So what have I been up to lately?
Not MMO'ing.
Seems to be some kind of lull before the coming storm in the blogosphere. Cataclysm release date is set for Dec 7, quite a while away, and truth be told, I can't get up any excitement for it. Warcraft lore still leaves me cold. There is a huge discussion over why WoW vets are seemingly so intolerant of the "lesser-abled," be they n00b or newb. And I can't bring myself to get roflstomped while reading up tomes of six-year-old website info in an attempt to learn and catch up and bridge the gap - far better not to play the game - which is a personal outlook or character flaw which also applies to participate in FFA PvP games in which the vets have a massive leg up on the newbies. My ego is not so cement-strong as to expose it like that over and over in what-was-meant-to-be-a-game.
If I am ever bored enough, I can buy another WoW timecard and mess around for 2 months. It's about $50 sgd though, the price of a singleplayer game. I'm not sure I can keep the focus going for 60 days.
(Lately, I have come to hate the monthly subscription model. It sets a clock going in the back of your head asking you to keep evaluating if it's worth it.)
This is also the same problem I'm having with ATITD. I'm actually still paying for 3 characters, but barely logging on. Truth be told, I could give up the original shard, except I'm not sure I want to cut off all ties with my friends/acquaintances there. The other 2 characters are on Bastet, and while nothing ever happens in Bastet, I kind of like it being there.
And maybe I might want to start again a month or two later. I don't mind one or two months of lying fallow and paying for the priviledge of not starting from scratch (aka maintaining the sub so I don't lose my stuff). It's just that I can't predict when I will get renewed interest in the game. And the sub keeps asking, oi, wanna come back now, wanna play this now, like an irritating itch. Taking a complete break, it's not.
On the other hand, I have games like Lord of the Rings Online and Global Agenda just sitting in my back pocket. It's a one-time deal. Paid for. Done. Log in, play it whenever. We may come out with an expansion you'll have to pay for now and again, but you decide then whether you're still interested in our game to pay for it then.
This mechanism is also what drives Magic: Duels of the Planeswalkers, which I've been playing for a good 50% of my free gaming time lately. Short card bouts, relaxing and still a challenge at the same time, with a sense of progression as you win games and unlock new cards. And it's fun to learn an entirely new game system.
The rest of the time has been spent experimenting with other games.
I tried the Medal of Honor Open Beta. The graphics are spectacular. The sound is nice. The gameplay is shit. The lethality factor is very high, a bullet or two puts you on the ground - sort of a nod to the realism of its setting. Unfortunately, two other factors come into play. Cover is scarce, or rather, there are still many open firing lanes on the map I played. All the models are light-colored and realistic in camo, so it's really difficult to identify friend from foe from the snowed-in scenery. The most effective class appears to be the sniper. You can zoom from a distance further away than the other two classes and take potshots while still being in 50%-75% cover yourself. And the way they've depicted the sniper's battle rifle is crazy powerful (if realistic). Most every other sniping game brings your scope down after a shot as you reload. Your scope stays up in this one, and you have 13 bullets before you need to reload. 1-3 of which will kill a person depending on how good or crap your aim is. My aim sucks and I could still kill people by just aligning the crosshairs and pumping out 3-4 bullets.
This results in a whole bunch of people huddled behind rocks, peeking out every so often to take potshots at other people who exposed themselves out of cover. Mostly, these are the people who run out because a) there is ostensibly an objective of attacking/defending, b) they are bored and want to score some kills. Realistic, perhaps, but bloody boring gameplay. The immersion also breaks about the 11th time you get killed with one bullet and respawn.
The Maw is cute. I bought the lot when it was on Steam offer, and finally got around to installing it last night. The premise of indie games are always quite different from the norm. You control a cute alien who walks around his alien Maw buddy like a dog on a leash. The Maw eats stuff. Lots of stuff. In so doing, it takes on characteristics of the stuff it eats. And between the two of you doing stuff, you solve puzzles that get you to the next level. For the first few levels at least, it looks elegant and polished - step-by-step you get taught relevant controls as you need them and then are asked to put them into practice to get by obstacles. It looks a bit short. Portal short. The kind of beginning, middle, end complete game-kind of short. It's not a bad short per se. It's a "we might leave you wanting more" sort of short.
Which brings me to Monkey Island 2. I have worse memories of this game than the first one. Mostly due to the crap ending that poked out of the blue from nowhere. I bought the special edition only when it was on offer, to complete my collection, rather than from any real nostalgia. On replaying it, and listening to the developers' commentary, it solidifies my opinion that Monkey 1 was the better game. How so?
The devs mentioned that Monkey 1 was considered a short game by the community, so they purposefully set out to make Monkey 2 a longer game. 40 hours worth of play, supposedly. Mostly, this led to puzzles that were crafted out on a whiteboard to necessitate visiting all three different islands (click on Dread's ship, click on island in the map shown, run from screen to screen until you get to the place you need to go) to collect the required items to solve the puzzle. That is a LOT of agonizing back and forth running.
The jokes in Monkey 2 are a lot more pop culture-centric, rather than timeless or pirate-themed like in Monkey 1. I saw a lot of Indiana Jones references, the entire ending is a Star Wars reference ("Guybrush...I am your... brother!"). There are more lame gags. Generally, while Monkey 1 respects the world and the lore, Monkey 2 attempts to break it wherever it possibly can. (eg. the ship crate that pops up out of nowhere once Wally is kidnapped, you hop in, it sounds like it's full of snakes (remember, Indy hates snakes), and some cargo moving guys randomly appear to move it to LeChuck's fortress in the middle of nowhere.)
I might play Minecraft again when the mood hits me, but I'm on hiatus for a bit. The update is that I went back after my lava bath and managed to spelunk more successfully, rescuing a couple diamonds, some gold, and enough steel/iron to craft an entire suit of steel and have leftovers for other things. I'm nursing the idea of a really big project, like an underground tree farm, or a big castle or a Great Wall of Unnamed Continent, but haven't gotten around to that yet.
I've been reading. Or re-reading, rather. The latest bite-sized series is an old-forgotten-author space opera type called Star Commandoes by P.M. Griffin, full of somewhat purple prose and lots of humorous domestic scenes of people who like each other squabbling and overfeeding a cute pet, interspersed with chapters of random shooty action/violence. Sort of a tomboy's romance series, I guess. Ed Greenwood is another good author for this sort of fantasy escapist nonsense. It's a nice enough break from the grim dark millenium of WH40K novels that have been my only fiction staple lately.
Nonfiction is easier, if more expensive. A lot of interesting perspectives and revelations by people who have or probably should be invited to TED conferences get talked about around the self-improvement blogosphere. And Amazon.com leverages the networking effect by promoting books that other readers who looked at this book also bought. So an hour's casual surfing in Amazon leaves a shopping cart with a shipping fee that seems enough to hire a personal plane, and results in a lot of hurried "transfer to wish list" button pressing to narrow it down to a reasonable selection. Good thing the USD exchange rate is now about 1.3-ish. More on that when the books actually get here to be read. And yes, I do the library thing, but I read at such a slow pace that I often incur fines, which boils down to me renting books. :)
I keep getting the nagging feeling that I should go back to my roots of RPGs (the tabletop kind) and writing original stories. It's been years since I did a successful Nanowrimo. It's just so hard to think up stories these days. I stumbled across Mongoose Publishing and their magazine series Signs and Portents, and have the website sitting tabbed in Firefox just waiting, waiting for me to have time to download and read them.
Just haven't got around to that either. My entertainment has to come in such bite-sized pieces these days.
Bleh.
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