RPG Articles

Seriously though, this is a lot of fun. Having a non-monolithic OS is heaps of good stuff. Aside from some really aggravating issues with my bluetooth headset, and some video driver juggling, it’s been great. I’ve been playing my older games under wine. No Metal Fatigue though, it’s apparently doomed to not work right anywhere. I can do all kinds of crazy stuff to pretty up the desktop, the Add in Add/Remove Software isn’t a sad joke, and everything is running at least 50% smoother than my XP install.

They suck.

Makes me pretty determined to go nVidia next time I upgrade. All this and I still can’t do direct rendering, because ATI just hasn’t gotten around to it. Sure, there’s an open source driver, but it’s fairly primitive thanks to ATI not only refusing to do the work, but also refusing to let others do it. Way to go.

Still, so far I’m pretty happy that I decided to go dual boot. Ubuntu is fast, clean, and personable.

Conceptually, I love video games. Have since my first exposure, shortly after being able to walk semi-reliably. But over the last couple of years I’ve noticed that I feel punished by the games I’m playing. Honestly it’s impossible for me to tell if it’s me or them.

Let’s start with FPS games. These used to be games I didn’t like, but then grew on me, and now I honestly can’t give a damn about. Doom, Quake, and all of their sequels were nothing but nonsense. Later I discovered Unreal Tournament, which had a certain organic flow to its twitch gameplay, and I was hooked. Followed up by Rebel’s excellent AvP, and the cool but somehow lesser AvP2 from… damned if I can recall. Somewhere in there Deus Ex came out, which aside from the multiplayer was one of the finest FPSs ever made. Now? I dunno. It all feels drab. Bioshock really sealed it for me. The game, from the Irrational guys, had a lot of hype, meaning you have to deduct at least 30% from your expectations, but even after that it was a pile of crap. Sure, it was just a demo, but this is supposed to be the next big game? All this talk about dynamic interactions, and organic play elements, and all you get is a stream of tightly scripted events. Ok.. well.. maybe this environment interaction stuff is hot. No, no I’d say it was pretty standard. Bumping junk over is, well, not that impressive. At one point I used the fire ability, torching some stuff, and noticed that a bottle of booze had some flames on it. I could still drink it, and they just went out pretty shortly. Woot. You have this lightning power, which stuns the weaker enemies. Not kills, despite being lightning, but stuns. Unless they’re in a puddle of water, then they die. Multiples of them will die. Beats the hell out of me why that would be. Then there’s these powers themselves. It’s just magic. The whole thing is just a magic system based on being a crazed junkie. Actually, that would be more interesting, but I digress. Made me want to go and find a copy of Parasite Eve. Sure, it was an RPG, but at least I could fiddle with my gun and all my powers were appropriate to the genre.

So, next are the RPGs. This is a lot like complaining about Santa Claus, because there just aren’t any. The few that do make it to release are either total crap, an MMO (see total crap), or a “hybrid game” (see total crap). Like Oblivion. I wanted to like it. I did. But what the hell man? “Part first person shooter, part RPG, part retard coddler, this one has everything!!”. The game ran like crap, on any system I saw it on, then proceeded to be an endless parade of the same crap. Add that to a “dynamic challenge” system that rewarded you for not leveling and you get a steamy pile of stink. I get depressed thinking about the next Fallout game. MMOs are… sad. I currently play EvE online, but I think I’m cancelling it. Games that rely on socializing, and most of them make that the primary object now, are just weird and sad. Click… type at retards I don’t know…. click… more typing…. hey you were interesting, bet you never login under this account anymore… click… what the hell is the goal here…. click… I think I’m gonna go see a movie….. cancel account.

Then there’s the RTS games. Amongst my earliest favorite games was Dune 2000. Then there were all those awful Command & Conquer games, and the mind numbing Starcraft. Then I caught a break and Emperor:Battle for Dune came out. Neither game was perfect, what is, but both captured a lot of cool elements and flow of play that few others ever have. Sure, people that memorize build orders, click out a thousand orders a minute, and exploit odd mechanics to optimize unit survival can win that way, but unlike other RTS games of the time, that wasn’t the only way to play. You could strategize some, rather than pick a strong unit and churn out a billion. Also, units didn’t have weird powers that had to be individually managed in order to be effective. Then came along Dawn of War, and later Supreme Commander. Excellent games, but frustrating for me. Dawn of War was hard to play with random unit spam. You had fairly small numbers of units, and a great overall balance. Then each revision and expansion eroded that to death. The Tau/Necron expansion pretty much sealed it. I knew it was over when my hyperactive friend started being able to churn out a billion units before I had five. Patched by the committee of people that hate non-repetitive tasks. Supreme Commander started off good, but a handful of super powerful, but standard, units with little to counter them with have upset the cart for me. There just isn’t any reason for me to play it anymore. I don’t want to right click 50 times a second to make my units survive an attack. I don’t want to face a flight of 50 gunships and have them be absolutely impossible to stop. Yet, these are, and will, be the ideas that get enhanced, because that’s how all these people “play”. Not with thought, but with trial, error, and memorization. Not being an ant, this doesn’t appeal to me.  The flipside of this sort of gameplay is something like Metal Fatigue, but it had a severe fatal flaw- a game could last forever. I’m all for epic, but forever is a bit much when you can’t save a multiplayer session. It also doesn’t work right with SP2 under XP, so it’s right out the damned window.

Is it me? I dunno. It doesn’t matter much either way I suppose.

I hesitate to call this a book review. It had interesting characters, and some old, but trusty, story elements, but anything that could be called climactic was left out. It really just sort of becomes someone talking about how crappy modern America is, and how we should have more God in our lives. It’s better than that sounds, but still a really awkward bag.
In the end it sort of came off like a collection of story ideas that he edited together, so it just didn’t satisfy me at all.
It’s short, very short, so read it if you’re bored or something and it happens to be around.

Wow. I hear a lot of comparisons, to use the term liberally, between operating systems, but sometimes I’ll read something that is just trash.

I really, overall, have enjoyed Windows. At least 98SE, 2k, and XP. I’ve really enjoyed the Mac OS since 8. I’ve really liked linux and unix since about 1999.

Now, would I say that 98SE was better than, say, FreeBSD in 99? Depends, at what task would you be referring? Under 98SE I had a lot of end user stuff to play with, the most important to me being games, as well as easy video and sound. It was, however, unstable as all get out, though perhaps not as bad as 95A-D(was it D?). FreeBSD offered virtually nothing in the way of that sort of experience. Linux had made some strides, but it was still a deathmarch for the newcomer to get it all going well.

So, what if I wanted a server for a small office or home? Well, I sure as hell wouldn’t run a 9x version of Windows. NT? Lord, only if I had to. FreeBSD? In a damned second. Stable, run on tons of hardware without fail, inter-operable, truly multi-user, and with a software collection to make you slap your momma. 2000 took over some of that market, because it offered a pretty easy but powerful implementation of LDAP.

Mac OS 8 and 9 were a lot like 98SE, but with better overall stability and almost no games worth playing. There was a complete lack of certain tools, like shells and network sniffers. Sure, ClarisWorks had a terminal program, but how ghetto is opening your doc editor to connect to a remote terminal?  Still, Mac users were easily trained to fix their own problems, and there were plenty of problems regardless of what they’ll tell you.

“Oh, I just have to rebuild the desktop.”
“Let me assign more RAM to that application.”
“Time to zap the PRAM!”
“Let me just delete these pref files.”

Seriously, it was just the lack of a command line that made these people feel comfortable. If they had any inkling what the hell any of that was doing it would make them drop fudge, right there in the office. Ping scared users because it had some deep hacker connotation by virtue of being in the command line, but telling your computer to arbitrarily blank battery backed RAM that contains application references is cool, so long as it just requires you to hold down a handful of keys. And have you seen a pre-OS X error message? Utterly without meaning most of the time. Oddly, I think this is what spawned Mac loyalty. Easily replicatable steps to solve problems caused by outrageous engineering flaws. Windows required you to treat every problem just a little different, and thus caused people to either not use it, or be lazy about it and shove all issues off to the techs because “they didn’t understand these computer things”. Sure, some people got into troubleshooting PCs, but most of them became techs.  FreeBSD made you into a man. If you wanted to use it, you had to learn what you were doing.

The BSDs, OS X included, have done nothing but get stronger over the years. Ditto with Linux, especially the primary distros. Windows? It primarily gets by with brand recognition and perceptions of things as they were in 99 or 2000. Sure, XP has served me well, but if you put an XP box in a regular home, it’s infested within hours, has retarded arbitrary versions (Home/Pro/Media Center) that primarily dictate how screwed on upgrades you’re office will be, removes the AppleTalk compatibility found in 2000, breaks QoS, and implements UPnP, a service best described with words from the Necronomicon. Oh, and since it lacks a well defined system and user-land, if you have multiple profiles on a machine then a single infection can cause headaches throughout, as you try to completely scrub each profile so it won’t re-infect the whole box. What does it do well? Video games and device drivers.

Why is that? Why does Windows enjoy that advantage? Well, it’s a misnomer to say they do drivers well. More accurately, hardware vendors spend the bulk of their money on developing for the biggest market share, which happens to be Windows. This has nothing to do with how good or bad a platform is, but rather how many people own it. And don’t start about how people only buy good things. They buy because, at this point, they’ve always had Windows, which was a pretty good alternative to DOS or OS, uh, 1. Apple has managed similar success, but in an odd way. They keep, or rather kept, as much in house as corporately possible. Bam, no driver issues. Also, bam, no upgrade path for the average user, at least as far as components go. Give and take, but with Apple on the smaller share. Except for schools, they owned the schools.

I read articles like that one I linked to, and can’t help but think they’ve accidentally tried something hard. Like Debian, or Slackware, or Gentoo. Sure, I’ve had issues even with the current “friendly” distros (Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSuSE) but not often, and going from nothing to application filled machine from a single install is a mighty benefit. To say that Linux driven desktops will never come to the mainstream is as bad as saying that Windows or the Apple OS will be dropping out anytime soon. Which is to say, willfully ignorant. The biggest sticking points I’ve had, really the only one’s recently, are bluetooth and wireless. Wireless hasn’t been hard lately, but can be quirky. Bluetooth under Linux daunts me.

Two really strong factors have propelled Linux along, and accelerated it to an amazing speed. One, the people behind the kernel and respective distros are highly dedicated, with a developer base that works out of devotion rather than action items. Two, the opensource and mostly free distribution system allows big updates whenever they want. Microsoft can’t push out new versions of Windows two or three times a year, nobody could afford it. Apple releases more frequently than Windows, but the distribution is relatively small, and Mac hardware is expensive enough that it’s worth it to a lot of users. Linux? Screw it, it’s free, and that results in a very organic development cycle.

So long as they hang onto that organic growth curve, it’ll be just fine.

So, some folks have been arrested.

Going after pirates and counterfeiters, while a huge waste of energy, is something I can understand, but going after mod chip people? Why do console people think that we’re renting this stuff from them? There’s a few reasons to mod a console-

• Play burned games. This is not to even say pirated games, but rather any game burned to a disc, such as a pirated image or backup.
• Make the device more useful, such as with a music player, movie player, and/or networking capabilities.
• Because someone likes to play import titles, and you’ve imposed an unreasonable and arbitrary restriction on that.

Seriously though, if you buy something, you can modify it. Sure, sometimes you have to be mindful of state or federal regulations, such as tuning a car or mucking with radio gear, but Dodge wouldn’t bother harassing people for adding a high flow filter, or cold air intake.

Then we get to something that always bothers me about these piracy issues. The “sales lost” numbers. Lost? You think they were all going to be sales homie? I’ve downloaded a lot of stuff for the PC over the years, and let me tell you, of the hundreds of games I’ve tried that way, only like 3 have ever been anything good. Know what I did then? Bought them, because it’s nice to support people that make something good. That and a lot easier to get updates, play online, or get support. Demos don’t cut it, usually, and ads are virtually worthless, for anything let alone something as “feel” driven as a game. It’d be like finding a warehouse of Crash Bandicoot bootlegs, sure you can talk about how “this would have been a trillion dollars in sales!!”, but in reality only like 4 copies of the game sold. Ever. Not because of piracy, but because it was bad. This isn’t like drugs or counterfeit money, where you have a guaranteed market.