Author: littlemute

Weekend nerdifications and Talisman ruminations

Excitement!  Battleblock Theatre was released onto a very expecting public recently and I had the good fortune to NOTICE it on XLBA in order to que it for download.  Needless to say, anything related to the Castle Crashers team is likely to be pure gold– and it is.  I had to peel myself off the TV to stop playing (due to crying and screaming of childrens).   Unfortunately, the game is too difficult for young kids without any experience with Contra or Mega Man– but the skills built in Battleblock will carry a child through a lifetime of side scrolling gaming.  While my daughter said she will never play the game again due to her failed jumping at all times, I will likely build a level just for them in the level editor to ease them into the genre.

That said, the height of nerdery this weekend was (finally) a game of Talisman 4th edition with the City expansion.  While the city was the worst of the 2nd edition expansions, Fantasy Flight has done good work bringing the board into the 4th edition paradigm.  Essentially, if you have a lot of gold, you go to the city to buy stuff or get transport to where you need to go.   It’s much easier to get around in and still has a jail as well as three guilds that can be joined (no Sheriff).  Just a few games back I was complaining that there were ways to accumulate tons of gold but no good place to spend it that was readily available.  Sure you may have gotten lucky and pulled a trainer and the like from one of the decks, but until City came around, gold was only used for healing up lives lost and buying a horse when available.  With all the expansions, the Adventure deck is so gigantic it’s rare that you will see the same cards at all in many games.  We have not, since the second expansion or so, flipped the Adventure deck– and this happened quite a bit in the older versions of the game.  This makes games more surprising, but you certainly can’t count on some of the core items (Wand, Ring, Unicorn, Runesword, Warhorse) coming up.  With City, you now have more control over your item build for your character.  It will be easier to say” ‘for this game, I would like to get X and Y objects to help me win’ and go and get them rather than just hoping they will come up.  The new full plate is pretty cool (4+ armor save and +1 strength).

after four hours of talisman!
after four hours of talisman!

Comparison with 2nd edition’s City brings up the question of “advanced” careers in Talisman which were not included in the new City expansions.  As Talisman was a GW game and Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay has a career advancement system, 2nd edition Talisman added in the idea of advanced careers that can be purchased to upgrade your hero. There were not a lot of choices here but there were two in particular that were a bit of rapening if used correctly.  First was the High Mage.  Any high-craft hero could become the high mage by simply depositing a magic item in the city.  This gave a character two (!?) spells per turn and added and additional 2 craft.  Remember, unlike the new addition, players could not turn in defeated monsters for Craft so that 2 Craft is pure gold in 2nd editions. What’s more since 2nd ed. Talisman Dragons added a ton of magic items to the game, it was an easy thing to get some shitty magic trinket and suddenly be the most powerful spellcaster in the game with a quick trip to the city.  Most underpowered/low tier characters would immediately attempt to do this as their first set of moves in the game.   While still not on par with the Monk (who is laughably underpowered in 4th edition), Astropath or Prophetess, the High Mage was boss of almost all the other characters since the 2 craft bonus put him above all of the craft-attackers like the Ghoul, Wizard or Sorceress.  All that said, I do not miss the advanced characters.  It was a neat idea for the game, but wasn’t built into the entire system (I could easily see a talisman clone where the entire character leveling was choosing new careers) so felt like a bit of a shoddy addon– a much loved shoddy addon mind you.

I hope to get another Talisman game in this year– the next purchase in that line is Talisman Dragons which seems a bit overly complicated for what it brings to the table.  What next for 4th edition?  It’s got to be Timescape.  There’s no other place to go!

 

DOTA 2- down the fucking rabbit hole (again)

there was a time when I was blissfully unaware of what this means.
there was a time when I was blissfully unaware of what this meant.

I got into the beta of DOTA2 awhile back and after installing my only experience with it was waiting for a match to start and then quitting after about 2 minutes.  Given that I played the early versions of DOTA as part of my (and everyone else’s) Warcraft 3 addiction, I didn’t think I was missing much.  How good could it be? It’s a bunch of WC3 heroes fighting each other on the same map over and over and over again and I’d done that before.  Plus,  I remember it being pretty boring compared to a straight up WC3 match– you do only control one hero after all.

However, I’m eating a bit of crow meat now–I’ve played some handful of matches here and there and am largely hooked– every time I win one of those boxes, I buy a 2$ key (the game was free after all so I feel I owe them something!).  So my few and dear readers, I will likely post a terrible amount of DOTA stuff in the next gaggle of months until the addiction passes.  The realization that I liked it hit me last night when I actually called it the Cosmic Encounter (the best board game ever made) of video games– in that the basic premise is very simple and easily understood, but the sheer asymmetry of the number of heroes turns it into something completely different every single time.  What’s more, even if you suck really bad, you can still contribute to your team if you have a basic understanding.  Going into a server assuming you will be THE carry in the game is setting yourself up for disaster, but pushing lanes, support and ganking are doable with just a bit of practice.

Please note the most popular video game on the planet is effectively a DOTA clone (League of Legends) so the addictive qualities speak for themselves.

A neo guardian heroes approaches

After the legendary Guardian Heroes appeared on XBLA we’ve had some good times with it and people likely noticed!  Looks like the team that did  the gorgeousity that is Odin’s Sphere on the PS2 have queued up a very similar title to the revered Guardian Heroes: Dragon’s Crown.  Please note the female proportions present in the illustrations.

Reader falls from the Googlecunt

Google Reader will be cancelled in July.  This is a service that I use daily and there isn’t a good replacement (yet).  This got me thinking about the whole free-software as a service model we seem to have swallowed as a culture.  Web based emails is email is email, an online drive is meh, web-based calendars are just annoying (because you have multiple-on your phone, on your wall, on your computer, on your cloud based service) and maps? Well that’s pretty essential– but they don’t really need to show me where I am at– I KNOW that so it’s not something worth individualizing.  Sharing? Please– who gives a shit? Given that all these web-based tools are free because they monetize their userbase it’s quite nice for us users who would normally have to pay for such services— however the free model means that the owning company can simply shut down any service it doesn’t like without any contractual issues with it’s clients.  So giving free means taking away whenever and however.

That said, do we really want to use free software ever?  Is the concept of free software (where WE as users are the actual product for the people that really pay Google and the like for our information) something that we should all examine a lot more closely?

Frankly I would rather have paid or have a monthly payment for my feed reader and will do so in the future, ideally for an application where I can choose to update or not– but we were all cajoled into thinking free is a good idea back in 2006 or so– that cajoling that free is good is, in fact, Google’s business model.  We give you, our product (which is the users,) something for free and we monetize your use and interest in that product.  Now instead of paying for a hard drive, you can get one for free online where you can store your stuff. Your mail communications are all online as well.  What will happen when Google decided to get rid of Drive and Google Plus–or even MAIL? More likely these will eventually change to such a degree to make them unusable for the original adopters   Just like Reader and Google Wave, they have zero obligation to you as a user to keep that service running since it’s free and also not a free application (it’s a software as a service).  So if said piece of software isn’t a service that generates revenue for their actual customers, it will eventually be cut away to cut costs for services that do.

The main issue is that Google, Facebook, Yahoo, etc. have actual products that they sell to clients, but it’s not something ANY of us would want to buy for the most part; yet we are the ones that actually generate this revenue for these service providing companies, whether it’s by our searching or using free services or allowing a company to monetize our personal connections.  We are their product.  The bottom line is, if you use a free service, assume that it will either be changed or go away at the whim of the provider, i.e.: it CANNOT BE RELIED UPON.