I Haven't Mentioned the Game's Name For a Reason

Kill Ten Rats has the right idea. One of the more frustrating things about situations like this is that there's just not much any individual can do about it. I was tickled to see myself quoted in various places, and I'm glad I brought the issue to the attention of various folks, but that's not going to hit EA very hard. It's not like I was going to buy the game anyway (I don't have the right console, or a console at all, for that matter.) I also know too much about EA's internal structure to think that boycotting, say, The Sims is going to have any useful impact - the two products are so widely separated that no one's going to be able to correlate that kind of data. A media blackout, on the other hand - that, I like.

I will have to remember this particular product, though - I will be very curious to see what the sales are, and if this controversy sparks again around launch. I suspect it will - the internet has a very long memory.

Non-Apologies and Other Links

Apologies like this are worth less than nothing, very literally. It annoys me more to see that the people behind it still can't see the problem even when it's explicitly pointed out to them than it would if they just went on their merry way.

A real live booth babe weighs in. She uses more caps than I did, and I applaud her for it.

I love Lum's blog, and I'm always grateful for the traffic, but his commenters are... not good with topics like this.

An unemotional social media perspective on the contest and the resulting stink. I usually prefer to write pieces like that, but every now and then it's more fun to bellow at the stars.

A really good link roundup and perhaps the most succinct summary of the issue at hand: "This contest ENCOURAGES the behavior that makes cons UNSAFE FOR WOMEN. PERIOD."

I'll probably try to do a somewhat more technical analysis of this contest once my blood pressure is a little more stable.

GAHHHHHH

(Warning: Adult Language and EXCESSIVE USE OF CAPS)

I am fucking sick of working in an industry where this sort of shit makes it out into the public eye. I understand that absymally stupid ideas get floated in meetings all the time, but at a billion-dollar company like EA, you'd think SOMEONE would have the basic common sense to put a stop to a FUCKING CONTEST TO SEE WHO CAN HARASS YOUR EMPLOYEES THE MOST.

Yeah, they're booth babes, yeah, they're probably used to it. I don't care. First of all, "commit acts of lust" is NOT an acceptable way to describe "take your picture with the girl in the costume!" I've worked Comic-Con, and while there are lots of perfectly normal, well-adjusted people there, there are also a LOT of people with boundary issues, an imperfect understanding of social norms, and/or a really fucking twisted view of women. It's hard enough to maintain one's personal space - having fucking Marketing supporting the random gropage as a CONTEST does NOT HELP.

Secondly, any other women in, around, or remotely near that booth is going to have to deal with the spillover, guaranteed. I can barely imagine a more hostile work environment. I hope to hell they have an otherwise-all-male booth, or that the female employees have some good practical self-defense skills and a lawyer. *shudder*

Thirdly - Jesus, what kind of monkeys did EA hire instead of lawyers? I expect a certain casual misogyny from the Marketing department (sad to say) - sex sells, those boys know it, and they don't ever bother to think real hard about the implications of using it. But if I were anywhere near the EA booth and got my tit grabbed, I'd be on the phone to a shyster in seconds.

My God, what a stupid fucking idea. I can't decide if I'm glad I'm shut of those assholes, or if I'm sorry I no longer have a building key, because there's some nuts need kicking.

(Edited to add, apparently it's ANY booth babe, not just EA's. Lawsuit in 3, 2, 1...)

Angels: The Analysis

A few thoughts, in no particular order.

- The tutorial was quite good, with a few minor exceptions. Once or twice a step was left out that proved to not be needed by the very end, but was definitely needed in the interim to make a feature work. Other than a few of those hiccups, though, it was a very simple task to follow along.

- The bulk of the time I spent on the project was in the art. Part of this is that I'm working in Paint.net and have no particular skill or training in computer graphics, but it's still definitely a bottleneck.

- Angels is a very bad game. The projectiles are too big, the characters are too big, and there's just not enough room to maneuver to make it at all interesting to play. This isn't precisely on purpose, but I definitely don't care enough to change it. I don't actually like shooters, and so I'm not interested in trying to refine this one.

- There's something about Adobe software that consistently baffles me. I just find it incredibly cumbersome to use.

- I'm fully aware of the fact that it makes no sense that the shield appears on the angel's sword arm.

- I think my next project will be something 8-bit RPGish. That's really my area of expertise.

While I'm not going to spend much more of my 30-day trial of this software on this particular game, I am definitely interested in bug reports. Feel free to leave them in the comments!

Angels v1.0

This is my first-ever Flash game. The code is based (well, copied mostly) from the Kongregate Labs tutorial, which was excellent. I must, however, take full responsibility for the art.

Play the game here.

How to Play:

- Use the arrow keys to move up, down, and back and forth.
- Use the spacebar to shoot.
- Dodge the imps and their projectiles - without a shield, the spit will injure you, and while you can kill them with your sword, you will take damage from the acid rain.

- The floating apples will give you bonuses:
- full health
- injure all enemies on screen
- Holy shield (protects you from imp spit)
- Holy sword (allows you to use your sword safely)

- Periodically larger and more powerful enemies will appear. They will take several shots to bring down.

Analysis will follow in a subsequent post.

Of Course He's a Holy Priest

Children's Week

I did the Children's Week quests yesterday - both quests with my rogue, and the lower-level Horde ones on my belf. They haven't changed at all, but they're still a quick way to get a neat little pet and pick up a couple of flight paths if you've been lazy. I'll probably do it on my Alliance paladin as well, because... well, I have this extra ice cream, and it'd be a shame if it melted.

Checking In

I haven't posted in months not because I haven't been playing, but because I finally joined a WoW guild, and they keep me busy. It's actually a RL friend's guild, and they're a crazy bunch of roleplayers. My rogue has been raiding Karazhan pretty regularly and is wearing quite a few epics, and my Alliance paladin has been recreated and powerleveled to the mid-thirties. My belfadin has been neglected somewhat, but gets Scarlet Monastery runs when we get sick of Alliance.

I may or may not write more regularly; I haven't decided yet. Our guild is blissfully drama-free at the moment, so it's not like I have a ton of great stories to tell.

Holiday Roundup

Been playing a little of this, a little of that:

SimCity Societies: Fun for about three days, then I became bored. Haven't tried the newly-added "challenge modes" yet, but I'm not exactly captivated by the gameplay. One of the things I liked about previous SimCities was watching my city grow and change over time - in Societies, what you place is what you get. I got nine of the ten achievements by building a small town that earned a profit, letting it run at top speed while I had lunch and read for a while, then using the hundreds of thousands of dollars I'd accumulated to build the rest of the city types on the same map. The "Authoritarian" one is the only one I haven't gotten, because it's dependent on having your Sims be not upset but not overly happy, which requires some fairly specific planning. Overall, I give it a resounding "eh".

The Sims: Seems to have run its course again. I've got a lovely little town I can come back to when I feel like it, but the charm has, once again, worn off.

TR: Went to the roleplaying event on Defeat of Earth Day, which was fun, if predictably disrupted by bored players with particle effects. The clans that showed up in uniform looked damned sharp though. Played some on Resurgence Day, but missed the actual attack. Pity.

My main hit 18 and I'm nearly done with Divide - one more boss, a few CP attack/defense missions, and the instances, and I'll be on to Palisades. I think the plan will be finish Divide, finish Wilderness on Jaxon, run through Palisades, go back to Divide on an alt, do another zone on the main, etc. The cloning system is awesome but there's definitely going to be some repetition, particularly when I have 8 troops to run through the 30-50 content. Fortunately, Divide at least has some bits I want to do again (the Bane-in-prison quest line in particular is fascinating.)

The fun of combat has definitely not diminished, and I'm beginning to play with some of the unique Ranger skills - I can see how the classes will begin to differentiate. I also want to start fooling around with crafting, now that there's a global trade system and one can find markets to sell equipment with well-chosen mods. 30 is a ways off yet, though.

The Sims 2

I acquired almost all of the Sims 2 expansion and "stuff" packs (long story) and decided to install them on Sunday just so I could throw out all the shrinkwrap. This was probably a tactical error.

I played the Sims back in the day, and quite enjoyed it, and the Sims 2 was a definite step up in complexity and depth. But after a while the irony of neglecting my housework to do virtual housework gets to me, and I shelve the series. There are some neat things going on with the expacks, though, and they've been fun to explore. (Note: I installed four expansions and three "stuff" packs at once, so I'm not real sure about which bit came from what.)

More stuff is always a plus - the house construction and interior design aspects of the series have always been near the top of the list for me. There are also quite a few new min-maxer treats since the original, like "talent badges" for things like fishing and "lifetime achievements" that, if achieved, seem to shortcut the whole mood concept (permanent platinum mood? Woo!) I love having kitties running around, so I'm down with the "Pets" pack, but "Seasons" just seems like a long-delayed wishlist item packaged all shiny.

I haven't started my own business yet, so can't comment there, but if I don't update about TR as much, it's because the Stilwaters are busy fishing and mowing the lawn :P

Divide, part 1

Spent a while in Divide today with my ranger - it's much bigger, and feels much more dangerous, than Wilderness. It's a nice contrast, actually. I like that not all of the Logos have handy quests to point them out, although I will probably end up hating it if I can't find all of them.

I've played my specialist some, too, and am starting to get a feel for how to play him - much more defensively than the Soldier, for obvious reasons. I really didn't use the soldier's skills that much, other than the chaingun, but I'm feeling the lack in some cases. The Repair tool is damned handy, though.

My Commando is on ice for the moment - I don't want to try to run Divide with two characters at the same time, or I'll go nuts.

I'm really looking forward to the holiday events - I will have a week off at the end of the month, so I should be able to take part in the RP memorial service as well as the Bane assault on Foreas base. Good stuff!

Tabula Rasa: The Soldier

The Soldier class is the intro to the combat line of TR's class tree. As such, I think it performs its function tolerably well. There isn't a tremendous amount of distinction at this tier, but really levels 5-15 are more about learning game mechanics than class roles, and the tools the soldier has available work fairly well for that purpose.

There are four Soldier-specific skills, and I tried out all of them. Since they're the real distiguishing factor, I'll focus on them for the purposes of this review. (Attributes are non-class-specific, and crafting is its own topic.)

Rage: Rage is on the verge of being drastically altered, so I'm mostly going to skip it, other than to note that I'm not very good with remembering to buff myself regularly. It was pretty awesome when I did remember to use it, but that's probably at least partially because it's 5x as powerful as intended.

Shrapnel: This one was fun - it's a point-blank AoE effect, handy for those tight situations. It has a longer cast time than I'd really like, but it seemed to do pretty decent damage, and AoE always makes me happy. I may play with it further on my melee clones (I can't see it being too useful on a sniper, though.)

Machine Guns: I can't imagine why you wouldn't put at least one point in this. I saved my chainguns for heavy targets like Kael and mortars - they're ammo eaters and you can really go through cash if you use them too much - but situationally, they were invaluable.

Reflective Armor: Again, why not put a point in it? In these lower levels, you level past armor far too quickly to cling to any particular piece, so I used the best stuff I had at the moment, type be damned. The concept is fascinating, though, and I like the idea of different advantages to full-suit vs. piecemeal armor.

Overall, the skills seem reasonably well-chosen to give players a taste of upcoming decisions. The idea of armor types that are more complex than simply "good, better, best" is a critical one, even if the actual choice isn't critical this early. Shrapnel is reflective of skills to come (carpet bombing and scourge, in particular) and Rage is a nice differentiator between Soldier and Specialist. I was able to solo the Wilderness instances with sufficient but not excessive challenge, and I definitely got a solid grip on how to play a heavy combat character.

The only real lack was in melee combat - other than critical kills, I really don't have any taste of how that would work. Hand-to-hand doesn't make much sense when it severely damages your weapon, plus the shotgun has beautiful knockback and is well-suited to those kinds of close-quarters situations. I was originally planning to aim for Spy, but I know I like sniping, and I have no idea if I'd like melee. A melee weapon - even a set of brass knucks - would give players a way to try out that playstyle here, where the stakes are low.

(As it is, the critical kill concept is just bizarre - distance and cover are your best advantages. Why on earth would you give them up? But that's a rant for another day.)

Next Tier

Finished Pravus Research, which wasn't a bad zone but for a bugged quest drop that made me restart it. Fortunately, all that meant was I had to kill about three extra Bane, so I'm not too cranky. Finishing the instance and associated quests meant I did get my clone credit in time, so I now have a Ranger and a Commando at 15, who each have an extra clone credit. Go go alt fiend!

Got both of them to Divide, where it is clear I will be kept happily occupied for quite a while. I'll probably switch off between the two of them and my Specialist, who's only 8 and has a ways to go in Wilderness. Soldier class review incoming, once I gather my thoughts.

Caves of Donn

Ran the Caves of Donn solo tonight. Wasn't too terribly hard, minus a couple of mismanaged group encounters, and the regrettable slaughter of the party of Foreans I led into a Bane mortar. I like the instances, although I wonder if the intro movies are supposed to be quite so choppy. It may be time for a driver upgrade, who knows?

Dinged 14 somewhere in there - we'll see if I can make it through Pravus without dinging again - that would allow me to clone before 15, so my clone would get the credit at 15 as well. Either way it's not a huge deal, I guess.

I'm slightly baffled by the change to crafting - now all weapon mods require crafting skill as well. I suppose that's nice enough, but I'm not spending a point on it on an actual fighting character. I'll make a crafting clone at some point and play with it then. Until then, I'll just sell off all the recipes and save the components for the forthcoming Military Surplus.

Work was insane last week - hopefully I'll get more time in the next few weeks.

Oh, THAT Button

Figured out why I failed one of the Crater Lake missions - I hadn't radioed in to HQ to complete it and trigger the next part of the chain. As a matter of fact, I'd never even seen the "Radio HQ" button until I went back in, completed the mission again, and scrutinized the mission log to find out what went wrong. I think that was my first actual radio mission, and had NO idea how it worked. Well, now I do!

In happier news, I successfully completed all the Crater Lake missions, this time solo. I'm sort of glad I had a squad to take out the mortars with, the first time, but I was able to avoid them this time and get everything that remained done. I'm halfway to 14, though, so I'm not sure I'll finish the ToO before 15. Oh, well.

Now that I figured out how to do the damned thing, I think the instance was actually quite fun. It wasn't scripted at all that I could tell, but the missions were laid out such that it had a very nice flow and felt like a coherent storyline. I'd heard really good things about TR's instances from friends, and am happy to find myself in agreement :)

Inside My Head

Great article at IGN about playing Sarah Morrison, with the three devs who trade off playing her in-game. The "expanding her character as we go along" sort of dynamic is one that's always really drawn me to the roleplaying side of MMOs, even if I'm REALLY bad at RP.

And by bad, I mean I'm antisocial and quiet at the best of times, so I tend to do all my roleplaying inside my own head. All of my MMO characters have fleshed-out backstories to greater or lesser degrees, but I'm the only person who knows them. It's still a pretty big part of my fondness for any given MMO, though.

Fleshing out the history and relationships between my characters and figuring out their place in the world gives my creative brain something to do while muscle memory drives most of the gameplay. Some games make this easier than others - contrast Ultima Online, where I could play a half-mad shepherd priest who ranted about the Virtues while running around barefoot and praying fanatically at shrines while being followed by a docile herd of goats, to World of Warcraft, where about the quirkiest thing I can do is collect booze (no, really - my rogue has a bag and a half full of quest reward flasks and beer-stein maces) or play a Retribution paladin (which I don't, actually.)

City of Heroes was probably the best for RP, of my previous MMOs. It had detailed and cohesive worldbuilding and a plausible framework for the characters to fit into. There weren't very many restrictions on the actual character appearance/backstory/whatever, but the world itself was fairly restricted - you play a hero involved in the struggle against evil, both banal and profound. That restriction, in my mind, actually makes RP easier - and more fun. It feels less like pointless wankery and more like just interacting with the world.

Tabula Rasa works for me in much the same way that CoH did - I have a definite framework to build my character in, but I can imagine whatever motivations and history I want to. Instead of the fabulous costume creator, there are the "ethical parables" - they're minor touches, and they seem to be almost impact-free in terms of actual gameplay, but so far they've been the hooks to hang my character development on. (Well, that and the cloning system, which I swear I started playing with at least 48 hours before reading Old Man's War.)

Why is this important, since it only takes place in my head? I don't know if it is, to anyone else - certainly of the above list, the least RP-friendly game is doing the best. But for me, if I can thoroughly develop a character or two - story-wise, not gameplay-wise - I'm pretty damn hooked. I still mourn for my UO character Itarion, deleted untimely, and his descendent Jeremiah, sold off on eBay in a fit of madness. I've been playing UO for ten damn years. I have an incredibly high level of investment in that game - those characters, partly, but also just that world, in which I've created a whole epic saga spanning generations. We don't have enough data on longevity and MMOs to make generalizations about this level of commitment and a game's long-term success, but I know it makes a difference in how invested I get in a game.

First Instance

Ran Crater Lake tonight - did it a little bit fast, seem to have missed an objective. One of the squad had clearly done it before and was moving right along, but I don't really feel like I learned it. It was interesting, certainly - and would probably be very hard to solo at 12 - but I think I'm going to run it again, solo, to try to figure out what I missed.

Predators

Took 'em out - actually wasn't that bad. Three shots with a rifle from behind, and boom! That puts me at instances-only with my soldier, just in time for me to fly home and spend some uninterrupted time playing. The short-session nature of this game works when I never have more than half an hour before someone needs the computer, or we're going to eat, or something, but I am rather looking forward to doing some serious catassing after all this family time.

Stilwater

So I decided to go for it, and my in-character TR adventures are now available at stilwater.blogspot.com. I'll probably keep doing out-of-character updates here, because it requires different brain cells.

Speaking of which, I'm through with all but the instances in Wilderness (well, that and killing a trio of Predators, which I haven't really attempted since the one embarrassing failure.) I did the assaults today - that was interesting, but also sort of frustrating, as I clearly couldn't succeed solo, and even retrieving the tokens was risky. I've seen a lot of requests to make the tokens pop into your pack instead of staying on the corpse as loot, and I can see why.

Also ran a few missions with my Specialist - Pinhole Falls was vastly easier now that I know the trick to fighting Miasmas. Picked up a couple of Logos, hit level 6 with him, did the parable mission that I wanted to write a post about. Since Jeri's at the instances-only part of Wilderness, I'll probably play him more. He's definitely fun to write about - thinking about what it would be like to be a clone, and an opposite-gender clone at that, is neat. (Jeri, on the other hand, is well on her way to being the stereotypical nutbar sniper. Also fun, but in a different way.)

The tier-and-clone system makes for interesting character development - I honestly have no idea what Jaxon will ultimately be, but I can pick whatever works for his character at each point. I like that. I like it a LOT. I mean, if he ends up being too broken to be an effective soldier, he can even be my crafter alt :P

(Note to self: Write an essay about the psychology of clones in TR's world. Along with the class review and the Wilderness review, I suppose.)

More Checkboxes

I got all of my LZ defender tokens about ten minutes after I made yesterday's post, and switched to Imperial Valley. Wow, it's much more intense there - more Bane, less downtime. The shotgun-berserker method doesn't work as well there - too many groups sniping from too many different directions. For the last wave I found a sniper's perch in the hills above the city and just used my rifle - took almost no damage, and when I ran out of targets and dropped down to collect my tokens, the plains were positively littered with my kills.

I got my Bot Stomper title in the course of the CP defense, then took out the last handful of Xanx. All I need for the ToO now are the instances, which I probably won't get to until I get back home, and CP assaults. I'm not sure how easy those will be - certainly Wilderness 1 is well defended, but the other instances may be more likely to get overrun.

The official site's latest promotion is HIGHLY tempting - it would be a great way to polish my fiction-writing chops. I'm going to think about it for a few days, but perhaps I'll create a sister blog to this one just for in-character musings.