Linkstorm: Civil Libertarian Roundup

Civil authorities are pressing for expanded domestic use of drones. I'm sure it's perfectly innocuous.

Errol Morris points to the Umbrella Man theories surrounding the JFK assassination as proof that you can never trust your own judgement as to whether or not something you see is truly sinister. Rather than giving up your own sense of reason to a man who looks like he's wearing an old man makeup, maybe there's another way. A way where you critically analyze facts and discrepancies without regard to how "sinister" they are or how desperate you are to prove a conspiracy.

Team Fortress 2 Videos

I could swear I've posted these before.

Team Fortress 2 is the sequel to a popular First Person Shooter that I've never heard of, but I can guess the name of. It uses a set of different types of characters you can play, from a flame guy(no video) to a soldier(video!). Anyway, the characters are visually and functionally distinct, giving them miles of personality, as the introduction videos below demonstrate.

Bohemian Rhapsody: Titanium Rhapsody

Weekend Music: "The Scientist Salarian's Song" by Mordin Solus

That's a real thing that happened between fighting evil robots and fighting even older evil robots from outside of the galaxy.

GoMnomnom: The Role of Weather

Weather is important out here. There's no shade and there's no ground. If the wind is blowing, it blows for miles across the water, unimpeded by any of the tiny structures we've built out here. With the exception of a few clouds, the sun shines straight onto the deck, punishing the deck crew for twelve hours straight. The line of sight that extends out to the horizon gives you an appreciation for the rain, too. Storm fronts aren't monolithic lines moving across the horizon, but masses of clouds that may or may not feel like delivering their precious cargo where you are. I haven't yet tired—and I hope I never do—of the novelty of standing on a dry, sunny deck and spotting columns of rain a few miles away.

The Game's The Thing: Why We Play Rehash

The basic question for this thing is: “What do players get out of this?”

I’ve gone over this before, but I’ve both given it additional thought and read over a number of quality essays on the subject.

Players, to varying degrees, like Interacting with a setting and other players, participating in a Story (either of a character or a larger setting), and Accomplishing something.

Story is a player’s interest in playing a part in an epic story or a role. A character wants to participate in a fantastic setting and become immersed in it. It includes both simple escapism and a more complicated desire to be something instead of just being something else. Players who want to roleplay something very different from themselves, see where the storyteller’s narrative is progressing, and interact with the environment as a real person might, irrationally or no.

GoMnomnom: Time Served

I can't tell you guys how great it is to have a blog, a schedule, and a few days of responsible pad in case something goes horribly wrong. It's all grown up and...predictable.

Having a time table in your life, a rhythm is one of those surprisingly cool mature things. I just...love being...so...mature.

Ouroboros, aka Dude, this review of a thing is a good thing!

I occasionally read No High Scores, which is a pretty sweet site. Recently, Michael Barnes did a review of Dragon Age 2 (Part 1, Part 2) that I couldn't love more.The winning quote for me:

In a game where politics, intrigue, characterization, and dialogue are more compelling than swordplay, it gets to the point where the fighting just becomes pointlessly grueling.

That defines much of the tone of the article that I identified with, and in fact coincides with much of my thinking on roleplaying games in general. Killing things with numbers is something that a computer will always beat a tabletop game at. For now anyway, humans beat computers for making a universe that allows a person to interact, react, and generally feel like another person in that universe. I'm not saying the two can't fuse; quite the opposite. I'm talkin' 'bout Dragon Age 2 after all.

I only know about DA2 the same way I know about every video game but Braid: I watched a friend play it. Granted, for DA2, I watched a friend play it a lot. Enough to speak authoritatively about the game as a roleplaying game, even if I can't talk about things I don't care about (like how good combat is ["shitty to watch," if you're that curious]) or things I'd like to be able to talk about (all those little papers that built on about the universe that Richard never read, that kill-happy illiterate).

Dragon Age 2 is great. The interactions are organic, and even though when Anders asks you for a secret favor that involves distracting one of the most respected figures in the city you know he's going to fuck shit up for the final pat of the Act, and even though any doubts you have about that are erased when he starts wearing black and apologizing all the damned time after you do that favor, what he did is still shocking and fucked up, and even when I was chanting "Kill this fucker!" though out the entire scene that followed, I still voted to spare his life by the end of it, it still love it. I don't know if that means I was forgiving of obvious plots that are well-executed or just drunk (maybe both), but it was an experience that even as a person who had no stake in it at all, I cared about.

Isabella's borderline Deadpool routine is so great that people who write Deadpool should take notes from Bioware on how to break the forth wall without erecting a boorish, self-congratulatory sign in honor of having done so. Your friends in general are great, coming across as clearly defined characters you can get a handle on after a single scene (as I did after jumping in during the middle of Act I), while still having a satisfying amount of depth to them. The NPCs are great, with only Meredith wobbling a bit in being just a bit too crazy at times to believably be where she was in the story (which is mostly explained by the end), and what Michael Barnes says about the blood magic getting used excessively...let's just say that Evil Dead 2 reimagined as a Hemophiliac Emo Suicide Pact anachronistically adapted into an Eighties anime wouldn't have more blood than Dragon Age 2.

I only noticed the reused environments when it came to people's estates, but even that was fun because it was fodder for jokes about the diversity and training of interior designers in Kirkwall. In the tunnels and on the beach, there was little enough of interest for me there that I never noticed the recycling.

Updates

Most of my Christmas shopping is done. Guess I need to...wrap this stuff or something.

Did some DnD Sunday. It went pretty well, but the adventure needs some polishing. The next story begins with a tavern tale from one/some of my players, which could go terribly wrong. I also need to give everyone some slightly better equipment, since my dragons, kobolds, and zombies don't come packed with treasure (not that it would matter, as they've only killed kobolds thus far).

Haven't done much with Magic because I am pretty Magic-ed out.

I am not, however, video gamed out. Double Dash is awesome enough to make me contemplate buying a TV (and a Game Cube/Wii), but only in transient fits. I also bought the Humble Indy Bundle for Child's Play this week, which really worked out. Braid and Osmos are tons of fun in that they're challenging and make me think while I'm playing them.

Osmos: It's not science; it's fun science with dodgy menus.

Cortex Command is aggressively bad, but it tells you that it's just a beta and you should cut it some slack so I don't hate it. It'll be a nice ragdoll physics Real Time Tactics game just as soon as you stop getting curb stomped and watching all of your reinforcements crash their rockets in the tutorial. Getting beaten like a clueless, drunken Bane stumbling to into an S&M scene is not informative. Well, it is informative in a "let's never do that again" kind of way, but that's a very specific kind of information.

Cortex Command: It's okay; it's still in beta.

Revenge of the Titans is a passable time-killing castle-defense game, but I kinda ruined it by considering the fact that it might actually be a cunning twist on the castle-defense genre. The general who briefs you about upcoming missions suddenly becomes despondent ("Faceless Commander, the next battle is in Stockholm. Expect waves of enemies from all sides...sometimes it feels like this bloody, pointless war will never end.") or the scientist who explains your new technological breakthroughs starts getting to familiar ("These cooling towers will increase the firing rate of our turrets...but Faceless Commander, whose cooling off your turret?" replete with little pixelated hearts.).

Sadly, I know that's not to be. The generic levels will keep getting generically harder until the time and attention needed to beat a level well exceeds what I'm willing to put in on a cookie cutter game with no emotional investment and enemies who actually look kinda like the Night Fury from "How to Train Your Dragon". I'll just say "fuck it all, I'm playing Dawn of War" and then do just that.

Revenge of the Titans: In all probability, it's what you play before you start playing Dawn of War again.

Machinarium is an adventure game that, like Yahtzee once said, requires you to rub every item on your inventory in each item in the game world before you move on to the next room. While they do parse down the whole "ton of inventory items thing," the best way to skip the indeterminable time you spend clicking everything around you, you can consult in-game hints (which you are encouraged to do only when you're really stuck, which would only change the hint-seeking habits of the most impressionable and idiotic of Catholics). The hints, however, are safely locked away behind a crappy, three-button mini-game about key that shoots lasers to kill spiders in a randomly-generated map of bricks and spiders, both of which will kill you when you touch them. Which is an interesting idea to deny the fact that if no one gets your game, then they can just beat it by completing a slightly better game. The hints don't "hint" anything. Which is glad because the first time through I naturally thought was doing all this key-navigating, spider-shooting bullshit for nothing, or rather for the chance to see some high-sounding, vaguely worded hint or an esoteric picture of a few components around me. No, the hints are just how to beat the level in words.

Machinarium pretty much plays like so; look at all the charming things that happen when you're retarded robot enters a room, decide how much of this room's arbitrary bullshit you're willing to deal with, kill some spiders, die, die, die, punch your computer, die again, finally kill all the spiders and don't get killed by bricks until you get a picture of what you're supposed to do, then try to do it, and punch your computer.

Machinarium: It's two games that will both make you want to punch your computer.