Month: December 2008

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Промоакции для игроков не только в шутерах — воспользуйся промокодом Vavada от наших партнеров и получи бонусы, которые подарят азарт и атмосферу, сравнимую с игровыми победами.

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Ozzie’s in a pickle!

Guess what game I bought myself for an early holiday gift? The title should give it away, more than likely. It’s making my MMORPG vacation due to traveling on work so much less painful.

Much geek love for this finally coming to portable. This, Secret of Mana, and Earthbound were my all-time favorite SNES games growing up. I’ve very nearly bought one of those emulator kits for my DS simply so I could play these games. With this release, I see the possibility for Secret to follow (Children of Mana was horribly disappointing) and perhaps, dare I dream, Earthbound. Ness, Randi, and Crono are the three kings of RPG history…

Comic Book Bleg

I have a few long-boxes of comic books I want to get rid of, mostly from the 1990s. Is there an orthodox way of doing so in this modern digital age? Ebaying one at a time, or even in batches, seems like a lot of work for limited return. Swinging by the local comic shop seems like very little work for almost no return. Our audience seems like the sort that must have encountered this problem sometime.

Oh, and have you seen comic book legends revealed? That one’s for you, Hudson!

: Zubon

Efficient Trolling

Arnold Zwicky blogs at Language Log (and if you read only one linguistics blog, it should probably be Language Log). Earlier this year, he wrote about caring for his late partner Jacques. Jacques had brain cancer, and the best treatment available only moved him from impending death to inevitable dementia, an Alzheimer’s-like decline a decade down the line. Arnold spent twelve years caring for him.

This appeared on a linguistics blog because of Jacques’s particular problem: avoidance of evidence that he was in California. I encourage you to read the whole thing. He could read normally, but he could not consciously process the word “California” if it implied that Jacques himself was in California. For him, license plates were blocked, news reports were garbled, and postcards were illegible, but only the parts implying that he was in California. National news that mentioned California would have been fine; you could see those anywhere. His brain was effectively reading ahead, recognizing the word and the context, blocking it from his conscious awareness, and then rationalizing why the word was not there.

Prof. Zwicky has some comments about similar dementias. Others in the comments share their stories about caring for family members and their cases of implicit and explicit awareness. The dialogue draws out more details. It is a heart-rending account of loss.

And then one commenter tossed in, “TL;DR” Five characters, and I wanted to track the IP to put a brick through someone’s window or skull.

: Zubon

The Eregion Chapters

I am really digging the Mines of Moria expansion for Lord of the Rings Online, and I have barely scratched the surface.  I started as a level 48 Captain, which got me a little worried.  Turbine seemed to sense the need for more intermediate content and created Eregion (level 48-53).  This got Ravric, Foe of Night up to level 51 with a crit-monster legendary halberd, Meticulous Owl.  The quest design in the first Mines of Moria region is absolutely fantastic, and it truly shows how masterful Turbine can be. Continue reading The Eregion Chapters

Reading – The Lost Art

First off, I’d like to say I blame WoW for this. As a player who played it for three years, I know what I’m talking about. WoW caters to entry-level players, and not reading quest text in WoW was par for the course – in fact, there’s an option to make it display instantly so you can close it right away, and most did. There’s one quest that even mocks this trend, by saying in the quest text “Blah blah you’re not even reading this anyway”. As an Old School(tm) Quester, back in the days of Everquest, you had to read the text carefully. Those devs were devious in their writing, and the hint for the quest was likely buried deep in the words spewed by the NPC. (They relished in this, they told me several times) This said, I miss the days when people would at least try to figure things out for themselves. I took the week off last week and got a good bit of playtime in on the Lord of the Rings expansion. The quests are well written, simple, and literally lead you around the land, telling a story, with multiple quests usually having you kill in the exact same area. There was only one item in days of questing I couldn’t find from reading the text (which was a paragraph or two at most). From the advice channel, you’d think you needed Indiana Jones to find the target. And even worse, you’d see the same question mere seconds after the last one was asked, and you know that person had to be in the zone at the time.

I wonder if they drive around town shouting out of the window “Hey, where is the Taco Bell?” to passers-by.

Introduction to the Kingdom

My occasional references to Kingdom of Loathing seem to miss many, so this is your briefing. Kingdom of Loathing is a silly browser-based fantasy adventure game with a limited number of turns per day. It makes mocking or ironic use of the familiar computer RPG tropes, and most of the game text is humor-based. The graphics are stick figure-based. Over time, it has developed a loyal following, an active economy, and a sort of meta-game developed by/in cooperation with the community.

You pick one of six classes: melee (Seal Clubber, Turtle Tamer), ranged (Accordion Thief, Disco Bandit), or mage (Pastamancer, Sauceror). A Sauceror might protect himself with a Jalapeño Saucesphere and attack with a Saucegeyser, while a Seal Clubber uses Musk of the Moose Ox to find enemies to beat down with his Lunging Thrust-Smack. The three types of classes each lend themselves to different play strategies.

Your goal is to save King Ralph XI, who has been imprisoned by the Naughty Sorceress. Along the way, you level up by completing quests like killing rats at the Typical Tavern, making a Bitchin’ Meat Car, or helping the Deep Fat Friars. Once you save the king, you can hang about and mess with whatever you like (content keeps going), or you can Ascend and start over. Ascending lets you make one skill permanent, and you can get your stuff back (eventually) from Hagnk’s Ancestral Mini-Storage.

Along the way you will fight monsters like filthy hippies, chowder golems, vampire clams, zmobies and zobmies (at The Misspelled Cemetary), and spooky gravy fairy ninjas. You might stab/club them with the ridiculously huge sword, shoot them with a bubblewrap crossbow, or channel your pasta spell through a Gnollish slotted spoon.

It might be worth checking out the wiki for more silliness. You will want that link anyway, because it is probably not possible to reach and defeat the Naughty Sorceress without some spoilage.

: Zubon