<3 Gaming

Extreme fun. The Far Wilds is probably close to the order of crack on the addiction scale. Alc, linked us to this on Subcreation about a week back and I started playing (thanks to Valoren for the motivation) about a week ago. I just have to say that I am completely impressed with this game.

If you have ever played an TCG such as Magic the Gathering (awesome), Pokemon (not as awesome), or Yu-Gi-Oh (why not cut yourself?) then you will already feel on fairly comfortable turf before stepping into the fray. The game essentially plays as a mix of RTS and TCG. The objective is fairly simple. control flux points, which nets you glory points at the end of your turn provided that you control more flux points than your opponent. The first to reach the glory cap wins the game.

How it is a TCG:
You build decks. decks contain various cobminations of creatures, buildings, enchantments and spells. Four major card types help provide the diversity. Similar to the way you have color themed decks in Magic the Gathering. You can mix and match color sources as well to make cool combos. The four factions are: Slyvan, healy range types mostly, the Mountain Fold, lots of defensive abilities, the Dark Legion, a largely offensive batch of cards, and Elemental mostly control cards.

How it is a RTS:
The game takes place on a map as I mentioned above (no I am not an idiot I just thought it was worth mentioning twice :p). The map has five flux points positioned in the same place every time you play. However the terrain of the map changes randomly every time you play a new game. Terrain can come in various forms, such as deserts, mountains forests, and so on, and can actually be helpful or harmful to you while playing. For example most creatures exhibit reduced movement while traverse a mountain or forest. The strategy comes into play not only in the order in which you play your cards now, but where you place your buildings and units.

The game itself:
There are a few pros and cons to the game as with any game. It is up to the player to determine how they weigh for each. I will start with my cons since bad news is always best to be heard first.

The game client sucks. No offense developers but it really is buggy a lot of the time. Fortunately there is a second client, and for anyone who happens to get extremely addicted to the game all you need is a modern web browser and flash player installed. The browser based version of the game runs extremely well on all platforms. I tested it out on Ubuntu + FF and there was zero difference in game play. Another downside to the game is that if you are attempting to play the game for free (it is entirely possible to do so by the way) then you may end up burning yourself out on the game before you can do anything. Gold is primarily earned through placing on the ladder and winning tournaments. Sadly if you start free that means you start with the basic decks available to all players and they suck. Right now this is part of the experience I am going through. I am currently trying to either justify dumping $20US into gold purchases or maybe giving up entirely.

The good news. As I mentioned before the game is free to play for those with patience. There is also the added bonus that you get phantom cards (they have a 20 day timer on them) for use in ladder play and challenges only. The browser client does make it possible to play the game from pretty much anywhere. It would be pretty cool to see it played on. Also the community is fairly small. You can actually interact directly with the developers in game and you can quickly get to learn who the fan base is. Last but not least the game does seem to be fairly balanced. Granted if you don’t have any cards it sure makes it hard to play well in a game, but once you get a few phantoms you will be surprised at how much more fun the game becomes.

All in all I have had a lot of fun with the last week I have been playing. Its a nice challenge and a new presentation for two old but great game styles. I highly recommend anyone who is a fan of either TCG or strategy games play this a bit.

The imagination wiki should now be readable to the universe, albeit I doubt the universe cares. I started an article on my thoughts about creating a zombie MMO style game. I have lots of minor details in my head on how I would like it to work, but I find as I articulate the ideas into text there is a lot of ideas stewing in there. Anywho if you are interested keep your eyes peeled on the article as it will probably be the fastest growing one on the wiki for a while.

A new idea has been growing in the back of my mind over the last month or so. Rather than building up to why I think this is a neat project to start I am going to just come right out and tell you what it is, then do that whole justification thingy.

Put simply, I want to start a wiki (in fact it technically already exists) which contains thoughts from my brain imparted directly onto a wiki article.

At first I thought to myself how would this be any different from a blog that I (barely) post in? I think I have managed to create a couple convincing arguments, to put my plan in action. The first and foremost being that wikis really hold no concept of order unless you go about establishing it. This means that I would actually be linking articles together not based on chronology or subject matter but purely on the order in which it falls out of my head and onto the page. In fact there is not even a guarantee that will happen. All I ever will need is my trusty search button regardless of linkage. Granted you can still accomplish this somewhat with a blog but I also feel that the contents of a blog should actually be readable and cohesive. The imagination wiki does not have this constraint. I could create an article about the hostile zombie take over and how it should be converted into a concept for a new MMO (this article is happening), and move quickly on to thoughts of why there are so many species of fish found within the Congo river. Really this is the very nature of a wiki.

Will this actually be useful for me? Only time will tell, but I think that besides providing a memory map it will at least be helpful in reminding me about those ideas I had about penguins, a laptop, and…. something or other, damn you forgetfulness!

This weekend I took some time to finally move Subcreation to a new host. We have been planning the make the transition for a few months now and the fact that there have been outages occurring more and more frequently only hastened the deal.

So lets hope for much less down time now! Pretty much all the hard work is done since we have changed over to SMF and now changed to our new host. Its time to find fun things to do with the site! Or maybe go back to working on the MTG Inventory again…

It has been a few weeks now since I rolled out Ubuntu on my in-law’s new computer. Not a single phone call has been made to me yet about… well, anything. As the saying goes, no news is good news.

I’m calling the operation a success. When I actually asked them what they thought of Ubuntu the only comment was that it was pretty similar to Windows XP, minus the fact that their “My Documents” folder moved… pretty trivial.

Now the challenge is going to be how to figure out an automated process for maintaining the thing from home. SSH go!

Life continues to be busy. However most of that business is self created. I recently resubscribed to WoW, and when I haven’t been playing that I have been watching re-runs of House on USA playing catch up. Hurray for coming into a series late! However one of my recent endeavors involved setting my in-laws up with their new computer… read on if you dare!

I should probably explain that I am an avid user of both Ubuntu and FreeBSD on my home computers. In fact out of the five computers running in my home I have one Windows PC and it exists solely for gaming (<3). I even made my wife switch over to using Ubuntu since she does nothing but browse the web, check her email and chat on instant messenger. She actually enjoys using it by the way. Where does the experiment come in? Ah yes, the in-laws. They for the most part never use their computer for anything except the same tasks my wife does mentioned above. Throw in some word processing and a bit of mp3 listening and viola you have the total sum of computer activities that occur in their household (when I am not there :p).

After replacing a router, failing to get a printer to print and realizing that there was an issue with the rebooting process on the hardware I finally got everything up to my satisfaction… minus the printing. I showed my father in-law around the system, told him how to find basic stuff, left the little help menu on the task bar and made the system resemble XP’s layout as much as I could without doing major changes. He seemed to find it either as adequate and interesting, particularly the multiple desktop feature.

Now the experiment has begun, we are approaching the close of week one of in-law Ubuntu conversion and my phone hasn’t rung once yet with a problem or question. Hopefully they will find it just as useable and if things go well I will plan on converting the entire family! Mwa fwa fwa fwa…

In all seriousness though I think that Linux is particularly a great solution to the basic computer users like my wife or in-laws who share this simple feature set. It is also great to not have to deal with the anti-virus and spyware issue (yes they may exist but its rare to find them). The other added bonus is that remote administration became a hell of a lot more easier for me. I will probably follow up in a couple months just to let everyone (aka the 2 people reading this) know how Linux actually works out for them.

For the last week, plus a little more, I have been working on transitioning Subcreation.net’s forum system to a new software platform. Our old setup was horribly out of date, and not to sound mean (<3 you Alc!), but sadly the source code had been changed so much that I couldn't even find out where original code began and new code ended.... or something like that. However the biggest reason we switched over was because PunBB, which has been a very decent forum for quite a while really just seems to be heading south. They have some great software, but sadly the community has seemingly gone kaput. There are a lot of details behind what has happened there, but the short version goes something like this:

Open source forum software gets bought, continues to be open source, but starts making fundamental changes to the general “concept” of the software because a major original party leaves. Old developers fork the code because they don’t like the new direction.

As such updates are far and few between, both projects really are somewhat interdependent as is apparent on both of the projects boards, and there is a lot of not good feelings that seem to be held at least from the FluxBB side of things (the forked version).

Another big reason for the move is that Subcreation, though it is a small community, has somewhat outgrown the usefulness of PunBB. Instead of being lightweight and minimal, we needed something with a richer feature set. Mainly for features for administrators. This brought us to SMF, or Simple Machines Forums. Which basically holds a lot of logging and other administration abilities that PunBB/FluxBB just lack without heavy modification.

Anywho, so the site has officially transitioned. Though now I am in the process of weeding out kinks from the change over. However I am happy to say that the state the forums are in should be good for a while and will hopefully last us for quite some time.

Way back when I first purchased my Nintendo DS (original baby!) I felt stupid not too long afterwords because being the huge RPG fan I am the Sony PSP was looking like it had much more potential for RPGs to be made. With its classic controller scheme and the fact that the Playstation (PS1) had been the RPG king of its day I was saddened that I had caved in to the neat stylus/touchscreen combo.

The DS has really come through for us RPG players of recent though. Let me give you a list of games. This is a list of all the upcoming and current Nintendo DS games that are RPGs or variant on the RPG genre. You may notice that the grand total comes to about ninety different games. Ninety!!!! That is in fact, a ton of games. I probably own just about every decent RPG ever made for the Playstation and that total barely touches thirty.

Quality is definitely an issue here however, and the total number of good RPGs out of all of them may be much much lower, however from my small library I am willing to bet that most of the ones with the words “Square Enix” written on them are pretty damn good.

A couple of the upcoming titles that will be released this year (some this week) are Valkyrie Profile, Pokemon Platinum, and Black Sigil. All three look fairly solid in their respective ways. Black Sigil is the most appealing to me as it is the most traditional JRPG of the bunch. It almost looks like something out of RPGMaker XP. Lets hope it can stand up to the good things I have heard.

Otherwise it will become Izzy fodder.

She is vicious, trust me!

P.S. – In hindsight I probably should have called this blog <3 RPG Gaming…. oh well.

This is what I see every time I log in to my home box.

For a few hours each weekend I have been replaying the original Paper Mario, praise be to virtual console, and have been quite thoroughly enjoying it. Paper Mario reintroduced us loyal nintendo RPG lovers to a lot of the concepts that were introduced by Nintendo and Square (now Square Enix) in Super Mario RPG. Most specifically the action commands which could be performed during battle, and right before, which allowed you to deal extra damage or reduce incoming damage. Which would happen with correct timing of certain button presses. The actual story of Paper Mario is what really made the game fun however. The silliness of the paper citizens of Mushroom Kingdom coupled with the comical nature of the events in the game really make it a game you can laugh with while playing. For example, the haunting voice of Tutankoopa, or the Invincible Tubba Blubba who loves munching on ghosts both have quite amusing dialog to go with their ridiculous appearance and nature.

The sad news is that the latest game in the franchise of Paper Mario was nothing but a disappointment. Leaving out the incredible turn based combat system that held the series strong for two iterations was a complete disaster. Another thing that made me very sad was the secondary characters. The pixl’s were though part of the story, not very unique in appearance and mostly just sat in the background as a a helper. This may as well be called a platformer/action adventure game. Lets hope the next time around they can return to the formula that makes the it fun to play.

In summary:
Paper Mario – Awesome
Paper Mario: Thousand Year Door – Awesome (though I made no mention of it above)
Super Paper Mario – Crap crap crap poop crap awful bad.