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Random, but here are some buttons I made for A Tale in the Desert (Tellings 2 and 3):

If you have a Nintendo DS, play Animal Crossing, and are interested in visiting other towns via Nintendo WFC, email me your Animal Crossing friend code (deb@dria.org) :)

Update: Or just post here!

This article talks about how games are being developed to provide real training for disaster response teams. The twisted part, of course, is that if they’re any good, these training programs could probably make millions as commercial games.

Boolean got a brand new XBox360 yesterday. From what I’ve heard, this is nothing short of a minor miracle since they managed to sell out of the damned things seemingly before stores even opened. Remarkable.

Anyhow, while Boolean was out and about on his ongoing shopping extravaganza (xbox, games, some sort of special cable, memory card, beer), he bought me a present: a brand new (blue!) Nintendo DS! Knowing that new game systems are basically useless without games, he also picked up a copy of Nintendogs which, essentially, boils down to being a puppy simulator. It’s unspeakably cute.

Since Boolean was all caught up driving some seriously shiny virtual cars around, I ran off to the bookstore, stopping at the game shop long enough to pick up three more DS titles: MarioKart, Sims2, and Trace Memory. Quick reviews: MarioKart is fun, Sims2 is fun (but not even remotely Simmish), and Trace Memory (so far) is a lot of really boring dialogue interspersed by me getting annoyed because I’m already stuck. Chances are good that I’ll pick up a few more games today. Currently my “to buy” list is: Kirby, Space Invaders Revolution, Zoo Keeper, Lost in Blue, and Advance Wars.

If you know of any DS games you might think I’d like, feel free to leave a comment. I’m actively looking for recommendations, particularly for RPGs, Puzzle games, and Adventure titles (or interesting FPSs such as Tomb Raider or No One Lives Forever).

I’m getting older, it’s true, but I’m not yet ready to blame my encroaching decrepitude for my growing boredom with contemporary games.

My most recent two forays into gamedom were World of Warcraft and Guild Wars. WoW held my interest for roughly two months. After that I played on and off out of a desire for it to stop sucking, and then I just held my subscription for a couple of months out of forgetfulness. Then I quit, and I haven’t really considered going back even once.

Guild Wars, luckily, doesn’t have the same guilt-factor as WoW (or other subscription games), because there’s no monthly fee. It doesn’t matter if I don’t play at all this month, because I’m not forking money into the bottomless furnace of the internet just in case I decide I want to give it a go some random Saturday afternoon. On the other hand, I played for a little over a week, left it for a week, and haven’t really thought about logging in since.

WoW and Guild Wars, you see, are both basically the same goddamned game. Fantasy role-playing in a massively multiplayer world (caveats aside), where you quest to gain levels and loot. These are basically the same as Horizons, and Anarchy Online, and Star Wars Galaxies, and Asheron’s Call (1 & 2), and City of Heroes. As a matter of fact, they’re the same as the Baldur’s Gates, the Morrowinds, NeverWinter Nights, the Diablos.

In all of these games the basic premise is that you, for whatever reason, are a hero in a mythical land — usually armed with a sword, a bow, or magic — running about doing quests in an attempt to get gold and loot and experience so you get bigger, faster, and stronger. You’re working to get bigger, faster, and stronger so you can go out and get more gold and loot and experience while fighting bigger and badder bad guys. In the end (if there is an end, and as often as not there isn’t), you vanquish the biggest and baddest bad guy and save the realm from whatever horrors that bad guy was unleashing upon it.

I think I just have to finally accept the fact that most RPGs just suck, whether they be Massively Multiplayer, Limited Multiplayer, or Single Player.

So, by discounting RPGs entirely, what’s left? I’ve already abandoned the following genres in the past:

• First Person Shooters (the Doom-alikes)
• Real Time Strategy (the Starcraft-alikes)
• Sims (the SimCity-alikes)
• Turn Based Strategy that involves combat (the Civ-alikes)
• Puzzle games (the Myst-alikes)
• Choose Your Own Adventures (the Longest Journey-alikes)
• Racing Games (the Project Gotham-alikes)
• Sport Games (the Madden Football-alikes)

I don’t play FPSs, Racing Games, RTSs, or Sport Games at all. The rest of these genres will occassionally cough something up that I’ll take a look at and even buy, but in the past 3 years none of them have produced a game I’ve “finished” in any meaningful way.

So, what’s left? Bejeweled. Katamari Damacy. The bittersweet memory of the first Tomb Raider.

The thought of finally having to admit to myself that I just don’t like contemporary RPGs is just depressing. I think I’m going to have to find a new hobby.

Lots of little things to talk about.

HHGttG: The Movie

I finally went to see the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy movie. I remain ambivalent. I didn’t hate it, by any means, but I also didn’t particularly like it. The new Marvin is cute, yes, but didn’t quite convey the utter pathos of the Marvin in the TV Series. The movie’s Ford simply doesn’t hold a candle to the TV Series’ Ford. I actually dislike the movie’s Zaphod, while the TV Series’ Zaphod remains one of my favourite ne’er-do-well characters of all time. Also, for obvious reasons*, I do not like Vogons and am somewhat upset that they were given such a central role in the movie. All in all, I found myself wishing the parts that overlapped the TV Series were more like the TV Series, and the new parts just didn’t have the same comedic zing I’m accustomed to in Adam’s work.

As someone else (somewhere) said: It started as a radio show, so dialogue is everything. They butchered the dialogue, and so a lot of the “funny” just got mislaid. That said, if the rumours are true and they do turn the movie into a trilogy (of however many parts) I will go see them all. In the meantime, however, I will be rereading the books and rewatching the TV Series (now out on DVD). If you haven’t seen the TV Series, I cannot recommend strongly enough that you shell out $25 and order the DVDs. It’s really, really funny.

On Tiger

The novelty of the new Tiger features has worn off so I can be a little more objective about it now.

Dashboard: The eye-candy is nice, but overall the usefulness is low. Widgets tend to eat system resources like crazy, so I’ve minimized the ones I have running to: World Clock (x2), the Dictionary/Thesaurus, and the weather widget. The others don’t provide enough actual value to make up for the system resources they suck up like little sponges.

Spotlight: I use this all the damned time. Cmd-Space brings up the Spotlight search, type in the name of an app, then hit Cmd-Enter and the app will launch. This is what I largely used Quicksilver for, so I’ve been able to get rid of Quicksilver, freeing up more resources for other things (like browsers and email clients and things I actually use all the time).

Smart Folders: I haven’t really mastered these yet, so don’t use them too much at the moment. Where “too much” actually means “at all”. I need to sort out how to use Automator to meta-tag my files in bunches. Once I do that, Smart Folders will become much more useful to me.

BluePhonElite (3rd party): My trial ran out and I haven’t purchased a proper copy yet. Downside: I have to use my phone’s keypad to write SMSs. Upside: my phone’s battery lasts 3-4x longer when bluetooth is turned off. I doubt I will buy a license.

DragThing: Cute, but largely pointless. I used it for a little while to make really complex docks full of things that would let me organize and launch all kinds of applications. Spotlight’s search-then-launch feature obviates the need for that. Got rid of it and freed up more system resources. My regular dock is also back to a nice manageable size of 12 icons (Finder, XChat, Firefox, Thunderbird, iChat, AdiumX, SubEthaEdit, Terminal, Calculator, iCal, System Prefs).

Guild Wars

I picked up Guild Wars last weekend and have been playing semi-regularly since. It’s a very fun game, but also very different.

First off, there’s no monthly fee. This is Highly Compelling for the obvious reasons. I finally unsubscribed from World of Warcraft after not logging in to seriously play for 3-4 months. During that 3-4 months, in spite of putting in roughly 4-5 hours of play time, Blizzard hit my credit card for roughly ~$80. Screw that. No monthly fee means no serious commitment, no pressure to “get your money’s worth”, and so forth.

Second, everything outside of common areas (towns) is an instance. That means when you’re out being an Intrepid Adventurer doing quests and killing critters and getting loot, you (or your party) are the only players there. No killstealing, no camping spawns, no random jerks being jerks, etc. That part of it plays exactly as a single- or limited-multiplayer-game would play. Common areas are for recruiting people into your party, trading, chatting, etc. I actually complained about this in Anarchy Online, but it doesn’t bother me in this game. I’m not sure why.

Third, if forced to describe it by comparing it to other games, I would have to say it’s like a cross between DiabloII, NeverWinter Nights, Dungeon Siege, and a MMORPG.

• Henchmen make it like NWN

.

• The loot system and linearity of areas makes it like Diablo II
• The Henchmen and linearity and loot and general appearance of avatars make it like Dungeon Siege
• The MMORPG part makes it like a MMORPG.
• None of these comparisons really do it justice.

Anyhow, it’s fun, it’s different, it’s free online play. If you like these sorts of games at all, I recommend it highly.

I think I might try to avoid the inevitable pay-them-go-three-times-and-never-go-back problem I usually have with fitness centres by just getting Dance Dance Revolution for the PS2 and dancing myself into better shape. There is some logic behind this decision:

1) I’m way more likely to work out in the privacy of my own home than anywhere else.
2) It’s way cheaper than getting a gym membership.
3) It looks like fun.
4) It would be a decent way to actually do some exercise, which I don’t currently do. At all.

My only problem is picking a DDR pad. If you can recommend one, please drop a comment here. There seem to be a lot of choices out there, so I’m looking for something a) reliable, b) not too expensive, and c) stable enough that I won’t end up killing myself slipping on it (or having it slip on the hardwood).

Yeah, so, the Playstation 2 came out about a million years ago, and I just finally got around to getting one last weekend. I’m now in the process of trying to identify which handful of the several-thousand games in the PS2 library I want (that I can still get somewhere).

The actual reason for getting a PS2 was Katamari Damacy. If you haven’t heard of this game by now, you’re probably a sub-rock-dweller, as it’s quite possibly the most universally-adored game since Tetris. The premise is utterly ridiculous: You are a tiny Cosmic Prince. Your father, King of the Cosmos, got drunk one day and managed to destroy all the stars in the sky. He’s decided that it’s up to you to fix the situation, and thus sends you to Earth to roll objects up into large balls (katamaris). When the balls of rolled up things are large enough, they are launched into the night sky where they then turn into stars. Yes. The premise of the game is to make large garbage balls.

Sounds ludicrous, but it’s really fun and silly. If you have a PS2, you should go buy the game. If you don’t have a PS2, you should go buy a PS2 along with a copy of the game. It’s just plain old fun.

Today, Boolean and I went to EB. He needed a copy of Splinter Cell: Something Something for XBox. I tagged along so I could check out the used PS2 bin. The used PS2 bin turned out to be two very large sections of wall, lined floor to ceiling with games. Ho ho! I ended up buying used copies of Bard’s Tale, Shadow Hearts, Silent Hill 3, Beyond Good and Evil, and Final Fantasy X. Five huge games for the price of two-and-a-half new copies. The expensive one was Bard’s Tale, of course, since it’s still on the “New Releases” shelf. The rest ranged from $17 to $24. Given that almost all new games had copies on the used game shelf, I can’t see myself ever shelling out full price for a new PS2 title.

If you have PS2 games to recommend, feel free to drop a comment here. Here are some hints about what I do and don’t like in games:

1) I despise first person shooters of all descriptions. I just suck at them. I doubt driving with my thumbs is going to help that at all.

2) I suck at real time strategy games, and thus hate them. This definitely isn’t going to change because I’m simply too ADD to remember stuff for very long.

3) I like RPGs. The more RPG-y, the better. Favourite RPGs of all time include: Neverwinter Nights, Morrowind, Diablo, Dungeon Siege. Note: I have never finished any of these, see #2 re: ADD.

4) I like action puzzle games, but am of the opinion that most action puzzle games suck. I loved the first Tomb Raider. The rest of them sucked. Everything I’ve tried like Tomb Raider since has sucked. The Thief series had a lot of potential, but they blew it by making me actually have to disable/kill people. The shooting part of the original Tomb Raider was utterly incidental. Note: I also hate jumping/timed puzzles. Prince of Persia came close to being the sort of action puzzle game I like, except there was too much combat. No combat + all puzzles would be ideal. If you know of a game like this (any platform), please let me know.

5) I like sims. Sim City, the Sims, etc. The Sims: the Urbz looks retarded, so don’t recommend that one. I don’t think sim games really translate well to consoles, but maybe there’s an exception to the rule out there somewhere.

6) I like cute games. Katamari Damacy is relentlessly cute. I actually played Pokemon on my GBA for altogether too many hours. Final Fantasy Tactics: Advance sucked up a huge chunk of my life.

Right. Time to hit Egypt to check the beetles, then maybe log in to WoW for a while if it decides to cooperate. Then, maybe Bard’s Tale ’til I pass out. Yay weekends.

1) Sin City is great. Go see it. I’m already looking forward to getting the DVD and watching it again, then watching the commentary track. Usually I don’t care about commentary tracks, but this one will be interesting. It’s really a piece of art.

2) There are a lot of people on the internet who seem to care way too much about really stupid things. The examples of this are endless, so I won’t bother going into specifics. Mostly I just want to say that a lot of folks just need to get a grip.

3) There are a lot of people on the internet who care a great deal about things that aren’t so stupid. Sifting these few delicious grains out of the deluge of chaff is hard. I’m becoming increasingly impatient with the internet and the content it provides. We need some sort of system that can help with this. Google is good at what it does, but it does not help sort by quality. Technorati and Blogdex and other similar services also suffer from the quantity-over-quality disease. There has to be a better way.

4) House M.D. is a good TV show. You should watch it. Hopefully it won’t get cancelled.

5) The new Battlestar Galactica, I’ve decided after long consideration, is the best sci-fi television series in history. I’m not kidding. It blows all the Star Treks clear out of the water, and I actually liked some of those. Firefly is the only other sci-fi series I can think of that even comes close.

6) I am sad that Enterprise has been cancelled, but not nearly so sad as I was about Firefly.

7) I wish the Max Headroom Show would just come out on DVD already. Come on, people.

8) Over the past couple of years I’ve realized that geek culture is now mainstream. Games, Comic Books, Bad TV Shows, Computers, and all that. I guess there were a lot more of us holed up in our parents’ basements playing Space Invaders, reading X-Men, programming NPC-generators on our Commodore 64s, and watching Kung-Fu than I thought. I wonder what constitutes “geek culture” now that will become mainstream when today’s young geek hits her 30s? I bet I wouldn’t recognize it if it hit me in the face.

9) I like ecto.

10) RSS feeds change how I use the internet. I am not entirely sure I like these changes. With RSS feeds, I do not browse, I scan. I also find myself relying on them, when there are a large number of sites out there that do not have them or to which I haven’t subscribed. Push technology just ain’t all that, no more now than it was in 1997. There’s a lesson in here somewhere about quantity over quality again, and how the sheer quantity of poorly-filtered (it’s not really unfiltered any more) information forces us to skim reams and reams of garbage simply because we don’t have time to dig through it all to find the stuff that’s actually worth reading.

11) We need much, much better filters. Also, librarians.

I just stumbled across a random Dungeons and Dragons reference on the interweb, and it reminded me of something that I’ve been looking forward to since I was a D&D-playin’ C-64 hacking teenaged geekette: The ability to quickly and easily create modules for a computer version of D&D.

Once upon a time I, and legions of my like-minded brethren, believed that Bioware’s Neverwinter Nights was going to be all that and more. NWN did ship with a full editor suite, and the community has, over the past 3-4 years, produced some amazing modules and add-ons for the game. The editor, however, misses the mark for the “quickly” and “easily” parts of the equation by a very wide margin. I have spent altogether too many hours trying to create modules with the editor, but it is so clunky, anger-inducing, and esoteric that I have never been mule-headed enough to actually finish one. I strongly suspect that I’m not alone, and that’s with a decent technical/programming background. The best and most creative DMs I’ve known are not so technically minded, so the barrier to entry for those who would most benefit from such a tool is astronomically high.

So, the great promise of NWN never really bore fruit. People still use the editor, and more people do benefit from the results, but even so, the modules are prone to bugs (oh god, the bugs), crashing, lost save games, lost progress, and so much more. In the end, it’s a sad and frustrating system.

Here we are in 2005, surrounded by technology on all sides, and we’re still waiting for a game system that really puts the creative tools to make cool games in the hands of those who would best be able to use them.

Expanding on that, I look forward to the day where someone puts out a system that allows fledgling game-designer wannabes (like myself) to create persistent, massively-multiplayer game worlds. Sort of a NWN-like editor system (only significantly less painful to use) only for designing whole worlds and game systems that we can then host online. The “massively” part doesn’t even have to be that massive. Even if a world only hosts a maximum of 500 concurrent connections, that would be a good start. I strongly suspect this is a lot harder than I think, and I’m pretty sure it’s awfully hard. Someday someone will pull it off, and upon that day I will rejoice.

I’m also looking forward to the day where TV is less stupid and more like iTunes. I would happily pay for a service (either subscription, or piecemeal) that would let me download and view commercial-free TV shows on demand. Gleefully, I would pay for such a thing. Our current alternative, which is becoming very popular, is to not watch TV at all, but instead wait for TV shows to be released on DVD. We buy lots of TV shows on DVD and then watch them on our own schedule without the annoyance of having to fastforward through commercials. I’m hoping some giant mega-corporation comes up with a TV-on-demand service like this in the near future. There is TV out there worth watching, but the current delivery mechanism sucks.

Finally (for now): I’m looking forward to someone (probably Microsoft, since they own the rights) doing something interesting with the Shadowrun franchise. Think “Matrix Online” only gritter, cooler, and with 100% less Keanu Reeves. Mmm. And street shamans. Booyah.