2013 New Year’s Resolutions

2013:

Once again I am at the keyboard laying down the goals and aspirations I have for the next year. Every year I say the same thing that I cannot believe the old one is done and the new one is starting. In less than 1 day I will have to sign and think of writing 2013 for the year.  2012 was an eventful time, but not always so grand.  This year I am quantifying and organizing my goals in the following categories: Health, Spirituality, Knowledge, Work, Education, Home Repairs, Trips, Game Designs, Game Playing, Movies & Entertainment , Computer Life, Car & Lifestyles.  Each entry will have 5 goals from lofty to banal.

 

Health:

1.  Solve why I get these headache and reduce them to 1 per month

2.  Exercise more — walks at break, lunch, and once a week do some sort of 30 minute workout

3.  Eat better with less red meat, less salt, and more fresh foods

4.  Take a vitamin or some form of supplement to help with digestion

5.  Main issues for 2013 is to resolve my feeling of pressure in the chest area — beating heart feeling?!?

 

Spirituality:

1.  Continue explore that which cannot be solved.

2.  Try and understand the deeper implications of time and space

3.  Just be happy for the moment and not worry about the past or future

4.  Spread happiness to others — a simple smile can bring someone a moment of happiness

5.  Read more on spirituality

 

Knowledge:

1.  Continue to go to school

2.  Take at least 2 more classes this year, but try for 3

3.  Learn more about computers, servers — especially the Mac that I will get at the office

4.  Try and read more on history, through magazines, books, and videos

5.  Open my mind to other possibilities — reject the standard responses and be more open to new ideas

 

Work:

1.  Continue to learn and get involved

2.  Enjoy the four weeks of vacation — taking them in 2 day bursts (making for many 4 day weekends)

3.  Become a Celia employee

4.  Continue to be the best IT professional — friendly and knowledgeable.

5.  Continue to dream about other jobs and other places. . . .

 

Education:

1.  Graduate

2.  Continue to take courses and learn

3.  Stay in contact with friends and professors at school  — network

4.  Try and go to the university library 5 times this year

5.  Dream of going on for a Masters degree.

 

Home Repairs:

1.  Carpet for the house

2.  Painting the walls

3.  Painting the door and wall of the garage

4.  Spruce up the yard

5.  Put the house up for sale

 

 

Trips:

1.  Ann Arbor

2.  Traverse City

3.  Upper Peninsula

4.  Going south

5.  Going to Europe

 

Game Designs:

1.  Start and work on RuleMaster the ultimate fantasy RPG

2.  Contact Jeff Dee and work on a V&V module

3.  Design a card or board game

4.  Create a new mod or find a game that you can mod and make a creation

5.  Work on Phantasm Adventures

 

Game Playing:

1.  Try new games — get a new game once a month

2.  Play other than computer games

3.  Game Night (with friends) needs to be more varied

4.  Return to a more active gaming — playing with friends on D&D or some RPG

5.  Card games or board games

 

Movies & Entertainment:

1.   Five movies at the theatre?  Possible?  Not sure. . . .

2.   Five novels

3.  Three magazine subscriptions

4.  Break the mold of years past and get out more or have new friends in

5.  Find a new hobby, outside of gaming!

 

Computer Life:

1.  At work get my Mac and learn how to use it

2.  At home get a tablet of some form

3.  Much less Facebook and more of Google+ or other social media

4.  De-emphasize sitting in front of the computer but doing other things

5.  Get down to one computer in the den

 

Cars & Lifestyles:

1.  Continue to drive and save with the General C

2.  Sell the Mercury

3.  Search for ways of saving money

4.  Sell the house

5.  Be Happy More!

 

 

 

Results of 2012

Looking back through my list, I make my judgement on how well I did for the year.

Sleep:

I do not think I got more sleep in 2012, and it is odd because this morning I laid in bed thinking exactly that thought that I wish I could sleep more. I am dead tired at 10 PM, but just can never get past 7 AM. I do try and take some naps now and then, but I wish I could have day dreamed more and just not did anything.

General Health:

I did eventually get my taste back, that which plagued the first 6 months of 2012. It is good to being able to taste the sweets again. Overall I feel my health is about the same as it was for the last several years. I have my headaches and my general pains.  Less doctors is a good thing and more exercise!  I was doing some decent physical workout earlier in the year, but as it got colder it waned sadly.

Spirituality:

Lacking is the only comment I have.

Knowledge:

Continued to go to school. Created a website called Teaspoon of History but it faltered quickly. Hopes are to return to writing in it again.  I try and read history and general science articles and maintain some sense of knowledge on all things.  Overall I did well in this category.

Work:

I certainly did enjoy the 4 weeks of earned vacation this year. It was splendid.  I again struggled throughout the year with my job, often feeling like I wasn’t doing my best or that I wasted so much time doing nothing. I am slowly improving my skills in computers, but I think I forget more than I learn. I hdid send out a number of resumes this year to all sorts of interesting places, one including Osprey Publishing in England but never heard anything of that or any of the other many resumes.  It seems I am stuck where I am at.

Education:

Continued to go to school and put 3 more classes under my belt. I got an A  in the history of the English Tudors and a A in Michigan history. Still about 5 classes away from graduating. Floundered at writing in general and have not been able to get into a mood to write anything.

Home Repairs:

A big year for projects here with a new roof, a new front door, a new landing, and a new spring for the garage door!  Didn’t get carpets, but need them soon.  I also totally revamped my den which now is great and I am so happy I did it.  I am looking for a chair now to put in there where I can read or take naps – that would be splendid!

Trips:

Ann Arbor and Traverse (three times) went well with the typical problems associated with my wife imagining one sort of holiday and reality delivering the other.  Overall it was a good year for trips, although I would like to go to other places than the two listed — seems like a wash and repeat of every other year.

Game Designs:

Sadly this category truly floundered.  I didn’t get much done.  I did start messing around with Phantasm Adventures again and briefly talked to Jeff Dee about a new module for V&V but nothing ever materialized.  I also started a game called Iron Age, but it quickly failed as well.

Game Playing:

Never got back in Everquest II and towards the end of 2012, I started playing Guild Wars 2.  I do not think I will ever return to EQ2 again. I also sadly never got into any other board game or card game. and that is a true shame — I wanted to break out of the tired cycle of computer games from 7 to 10 set to repeat.

Movies:

Didn’t get anywhere close to going to the movies as much as I wanted to.  Just seems like I could never get organized. So many good movies I missed on the big screen. Saw a few, but do not recall what they were right now.  Wanted to see the Hobbit in 2012, but it just never happened!

Computer Life:

I did surpass my 20,000 tweets and came in slightly over 23,000!  I did do a bit less on Facebook and I tend to want to move away from it even further.  I am learning a bit more of Windows 7 and enjoy how it works on my computers at home.  Oddly the games I thought I would enjoy, I did not:  Fallout 3 sucked, Skyrim never got cheap enough, and Civilization 5 was horrible.

Communications:

Never got a smart phone or tablet.  Still have Charter and although they dork me with pricing they are the best overall deal for me.  Wife has a texting phone so that is great and a complete success.

Accidents & New Car:

Truck accident in January led me to sell the truck I owned for 12 years and get a new car.  Eventually settling on an orange Prius C that I nicknamed the General C — like the General Lee from Dukes of Hazard but the C because of the model but also because my last name is Christensen.

 

Weekly Gaming Diary

Each year, from October to October I record what my impressions are in my weekly gaming group. Gone are the days of the 8 guys packed into my house playing D&D, but I still manage to have a couple of friends over almost every week. We almost always play computer games, as the diary reads below. Every now and then we have a ready great night — something very special. We have had some good nights with some fantastic adventures. Where appropriate I have highlighted interesting events.

10-03-12 Over the weekend I amended the game a bit changing Slavery and harbors. The big change I made was giving a new Unique Unit to every civilization. We started a new game at a slight accelerated pace with me playing the Greeks, Joe playing Kongo, and Wade playing the Iroquois. Wade played exemplary and won a great amount of credibility. I floundered like always. Joe seemed content on being off by himself. Good game overall.

09-26-12 Another fantastic night playing Civ IV. We all had so much fun. If this can continue for another couple of weeks, it will be great.

09-18-12 Had one of the best nights playing CIVILIZATION IV in memory. We all did well and we all had fun exchanging tactics and barbs. Good battles and great fighting. We are looking forward next week to continue this fun game.

09-12-12 Played the same game and am slowing pulling myself up, though in last place we are having fun.

09-05-12 Joe, Wade, and I played a fantastic but frustrating match of History Rewritten, a Civilization IV mod. I ended up in a swath of jungle and had a tough time throughout the night. We will play next week which for me will be better. Fun but aggravating at times.

08-29-12 Trying out my new Civ4 mod, Age of Discovery2. No doubt it will be an utter failure.

08-14-12 Playing Civilization 4 with the Multivwerse mod. Joe, Wade, and I all did quite well but we were playing on easy level. Next week we will be on our standard of Noble and Marathon.

08-08-12 Still playing World of Warcraft with Joe – running dungeons with our top level guys. Wade expressed interest in coming over again and so we may alter our playing a bit? May eventually settle on Civ4 again?

07-24-12 Continued playing WoW this week. Wade did not get over because he is still feeling poorly but also because he doesn’t play World of Warcraft. Joe and I found several interesting secrets last night – coming and going out of dungeons and velium sheets (so I can use my enchanter on my other toons.

07-17-12 Played WoW.

07-10-12 Great fun again playing World of Warcraft.

07-03-12 Great fun playing City of Heroes. May play WoW next week.

06-26-12 (last game of June) Played City of Heroes, but it was a difficult night with many deaths!!!

06-18-12 Sara’s birthday so we are pushing it to Wednesday, if it happens.

06-11-12 No game this week because I am up at the cottage. Next week we hope to try Civ4 again!

06-04-12 Started out playing Civ IV but it kept going OOS. So we moved back to CoH and I played Cloudstuff for great fun.

05-29-12 Great fun once again – I played two healers. Dr. Cloudstuff and Atomic Soul

05-22-12 Everyone has fun. We played heroes last night. I made a new guy called Atomic Soul.

05-15-12 Fun times.

05-08-12 Both guys came over and we played City of Heroes with “good” aligned characters.

05-01-12 Confronted WADE on being overweight.

04-24-12 City of heroes.

04-16-12 More City of Heroes fun. We all went up a couple of levels. Wade is still silly!

04-09-12 Another week with Joe, Wade, and I playing City of Heroes. Joe and I had a great time – made fun of Wade. He is such a tard.

04-02-12 First time that Joe, Wade, and I got together in so many months. This time to play City of Heroes. We had a good time, if not some awkward moments when Wade tried to show how much he knows about the game. Overall, we had a great night with some interesting battles. Looking forward to next week.

03-20-12 Tried to play Civilization IV but the game kept crashing. So now we are playing City of Heroes again. Probably something we will try and play since it seems Joe is more interactive with that. I got a new power supply.

03-13-12 Still playing Civilization IV – my mod called Conquest – Still crashing on my other machine. Need to get a power supply for it.

03-05-12 Played Civilization IV: Conquest. Had a good time but crashed a few times.

02-28-12 Played CoH but not really enjoying it as much as I thought I would. I think Joe is much more hooked on it then he says – he is making a dozen toons. He is a cheap son of a bitch though, so he wont spend any money on it – nor will he do so for EQ in the future.

02-21-12 Still playing City of Heroes and have settled on two guys (me: The Oak King; Joe: Fusilier). Deleted other guys.

02-14-12 Played City of Heroes. Made 2 sets of guys: H1 and Mithril Mage. Joe made Uuo-118 and Mr. Blackboard. Had a ton of fun

02-06-12 Played another couple of games of Civilization IV but had continuing issues of OOS errors. Worked through some but still had issues.

01-30-12 Playing Civ4 but in the end, we decided to restart again and added some new rules.

01-24-12 Still playing Civ4 and having some fun.

01-16-12 Got Civ4 running again. Had a fun night.

01-10-12 Tried to play Civilization 4 but the game kept crashing. So we played EQ2 instead and had fun.

01-02-12 Played a bit of History Rewritten but my secondary computer has been crashing lately. First game went well, but then half way through the night it crashed constantly. Played EQ2 and went into a new dungeon and had some fun. Computer crashed once during that episode. Thinking it may be the power supply going bad, as it was always a bit under powered to start. Found a PSU for 40 bucks that should work.

12-21-11 Joe finally got his new computer. I set it up for him last night and he is so loving the graphics in EQ2 and in Civ4. Really great!

Changing the game night to MONDAY as classes schedules have changed.

12-14-11 Started playing on Monday nights because school is essentially over. Gives us an extra 30 minutes of game time – although unsure why, but that is what Joe says?!? We are still playing Civilization IV with the new mod and having fun; History Rewritten.

12-05-11 Tried a new mod called History Rewritten and it was fun, but I want to make some changes to it. Joe and I played on a Earth map, me being the Polynesians and him playing England. Fun so far.

11-30-11 Maybe a game tonight. Last night Joe called it off because his truck broke down and he couldn’t get it fixed. Undecided as to what to play, if we do get together – EQ2 or Civ 4?

11-23-11 Played a new mod called Rewritting History and had an absolute ball. Great mod with all new graphics. We are well pleased with it.

11-16-11 Played two games of Civ 4 – both on the Thomas War Extended Mod. Joe stunk at both of them. Both games I was doing well.

11-08-11 Played Civilization IV again and had a ton of fun playing in the original mod, Thomas’ War with a huge earth map and 10 opponents. Joe played Brazil and I played Mexico. We are both doing well.

11-01-11 Had great fun in Everquest II last night. Played some low level guys and took down three dungeons – last minute, we loaded our big guys into the game and took out several epic mobs.

10-26-11 Continued to play Everquest II. We journeyed to two new dungeons and had many hours of fun. Made some decent loot that we will probably just sacrifice to the gods or perhaps mute.

10-19-11 Joe and I continued to play Everquest II, playing our 90th level guys first for 2 hours then going on to play some tertiary characters for about an hour. Had some great BBQ chicken pizza as well. Thoughts of inviting Wade over circulated since we miss our good friend – perhaps soon I will have a new computer allowing him to play on my 2nd computer.

10-11-11 Great night playing Everquest II

10-05-11 No game because of studying for a test. Next week we are going to try and play Multiverse.

My Gaming History

I knew I was hooked on gaming ever since my brother came home from the store with an Avalon Hill board game called Starship Troopers. I am not sure what year that would be, but I would have to think it was the late 70s. It wasn’t until high school that I came across D&D; I remember pointedly each time I bought a brand new copy of the 1st edition set of AD&D — still to this day can I remember the smell of the binding, cracking open the Dungeon Master guide. It was only a few years later that I started constantly DMing and then writing my own adventures. During those formative years we use to play a different RPG every month, trying out dozens of games — Sadly after three moves I own only a small percentage of my original core rules booklets.

In 1980 I home published a little book called Phantasm Adventures. I typed all the pages up on a typewriter and photocopied and bound them. Perhaps 100 copies of this game exists, yet only recently I had people from Canada and England asked me if they could buy a copy for their RPG collections. I own one original copy of the game — the where about of the other 99 are a mystery to me.

It was during this time that Jeff Dee (the creator of many of the original art found in the 1st and 2nd edition D&D rules, and also the writer of Villains & Vigilantes), and later Jack Herman (co-author of V&V), both moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan. I am unsure of the reasons he moved here, but I think it was a comic-drawing gig. The funny thing is I remember asking my mother if I could go down to this guy’s house and do some gaming, and my mom, always the worrisome type said no because it was in a rather unruly side of town (for Grand Rapids). So it wasn’t during the first alignment of the planets that I met Jeff Dee and started my game design career.

But the second time when again he posted a sign at a local hobby store looking for gamers a year later, I did finally get to meet him. It was here that I was introduced to V&V (the first super hero role-playing game). If I had to put a date, It was probably around 1984. Jeff Dee was the best GM I have ever played with — his campaigns were so imaginative, the stories were intricate, and best of all the battles were engaging. I remember always wanting to go to his house and game.

During this time, I also met up with Scott Bizzar (president of Fantasy Games Unlimited) and I pitched him a number of ideas on different full length gaming system including my little brown book called Phantasm Adventures. This was before the time of true word processing or very early on. If my memory serves me in 1984 the Lisa computer came out for Apple and that was the start of what I would call personal computing — although it would be another 15 years before I owned a Mac for a brief period of time. Alas, during this “Stone Age” everything had to be typed on either a typewriter or a bit later on my archaic Commodore-64 word processor.

It was in 1984 the I wrote my first adventure module for V&V called The Devil’s Domain. The adventure centered around a demonic figure trapped in another dimension trying to escape to Earth and a group of stalwart heroes trying to stop him. To this day I still get small royalty checks from the company every year.

In 1985 I released a compendium of super villains for V&V called Most Wanted III, having the prior two Most Wanted written by Jeff Dee and Jack Herman. This was another great production value module with artwork predominately done by Jeff Dee.

In 1986 I released my third and last V&V adventure called Return to the Devil’s Domain. By this time the franchise was seeing great growth but the overall production standards having slipped with shoddy artwork and poor editing.

In 1987 through 1988 I moved to Japan for a year. It was during the early part of my stay that I visited a bookstore and bought a Japanese game magazine called Game Graphix. On the back they put their address in English, I suppose because they thought it looked fantastical — as if a game’s magazine here would put their return address in elven, I guess. I wrote to the company and within a week I was sitting in their offices talking about games. The rest of the year saw the formulations of a dozen game books — I would write them in English, then present them to the editorial staff that would translate them into Japanese. It was during this time that I wrote and published Phantasm Adventures, Bloodbath, Bloodchant, and Multiverse.
in 1990 I was nearly considered for the producers position at Interplay, the maker of games like Fallout and Bard’s Tale. I was to work on a game called Castles. I flew out there and had serious talks with the president, but in the end I did not take the position.

When I returned to the states I continued to work on RPG designs for 10 years, working with every major publisher including TSR, Steve Jackson Games, Iron Crown Enterprises, and Different World Magazines. I still banged out expansions, modules, and map sets for the Japanese.
It was between 1987 and 1997 that I wrote such works as The Castle Guide and the Equipment Guide for 2nd edition AD&D. I also wrote a huge compendium for RoleMaster under the name of Heroes & Rogues. I also took a hand at editing for Hero Games, working on several super hero adventures for Champions. the Japanese continued to buy my creations including Advanced Phantasm Adventures. You can see more about this English version here:

http://emeraldtablet.wordpress.com/phantasm-adventures/

It was during this period that I was on fire on creating home-brewed game systems, just as desktop publishing was taking off. I created a dozen RPG systems all seeing a very limited print but I became a center of gaming fury in Grand Rapids. At one point, I remember, I had 12 guys in my house playing one of the games. I created such systems as TED&D (pronounced Teddy like the bear) which stood for Troy’s Enhanced Doom & Death; Realms of Ardaan; and Star Traders.

I finally got to work at a computer game company when I accepted a position at Bethesda Softworks, the maker of Skyrim among other computer games. I was to work in the offices and also collaborate on Dagger Fall. My stay at the company was short lived as I discovered that working in the industry was not as glorious as it sounded.

After returning from Bethesda, I entered the “Dark Ages” of design, not producing anything of real quality for 10 years. It was a time of placid existence, without thought of worlds beyond ours — even my gaming dried up and I became lost in the world of gaming.

In 2007 I returned with several community mods for Civilization IV, a computer game of conquest from Firaxis. Although not a programmer, I did figure out how to make large modification to the rules. To this day, I still get people from all over the world emailing about how much they enjoyed my mod.

in 2010 I was contacted by Jeff Dee and Jack Herman about writing a new module for V&V; This project is in the works. It was during this year that I was also contacted by some of the original editorial staff of Game Graphix in Japan and they sought to release a new version of Advanced Phantasm Adventures. Sadly, this project keeps lapsing because of many outside factors.

In 2011, I started another design project called Iron Age. It was built off from my game rules system called Bloodbath, but a bit more complicated. It was also backed up by historical research, hoping to put players into a relatively real world environment of history. My hopes is that playing the game will spur the players to learn more about the culture and history during the Iron Age. The development continues, but slowly.

Great Gaming Short Film

As everyone knows, I generally do not like to add video content to the Emerald Tablet, but this short film so captured the feeling of our local gaming group that I just had to offer it to all of my readers. The name of the video is “The Politics of Competitive Board Gaming Amongst Friends” and all about what guys do when they get together to game. In this case it is how friends become sometimes a bit too competitive on a simple game, but what I like about the video is that it isn’t pretentious or unrealistic.  It doesn’t degenerate into sophomoric pandering of ninjas and or sword fighting, magic spells, or guttural name calling.  It simple is how the game is played all across the country in tens of thousands of homes every week — I am sure you will identify friends  in the video and nod your head more than once knowing exactly what is going on:

The Politics of Competitive Board Gaming Amongst Friends

Monday Night Games

This week my friends Joe and Wade came back over for another round of Monday night gaming goodness. As it happens Joe showed up first and we talked about what sort of games we wanted to play last night. The problem is that we have only about 4 and half hours, a bit less if we plan on having some food. In weeks past, we would all get a big pizza and sit around and talk about the next “big” game. For the last several, however, we decided in advance to eat quick and get on to more dedicated playing of a game.

We talked about playing some Civilization IV, with either a mod that I designed such as Multiverse or Extreme II or perhaps one of the many fine other mods out there. Those interested in a bunch of really great stuff, I urge you to go here: http://forums.civfanatics.com/forumdisplay.php?f=171

Extreme II can be located here: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=415468

And my mod that encapsulates magic, steam punk, and a ton of what if technologies can be found here: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=440184

In the end of our conversation, we decided that we would allow Civilization to rest for another week and continue on playing our characters in the MMO (Multi-Massive Online) game City of Heroes. This is a free to play game, that has a very low entry point but delivers up great mounts of fun. So cool and exciting to create a hero or villain of your own design and then play it through scenarios and missions, collecting secret tips and plans. As you play the game, you gain levels with which you can select new powers or increase the strength of old powers.

You can find more reference here: http://na.cityofheroes.com/en/my_account/download_game_client/download_city_of_heroes.php

If you decide to try the game, you will notice that you need to select a server — basically a copy of the game spread over many computers. Your character will be locked to that server until you can transfer him, so make a choice. My friends and I are on Defiant, if you want to join us sometimes.

 

Wade eventually showed up and he told us he had transferred some of his higher level guys to the Defiant server, which makes missions a bit easier.

In the game, any level character can join up with any other level character through a mentoring program. The leader of the group decides the level cap. So if a low level guy adds high level, those more powerful characters become his level until the group breaks up, alternately a high level guy who adds lower level characters the new additions will be 1 level less than the leader.

Joe played his character Master Jailer throughout the night, while Wade and I switched through a couple of toons. I started out with my super villain called The Butternut Kid, a young cowboy with a fancy set of pistols, but later I moved to my other guy called Doctor Cloudstuff. Cloudstuff is a steampunk character with magical and technological powers to heal and also a crazy gun that is rather powerful.

Our adventures took us all over the map and we completed many missions that night.

 

Some did not end well and several times our guys had to be rushed to the hospital. Going to the hospital happens when the team is beat up and knocked out — it is a time penalty for not successfully managing the fights in a mission.

With a bit of luck and with some arguing amongst ourselves, we ultimately won the day and succeeded in our missions.

 

Each of my guys went up a couple of levels and I added some new powers.

It was a great night of camaraderie that I hope will continue next week.

First Impressions of Diablo III

I am sure most people that reads my blog have heard about Diablo III, a game from the company Blizzard. It is one of the crown jewels of the game company, aside from World of Warcraft and Starcraft. For the last ten years everyone who remembers Diablo II has been excited about the sequel. For years we were tantalized with screen shots and promises of the game to be released.

I cannot think of the number of times over the last five years of hearing “authenticated” rumors of the game’s release, with always the motto “It will be released when it is ready, and not a day before.” Year after year the game did not come out.  Often long lapses of silence from Blizzard causes people to think it was never going to be released.

Well the game is on the verge of finally coming out.  This weekend (April 20, 2012) anyone could log into their servers and download the game (it is over 4 gigabytes in size).  Playing proved a bit more difficult with the servers constantly going down, but it was a test for this sort of thing.  The true release date is May 15th of this year, so they have some bit of work ahead of them before release.

The game has a number of new character classes to play. The rich abilities and smooth programming is obvious the moment you start playing the game. Everything seems to work, except in a few rare instances of lag (which is more of the Beta thing, I believe). Each character can be played as either a man or a woman, different than the original game when if you wanted to play a sorcerer, for example,  you had to be a woman. Each model seems high detailed, but oddly all of them seem to have advanced palsy: they twitch, squirm, and teeter almost drunkenly when standing still — this is not good animation, sorry. If you let them stand long enough, they do have some unique expressions or animations which is very pleasing.

I think there is a number of cool aspects to the game,  but I am really not impressed with my two day sojourn of the beta testing for a number of reasons.  I had so much hope this game was going to be a continuation of the fantastic gaming of Diablo II, but with better graphics and more of everything.

Aside from the lack of server capacity, which is to be expected from a monumental release of a game like this — hundreds of thousands if not millions of players logging in on untried servers, I do not fault the designers or Blizzard for this. The Beta is exactly provided to test such things.

What I do have a problem with is the two fold contention of the company changing some basic game tenants of Diablo III and also having this attitude of “We know how to play the game, so we’ll make all decisions for you while playing”.

First the major changes in the game. First and foremost, it is a Software as a Service model. That means although you buy the software you never really own it. That to play the game, you must log onto their servers. They control every aspect of the game, from its content to the characters you will spend months playing. It is more of an MMO than it is a single player game, like it or not. Worse, there will be no player made mods for it — they control the servers and thus control the content. What made Diablo II so great was that over the years countless modifications to the game allowed for repeated play. That will no longer be possible. If the server is down, you cannot play the game.

Graphics are of course much better now than from 2000 with extreme resolutions and millions of colors, but to be honest the camera is so far removed no details can be seen when you add new equipment. There is a zoom mode when you go into equipment/inventory but it is not playable at this setting (I wish it was!).

Character generation although fluid and individual skills are impressive, they leave no room for tinkering. Fans of the new game will say, certainly you can select different skills and augment them with runes, but the days of having builds and skill points are gone. When two 30th level wizards meet, they are essentially the same! They have the same abilities and the same capacity of doing things. This mentality of “We know what is better, so we will decide how the character develops” seems thick throughout my weekend play.

Some classes seem outrageously over powered, such as the wizard. During my play I could constantly fire a spell never having to wait more than a second for my mana. However, other classes seemed borked right out of the gate. My barbarian and monk were constantly crying for their version of stamina to do any sort of special attack — this was so obvious in the first couple of hours I wondered how the designers would have not seen this?

Gone are the days of finding some treasure and having to wait until you discover its use or use a scroll on it to determine what it is. For some unknown reason, the designers thought this was not fun?!? All items are automatically known when they drop. Worse is that each player sees different treasure — No more scrambling for treasure, but also no more having to talk to anyone about a trade (you can buy and sell things on the auction which is so unbelievably sterile it is sickening). The designers have removed any reason to communicate with someone else in the game.

although you do eventually get a teleport capability, it is again at the hands of the designers and not under the control of the players. “Let us play, because we know when and where you can use it best.” This kind of surely, I am better than thou attitude pervades every aspect of the game.

It is suppose to be a multi-player game, but for some reason they have removed any reason why you would speak with another player? I was in multiple open games and no one ever said anything. Even when I talked, I was met with silence.

Blizzard went to great lengths to force players into the way they think you ought to play the games, yet allowed characters to be called all sorts of foolish and trite names. I would have thought that if the consistency of the world was to be maintained, which seems forefront in the minds of the designers, that a random or restricted name list would have been screwed on tight!

What astounds me about the game more than anything else is how easy they have made it. Aside from never having to fear death — and literally I played every class to 6th level I never died once. Did everyone here me? I never died — on most characters I never even feared death! Secondly, they hold you hand in every quest to the point of …”Hey I have played this game for 10 years, so let me lead you around by the nose” mentality. Everything is mapped out for you — you never guess where anything is at or where next to proceed. There is no room for exploration because they tell you everything that is going on!

This game should have been released five years ago, albeit with lesser graphics but there is nothing here I see that says “This is the reason we waited 10 years to put this out?!” I am still holding out hope for some serious play balancing, making the game harder, and options that allow for player interaction in the next couple of months.

Monday Night Gaming

For the last several years now, my friends and I have gathered on Monday nights to play a rich cornucopia of computer games. Often just one a night, but we made sure to play a number of them over the course of weeks and months.

The games we have selected over the past years have been either some form of a MMO or a turn based strategy games. The first sort of game doesn’t necessarily require playing on a LAN (and in some cases bridged to the web for authentication) but we find it so much more fun to sit in the same room. Many can argue that with headphones and mic, one could get the same camaraderie even if we were scattered around the world. More than likely, but we still find the proximity of friends in the same room to be so gratifying — mostly when one of us takes a head plunge into foolish maneuvers or some other deadly recourse.

So a thought occurred to me that why not document our weekly gathering for others to learn the sorts of fun we are having and also to historically document the games we played and the troubles. In the past I have simply posted a running dialogue of the dates, times, and game events we have had. Rather frequently from now on, I will detail a bit more specifically what sorts of things that are going on and who is at the engagements.

Our group is not particularly large, most often just three of us and sometimes only two. On some rather exciting occasions we do get a few more guys in the group, but then the application of power for the computers and sitting room for their rumps can be a bit daunting. On even some more rare occasions we have actually joined a few friends from the web into our mix of onsite players, which can be interesting too.

This week we started out with arguing which game we were going to play. A friend brought over “Settlers of America: CATAN” but we agreed that until all of us had a chance to read the rules that it would not be a great idea to play. CATAN is also not a computer game but a board game, and there are a few of us here that would rather play something on a screen than on a table (not me, but at least one fool which will remain nameless).

Our second choice of games to play was Drakensang Online a new Diablo II clone with tendrils of MMO style of gaming. You can find the game at: http://www.drakensang.com/

The game is very easy to play with nothing more than creating an account with a username, password, and a few demographic bits of information. The initial download is also very small at under 30 megabytes — it is somewhat unknown if the game is a browser based game or if it is a more traditional locally installed client game. I suspect it is an amalgamation of the two. Very low overhead and quick entry into the game makes it a jewel to play.

Even some of the older machines handled the game rather well, but we had to scale back a few graphical choices. It did get laggy at times, but overall a pleasant experience.

The game presently has three classes to choose from and can be played either as a man or woman, though the choice of model has no bearing on the game play. There is no non-human races to play, such as elves or dwarves. There is also an indication that a fourth class would soon be released — I suspect a full scale cleric. The other classes are a warrior, mage, and a archer type (called a ranger).

Game play is very similar to Diablo II with your fingers quickly becoming sore from the clicking. It achieves nearly the same goals as the earlier mega popular game of Diablo, but just falls a bit short on some graphical and gaming aspects.

The largest problem my friends and I have with it is that it is again another cash shop game where everything is up for sale. You can gain some of the in game cash on mobs, but very miniscule. Most of this money, which is called armadent (or something close to that) is purchased with real money. All sorts of weapons, armors, and upgrades can be purchased with this cash, which for me cheapens the overall experience.

We played to level 6 in the game which took us a bit over an hour. We were grouped for most of the time and did not interact with the other online players we saw. There was a wide range of interesting character names and styles, and just like other online free to play games hundred of idiots with uncreative and just stupid names running around begging and pleading for assistance.

After flailing around in Darkensang for a bit over an hour, the real gaming started when another friend showed up and we all agreed to play some City of Heroes. At this time, this is our main stable game — each of us having a slew of different characters in play.

Most of my friends have 20 and 30th level characters, but mine are much lower levels often in the teens. I have been playing EVE online for the last two months and wasn’t playing City of Heroes like the others. I also find I cannot play long sessions of this game by myself because without friends to heckle and cajole it isn’t an attention getter for me.

We started out the night with my character named Rocket Ranger, a small diminutive fugitive of the law that can fly and has augmented fists of power, another player had a character named Jailbreaker with powers of modified guns and mechanical tricks, a third guy rounded out the group with a name of RUTO which he claimed stood for something. Most everyone there agreed it stood for stupid! He was supposed to be our healer but he was a clutz and failed miserably. Finally we had a guy called Super Nova which flew and had fireball super powers.

We ran through several missions with these guys and generally made out well. I went up three levels and added several new powers to my line up of capabilities — I got a new hand to hand attack and also augmented several super powers with slots.

Next we got some new guys out. I selected a super villain that I called IQ-9 that had robotic pets and he could wield a large phaser. Another friend had a cute but essentially ineffective Leprechaun, and another played a multi-tentacled tank that could effectively hold the line with NPC monsters

[in this picture, poor IQ-9 is laying face down in a evil secret base after being knocked out. The healer failed again]

Having leveled IQ-9 a couple of levels and adding an additional power of another robotic ally to his abilities, we switched again to another set of guys.

My final guy for the night was Doctor CloudStuff, a super villain of steampunk motif and the super powers of healing. Others in the group was a guy named Toxic Joe which was a brawler with caustic and poison powers. We also had some miserable little female cricket character that could summon weather and controlled pets.

Doctor Cloudstuff again gained three levels and augmented his powers by adding a classic steampunk cannon to his arsenal.

At the end of the night, everyone agreed we had a great time and we all went home smiling. Next week I am sure we will continue our battles in City of Heroes.

Revisiting City Of Heroes

About the same time I left Everquest II in search of new games to play, I decided to return to an MMO that I started playing back in 2004. Recently City of Heroes, the massive multiplayer online game of super heroes and villains went free to play. It had been almost six years since I last walked the streets of Paragon City and was looking forward to seeing if any of the jazz of the game remained.

Even better for me than returning, I also talked a number of friends into trying the game as well. Since it was free, the other guys had really nothing to lose. Of course, I did have to set up their accounts and even create a few temporary characters to play, but in the end it was well worth it.

The game is very straight forward and easy to play. The graphics have been tweaked over the years, but they still show the age of the engine. What is good about that is any computer even those that are five years old can play the game on near maximum settings.

One of the great jobs of the game is creating a super hero, or if you wish, a super villain. There is also a tertiary subset of characters outlined in an expansion from several years ago called Rogue which softens the edge on good and evil and replaces it with generic good and bad guys called Vigilante and Rogues. Based on a soft alignment system, characters flow between these polar opposites as they do missions.

Characters are broken down into Origins. Origins are Natural, Magic, Science, Mutation, and Technology. As one can tell by the names, the origin simply suggests where the powers of the character originates from. Later in game play, players can find Enhancements devoted to a particular Origin that is better than generic power-ups. That is, if I created a Magic Origin super hero I could only use Magic Enhancements and the others such as Natural, Science, Mutations, and Technology I would need to sell.

A character must also select an Archetype which is similar to a class in generic RPG systems. Just as fantasy games have clerics, warriors, magic users, and thieves, City of Heroes have tanks, blasters, controllers, and defenders. There are subsequent evil names for the same archetypes. Archetypes create a class in which specific powers are granted. Thus, a character is created as a blaster he would not gain the powers of healing, though he could select a third and very weak tier of powers that allows some healing capabilities.

After the Archetype is decided, along with the Origins, the player needs to select a primary  and secondary powers. There are innumerable powers for each archetype and the combinations seem rather open ended. After 4th level the character gains a third and subsequently every 2 levels another chance of selecting a tertiary power set.

Most players will select a super movement power at 4th level, though the longer one plays the game, and subsequent characters are developed one realizes that it is better not to select a super movement power until later. Super Movement can be flying, teleportation, super speed, super jump, or even invisibility.

Tertiary powers also allow the character other sorts of super abilities, such as healing, leadership, and hand to hand fighting.

After the powers are selected is where the real fun of the pregame begins. My friends who decided to play the game after some arm twisting found this portion of character generation the most fun and rewarding. In this portion of the game the player determines how the character looks from sheer size and mass to the minutia of a hundred selection of helmets, capes, gloves, pants, belts, and boots. The combination seems utterly endless and my friends could sit for hours swapping one model for another. In addition, you can change the color of each piece. One can build a unique super hero motif or sadly create a kaleidoscopic nightmare like my friend has done:

After one is completely finishing the looks of the character, adding additional special effects completely tinting in a variation of colors, you start the game.

There are 50 levels to the game, with beginning players start at either first level or 4th level if they complete a minor but aggravating tutorial. Every even level up to 30 gains an additional super power. Odd levels gain additional slots in which players can augment the power with enhancements. Enhancements generally add an additional benefit to the power including such things as a bonus to strike, more damage, less fatigue in using the power, and so forth.

Although the game is more than six years old there is a deep and thriving community of players. Having the game free to play allows for easy access to the core features but long term players will want to get a subscription to the game at a cost of $12 a month. One can play for free easily and never get a subscription, but you are limited to two slots for characters and the inability to trade with other players, or buy or sell things on the market. Not essential, the VIP service as it is called is probably worth the twelve dollars a month.

There is also a cash shop, similar to other games of this sort, where instead of becoming a VIP you can add services and abilities ala carte. Meaning that you can buy the ability to trade for a limited time or open up additional slots for characters for a one time charge. I am going to try this after a couple of months of play because I generally only play two to four characters and have not really used the trading system all that much.

One can group up with other super heroes/villains and go on large missions gaining bonus experience and rare enhancements that are not generally found simply beating up the NPC monsters. Missions are fun and quick, allowing players to avoid the great time sinks that exist in other games.

Aside from that, one can create a super hero/villain organization and construct a special base that can hold innumerable items to help others in the league.

I am thoroughly enjoying myself as a returning player. My friends also enjoy the game too from character generation to playing hours on end. All of us have moved to a VIP status and are constantly making new variations of archetypes with origins.

I have too many characters to list here, but recently I have been playing on the Defiant server with several villains.  I have a 14th level villain called The Butternut Kid, a 10th level defender called Doctor Cloudstuff, a 10th level robotic controller called IQ-9, and a 11th level blaster named the Dinosaur Hunter.  I also have several heroes, with a 38th level Brute called Meganaut and a 28th level blaster called The Wild Wild West.  Names can generally be whatever you want, but of course there are rules against insulting and vulgar names.  Names have to be unique as well, so some of the more popular names have long ago been taken.  With creativity, one can still invent interesting names!

I think you will enjoy the game too, as I have come to a strong conclusion that there is still a ton of JAZZ in this game. Go crack some heads and join the leagues of new super characters searching for fame and glory.

Reflections on Eve Online

One of the last major Massive Multiplayer Online Games, often referred to as a MMO, for me to tackle is the Icelandic creation called Eve Online. It is an interstellar game of conflict, manufacturing, production, exploration, and control of space. It is a game spread across more than 5,000 star systems with each containing dozens of individual planets and scores of moons. Each of these locations are ripe for mining and production.

Unlike other MMOs, the breadth and scope of Eve Online is limited to two servers. Basically there is an English server and a Chinese server. All the players of the game exist in either of these two shards (consider them dimensions if you will). Most other games divide their players across dozens of servers, each an exact copy of the others but having their own economy and playing style. Eve online bundles everyone into one of two servers which makes for a more dynamic and personal experience of the game. (edit: I have recently been informed that the Chinese server is no longer in operations — as to the reasons, I am unsure but will find out)

Amidst all of this glory of gorgeous planets, stellar gas, and deep dark space are 50,000 real players who via for control of the space. The game has been around for many years, with its original release in 2003 it has gone through many free updates and iterations. As stated above, it is a game that was coded and produced in Iceland, a rather unlikely place to forge a MMO that is played around the world.

Unlike most other MMOs, where players are represented by a single figure that moves through the game, Eve Online is more focused on the various ship that one can fly. There has been a diminutive and lackluster attempt to create a single avatar, the person behind the wheel of the ship, but it has real no effect or use in game. One can leave a ship and walk around a small and boring cabin, but there truly is nothing to do there that one cannot do from the cockpit of a starship. Vague rumors have circulated that at some point open meeting points will be introduced where avatars can mingle with others, but other than a myopic Facebook device it will have little use in the game.

I have tried to play Eve Online many of times and it must be stated, at least from my experience, that it is one of the most complicated and obtuse MMO games on the market. It is truly a different experience than any other game I have played.

Most games of this nature are driven on two principles. Effort into improving skills and equipment and money. But in Eve online, it is all about Time. period. Other games make players play the game to improve their abilities, but in Eve it is simply a measure of real time devoted to a particular skill set. So in a similar game, a player may have to go out into the world swing a sword at monsters to get better at fighting, but in Eve you simply click on a skill such as Small Turrets and wait for the real world timer to click to zero. A player does not need to be in the game for the timer to click down thankfully, but many skills have unbelievable real world timers — it is not hard to find skills taking weeks or even a month to learn (again this is real time and not some condensed version of time in game).

Money is another thing that is handled completely different than in any other game I have ever played. In most other games, objects in the game are purchased with imaginary gold coins or some form of money (though there is a relatively new practice of real world money exchange proliferating around the game worlds now), but in general a character goes on adventures to raise gold to buy the new sword, armor, or magic spell he needs. In Eve Online however, money is really just a minor brake to the ends of gaining an item. That is because CCP, the company who makes the game, allows players to buy and then sell game time — see the connection. So a new player could spend $18 dollars of game time and then sell it completely legal within the game for 450,000,000 isk (isk is their form of money).

I have been playing for a month and I can generally now make about 10,000,000 credits in a day doing horribly time consuming and boring things. And I am sure there are thousands of players who will scoff at that and say they can make 10,000,000 isk in an hour. But however the money it is made, having the ability to legal buy isk at a comparably rate of 25,000 isk for every cent simply dilutes and cheapens the aspect of making money in the game. I should point out that, as I have been told many times, some player must buy the PLEX (the name given to game time) originally, so it is not as if the company is printing worthless script. It does change the concepts of the game, however.

Looking at the framework of most games, one gets better by actually playing the game and using skills repeatedly go get better and also going on adventures to raise capital to buy needed objects. But Eve casts that aside. It is only about time and real world money. A fresh player can buy anything in the game with a deep real world pocket, counter balanced that it requires skills that only real time unlocks. The good aspects to that is that a seasoned player cannot simply create multiple accounts and fly high end ships around without first spending time training, but of course the bad aspects is that Eve is all about time — a short commodity to most adults.

So with the understanding that the game is principally about time and really nothing else, we can look at the basic aspects of it.

Again there are three main paths for players in the game. PVP, Mining and Productions, and Missions. There is no restrictions to mixing these three paths and generally all players will do all three at some point in the game.

Space is divided up into regions of controlled space. With starting players finding themselves in an area guarded by computer controlled police ships that will enforce civility. As one ventures further into frontier space, these laws degrade and a player can quickly find himself in lawless space where there is no rules. This is where PVP starts. There are also worm holes that starships can enter that projects the ships into vastly deep space where both computer controlled ancient aliens reside or groups of players wait for intrepid explorers to stumble into. Winners of player vs. player combats, get the spoils of the destroyed ships to sell.

Next comes mining and manufacturing. Another huge time sink. Starting players can mine asteroids turning the metals into other objects in the game that can be sold to other real players. I have been told that 90% of all items in the game are player generated, making for a robust and thriving market. At some point the mining will become particularlly boring, which for me it already happening at 30 days of play. The next step up is to perform Planetary Interactions, or basically landing a colony on one of the thousands of planets in space and start mining and combining resources found only on planets. Expensive in the form of isk, but again if a player is willing to shell out real money, there are but a few skills one needs to achieve this goal. And finally there is moon interaction, which I have not done at all and cannot really speak of what it entails aside from that it can only be done in space that is open and wild and is more created for corporations (e.g. guilds, clans, or other terms associated with player designed groups).

Edit — There is also a portion of the game that I was completely unaware of, see how I am learning stuff just by writing about it, that is research oriented.  I assume you can make research facilities that can recreate blueprints with.  I have also been told that it scales far better than Planetary Interaction.

There is also missions in the game that can grant players money, items, and fame. Most of these things are the standard nauseating quests found in every other MMO on the market. Talk to a person who says he needs X of this, moved to Y of that location, but look out because E enemies will try and foil your attempt. Wash and repeat until you are weak in the knees and eyes crossed.

There is so much to see in the game and I again have been told it is possible to travel the expanse of the known universe, giving enough time — see how that word keeps repeating itself in the game. Time is everything in this game and there are no shortcuts. In some games they use teleporters to move avatars around because the world is so large, but although there are jump gates (e.g. gates that connect two far ranging locations in a moment of time) there is still incredible lengths of time devoted to approaching them and just traveling around in space to get to the planet, moon, or asteroid. I have become an expert at alt-tabbing to other things while I wait for my ship to move to this spot or do that little time chore. Mining is that way, for me; I get my ship mining then walk away or alt-tab to Twitter because watching my lasers cut asteroids into little chunks is as exciting as watching a pot boil with water!

There is something that keeps making me come back to the game, but it is a different pull then other MMOs. Games like City of Heroes, Everquest II, or Rifts is that you want to stay in the game to do that next quest or get that next skill. In Eve Online it is all about that payout of time — when 7 days elapse I get this new skill; or when I sell my PLEX I can open up another 3 planets for mining.

I am still learning in the game, something someone told me just recently who had been in the game for years — you are always learning something new here. It is ever changing.