up umbrella, it would (in a pinch) accommodate two laptops, plus it had room for all my random do-dads, a book, a spare floppy drive for the laptop, the laptop’s bulky AC adpater plus my CD case. But it was cheaply made and the zippers were a huge pain to get to work right. Anyway now I’m back down to my old Samsonite laptop case that I originally got for the iBook which holds practically nothing except the laptop, my namebadge/key card and a pack of gum. But it is solid as a rock and I’ve never had any problems zipping it up.
  • Except that time I zipped my favorite shirt into it first thing in the morning and ended up with a big snaggy rip thing across my stomach all day. That was weak.
  • Speaking of weak, I’ve seen people (aside from my brother that is) using the phrase “Weak sauce” quite a lot lately. It even makes an appearance as a catch phrase for one of the (more annoying) characters in Advance Wars. Weird. I kind of assumed my brother had made that up. Unless he invented a meme… Gasp! Scott is Internet Famous!
  • Not really.
  • After much fiddling I think I got my IMAP email working from DreamHost. I love the new hosting company and they have some stellar features but sometimes it seems like getting things to work they way you expect them to is just a few centimeters short of being Really Totally Easy. I’ve noticed this a lot with computing tasks: No matter how good it is, it’s not like working a Microwave. The chasm between, say, a clever bit of software or a clean user interface and RTE is theoretically minute, but it seems like in practice it might as well be the Grand Canyon because no one (not even Apple a lot of the time) can get to that point where you have to want to do something quite unusual before you have to ask for some help.
  • Case in point: I was trying to set up the DS to use my home’s WiFi connection. I was able to do so after a couple of hours’ frustration (also time when I was not actually playing with my new game console so frustration falls a little short, description-wise) and the solution I came up with was to change the type of WEP encryption I was using. This worked great for the DS but of course immediately kicked all other wireless devices off the network. It was a temporary panic moment before I realized how to change the other devices’ settings to reflect the updated environment. My point is that I use Macs at home and it should have been like, “Oh, you want to get your DS on this network? Plink! There you go.”
  • I suppose if that were the case I (and half the people I know and call friends or loved ones) would be out of a job. Viva job security through ineptitude!
  • There is something wrong with me. My stomach starts to hurt and gurgle and get a general bathroom-y feeling after I eat dinner and occasionally after I eat other meals as well, if I eat too much or the wrong thing. I’m seeing a doctor about it, but it’s starting to (ahem) cramp my style.
  • We went up last week to see Beans graduate from eighth grade. I know I graduated from Jr. High with a similar level of pomp and circumstance (Ha! I kill me!), but I remember thinking it was a little overdone considering what our relative accomplishment level was and I had a thought-deja-vu in witnessing the proceedings at Beans’ event. Still, he was class president and got to give the opening speech and his girlfriend was Valedictorian (with something ridiculous like a 4.36 GPA… something I didn’t know was possible since that would mean getting straight A+’s and something else, like—I don’t know—saving twelve drowning people between classes or something). So it was at least quasi-entertaining. There were a couple of musical numbers, and while I don’t recall my mother actually ever telling me that if I didn’t have anything nice to say not to say anything at all, it sounds like a solid policy. One which I will employ at this time.
  • Seriously. Nothing nice to say.
  • I would like to submit, for the records, a few facts. It is June. I live in California. In an area widely regarded for mild weather. It is overcast and cold today. With a chance of rain. What?
  • Stupid non-summer.
  • I keep meaning to watch the World Cup. I actually like watching Futbol, but I think it’s usually on at freaky hours like 7:45 am. I suppose watching World Cup soccer beats working, but I doubt my boss would be thrilled with the “Ole Ole” chant while people are conducting business.
  • Plus he might take back the bonus he told me about yesterday. All things considered it was a lot better than I thought it would be, especially since the targets I and various parts of the company (such as our team, our division, etc) were supposed to meet were graded stuff like “Pretty good, but not great.” If this is what I get for “Pretty good,” I’m fairly intrigued to see what I get for “Great.”

Trade Bait

Leave a reply

I’m planning to pick up my shiny new DS Lite this weekend. Aside from the general excitement about new gaming fun, I’ve been mulling over my initial purchases some.

I decided in order to get the stuff I want (and still stay within my budget), I need to unload a few things. Of course trading stuff in to game stores gets you practically nothing but practically nothing is better than literally nothing. Still, I’d rather give other folks the chance to take my stuff for cheap and maybe have them actually get some use out of it rather than sit around. I’ll do my best to beat used prices from major retailers. Can’t promise you won’t find cheaper stuff elsewhere but at least I’m an honest guy and I take care of my stuff… which is more than I can say for Mr. Random Internets Guy. Also, I’m negotiable.

If you’re interested in any of this, please let me know soon. Some of it may be gone by next week, others may still be around so first come first serve and all that. Also, I don’t need hard and fast commitments or cash by tomorrow or anything like that, just a quick note that says, “I saw you were unloading X and I might want to take that off your hands…” will suffice to hold me from trading it in right away.

Here’s the goods:

  • GameBoy Advance SP – Silver. No damage but it is a little scuffed from being in my backpack. I have a new AC adapter (third party… I lost the original) and I’ll send Tetris along with it if you like. EB Games sells them used for $59.99. I’ll take $25 for it OBO.
  • Golden Sun – A fun SNES-style RPG along the lines of Final Fantasy II. EB says $7.99 used; I’ll take $5.
  • Metroid Fusion – It’s fun but hard. It has a cool link up feature with Metroid Prime (although it could have been a lot cooler). It’s $9.99 from EB but kind of hard to find sometimes (at least around here) so I’ll do $5.
  • GameCube – Silver, and includes a Wavebird wireless controller, regular silver wired controller and I’ll toss in your choice of Metroid Prime or Eternal Darkness (unless you’re a kid in which case I’ll give you Metroid so your parents don’t hunt me down for giving you nightmares). EB sells a used GC for $60 and a new Wavebird for $35 (they don’t have a used price on it) so I’ll say $50 OBO for the whole deal.
  • Resident Evil 4 – Best game I’ve played in a long time. No kids, though, it’s too gory. $17.99 at EB for a used copy; I’ll do $12.
  • Halo 2 – You may have heard of it? $25.00 used from EB but yours for only $15 from me. Such a deal.

If you want all the Nintendo stuff (GBA SP and GC plus the games) I’ll throw everything into one box, cover the shipping and give the other game (Metroid or Eternal Darkness) plus a GBA/GC link cable and anything else I have lying around. We can call it $80.

Oh, and while we’re (sorta) talking about Nintendo: Remaking the original Legend of Zelda SNES-style? Yes. Please.

Groans and Eye Rolls

Leave a reply

A few links have managed to get my eyes rollin’ before I’ve even completely opened them for the day. Care to join me?

The first article is from Hardcore Gamer and is (yet another) article on getting girls to play video games. How original.

The problem with the article (aside from it saying the same basic things that every single other article with this same title has ever said) is that it falls into the same basic presumptive trap that all other similar articles fall into. The presumption is that there is some secret password or combination of tricks that can be executed to magically unlock the secret gamer in all females (not unlike solving a video game puzzle). I suggest that the very notion is patently false.

I think that in a broad sense there are probably a few games out there that any person could get into. Lots of people who have vicerally negative reactions to video games wouldn’t consider it untoward to play a few rounds of Tetris or Solitare. Of course those are actually video games, but they are so removed from what a lot of people percieve as “gamer games” that they find a class all their own which sits outside that realm in people’s minds, even if technically a distinction does not exist.

But the thrust of the article and the implication it puts forth is not that you might be able to find a handful of games that your girlfriend will tolerate but rather that you can actually convert her into (at least an approximation of) a full-fledged gamer. Which is, of course, a ridiculous notion. There is no more guarantee that you can convince your significant other to join your hobby than there is that she can convince you to get really excited about visiting Sephora, taking ballroom dance classes or shopping for fun. She might, but the guarantee is bogus and misleading.

My opinion is that games are self-selling in a very significant way. And I’m not just talking about video games, either. Lots of game companies and gaming communities spend a lot of time saying, “How can we get more people to play our game?” The truth is that you can market until the cows come home and maybe you’ll get lucky and start a fad or something (witness Pictionary which was everywhere for a while there in the late 80s but realistically is only a ho-hum game) but you generally won’t convince anyone to play a game that doesn’t already want to play it.

Certain things (games in this case) attract certain types of people. I love Science Fiction, strategy games, complex rules, artistic opportunities and collecting stuff: You could easily say that a game like Warhammer 40K was more or less made for me but it wasn’t Games Workshop that came calling to me saying, “Hey, try this game on for size, Mr. Collecting-Strategy-SF-Arty-Rules Guy!” They merely existed, and somewhere in my geekly travels I developed a conscious notion of Warhammer and what it was and what it represented to give it a shot. I wanted to play for years before I actually did not because of some marketing blitz but just because I had a sense before I even knew what the game was like in practice and what the hobby entailed that it was something I could “see myself getting into.” I think I used those exact words when describing it to Nik.

The point is that some girls are going to look at video games and say, “Hey, what’s that all about?” They’ll have a strange sort of passing interest in them. They may not actively play the games, but they could because the interest level is there. And it’s not that they are going to always be thrilled with gaming (especially their guys’ gaming habits), but just that there is either a tolerance or a certain set of preferences and predispositions that make video games more acceptable to them.

In the end it comes down to individuals. I know that Nik will probably very, very rarely—if ever—play a lot of video games. She’s picked up a few puzzle games now and again but for the most part her interest in video games has been hovering somewhere around nil. But for the most part she’s understanding when I play games and she’s more predisposed to other types of gaming (hence why she accompanies me to KublaCon and DunDraCon but probably would take a pass if I ever had a chance to go to E3 or PAX or something similar) which have more social aspects. That’s fine: There is something in there that we both have to accept about each other. But as much as she may love for me to be really excited about purse shopping or whatever, the fact is that I probably am going to only ever be capable of tolerating that she does it without ever really getting on the same page as her about it. I hope she’d be cool with that just as I feel it’s actually better for me to just accept that Nik isn’t a video gamer and if the best I can get is that she doesn’t actively fight me on game-playing (tossing out consoles and the like) that’s certainly good enough.

The second article is this surreal take on why Apple doesn’t care about gaming. The thrust of the article seems to be that video games are all violent death-and-destruction simulations and Apple is a lovey-dovey kind of peace-and-hippies enterprise which eschews video games as unpleasant by-products of an unenlightened Windows world.

Puh-lease.

Boy did this chump ever buy the Apple lifestyle line—including hook and sinker. Come on, buddy, do you really think that Apple is some love-and-harmony utopia with a lickable candy shell? Did Santa Claus tell you so and his story was corroborated by The Tooth Fairy and her entourage of Leprechauns? Cut me some slack. Apple is a business. They want profits.

I’m sorry, were you expecting more? Something profound, perhaps? Nope, sadly, they just want money. As a matter of fact, as a publicly traded company, they are obligated to make money. Anything else? That’s just marketing. Plain, simple and ugly.

I’ll tell you why Apple doesn’t care about gaming: They don’t think there is enough money in it. Could they put out a gaming rig? Sure. But they won’t because they don’t think it will increase sales enough to make a difference.

Florian Eckhardt thinks the reason is that game computers are centered around upgradeability and Apple would rather you buy a new computer than upgrade, which is a valid point. But it still comes down to money: It would cost Apple money in upgrade-system sales to provide an open box system suitable for gaming.

It’s kind of unfortunate, but it is what it is. For the most part I’m content to use Macs for computing stuff and play video games on consoles. The crazy thing about open markets is that I actually have that choice. Not as crazy as the notion that a company would turn down the opportunity to improve their products’ capabilities for some sort of altruism or bravura of concern for the family unit, but still.

Finally, (and this one didn’t annoy me, really, I just wanted to link to it) Tales of a Scorched Earth reviews X-Men 3 and hates it. Or at least compares it unfavorably to the uncomfortably campy Batman Forever (which of course hearalded the second worst movie of all time, Batman and Robin), so I think we agree on one thing: If there is an X-Men 4, it’s going to be dirty booty pants.

Shady or Tasty?

Leave a reply

This Help Wanted ad comes courtesy of Nikki’s job search:

FULL TIME OFFICE ASSISTANT
Mon-Fri 8-5 $8/hr. Cook books helpful. Will Train must have basic comp. knowledge 239-5555

What I can’t figure out is if they need someone familair with questionable accounting practices or if they want someone to make them lunch.

The Last (One I Can) Stand

Leave a reply

We went out on a sort of triple-date with two other couples to see X-Men 3. Not a date movie you say? Perhaps. But consider that the three guys each have a strong geek streak running through them (though some may hide it a little better) and our respective significant others all have a high threshold for… well, us.

In any case I guess there was enough consensus that there was very little grumbling (if any, I really don’t remember any dissent) and so X-Men it was.

Now I liked the first X-Men. The second was okay but unlike many folks I thought there was something lacking with it. It seemed like they were still stumbling with the same problem they had before which is that there are way too many X-Men characters to make for anything even remotely resembling character development in a two hour action film. So they try to cram as many in as possible but they usually just end up with a slew of cameos as the big name stars (McKellan, Stewart, Berry, Jackman and Paquin) steal all the screen time.

It was forgivable in the first movie (“An X-Men movie came out!”) and reluctantly tolerable in the second (“Well, they got in some cool new guys like Nightcrawler”) but at this point it’s getting stale. And bizarrely, they still struggled with too many characters but they managed to kill or disable a ton of them and generally took massive liberties with characters, alignments and introductions such that it was difficult while reading the credits to determine when, exactly, some of the characters had actually appeared. For example, I defy you to identify Psylocke or Jubilee first time through the movie. That I only know they were in it because we watched the credits (there is a credit cookie at the end) means, to me, someone didn’t do their job completely.

I swear this is the last time I mention it, but if you want to do X-Men right, you need to do what they did in the comic book and split them into multiple teams. I still maintain that if you made two movies with the same basic storyline but with each following a different group of mutants through the narrative arc with copious crossover (you could see the same scene with all X-Men from two different perspectives, for example, or the actions of the villains in one movie could make a setback encountered by the other team more clear in the second movie), you could ping the fanboys’ wallets twice and you would at least have the opportunity to give the characters the attention they deserve (and in a way, demand).

Anyway, the main problem with The Last Stand is that I’m tired of Magneto. Sure McKellan is a good actor, but the mutant-vs.-mutant theme has gotten a bit stale. Where’s the Sentinels? Apocalypse? Omega Red? But even if they felt compelled to bring Magneto back in, the film’s secondary plot revolving around a cure for the mutant X gene fails on so many levels. For one thing it’s boring: Who wants to watch a super hero movie where they lose their powers? For another it isn’t properly handled because in situations where it could be useful it is mostly ignored and the mutant who’s mutant ability is to undo mutant abilities is both paradoxal (wouldn’t he cancel his own mutant ability out?) is treated like some kind of artifact since they never even bother to try and explain how they were able to synthesize his ability. If that were possible, why not sythesize Storm’s ability, or Wolverine’s healing factor? Pharmecuetical companies could make a mint with a regeneration injection, so why would they bother curing mutants? Scott Kurtz on PvP has similar complaints and I concur with some of his gripes.

The whole thing is sorta cheap and cop-out-y. Even the credit cookie is bogus, as is the event that necessitated it. In tandem the two events cheapen the entire movie. The Dark Phoenix thing is handled better than I expected, which is the one bright spot (hurr) in the script. I would have preferred the entire movie revolve around the Phoenix storyline. At least from here on out we can fully expect any additional movies to be complete crap since Hugh Jackman will probably splinter off and do solo Wolverine movies and with most of the other big name stars either facing dead characters or expressing clear disinterest in further sequels, X-Men 4 would end up looking like a second rate New Mutants adaptation.

A Game of the Same Name

3 Replies

This weekend was KublaCon. Non-geeks may want to skip this part. Actually, non-geeks may want to skip this site, but if you insist on staying the best I can offer is fair warning.

I only have two anecdotes of a non-game-geek variety which I will share now, at the top of the post, so those who don’t care about the specifics of Type-P Magic: The Gathering tournaments or comparisons between Settlers of Catan and Catan The Card Game can get to the stuff they might be able to stomach and leave the rest to those who care about such things. Or at least those who don’t need help sleeping.

Nik and I had been at the con for less than ten minutes, checking in and parking and so forth. The electric buzz that only the hardest core geek will ever get from merely being in the vicinity of dozens of games had started to sizzle my bones and I was getting eager to wander the Dealer’s room and start some kind of game. As we stepped into the elevator from the atrium level a thin brunette wheeling an oversized suitcase pinned the doors from closing completely and bustled in, a flurry of nervous energy and caffienated exhuberance.

“Oh my gosh!” she gushed. “Are you two here for the thing?” I was perfectly clear as to what she was referring to: It isn’t exactly as if KublaCon’s presence in the hotel is particularly subtle. Even if they didn’t plaster posters and flyers and advertisements all over the lobby and atrium levels, there is something decidedly unusual about a cluser of over one hundred readily identifiable geeks hunched over tables, scowling in intense concentration at a plastic soldier and a vinyl wipe-off mat covered in hexagonal lines. It’s something you can’t readily dismiss, at any rate.

But Nikki misunderstood the woman. We hadn’t checked into the con yet so we were lacking the lanyard name badges and bright pink wristbands that would mark us as one of “them” for the duration of the con, that made Nikki’s reply completely believable. “Uh, no,” she said.

Immediately I knew what was about to happen. I suppose the right thing to do would have been to stop the whole conversation there and correct Nik’s mistake and prevent the inevitable. But instead I let the woman’s bullish conversation style have its way and sat silently with a half bemused, half agitated smile on my face while she ploughed on.

“I saw all these guys with ponytails, and I didn’t know what was going on! So I asked the hotel desk and they said it was some kind of—” her voice lowered to a conspiratorial stage whisper “—Dungeons and Dragons? A convention! I guess they all get around and just… play these games! Oh my goodness, can you imagine? All these old guys acting out sword fights all weekend long?” She laughed then, a breezy and genuinely amused laughter. I stood against the cool elevator glass and regarded her as one might a gnat that you’ve intercepted trying to make a beeline for your ear canal. I wondered briefly if I should spare her embarrassment and try to get off the elevator with a minimum of fuss. What harm could it be? She had her laugh—she would have anyway, with or without our presence.

I wasn’t personally offended. You can’t engage in a hobby or activity the likes of role-playing or video gaming or computer programming or even rock climbing, motorcycle riding or scrapbooking without enduring a certain set of preconceptions which may or may not directly apply. It comes with the territory, and you can either let it get to you and ruin your enjoyment or you can learn to let it roll off of you and ignore what may in fact be an outright negative perception. Since to me, gaming is all about having fun, I do so in spite of the perhaps strange looks or naive questions. People can even be downright insulting but you know, that’s fine. I don’t play role-playing games or Warhammer to fit in with the cool kids, I do it because it’s a hoot and a holler. You spend your life trying to impress everyone and you end up hating yourself so my attitude is whatever, man.

But at the same time I don’t want to push my opinions on how awesome the newest GURPS sourcebook is or try to drum up a conversation with a random person on the bus about whether the new dual lands that hit you for a point of damage in Magic are a fair trade-off for the imbalance of the old-school Beta-era dual lands. I can enjoy my pastimes in relative peace so long as I’m not acting like some kind of geek recruiter. My philosophy, such that it is, basically dictates that people who are interested in games of this nature will drift to them naturally and trying to evangelize on their behalf is good for nothing more than some awkwardness at best or downright hostility in the worst case.

I had just made up my mind to stay quiet and let her get off the elevator when Nik piped up, “Oh, yeah! We are here for that!”

The woman’s expression was almost amusing. It lasted for only the briefest of moments but it summed up the essence of social agony, noting that she had firmly planted her foot in her throat and that she had been mocking the very event that had brought us to that very elevator. It is good for her, then, that she seemed to be a breezy and generally care-free person because she bounced back with impressive quickness. She touched my arm in a gesture of—I’m presuming—apology and reassurance as she laughed, hysterical anew. “Where’s your ponytail?” she giggled. I fought the urge to whip off my hat and point out that I was currently incapable of growing such a follicular delight and assuring her that were I able to, I probably would indeed have long hair. Most likely pulled back into a ponytail for convenience’s sake. I also bit my tongue to refrain from expressing how much I detest being touched by people I don’t know. My social discomfort grows, not unlike the Nothing from the Neverending Story, with each passing day and at this point the best I can do to contain it requires that I suffer in silence lest I become some caricature where my personal quirks are broadcast to the populace at large and illuminate a beacon whose light reaches the corners of the Earth declaring me a Freak for all to see. Unlike currently where the light is relegated to a small flare or a dim flashlight.

As the woman exited the elevator one floor below ours, she did so with a casual wave and a “Have fun!” cry that really could have been mistaken for nothing but sincere. Nik and I exchanged glances and burst into laughter of our own.

Later, after long blocks of gaming sessions interrupted only by trips to the con snackbar for $1.50 canned sodas and cold corn dogs we decided to try and get a Real Meal. Unfortunately, unlike DunDraCon where the hotel is located in close proximity to a sprawling strip mall, Kubla’s host hotel has only a Mongolian BBQ joint and a Sizzler in reasonable walking distance. Lacking better options, we (somewhat reluctantly in my case) decided to hike to the Sizz.

Sizzler is the lowest of the low-rent steak places. Even the buffet-style Golden Corral offers a better selection of steak and salad options (and at better prices) and I would classify the average clientele of GC as “questionable.” Take that how you like. Sizzler isn’t exactly bad, but calling it good without irony or referring to something other than its food offerings is a long stretch. But when your other option is a hamburger from room service for $18.47 plus 20% gratuity and $2.50 service fee, well, sometimes you have to take what you can get.

The rest of our little group was all about the steak and all you can eat shrimp. Having had a hamburger for lunch the thought of another slab of overcooked red meat wasn’t appealing to me so I opted for a Cajun chicken sandwich that was perfectly edible and in some ways tasty although I felt the use of the word “Cajun” in the title was stretching the application of that particular word. Nikki, on the other hand, wanted the shrimp but not the steak and wasn’t really that excited about the all you can eat prospect. To put it into perspective, all Nikki can eat, on a typical day, is less than one-third of a normal restaurant portion. Even a skimpy restaurant’s portions can be enough to overwhelm her so the prospect of all you can eat is of dubious economic value in her case. The only other option that seemed like what she was looking for was found on the kid’s menu. I told her to just order that but she was nervous about it because they have big notices everywhere saying “Under 10 Only.”

The specialty menus at restaurants kind of baffle me. I’m talking about the Kid’s and Senior’s menus. They seem to make a big deal out of the age restrictions and yet the food isn’t really any differently priced if you look closely enough at it. The kid’s menu is often undigestable sludge but it is priced, in a volume to dollar sense, roughly the same as the adult menu. The prices are only lower because there is less of it. The same holds true for the senior menu at most restaurants and while a few may actually offer legitimate senior discounts that doesn’t really make that much sense to me because if you were to give older adults a discount (say 5% or whatever) why would they need their own special menu? Just give them the savings from whatever they order (I’m sure some restrictions would apply). So whenever I see seperate menus I have to really question why those things are cheaper and the only thing I can come up with is (ready for a shock?) they actually cost the restaurant less.

That being the case, why anyone wouldn’t be able to order those items is beyond me. If I just want a small snack at an eating establishment, why should I have to pay for the larger plate and be stuck with leftovers? The same holds true for the lunch menus: Offering lesser portions for lower price should be a universal option, not limited to age or time restrictions. It’s stupid.

But in this case I was pretty confident that they wouldn’t make a big deal out of Nik ordering from the kid’s menu. Why would they? And true to form they didn’t seem to really bat an eye at the register when two adults ordered one adult item and one kid’s item. Obviously one person was ordering out of the age bracket, but so what? Money is money, and the cashier gladly took ours.

Of course when we got to the table we were required to present one of our reciepts to the server, a distracted-looking middle aged woman with a lilting Spanish accent and a constantly harried demeanor. She snatched the tab off the table as she came by with the stalwart Sizzler Toast and glanced at it quickly. Then she did a double take and regarded Nik like a specimen in a petri dish. “Oh,” she said disdainfully, “You’re too… big!” The implication was that Nik was not deserving of a child’s entree since she was too grown up. I steeled myself for a confrontation but the constant pressure of a half-full section proved too much for her will to resist and she bustled off instead of continuing the thought. It was just as well but as she left Nik seemed a bit put off by the remark. There may have been under-the-breath grumbling, but Lister was talking too loud to hear it.

That may have been the end of the intrigue, but then Nik started watching our friends mow through plates piled high with vegetable delights from the neverending salad bar. She started wondering out loud if she shouldn’t have opted for the salad instead of the kid’s shrimp. I told her she could go order a salad bar if she wanted but she stressed that she only wanted a single trip. I didn’t recall such an option so I offered to return to the front counter area and investigate.

The only thing the menu listed as even close to what Nik was looking for was a “Side Salad” which, lacking a description, may or may not have been remotely close to what she was looking for. So I identified a managerial-type employee and approached him in what I hoped was a friendly manner. “Are the ‘Side Salads’ a single trip to the salad bar or are they pre-made?” I asked. The manager looked at me with confusion and asked for clarification. “What I’m saying is that my wife wants just one trip to the salad bar, do you have something like that?” The manager responded by reaching beneath the counter and pulling out a salad plate and handing it to me.

“Here you go,” he said, “it’s no problem.”

“Are you sure?” I was skeptical. “I’m fine with paying for it.”

“Nah, don’t worry about it.”

I gave him my most sincere smile and thanked him profusely. As I walked back toward our table I was thinking that maybe I was wrong about Sizzler. Their food may occasionally be a touch on the cheap side but at least the service was turning out to be pretty decent. Giving Nik a free single trip to the salad bar certainly constituded going above and beyond the call of customer service in my book. As I approached the table to give Nik her plate I noticed that our server was back and handing out refills and plates of food ordered by some of our dining companions, who had placed their orders earlier than we had. But as I approached and tried to hand the plate to Nik so she could get her salad before the entrees arrived, the server intercepted me.

“You need ticket for this.”

“No,” I started to explain, “I got it from the guy at the front.”

“I have to get a ticket.” She wouldn’t let go of the plate and we had started a kind of subtle tug of war with it. I surrendered the plate and pressed my point.

“Listen, I got this from the manager, he just gave it to me. He said it would be cool.”

“That’s not the way it works,” she stressed, a firm believer in order and structure.

I was trying not to get worked up because I knew I had gotten away with a coup by getting the free salad in the first place so losing it now wouldn’t be a great human tragedy or anything but I was so close to succeeding in my mission only to be hijacked by this wage slave with no real stake in whether or not I got free salad. “No, I’m just saying I got it from the manag—”

She interrupted, “You come with me,” and she began marching, plate in hand, toward the register. I followed, unwilling to concede defeat just yet. As she approached I noticed with disappointment that the manager was no longer milling around the cashier’s stand. A setback. The server approached the youthful-looking alternate cashier and started to thrust the plate under his nose, accusingly.

“No!” I said again, “It wasn’t that guy. It was the manager, the one with the black shirt.” Finally I seemed to say something that registered with her.

“Oh,” she said, now a bit dejected. “I’ll go find him.”

A few moments later she reappeared with the black-shirted manager guy who apologized and said, “I knew that was going to happen. But don’t worry, it’s taken care of now.”

I thanked him again and the server offered a mumbled and insincere apology and then bustled off to some other steak-related catastrophe while I wandered back to our table and finally delivered Nik’s long-awaited ticket to salad bliss. Our friends expressed their disbelief in the extreme tactics employed by the server we shared a good laugh at the ridiculousness of the situation. Eventually our food came and we ate; it turns out that Nikki was unable to even consume as much as a ten-year old as she left a few assorted shrimp on her plate as we patted our bellies and began the trek back across the street for more gaming.

On the way out I left our server a decent-sized tip.

For the entertainment.

Magic in the Air

Here are the games I played at this year’s Kublacon:

You may notice a couple of things about this list: One is that it isn’t, generally speaking, the most intensely geeky list ever. Aside from DungeonQuest and Magic, any of these games could be played at your average family game night.

And that’s okay. It may have been nice to play something a bit more gamer-y but we did that last year; one of the things about hard core games is that they tend to take up huge blocks of time. When a single game of Warhammer can last up to four hours and your average dungeon crawl in D&D takes five hours at least, you’re looking at a whole lot of time burnt on something that you could play on any random weekend. In my case at least I don’t go to cons looking for a bunch of new people to play with and while I don’t necessarily mind playing with strangers, unless I’m in a tournament or something there isn’t much I couldn’t do any other time except play a whole bunch of different games. So that’s what we did.

The other thing you may note is that I have Magic up there.

This is significant because it marks the first time I’ve picked up the game or spent money on the cards in over eight years. The last time I tapped a land for some mana was when I was 19 or 20… but back then it was on. I calculated my deck in those days to be worth upwards of $200, and that was when cards that are nearly unheard of today (Moxes, Black Lotus) were the hot commodities. Current drool-inducing cards (some would say the ones that broke the game) like dual lands were certainly not commonplace but were more or less readily available for the right price. I did a lot of trading and single-card buying to build my deck into the library-crushing machine that I wanted it to be.

It was fun but let me tell you a simple, perhaps obvious fact: It was darned expensive. And it was relentlessly expensive. Each new set that came out offered a new opportunity for deck tweaking and scavenger hunts to find the perfect rare card to squeeze into a deck. It was neverending and after a while my wallet and my patience were stretched so thin that I couldn’t stomach it any more. As fun as playing Magic was, it didn’t work on a casual level. So I made the decision to stop and when I stopped, it was for good.

Sorta.

What drew me back to the game was basically an idea that had been around for a long time but had at some point evolved into a type of game that gave the flavor of playing Magic including deck construction and actual facing off versus an opponent but without the massive financial committment to building the best deck ever. And it even introduced some of the stakes that were originally designed into the game that had been all but cast aside during my deck-obsessed heyday: The ante.

The structure is called Type-P or Permanent Sealed Deck. Sealed deck tournaments have been around for a long time and usually involve each player grabbing a starter pack and any assortment of booster pack combinations the tournament coordinators wish to grant. Each player opens their new card packages at the same time and is given a finite amount of time to use the cards they got to build a competitive deck. Sometimes a trading option is introduced, sometimes not, but the end result is that it tests your ability to identify quality cards and puts your deck-building skills on display since you have to sometimes get creative in order to make a reasonable deck when the pool of cards to draw from is severely limited.

What Type-P does is try to take the flavor of the sealed deck and use it for longer than a single-sitting tourney. So there are standard Type-P decks which consist of an initial pool (or “universe”) of cards that is applied to all of these types of decks. There are of course certain rules and restrictions about what kinds of cards and how many of certain types are allowed but generally speaking the idea is to create a deck from a smallish number of initial cards and then play that deck against other similarly constructed decks for ante.

Each time you win, your universe or pool increases by one. When you lose, your overall universe decreases. You track your decks’ total cards which works to create handicaps for the games. For example if the initial universe for a P-Deck is 98 cards and you win twice your universe should be at 100. If you play your 100 card P-Deck (which doesn’t mean the actual playable deck has to contain 100 cards, only that you have 100 cards with which to build that deck) against a P-Deck that has lost a bunch of matches in a row and is pulling from a universe of maybe 89 cards, you theoretically have a significant advantage and therefore handicap rules apply (usually to the manner in which ante is settled at the end of the game).

This works brilliantly for people like me who enjoy the gameplay and the deck construction but don’t want to be involved in the collection aspect which is what generally drives the expense. And in a way using Type-P rules you get most of the flavor of Magic without all the headache of trying to either luck out and open a pack with just what you needed or going out and spending as much money on a single deck addition as you might on dozens of randomly packaged cards. Plus there is enough flexibility to the Type-P rules that as long as you have a pool of potential opponents who all agree on the base universe size you can expand the play style into any realm you want.

For example we all created standard Type-P decks for a registered game we played in for several hours. But that required that seven of the cards we had just purchased had to be randomly taken out of our pool to level the playing field for other P-Decks that used different types of starter and booster packs as the base. Those cards then became essentially useless unless we decided to start collecting again which I had no interest in doing. So instead we went out and each purchased a Fat Pack which included about 130 cards instead of the normal 98 and added our seven pulled from the original P-Decks for a starting universe of 137. So long as we play against other people with 137 card starting universes, it remains equal.

I spent a weekend playing Magic in a way that was far more enjoyable than I ever remember it being during the years I played it in high school and immediately after. I didn’t worry about mint conditions and relative card values, I didn’t fret over losing cards in ante (which actually makes the game a lot more fun) and I spent less than $30 total on a relative boatload of cards that I can continue to use as long as I like just as long as I find other players with compatible decks.

Viva Type-P.

Anyway, aside from a lot of Magic we also played the new version of Ticket to Ride, Märklin. If you’ve never played TTR, it’s a great European-style game with pretty simple but elegant gameplay that works well for all types of gamers. It’s basically non-competitive since for the most part you aren’t really given much opportunity to mess with other player’s strategies although you do keep score and there is a winner, during the game it’s mostly a series of strategic moves against luck, opportunity and your own gameplan.

Märklin introduces a few new twists from the previous games. For one it fixes the Ticket mechanic from TTR and TTR:Europe where once you completed your initial Ticket requirements, the relative risk versus reward for choosing new Ticket goals to complete was pretty minimal. You were usually much better off trying to get the longest track which kind of defeated the point of the game in a way. Märklin eliminates the longest track bonus and instead gives extra points to the player who completes the most Tickets, which I think is as it should be.

Märklin also adds a twist on the wild Loco cards by introducing Locos that can only be used to assist with long tracks (four or more spaces) and country-specific destinations that can be met as Ticket conditions with more than one completely separate track. But the most obvious new twist is the Passengers.

Each city on the map (Germany in this case) has anywhere from one to several numbered tokens which stack in order from highest on top to lowest on bottom. As you place your tracks you can choose to park one of your three passenger pieces on one of the connected cities and at any point in the game you can move them along your track (or hitch a ride on other players’ tracks with the help of special Passenger cards), collecting the topmost token on every city stop along the way. You can only use each Passenger once and the challenge is to get your Passengers into positions where they can collect the most points on their journey without waiting too long for some other player to come by and swoop on your high-point tokens.

I liked everything about the game except the Passengers which I felt were more of an annoyance than really anything else and didn’t add nearly as much to the game as the stations from Europe did. The fact that the Passenger cards are mixed in with the color-coded track cards also frustrated since at times (especially near the end of the game) you can be desperately searching for a specific card color and drawing a stupid Passenger card (of practically zero value near the end of the game when all the good routes have been well traveled) can mean the difference between a big points jump and no jump at all. Still, overall the Ticket to Ride games continue to be well executed and fun to play. I fully expect an Ultimate Ticket to Ride game eventually which incorporates all the best mechanics from previous editions on a truly massive map. Maybe TTR: Russia or something.

I want to make special mention of the Catan card game which was my favorite new game of the con by far, despite being only two player. It truly captures the essence of Settlers and, I think, in some ways surpasses the original board game in terms of strategic opportunity since a lot of success in Settlers stems from fortunate die rolls to collect the resources you need and starting locations play a big role in how well you have the opportunity to play throughout the rest of the game. Since those factors are eliminated in the card game (every turn yeilds some resource for all players in the card game and each player starts off on exactly even ground) it makes your execution completely paramount.

The Catan card game rules are a bit dense and after two games Nik and I are still finding new little gotchas and allowances we didn’t know about before but it’s worth the effort and completely engrossing, especially if you’re a fan of the original Settlers board game.

Finally I need to discuss DungeonQuest, the out-of-print favorite that I have played before but was only able to truly appreciate this time around since I didn’t have to spend the first forty minutes of the game trying to wrap my head around the various scenarios and rules lookup phases. This is in my top ten games of all time, easily. It is the ultimate “You Got Moded” game. Any board game where you can literally lose (as one of our players can readily attest to) on the first turn has got to be awesome. Our hapless compadre even started a new character because he died so quickly and a mere three turns after the first trap claimed his life he lost yet again on a freak Ruth-pointing-to-the-fence style call of his forthcoming die roll. That he didn’t know he was trying to roll anything other than the number he called only made it that much funnier.

I decided that I must own this game, but the fact that it is no longer in print, is pretty popular to begin with and was pricey even when it was sold in stores makes it an expensive proposition. I’m not quite sure I’m ready to drop $65 minimum on a game at this time. Still, if you want to get me something for my Birthday (in six months…), there you go. Perfect idea. Good luck finding it, though.

I’m serious. Good luck.

What Might Have Been

As fun as the con was, it wasn’t what it was supposed to be. One of our players had a registered Blood Bowl tournament that had no one show up so we abandoned the game. I was supposed to finish my Warmaster army so we could try that and I dropped the ball hard so that didn’t materialize. I was also planning on having a Shadowrun 4th Edition adventure ready to go but I got bogged down with so much other stuff to do that it floundered in the back of my mind until it got way too complex to be realistic, especially considering how much has changed from my familiar 2nd Edition rules: Trying to build a campaign around an unfamiliar system is pretty rough. I made some progress on a quickie intro adventure, more of a one-shot deal than anything else, but I never got around to creating any characters and it didn’t seem like the rest of the group was that into the idea of sitting around doing the pre-adventure stage thing so it fell through.

To an extent that means that the best laid plans were more or less ruined by my procrastination but I think we ended up with plenty to do so maybe next time. The key, I’m realizing, is not to have 600 things you want to do in the pipeline, but to choose one thing you absolutely want to get done and focus on that until it is finished. Then, if there is time left, you can move on to something else. When my pre-con to-do list included a GURPS campaign setting, a Shadowrun adventure, a whole Warmaster army painted, finishing touches on Warhammer 40K armies, a Blood Bowl team to paint and a prototype of a game idea I have to construct… well, the mere thought of all that was too crushingly impossible of a feat and so I did what all procrastinators do when presented with a mountain of tasks: I did something else entirely.

Live and learn.

Life as a Soundtrack

Leave a reply

There’s a meme floating around Livejournal (maybe you don’t ask what I was doing over there, kay?) that I can’t track down the original source of since the attribution stops at a “friends only” page, but whatever. It’s clever so I’m jacking it.

I’m also adapting it a bit for my purposes, because I’m like that. A tinkerer. Anyway it works like this, you have eighteen “scenes” in your movie. Set up an iTunes playlist that has no unplayed tracks (you could use something other than iTunes but, I mean, why?) and make sure it’s on shuffle. Hit play and for each song that comes up, associate it with that scene. Then hit next and the next random song gets associated with the next scene and so on. The rules are that you only get one skip for the whole list (so use it wisely!) unless you get an artist repeat in which case you can skip again. I suppose if you don’t mind having more than one song from the same band you can ignore that rule, but I like having a big mix. Personal preference. The last rule is that you can swap two scenes at the end if you like, but no more. No cheating. The scenes are identical to the ones in my list below. Ready? Here goes:

Opening Credits: Too Little, Too Late – Barenaked Ladies (meh, not what I would have prefered but could have been worse… this is more of an near-the-end-of-the-movie track)

Waking Up: The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin’ Groovy) – Simon and Garfunkel (a decent fit here I think, but would have been much better for Life’s Okay scene)

Average Day: Crosstown Traffic – Jimi Hendrix (I can see this totally working here)

First Date: Help! – The Beatles (this was my switch, I had I Get a Kick Out of You here first and this one below… this way is so much better)

Falling in Love: I Get a Kick Out of You – Frank Sinatra (not bad considering that my switch was only one slot off)

Fight Scene: Secretarial – A.C. Newman (one of my bigger disappointments; I have a lot of heavy stuff in my list and this doesn’t quite work, even on an ironic level)

Breaking Up: Escape – Metallica (heh, I skipped over Jerry Was a Race Car Driver by Primus to get to this one. A good use of the skip I think)

Getting Back Together: My Favorite Mistake – Sheryl Crow (almost couldn’t have picked a better song here)

Life’s Okay: Transparent – In Flames (clearly the worst of the bunch since this song is basically about the opposite of life being okay)

Mental Breakdown: Welcome to This World – Primus (you know, this works)

Driving: Riders on the Storm – The Doors (I swear I didn’t cheat to get this one here)

Flashback: Disillusion – Badly Drawn Boy (sorta okay, more of breakup song really but it doesn’t say what the flashback has to be about so I guess it’s acceptable)

Partying: Unsung – Helmet (could be better, could be worse)

Dance Sequence: Cave – Muse (far from the greatest dance song in my list)

Regretting: The Good Times are Killing Me – Modest Mouse (appropriate)

Long Night Alone: Pretty Babies – Dishwalla (this one sucks not just because it doesn’t really work but also because I hate this song, by far the worst from the Pet Your Friends album; can you think of a worse lyric than “Why the need to eroticize our children”? Gah)

Death Scene: No More Tears – Ozzy Osbourne (I was kinda disappointed by this one at first but the more I think about it, it’s actually pretty good here)

End Credits: Go – Pearl Jam (ill-fitting if you try to sort of loosely visualize the movie; a better opening credits or fight scene song, but I was out of swaps… in fact, had I one more exchange to make I would switch the Opening Credits track with this one)

Overall not too bad. The playlist with unplayed tracks is because you don’t want to put something on there you’ve never heard before as I learned when trying to do this with my iPod. Also I should maybe point out that the playlist my iPod pulls from when updating is focused on having more unplayed or infrequently played stuff on it rather than songs I listen to all the time, so I did a lot of skipping over assorted techno tracks I’ve never heard and rare deep album tracks that I couldn’t place. This might have been better (or at least quite a bit different) if I was doing it from home with my actual iTunes Library. Still, a fun way to waste five minutes.

Try it. It’s fun.