Hey Man, well this is Babylon

Reading: Nothing at the moment, sadly.

Wearing: The usual.

Planning: A long weekend with very few major activities, and hopefully some Savage Worlds excitement.

Playing: Parasite Eve and One on the Playstation.

Not Playing: The Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness

Writing: Some notes for an upcoming city-building project with the game crew.

Listening: A crap-ton of electronica Chris uploaded to my FTP server over the last few months.

Watching: The Wire, which after two episodes is now possibly my new favorite TV show. Writing this good should be canonized and worshiped.

Anticipating: Massage tomorrow! Having a new home! Yeah! Bioshock coming to the PS3! Yeah!

Dreading: Packing, although thankfully I’m still mostly packed from the last move.

In this article, Tycho loudly lambastes Electronic Arts’s chosen DRM encoding which will be present in the upcoming PC port of Mass Effect. Sounds awesome of them to say so, right?

But lookee here, they’ve gone and added it to their own game!

That is just not cool, man. Not cool at all. I was looking forward to this game. I really, really hope there is some kind of misunderstanding. If not, this will be yet another game that I can add to the list of “new games which are driving me further and further away from PC gaming.” It is indeed getting close to time for me to purchase an Xbox 360. Thank the gods I’ll soon be living with a proud owner of a PS3. At least the consoles never have to deal with this total BS.

When I spend money on a game, I want to purchase it; what I do not want to do is purchase the right to request permission to be able to play their game.

EDIT:

Here’s the link for the discussion at Penny-Arcade. Here’s the link for the discussion at the Greenhouse forums.

Obama won the Oregon primaries. Sweet. He currently (read: still) has more delegates than Hillary. Even sweeter.

Hillary needs a new do. She has Andy Warhol hair, and it’s quite hideous.

That game One that I mentioned?  Sweet Jeebus it’s hard.

I want more TV shows and movies where the main characters are ugly, or even just plain-looking.

Portland now has a gay mayor who shares a name with both a crappy beer and a long-dead former Governor. He’s also pretty handsome, too.

Anyone remember Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure? I think the character Large Marge should have her own TV show too.

Looks like I might be kicking up an InSpectres mini-campaign in June, to get read for the Iron Kingdoms game in July. This mini-campaign would be modern, and the characters would be a new franchise of the widely popular Ghost Facers company.

I’m enjoying a really good discussion on methods of player narrative empowerment within Shadowrun.

Thankfully, my worries were unnecessary. Karaoke was fantastic, the ex was not there, and we had a lot of fun. I also got a new Shadowrunner to join our group from that night, too. Woot. Highlight of the evening was definitely Kat doing the most amazing Patsy Cline rendition I’ve ever heard. The rest of the weekend? Shadowrun, Parasite Eve, and a crap-ton of Me Not Spending Any Money. Okay, I lie, Winco counts as spending money, but it is in spirit a preface to me not spending money for the rest of the week or so.

The rest of this post has to do with video games. Read more

I recall a fantastic Playstation 1 game called simply “One.” It was one of the first third-person action games I’d ever played, and I thoroughly loved it. I want to find it again. So, guys, can you imagine how hard it is to actually search down and find a game called, simply, One? Yeah. It’s goddamned hard. EDIT: Nevermind, I finally found it on ebay. That was tricky.

Anyway, last night I tooled around with the settings of two pieces of Playstation Emulation software: PSX Emulator and ePSXe. The first one is almost perfect. It does everything wonderfully, plays without a hitch and a bare minimum of settings tweaking. Fabulous! Not really, though, as the graphics look pretty lame on a crisp LCD – this is because the software doesn’t make use of hardware acceleration, and thus the games look like they did originally. Not so bad, I guess, but… ePSXe, with the right settings, makes the games look a whole lot nicer, and greatly improves on the original appearances. This is great! Right? No, sadly, because no matter how I tweak the graphics, and no matter if I run from the PSX disks or from ripped ISO files, the cut scenes are always sped up a fraction and lack sound. That kinda blows. Read more

In this post I mentioned some changes I was making to the rules involving Infection, Crazy-Go-Psycho rules, and a few other things. Those changes are now live, with an additional 11 pages of content and formatting going into making the rules more cohesive and flowing. As always, download them here.

This morning, I resisted the powerful seduction of bacon. It was difficult, as my willpower is weakest in the groggy hours, but in the end I prevailed. I was heavily tempted and conflicted, but managed to set my resolve and not eat it. I love me some bacon, that’s the godsbedamned truth. But two things I adore far more than bacon are the exercise and strengthening of my personal willpower, and the dedication to a long-term goal of the bettering of my body.

So, game-wise, I’m torn. On the one hand, the idea of the characters being both watchmen and criminals in Five Fingers really appeals to me, because the notion of a game set up like The Wire is really damn cool. On the other hand, the idea of them being members of the FF chapterhouse of the Strangelight Workshop (aka, the Ghostbusters) is awesome, if only because I really like the word “Strangelight” and can see it being made into one wicked-sweet logo for the campaign’s logsite.

Lately, my dreams have been incredibly realistic. So realistic and subtle that at points during the day I muse whether or not certain things I remember recently were not actually just dreams. I’m talking about really vivid dreams, but none so crazy that they are obviously hallucinations or dreams.

A post on my friends list by tcpip has led me to look up the Fatal Frame series of video games again. I played #2 for a bit, but it was just too damn scary and the mechanics too damn slow and clunky for my tastes. So, instead, I settled for watching Lisa play it, and at that moment, my lust for watching others play involving video games was born. Anyway, I decided to look up the plot and stories of the three games from the series, resorting to Wikipedia for my information. Warning: Fatal Frame Video Game Spoilers Behind the Link! Jesus Harold Christ, the Japanese really are insane.

Behind the Snip is my new favorite song of the week. Read more

I sadly suspect that my planned upcoming Burning Wheel game set in our homebrew “Undiscovered Countries” setting will never see the light of day. The game has been doomed from the start, and I’ve been fighting it. Three player drop-outs so far (two replacements acquired), and one no-call no-show. I really want to run this game, but fate seems stacked against it.

Grrr.

- NPC

I’ve got a hankering for a different kind of Dungeon Crawl. I’ve got a hankering to play one in which the characters are not warrior-robbers trying to kill everything and take their stuff, but instead scholars, explorers, archaeologists, and cave-crawling experts seeking information and relics from ancient cultures. Maybe they have one or two weapons among the lot of them, but mostly be pretty non-combat. A game where the characters get extremely excited about discovering intact flower pots and eating utensils from a bygone era. There would be a lot of game focus on history and culture, and a lot of time spent surveying areas, studying the flora and fauna, etc.

Have any of you run or played in games like this? Are there any published adventures or modules which specifically focus on this?

EDIT: Yowza! Somehow, this became a heated topic on a livejournal community where I cross-posted. Regardless, there are a lot of damn good ideas in there that I hope to steal in the near future.
- NPC

After the last playtest and a lot of deliberation and fiddling over the weekend, I’m making some big changes to the rules, mainly in the form of mechanical consolidation. Essentially, I’m modifying the Infection and Crazy-go-Psycho rules to bring them more directly in line with the rest of the system, so they feel less like modifications and more like integral chunks of the core rules. Read more