Portal!

I just beat it. For a puzzle game, it has the best damned sense of pacing I've ever seen. I even found myself reveling in the jumping puzzles. Me! Enjoying a jumping puzzle! It's freaking unheard of. But I did, and then I was taunted by an hilariously insane AI as I blew her apart with her own rockets and finally got to the end credits, which has a song by Jonathan Coulton. That's the same Jonathan Coulton we discovered last year. I love when there are little connections like that.

It's so satisfying to actually complete a game - I haven't beaten a game entirely in way too long. It comes with the territory of playing an MMO and more open-ended games, but damn does it feel good to complete something.

Now, to complete the achievements....

Poor Blood Zombie

So, as requested and because I love blabbering on and on about it, there's a lot more to say about Hellgate: London.

The first big issue is the subscription service. A lot of the community isn't happy with this. The question of subscription is actually why I took a long break from keeping up with the community over at Hellgate Guru - I loved it at first but after about six months, there wasn't a lot of new press releases left to discuss so everyone just started fixating on the subscription issue, which got old fast.

Basically, everyone who buys the game gets the full game. Full single-player mode, and the ability to play online on the same servers as everyone else. Basically, you get everything you did with Diablo II, except with supposedly better anti-cheating measures and not having to deal with Bnet. Online, though, is where the subscribers (Elites, I think is the term they're going to use) get extra goodies. For one, free players get only three character slots per account - kind of annoying since there are six classes with more slated for eventual release. Elite players get lots more, not sure how many. Elites also get slightly bigger bank spaces. Someone in the game is going to get communal stashes accessible by all their characters - whether this is going to be everyone or just subscribers is still up in the air, as far as I've read.

Beyond that stuff, I think most of the difference between free players and Elites comes from expanding content. HGL will have expanding content. Eventually they plan on introducing at least three new classes, upping the level cap, introducing new zones, new loot, etc., and only subscribers will have access to this. This seems to be the main advantage of paying monthly, along with "Elite gear", which will supposedly look cooler but not be functionally any better than what everyone else can get.

As far as I can tell, if you don't plan to play online, there's no reason to subscribe. Though if you never play online, it's unknown if you'll ever have access to the post-release content. There's talk of releasing it eventually in expansion-pack-esque products, but that's all hearsay at this point. It's also unknown what will happen if someone subscribes for a long time and then decides to stop for a while - we don't know if you'll lose access to some zones/gear/classes/whatever or not, so how they're going to handle that really needs to be clarified. I'd say this is their main weakness right now - more the vagueness of their subscription model rather than its existence.

The other beef people seem to be having is the level design and randomization - they complain that there isn't a lot of variety. Granted I didn't get to play the beta as long as others but I was actually pretty impressed with the random level generation and the variety of level terrain templates. It's not WoW, but it's about what you'd expect for a game set almost entirely within London - you've got your dank sewers, your dank catacombs, your burned-out cityscapes, and the occasional hell-rift (the walls in hell look phenomenal, by the way; it looks like hot lava cooled around bones and skulls that had been pressed into it). Then there are some great static zones, which I'm pretty sure are the same every time and aren't randomized.

These are the major set pieces of the game, and mirror actual sites in London - seeing the British Museum was really cool, even though I was being chased by Emperor G-something and his hordes of demonic Goro-impersonators. I think there are going to be some cathedral settings too, though I'm not sure which one they'll be modeled after. Anyway, the level randomization is well-executed as far as I can tell (except for one time where I got a map whose only tunnel to the next zone was blocked by a giant flaming subway car), and while you're not seeing the variety of tilesets as you would in a true MMO, the terrain is a lot more varied and interesting than in Diablo II, and I didn't even get to see past Act I in the beta.

So far, I'm extremely excited. I'm not hugely keen on the idea of spending $10/month to get all the eventual content the game will have to offer, but I have to say I like that there will be expanding content. Plus, when the devs post in the fan forums that people should play the game without subscribing for a few months before making the decision, I think they at least have a pretty good attitude about it.

Diversifying

So for the last couple months, most of what I've been playing has been Command and Conquer 3 and the biggie, WoW. Together (mostly WoW, to be honest) they've eaten up most of my fairly ample gaming time. A little Okami here and there, and a nostalgia-filled play-through of Warcraft I & II, but not a whole lot of variety. That does seem like it's going to be changing.

Aside from starting to edge towards WoW-burnout and wanting to stave that off, there are far too many good titles to ignore. I broke down this afternoon and bought the Orange Box. I don't know why it's orange, but it has Portal and Episode 2. Portal has been recommended to me by more people than I can actually remember at this point, and anything that Yahtzee actually can't come up with an insult for is at least frightening and at most promising. Plus, I need to figure out what the hell all these references to cake and companion cubes are all about.

Which reminds me - anyone who'd like a copy of Half Life 2 and/or Episode 1, let me know - thanks to the Orange Box I, like Andy, now have a spare copy of each.

Heck, even C&C3 has me excited again - Generals may have been very far astray from the series to that point, but C&C3 brings it back and does a pretty good job with the storyline, enough that I'm actually excited to find out what happens next. It'll probably get shelved for a while after I beat the single-player campaign, but that's what happens with me and RTS games - I'm not much for multiplayer of that sort.

But the game I'm really excited about is Hellgate: London, the NDA for which has finally been lifted. I managed to get invited to the beta fairly late into it, unfortunately, and have by this point been invited six times, four times to the US one and twice to the EU version, so if anyone would like a beta key just let me know - only problem being that the servers go down on Friday. Anyway, I started off and I was a bit skeptical, what with somewhat disappointing performance on my machine and the fact that I'd given up waiting excitedly for this game almost a year ago, which was almost a year after I first got excited about it.

But I've been pleasantly surprised ever since. The gameplay is fast-paced and a very pleasant change from what I've been doing lately, plus it has the authentically capitalistic instant gratification of Diablo. Loot galore, and lots of shiny things to keep you occupied. There's even a crafting system in place to augment existing items and built new ones, all of which require a variety of items, which you obtain by breaking down unwanted items. And since I'm a packrat who loves collecting resources and reagents, hoarding all the runic shards and tech components has me extremely happy.

So normally I'd say you should all go out and try the demo, but I hear that it's actually worse than the beta and is quite crappy. The beta itself is still somewhat buggy. I don't know what's normal for a beta, but this seems pretty status-quo so I'm not exactly worried. Hopefully it'll be improved substantially in the next week before release, and I know that at least one big patch is on its way. I've already pre-ordered it and I'm still happy about that, now I just hope it gets here on time. It looks to be damn fun. So far it isn't perfect, but if you liked Diablo, you'll like this too. Ooh, plus, there's one class that plays best from a first-person point of view which is quite interesting. So at the moment: flawed but extremely fun and promising. If I'm allowed, I'll say more after the patch.

And good news, everyone! I get to stop bitching about the school not giving me benefits - starting January 1, I get more hours and benefits, which includes the ever-popular health insurance. Everything else in my life is pretty damn dandy too, so huzzah and good night to all!

Terry Jones!

Last night I went up to the Cities to hear a talk about life in the Middle Ages by none other than Terry Jones. Now I like medieval history to begin with, and when it's presented a Monty Python member, it's even better. His history is also pretty good - most of his methodology seemed quite strong, and I'm willing to chalk the weak points up to the fact that he was limited to a 45-minute talk to a group that wasn't all history students or scholars.

He's a very engaging speaker with a hilarious slideshow, including a painting from the 14th century of someone reaching up through a crack in a platform and pulling down a magistrate's underwear. Hilariously uncharacteristic of Middle Ages art, though of course his point was that it wasn't all that uncharacteristic. Nor were people who lived in that time the benighted, ignorant rubes that we commonly think of them as (at least, not all of them). All in all, a very good and informative presentation. Plus, really damn funny.

Also they had a trio playing late medieval/early baroque songs, followed by a group of Gregorian chanters. I noticed that they all had little hard leather folders for music in their hands, but that they weren't open, so I hoped for the best. And after a few pretty well-done chants, they marched out, singing the song from Holy Grail, and hitting themselves in the face with their books. It was stupendous.

My most recent finds

Someday, perhaps, I'll have more of my original material to post here (aside from my ramblings and Pirate Raid reviews, that is), but until then it's a good a venue as any for some of my recent Worthy Internet Specimens.

First is fullyramblomatic.com, a blog much like mine only funnier, filled with more content, and slightly cluttered with ads by Google. Also, it's written by an irate British man, which I only wish I could claim to be. From what I can tell his reviews are pretty dead-on: I haven't played all the games he's reviewed, though I still need to get to that Bioshock demo I have. They're all hilarious, though, and the one about Peggle at least is pretty much dead-on. Hillary and I played that for about three hours without really realizing it, and that was the DEMO. "Insincerely cute" is also the perfect descriptor for that game - it tries to hard to be plush and doe-eyed that it rounds the bend into boring plasticity.

My other find, brought to be me thanks to Hannah, is Brandon Bird. He's the creator of the famed Law and Order Coloring Book and that ever so amazing painting of Christopher Walken building Optimus Prime. All the nerd culture juxtaposed with classical allusions are only made better by the fact that he's actually pretty damn, good, and able to mimic several different classical and foreign styles. Plus, he has a drawing of Harrison Ford playing a Black Lotus. Win.

As we near the ends of Buffy and Angel, Hillary and I are running into more and more spoilers - extremely annoying spoilers. I also just read an article (while finding the above picture of Spike) that claims that he ruins Season 7 and is symptomatic of the bastardization of the show's entire unpopular-kids-as-heroes motif. I hope it's wrong. I also hope that most of the spoilers I read are wrong, but then they wouldn't be spoilers, would they.

And I don't normally talk about personal stuff on here but I think I will mention that Hillary and my one-year anniversary is coming up in a few days, because I'm just so damned happy about it! So there, take that my self-imposed blog-content limitations! Eat a happy anniversary, to us!

Nerd TV

Nerds do seem to be becoming more and more mainstream. I'll just assume that my Carleton's Biggest Nerd win was the herald of a bright and new era of widespread nerdlery and move on.

Watched the first episode of the new Heroes season, and before that I was pleasantly surprised by Chuck, which is conveniently aired right before it. The premise is nothing super-original, but the execution of the nerd-becomes-pivotal-government-operative plot is actually pretty darn good. The supporting cast is also quite funny, and, more importantly, has Adam Baldwin. That's right. The main character is a nerd with a spy sort-of-girlfriend played by a Russian supermodel, and gets into a car chase with Jayne from Firefly. What more could you ask for?

The Heroes season opener was good - not terrifically exciting, but good and definitely a solid setup to some new stuff. Aside from some obvious Nissan product placement, I'm definitely looking forward to more superpowered actions. There are at least two new characters, Mexican it would seem. I have my theories about them, but I'll keep those to myself until everyone's seen it.

The space game I mentioned before progresses; I think the different cultures/empires and ships are the next step.

Apparently both Adam Baldwin and Nathan Fillion are in Halo 3? Wackiness. Still, nothing trumps Command and Conquer 3's cast.

Work, pirate raid, and a few projects

Greetings from the library, where I sit at my desk and manage my multitude of matriculated minions. Actually there are only two of them, but at least I have minions. Being an Evening Supervisor is pretty relaxed, which is good; the only downside is that three times a night I have to go around the entire building and count the number of people, divvied up by various areas. It's for "usage statistics" or something frivolous and corporate like that. My theory is it's to keep me from doing nothing but sit at my desk and surf the intarwebs for six straight hours, so it might actually do me a favor. It's a decent amount of walking.

The search for a second job is still a big fat zilcho, though as usual I still have a few leads left to explore. I am taking it at a kind of leisurely pace, because let's face it - getting rejected 8+ times in a week would be kind of bad for the ego, even if it's just because most places don't seem to be hiring at the moment. I blame the economy, or something.

More shenanigans have been borne of WoW: one of our buddies was quitting for Tabula Rasa (which looks more interesting than it has any right to, from an I-can't-afford-it standpoint), so we gave him a farewell Pirate Raid. I think my writeup came out pretty well. There are even Pokémon jokes at the end, and overall it's at least marginally accessible to people who don't fritter their time away online excessively. It actually made one of my guildmates ask if I did this kind of a thing for a living. Nerd commentary? Please, be a real profession someday. Soon.

Another guildmate and I are in the early stages of designing a browser-based space strategy game. Think the Fleet Game, only with less nobody-wants-to-play-it-itude. And computer-based, like it would have needed to be. We're looking at a pretty standard planetary expansion model, with technology and ships and whatnot - nothing revolutionary, but a chance to take our own stab at the genre and for him to learn a new programming language (Ruby Rails, I think? Maybe just Ruby). I'm not going near that end of things. We're in the early design stages, but I'm pretty excited, so perhaps expect more about it in the future!

No beer reviews because my booklet from the event is at home. Maybe that'll be impetus to post again before another three weeks go by.

Verily, I have returned to the Inter-webs!

Prithee, forgive my long and no doubt arduous truancy in furnishing mine blog with new articles for your purveyance! Good Sir Spudler anticipated my ambitions by a matter of hours and, in response, I hereby purvey to you, my kind audience, this next installment of this most humble serial. First, a moving picture!



And now, some actual content. I moved into my apartment in Northfield, MN about a week ago, and have been settling in. It's a bit weird to be finally entirely on my own, but I think I'm handling it pretty well, if a bit belatedly. I'm neither starving nor covered in my own filth, and scurvy is held at bay by fruits. I'm pretty sure bananas and grapes help stave that off, right? Anyway. The apartment is nice, if a bit slanty, and I've managed to procure a good internet connection. I got the entire 1.8gig Bioshock demo in under and hour. It was awesome.

I have, perhaps regrettably, been bitten by the WoW bug again and have gone back to playing. It's fun; Bronn the orc warrior is a satisfying character. Also, Reckless Ascension, our guild, is full of awesome people. We also do PVP raids on the Alliance capitals sometimes, and I took it upon myself to be an incredibly nerdy photojournalist at some of these raids.

The first was a spontaneous raid on Stormwind in response to a couple Alliance guys trying to bust into Orgrimmar: To Stormwind!

The second was a world tour on RA's first anniversary. We killed most of the Alliance towns in the world, a couple of them twice, and ended up actually killing both of the leaders in Darnassus. Sweet zombie jesus, I'm a nerd!

So a few night ago my old roommates (sans Cary, who is sadly in NY) and John and Hillary all came over and we watched the new TMNT movie. It was ok; they did a good job of developing the Leonardo/Raphael conflict, but did so at the expense of, well, anything interesting involving Michaelangelo or Donatello. The CG was cool, and it was fun enough, but it wasn't great.

What WAS wonderful was that after the movie, we managed to track down a lot of cartoons from when we were young. Full episodes! Online! What will the internet think of next? So we watched some Transformers, Battletech (in which the CG looked worse than MechWarrior 2, good lord), SwatKats, and most importantly, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

I had no idea how deeply this show was ingrained into my memory. I still knew all the voices subconsciously, somewhere, to the point that I felt like I'd heard each of them in other shows since then. For a couple of the voice actors that's almost certainly the case (I think one's in SwatKats, actually), but the deja-vu was uncanny. So we watched a couple episodes of that, got all nostalgic, drank some spiced mead (thank you, Brandon!) and then headed to bed. It was a grand night.

NEXT TIME, PROBABLY: That beer-tasting I went to about two months ago and meant to blog about!