Month: June 2010 (page 1 of 6)

The Advantages of Steam

June 30, 2010 / / 0 Comments

Courtesy Valve

Summer is here. To celebrate, Steam is having a mind-blowingly brilliant sale. They’re offering discounts on many of their packages – titles from publishers like Valve, Square Enix, Atari, Rockstar, etc. But it doesn’t stop there. Every 24 hours or so, they slash the prices on a few titles. So while normally a game that may interest you may be a bit on the pricey side, if you can catch it during this sale you’ll save a ton of cash. But why spend money on games at all? I mean, sure, you can pick up Torchlight for $5 and have Diablo-flavored fun with fresh graphics and an adorable animal sidekick while you’re waiting for Diablo III to emerge from Blizzard, but why do it through Steam instead of GameStop, for example?

I’m glad you asked.

W+M1

This has less to do with Steam specifically than it does with PC gaming in general, but for me, the control scheme of keyboard & mouse is superior than those for consoles. By this point, yes, I’ve gotten used to moving one thumb to push my digital avatar forward while the other thumb lets me look around. But when I return to a game like World of Warcraft and have more than a couple buttons at my disposal, the result is actually more immersive and has a great deal of potential for flexibility.

Take Team Fortress 2, for example. On the X-box, one of your precious few controller buttons calls for a medic, another does a taunt. You can hook up a headset to use voice chat, but unless you want your team hearing what you’re yelling at your spouse, you’ll need to move your hand from the controller to flick the mute switch. With the keyboard attached to your PC, you have a lot more options for communication. Many more voice commands are available for your character, and if those aren’t enough, the voice chat option operates with push-to-talk functionality, rather than being on all the time. And all of these are at the fingertips of one hand, while the other controls your viewpoint, combat commands (shootin’, etc) and weapon selection. It just makes more sense to me, but then again, I’m a crotchety old man set in my ways.

What is this DLC you speak of?

Another big difference is that not every developer wants to nickel & dime people for DLC. To Valve, DLC is called ‘updates’. None of the new maps, weapons or headgear available to players of Team Fortress 2 on the PC are accessible on the 360, because Valve doesn’t charge money for them, and they aren’t going to. Those games that do charge for DLC – Borderlands for instance – can do so via Steam if they choose, but it’s not a requirement. This again points to Steam being a more flexible and open-ended engine for content delivery than, say, X-Box Live.

Community Service

It could just be a matter of perception, but based on my experience, the community around Steam seems more constructive and geared towards fun than that of X-Box Live. There’s nothing wrong with a spirit of competition, but getting yelled at by twelve-year-olds who have nothing better to do than polish their console shooting techniques in preparation for the next Halo title isn’t exactly my idea of a good time. You’ll get the occasional loudmouthed loser on Steam, as well, but at least the admins of those servers can kick said loudmouths with a quick keyboard command. Good luck doing that with a console.

No Motion Controls

I think it’s going to be a long, long time before we see anything like Garry’s Mod hit consoles while developers are so hung up on things like motion controls and 3D. To me, gameplay innovation should about what can be done with the games themselves, not how one sees or controls them. Does nobody else remember the Virtual Boy? Am I the only one who thinks that adding extraneous peripherals to gaming consoles is a path leading to a dead end in development? I guess while everybody’s flailing around their living rooms trying to find ways to make that fun and unembarrassed, I’ll be playing with rag dolls in a physics engine. I’ve even had a couple of series ideas.

Not comedy, though. Das Bo Schitt has that covered.

So yes. When I’m not writing, watching movies with my wife or playing World of Warcraft with her, I’ll be Steaming things up. Unless something exclusive to the consoles hits, like War for Cybertron. I mean, come on – from what I understand, somebody finally brought back what made the Transformers awesome in the first place.

Don’t Fear the Critic

June 29, 2010 / / 0 Comments

The Critic

This week’s Escapist is talking about constructive criticism. Yahtzee himself chimed in on criticism on one point:

Criticism is a powerful force for good. Nothing ever improves without coming to terms with its flaws. Without critics telling us what’s stupid and what isn’t, we’d all be wearing boulders for hats and drinking down hot ebola soup for tea. – Zero Punctuation: Overlord 2

I could make all sort of analogies for criticism. There’s the bonsai tree example, the fat on a steak visual, the sanding of a bat to remove its splinters for a nice clean hit; I could go on. But suffice it to say that the best criticism is one that sees what a work is going for and points out the flaws so that the crux of the work can be improved while things that don’t work can be discarded.

Declaring something to be absolute crap is a great way to appear critical and level up on the Internet, so that’s what some critics will go for. This should not, however, deter the creative mind from letting criticism getting in the way of creating something. Even if said criticism is coming from that selfsame mind.

Even if you’re not looking at your art as a means of income, and it’s just something you do for fun, critics shouldn’t deter you from trying to create something if you’ve the mind to try it. However, some criticism is meant to be constructive, while other criticism becomes destructive very quickly. There’s a world of difference between “This sketch needs work,” and “Your art is horrible and will never improve.”

It comes down to a difference in mentality. Some people want to cultivate dreams in this world, to help bring a new vision to life. This requires a lot of effort, though, more than some people are willing to put into a creative endeavor, and it can be a scary thing. Like the man said, there will always be mediocrity out there, people who can’t deal with the extra percentage of effort some put into what makes them passionate. That, I feel, is where a lot of destructive criticism comes from. But I could be wrong.

Anyway, you can’t be afraid to put your work out there. Good criticism will help your work get better, and bad criticism can pretty much be ignored. Just like there is such a thing as good & bad writing or good & bad film-making, there’s good & bad criticism.

Test everything, and hold on to the good.

Book Review: Lamb

June 28, 2010 / / 2 Comments

The Gospels in most standard Bibles – Matthew, Mark, Luke and John – talk a great deal about the birth, ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. But there are about thirty years of his life missing from those narratives. A question asked by many (including myself) is: what happened during those thirty years? How did they help shape the Son of God’s ministry? Christopher Moore, an author and humorist I’d rank with Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett, attempts to answer that question with Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal.

Courtesy Christopher Moore's publisher

Levi bar Adelphus, who is called Biff, is raised from the dead by the archangel Raziel to write a new Gospel. Kept under house arrest – or rather hotel arrest, as they’re staying at a Hyatt in St. Louis – until he finishes, Biff sets his mind on the task of recounting his journeys with his best friend, Yeshua bar Jehovah of Nazareth. Josh & Biff both work for Biff’s father as boys, and take turns courting the irrepressible Mary of Magdala – Maggie, for short. When an angel appears to Josh and tells him he needs to find his destiny, the two embark on a journey across the continent in search of answers.

In addition to making an attempt at shedding light on one of the most influential men in history, Lamb also takes a fascinating look at some of the other faiths and philosophies in the world, such as the teachings of Confucius, the tenants of Buddhism and some of Hinduism’s darker sides. There are a pile of references to everything from the world being round to evolution, and a great deal of it is done with tongue firmly planted in cheek. I don’t know if I’ve ever even heard of an elephant doing yoga before I read this book.

Yoga Elephant

This is a very funny book. If you’re reading it in public, especially in a library or a study hall, you are very likely to disturb others. I lost track of the number of times I burst out laughing reading it. As I said, Christopher Moore’s work is of a high caliber of satire and humor. This was my first time reading one of his books, and I know I’ll be reading more after this. I also know I’ll be reading Lamb again because, as a Christian, I’ll admit I got a great deal out of it.

I know there are people out there who consider any reference to Christ in literature outside of the Bible to be blasphemous or false or something like that. They might think that portraying Him in any way other than fearful reverence dilutes the power of His message. Christopher Moore proves thoroughly and completely that this is not the case. The notion is that a divine and omnipotent intelligence alien to our own responsible for the creation of the universe incarnated as a normal human child to experience the range and depth of the human experience without the bias of an omniscient point of view. Lamb shows the confusion, determination, delight and humanity of Joshua, treating him with respect throughout the work. His desire for understanding and compassion is balanced very well against Biff, who acts as a sarcastic and realist foil for the Messiah. It could be said that Biff shows us what it’s really like to have a “personal relationship” with Christ, in that sometimes Biff gets smacked a bit hard, and sometimes Biff yells at Josh for one reason or another. It’s a friendship, a very deep and human bond, and I think this review is going a bit more serious than I intended so here’s a picture of a bunny.

Bunny!

Apparently Josh liked bunnies. Anyway, Lamb is a great book, on many levels. It’s funny, interesting, powerful and tender. It never disrespects its source material, has a lot of good research behind it and just tries to answer a few questions that might nag anybody who looks on the life of Christ with their brain engaged. Questions like “What was Jesus like as a young man?” and “What if Jesus knew kung fu?”

Recommend Some Fantasy

June 27, 2010 / / 2 Comments

Hero with a Thousand Faces

So with Citizen in the Wilds now in the revision process, I thought it might behoove me to take a look at some other fantasy literature, maybe examine what works and what doesn’t. Since most of what I’m doing involves the defiance of most fantasy conventions, I’m curious if anything I’m aiming at hasn’t already been hit on the mark by another, more prominent writer.

For example, floating cities aren’t anything new. Look no further than Dalaran in World of Warcraft. However, I don’t know how often the ‘ruling power’ in a given land has been one ruled by mages and defined by the use of magic – ‘magocracy’ is the term I’ve used previously. Everybody has elves in their stories, and most of the time they’re dying out, but I’m curious as to how often they’re shown as very upset at this state of affairs, rather than quietly accepting their fate and loading up on ships to sail into the West.

That said, I own most of Tolkein’s works, a full set of Narnia, and somewhere in this mess are my copies of A Wrinkle In Time, a collection of Conan stories and even Eragon. I’ve taken Tigana out of the library before and would do so again, mostly because I didn’t finish it before returning it. What else would you recommend me to read, oh wise Internets?

And So It Begins

June 26, 2010 / / 2 Comments

Red Pen

I spent a little extra time at the office last night printing out Citizen in the Wilds. Technically it’s now in its second draft, as I rewrote the first three paragraphs before printing. I think the opening is a bit stronger, now. The plan is to do a little revising and editing on the first chapter or two today, and transcribe those change into a Google document tomorrow. If you want an invite, let me know. The more the merrier.

In addition I’m looking to enter Blizzard’s fiction contest. They want a short work of fiction between 2.5k and 7.5k words in length. I’m shooting for the middle, around 4500. It has to be set in the universes of Warcraft, Starcraft or Diablo. In the interest of staying original, and veering away from self-insertion by channeling one of my Warcraft characters (which might actually be against the rules of the contest, to boot) I’ll be writing a story set in Starcraft’s worlds. Tentative title is The Haunting of Pridewater. Should make for an interesting sci-fi “war is hell” yarn.

So that’ll be my day, Internets. How’s yours shaping up? How are folks doing at Origins? Anybody else excited for the US/Ghana match his afternoon?

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