Like many amateur bloggers (and don't get me started on how hilarious I think it is that anyone qualifies as a professional blogger) I have fallen prey to 'real life syndrome'. Literally enthralled by my thesis, finals week, work, and holidays, I have forgotten to post to my blog. This is probably okay. It's not like I'm getting paid for this.
I've noticed that the majority of my posts thus far have been about food and/or games. In the spirit of this, and to keep you and me going during the blogging famine, here are some games I'm playing now:
*Dragon Age Origins (I think I'm at least halfway through it)
*Assassin's Creed II (It's-a me! Pop culture references!)
*Halo 3 (I am the last person on earth to get Halo 3)
*Dungeons & Dragons Online (Trying to master the art of auctioning)
*Baldur's Gate II: Shadows of Amn (FOR THE GLORY OF AMN!!!!)
It's tiring having all this free time. Here are some things I've eaten lately:
*Tamales with queso and Texas chili (traditional Christmas meal)
*Beef tenderloin encrusted with pecan, mustard and herbs (good one, Mom)
*Deviled eggs (I don't understand why I like deviled eggs so much)
*Two-tone fudge (another Christmas tradition)
*Ham (too much ham)
*Those gumdrops that only come in Christmas colors and the red ones are cinnamon and the green ones are mint (I can't decide which is my favorite)
Lists are fun. In any case, I had a great Christmas. I am outfitted with some dandy new clothes and other presents. In particular, I got both of A.J. Jacobs's books, "The Know It All", and "A Year of Living Biblically". I chose to read the latter first, and have been extremely pleasantly surprised by it. When I finish, I'll probably write a review.
Showing posts with label games. Show all posts
Showing posts with label games. Show all posts
Sunday, December 27, 2009
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Read the Manual
I remember when I was younger, when my video game purchases were limited by my allowance and thus primarily for my Gameboy or classics for my PSX and very infrequent, one of the very best things about making the purchase was reading the manual on the car ride back home. Man did I ever love reading the manual. There is the sense of studying it closely so that when I played the game, I would be prepared to operate its controls, but mainly, the manual was my first leap into the game's world. Most manuals are simply guides to the controls, but almost all of them have at least some little blurb about the environment. Some manuals even had more information about the game world than the game itself (cf. the Marathon manuals). Often, manuals gave you your first explanation of how the game world worked, which is always important for me as it is my first step for immersion. I also remember what a treasure trove finding all the old manuals for my grandmother's NES games. That was pretty awesome.
There was always something interesting in the manual for me, little previews to get me psyched up even more than I already was. And seeing as I had to save up sometimes for months in advance in order to buy a game, I was already pretty psyched up. Then, as now, I only bought games I really, really wanted for sure, which were few and far in between.
Reading the manual now is a much different story. I buy games a lot more often now that I have disposable income, and since I am usually driving myself, I usually can't read the manual on my way home unless I want to get into a car accident. But the manual is still the first thing I look at when I get home, and reading it is the first thing I do, before I ever play the game.
These days, I frequently find myself disappointed by manuals, sometimes to the point of absurdity. Dragon Age: Origins is a fantastic game with a terrible manual. I can't even remember what it said, except that it made no sense to me whatsoever and was pretty disorganized and all around hard to read. I'm sure there was some valuable information in there somewhere, but I couldn't tell you what, and this is the pattern I see most often these days. It seems manual writing is a bit of a lost art. I don't know if game publishers have a philosophy for manuals, and the lack thereof may be the reason why they are so wildly different from game to game. It would be nice if a manual made me excited to read on about when to press A, but I also have to recognize that the manual, as an auxiliary piece of literature which is often made redundant by in-game tutorials, is not necessarily important enough to spend a lot of time or QA on.
There was always something interesting in the manual for me, little previews to get me psyched up even more than I already was. And seeing as I had to save up sometimes for months in advance in order to buy a game, I was already pretty psyched up. Then, as now, I only bought games I really, really wanted for sure, which were few and far in between.
Reading the manual now is a much different story. I buy games a lot more often now that I have disposable income, and since I am usually driving myself, I usually can't read the manual on my way home unless I want to get into a car accident. But the manual is still the first thing I look at when I get home, and reading it is the first thing I do, before I ever play the game.
These days, I frequently find myself disappointed by manuals, sometimes to the point of absurdity. Dragon Age: Origins is a fantastic game with a terrible manual. I can't even remember what it said, except that it made no sense to me whatsoever and was pretty disorganized and all around hard to read. I'm sure there was some valuable information in there somewhere, but I couldn't tell you what, and this is the pattern I see most often these days. It seems manual writing is a bit of a lost art. I don't know if game publishers have a philosophy for manuals, and the lack thereof may be the reason why they are so wildly different from game to game. It would be nice if a manual made me excited to read on about when to press A, but I also have to recognize that the manual, as an auxiliary piece of literature which is often made redundant by in-game tutorials, is not necessarily important enough to spend a lot of time or QA on.
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Exercises in masochism
What Facebook really needs is Bastard Tetris. That will teach you to procrastinate. Maybe you think you're good at Tetris. Maybe you think it won't hurt anything if you just play a flash game for five minutes. Well, you're wrong. If you're going to procrastinate, you may as well punish yourself simultaneously, rather than later when you realize you have wasted all your time.
You'll start playing Bastard Tetris, and for a bit, things will go just fine. Oh sure, it threw you the worst starting piece, but that's no big deal. This isn't that hard, you'll say to yourself. I'm even doing well, I've knocked out five lines already! And that is when Bastard Tetris will give you twenty S-pieces in a row, and then squares. Don't be ridiculous. Bastard Tetris isn't your friend.
And you will love it, because you deserve every time you get the L-piece that faces the wrong way from what you needed, because you are supposed to be working right now.
You'll start playing Bastard Tetris, and for a bit, things will go just fine. Oh sure, it threw you the worst starting piece, but that's no big deal. This isn't that hard, you'll say to yourself. I'm even doing well, I've knocked out five lines already! And that is when Bastard Tetris will give you twenty S-pieces in a row, and then squares. Don't be ridiculous. Bastard Tetris isn't your friend.
And you will love it, because you deserve every time you get the L-piece that faces the wrong way from what you needed, because you are supposed to be working right now.
Friday, October 23, 2009
Someone was mean to me on the Internet
As some of you know, I spend a great deal of time on the Internet. I am bold enough to say to my professors that I spend so much time on the Internet that I am qualified to write papers about it. A lot of the time that I spend online is used playing games. These days, I generally like first-person shooters, like Counter-Strike or Team Fortress 2, where I feel like I am a comfortably average player. I've occasionally dallied in MMOs, having played Guild Wars devotedly for a little while. Right now, I play on Dungeons & Dragons Online, which is, notably, free.
All of these games center on the multiplayer experience, in the sense that without other people, there is no game. Even in MMOs, where it is possible to play through content by yourself, there are numerous points where it is simply not possible to win if you're alone. So interacting with other people is a big part of the games. When people are friendly and competent, this can make for an awesome game. When they are stupid or rude, well, you get the idea.
Something happened to me today that never happened to me before. Now, I have been yelled at plenty of times while gaming online for a large variety of reasons, but this was new to me. I was lectured, extensively and aggressively, on how to play my character, as I was, apparently, doing a terrible job.
On DDO, I play an elven ranger named Shenoute. The ranger's job is, historically, to shoot things with arrows and pet animals, all the way from the original Dungeons & Dragons days. In tabletop, where a Dungeon Master is interacting with you and crafting a story on a personal level, rangers can have all kinds of uses. Their ability to commune with nature, be invisible, and shoot people is rarely questioned. But when D&D hits the MMO platform, the tactics change. Thinking creatively is not important here; you must always be the biggest, baddest killing machine (or healer) possible or otherwise YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG.
The way I play Shenoute, I pretty much live on my bow. I shoot arrows at monsters. I try to manage how monsters hit my party, because I see them before everyone else does, and I also try to draw fire away from other people. I am going for a particular prestige class that is basically a sniper. Why? Because I think that would be awesome. And I like playing this way. I think it's fun.
But this is not enough for some people. It was not enough for the guy who decided to call me out tonight. We were breezing through quests on the hardest level with the greatest of ease, and halfway through a long quest, he turned around and started tearing into me. Why do you use a bow when everyone knows they suck, he asked. Ranged is crap, you need to switch to melee. Stop shooting at things and melee. If you don't want to melee, then why are you here? Why are you taking up space being useless? Oh, 'you want to have fun', whatever.
For this person, it was not enough that we were doing well and enjoying ourselves individually. He seemed to have every sundry detail worked out to exacting specifications for how it should be done, and any deviation is useless and offensive. He had to turn around and start accusing me of messing everything up for everyone. Naturally, I am perturbed by these kinds of people, for whom playing a game is a mechanical process with rigidly defined rules, for whom it is a matter of clockwork and machine-like efficiency. It doesn't matter if they actually succeed in this or not, so long as they think this way. Seeing someone like me, whose character has been haphazardly designed for maximum coolness and funtime rather than to beat the game at its own rules, is apparently unbearable.
I wonder if they are really having fun, or if yelling at other people and telling them how to play the game 'right' is their way of compensating for the fact that they aren't really having fun. Seeing what they are lacking, perhaps, they lash out. If that's true, it's pretty sad. I can't hope to understand why people like this go to such lengths to enumerate things that they may as well be performing statistical analysis to find the best class combinations. I really just want to have fun, so I left the party in the middle of the quest and found another one that picked up where I left off. I plan to keep running and gunning, even if it isn't the best class in the game, because that's not what's important to me.
All of these games center on the multiplayer experience, in the sense that without other people, there is no game. Even in MMOs, where it is possible to play through content by yourself, there are numerous points where it is simply not possible to win if you're alone. So interacting with other people is a big part of the games. When people are friendly and competent, this can make for an awesome game. When they are stupid or rude, well, you get the idea.
Something happened to me today that never happened to me before. Now, I have been yelled at plenty of times while gaming online for a large variety of reasons, but this was new to me. I was lectured, extensively and aggressively, on how to play my character, as I was, apparently, doing a terrible job.
On DDO, I play an elven ranger named Shenoute. The ranger's job is, historically, to shoot things with arrows and pet animals, all the way from the original Dungeons & Dragons days. In tabletop, where a Dungeon Master is interacting with you and crafting a story on a personal level, rangers can have all kinds of uses. Their ability to commune with nature, be invisible, and shoot people is rarely questioned. But when D&D hits the MMO platform, the tactics change. Thinking creatively is not important here; you must always be the biggest, baddest killing machine (or healer) possible or otherwise YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG.
The way I play Shenoute, I pretty much live on my bow. I shoot arrows at monsters. I try to manage how monsters hit my party, because I see them before everyone else does, and I also try to draw fire away from other people. I am going for a particular prestige class that is basically a sniper. Why? Because I think that would be awesome. And I like playing this way. I think it's fun.
But this is not enough for some people. It was not enough for the guy who decided to call me out tonight. We were breezing through quests on the hardest level with the greatest of ease, and halfway through a long quest, he turned around and started tearing into me. Why do you use a bow when everyone knows they suck, he asked. Ranged is crap, you need to switch to melee. Stop shooting at things and melee. If you don't want to melee, then why are you here? Why are you taking up space being useless? Oh, 'you want to have fun', whatever.
For this person, it was not enough that we were doing well and enjoying ourselves individually. He seemed to have every sundry detail worked out to exacting specifications for how it should be done, and any deviation is useless and offensive. He had to turn around and start accusing me of messing everything up for everyone. Naturally, I am perturbed by these kinds of people, for whom playing a game is a mechanical process with rigidly defined rules, for whom it is a matter of clockwork and machine-like efficiency. It doesn't matter if they actually succeed in this or not, so long as they think this way. Seeing someone like me, whose character has been haphazardly designed for maximum coolness and funtime rather than to beat the game at its own rules, is apparently unbearable.
I wonder if they are really having fun, or if yelling at other people and telling them how to play the game 'right' is their way of compensating for the fact that they aren't really having fun. Seeing what they are lacking, perhaps, they lash out. If that's true, it's pretty sad. I can't hope to understand why people like this go to such lengths to enumerate things that they may as well be performing statistical analysis to find the best class combinations. I really just want to have fun, so I left the party in the middle of the quest and found another one that picked up where I left off. I plan to keep running and gunning, even if it isn't the best class in the game, because that's not what's important to me.
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