Mike Shea, 10 May 2008
The current state of objective video game reviews is pretty sad. A lot of games not worthy of such high ratings end up with 95 and 100s on metacritic through a mixture of hype groupthink, good marketing, and idol worship. Bioshock is one such example, a good game but no where near worthy of a 96% overall metacritic rating. Gears of War, a game about shooting concrete, got a 94%. Again, it isn't a bad game but it isn't worthy of a score like that.
Now we have Grand Theft Auto 4, a good game but a game not worthy of the 99 it has on Metacritic. There's a lot of fun to be had in this, but it's far from revolutionary and far from perfect. It does a fine job bringing the Grand Theft Auto series to current generation hardware but that's about all it does. There's nothing unique and, while fun some of the time, a lot of it can be pretty tedious.
The city in GTAIV is huge, rich, and detailed. It feels like New York even though I really don't know much of New York beyond what I've seen in movies.
The graphics are fine but not worth all the fawning people are doing over it. I've seen better looking games on the 360. For a game of this size, however, the graphics are impressive.
The character detail is fine but its Nico himself that steals the show. I never got very far in San Andreas mainly because I couldn't get into the main character, but I find myself roleplaying very well as Nico Bellec.
That's what GTA IV is, deep down. It's a roleplaying game. All throughout the game I found myself acting as Nico would act, choosing the sides I thought Nico would choose, and even changing his behavior based on random circumstance. I remember the clear moment when Nico went over the edge and lost any care for killing other human beings. I remember when Nico decided whether he would back Dwayne or Playboy X. I remember how different I felt after robbing the Liberty City Bank. As a roleplaying game, GTA IV is amazing.
The open-ended missions of GTA IV are really excellent. I found myself doing a lot of vigilante missions just for the fun of chasing a guy down the street. They're a fun way to play the game without actually moving through the primary plot line. It's that sort of open-ended game play that keeps GTA living and breathing when other games, like Gears of War and Bioshock, lay forgotten.
As good as it is as a roleplaying game, it's not a very good action game or a very good driving game. For a game that spends as much time behind the wheel as it does, GTA's car physics are shit. When I find myself chasing someone, it isn't a competition between me and the other guy, its a competition between me and my car. More than once I slid into a 360 rather than a nice controlled power slide and ruined a 20 minute mission when my car got caught on a curb.
Nico himself doesn't control that well either. I remember how much I hated Splinter Cell when I found myself duck-walking away from cops who were repeatedly shooting me in the back of the head. How many times should Nico get caught in a door jam or get his head caught on a street sign?
The game I am most likely to compare GTA IV against is Crackdown, an amazing open-world supercop game that had much better control and much more empowerment than GTA does, though it lacked a lot of the detail and depth that GTA IV has.
While the graphics are good, the framerate drops a lot on the road and pop-in scenery breaks a lot of the immersive feel.
The load times are also maddening. The game takes two minutes to load from the minute you turn on your 360. More and more it seems like console game publishers are expecting us to treat our 360 like a PC. I don't want a PC, I want an instant-on instant-play gaming system. The load time doesn't improve my mood when I have to sit on a "loading..." screen every time I die.
Driving between missions is the eternal GTA IV timesink. The missions themselves are often a lot of fun but the constant driving between my safehouse, the local Cluckin' Bell, local gun shop, and whoever my next contact is take up about 70% of my playtime. The subway system is too complicated to use and my cousin's taxi service doesn't always seem to work.
GTA IV is a fine game and I find myself enjoying it each time I play, but to see how the press, both mainstream press and gaming press, fawn over a game that is so clearly flawed upsets me. A game that simply moves the status quo ahead a notch isn't deserving of a perfect score. A game as flawed as GTA IV is doesn't deserve anything over an 80 or 85. The fact that nearly every game reviewer on the planet gave it a 100 shows that something is rotten. Whether they got caught in the hype, hope for a job with Rockstar, or don't want to be chastised by their friends - the media chose to give this one a free pass.
GTA IV is a fine game and worth the money but it isn't the second coming. Enjoy it, but demand something more as well.
Mike Shea, 3 May 2008
Clay Shirky wrote an interesting article where he compares three periods in history and how it affected those who lived through them. First was the industrial revolution:
"The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing-- there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London."
In the 20th century, he argues, the social lubricant that took us into the information age was the sitcom:
"We did that for decades. We watched I Love Lucy. We watched Gilligan's Island. We watch Malcolm in the Middle. We watch Desperate Housewives. Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat."
I'm in the middle of calculating out some major financial planning and deciding at what point I can retire (one of the beauties of not having kids is reducing your working life by 10 years). A lot of the retire-early guides point to one of the bigger problems people choose to ignore: what the hell do you do with all that time?
I have a fair amount of free time already. I am lucky to have a job that leaves my nights and weekends open. I have a lot of hobbies, but I manage to fit them in. I have the time I want to spend with those I love and the things that are important to my life. What if that free time suddenly doubled?
Likely I'd spend a lot of time on Ebaum's world or buying so much crap that I would have to go back to work to afford it.
We all have a lot of big ideas about what we want to do. Some of my bigger goals, like writing a novel, I've actually done. Though I'd love to follow the Ray Bradbury philosophy of writing 1,000 words a day, every day, and I'd have 52 short stories a year. That's not realistic. I'm a lot more likely to watch "Cranky Geeks" and surf Digg than I am likely to do anything productive.
People think about retirement and talk about traveling or relaxing on a beach or learning a musical instrument, but what then? I figure I'd have three weeks of retirement before I'd be bored out of my mind. It's not just a matter of finding something to do but finding something you'd want to do that takes up a lot of time.
Clay Shirky's article talks about the Cognitive Surplus - the extra brain power we all have as a people and how the internet has connected us. I'm burning clock cycles right now writing about this topic while you're burning excess cycles reading it. We all learn from it and grow. You might talk about it with someone or post the idea to a forum and the idea grows.
I spent seven years dug into a deep online community; I'd likely do that again with either Warcraft or D&D or whatever my topic of choice would be. I remember the guy in "King of Kong" who was retired in his 20s and spent his days watching grand-masters of retro arcade games compete for the best Q-bert score.
Is it a waste of a life? Maybe, but we are lucky enough to have lives easy to waste. Why not enjoy it?
Mike Shea, 27 April 2008
I listened to the Cormac McCarthy audiobook of No Country about three years ago on a recommendation by Stephen King. When I heard the movie came out and when the reviews all came back positive, I had a feeling they had done what is right and stuck to the same story of the book. After watching it this afternoon I am happy to say that they stuck to it perfectly.
No Country For Old Men is a case study in how to write a good story. There is a single seed that begins the story and a hand full of very powerful and very deep characters that revolve around the seed. They crack against each other and bump around the bumpers like balls in a pool table. There is no guidance for how the story goes and no awful hollywood plotting or stereotyping. Never once did they say "we have to do X because that is what the audience expects".
Michelle and I watched "30 Days of Night" a couple of nights back. It was good and stuck pretty close to the comic book except for a few parts. One of these parts was a totally contrived plot where the sheriff in this Alaskan town is currently in the process of breaking up with his hot fire marshall wife. She's this little perfect blonde clear-skinned 20something with nauseating dialog regarding how fire marshals carry pistols and "I should never have left you" when shit goes south. In the comic they were a middle aged couple with no friction and the story followed the vampires. Somewhere in the translation, some Hollywood jackass decided that the story needed a romantic sub-plot to get the women accepting a movie where a child vampire tears the throat out of someone and another Alaskan is ground up in a huge shredding machine called the "Muffin Grinder". Give me a break.
No Country For Old Men, the popularity, and the critical reviews should show the Hollywood cardboard people that a good story is a good story and needs not a single added or subtracted element to make it palatable for a wide audience.
The best way to describe a movie like No Country is to call it a movie of chance. The story resides on chance as does the path of the characters. It is the best movie I've seen this year.
Mike Shea, 26 April 2008
I've had about a half dozen games sitting on my shelf almost totally unplayed since Christmas. Mass Effect, Assassin's Creed, Mario Galaxy, Half Life Orange Box were all among them. A few I kept, and a few I sold on Ebay. I haven't even played top-tier games like Mario Galaxy for very long before running off to other things.
My life with games is different now. Aside from World of Warcraft and the occasional Zelda-like game, I don't spend more than five to ten hours with any game. Instead of feeling ripped off after beating a game in 10 hours, I feel relief. I want to finish these games but I don't have the patience I once had.
That's one of the things that makes Portal so great. I've had Orange Box sitting on my shelf but when a couple of my players burst into singing "Still Alive" at my D&D game on Thursday, I made a determination to play and beat Portal. I did so, in three sittings, from Thursday night to Saturday morning.
Portal shows that there is a niche for a new type of game. This game can be finished in five to ten hours and has a more limited range of interaction than a traditional $60 game but still has everything we expect in games. Of course, the price should be slashed as well - we shouldn't have to pay $60 for a five hour game. However, when we look at Metacritic, many of the games scored above 80% aren't full games. Rez and Geometry Wars, for example, hit the world of gaming hard and neither are nearly as deep and rich as Assassin's Creed or Bioshock, or Mass Effect. And I liked Portal more than all of those games.
Game producers are spending too much money making games these days. Games have budgets like Hollywood blockbusters and require a return of 10 million sales before they break even. Yet we gain little from that extra money. Sure, Halo 3 is a great game, but there are also a ton of really bad games with high budgets to go along with it.
I'm hoping we see more games like Portal in the future. A small number of really creative people with a licensed game engine can make a game that is just as engrossing and entertaining as the huge blockbuster games that require 200 people and the budget of a Michael Bay movie.
So what about Portal? Here is a game simple in scope but extremely creative. It redefines 3d gaming. It twists your perceptions of space and gravity. It has probably the best villain in any game I can recall playing. It has the best ending I can recall seeing. It is a game I want to share with all of my friends, a game I want to talk about and play again. It was also one game of three in a single box; making Orange Box the best game available for the Xbox 360.
Grand Theft Auto IV is coming out in a couple of days and I'm sure to spend a deal of time with that. It is one of the few games I know of that demands my attention and may for a long time. There aren't many games that do that these days. But while I wait for this behemoth living world on a slice of plastic and metal, I am really glad I spent the time to play through Portal. I will always remember it fondly and if you own an Xbox 360, I cannot recommend it enough. It is worth the price of Orange Box alone.
Mike Shea, 23 April 2008
I hate Pennsylvania. We never hear anything about these people and all of a sudden they're the pivoting point in the future of the world. Then they blow it by voting the wrong way because of out-of-context quotes pushed by media jackals.
Clinton not yet getting pushed out of her corrupt candidacy was only the first piece of bad news I heard today. The second was a note I received from ParentTV.org regarding Grand Theft Auto IV. They're "putting retailers on notice", telling parents to tell retailers "To reconsider any decisions to sell Grand Theft Auto IV: Liberty City." How is that protecting children? Why is it that any form of censorship is acceptable if they hold up a little baby and start screaming? Why do these groups want to take on parental responsibility for themselves and simply cut off anything to which they do not approve?
If Clinton gets into office, we can expect the worst with this sort of thing. As a New York senator, she pushed for a bill and a 90 million dollar study to study the effect of violent video games on kids. Of course, being a good scientist, she started with an objective hypothesis that states "Children are playing a game that encourages them to have sex with prostitutes and then murder them". That's very scientific.
The great irony here is that this whole controversy came up with the "Hot Coffee Mod" which showed horrifying scenes of sexual intercourse in a game that lets you kill just about anyone with just about anything. Considering it was the Clintons who had cigar-porn pushed to every piece of media in the planet for about six months, I think they're hardly the ones to complain about pushing smut to children.
Maybe your a parent. Maybe you really could give a damn about video games. Maybe you find what you hear about them to be repulsive. That's fine. Don't buy it. Don't let your kid buy it. Just remember that some people, a lot of people, like it and they're not going after your copies of Readers Digest or Forbes or the Bible. The point is, leave other people to their own hobbies. Just because you have an opinion doesn't give you the right to force it on everyone else.
So now the good news.
The 90 million dollar study never went anywhere. The whole idea of the study was to push the typical left-wing parental protection agenda another notch further to protect our poor children from nipples and descriptions of oral sex outside of the oval office.
Second, GTA IV is probably going to sell 10 million copies by the end of the year regardless of any bullshit the Parents TV assholes might try. People love these games. They love violent movies, violent books, violent comics and other violent games. It may scare the shit out of people, and maybe it should, but its here to stay. I lived through the death of the Comic Code Authority, letting me read comics like Sea of Red, and I will live through this too. When it becomes mainstream, nothing can stop a good game from getting into our hands.
Still, Clinton is a threat to our entertainment and her drive to steal away freedom to protect proverbial children can damage us badly. So what can we do?
Vote for Obama as often as we can. To all my Indiana friends out there, go vote for Obama in the primary. Even if you hate democrats and really plan to vote for McCain, go vote for Obama anyway.
Write to Parents TV and tell them to stay away from your right as a parent.
Go buy your copy of GTA IV and have fun.
Mike Shea, 20 April 2008
I just finished reading "Name of the Wind" by Patrick Rothfuss. I've been reading it bit by bit over the past few months, enjoying the warm taste of it a little bit at a time right before bed. It is the sort of book that feels like a warm pillow, inviting but comfortable. Today I finished reading the last one hundred pages in a final plunge and now I'm sort of sad that its over.
Name of the Wind finds a startling balance between the whimsical fantasy of Harry Potter and the sharp realism of George R.R. Martin. The story manages to avoid Rowling's plot devices and contrived story arcs instead flowing into a story based on realistic outcomes. It is a story that lives on its own, clearly written as it flowed rather than following a pre-determined path. Though it clearly follows George R.R. Martin's interwoven storyline, making no apologies to the way life moves forward, it contains little of the gritty sharp edge that might turn many away from Martin's most excellent series.
Name of the Wind breaks the fantasy cliches I hate most. There is no young farmer boy who ends up being a hero of the world. There is no party of adventurers. Each thread of the story doesn't necessarily find a nice neat little knot at the end. Name of the Wind is a book that feels like a man's life. It is relaxed and powerful and wonderful. The language is clean and flows easily, making the 670 page book feel like one much smaller.
Name of the Wind is Rothfuss's first published novel and its a powerhouse. I don't exactly remember how it made its way onto my shelf but I'm glad it did. I loved every page and I recommend it highly.
Mike Shea, 31 March 2008
I have to present often at my job. I've been doing it for a lot of years now but still, when called upon, I feel that feeling of dread deep down in my heart when I hear I have to present. I had to present a couple of weeks ago at San Diego for only about 30 people or so, but still I had to work at it. It makes it harder that I demand more from my presentations than most people do.
Taking a walk in our beautiful woods by our house and fretting my time in front of the big-wigs, Michelle asked me what I thought the most important five things are to making a good presentation.
Here are my five most important tips for giving a good presentation:
Informational presentations are bullshit. Go read a paper. Don't waste time just giving me a whole bunch of information. Change my mind about something. Convince me of something. Make me go do something. Presentations should result in action. Most presentations fail to do anything other than bore the piss out of the audience. Instead, teach them something that changes their lives.
Define the purpose of your presentation in a single sentence. What do you want the audience to do? What do you want to accomplish with your presentation? What is the purpose?
Fancy businessfolk call this the "elevator pitch". If your stuck in an elevator, what would you tell a stranger about what you do or what your project is about? Define it as simply as you can.
The same is true with the purpose of a presentation. Simplify it. Have a purpose. Use the audience for something. Don't just tell them about something, make them do something about it.
Many presenters spend far more time futzing with their slides than they do learning about their topic. Spend the time to know your topic backward and forward. Build up a passion for what you're talking about. If that's hard, find the part of it you do have passion for and focus on that. If you have absolutely no passion for what you're talking about, consider a way to present on something else.
Spend more time understanding the topic and focusing on the purpose instead of playing around with beanie guys in powerpoint.
Nothing is worse than bad slides. Anyone in business knows how bad they can suck. Huge slides filled with text or giant organizational or process flows that no one can read. Any time someone refers to a slide as an "eye chart" or says "I know you can't read this" should be fired. Minimalist slides are almost always better. Keep the total words on a slide under ten. Focus on key topics or use high resolution pictures to make a point. Don't fill up a slide with words or you will be competing with your own words as you speak for the attention of the audience.
Like everything in life, constantly simplify and cut out everything that can be cut from your slides. Extra logos, worthless graphics, needless text, cut it all. Murder your darlings.
If you can get away with it, don't use any slides. Instead, give the audience a handout outlining your talk or a paper that describes your topic. Handouts are a lot more useful than most slides.
Go over your presentation vocally, out loud, as many times as you can. You don't need to do it word for word when you present, but the more times you go over it, the better and more natural it will be when you present. Memorization isn't the goal. Knowing your structure, your flow, and your focus is the reason to rehearse. Like knowing your topic, time should be spent rehearsing a presentation instead of screwing with powerpoint.
Nothing is worse than a presenter who can't shut up. Every minute you go over is one minute per person at the discussion that you waste. If you're presenting to a group of 20 people and you go five minutes over you've wasted nearly two hours of time. Stay on time or better yet, finish early. Don't use questions from the audience as an excuse either. The audience will always have questions. Cut the amount of time you have for a presentation by half and practice to end within that time. If you have 30 minutes (as I do tomorrow), present and rehearse to finish in 15. Stay on time.
There are a lot of good sources for good presentation tips. I recently read Presentation Zen. It's an excellent book and I highly recommend it if you have to give presentations. It isn't easy, however, and its pretty radical when compared to most corporate powerpoint presentations that fill up slides with tons of text indented into fifty levels.
There are a number of other valuable tips. Lifehacker has a whole bunch. Like just about everything in life, the best way to get good at something is to do it. The best way to present is to do it over and over and over again. Oh yeah, a big ego helps too.
Mike Shea, 22 March 2008
I was really looking forward to ripping open my two sets of Fane of the Forgotten Gods D&D Dungeon Tile sets. The Dire Tomb sets really re-invigorated my love for Dungeon Tiles after the disappointing Underdark set. Every time I built a dungeon using Dire Tombs I was able to use just about every single piece in the set. I built some multi-floor ziggurat-style dungeons that were large and expansive and a lot of fun.
After opening up one of my two sets of Forgotten Gods, throwing them out on a table, and spending about an hour of trying to build a decent dungeon out of them, I have to say I am disappointed with Fane of the Forgotten Gods.
First, there aren't nearly enough big room pieces. A good set, like Dire Tombs, included three double-sided 8x8 pieces. A good dungeon needs some nice big rooms. Instead, with Forgotten Gods, we only get two and two sides of them aren't rooms but overland buildings. One of them is a stable. A stable! What Forgotten God came from a stable?
Because only two of the five sheets included large rooms, there is an abundance of smaller flavor pieces. I always have a hard time with the flavor pieces. I really don't want single square pieces. I much prefer larger 2x4 pieces with alters or 2x2 flaming cauldron pieces. There are a few nice 4x4 pieces in Forgotten Gods including some sort of sphere of soul catching. There's also some good statue pieces. Overall, however, there are way too many small pieces.
Another complaint I have is the abundance of odd-shaped pieces. There are four corner pieces and a whole bunch of 45 degree aligned pieces. These are extremely difficult to place within a room or line up to any of the other hallways.
I know the Dungeon Tile designers want to make these sets flexible but that flexibility comes at a high cost of usability. I'd much rather have a set with six to eight room pieces (four double sided rooms) and a smaller amount of flavor pieces. Dire Tombs really had the perfect mix of large rooms, good hallways, and nice usable smaller flavor pieces.
I really can't get over that stable. I think I have a stable just like it with the overland dungeon tile set from a while back. Why not have a circular room or some other oddly shaped rooms?
I hope future sets take the approach taken with Dire Tombs and less like Forgotten Gods and the Underdark sets. It shouldn't take a mix of multiple sets to make a good six-room dungeon.
I really like the D&D Dungeon Tile sets now that I figured out the best way to use them. However, sets like Forgotten Gods are disappointing. I hope the designers go back to sets like Dire Tombs and avoid the abundance of smaller pieces over larger room pieces.
Though disappointed with Fane of the Forgotten Gods, I look forward to the next release.
Mike Shea, 15 March 2008
I am embarrassed to admit that my love of comic books started with G.I. Joe. I didn't break out of that horrible trend until I was resurrected with The Watchmen and The Dark Night Returns. I read the Punisher and I read the New Universe series. I read about the Beyonder, I read Wolverine, I read Elektra which got me into Frank Miller's stuff leading eventually to Sin City, Hard Boiled, and 300.
I never got much into the mainstream of Marvel. I didn't know Captain America's real name. I couldn't tell you who the Avengers were. I can't even name all four of the Fantastic Four.
I've always wanted to get back into mainstream comic books but nothing really dug into me. That was, until I read the Ultimates.
The Ultimates is a modern rewriting of the oldest Marvel superheros using today's themes, politics, and attitudes. For the most part it works very well. They have all the heroics of a good super hero comic book. The first ten pages of Captain America back in World War 2 is worth the cost of the rest of the book. The artwork is the clear evolution of fifty years of comic book writing with beautiful glossy pages, wonderful color, and perfect scene design. The writing is good in most places and great in a few. The story is enjoyable if not brilliant, with the dialog just trying a little too much to bring older characters into the modern age.
My review here covers two of the Ultimate graphic novels; Ultimates 1 and Ultimates 2. Both run about $20 to $30 for roughly 300 pages. The books are extremely handsome, bound very well, and are a true joy to read. I find little peace in my life finer than sitting on my back porch on a beautiful day with Ultimates 2 open on my lap.
The story does tend to throw a whole pile of characters at you all at once. It never seems to relax as every two pages brings about a new character you may recognize or you may not. Not being a huge Marvel fan from day one, I couldn't tell you how Hawkeye differs from his original character, but he's pretty bad-ass in Ultimates 2.
If I had any complaint it would be that there is too much character and plot packed into too little space, even for 600 pages of comic book.
Overall, however, I love these two graphic novels. They were well worth the price in the time I spent enjoying them. While they aren't on the same emotional level as Watchmen, Dark Knight Returns, Ronin, or Sin City, they surely entertain far more than most super hero movies ever have. For comic book fans, I highly recommend them.
Mike Shea, 8 March 2008
The chain wielder swung his chain and grinned at us. The mage behind him drew her hands out from her robes. With the three axe wielding berserkers in front of us, we were clearly outmatched. Battle began. Our ranger drew back and fired two arrows, striking against both the mage and the chain wielder. Our fighter and paladin engaged the barbarians. Our mage cast sleep and a round later, the chain wielder fell asleep where he stood. The cleric ran over and, before the chain wielder's head cleared, poured every ounce of his holy energy into the downed chain wielder, and down he went. I scored a 38 point Cascade of Light critical hit. At level 1. With a cleric.
This isn't your father's Dungeons and Dragons.
Over the past six months, ever since Wizards officially announced the 4th edition of Dungeons and Dragons at Gencon in Indianapolis in 2007, we fanboys have been digesting every single piece of information we could get and reverse engineering every cryptic blog post, podcast, and article we could find. We built our own house rules with diagonals counting as 1 and tossing away critical threats for direct critical hits. For six months we drank every single drop of information that came out of Wizards. This weekend the floodgates broke and we nearly drowned in the piles of new information we received.
The waiting is over. We've played 4th edition. And it's good. Very good.
When I first began playing D&D 3.5, I remember how clearly impressed I was with feats. I never cared much for the skill point system of 2nd edition. They seemed generally weak. Feats on the other hand had a clear combat advantage. They truly altered your character. 4th edition takes this a step further with "powers". These powers take feats a step further. They are the main effects your characters have in battle. For spell casters these powers clearly resemble spells but for melee classes they're something new. If you've played any of the classes in Book of Nine Swords (perhaps the best evolution in D&D 3.5) you know exactly how they work. Now our dwarven fighters are shield-bashing hobgoblins off of cliffs while our ranger fires a pair of devastating arrows into two different enemies simultanously. These powers are the core strength of 4th Edition. They may also be its biggest drawback.
Speed of play was a core tenant of the design of 4th Edition. No longer would players have to comb through the Player's Handbook seeking grapple rules. Now troll heads would roll, one right after the other.
After sitting down and playing about two-dozen 4th Edition battles over the past four days, I can state the following with first hand knowledge. At lower levels, it doesn't play that much faster. In two five-hour games and a half dozen 30 minute Dungeon Delves, I found the battles to take as long and perhaps longer than previous Delves at Gencon and previous low level adventures. Much of this can be attributed to how new the whole system is. It took all of the players time to grasp all the new rules and understand all the capabilities of each level 1 character.
That's not the only reason games ran slow, however. The variety and the strength of each character's powers require some thinking. There's a lot more strategy in each move now. Sure, iterative attacks are gone, as is wizard and cleric spell memorization (thank the gods), but it's been replaced with tactics and strategy. Maybe that's where it deserves to be. It's a lot better to spend your time discussing the best way to set up a bunch of skeletons so you can knock them into a gorge than it is to spend your time looking up turn undead charts. But if you expected 4th edition to speed up the game, it won't - at least at first level. I fully expect higher level battles to go much faster with the new rules and new mechanics than they did in 3.5 but that still remains to be seen.
While powers may seem to complicate standard character actions, most of the other game mechanics are greatly simplified. The consolidation of skills, the removal of the full-round action, the simplified movement rules, and the consolidation of status effects all speed up the game quite a bit. Within two battles the rules feel natural. This is how D&D should be. People shouldn't have to struggle to have a good time at the table.
There's still a lot we don't yet know about 4th Edition. How will character power scale over time? How will the rules make your character seem to continue to grow in power without becoming too difficult to play in higher levels? We know that the Wizards team wants to speed up the process to build and run the games but how exactly will this work?
I had an opportunity to discuss adventure building with Rob Heinsoo and James Wyatt on the last day of D&D Experience. They gave me some interesting information. First, when a dungeon master builds a non playing character (NPC), they do so by building them up as one would build a monster. NPCs don't need every single bit of information that a player character needs. They just need enough to build a character for the purpose of the story. As a test, James Wyatt loaded up his galley copy of the monster manual and built an 8th level fighter in under two minutes. Likewise, monster progression won't occur just by adding hit dice onto a monster. Instead the DM will create an "elite" version of that monster that actually acts and counts as two monsters of the same type. These elite monsters might gain action points or extra moves or situational attacks on top of hitpoint, armor, and attack boosts.
We often miss the primary purpose of game systems like this. These rules exist so we can build a story. It's a story split throughout the heads of the players at the table and within the random chance of a die roll. It's a story created spontaneously by those who sit at the table and turning, literally, with the roll of the dice. It is easy to get caught in the strategy of the rules and forget this core purpose. These rules exist to build a common framework for this shared story. It is clear, however, as we listen to the designers talk about their work and watch them run the games at the table that they haven't forgotten the importance of the story. The monster statistics are built to represent that monster. The powers of the player are meant to build in the dynamic action of those characters. It will be wonderful to have a system where I can use the rules to define the characters in my world rather than worry about whether I am handling their skill points correctly.
Our party had just defeated a band of corrupt guards and the rogue guild lackey who had hired them when we heard the onrush of the rest of the town militia. How would we escape? That was up to us. The dwarf overturned a cart, sending it and its contents crashing onto the street. Our ranger danced up the wall of a building, tripping at first but finally making it over. The dwarf grabbed a barrel and tossed it at the guards, sending them all sprawling. The warlock, always the most charismatic of the party, was so deft of mind as to not only convince the guards that he was but a bystander, but actually began ordering them himself. Soon, our party rushed out of the city with the chaos of the town square long behind us.
4th Edition isn't just an easier way to play our favorite game. It is a better, faster, cleaner way for us to build stories that would otherwise never be told.
Mike Shea, 28 February 2008
I'm just about to head out to D&D Experience in Crystal City. This is a four day D&D event with the first public play sessions for 4th edition D&D. I'm going to be liveblogging the event with my iphone to my special D&D Experience Tumblr Liveblog found at:
You can subscribe with Google Reader to get direct updates of my adventures.
Mike Shea, 24 February 2008
I received my second set of sketches for the cover of Seven Swords, my first novel, thanks to Dragonsnail, who did the cover to Vrenna and the Red Stone. The cover looks excellent so far, with a detailed Jon standing over the town of Fena Dim before Stark's vampiric cannibal bandits ride into the town.
The cover has motivated me to start typing up the book. I just finished typing up chapter 3 and have about 6,000 words so far. It's hard to get motivated to type it up - the beginning of the book is a little slow - but I can't wait until I hit some of the fun action scenes that flow throughout the final 30,000 words or so. There are a lot of scenes in that book that keep rattling around in my head, scenes I am proud to have written.
Zen Habits recently posted an interview with Stephen Covey of the Franklin Covey personal productivity fame and author of "Seven Habits of Highly Successful People" which I never read. After reading the interview, I'm sort of glad I didn't. For example, consider what Stephen Covey's morning is like:
"I make an effort every morning to win what I call the private victory. I work out on a stationary bike while I am studying the scriptures for at least 30 minutes. Then I swim in a home pool vigorously for 15 minutes, then I do yoga in a shallow part of the pool for 15 minutes. Then I go into my library and pray with a listening spirit, listening primarily to my conscience while I visualize the rest of my entire day, including important professional activities and key relationships with my loved ones, working associates and clients. I see myself living by correct principles and accomplishing worthy purposes. One of my favorite quotes is, The greatest battles of life are fought out every day in the silent chambers of ones own soul. (David O. McKay) Much of this listening and visualizing work is very challenging, so I win the private victory when I have made my mind up and commit to live by correct principles and to serve worthy purposes."
I'm lucky to get the right goddamn tie on and make it to work on time without slipping down a muddy hill walking the dog and this guy's doing yoga in his own private pool while praying with a listening spirit. I'd say this guy's vision of reality is significantly different than mine.
Here's another great quote:
"ZH: Do you have any thoughts you can share about filtering out the noise in life (especially noise from technology) to focus on the things that are truly important. How can we be sure to see time-sensitive emails but not live in our inboxes?"
"Covey: I am fortunate to have a very helpful team that enables me to spend time doing things that are important but not necessarily urgent."
A helpful team? How do I get one of those? I'd sure love some dude who sits and watches my Gmail to make sure to handle that ebay phishing email as soon as it shows up. I have to check four inboxes multiple times a day and this guy has a team of people that let him float around in a hyperbolic tank thinking big colorful thoughts like William Hurt in Altered States. Give me a break.
"ZH: What is your work setup? What tools do you use? What kind of computer and software are indispensable for you? How do you set things up to optimize your effectiveness?"
"Covey: I work with a complementary team, which means you build on your strengths and organize to make your weaknesses irrelevant. Modern technology is one of my weaknesses, but my associates make this weakness irrelevant because they are superb at it."
There's that magic team again. Some day, when Michael Bay buys Seven Swords and I'm using $100 bills for toilet paper, I'll have a team that handles all my technology for me so I can be sure not to waste my valuable time watching Girls Next Door.
Here's another beauty:
"My team and I also make occasional blog postings and will do so more and more in the future."
Even Frankly Covey, master of productivity and successful habits is apologizing for not blogging enough! That should make Brad Myers happy to hear.
Maybe I'm just bitter because he slammed GTD:
"ZH: Have you read Getting Things Done and The Secret? What are your thoughts on those two separate phenomena?"
"Covey: I have read these books and have enjoyed them and believe they contain elements of wisdom and practical suggestions. But for me and my world they are too simplistic and superficial."
Simplistic and superficial for a guy who has a team of people who read blogs and tell him what they say.
I'm glad I haven't gotten into Seven Habits or the other Franklin Covey stuff. The idea of "big rocks" and focusing on our life goals first never helped anyone clear all the shit off their desk and empty 35,000 emails from their inbox. Having a simple system that ensures you can handle all the bullshit life throws at you without going batshit crazy is a lot more likely to free up your time so you can even think about having a life goal. That's the system for me.
I leave you with my edited version of Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Successful People
Mike Shea, 17 February 2008
I'm always on the losing side. First NBC pulls my two favorite shows off of iTunes, lowering the value of my Apple TV, and now I find out that my HD-DVD player is obsolete at less than a year old.
Wal-Mart, Best Buy, and Netflix all announced they will no longer carry HD-DVD movies. Toshiba said they will cease production of HD-DVD hardware. Of course, I opted to invest in an HD-DVD player for my Xbox 360 so now I'm out in the cold.
Why Hollywood and the big electronic megacorps were allowed to leave that smoking room with two formats still boggles my mind. Everyone knew it was a bad idea. We did, the media did, Hollywood did, the electronic industry did. Everyone knew it would stunt growth and cause bad blood. It has with me.
I'm not going to buy an HD-DVD player. I'm much more likely to buy an up-converting DVD player when I get a TV that includes HDMI. I already own about four HD-DVD movies including two that I want to keep - Blade Runner and The Fountain. After seeing how good movies can look upconverted, I see little reason to invest in a new player and new software for it.
It's unfortunate that only one side suffers in this format war defeat. Even though their player is the declared winner, it should be clear that the format war was costly to everyone.
Of course, a format war between two DVD formats isn't even close to the format war that exists on the digital front. Every single provider of digital video has a different incompatible format there. Apple, Microsoft, NBC, Netflix, Amazon, and a dozen others all offer expensive incompatible, and limited digital copies for download. You're still better off buying the DVD and upconverting it with Handbrake in an open H.264 or Xvid format.
The big media industry is in a really sad state right now. All of the next-gen formats, both digital downloads and high definition DVDs offer products with greater limitation than products we were able to buy ten years ago. It's confusing and costly to customers, offers little increased value, and does nothing but fuel a broken business model for Hollywood. It may be decades before we're able to come out of the other side. In the mean time, expect to pay for the same content multiple times in a lower quality format that will not last more than a few years.
Avoid it by buying a good DVD upconverter and subscribing to Netflix.
For the past twelve years I had a friend and companion who traveled with me across country, lived in four different homes with me, survived two different dogs, and always greeted me with a raspy meow every time I came home. She brought me happiness and relaxation every day of her life. Yesterday, after a massive kidney failure, my wife and I had to put our cat, Taniko, asleep. We miss her dearly. Even Jebu, our shepherd, is mopy.
Mike Shea, 12 February 2008
I've tried a variety of backup procedures over the past few years and, with the recent release of Time Machine and a Leopard-compatible version of SuperDuper, it's a good time to review my backup procedures.
Merlin Mann recently referred to an excellent, simple, and effective backup procedure for macs from jwz. It comes down to using two drives in external enclosures of a same size and connection type as the primary internal drive. The primary drive is copied bit for bit to one of the external drives as a bootable copy. This is updated nightly. Every month or so, this drive is rotated out to an alternate location and the other drive is now updated daily. This keeps two bootable copies available. If the machine goes down, it can be booted up with the next local copy.
This seems like a good system to me, but its tougher to do with a Macbook Pro because the drive is so hard to replace. However, the Macbook Pro can boot off of an external firewire drive. This system also doesn't handle archives of files as they change or are deleted, but Time Machine does.
SuperDuper is an award-winning drive cloning app recently updated to work with Time Machine and Leopard. In conjunction with Time Machine, it can create an external bootable drive that sits on the same drive as your Time Machine archive. It is easy to use and can run on a schedule without needing to be running at the time. I had a little trouble getting the cronjob created by SuperDuper to work with another cron I have set up to download a copy of my website stuff every day, but with some good technical support emails, I figured it out and got the schedule working.
With SuperDuper, Time Machine, and Jungle Disk, I have a backup procedure that is probably overkill but will surely be protecting my data far more than the average user. Let's take a look:
Every day at 4am, Super Duper makes a bootable copy of my drive to one of my two 500gb Western Digital MyBook drives. This drive stays connected all the time.
Time Machine makes an archive of every file that changes on my computer to that same Western Digital drive.
Every couple of months, I swap that drive out and replace it with another identical 500gb Western Digital drive that I keep in the trunk of my car. The current drive goes to my trunk and the trunk drive now acts as the daily backup drive. As in 1, this drive is a bootable SuperDuper mirror and a Time Machine archive.
Jungle Disk copies my Documents, Music, and Photo library to my Amazon S3 account. Right now I'm using 3.2 GB and it costs me about 50 cents a month. This is overkill but for six dollars a year, why not try it out. These files are technically available from anywhere on the net as long as I can get a copy of Jungle Disk running on a machine but it does require Jungle Disk - I can't just reach to S3 and fetch the files.
The Jungle Disk backup is probably not that useful. The SuperDuper and Time Machine backups alone are a little bit of overkill but with both of those in place and a drive outside of the house, I'm pretty well protected. Even if my Macbook Pro hard drive completely dies, I can still boot the machine off of the MyBook Firewire drive and still be up and running. I was surprised how well the machine worked off of a firewire drive.
I highly recommend SuperDuper and Time Machine. Between the two, you can create a fully bootable drive mirror and a simple and deep file archive.
Mike Shea, 8 February 2008
Today a quote worthy of George Orwell:
"...the damaged state of American democracy is not the fault of George W. Bush and his minions, the corporate-controlled media, the insurance industry, the oil industry, lobbyists, terrorists, illegal immigrants or Satan. The point is that this mess is our fault. We let in the serpents and liars, we exchanged shining ideals for a handful of nails and some two-by-fours, and we did it by resorting to the simplest, deepest-seated and readiest method we possess as human beings for trying to make sense of the world: through our fear. America has become a phobocracy."
