Hey Man, well this is Babylon

I end this week with a poetic little idea I just had:

Heavy Metal Bands,
Using Blossoms are Falling:
Duel of Verse – Throw horns!

(I totally meant to post this Friday, but when saving it I forgot to set the auto-post time-thinger and only realized it today. Might as well add a few more notes to it, then.)

I was going to mention this last week but got side-tracked: the Alliterated Games Forums are down for an indefinite period of time. No one was using them, and they were just collecting spammers and bots. If I bring them back up in the future, it will likely be as part of…

The new website I’m putting together! The current AG website isn’t all that easy to update without me breaking things, so I’m setting up a content management suite to handle the basics. My first order of business is to get the basic game pages set up and an official newsfeed. After that, having a forum again would be nice, but it isn’t a major priority. I also want to set up a cart application, so folks can buy things directly from my website, without me having to handle fulfillment through Paypal.

Alpha Protocol continues to rock my knickers. I am only halfway through the game, and I’m already itching for a second play-through. My current style is the suave, stealthy master of the silent kill. My second play will be all BigGuns McDoucheBaggins, the no-questions-asked bullet-loving commando. I am looking forward to see more of the drastic changes in story and play I’ve already sipped with the handful of checkpoint replays I’ve experimented with in the game so far.

One thing about it that I really dig – and wish other games would pick up ASAP – is the Social Mission. A lot of Alpha Protocol’s game play involves hands-on espionage, sneaking into secret complexes and doing all that cool stealth-action spy stuff that makes movies like The Bourne Identity awesome. But almost as many game missions are purely social: you arrive on scene, meet a guy, try and make a deal of some sort, and hopefully walk away with a new ally or piece of information. The clothes you wear in these missions frequently makes a difference, so you should remember to switch out of that tactical armor before heading off to have dinner with the syndicate honcho, otherwise you might piss her off with your incredible social faux pas. I love this, and aside from Mass Effect 2 – which only has a small handful of missions like these – I’ve not seen it implemented in other mission-based games.

This coming weekend will be Free RPG Day! Every year I get excited about this one, as my favorite local game store Guardian Games always has a big shindig to celebrate. This year I’ll be running the new teaser adventure Final Sanction for the upcoming Deathwatch RPG from Fantasy Flight Games – the newest RPG in the Warhammer 40K product line. I’m not well-versed in the W40K universe, but this one looks nice – it’s the equivalent to me of the Starcraft storyline: Space Marines in massive suits of power armor fighting wave upon wave of infectious buglike monster hordes.

I leave you with a video for a song that’s been stuck in my head all morning:

Been a damn busy week. Not enough time for blogging! So here’s my weekend update, a day late.

First, a link. Check out Universal Dead, a new low-budget web series about zombies. It’s… not bad. Not bad at all.

For the last few days I’ve been going back and forth between Dragon Age and Alpha Protocol. My current goal in Dragon Age is to play as a solo Archer Rogue + Dog combo for as long as I can manage, outside of the few spots in the game where other companions are forced upon you. I’ve always been a fan of odd “challenge runs” in video games, and I figure this one would be called the “Post-Apocalypse” DA run – survivor + dog, in other words.

Alpha Protocol has been fun. I see a game series in the making here, and this one’s a good start. It reminds me a lot of the original Mass Effect – awesome in many ways, but marred by some rather aggravating design choices. I’m only a few hours in, though, so I’ll save my full decision for a later time after more hands-on experience with it.

I met a few awesome folks and sold a few more copies of Cannibal Contagion this past Memorial Day. Guardian Games hosted their second annual “May of the Dead” celebration, and I was there pimpin’ my game and hanging out with my fellow nerd. Had some great talks with a fellow from the local chapter of the Zombie Squad, and ran a hilariously fun session of my game for a new crew of survivors. Thanks for playing, folks!

I’ll close this post with some thoughts on video game trailers. First, read this article. Go ahead, it’s a good read. Watch all the trailers.

Done? Understand that I get where the writer is coming from, and I whole-heartedly disagree. I want actual game-play footage in my video game trailers, goddammit. Without actual gameplay footage, I might have made the mistake of purchasing any number of generic “guns plus one cool trick no one else does” first-person shooters. I want to actually see how this game is different. You can take a shitty game, give it an awesome story, and fill the trailer with so many awesome cinematics and popular industrial tunes and the consumers won’t know the depth of your deception until they pay for it and hate it, because you never showed them the actual game.

I want to see the game. I don’t give a rat’s ass about marketing cinematics which most likely won’t even be in the final product, and probably look better than that product will, too. Yeah, that new Deus Ex trailer looks cool, and shows us a wonderful cyberpunk world with a compelling story. SO did the trailers for Neocron. Remember how much that game sucked?

I really should start posting here more often!

Reading:
Red Seas Under Red Skies, by Scott Lynch. This is my second attempt at reading this. I got about 100 pages in on it sometime last year, but couldn’t focus on it for some reason. This time I’m doing much better, and am pretty hooked. My one complaint: I’m kinda tired of Locke Lamora. He’s an ass and is growing less and less sympathetic with each turn of the page. I fear he is going to be another Drizzt Do’Urden “Mary Sue” character. Jean Tannen is far more sympathetic, and frankly, far more interesting.

Writing:
Trying to finish up the newest draft revision of Cannibal Contagion. This one’s looking awesome, and I believe the product is nearing completion.

Watching:
Finishing up Season 4 of Battlestar Galactica – it FINALLY started getting good again with episode 6, after five totally abysmal crapholes of boredom kicked off what looked to be a pretty mediocre season. Also, watching through Season 2 of Avatar: The Last Airbender with the Lady. The fact that she’s enjoying it excites me.

Playing:
I bought a new copy of Thief: Deadly Shadows recently and gave it another spin. I tried this game a few years back, and while I couldn’t get into the controls at the time, something about it has stuck in my brain like a nagging compass alignment ever since. After finding out that it is compatible with the Xbox 360, I tracked down a copy and have started playing it again. This time, I’m all about it, and I love the stealth controls. So far, this is an A+ game for me.

Let’s start with the quickies, and then we’ll talk gaming:

Reading: RunePunk
Wearing: Comfortable close-fitting clothes suitable for cycling. I love this weather.
Planning: The first session for the Sky Pirates game, this Sunday
Playing: Rule of Rose and Skies of Arcadia
Not Playing: The Siren: Blood Curse demo. Laaaaaaaaame. Tried it last night, and seriously, what’s with these crap-looking games not making the most of their platform’s hardware specs?
Writing: Some notes for various game design projects, mostly an Art List for the Cannibal Contagion book.
Listening: Pimsleur Spanish I
Watching: The Wire, Season 4. Man, the end of Season 3 almost brought tears to my eyes. One of the things that gets me the most is seeing people fail when they’ve worked so goddamned hard to succeed.
Anticipating: Dead Space in October. Read more

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.

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