Bright End of Nowhere

I keep putting off posting because I don't think I have anything substansial to let people know I'm still alive.

Anyway. My life has once again gone crazy and I'm just trying to keep up.

1.) Two PC game recs:

1a.) Transistor is really, really pretty. And it's fun and fairly clever. Reviews on the internet complain that the story is a little opaque, but really, it's because they did some interesting narrative tricks instead of laying it all out for you in a linear fashion. You figure it out by putting together what ephemera you find along with the (unreliable, biased) narrator is saying. It's made by Supergiant Games, the same people who made Bastion. And they got Darren Korb to do music again, so the soundtrack is excellent.

1b.) I accidentally 9 hours on Sunday playing Endless Space, which I guess is best described as Master of Orion-meets-Civ. 4X space game that's actually playable and doesn't feel overwhelming with micromanagement in real-time (it's turn-based). I hear the DLC expansion kind of sucks, though.

2.) I somehow got myself roped into staffing and being a plotwriter for a woods-LARP. As a corollary to that, I've found myself with the task of writing an entire critical mechanic system over the summer. Why I do this to myself, I'll never know.

3.) Trying to get my contract extended at work. This may or may not happen, depending on a grant. The probability of getting said grant might increase if I can manage to get a paper submitted. Which is where most of my energy is going. What's not going to that is going to the back-up plan, which is "find a new job". This plan is annoying. (On that note, anyone looking to hire a mechanical engineer with too much EE for her own good, who actually likes fluid dynamics, and has spent more time than one would think doing signal processing for biological systems?)

Hi. Yes, I'm alive. There's been a bit of things that happened since my last post.

( Health )

( PAX East 2013 )

1) I seem to have committed Tumblr. I'm not sure yet what I'm going to do with this thing. Well, actually, I know what one of them will be, because a certain friend is a TERRIBLE INFLUENCE and we apparently enable each other. 3shotsminimum is the collaborative one (in which we learn what happens when a couple of engineers/gamers have far too much free time on their hands). If I'm not careful, I might end up getting brow-beaten into posing Mass Effect fic bits on there. Among other ridiculous projects. (ultranos is the personal one I have no idea what to do with yet.)

2) Speaking of ridiculous projects, I seem to be writing a SIK game. Or several SIK games. Possibly also a one-night. I blame "One Night in Bangkok".

3) I went on vacation! I nearly got my speaking privileges revoked in the Museum of Science and Industry, because I am basically a snarky 12-year-old with a job. (Thank you, yarmond, for that description.)

3b) The MSI had a full-scale replica of Curiosity! It's adorable.

4) I am now only one season behind in Dr. Who. I am, however, caught up with Leverage, The Newsroom, and Warehouse 13. I am making progress! It would be easier if I didn't keep getting distracted by ME3 Multiplayer (anyone else play on PC?)

5) I kind of forgot I have an unplayed copy of Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep. That might be a good thing to start soon. I miss bashing things with keys.

Someone tell me it's a terrible idea to start the Mass Effect series over from New Game+ on ME1. (I'm currently refraining from checking Codex entries in ME2 and 3 because I had an insight into the ending, and really, I should be letting this go and not let myself obsess more. But goddamn, do I ever get like this when a story carves me up inside and leaves me thinking and hurting for days.) The fact that I'm enjoying playing multiplayer with my housemates does nothing to help the desire to play more. Again. *facepalm*

That I should go and goddamn finish my Dragon Age:Origins game that's almost at the end so I can play Awakening and DA2. Or, you know, any of the other games on my very long list. Like Kingdom Hearts: Birth By Sleep or Devil Survivor 2. Or Civ5. Actually, no, let's not play Civ5.

Because, the thing is, I realized that I do need to take time every day to play a game or something because it makes me happy. And maybe I'm not getting the most sleep ever, but it's restful enough and I'm not stressed out. I realized a month ago that I should say to hell with the idea that I should be spending my time "doing something else productive" instead of gaming when that "something else" just turns into "staring stupidly at the internet" because I don't actually have anything else I need to do. My brain finally got the memo that I'm not actually in school anymore, and no, playing a game isn't wasting time. That it's good and healthy for me to take time every day to do the thing that makes me happy because even an hour or two vastly improves my quality of life.

I did not intend to go all radio silence here, but so it goes. I've basically been chilling and having the return of this magical thing called a "social life", which is quite nice. Especially since it basically translates to two of my biweekly gaming runs coming off hiatus (in alternating weeks even!). Well, one is still technically on hiatus, but the group decided to go start a new thing. That being pirates, using the FATE system. (Which is why I'm suddenly reading up on the merchant history of Venice. See, the things I do make sense, really!) The other is DnD 4E campaign where we're all up in Paragon tier. We are so amoral and snarky.

Speaking of amoral and snarky DnD parties, my DnD group convinced me to go read the Dungeons and Dragons comic published by IDW. I was pretty much sold on lines they dropped on me and further sold on the Amazon preview. When I finally read Fell's Five, I realized my group was right, and it really does sound a lot like us at the table. And then I finally realized it's written by John Rogers, which really does explain why the halfling rogue sometimes has shades of Parker. And moved the comic up from "awesome" to "holy fuck yeah!"

I was talking with my housemates today, and we got into a conversation about Neverwinter Nights, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age, and our individual playstyles. I rarely, if ever, choose to play as a mage if I get the choice. Yeah, they're DPS gods usually, but it's usually not my thing. If given the choice, I'm much more likely to play rogue. Specifically, rogue-assassin. I was blatantly that path in DA:O and in ME1, I took the path that got me Infiltrator, as sniper rifle proficiency is probably the closest thing to assassin in the ME'verse. What's really interesting is that I only really do this for video game RPGs. I've never played a rogue in a tabletop. Closest might possibly be the Ranger with 2 levels of Dread Commando in 3.5ed, but that's a stretch.

I've also been playing through a strange...action-adventure? game and am almost done with it. El Shaddai is a very visually impressive game. The art is fantastic. The plot is pretty standard "Japanese creative reinterpretation of the Apocrypha" fare, emphasis on the "creative". It's a bit odd at times. This time, it's the Book of Enoch, but apparently taking place before the Fall, since Lucifer Lucifel is around acting as Captain Exposition and your save point...with god on speed dial on his cell phone. I told you it was odd.

One thing that's making me headtilt in a very amused way is that hit points are represented by armor. Get hit enough, and your armor breaks off. Yeah, health state is represented by clothing damage. Only this time, your protagonist is male and at 1 HP, he's walking shirtless. Turnabout is so fair play.

Anyway, where the plot sort of makes sense, some of the design decisions...well, the designers were clearly on the good drugs. The levels have gone from Okami-style line drawings in monochrome to psychedelic mutli-colored moving platform puzzles that make you wonder if you're staring at a Magic Eye puzzle and everything in between. (I'm still not sure why the game decided to make me race through a level in a TRON-sytle crazy motorcycle chase, but I will not deny it was cool.) I think I'm nearly done, but I need to somehow beat the fallen angel who changed form to a teleporting, giant, bipedal insect with a Megaton Kick who also shoots fireballs.

I said they were on the good drugs!

Remember when I was utterly obsessed with Persona 4 (er, as opposed to right now, when I'm only somewhat obsessed) and most of the rest of you were completely baffled by this? They made an anime, and not only is Persona 4: the Animation airing in Japan this fall, but you can get it, subtitled in English, within 24 hours of original air time on Hulu. It's pretty much exactly like the game, minus dungeon crawling. It sends me right to my happy place, and I adore it madly.

In other Things What I Am Watching news, I finally had enough of people beating me over the head and started watching the Eleventh Doctor in Doctor Who and Last Exile (steampunk airships!).

I also seem to have mostly abandoned League of Legends and fallen headfirst in Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance. Not that this is a bad thing, considering it means LAN games with housemates as they teach me about flak and tac d.

It sounds like my old DnD 4E game is coming out of hiatus soon, which makes me a lot less pissed for accidentally forgetting to cancel my yearly subscription to DnD Insider. It's useful now! I'm pretty excited because this was the campaign that was a sequel (set 50 years later) to the first 3.5ed campaign I played way back, and we'd just hit Paragon tier when hiatus happened. So I'm looking forward to getting my DnD back on. (My character is the grandkid of my original character, and she's all kinds of cranky because of it. Such as being utterly convinced that her getting assigned to the party is some kind of punishment but no one is telling her what she did wrong.)

I've been playing my way, slowly, through a second run of single-player for Portal 2, taking the time to really appreciate the level design and voice acting that Valve put in here, not to mention just trying for Achievements (in interest of not spoiling, two with the least-spoiler-tastic names I'm working on are "Smash TV" and "Overclocker", which I keep missing by seconds, damn it). I'm also playing through co-op with a friend, which is also a lot of fun and takes some amount of mind-bending to figure out.

Which means I'm also glad that Valve announced Friday that they're going to be releasing free DLC sometime this summer that includes new test chambers and challenge levels. Score.

The "problem", and I use that word lightly, here is that the time I spend playing Portal 2 means time I'm not playing any of the other games on my very long list of games on Steam. Or on the PS2. Or PS3 or 360. My life is hard.

( In which I wax philosophical about Steam and my relationship to digital distribution )

1) Saw Sucker Punch on Friday with the Usual Suspects. I suspect this is a movie that people will either enjoy or hate. Me, I enjoyed it, but I completely turned off my brain after the last trailer ended and was highly sleep-deprived. If you think about it too hard, you will probably be disappointed. It probably also helped that I had zero expectations beyond "stuff exploding". Which happened! And there were clockwork Nazi zombies. So, you know.

It was video game movie. Those are always terrible, but at least this was entertaining, which puts it a cut above most. Sucker Punch does not exist as a game, but I watched it and kept thinking "I played that in Dragon Age, and that in Time Crisis, etc." I was left with the desire to go play Ninja Gaiden or Bayonetta afterwards. Especially Bayonetta.

2) Went up to NH today on a whim and ended up at one of the Borders' closing sales. Where I happened to score the first season of TSCC for $15. Win.

3) BlazBlue continues to be fun. I need to figure out which characters are the lightning bruisers or fragile speedsters, because that's my play-style for fighting games and until I find them, I will suck. The game is also fairly challenging even on Beginner mode, which is cool. I'm less excited about fighters where I can buttonmash and end up winning arcade mode (Soul Calibur 3, I'm looking at you).

4) I finished Usurper of the Sun by Housuke Noriji last night. I might do a more thorough review later, but it was quite good if a somewhat hard-SF novel about first contact that follows the female protagonist from age 16 to age 40+ as humanity tries to figure out how to deal is the kind of thing you like. Which I do.

I've been thinking about game mechanics and storytelling a lot lately. Specifically LARP mechanics, but that's because I'm writing a tenday*. But I've also been poking at writing rules systems for tabletops, both d20 expansions, homebrew, and Fate, just for fun. And I kinda want to talk aloud about some of this stuff, and I'm probably driving some of my friends I hang out with nuts at this point. But hell if I know if you lot want to listen to this either.

Therefore, poll!




* If you have no idea what I'm talking about and would really like to know, please ask.

So, today my alarm went off. I flailed at the snooze button, rolled over, then remembered something and checked my email on my phone, found out that the Institute was closed today for all non-essential staff (I'm not essential in the least), and then burrowed further into my blankets and went back to sleep.

Yay, snow days. Yeah, Boston got buried again. And I'm saying this as a former Midwesterner, so I know snow.

Thus my day was mostly spent gaming and drinking tea. Well, tea and then homemade hot chocolate made from Mexican chocolate with Guajillo Chili (from Taza Chocolate). It was gooood.

Reinstalled Supreme Commander after the Great Windows XP Crash of 2010, so I expect SupCom parties in my near future (MONKEYLORD!). During the installation and patching process (which took...some time), I watched Yarmond play Valkyria Chronicles, which is no-really-we-swear-not-WWII. Where the Empire might be either Germany or Soviet Russia and the Federation is the allies, and as far as we can tell, you might be Lithuania or some other small Baltic state. The map is we-swear-it's-not-Europe-see-Italy-is-missing. It's kind of hilarious. But most importantly, you have a tank. A tank that goes "RRRRRRRR'. No, seriously, the tank has comic-style lettering next to it when it moves going "RRRRRRR". It's kind of ridiculously adorable.

And then I managed to get myself horribly addicted to playing Dragon Age: Origins, which I bought as part of the Dragon Age Ultimate during the Steam sale on Christmas Day for $25. It's totally worth the $25. I've played for 6 hours, and I'm disappointed I have to stop because I have work tomorrow.

I have to admit, I'm pretty impressed these days with Bioware. I remember being kind of "meh" about Neverwinter Nights the first time I played it, but I was very much used to JRPGs. This isn't JRPG, but it's engaging enough in the story to trigger that part of my brain and engage it. The inability of a lot of western RPGs to do this is pretty much why I don't play a lot of them. Sandbox games are fun, but I find I enjoy an RPG a lot more if the story and/or characters are engaging. And DA has that, even if I only have Alistar and Morrigan as my party members right now.

(And I'm so very, very glad that Claudia Black is doing a lot of voice acting work. It's not a visible job, but it's a lot, and let me tell you: after sitting through years of terrible VA in video games, good voice actors are worth their weight in gold.)