Tristan Davis.com

April 1, 2012

Adventures in Free to Play: Age of Conan

Filed under: Media Review,Video Games — Tristan @ 12:34 pm

Continuing my review of free to play MMORPGs, I downloaded Age of Conan and gave that a shot.  The results were uneven.

1. Action. This is definitely the most action centric MMORPG I’ve ever played.  Rather than the standard pick a target and do basic attacks, Age of Conan employs a defenses system.  Basically, when you have an enemy selected, there are little brackets to the left, right, and top.  These are weighted to show where the enemy is concentrating their defenses.  This corresponds with the first three attack keys in your hotbar, so you can attack on the side that the enemy is defending less.  They’ll move their brackets around based on where you attack, encouraging you to keep mixing it up.  Also, your power attacks only work when triggered from certain directions, so there’s actually some strategy in getting them to shift their defenses, then sweeping in on the exposed side with something strong.

There’s also a system where you have your own defenses in a similar fashion, but I could never get the hang of shifting them on the fly, or really tell where my enemies were attacking anyway, so I ended up keeping them even all the time.

2. Nudity. Age of Conan has very few qualms about nudity.  Given the Robert E Howard setting, this is not very surprising.  If you’re playing a female character, and aren’t wearing any torso armor, there’s going to be boobs instead of some forgotten age version of a bra.  It’s hard to say how I feel about this.  On the one hand, I’m in favor of games that are clearly intended for a mature audience going ahead with actual nudity.  On the other hand, this game can also be pretty immature.  For instance, the brothel in the first city is called the Bearded Clam.  Yeesh.

3. Graphics. Age of Conan actually looks pretty decent at a mid-range setting, the highest my computer allows before getting all jittery.  Character creation leans towards the Elder Scrolls mold, with a lot of customization in the facial features area.  Of course, once you get into the game, everyone kind of all looks the same anyway except for what armor they are (or aren’t) wearing. Still, I’ve always found that a more in depth character creation system leads to a certain amount of attachment to your character.  Taking the time to make them look just like you, or at least just exactly how you want them to, helps you identify with them more.

4. Micropayments. Age of Conan doesn’t wear the free to play cloak that well.  From word go, you’re constantly aware of how much of this game is locked off to you unless you pay more.  The classes available at the outset are highly limited unless you pay a premium to unlock more.  My inventory window had a lot of empty boxes that the game absolutely refused to let me store stuff in.  I’m not certain, but it seemed paying money would have opened up those slots.

5. Soloing. Generally speaking, Age of Conan was pretty forgiving to the solo player like myself.  The main questline won’t let you play too far unless you’ve reached a level where you can handle what’s being thrown at you, which is handy.  Unfortunately, it’s not always easy to tell where in the game I should have been leveling up.  There came a point where it seemed all the areas I was in were either too easy or too hard, and I couldn’t figure out where to go to find a happy medium.  Of course, I acknowledge that maybe it’s not really built for soloing,  but I didn’t ever really see people tackling things as a group, so maybe I was just missing a big area.

6. Quests. The quest variation was slightly better than most MMORPGs, and certainly better than Lord of the Rings Online.  They appear to be actually tailored to your class a bit.  Since I was playing a rogue, they tended to have a focus on sneaking around to get things done, where I assume a fighter class would probably have been bashing in more heads.  True, a lot of them boiled down to ‘go here, do this, collect this,’ but when you think about, life is just a series of repeated tasks anyway.  I did dishes today, and I’ll probably do more tomorrow.  At least I didn’t have to fight carnivorous plants to get them done.

All in all, I’d qualify the game as generally worthwhile, though, since I haven’t felt the strong urge to launch it again for a while, maybe it’s just not for me.

March 8, 2012

Adventures in Free to Play: Lord of the Rings Online

Filed under: Media Review,Video Games — Tristan @ 2:57 pm

I’m a big fan of huge, open world RPGs.  I love big, time consuming games for a variety of reasons, but one factor is a simple equation:

$/h=v

Where $ is the price of the game, h is the time spent playing it, resulting in v, which is a value.  What you’re looking for here is a low number for v.  If a new game costs $60, and entertains you for 20 hours, you’ve paid three bucks an hour for that entertainment, which, compared to the price of, say, a movie ticket which gives you about 6 bucks an hour of entertainment, is a good deal.

To that end, it recently occurred to me to give some of these MMORPGs that have gone free to play a try.  if v=$0, that’s a definite win.

So I downloaded Lord of the Rings Online.  This was a mistake.

This game is terrible.  I was only able to tolerate it for a few hours before I gave up in disgust.  Here are my main complaints:

1. It’s ugly.  Super unattractive.  This is a game that came out in 2007 and is just hideous.  I think the original Guild Wars has better graphics, and that’s a game that came out two years earlier.  The second time I launched the game, I decided to turn up the graphical settings to see if that would help.  Like many people, I often play with low settings to improve performance.  Imagine my surprise when I realized I was already set to the maximum across the board.

At one point I got a leather helm, equipped it, and was annoyed to see that my elven ranger had put what appeared to be a wilted lettuce cup on his head.

I try not to be a huge graphics queen, but with this game it actually confuses me.  At one point I was tasked with finding somebody’s lost son or friend, I can’t actually remember which.  I followed the waypoint, killing wolves all the way, until I found what assumed to be his body, as the quest told me I now had to go and find the quest giver again.  When I did, the quest giver started talking about he goblins clearly got his son/friend, saying I had told him their were goblins around the body.  This left me confused, as all I had seen were wolves.  It later occurred to my that the odd lump of polygons I’d encountered was meant to be a dead goblin, not a dead elf.  Not that there was any way to tell them apart.

2. Boring quests.  I got to somewhere around level 7, and every single quest I had amounted to: travel to some place, kill four or five guys or collect four or five things, then go back to the quest giver.  Every single quest.  To be fair, plenty of RPGs are mostly grind of this sort.  Heck, I recently hooked up my old PlayStation 2 and started playing Final Fantasy 12 again, and that’s a game where I can litterally spend hours running in a circle to build up a good chain killing skeletons.  The difference there would be that Final Fantasy 12 is visually stunning and actually engaging to play. Which brings us to…

3. The fighting.  It’s the standard MMORPG hotbar system.  Except I have no idea what the difference between any of my skills were, save that half of them seemed to be melee and the other half ranged.  Worse yet, there’s a weird bit where it seems I have to pick which kind of attack I want to start with or something.  All I know is, when I click on a monster, I expect my ranger to start shooting him full of basic arrows while waiting for me to tell him to do something more complicated.  Instead, I usually got a weird message saying I need a valid target, then, after clicking again, he starts firing.  I don’t know what a more valid target for arrows is than a goblin.

4. Lack of voice/lazy cut-scenes.  There’s really no voice in this game.  The only time you really hear anyone talking in game is when getting or completing some quests.  A long paragraph of dialog will pop up, and the quest giver will say something that is sort of vaguely similar to just the first sentence.  The differences in what they’re saying compared to what is written is distracting, and only takes you out of the game.

And the cut scenes in instanced quests aren’t any better.  The ones I encountered featured no voice, just word bubbles popping up above guys, sometimes overlapping with each other while the dialog played out, giving the whole thing the feel of a particularly poorly layed-out comic book.

That about sums it up.  It’s ugly and it’s not fun to play. A friend told me that Age of Conan is supposed to be fun, so maybe I’ll give that a shot next.  Right now, I’m going to go uninstall this and then fire up the PS2.

January 2, 2012

2011 media in vague, half-assed review

Filed under: Media Review,Video Games — Tristan @ 11:44 am

Let’s do a quick recap of things that I watched/played/read in 2011 and how I felt about them, shall we?

1. Worst movie: Suckerpunch

I reviewed it here earlier in the year, and distance has only made me less fond of the bloated, stupid, misogynistic mess.  As to the whole infantilization of its sexual lead, director Zack Snyder now says that was the point of the movie, that you’re supposed to be uncomfortable with it.  Unfortunately, as nothing in the movie ever makes it look like we’re not supposed to find Babydoll sexy, I have to think that saying it after the fact doesn’t really count.  Just because you say your movie is actually supposed to be a critique on the sexualization of youth in our culture, that doesn’t change the fact that you dressed up a young looking 21-year-old in a 12-year-old’s Japanese schoolgirl sailor suit and filmed her fighting robots and doing sexy dances.

2. Best underperforming movie: Fright Night 3D

This movie deserved so much better than it got.  It was funny, scary, smart, and everything else a great horror/comedy/action movie should be, but hardly anyone went to see it.  Colin Farrell turns his natural charm to the creepy side to play a vampire, Christopher Mintz-Plasse continues his track record of awesome parts in awesome movies, and David Tennant gets some great laughs out of being a foul-mouthed magician.  Even better, the 3D didn’t make your head hurt.

3. Most wasted potential in a new TV series: Grimm

I should do a full breakdown of Grimm here, but here’s the bones of its problems: Taking a strong opening two episodes that hinted at a large world full of fairy tale creatures that live in disguise among us mostly law-abiding everyday people, then utterly throwing any sense of a grander plot and continuity out the window in favor of a paint-by-numbers police procedural starring a protagonist who’s apparently totally uninterested in learning anything at all about his role as judge/jury/executioner for the mythical world.

4. Best Video game: The Elder Scrolls v: Skyrim

In all honesty, I have yet to play the other game that’s getting a lot of attention on best of the year lists, Arkham City, so this may change, but Skyrim is still utterly enjoyable, even after I’ve finished all of the two main plots and all of the guild quests.  I’m actually only two achievements away from having all of them in the game, but in pursuit of those, I still keep finding whole new sections of the map to explore that I’d totally missed before.  The combat is, in truth, only slightly improved from Oblivion, but they’ve fixed the auto-levelling world so perfectly that it doesn’t really matter.  Hmm.  I should probably do a full review of Skyrim too.

5. Best video game sequel: Portal 2

Okay, I know.  Technically speaking, Skyrim is also a sequel, but only in that loose fashion that all of the Elder Scrolls games are connected through their common world.  Portal 2 was a direct sequel, and though it might not have been as long as I usually like my retail releases, it was pitch-perfect all the way through.  For starters, it was funny, genuinely funny, in a way most video games don’t have a clue as to how to reach.  For an example of what passes for humor in other video games, look no further than Saints Row or that awful looking new Duke Nukem.  But it balanced that humor with moments of creepiness and fear due to the atmosphere of the massive, abandoned research lab, combined with the taunting of AIs and the increasingly deranged recorded ramblings of a long gone Cave Johnson.  In fact, I’m going to say that Skyrim and Portal 2 are co-winners for best video game.

6. Best video game that makes you send innocent men to prison: LA Noire

Okay, technically, this could be the worst video game that does it as well, ’cause there’s really only one.  LA Noire is fantastic, if only for the potential for future games it represents.  The facial animations are incredible, it was just the game design that was lacking.  For large sections of the game, you spend all your time getting innocent men to confess to crimes they didn’t commit, and you can kind of see that’s how it’s breaking down as you’re doing it.  Also, the main character is thoroughly unlikeable, and his motivations are kept maddeningly opaque until very near the end of the game.  For a noir movie, that would be fine, but for a video game, where you are in control of that character and thus somewhat complicit in his decisions throughout the game, it’s very annoying to have him suddenly commit adultery in a cutscene with no explanation.

7. Best fantasy series I finally started reading: The Kingkiller Chronicle

The second book in Patrick Rothfuss‘ fantasy series came out this year, so I think this one counts.  It’s incredibly well-written, and, unlike Harry Potter, handles magic smartly and with understandable rules and limits.  The characters have depth and are interesting, and the world is dripping with history and fully realized.  I actually started reading this series to Elisabeth, but, as I was partway through the second book while reading her the first, I began to worry about how happy an ending we’re going to get, so I had to stop.  As a story that is looking to be about the high price of revenge, I probably should have figured that out sooner.

In case you’re wondering why I didn’t give a link for everything in this review, I just wanted to link to things that I thought people might not have heard of.

September 29, 2011

Herman Cain, Taxes, & Slavery

Filed under: Media Review,Politics — Tristan @ 9:27 pm

Herman Cain recently released a campaign ad to illustrate the tax plan he would enact were he to become president.

I have a few things to say about it, but I don’t feel like I can really cover it all in a comic, so, wow, two posts in one week!  Amazing.  I’m not going to go into much detail on the actual meat of the 999 tax plan here, except to say that I think if you were to find one magic number that if you applied it as taxes to individuals, corporations, and as sales tax, and the revenue generated from that was enough to run the federal government, I’m kind of surprised that it’s a nice round number like 9, and not, oh, say, 8.9736395014.  Also, I think the world is actually a complex and uncertain enough place that to say “Here’s our tax code and it will never change because it’s going to pay for everything, ever, all the time, no matter what happens” is a little optimistic.  And unrealistic.  Let’s call it unrealoptimistic.

The real issue I have with this ad is the opening line:  “Our tax code is the 21st century version of slavery.”  I find something very troubling about equating our taxes to slavery.  I don’t think that paying a percentage of what you earn in exchange for important services (fire, police, roads and other infrastructure, education, defense, libraries, the list goes on) is really the same as actually being the property of another human being who can beat the crap out of you for not working the in the fields all day.

I think Herman Cain is able to get away with it right now for two reasons:

1. He’s trying to appeal to the Tea Party, which has become so divorced from reality that they’ve apparently convinced themselves that absolutely everything the government does is the work of fucking Satan, especially taxes because how dare the government take any of the money that I earned or interfere with my life in any way!  The government should never interfere in people’s lives except when it’s making sure those gays don’t get married, obviously.

2. Herman Cain is black.  I asked Elisabeth what she thought would happen if a white politician had said taxes were the same as slavery, and she said his political career would be over.  I tend to agree.

I poked around online, thinking there would be a bit of an uproar over this comparison, but I really didn’t see one, and that kind of surprises me, making me wonder if I’m overreacting out of some kind of subconscious white guilt.  But it just seems to me that slavery is a pretty harsh thing to compare anything to.  It’s like calling someone Hitler.  In fact, I propose that calling anything (late fees at the library, the hours your job requires you to work, waiting in line at the post office) the modern equivalent of slavery should be an addition to Godwin’s Law.  Say something is the same as slavery and you automatically lose the argument.

Also, really not wild about the final quote, “If 10% is good enough for God, then 9% should be just fine for the Federal Government.”  For one, I’m pretty sure “federal government” should not be capitalized, but mostly I don’t think how much you tithe should in any way have an effect on government policy, because, you know, separation of church and state.

September 24, 2011

Fun With Spam (no, not the food)

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tristan @ 1:08 pm

Spam comments on my websites tend to be hilarious.  Presented here are a few examples from Bashert.  I could include the ones from tristandavis.com, but it’s time consuming enough to wade through and trash the 1,644 spam comments in my queue without taking screen shots as well.

Oh, and for the love of god, don’t actually go investigating where these URLs lead to.  That would be a terrible idea.

Anyway, here’s the first one.

I highly doubt that post was created specially for bashertcomics.com.

I love how these start out with “comment4,” as they are apparently not good enough at coding their spambot to leave that out of the actual message body.  The only thing better is this:

Oops, forgot to put the actual comment part in.  This leads us to the wonder world of bullshit online pharmacy ads:

Yes, one of the side-effects of taking Zithromax is diarrhea, what with it being a pretty hardcore antibiotic.  However, I don’t know that a lot of people are trying to order the diarrhea specifically.

Personally, I would think that diarrhea would make Zithromax sort of a last choice when it comes to acne medications.

There’s a whole list of drugs I get spam advertising.  Things like Levitra and Viagra, I kind of get the point.  It’s boner pills, and who doesn’t want better boners?  It’s the maintenance medications that really confuse me.  I’m not going to post images for all of the drug spam, because that would take too long, but I’ll list a few and summarize.  The beauty of working a pharmacy is that I’m in a good position to understand why so many of these are ridiculous.

1. Vasotec.  It’s for high blood pressure.

2. Synthroid.  For low thyroid.  The thing about this one is that it requires blood tests to know what dose of thyroid medication you need, and it can change easily.  So just because you think you know the dose you’re on, doesn’t mean it won’t change, making the thousands of “synthroid” (probably not synthroid, and you’re lucky if it’s not toxic) tablets you just ordered from “Japan” (doubt it) totally worthless.

3. Clomid.  Used to induce ovulation.  Also often spammed with the word diarrhea in the message body.  Yippee.

4. Norvir. This one’s used to treat HIV.  If you have HIV, you really, really need to be getting your medications from somewhere legit, not the internet equivalent of the back of someone’s truck off the side of the road.

5. Citalopram, Lexapro, Prozac, etc.  You probably already know what these are.

6. Valium, Xanax, etc.  You probably also know that these do.  To be fair, these could have a recreational use as well, not that it’d be a good idea.

7. Percocet, Vicodin, etc. Ditto.

8. Motrin, “chewable antacids.”  These are over the counter, easy to find anywhere from a pharmacy to a gas station, and also pretty cheap.  There is no good reason to be ordering these from a shady website.

9. Doxycycline, Tetracycline, Keflex, and a host of other antibiotics.  Because, yeah, everyone should take tons of antibiotics for everything.  What’s a drug-resistant strain?  Who cares!

10. Cellcept.  This one’s to prevent organ rejection.  The only reason I can think of why you would need this and couldn’t get it legitimately is if you paid an unlicensed doctor 20 thousand dollars to give you a fresh kidney, while in a remote hotel room, a confused young hitchhiker is waking up in a bathtub full of ice with a poorly stitched incision and note saying to call an ambulance.

I could go on, but I won’t.

Really, there are very good reasons why most of these medications are only available by prescription.

Oddly enough, these pharmacy spam comments don’t usually even show up on my comics that are about working in a pharmacy.  Most recently I had to close comments on the Cavalry vs. Calvary comic due to the high amount of bogus prescription drug spam.  For reasons that I can’t even begin to fathom, Deflection is another favorite.

This guy’s bar for what honors him has been set pretty low.

I was so ready to believe this one was genuine, until I saw the unlikely name choice of “Xbox Repair.”  Is that, like, Polish?  At least this one was on a slightly relevant comic.

God, what are we thinking about chicken recipes?  This one… might be good?  I don’t know.  I’m a little wary of including whipping cream in this.  It’s not exactly a tandoori recipe, is it?  The typos make it hard to tell.

I used to get tons of spam trying to sell heavy kitchen equipment, like industrial deep-fryers and the kind of massive grills not used outside of restaurants.  I still have no idea why that happened.

I love this one.  It starts with a ludicrously verbose several paragraphs (when was the last time you heard someone being described as “arch”?), becomes bizarrely scatological, and at the end reads like the Hannibal Lecter political theory course.  I can only assume the body of the text was taken from some thankfully obscure work of fiction by a 19th century asylum inmate.  Sort of like the Marquis de Sade, but even more unstable. And at the end, it turned out to be advertisements for backhoes!  What the hell!?

Pornotube is a real website, and you can probably guess at its content.  This was not actually an ad for them, because, believe it or not, I think they’re actually a little too honest for spamming wordpress sites.  The link went to beseen.net, which has a waving American flag gif reminding us to never forget, and a background that is so fucking hideous that looking at their page for more than 8 seconds will actually cause your eyeballs physical pain.  I am not even kidding a little bit about that.  Beyond that, I’m not sure what their goal is.  I don’t recommend you investigate to try and find out.

I could go on.  I didn’t post any of the inexplicable ads for used rental cars in Northern Ireland, or the ones that are just in cyrillic.  But I think that’s more than enough for now, don’t you?

PS But speaking of the food, I’ve got a coworker that makes some really excellent Spam onigiri.

August 11, 2011

Chemtrails and Conspiracies

Filed under: News — Tristan @ 6:06 pm

The most recent comic touches on a little thing called a chemtrail.  That’s the belief that contrails left behind by high-altitude planes are not a natural phenomenon and composed of nothing but harmless water vapor, but is a government plot to spray us with a bunch of mind-controlling drugs.

Ah, conspiracy theories.  I often think of conspiracy theories as a product of the same brain functions that make humans so special.  Sometimes it is useful to take separate bits of data and find a pattern.  It can lead to great works of art and leaps forward in science.  Or it can make people think that the government is trying to control your thoughts in a way that a shiny new tinfoil hat can’t save you from.

Wikipedia has a pretty good overview of the chemtrail conspiracy theory.  I particularly like the bit where some news station misreads the test results from supposed chemtrail samples as having toxic levels of barium.  Better still is the thought that to get to that point, some crazy guy with a bunch of bowls sitting in his backyard looked in the sky, saw the contrails, thought he was being poisoned, then called his local CBS affiliate, who apparently had nothing better to do than go out to the crazy persons house and take his every word as gospel.

I also like that because Congress once pondered a bill banning chemtrails as part of a general ban on space-based weapons, people take that as proof that they actually exist and are being used right now, never mind the fact that the bill also banned an arsenal of imaginary doomsday machines that any Bond villain would have been proud of, including extraterrestrial and tectonic weapons.  Maybe these people believe the government has an earthquake generator.  Oh my god!  We attacked Japan with our earthquake gun!  I just created a new conspiracy theory!  Oh, wait.  That’s crazy enough that I bet someone’s already come up with it.

All in all, I’d lump chemtrails in with this old youtube chestnut: crazy rainbows in our water lady.

My final word is this: I think the best evidence that chemtrails do not exist is that if the government was spraying us with mind-controlling agents from planes in the sky, I bet the first thing they’d do is mind-control everyone right out of even thinking about the possibility that they were being mind-controlled.  I mean, if the government was really able to control our thoughts, we wouldn’t even have the word chemtrail.

PS. Chemtrails and Conspiracies sounds like they’d be a really shitty Angels and Airwaves cover band.

July 4, 2011

Other Half of Review: Fable 3

Filed under: Media Review,Video Games — Tristan @ 6:24 pm

Okay, I have now finished the game, and I am prepared to make my final remarks on the game.  Be warned, this will probably, no definitely contain spoilers.

First off, I’d like to refine a few statements from the previous half of the review.  For starters, another word about maps.  The zones in this world really are much more interesting.  They are more sprawling and fun to run around in then in any previous Fable game.  The first game’s zones were all quite linear, and the second opened things up a bit, but the third has the most open by far.  They’re also full of twisty paths and such, some of which are intentionally kind of hidden.  Some of them aren’t, but are still pretty hidden.  There was a fairly major entrance to the caverns off of one area that I didn’t find until having beaten the main story, as the bridge to get to it was just kind of out of the way.  This is why, yet again, I really think this game needed to have actual working maps.  At some point it just starts to seem weird that this is a universe where the people have, for some unknown reason, intentionally abandoned the fairly simple concept of the map.  They had it five hundred years ago, but as their society and technology advanced, they decided to just stop making them.

The weapons are still neat, but I realized how little variation they have.  The first fable game had a variety of weapons: swords, katanas, cleavers, axes, maces, pickhammers, greathammers, greataxes, greatswords, greatmaces, crossbows, and longbows.  Now, a lot of these are pretty similar, but it still led to a lot of variation in what weapon you’d be carrying around at any given time.  Fable 2 had fewer melee weapons, but more ranged, switching it up to crossbows, pistols, and rifles.  Fable 3 has only four types of weapon: swords, hammers, pistols, and rifles.  Personally, I found myself pretty much using the same two weapons all the time.  The TYPO (a hammer) and Briar’s Blaster (a pistol).  I was using these mostly as a way to compensate for the lack of armor.  See, since you can’t do much to build your defenses, the best way to win most fights in the game is just to win quick, so that means lots of damage.  Typically I’m a fan of using swords, as they’re faster, but compared to the slower hammers, the swords in Fable 3 are fantastically weak.  I kept getting killed as whittled away at enemy health with my sword.  Once I switched to a hammer, it was much easier, as a lot of bad guys can be killed with one hit, and few take more than three.  This is almost another example of why armor is necessary, as I feel like I have to use a hammer instead of a sword just to keep form getting killed all the time.  In trying to free up player choice with the clothes, they killed player choice with weapons.

Now that I’ve finished the game, I have some problems with the endgame section, which I’ll layout here.

For starters, the fight to take control of the palace back from Logan was done pretty well.  It was an enjoyable uphill battle through Old Bowerstone, including meetings with the various rebel leaders you’d recruited earlier in the game.  However, once we got into the palace, things take a turn.

Becoming king in this game sucks.  For starters, most of the questions put to you are pretty infuriating.  One of the first, what to do with your tyrant of a brother, is particularly stupid.  Your options are a) pardon him, or b) execute him.  It seems to me that what was really needed here was a third option, something along the lines of “life in prison.”  The rest of the decisions aren’t much better.

The Fable games have always loved forcing you to make a moral decisions, and they’re rarely too tricky about it, but it’s a shame that they let this taint the latter part if the game.  If I’m being put in charge of a kingdom, I find myself wanting a toolset for controlling it that is more like a SimCity or Civilization game, not the options which I’m presented with as Fable 3′s king, which always amount to, at most, three options, which can all be summed up thus:  1. Do something that is morally good but costs money.  2. Do something morally bad but gains money.  3. Do nothing and have no moral or monetary change.  There are some problems with this, as the game is really far too black and white in its morality.  First of all, the whole argument for sparing Logan in the beginning is that the evil he did was just to prepare for an approaching enemy that will wipe out Albion unless you can stop it.  True, you can still win the game with high morality and keep all your promises by just donating a ton of money out of your personal treasury into the kingdom’s (as I did), but you can still make the case that Logan was sort of justified in some of his actions.  In fact, sparing his life is considered a “good” action, although you can also make the case that he was an evil jerk and should be killed.  Suffice it to say, this is a very gray area, morally speaking, and so classifying all these decisions as either good or evil is pretty reductive.

Other ones were just confusing.  There is, apparently, an alcohol buying limit that is in effect, so the citizens of Albion couldn’t buy all the hooch they wanted.  For some confusing reason, a bunch of the upper-class will give you 100,000 gold to make alcohol illegal altogether, but I can’t figure out why.  For starters, someone has to be producing the stuff, and they’re probably pretty rich.  And, what, is the upper-class in Albion all teetotalers?  And, even more confusing, removing the alcohol limitation will actually cost me 100,000 gold, though why is never explained.  You could make the argument that that’s the cost it will take to clean up after all the extra drunk people, but it’s not really clear.  I went with no limit on alcohol, which is considered the morally good choice, and ever since then, my game is full of binge-drinking townspeople puking all over the place.  Oh, and the upper-class are doing it too, which makes me unsure as to who exactly wanted to outlaw alcohol.  Now, you have to figure that at least a few people would get really sick off of booze, then maybe they would dial it back in the future, remembering all the puking and the hangover they had next time they considered a drink.  But no, the world is apparently just full of alcoholics, just waiting for the limits to be raised or abolished altogether.  By that same argument, if you legalized heroin, everyone in America would be shooting up at the earliest possible opportunity.  I don’t know about you, but I know the reason I avoid heroin has nothing to do with its legality.

Worse yet, once you make these decisions, you can’t unmake them.  Even though you’re told it’s the annual budget for the town guard you’re setting, at no point a year later does anyone ask you, “so, what are you thinking of doing with the town guard budget this year, sire?”

Secondly, there’s Reaver, a ruthless industrialist who is the straw-man voice for doing any and all evil things when you’re making rulings as king.  There’s the problem that all of the moral choices he presents are hopelessly simple and pretty stupid.  For example, build a school for children or build a factory to force children to work.  Or, build a sewage treatment plant or just dump it on a bunch of peoples’ town.  It’s all very childishly good/bad.  The worst part about dealing with him is that, unlike Logan, who at least has some kind of justification for his actions, Reaver is just a greedy, heartless prick.  Earlier in the game, you watch him kill a man in cold blood for trying to unionize.  And in the Fable universe, all unionizing means is getting more than a 15 second break from crushing labor, and I’m not exaggerating.  A little later he tries to kill you by having lots of mercenaries and monsters attack you.  To sum up, he’s just a plain old bad guy, and I can’t think of a single reason why he wasn’t first against the wall when the revolution was over.  Instead, he’s still a captain of industry and is fabulously wealthy and comes to court like he never tried to feed me to a bunch of walking skeletons in murder pit inside his house.  Seriously, why can’t I kill him?

If they’d had anyone other than Reaver arguing for the “bad” side, they could have tried to turn some of these questions into actual moral conundrums, but then, I guess they would have had to come up with some actual moral conundrums first.

My other big problem with the endgame was the big bad.  It’s not, as previously mentioned, Logan.  It’s the horrible thing from the southern continent that Logan was trying to prepare for called the Crawler.  The big problem with the Crawler is that that’s all it is.  The Crawler.  What does the game tell us about it?  Um, it’s evil?  It wants to create darkness, or something?  It’s just a monster, plain and simple.  The first fable had Jack of Blades as the bad guy, a former hero who killed your family and spurred you towards revenge.  I’m pretty sure he was after world domination, or something similar.  The second game had Lucien who, um, killed your family, but was trying to rebuild the tattered spire so that he could wish his dead wife and daughter back into existence.  Still a little trite, but a definite step up in the story department.  With Fable 3 you’ve just got, well, a thing.  It’s a bad thing, but it’s still just a thing, and it’s hard to grasp its motivations.

Also, compared to the battle to take Bowerstone castle, the battle to fight off the Crawler’s attack was ludicrously short and easy.  Big, big anticlimax there.  Very underwhelming.

Fable 3 has done a better job of providing post-climax content.  There are more quests than there were in Fable 2, and as previously mentioned, the world is more fun to run around in.  I haven’t tried any of the DLC, but I’d hope they’d be better than the fairly weak offering Fable 2 had.

I’ve got a major, overall problem to deal with still.  The hero.  You.  The main character.  Up until now, the hero in the Fable games never had any real dialogue, and that was okay.  You started off pretty much as an orphan, ran around, solved quests, you even got married, all while keeping your mouth shut.  In Fable 3, you’re a known quantity when the game begins: the prince (or princess) of Albion, second born to the hero of Fable 2, and younger sibling to the current king.  You start this game as an adult, a first for the series, and the plot involves a lot of people that are already known to you, as opposed to the complete strangers you would meet in the first two games.  In this game, the hero talks.  Just not enough.  It’s really quite strange.  They’ve already made the decision that the main character has an established back story, so it’s already more difficult for the player to just pretend they’re playing as themselves in a fantasy world, and the hero does talk, just very rarely, and often at seemingly inconsequential times.  You show up at a meeting of the resistance, and then just stand mutely by while everything happens around you.  The worst offender would have to be when you’re in the caves where you first encounter the Crawler.  You’re there with Sir Walter, your closest and oldest friend in the world, and he’s a little afraid of the dark and a lot claustrophobic.  You’re running around in a maze of caverns while some kind of evil demon whispers and has shadows attack you, and Walter is steadily losing his shit, freaking the fuck out, basically screaming the whole fucking time, and you say absolutely nothing.  I don’t know about you, but if I was in the same situation, I’d like to think I’d be trying to calm my friend down and keep him from going insane.  But no, there’s not even “hey, relax Walter, we’ll be okay.”  You just run silently alongside him while he loses his fucking mind.

Also, in a game where all of the main characters fully embody the slightly cartoony, utterly vibrant and detailed design that is the hallmark of the Fable series, the main character’s face is terrible.  Sure you can put a beard on and try to hide it if you want, but that doesn’t help the fact that there came a point where my hero was sitting on the throne, trying to look sad or pensive or something, and all that was happening were the outsides of his eyebrows lowering strangely to accompany his awkward frown, for all the world just making him look somewhat constipated.  It’s an impassive mask, and when they try to put any emotion on it, it just looks strange.

Finally, choice.  Ever since the first game, I’ve wanted to be able to marry a character that mattered.  Well, too bad.  You can’t.  Ever.  The game gives you the option to marry whomever you want, provided their sexual orientation aligns with yours, but it has never mattered, since all they are is a few phrases wrapped inside a polygon mesh.  All the characters that have any bearing on the plot disappear the moment you’re out of the mission they’re involved in.  They could have waited for that option to open up until after the plot was over, so it wouldn’t screw up anything important, but no, they didn’t.

To sum up this two-part review, Fable 3 is still fun, but really, really needs to stop being bogged down too much by it’s childish and/or confusing views on morality.  They also need to decide who this series is supposed to be for before they make another one: the kind of hardcore gamer that is actually likely to play an RPG, or the casual crowd who wouldn’t pick it up anyway.  And since it looks like the next game is some kind of Kinect-enabled magic shooter or something, it looks like we already have the unfortunate answer to that question.

June 25, 2011

Half Review: Fable 3

Filed under: Media Review,Video Games — Tristan @ 3:51 pm

First off, I haven’t actually finished Fable 3 yet, so some of these points may be slightly inaccurate.  If that turns out to be the case, or if I finish the game and think some things need revisiting, I’ll either update this post or put up another one address those hypothetical issues.

Let’s start by saying that I’m actually a big fan of the Fable series, so even though I’m sure this is going to largely focus on the problems I’ve found in the game, I’m still someone who has bought and enjoyed each game in the series.  But the games do have some problems.

In a strange way, I sometimes think that the first game on the original Xbox was the strongest of the three.  Ever since then, Peter Molyneux, the series’ designer, has been doing his best to make the games more accessible to a wider audience, and I think therein lies the root of the problem.

Let’s start by talking about maps.  The first Fable had the standard mini-map in one corner of the screen, showing the player’s current location along with icons representing enemies, entrances and exits to the current zone, etc.  With the second game, Molyneux did away with a constant map, and introduced the glowing trail method.  Basically, by setting what your current objective is in the game menu, a glowing trail will show up on the ground, leading you towards that selected objective.  Fortunately, the map of the current area could still be accessed in the menu.  With Fable 3, the trail is still around, the onscreen map is still gone, and, unfortunately, the menu map, now replaced by a 3D animated map in the Sanctuary, is a significantly less accurate representation of the zone you’re in.  For instance, one zone, Mourningwood (yeah, ha ha) is a fairly twisty and convoluted swamp area that incorporates an army fort, graveyard, and town full of old-timey hippies, but its model on the map table is a fairly basic u-shape that is missing most of the zone’s landmarks and really bears no resemblance to the reality, which makes navigation pretty hard.  “But wait,” you say, “can’t you just set the glowing trail to where you want to go?”  Well, yes and no.  The glowing trail, as far as I can figure, can only be set to quests, so if you think to yourself, “gee, I’d like to go back to that graveyard and kick some skeletal ass”, I hope you’re able to remember how to get there by heart, because the glowing trail isn’t going to help unless you’ve got a quest there.   And even if you’re trying to get to a quest, the glowing trail is not 100% correct.  I’d say it’s easily less than 75% correct, and that’s a problem.  Just imagine that you’re driving to grandma’s house, but one time out of four, the GPS in your car takes you to Hooters instead.  One quest told me I was supposed to enter the Chillbreath Caverns, but the glowing trail kept directing me into a railway tunnel which in no way connects to Chillbreath Caverns.   Sometimes the trail led up over a ridge that was completely innaccesible to me.   I eventually had to look up on the internet where the quest objective was so that I could move forward.  At other times, you can be running around a zone for several minutes before the trail appears at all.

Why was the map removed?  I seem to remember Molyneux saying, sometime around the development of Fable 2, that non-regular gamers find the map intimidating or confusing.  Speaking to my wife about this, she agrees, although I don’t personally think it’s a significantly different skill set than navigating with a GPS enabled smart phone, something she does all the time.  Without question, the glowing trail is there to make it easier to know where you’re supposed to be going at all times, but that just makes me feel like there’s someone there to hold my hand, as if I’m not clever enough to figure out where to go using a map.  It’s kind of insulting.   When it works.

Speaking of the Sanctuary, which I was a couple of paragraphs ago, it has replaced the menus of the two previous Fable games.  This is partly a good thing, as the menus were always fantastically slow to load, and sticky and unresponsive to navigate through.  Really, there’s no excuse how slow and bad the menu navigation was.  That should really be the comparatively easy part of game design.   The Sanctuary is a small game environment that is always there and houses your weapons, clothing, tattoos, etc, and loads up almost instantaneously.  Unfortunately, there is a loss of flexibility here.  For one, it doesn’t seem to house a lot of the other stuff you had.  The Fable games have always featured food and drink that you can consume to regain lost health, with things like apples giving you a little health, and things like meat pies giving you a lot of health.  But in Fable 3, you can only carry one kind of food item at a time, reducing how much health you can regain at any given time, and doing away with the strategic use of the various food items.  And that food item is not visible anywhere in your sanctuary that I’ve found.  Also, there’s no place that displays things like house furniture, quest items, gifts, trade items, etc.  The only way I’ve found to know what I’m carrying is, if it’s a quest item, to give it to whoever wants it and end the quest, enter redecorate mode if it’s furniture, or, for the gift/trade items, go into a pawnshop and act like I’m planning on selling them.  The Sanctuary does have an animated John Cleese as your butler, so, that’s pretty cool.

I do enjoy the weapons in Fable 3.  The augment system, which had you placing magically empowered gems into weapons to give them bonuses, has been replaced.  The new system gives weapons objectives of their own, like “Kill 300 Hollowmen” or “Drag 10 criminals to jail” that, when completed with the weapon itself in the case of killing things or just equipped for social quests, give you permanent boons like increased damage with the weapon, more experience earned in combat, or increased attractiveness and immunity to scarring.

One thing I’m not happy about is the lack of armor.  Now, I understand why big sets of chain and plate armor was done away with after the first game.  The first game took place in a standard fantasy setting, while the second was an enlightenment-era civilization, while the third is in the midst of an industrial revolution, and it doesn’t really work to have people running around in steel plate, aesthetically speaking.  The armor appearance versus armor benefit question has been a problem for RPG’s for a long time.  You want your character to look cool, but maybe you want the benefits of another armor set that you don’t much like the look of.  I’ve been hearing about how Guild Wars 2 is planning on solving the problem: items you can buy from shops in game that let you graft the armor value and appearance of one item onto another, so you can run around in a low-level armor that you personally like the look of, but not have to suffer the low stats that would entail.  Something like that would have worked here, but I don’t blame them for not thinking of it first.  My suggestion would be a pretty simple addition to the Road to Rule leveling system Fable 3 uses.  Add another attribute you can upgrade that is simply “Toughness” to go along with increased melee, ranged, magic, etc.  You could still wear whatever you wanted, but would have some kind of armor to work with.

And I do think this game needs some armor.  I’m at a point where it seems that no matter where I go in the game world, I keep getting ambushed by balverines.   Everywhere from Mistpeak to MIllifields is full of them.   And Millifields?  Really?  It’s an upscale suburb.  If Bowerstone was Seattle, Millifields would be Bellevue.  But I keep getting attacked by feral werewolves there.  It’s a bit odd.  Anyway, balverines are one of the tougher enemies in the game, as they are fast, strong, can soak up a lot of damage, and also tend to attack in packs.  In any other RPG, this is where I’d start upgrading my armor or investing points in lengthening my life bar, but these are not options in Fable 3.  Fable 3 doesn’t even have a visible life bar.  You only know you’re hurt when the screen starts glowing red at you, and then you’d better hope you have a health potion.  Actually, several.   I’ve been boosting my combat skills to try and compensate, but I really just wish I could get some better armor.

One thing they could do is just put the armor in.  The Fable games have always been about the choices the player makes, and forcing them to live with narrative, moral, and physical repercussions of their decisions.  And if a player decides that they’re willing to wear armor that may not look as good because of the benefit it gives them, than that should just be one more of the many choices the game lets you make.

I am happy about the gnomes.  In fable 2, there was a side quest that had you hunting down all 50 gargoyles and shooting them.  They’d shout rude things at you if you were close enough, but you had to be pretty close to hear them.  The gnomes are the same thing, except they’re evil lawn gnomes.  You can also hear them from further away, which is nice.  And their taunts are a lot more funny.

And the zones you can run around in without having to wait for a loading screen have got steadily bigger and more interesting with each game.

Basically, I think the main problem the series has the continued attempt of its creator to make it a game for everyone.  Doing away with the map, armor, and most of the heads up display have all been about making it more open to non-gamers.   This is a huge problem, for one very simple reason: RPGs aren’t for non-gamers.  Role playing games are immensely complicated, with lots of math and statistics hiding just behind the curtain, and big, messy, open worlds for the player to explore that can be unashamedly intimidating for even veteran gamers, if they’re done well.  Simply put, an RPG is the last type of game that you should make if you want to make a game for people who don’t play games.  So please, Mr. Molyneux, next time, try making a Fable game for the people who want to play it instead of the people who would never pick it up in the first place.

May 14, 2011

The Finder

Filed under: Media Review — Tristan @ 4:53 pm

I watch Bones with Elisabeth on Hulu, usually a few weeks behind the most recent ep at least.  A couple of nights ago we watched the episode where Bones and Booth go to Florida before it all becomes a backdoor pilot for a new show called “The Finder.”  I’m here to tell you about that.

In generic plot terms, the Finder seems to be a show about Walter, an Iraq war vet who is brain-damaged to the point of paranoia, but he thinks that also gives him the power to find things.  He is aided in these dealings by bartender Ike (don’t let the name fool you, Ike is a girl and also British for some reason) and legal advisor Leo (Michael Clarke Duncan, so that’s cool).

I’ll come right to the point and say that the show was not good.  It missteps in a lot of specific ways, so I’ll go over those.

1. In what is basically his second scene, Walter strips down to his boxers and wanders around a murder victim’s apartment in order to profile him.  Why he felt it necessary to disrobe is never made clear.  He then proceeds to take a seat on the toilet and have a phone call with Bones.  There is nothing good about this scene.  There’s one kind of a neat moment where he notices two sets of well-worn mug rings on the coffee table, brings in all the guy’s mugs, and matches it to a teapot and specific mug, but then that information never really goes anywhere.  Most of the time I was wondering at how gross that guys apartment looked, and thinking that I would prefer to be in there with a hazmat suit, not next to naked.  And there’s nothing okay about talking to anyone on the phone when you’re taking a dump.  Nothing about the scene endears this guy to the viewer as a lead.

2. They tried to cram in way too much of Walter’s story.  The revelations about his character that we get in this episode are as follows: He had two tours of duty in Iraq, where got some unspecified brain damage that makes him paranoid.  But he thinks it gives him the ability to make connections where others don’t see them, so he doesn’t want to try to fix it.  There’s a line where Ike tells him that the only thing he can’t find with his power is love.  The problem with this is, these things should be spread liberally out over a season, not the less than 40 minutes this episode was.  That line about love, especially, should not be tried by any show until at least halfway through their first year on air.

3. Walter’s catch phrase of “I’ma risk it.”  It was sort of funny right up until it became clear that he had a catchphrase.  No one should have a catchphrase.  It’s stupid, and makes him seem more like a cartoon than a human being.  Let’s see, who has catchphrases?  The Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers say “It’s morphin time!”  Bart Simpson says things like “Eat my shorts.”  In this day and age, a main character with a catchphrase is not the sort of thing you can do in a live-action show for grown-ups.

4. Every character has too much going on.  Walter’s bullshit has already been brought up.  Ike is a British, female, tattooed bartender who lives in Miami and flies planes and pilots boats and who knows what else.  Leo is a massive black legal advisor who spouts poetry and is constantly going off on some ridiculous mystical crap about what ‘his people’ call Walter’s power.  More on that later.  Also, Danny Trejo shows up as a not-visibly tattooed Jesuit priest or cardinal or something.  (Fun fact: I thought they had digitally made Danny Trejo shorter for some reason, but looking it up, I discovered that’s he’s only 5’7″, which makes him shorter than me.  He could still kick my ass)  But the problem here is that there’s really no one in the group you could call a straight man.  Everyone is some off-the wall caricature or stereotype, so there’s no one to really identify with.

5. All that mystical crap with Leo.  I’m just personally tired of  shows/books/movies where one character has a “power” that could pretty easily be rationally explained (incredible observational skills coupled with good deductive reasoning), but then the one black character is always talking up how mystical and magical and amazing this is to his people.  Say what you want about Psych (it’s entertaining, but really not a fantastic show), as these two shows have basically the same premise, but at least Psych doesn’t make Dule Hill say stupid and demeaning shit every time Shawn notices a fence post has been moved.  For the record, this isn’t restricted to black people, this happens with native americans, asians… they pretty much always get the dumb task of acting like they automatically must believe in hocus pocus because they’re not white.  What, do increased quantities of melanin lead to belief in the supernatural?

6. Walter immediately falling for some girl.  It makes sense plot wise, because they want Walter to be pissed when she gets killed.  The problem is the girl.  She’s hot in a skanky kind of way (a ‘Do Not Resuscitate’ chest tattoo helps this along) but her character seems pretty awful.  We’re introduced to her as she making out with random bikers in a bar, and it’s stated that her profession is meth smuggler, and she’s working with the bad guy, although how much of his plans she knows is never explored.  So, all in all, it’s really hard to see what a (comparatively) normal guy like Walter sees in her.  But like I said, she’s really just there to get killed and make Walter mad.

7. They give the treasure (don’t ask, seriously, just don’t) to the Roman Catholic church.  In particular, to the Jesuits.  I’m not really sure how much money the church has, but I’d guess A LOT.  And even if they were hurting, it’s not like they don’t own a metric fuck-ton of valuable real estate and priceless works of art and mountains of shiny gold artifacts, so it’s not like they really need this money.  I’d be happier if it’d been given to charity.  I’m particularly peeved about the Jesuit bit, seeing as the local Jesuit hierarchy here in the PNW is still recovering from a recent scandal where it was revealed that their favorite way of dealing with priests accused of child molestation was to send them to teach at schools in remote, tiny communities in Canada and Alaska where it was harder for the kids to tell anyone about what was going on.  So, yeah, I guess they could use that money for legal fees.

The final and biggest problem is that this show is just a terrible fit for the Bones audience.  Bones is a show where science and reason are the ultimate answers.  Finder is a show where the main character has some ostensibly supernatural power.  They even had Bones herself at one point basically calling what Walter does magic.  And when you tune in for a TV show where your hour is typically spent watching the highly trained, educated, and above all rational people at the Jeffersonian use science to solve crimes, the last thing you expect is to watch three jerks spouting mumbo-jumbo as they bumble about Miami.

May 9, 2011

On Assassin’s Creed

Filed under: Video Games — Tristan @ 7:44 pm

I recently began playing Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood.  I’m still fairly early in the game.  I was doing a story mission last night that had swarms of guards attacking me off and on.  Then the batteries in my controller died.  I get a notification asking me to reconnect the controller.  Meanwhile, in the background, a squad of soldiers are turning Ezio Auditore into a well-dressed pincushion.

I’m not entirely sure why some games don’t automatically pause when the controller dies.  It seems like such a natural thing to do.

Now, there are some ways in which non-pausing is supremely helpful.  For instance, Assassin’s Creed 2 and Brotherhood both feature an economy that gives you money over time, depending on how much you’ve invested.  In that situation, I’m happy when I can walk away and let the controller turn off, but still earn my money while I’m making dinner or watching TV.  I imagine that’s why AC doesn’t auto-pause, because the folks at Ubisoft know people will want to exploit that and are happy to let them.  But it seems that some kind of middle ground could be reached between letting me easily make money and preventing me from dying a horrible, bloody death at the hands of Rodrigo Borgia’s goons because I need to recharge my Duracells.

I have two proposals:

1. The game knows when I’m in combat.  Why not pause if my controller dies only while in combat?

2. How about an option that lets me choose whether or not to pause when the controller dies?  That way I could leave it off if I’m trying to make some dough, or turn it on if I don’t want to die horribly.

Now, I’ll be the first to say that I know sweet fuck-all about programming a video game, but it seems to me that neither of those options seem that hard compared to the technical feat that is Ubisoft’s massive recreation of Rome that I can run, swim, and jump around in without any loading zones, slipping in and out of combat, helping people, and generally having a great time.

So, Ubisoft, how about working one of these into the recently announced Assassin’s Creed: Revelations?  Please?

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