No New Games

It's Wednesday, but there aren't any game releases I'm excited about today. There's quite a few next week, however, Harvest Moon DS being at the top of the list. I'll just have to try to be patient until then, I suppose. The release schedule really ramps up this month. Technorati Tags: Games more...

Postmortem

I had some serious fun RPing my little druidess last night. I wasn't sure how well I could pull it off. She is supposed to be misanthropic and mocking, but a bit on the tortured side (so emo!) I think I actually managed it okay. She insulted people's intelligence, etc., but it worked in the context of her delivering the prophecy for our little relic storyline. I went too far at one point I can think of. (Gel drove me to it -- she's just too much fun.) I met my goals, though: I delivered the prophecy. I established that she doesn't like to be touched. I was mockingly rude but not to the point where I drove folks off. It was good. Technorati Tags: Games Roleplaying WoW more...

NWN: Shadows of Undrentide (Completed)

It's a few years late, perhaps, but I finally finished the Neverwinter Nights second official module, Shadows of Undrentide. I was running through it because I really really (really) wanted to have a character that I built up to use in Hordes of the Underdark. Shadows hadn't really managed to captivate me before, and it didn't do much better this time, but I pushed myself on through it. The thing is, I'm not sure one should have to push their way through a game to get to the good parts. I've been trying to dissect what I felt was missing, and some of that came when I found the one part of the game that did captivate me. If you haven't played the game yet (unlikely as that may be at this date) and intend to, you might want to skip the rest of this paragraph -- this happens fairly late in the game. In the second chapter (The game consists of Chapter 1, an Interlude, and Chapter 2.), there is an ancient magical library you explore. As you reach the deepest sections of the library, you find yourself in a room with two books, one blank and one a romance-adventure of sorts. You begin to read the story and are drawn into it. You adventure your way through that small area to the end of the tale where you're presented with another story. There, the same thing happens again. Along the way, you collect a quill, an inkwell, and a little bit of information. With this at hand, you return to the library where you write your own story to capture the item you're searching for, and where you can also rewrite the endings of the two stories you explored so as to make them happier and gain yourself some companions for the task at hand. Coming to the end of this quest thread, I realized what I was missing in the rest of the module -- it was a sense of wonder. Nothing grabbed me because nothing seemed that fantastic, and the other things I've come to realize I usually grab onto -- intriguing personal motivations (PC or NPC), puzzle solving, and challenging but not overwhelming combat -- were also missing. Speaking of the combat -- I have to say that the combat in Shadows was terribly unbalanced. It's not just that it was hard, because there are ways to work with that. It was that it was uneven. I'd be mopping the floor with one thing, and then would actually have to cheat to get through another thing. We're not talking about "boss" creatures here. These were just the random things one runs into throughout a dungeon. There were things I couldn't hit. I remember one in particular, I had to roll a 19 or a 20 (both being crits with that weapon) in order to hit it. Some of this difficulty may have been from my insistence on going through as a fighter/druid, but that only explains the difficulty, not the unevenness. Before and after the creature where I had to crit to hit, I was one and two shotting some other monsters. Strategies didn't work. Using a door blocking trick helped me to not be overwhelmed by minions a few times, but that's the best it could offer (and all it should be useful for, really). The first chapter, none of this was a problem. As soon as I hit the interlude, the difficulty seemed to go up and down like mad, and I found myself frustrated more often than not. On top of this, the final creature (which should be difficult to kill, granted) was completely impossible. An examination of her actually said, "Challenge Rating - Impossible," in alarming purple letters. Even with this warning, I tried a good dozen times before I gave up and cheated. I figured out what I needed to do to weaken her, and let my henchman hold her off while I took care of it. We came out of that on the third try or so with both of us having nearly all our health and still, I found her nearly impossible to defeat. I finally turned on "god mode" and hacked at her for a good five minutes before she died. Even on a boss, it shouldn't take that long. It's not possible to have enough heal spells, potions, and bandages to survive a fight like that. From what I've read in the strategy guide and on the community message boards, it seems my finding this fight as difficult as I did was unusual, but I have that big purple challenge rating staring at me, telling me I'm not quite as crazy as I might think. Complaint the third, and last -- There are times in fights where there is a necessary strategy to defeat the "boss" creature, but no information is given regarding this. Again, this was something uneven, because there were a few conversations where critical information was passed along just fine. You'd think, with all this complaining, that I really disliked the game. That's really not true. I've quit games in the first fifteen minutes when I couldn't stand them, and I didn't do that here. It's not a bad game, but it's not a great game either, and I think that's what I expected from Bioware. It was just frustrating for me, and didn't push the buttons that I prefer in good RPGs. The first NWN campaign caught me up and it's one of the few games that I've nearly completed. (The list of games I've actually finished is incredibly short -- as is my attention span.) That being said, I did get through it and I'm about to start Hordes of the Underdark. I'm just trying to decide if I want to play a player-made bridging module between the two before I dig into it, but even playing the first half hour of it last night had me more interested than Shadows ever did. That's a little sad. Technorati Tags: Games RPGs Neverwinter Nights Shadows of Undrentide more...

What I Read

I don't remember the earliest things I read so well. I remember reading a fair amount of non fiction about whatever caught my interest. (Horses, castles, dinosaurs, wildlife, etc. I could go on, if I tried.) One of the earliest books I distinctly remember reading was Escape to Witch Mountain when I was maybe eight or nine years old. I checked it out from the school library. I was already reading voraciously then, so I'm sure there were many others. I've just lost the memory of them in the general fog my childhood memories have become. I remember a strong love for mythology and fairy tales, which is probably where my current love for fantasy comes from. That love for fantasy expanded into an interest in science fiction. There may have been some familial influence there as well. My mother is an avid reader, mostly of speculative fiction and mysteries. My maternal grandfather was the same, an avid reader and especially of speculative fiction. I remember him giving me all his cast off Asimov's Science Fiction/Science Fact magazines in my late teens and early twenties. My interest in classic literature came from a peculiar place. I was involved in musical theater, at least peripherally through my mother, through most of my childhood and teenage years. When I was in high school, Les Miserables was the rage with everyone, and I fell in love with the music and then the story. When I first heard the London cast recording (as opposed to my earlier exposure to the Broadway recording), I realized that there was more to the story than I'd heard before. Curious about how much was the invention of the composers, and how much was the original story, I dug into the book and found that I loved it. It's a difficult read. Hugo was a political writer and so he tends to go on about his politics at length -- politics that have little point of reference for a 17 year old American. His characters had so much depth and history that I really became involved, actually rereading the book after searching for a different abridgment (I still haven't managed to attack the full unabridged version) which focused more on the characters. From Hugo, I jumped to Dumas, and then (oddly perhaps) to Austen who is still my very favorite. So now, most of what I read is science fiction and fantasy. I love exploring different perspectives, and that seems to be most prevalent in speculative fiction. I've flirted with suspense and non fiction a bit, and am still actively seeking out classics that will draw me in as much as Austen and the others. Technorati Tags: Literature Books more...

Seedling

Yesterday, I applied to beta a new upcoming game, Seed. It looks like they're trying to be actually (not nominally, as is the norm) different from all the other MMOGs out there. Nowhere is this more obvious than in their decision to not have combat. This also means that there is no death, so no discussions about death penalties that mean something. The primary goal of the game seems to be information/resource gathering and management and social interaction and management. There seems to be a strong roleplayer following already. Also, the art style is unique. It looks much like a comic book with a little more depth to it (not quite the flat look that most cel shaded graphics have). The interface is small and unobtrusive in their screen shots (a series of buttons down the left side). I'm intrigued, to say the least. I was intrigued enough that I even posted in a couple of the "introduce yourself" types of threads. I've got my fingers crossed that I'll get into the beta early enough (or in such a capacity) that I can really test the game, rather than just the sort of open ended playtesting that most people think of for MMOG beta tests. Oh, in case you were wondering where the post title comes from, that's what they're (jokingly?) calling the followers of the game. It might only refer to the newer ones. I haven't quite grasped the whole gist of it yet. Technorati Tags: Games MMORPG Seed more...