GreyPawn.com

Sunday, October 11th, 2009

Vas Rel Sanct, Hallelujah!

I have seen it all now.

It was about a week or two ago when I was trudging along in Ultima Online, taking the moongate to Luna to check the latest on dyes for a new robe I had acquired when I stumbled upon a rune.  Not an unusual thing, typically large vendors will use this method to advertise, merchants trying to market for off-Luna wares at discount prices.  But this rune said something that caught my eye.

“Sunday Church Service - 7:00 p.m. EST, come one, come all!”

No way.  Being a curious type, I hit the rune.  It was coincidentally about 2 minutes after 7.  I encountered two structures built like Baptist churches, one was filled to the brim with players.  I dismounted my ethereal horse and walked in, finding just one empty bench left in the building.  At the front was a woman dressed in white and red, giving a sermon.  A Christian sermon.  The topic was forgiveness and patience.  An ankh punctuated the altar, comprised of white marble with a Fountain of Life (I assume for blessings and holy water).  A cross formed of goza mats was emblazoned on the floor of the building, and I realized that the stone on the front of the structure also was in the form of a giant stained glass cross.

I couldn’t help but sit through the sermon.  I kept looking at the congregation.  Kellen, Grandmaster Mage.  CREE DAL, Foe of the Abyss.  Shawn, Legendary Tamer with the giant half-dog/half-dragon creature parked outside.  The contrast seemed dizzying.  Here there was a female pastor espousing the virtues of non-denominational Christian faith in, of all places, Sosaria.  West of Trinsic near the Bog of Desolation to be precise.

I felt awkward to be wearing a wizard hat.  My spellbook has a gigantic pentagram right on the front.  I had just re-trained Necromancy, and I think my title was showing up as “The Ignoble GreyPawn, Elder Necromancer”.  I did however thank my lucky stars that I had recently purchased scrolls and had an odd 4,000 or so in loose gold in my pack - tithes should the social pressure mount and the need arise.

Eventually the sermon ended and I left, beating a hasty retreat to my guild’s headquarters.  Since that time, I expected to see no more of them, a fluke, fly-by-night and hardly permanent.  Instead they have expanded and now conduct midnight sermons on Saturday, as well as a normal service on Sunday.

What does this mean?  Ultimately, it means that emergent behavior is not limited to direct expressions of in-game ingeniousness.  It means that human experience is pervasive.  It means that in the wildest of all imaginations, we are likely going to be witness to what happens when one of the largest world religions finds itself in a fictional universe that has its own set of religions and morality.  Can Christianity resolve Virtues and Principles with Beatitudes and Fruits of the Spirit?  Is the Avatar going to end up a symbol for Christ, or vice-versa?

As it stands, the Church of UO is a thing, functional, extant and as far as I can tell not going to go away anytime soon.  It is wholly maintained within the game, offering services to users who would otherwise not even consider attending church locally.  That it exists, and how it got there does make me think of community in new ways, and certainly demonstrates a new paradigm.

I caught up with the pastor and interviewed her a bit, just to pick her brain on what the deal was.  What made you decide to start a church in UO?  “God led me to it.”  What tenets do you follow?  “Non-denominational.  Come as you are, be as you are.  No judgment, just the word of God.”  As it turns out, her son has played UO for almost 12 years, and she is an active member of the music ministry in “real life”.  I couldn’t help stiffle a laugh later, taking a tour through the church, noticing in the private quarters an arcane circle in bright blue plastered upon the floor.  Appropriate decor is probably difficult to come by for the (unofficial) Sosarian non-denominational offshoot of the Assemblies of God. I neglected to ask whether or not banksitting would be considered a sin, and whether or not there is an active outreach program to minister to the reds of Felucca.

Praise Jesus and pass the reagents!

Wednesday, August 5th, 2009

Quarterly Game Review

Recently updated my video card and power supply.  Can we please agree that any video card that requires not only one, but TWO power cables from the power supply to be plugged into it is overboard?  These hardware shennanigans drive me batty.  Eh, on with the reviews.

Overlord II - A pale shadow of the first Overlord.  What the hell happened?  The first Overlord was chock full of gooey content, the world seemed massive and open even though it was linear-driven.  This latest installment feels like a trainride from point A to Z and none of the fun customizable choices along the way.  The antagonists in the first were varied and wondrous, grand fairytale creatures gone horribly awry, forces of good bent on strangling the world of its choice between the two.  This second piece of garbage pits your Overlord against… wait for it.  The Roman Empire.  There are guys dressed up as Romans that you can fight, and also guys dressed up as Romans you can fight.  When you get tired of fighting Romans, you can fight the Romans.  Also, to add some spice to things, you can use a catapault to fight the Romans.  Did I mention the Romans?

The game also seems somewhat devoid of the dark humor of the first, as though the satire in the story was built by committee.  I was really looking forward to this game and it really didn’t meet expectations.

Anno 1404 (Dawn of Discovery) - The only thing bad I can say about this particular gem is that it sucked up way too much of my life.  I started to get that frightening mental thing going on where when you close your eyes, you are still playing the game in your head with this one.  Colonization of islands, resource management control, real-time strategy elements, ships with cannons and cargo, builder sim aspects - delicious.  I was honestly scared to death that they wouldn’t be able to produce a sequel to top Anno 1701, but this game improves on nearly every single aspect while presenting a different setting.  Hours and hours of replayability.

Empire: Total War - At a certain point in nearly all the Total War games, I start to win, and then this deep malaise sets in.  The certainty of victory.  The monotony of shuffling your diplomat thousands of miles across untamed wilderness to that one ridiculously far out city, one “BWONG” after another.  Pretty graphics, neat treatment of India and the trade cities.  I may come back to this one eventually.

Oblivion - I came back to this.  Mind-numbingly boring.  I can picture in my head some kind of hastily managed quest mill churning out generically written quests with god-awful proper names like “Cloud Ruler Temple” and “Icechurn Bridge” where “Grew’goth Mekwon” the Salisinian (orc) hocks his wares.  And every one of them a greenlight.  For all of the hundreds of NPCs in the game, there are quite possibly five, five total voices in the whole universe?  And two of them sound like a fat, cockney, out of work cannery foreman who can barely be bothered to move his facial muscles when he talks. 

The scenery is rather pretty with the new vid card though.

Evil Genius - I would give my right arm for a sequel to Evil Genius or Dungeon Keeper.  Is there simply no longer a market for these awesome games where you get to play the bad dude trying to build up a base to keep out the goodie two shoes?

Red Alert 3 Uprising - Satisfying RTS.  The inclusion of actors and a solid story really do make the difference.

The Sims 3 - A good occasional simulator.  Far more in depth than the old Sims 2, but what’s this?  It would appear as though all of the content the expansions offered for The Sims 2 has vanished, as though it were never created and integrated into the total offering of what the Sims was and is.  No, I have no illusions that EA is going to milk this third installment for every last droplet of expansion fodder it can and that The Sims 3 is like buying a factory-standard car - no A/C, antilock breaks, steering wheel etc.  It is a rather nice time waster though.

East India Company - I am such a damned sucker for Paradox games.  Stupid, stupid, stupid GreyPawn.  I bought this game literally the day it came out.  I played for about an hour or two before realizing this was quite possibly the worst ship style trading game on the market.  Port Royale ONE beats this game to pieces.  It’s like Civilization:Colonization broken down to its most barebones, sprite-based state and stripped of about half the features.  I don’t understand how anyone can release this kind of game and think, hey, this will be a success, when it fails on so many, many levels.  Why is this game a gig or so?   You could do this on a mobile phone to the tune of 13 megs.  I’ve never asked for my money back before for a game, even Empire Earth 3, but I’m really tempted on this one.

After Europa Universalis III and the screeching horror that was this game, Hearts of Iron 3 better be all that and a bag of Doritos or I am seriously handing in my Paradox fanboi badge.

Saturday, June 6th, 2009

iPhone Impressions

I am very sorry to say that I am now in possession of an iPhone.

It was totally not my choice, but a required thing for the project I’m on with work.  My first impressions were horrible, to relay the experience.  As it turns out, the iPhone is exclusively with AT&T.  To find one, you actually have to go to an AT&T Corporate Store… you cannot get them from authorized AT&T stores.  The corporate stores are rare, the authorized ones are prevalent. 

So to start, they essentially limit the availability by simply providing iPhones at as few places as possible.  If you want one, you must go in search of one.  You cannot procure one through happenstance, it is a cognitive move.

So I’m in the AT&T corporate store, and this cell phone maven comes up to me and takes my name.  She literally signs me in on a waiting list.  I sit down on the trendy waiting benches and watch as the high pressure salespeople do their best to try and get retirees to buy as many 30 cent pieces of crap, er, I mean $19.99 exclusive accessories, as they can.

After a 45 minute wait, I’m tendered up to the counter where the salesjackass mocks my vocal inflection.  I hate it when people do that.  Yes, I annunciate my words.  It doesn’t make me Thurston Howl the Fourth, fuckwit.  You don’t have to talk to me with pinkys up.  “Oh yes, of course, indeed, quite right.”  Die in a car fire.

It takes a good 10 minutes to figure out whether or not I will be able to make calls on my current plan to and from work or if I can even receive them.  He brings out the iPhone, which is situated in the most assuming box ever built by mankind.  I already feel like an elitist buying the damned thing.  I realize that the screen, touch-based, is likely to get pretty screwed with the way I treat phones, so we go over to look for a case.  My 48 cent case, I mean, my $29.99 custom iPhone exclusive leather holster in hand, I check out after the number is transferred.

So here’s the bad news.  The iPhone is actually cool.  I adore the apps, the interface is elegant, and I can actually type faster on the touchscreen than I could with my blackberry’s qwerty.  I am disgusted at myself for liking the damned thing as much as I do.  It’s so trendy and hip and ugh.  No one as uncool as me should have something as cool as this.  With it, I feel like I should own some bohemian loft apartment and watch indie flicks with my art clique shovin’ buddies.  Dark earthtones and soy chai latte’s pervade.

Monday, May 18th, 2009

Unappealing Food

Quick note.  Am I the only one mildly disturbed by the recent influx of “sliders” and “shots” when it comes to food?  A greasy pile of meat coated in low quality toppings on a mini bun does not appeal in any way to my appetite.  The assumption that I want to slam back a “dessert shot” of chocolate and whipped cream one after the other is somewhat insulting, and entirely disgusting.  Breakfast shots, slider trios, disgusting.  Must the marketing teams across the planet really travel down this path?  I don’t want to think about the chewed glump “sliding” down my throat hole.  They may as well be hocking the croissanwich as a “Pre-Poop you’ll thoroughly enjoy turning into brown waste.”

Saturday, May 2nd, 2009

Braid

So, I finally got around to playing Braid on the PC.  I had noticed this little gem on the Xbox 360 through the Xbox Live Arcade, but never followed up on it after going through the trial.  Well, with a little help from gamefaqs, I stomped this game in about a day and a half.  It was an interesting experience.

I’d almost qualify it as melancholy.  The last indie game I played was World of Goo, which made me cry and laugh in places, the sign of a really fucking GOOD game.  But this Braid didn’t seem to have the emotional depth that Goo had.  It started good, it built up slow, and near the end I was expecting some kind of closure, a release or a revelation of sorts.  But nothing panned out.  I have my own theories and ideas about what the game was about, the story it tried to convey, but the puzzle pieces don’t fit right in my head, to strain the analagous feature from the game into metaphor.

I come away from the game feeling “less than”.  Like seeing bits and pieces of a really awesome movie that you’d like to watch later, but can’t remember enough of it to look it up.  In terms of art, certainly stunning.  And some of the puzzles had me waltzing through the fourth dimension like Donnie Darko on crack.  The narrative - not so much.

Saturday, April 25th, 2009

Walkabout

I wrote once about the singular most important yearly ritual holiday that my family practices, Thanksgiving, and the meaning it has attached to it as a result of its excercise by my grandfather.  In terms of rituals, my family truly has very few.  I can count them on perhaps one hand.  The annual ones, like Thanksgiving and Christmas are the most obvious and most frequently experienced.  I had actually forgotten about the Walkabout blessing and the benediction of the new until very recently.

I was on the phone with Mom, and was sharing the news about how the move to the new house was going.  She told me that Pop would be incredibly proud, and then she asked me if I was going to do the walk.  The walk?  What walk?  Well, she explained, when you move into somewhere new, some place that you intend to make a true home, Pop would visit and bless it.  This was accomplished by walking the perimeter of the place, slowly, in prayer.  Prayer to protect, bless, raise a defense, cause to prosper, set aside.  He had done this at the family home, and when my brother moved into his house, and my Aunt’s, and every time my mom moved.

It is hard enough for me to write this, and when she told me, I broke into tears.  I had never seen him do this.  I don’t think I had ever heard this described.  The thing that got me was that I knew this ritual.  I had performed it before.  Having never seen or heard of it, I had yet performed it, in Baltimore, Austin, and of all places, Moonglow.  I know how this is done.  I know why it is so necessary.  I called my brother about it, he had seen it done and walked with Pop when he did it, and described it to me.  I could not speak.  How do I know this rite?  I still cannot talk about it out loud, nor have I been able to describe it to my partner.

Yesterday, I performed it at our new home.  Circumnavigating the yard starting at the furthest corner, each step is a request and a seal.  To raise a grand hedge of protection against harm or malice, establish a haven and a respite.  To bind, remove and unfetter any dark force which may be arrayed against this home or its inhabitants.  To bless it against disaster, natural and spiritual.  Each step a trace, drawn in land, set aside, owned by a servant to a god of hosts.  And underneath this packaged appeal, this high request for a blessing, a mark of gratitude and humility.  “Look, Lord.  Look at what you have given me.”  That’s why it has to be done in the sunlight, you see.

Each room, room by room, set in and blessed, the walkabout ritual, stupid name for it, is a benediction for structure, land, and inhabitant.  It would be assumptive of me to think that such a blessing would prevent fire, annihilation by hurricane or tornado, destruction or home invasion… but some portion of my heart stands in the middle of my conscience and insists in the loudest voice that “It does.  Trust me, it does.”  The part of my mind that tends to agree with the heart more often than not tells me, what the hell, perhaps it augments some statistical probability through the metaphysics of faith.  The soul reminds me of Job, and that all benedictions are at the behest and grace of the author of the universe.

With the addition of a puppy siberian husky and my relationship remaining very strong with my partner, I have my own little family now, and I have my home.  I am thankful for them, and I know that I am already blessed beyond what I could have imagined just a few years ago.  I know Pop would be proud.  I’m reminded of a tattered little plaque that hung up next to the air conditioner closet in the hallway of the home where we all lived.  It was a quote from Joshua.  But as for me and my house, we will serve the lord.

Thursday, April 2nd, 2009

Even Now, No.

Tuesday, February 24th, 2009

Polishing the Brass

From Sakkarah’s latest post from her blog at The End Game -

You’ll ask but what about the bugs that really wouldn’t take a whole lot of time to fix, that wouldn’t create notable imbalances and that have been sitting around for years? Well, that’s when you start looking at point 6: how many players are impacted by this issue. And unfortunately, the good of the many does outweigh the needs of the few. It’s like going to the ER. You’ve been waiting for 10 hours, the whole time watching people that came long after you go right in long before you do. And you’re like WTF?! You are no less important than the next guy. Your pain is no less real. Is it fair for you to suffer much longer than needed just because your injury isn’t as critical? Absolutely not. But when push comes to shove, the critically wounded won’t survive if made to wait, you will.

The analogy hits home, but I don’t quite think the mental state of UO’s vociferous community has quite been grasped.  Prioritization is a wonderful thing, and a necessary thing in any development and on any project.  It keeps the stupid stuff off the plates of the devs and keeps focus from flailing wildly.  There are truly only so many man-hours in a given day that can be dedicated to work on a project.

But the UO playerbase has been around for a long, long, loooooong time.  It is seasoned, jaded, shaken-up, stirred, Trammelized, soul-crushed and lingoed out.  It is literally the oldest consistent MMO player population in existence.  Many of its constituents are fully aware of the intracacies of development team machinations, and have a laundry list of entitlements.  It has been almost 12 years, and a lot of the players have been UOers longer than MOST of the dev team have been working on UO.  Hell, many of the gang I ran with on Atlantic’s RP scene went on to make MMOs of their own in various capacities.  I’m working on one at the moment, integrating lessons hard-learned from years playing the grand-daddy of virtual worlds.

But, the thing is, players aren’t upset that a designer might opt to prioritize the fix for one obvious flaw over another.  Players are upset that a designer might opt to work on refining the KR client while the Virtue system remains half done, a relic of the Renaissance expansion.  Players might be miffled at the huge expenditure it took to “update” and “upgrade” the UO client when, say, Forensic Evaluation, Item Identification, Taste Identification and Camping are skills in the game with no applicable purpose or use.  Tamers for some reason have gotten new tamables in nearly every expansion, while Magery hasn’t seen a new spell since the game went gold.  Mages, in fact, walk around heavily clad in armor from the tops of their heads to their toenails.  Maybe I’m old school, but shouldn’t mages wear robes?

The problem is, many of the issues which are considered legacy, and many of the content desires the aged community has will not be met in any major content push or expansion.  No one seriously expects a wealth of new content with Stygian Abyss.  These are UOers you are talking about.  We’ve had expansions like “Age of Shadows” where the greatest secret to the land was literally that you could drop a rune into a randomly located pouch and gain access to otherwise unaccessable areas.  How spirit-destroyingly underwhelming is THAT?  We’ve had launches like Third Dawn - I don’t even have to go into that one.  A vast new landmass to explore…with not a damned thing to do.  Stop making new clients, by the way, would you? 

The point players have been trying to get across for what on the internet qualifies as centuries is that it is COMPLETED content that is desired, not bug-ridden new methods of looking at it.  How about instead of a new trailer park landmass for housing brokers to plop down their hideously designed 18×18’s you spend an hour or two on boats?  Why not give cooks and beggars a reason to exist beyond the eccentric?  The rage happens because it looks like there are two fronts where designers are concerned.  A) The Latest Expansion and B) Fixing Easy Bugs.  In the mind of the player, it is interpretted that perhaps 60% of development energy is invested in piling new features (loaded with bugs) into the expansion (which will consist of 80% things players have not asked for but that you think are neat).  40% is perceived as being spent on things like fine-tuning the BOD turn-in percentages, adjusting the swing speed modifiers on Nox Ranger crossbows and reducing gold returns on escort quests.  Ultimately pointless minutia. 

Only occasionally does a beacon of light shine through in terms of new content or features, likely punched through by sheer force of will past the tunnel-visioned troglodytes that soak up the rest of the design team’s resources.  New plants, new potions, new craftables - yay!  MORE PLEASE.  No, don’t stop.  That was delicious, refreshing pure water and we’ve been dying in the desert for years.  More, for the love of GOD, MORE! 

But you do stop, because the range on that one thing needs its range adjusted, and between that and figuring out how to keep new gargoyle player characters from mounting an ethereal steed, there just isn’t time.  At this point, from this perspective, the emergency room triage is not so much the metaphor.  More like polishing the brass on the Titanic.  Sure, holistically you’ve spent an embarrassing amount of time on two mostly useless 3D clients with minimal adopt rate, the expansions have been a never-ending march of mild content additions absent any lore or in-game justification for them, and UO’s population has aged to the point where there are more 6-8 year veterans than there are 1 year players, but let’s focus our energies on the Lieutenant Guard Sash drop rate on Lord Oaks.  That’s totally important in the grand scheme of th..*blub blub blub*.

Sunday, February 22nd, 2009

Collect Cash, Hire Team, Insert into Dumpster

Tomorrow, a game published by THQ and crafted by Swordfish Studios will come out for the Xbox 360 and Playstaion 3.  The name of the game is “50 Cent, Blood on the Sand”.  I’m not lying, I wouldn’t do that to you, gentle reader.  For confirmation, please visit the following link. http://www.50bloodonthesand.com/us/  Please do not visit that link while you are eating - it may induce projectile vomiting.

First off.  Let’s get the obvious out of the way.  There are no strip clubs in the Middle East.  Second, we have seen these graphics and gameplay before.  It is called Call of Duty.  Third, Saints Row does gang-related action far better.  Fourth, it usually takes a great deal to offend my sensibilities, I’m made of tough stuff, I have to be.  But the towel-head slaughterfest that this game is really doesn’t sit well with me.  No one is a bigger critic of “my own people”, with half my lineage in the country we’ll likely be invading under Palin/Wurzelbacher 2012.  There is literally a screenshot on the site of a guy with his face and head covered in a burka type thing, but he isn’t wearing a shirt.  Rather, he is wearing a crossed “X” strap of bullets on his naked chest.

If you have the stomache to endure the trailer videos, you see “Fitty” is attempting to get his prized diamond encrusted pimp skull back from the towelheads that stole it.  In Grand Theft Auto fashion, he interacts in cut scenes with unscrupulous semi-urban towelheads to find out which towelheads took it, and where they are so he can go blast a cap in their sandy asses.  And blast a cap he does.  In effects stolen wholesale from practically every other FPS since Counterstrike, Fifty Cent goes on a rampage piling up a body count of Middle-Easterners that would make General Petreaus blush.  It is interspersed with random lines of dialogue like “I wants mah skull back!” and “You have whats mine!”.

The levels, if they can be called that, are revisits to the classic “Middle Eastern war-torn village” that you’ve already explored nine THOUSAND FREAKING TIMES in every other FPS set in the mideast.  You know that biege building with the rocket launcher in it?  Yeah, that’s there.  And the cart with the baskets and rolled up persian carpets?  Yup, it makes a guest appearance.  And the bombed out mosque - all of our old favorites!  Oh gosh, I hope the marine helicopter can show up, that way they won’t have to waste any polygons or storyboarding from pointless fucking game to pointless fucking game.

Rest assured there are towelheads that run at your character screaming “FALAFEL!” and “Halamachhgahaghgaaa!” weilding both rocks and fully automatic weapons invariably.

I think the thing that quite possibly burns the most is that the development studio actually got millions of dollars to serve up this steaming pile of cliche’-ridden excrement.  Someone actually went to a pitch meeting, saw the design for this thing and gave it the green light.  They said, “YES, ABSOLUTELY.  I will give you fuckers millions of dollars, probably more than 10, to fashion this abortion of a game from the ether.”  Millions of dollars, an entire development team, with hundreds of man hours invested to power the machine that would give birth to this abomination.  Someone tell me, is Paris Hilton in need of a Real-Time Strategy game with her name on it?  Because if this is the sort of tripe that gets studios going, I’m completely willing to sell my soul to the lords of mediocrity that give these things a solid thumbs up.

Shadowrun Online remains to be made.  There are no plans for a Harry Potter MMO.  Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines isn’t likely to see a sequel, ever. 

Friday, February 20th, 2009

Darkfall Beta

Got into the Darkfall beta.

There is no tutorial.

*logs out*