Category: Gaming

Gaming Life Work
March 28, 2016

He must’ve been awfully bad at golf.

Last week, from a professional standpoint, is hard to describe without using the word “cluster.” I would probably take a mulligan on it. It’s part of why there weren’t any posts from me last week. I think I know where it all went wrong, too. Around this time last week, I forgot my thermos, you see. My thermos serves double duty as morning life-giver and lunchtime Ramen Water Measuring Apparatus. So I’m already fucked up from a lack of coffee, and I decide to go hit up the local food truck for eight bucks rather than the ramen I already have and paid a quarter for. Anyway, get home, end up with nasty food poisoning, stomach’s cramping like mad, whole nine yards.

Then we’re in bed, and we hear the dog barf, not hard since he sleeps beside the bed about a foot from my ear. I’m trying very hard not to throw up in the first place, dog isn’t helping, Diana goes and cleans it up. In the middle of cleaning it up, she knocks over a glass in the kitchen. I hear it roll to the edge of the table, then fall off. This thing detonates. It absolutely pulverized, a jet of glass about six feet in every direction. It’s after midnight at this point. I have to hold barf-dog while Diana makes an attempt at getting the glass out of the bedroom carpet. A lint roller is quite good at it, it turns out. It’s after 1 at this point, I’m still feeling very ill and need to be up in four hours, Diana is pretty much done. We decide to both take a sick day. And I don’t regret it, it was the right choice. I’m just bummed that I’m totally out of sick leave … (More) “He must’ve been awfully bad at golf.”

Gaming Life
March 21, 2016

Wouldn’t you not want to never not pass up this deal?

I saw one of the dumber attempts at deceptive advertising today by Comcast. Really, the sort of thing that makes you wonder where that “most hated company in America” title came from. In looking at internet options for the area of the house we’re looking at buying, their site gives the breakouts; you get 5Mbps for this much, 25 for this much, 75 for this much, 150 for this much…and 2000Mbps.

Wait, what? 2Gbps service? I mean, as a professional nerd, I don’t even have to look at the terms and conditions to know something stupid is being presented. For non-nerds, nothing in your house has the capability to go past 1Gbps for download. So what Comcast is doing here is listing the 1Gbps down, the 1Gbps up, and adding them up to get 2Gbps to make them look twice as good as Google Fiber, even though it’s the exact same service. This is the only one in their lineup that they present in such a manner. The others are only your download speed, and this one is download + upload.

The thing is, it’s $300 a month. It’s gigabit internet. Who are you trying to deceive, Comcast? The one demographic that immediately sees through your shady bait-and-switch, nerds that want gigabit speeds and are only going with Comcast because Google Fiber isn’t in their market yet. I’m one of those! And I’m not impressed or amused.

I played a fair bit of Cities: Skylines yesterday for the first time in a few months. The last few cities I built made use of the Unlimited Money/All Buildings Unlocked mods that come stock with the game (and a big thanks to Colossal Order for that and the Steam Workshop integration). Going back to a standard playthrough, it was rather liberating because … (More) “Wouldn’t you not want to never not pass up this deal?”

Gaming
March 15, 2016

New-U? No U.

So I finished up my first playthrough of Borderlands 2 yesterday, after about 3 weekend sessions. I have a few thoughts, and some of them are spoilers, so if you haven’t already been spoiled on a 3-year-old game, uh, watch out.

  • The Gunzerker is a ridiculously fun class. You get to play at any range, and while there are bonuses available to pistols, you’re not locked into them by any stretch. The bullet regeneration makes it feel like a whole new game, in a great example of addition by subtraction. By removing the concern of running out of ammo, it relieves a fairly pervasive stress that permeates the whole game, particularly after about the halfway point, where they throw numbers at you and start increasing quantity as well as quality of foe.
  • Mal in Eridium Blight gave me a pistol called the Fibber. There are a lot of variants of this gun, as is the Borderlands way. I got a hell of a variant, though. It’s a pistol, but it shoots a very slow moving blast of pellets like a shotgun. In my case, they’re also slag rounds, and the damage output is in the area of 8-10k per round at a time where SMGs are doing 200-400 damage a round, and shotguns are doing maybe 3k. Point-blank, this thing was absolutely lethal. It took care of the Jack fight, which I could tell would be a hell of a fight if you came in underpowered, in well under a minute. For that matter, it took care of every boss fight from the moment I got it onwards pretty much by itself, or gunzerking with another slow projectile weapon, just making a wall of sluggy slaggy death.
  • I have some gripes with the use of death as a plot device
… (More) “New-U? No U.”
Gaming
March 11, 2016

I’m probably bad at StarCraft, too.

So I saw the post yesterday on reddit on how Google’s AlphaGo AI beat a world-class Go player for the second consecutive time. This is a big deal given that Go has a rather intractable nature, it’s as much felt as analyzed at the top level. It also reminded me that I tried to learn Go like a year ago.

While I understand the rules, the aim of the game, and more or less how to score it, I’m missing something rather important, which is understanding the context of why I would want to, or not want to, make a particular move. How to defend myself, how to spot an attack before it gets out of hand. I’m so bad at this part of it.

For reference, the ranking system in Go starts with 30 Kyu at the bottom of the tier, it counts down as you get better, to 1 Kyu, then there’s 1 Dan, and it starts counting up. So 30 is the bottom, to be clear.

According to this Go AI, I am 32 Kyu. That’s like, bizarro world bad. I’m that goddamn bad. The game is spotting me 4 turns, and I still blow it most of the time. I was twice given four black stones at the start of the game and lost by 89.5 and 88.5 points. To compare, it would be like if you were playing basketball, and you were given 40 points at the start of the game, then lost 129-40.

I am 8-23 with an average play of 32.1 Kyu. I mean, it’s better than the Sixers. But it would be like if the Sixers were still this bad against, like, an elementary school. I don’t actually know at what age the average Go player was this bad. Five? Probably.

What … (More) “I’m probably bad at StarCraft, too.”

Gaming
March 7, 2016

Unwinding on Pandora

For about a month now, I’ve been telling myself that I want to pick up a new free-to-play MMO. I knew most of the usual suspects, and that they wouldn’t really do what I wanted. I did download the fan-service MMO known as TERA, and I was showing Diana each of the characters and classes you could be while laughing my ass off. She, however, was the most pissed I’ve ever seen her about a video game.

I had another abortive search yesterday, not ready to go into the clunky mess that is EQ1. Landmark is dead, never having made it out of Early Access. I was getting a bit irritated, honestly. So I decided to deconstruct what it was that I was after. Interesting combat, not too grindy, good progression, lots of loot.

Probably just as important, I had to consider what I didn’t actually want from an MMO. I can’t play anything that needs a daily, or even weekly, commitment. Simply not enough hours in the day right now. I’m not actually doing this for the social aspect. Or, more precisely, I’d rather be social when I feel like it, and solo the rest of the time.

It turns out, the game I was looking for was Borderlands 2.

It really does scratch the particular itch I had. For being one of the go-to examples of the “loot grind,” there’s actually pretty much no grinding required, you can outpace the main story just by doing the side quests in a timely manner. It’s got nearly unlimited replayability, with lots of New Game Plus options. Multiplayer is opt-in for drop-in play. And it’s ready for me whenever I get back to it. It’s not free, but I’ve had it for ages and it never really stuck before. This … (More) “Unwinding on Pandora”

Gaming Tales From Skyrim
May 24, 2012

Tales From Skyrim, Vol. 1: Farilon’s First Day

17th Last Seed, 4E 201:

My name is Farilon, and I’ve just arrived in Skyrim’s port city of Solitude, having departed from Sunhold on Summerset Isle. I am determined to outdo my jackass of a cousin, Lathenil, who you probably know as the author of the Rising Threat series. Truth be told, he is a lying fraudster, never once in danger from the Oblivion Crisis. But that is a story for another day. I’ve arrived in Skyrim to begin exhaustive research on the alchemical properties of the local flora and fauna, and from this research provide practical formulae from commonly available materials. I do not intend to go up against sabrecats, hagravens, giants, mammoths, or anything more menacing than a mudcrab or skeever, and I ask that you, reader, do not either. No potion is an acceptable substitute for not putting yourself in danger in the first place.

(Player’s note: Farilon is a novice alchemist with a chip on his shoulder but little experience to his name. He’s almost entirely incapable of taking care of himself; he buys his food from the inn and would not handle sleeping outside well at all. He starts the game in Solitude thanks to the “Live Another Life” mod with a starting inventory of 25 gold, 2 bottles of water, a loaf of bread, a sweetroll, a small dagger, and one set of fine clothes. Mods are tracking his hunger, thirst, sleep deprivation, warmth, dampness, basically all the things that one would really have to deal with in life. He starts with 30 Alchemy, 26 Illusion, and 21 Conjuration, but no spells. He will likely be spending some of his earnings on buying spells from the court wizard in Solitude.)

Solitude is a solid-looking town of typical Nordic architecture, the guards and the … (More) “Tales From Skyrim, Vol. 1: Farilon’s First Day”

Gaming Life Nerd Stuff
April 30, 2012

Ogre Game Labs: A Proposal

(This is intended for one person, really, but I thought I’d put it on here so you all could see a new project I’m wanting to work on and maybe express some interest.)

Myself and several other members have a particular interest in designing games, and enough new online tools have emerged recently that I want to pursue the thought of an extension of the OGREs. The Ogre Game Labs would be something a little different from a traditional chapter, as membership in it would be as temporary or permanent as the OGRE choosed, though they would need to first be OGREs to make use of the Game Labs.

The Ogre Game Labs has a few immediate goals and a few stretch goals. Immediate goals are:

  1. Provide a resource for game designers to get support in the designing of their game, through (mostly online) playtesting, consulting with other game designers, working with people that have experience in online game designing tools such as Vassal (www.vassalengine.org), Roll20 (www.roll20.net), and Magic Workstation (www.magicworkstation.com).
  2. Provide a way for gamers to get involved at the ground level of new games and designers/design teams. They can find a game concept that’s of particular interest and volunteer to playtest games, or find a group with a similar schedule. One resource will be that all OGREs will be able to set their availability by day of the week, and this will be public. By joining the Game Labs you opt-in to being contacted by designers who are available when you are.
  3. Answer some basic questions on copyright law as it pertains to card, board, and video games. Not legal advice but links to useful resources on how you are protected (and not protected) as a game designer.

Some stretch goals are:

  1. Provide connections to artists, graphic designers,
… (More) “Ogre Game Labs: A Proposal”
Blogging Fragrance Gaming Life
December 4, 2011

First World Dilemmas

My creative impulses are dragging me all over the place. I’ve got about a half-dozen projects I want to work on and I’m paralyzed with indecision. Maybe writing them down will help. In no particular order, I want to…

– Get started on the perfume I’m making for Eve.
– Play the hell out of some Skyrim.
– Make something in FL Studio. I don’t really have a hook in my head to start with, though.
– Finish configuring the netbook for emulator play. Yesterday’s testing was mixed. It’s fine with NES, Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Sega Genesis, but some SNES games are choppy, particularly Super-FX enabled ones. N64 games were hit and miss, I was getting probably 50fps on Super Mario 64 but it choked up a big hairball on Goldeneye and Hot Wheels Turbo Racing. I haven’t bothered with my PSX roms. I haven’t set up Quickplay for my MAME roms yet as it’s quite involved.
– Get Quickbooks set up for Diana. She’s wanting to learn how to use it so she has another marketable skill for the future job search. The idea I had is that we can set up Shooting Star Perfumes as the business to learn with. It might get us back into making our own stuff.
– Eat the hell out of some pizza.
– Listen to some new albums that came out, particularly the new M83.
– Channel former blogging buddy Krooze L. Roy and review some old video games. I hope he reads this some time, because I miss the hell out of his writing, and I still want him to message me some time about Amplitude on PS2.

And even out of so many tempting options, the combination of pizza and Skyrim is a siren’s call I … (More) “First World Dilemmas”