<3 Gaming

Barnes and Noble recently had a nice little clearance sale going on so I thought I would pick up a book or two… one thing led to another, and I wound up spending about $40. Weee!

Mmmmmmmm, SciFi/Fantasy

The list (for those who can’t decipher the photo) follows from top to bottom:

• Children of the Mind by Orson Scott Card (actually this book was given to me by my father in law who picked it up in a thrift store, which just so happens to be a great place to find really cheap books!)
• Uninvited by Justin Musk
• Lord of Bones by Justine Musk
• Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clark
• Zoe’s Tale by John Scalzi (This series of books is amazing!)
• Dreamsongs Volume II by George R. R. Martin
• The Complete Sherlock Holmes (leatherbound) by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
• NEXT by Micheal Crichton

Almost all of these books were under $5 with the exception of the Sherlock Holmes collection. I am really excited to start reading Justin Musk’s books since I have been reading her blog for quite a while now. She has great advice on there for anyone who is interested at all in writing or learning the process.  The rest should be fairly well known to an avid Scifi/Fantasy reader, or at least to me, with the exception of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell which apparently won a Hugo a few years  back.  So it must be rather enjoyable!

Now to find some time to read them between games of Starcraft 2…

Like many I have been consuming hours and hours of YouTube Starcraft 2 beta videos. Specifically HDStarcraft & Husky Starcraft, who are probably the best two commentators on YouTube for SC2B. Each of them have tons of videos that are not only informative, but also genuinely fun to watch. Anywho, after a few weeks of dedicated refreshing of my inbox/battle net account, and these hours on YouTube someone up there saw fit for me to get a beta key! Actually it was my former college roommate, but he is kind of tall! I had held back from making a post about any of the SC2 beta before this solely because I had only the viewing pleasure of these commentators but now I feel like I can really give a good and brief “Saritor” spin to the way the beta has been for me.

A few things happen when you log on to battle.net for the first time aside from the obligatory pants wetting from excitement. You are asked to pick what you think your skill level is going to be (Total noob? Check!) and wind up playing ten preliminary games to get yourself placed in to some league. I have to admit, that I even surprised myself by getting placed in the silver league, when I expected to end up in copper or bronze. Let us hope I can hold my own while sticking to it.

Solo games are very interesting, and extremely competitive already. The biggest challenge for me so far has been learning how to maintain macro on as large of a scale as is required by SC simply because I am used to the more micro intense Warcraft 3.  Multi-player games seem quite the opposite (2v2s are all that is available at the moment). Most of the time they just feel like gimmick games with suiciding partners and poor matchmaking/one-sidedness. Its probably because I haven’t finished my preliminaries and due to the low number of players in beta, but RT feels way too much like the plague of WC3′s RT.  Many players just join games to sabotage themselves or try to do something very stupid, and it all is very unsuitable for my tastes. I approach the game with a “want to learn” attitude most of the time, and it is damn near impossible to know what you could have done to improve your game when your teammate tells his SCVs to kill his command center and then go rush your base. This is why I have mostly stuck to 1v1s. I really can’t say much about the 2v2 arranged team games, since most of the people I play with also like to 1v1, so we just 1v1 each other.

As far as the rest of battle net goes, many people seem to be disappointed in the lack of features it has (ie, chat channels), but at this point I don’t think this is the concern of Blizzard and so I have just put my opinions on the matter on the back burner. The system that is currently in place, though lonely at times is not really terrible and its plain to see that it is also not the final product. Probably one of the things I am most excited about, custom map making, hasn’t even been the focus of the beta yet, and who knows if it even will be. Though from the persistent internet fan base who have been keeping us up to date with Galaxy (the new “language” for SC2 map making) it seems like it will be better than ever. The distribution method seems to be minimally in place and I can’t wait to see that once it goes live too.

So if you feel like stomping a noob into the ground and you are in the SC2 beta please feel free to message me I am saritor.subc on battle net. I am usually around in the evenings and am always accepting 1v1 challenges!

So in an effort to consolidate all my various web presences back under one host you will notice I have redirected my old blogger site to this one. I rather like the very small theme. It keeps things nice and tidy! Also a list of my projects will end up on the projects page eventually as they are completed.

Just some food for thought…

According to this WoW.com article. Blizzard is in the works of potentially mandating authenticators on all World of Warcraft accounts. To be honest, I really like the authenticator idea. I even have the app on my iPhone and use it.  I find it to be a great extra measure of security for protecting my account info regardless of my amazing ability to not navigate to every fishing website messaged to me in game.  The only issue I see with a mandatory authenticator is that they do not soley bind to a WoW account, but it is something that your battle.net account uses as well.  What about all those people who are going to buy Starcraft 2/Diablo 3 that don’t play World of Warcraft?

Perhaps they will give a free authenticator away with the purchase of each game, and pray that it doesn’t get lost.  Hopefully Blizzard will make a strong attempt to get the authenticator application on more mobile platforms before they make a move to do this since in my humble opinion it seems to be the most reliable method of not having it stolen by the dresser goblins who also steal my socks.  After all, my iPhone never leaves my sight!

Lots of neat things have been eating up my time lately, just thought I would share a bit of the progress I have been making on them since it has been rather quiet around here lately.

PARPG:
I  may not have mentioned this here yet, but I recently became a full fledged developer on the open source indie game, PARPG (working title). It is an isometric 2d RPG set on a post apocalyptic earth. It is currently in super early development stages, and I really do mean super early. Mostly tons of back-end decisions and coding are in the works. Probably the two biggest undertakings (in the programming department) at the moment are the design and implementation of our questing engine as well as the restructuring of the limited GUI code we have right now so that its more modular. If anyone is interested in checking it out we should hopefully be releasing a tech demo of the game in late December I would guess, but depending on development speed it should be out this winter at the least.

I joined the project back in August of this year and it has been quite a learning experience so far. Who advancing your python skills through game development would be so enjoyable?

Subcreation:
Subcreation is also in the process of a bit of change. Currently I am working on getting us a blog up an running and fully integrated with our forum software. Currently I am working on translating the design of the forums over to the blog so that it is a seamless end-user experience and that should hopefully be up and running in another week or two.

The idea behind it is to get some of our more prominent community members to start blogging about their gaming experience’s from a Subcreation PoV, you know the whole “better gaming through intelligence” motif. Perhaps it will be successful, perhaps it will flop. Who knows until we try!

Kingdom Hearts 2:
Holy marvelous mickey batman! I started playing KH2 over this last weekend and so far after a couple hours of play time I have to say I have been completely sucked in by this series. Square may have been slacking off on the story end of the Final Fantasy franchise, but I would say that KH is picking that slack up and piling on even more awesome. Granted I am only a few hours into the game, but so far the setting is excellent, the mystery is fantastic, and the longing to keep playing even after you should have retired for the night is very high. Its almost like a great book you just can’t put down. (/me makes a mental note to go out and pick up the 358 2 days, and RE: Chain of Memories installments of the series.)

I should also be posting the Cowboy Bebop update soon to the anime guide as well, I just have been too preoccupied to sit and watch the movie myself! All in due time.

So over the last couple weeks or so Aion was released to much anticipation. I myself having vowed to not play another MMO ended up succumbing to my darkest desires of social gaming and bought a copy. Why oh why dear gaming gods did you let me do this? Blagh!

Anywho, after purchasing and installing the game, I have hardly done much else besides play the game in my spare “alone” time. Which by the way has also been drastically wtfpwn’d by the addition of a new family member seen here. Bringing the total dog count up to two, and the total amount of time spent being mauled by love filled puppies, to double whatever it was, surely a large amount of time though. <3 Puppies!

Back to Aion! So of course I pick a cleric as my class, healing archetypes are always my poison and why should this game be any exception? The first thing I notice is that Aion is AMAZINGLY BEAUTIFUL! Its tons of eye candy around every corner and the musical score to back it up is surprisingly refreshing for a fantasy based nerdgasm… er, game. At one point I believe I even made the comment to a friend that the combat music in a particular zone sounded distinctly like Sonic the Hedgehog which was completely unexpected and pleasant. Other than that the game feels very much like the now ingrained MMO experience I had playing WoW and the WAR beta. You have zones, you gain levels, you collect boar intestines for rewards and money. Pretty much anything you have done in a previous MMO you do here now. There are a lot of neat little things that are fun, such as each spell having its own unique and very distinct animation that make the game enjoyable but there are the annoying things as well. Such as gathering, something that starts out as fun and interesting and then quickly turns into boring and monotonous. Level 25 as it stands is essentially the stepping stone from the game being largely PvE and quest based to becoming more of a PvP run world. The grind (and yes its a grind at times) to 25 is almost too much of a chore if you are doing the content solo, but if you manage to pick up a leveling buddy along the way, or you have lots of patience (that one is me) then content just flies right by. The following should be used as a summary of the 1-25 levling experience:

1-10: Fun new and learning.
10-20: Wings!!!! Also questing is fairly fun and the landscape even though small is diverse.
20-25: Definitely a bit grindy at this point. You are basically holding on for the PvP which starts at level 25.

Overall though the game has been rather fun. It is nice to have something fresh to play, after five years of World of Warcraft one tends to tire of the same content over and over. Another great thing to note is that due to the Korean release a year before then coming to the North American continent definitely helped squash out the defects in game. I can’t say I have had anything really just bug out on me in my total time clocked, though I have had a couple random game crashes to the desktop. Very very few and far between though. Anywho at last it is time to try out this PvP stuff and hope that the game remains and becomes even more fun than it is on my way from 25-50. Be back on a report of me getting owned in the Abyss!

Yeah, it took me nearly seven years to get a copy of this game and play it from start to finish. Besides being Johnny Come-lately to every video game ever I still can’t help but be impressed at how good of a game it actually is. Though at least twenty people have told me so before. Here is hoping that the sequel holds true to the first in quality, but with a Tron based world how can it not be even more amazing?

Also speaking of Tron. Watch this and find a towel to mop up the drool:

For those of you who I speak to regularly you have probably already seen this but for everyone else (yeah I’m talking to you mom woo woo, go audience of one!) I have been participating in an experimental blog/class. The teacher, Ian Schreiber, happens to be a co-author on a recent text book for starting out game design students as well as a former video game programmer and game designer and is now moving into the education world. Long story short, Ian is helping introduce many people into the world and process of game design.

Admittedly, I have to say the class has been really fun, though largely non-digital in essence you can apply the same rules to ditigal games as well. The “homeplays” (aka homework) are challenging and fun, and the feedback on the forums has been excellent (sorry they are private unless you registered for the class otherwise i would post the link). I really feel like I am learning something useful! Another interesting thing, at least personally, is that so far a lot of the concepts behind game design have already been fairly obvious to me as a gamer. What is new to me is the organization behind the process. Normally if I have ever had an idea for a game the process is very cluttered and I tend to mix themes into mechanics and objectives. Ian has helped me essentially to organize my thought process. In fact recently we had to make a board game version of one of our favorite video games, and I feel I had a fairly successful idea with Super Smash Brothers. When I think about making a game now its not “oooo lets have an MMO world, but with Sims like character customization” instead the games are becoming more precisely defined such as: “oooooo let’s make an MMO world where players have the goal of X, Y, and Z. Then build some core concepts of mechanics that allow players to achieve those goals, and lets put it to this kind of theme”.

For anyone who is interested in following along in the blog definitely feel free to do so and even if you are not registered if you feel like participating in the challenges at all feel free to send me an email and I would be more than happy to work with you on them. I am sure that in the future more of my homeplays will appear here as well.

If you look out the window of your vehicle on your way into work today you may notice that there are in fact pigs flying. It all started on Friday the 19th when my wife and I decided to stop by the local AT&T store to check out the iPhone that had recently gone on sale. After about an hour in of some healthy debating, figuring, and some decent salesmanship on the part of the guy helping us, we left the store with an iPhone each and a huge phone bill for next month. It was around this time that we also saw the first delicious piece of bacon flutter off into the great blue yonder. Since then the number of flying mammals has only increased as my attachment the iPhone strengthens.

Here is a short list of reasons why this phone is now the coolest thing in my pocket.
1. A mobile SSH client
2. I now own an mp3 player
3. I pretend to wave a lightsaber around whenever the urge strikes me
5. I can check my email/weather/time of day/schedule/shop on amazon/learn Japanese
6. I can do any of the above anywhere I get cell phone reception on a tiny device that fits comfortably in my pocket.

You may guess that this is my first time owning a phone that has a feature other than just calling people and storing phone numbers, and you would be right. However I think that I held out for the appropriate length of time since the iPhone is now affordable and has basically taken the place of the Dell mini I was hoping to purchase for my new mobile computing needs (sorry Dell). With the added bonus of using cell towers for data if needed, being smaller, and having the same amount of storage… it’s definitely better.

As for the drawbacks, besides the huge cell phone bill we will have every month people are sure to call me an Apple’s consumer bitch… Also my thumbs get sore from playing tap tap revenge 2 for too long.

Sometimes I think to myself “Whatever happened to that guy I used to pwn noobs with on <insert game name here>?” More often than not the thoughts are just a passing wisp in the wind of my mind’s wandering. However today I had a conversation with a friend who made me stop and ponder more thoughtfully about it.

If I take a look back at my history of gaming I realize that a large majority of it was very social. It seems that the stigma of a gamer being typecast as the loner who sits on his computer has not ever applied to me (ok there was a short bit of time when this was true) or maybe not even the majority of current gamers. On top of that it seems that the social experiences I have had with gaming may have even furthered my desire to continue playing.

When I was twelve I lived in a small city. My brother and I were too young to stay at home by ourselves so we would be dropped off at a day care between the end of school and parents finishing work. This day care happened to be run by a woman who had three sons, the oldest of which was only a year or two older than me. This guy was the definition of cool, for me. We would spend hours watching him play Final Fantasy 3 (the US SNES version) or take turns amongst the three of us on bouts of Tekken 2. It was then that video games became something more to me than just another game. It wasn’t just the fact that the games were interesting, but I genuinely had tons of fun playing them with other people.

The next big step for me was when I hit my freshman year of college. Up to that point my gaming was still fairly social among friends who I went to school with. We would play Diablo 2 (LAN), Starcraft (LAN), or Goldeneye. With college however came the internet. A commodity previously sparse at my home due to dial-up was now overflowing from my cat5 cable eager to feed my newly built computer’s hunger.

At the time I was playing Warcraft 3, but fell into Counterstrike, Day of Defeat, and even a bit of Natural Selection. I remember campus wide CS and Halo matches, and when nothing was going on I would hop on to bnet and play some WC3 with the new friends I had made there. It was almost total immersion. Then my junior year of college came, and probably the biggest social game in history of video games was released that winter. World of Warcraft.

World of Warcraft is the best video game ever made to date. Even though now I could care less to play the game at all I say this because the game is so diverse and all encompassing that you can spend months and days playing the game, and have fun the whole time. I still manage to get sucked back in whenever a new expansion comes out. Put bluntly fun was had on large proportions, and it was with tons of other people. During my time with WoW I experienced quite a bit. I remember in Vanilla that upon reaching 60 and gearing up a bit that I somehow managed to get into the Death and Taxes with the help of a friend. At the time I had no idea of the scope of what that meant. I just knew that they were suppose to be the best guild on my server, it was only after joining did I realize that these guys were somewhat of a big deal even for WoW standards. My time with Death and Taxes taught me many things. Most importantly how important organization is in team gaming. I don’t think any of my time spent with any other raiding guild has been nearly as successful in organization as DnT was. People not only knew their jobs but were able to listen to and respond to each others actions with amazing precision. It was probably the first time I had ever felt I was in over my head yet there I was often rolling as the only druid through Molten Core progress raids and holding my own… I digress.

The realization of social gaming has become apparent in almost any video game you can pick up these days. With services like Steam and Xbox Live its almost impossible to find a game that is solitary even if it is single player. If gaming is not already a part of everyday modern life then it surely will be in the near future when you see what is knocking on innovations door. With new social gaming comes new people to play with. Sadly some of my old internet friends have become lost to the waves time, either because I have forgotten their names myself, or the only means of communication I had with them has been severed. I am grateful to have been able to play with a very diverse and fun crowd of people and hopefully will be able to continue doing so for a long time into the future.