Sometimes the cheapest and nastiest version of a thing really is the best version of a thing.
That's definitely true in the case of Ice Cream Sammiches.
The cheapest Ice Cream Sammich in a store is always the tastiest Ice Cream Sammich in the store.
Its just one of those rare things that started out in a perfect state back in the cowboy times when they were first invented or whatever, they just can't be improved upon, any little thing you'd try to change about them would be an instant disaster.
I mean, there's always something seriously wrong with the Fancy Versions of Ice Cream Sammiches, y'know, like, the breading ain't mushy enough or the Ice Cream ain't smushy enough and so it don't ooze out the sides of the sammich all wrong and force you to lick the wrapper or the wax paper its wrapped in is too fancy and waxy and it don't get soggy enough for you to accidentally eat a little bit of it and so you never find out how much fun it is to chew Ice Cream Sammich Flavored Wax Paper.
Anything you could think do to that perfectly awesome mess of sticky lick-yer-fingers-and-wash-your-face-afterwards sensory data would just tone it down somehow or make it tamer and less fun in some way.
You don't want that boney-ass Fancy Ice Cream Sammich made by that Aunt you got that goes around pretending to like kids just because its the "proper" thing to do.
Fancy Ice Cream Sandwiches just don't get it, man.
Some things were just meant to be disgustingly awesome and nasty heh.
Thursday, March 6, 2008
U GOPT KILED ROFLS
So... anybody wanna play SWG with me?
C'mon, we'll have the whole place to ourselves!
I'll even let you drive the Obi Wan Space Station Wagon!
Or that newer version of it that tilts all crazy that only has one working brakelight!
Bet they haven't fixed that yet!
Wonder if they still have that Nude Bug?
Boy its hot out here in the desert of Tatooine.
Mind if I take my pants off?
My legs are all sweaty.
Don't worry, we all come equipped with tighty-whities in this game!
Heh heh heh heh heh.
Goddam, I wanna play some kinda non-sword-n-orc game but there ain't a lot to pick from.
There's the Matrix, but I done that as far as its gonna go.
And there's uh, Eve Online, but I don't wanna play a game where I gotta just sit around and wait for stuff, I wanna get somewhere when I play, y'know?
So that pretty much rules that one out, unless we can get the admins to give us the cheat codes or something, which is a distinct possibility heh.
And then there's that new Richard Garriot Tabernacle Rasta game, which seems kinda cool but it doesn't let you move your UI around yet because the Creepy King is too busy preparing to go into outer space for real to fix that kinda lame-n-earthly problem shit ahaha.
And they ain't got Mechs yet, just the Promise of Mechs.
Which is better than no-promise-at-all, which is what it seems like you get with that UI problem heh.
"OH MY GOD THIS GAME HAS SO MUCH POTENTIAL THERE'S HARDLY ANYTHING ELSE TO IT!!!"
I mean, seriously, how hard is something like that UI thing to fix?
Maybe an hour of work.
And that's if you are high on something when they ask you to do it heh.
That seriously doesn't bode well for my impression of the combined technical aptitude of The Team ahaha.
I bet it would be fun to play for a little bit anyways, though, y'know, the maps look really good, at least, it kinda reminds me of Autoassault, which really was a fun game, at least for a little while, even though it didn't look like it was gonna be.
And they got that Alphabet Soup Magic Puzzle game we could play in there that teaches you Richard Garriots Alien Language and gives you special powers that aren't anything like the Force from Star Wars *rolls his one good eye*
Prolly wouldn't cost us nothing either, they got some cutting-edge-game-dev-idea "friend-key" system, we'd just have to suck up and make some friends with people who actually bought that game, pfft, that's easy, those guys are prolly starved for friendship heh.
Welp, there goes that plan, sorry ahaha.
Let's see, what else is there.
Oh no you don't, nothing with that Anime shit innit, man, I gotta draw a line somewheres, I can't just have you drag me into some Bottomless Abyss of Suck where our hair turns blue and wavy and our eyes get all big and cute and we just fall into the Suck forever and ever and listen to lame philosophical stuff that makes about as much sense as the lyrics to a Def Leppard song or anything anybody said in the sequels to the Matrix while bunny ears grow on our heads ahaha.
Man, at least SWG has spaceships we can actually steer AHAHA.
Yah see, its like, if you like scifi, you are totally fuxxored as far as this MMO stuff goes, wut iz up wit dat!
How can there be guys that say stuff like "oh, that orc stuff is so lame."
What the hell game are they playing that doesn't suck worse than the million billion orc games?
I musta missed something.
Maybe they play City of Heroes, that was pretty fun, I mean, its not scifi, and it got boring about as quick as Autoassault, punching thugs out over and over again until blood came out of your eyes, but it was pretty fun.
Superjumping around on the buildings was really great, though.
Meh, I don't wanna do that again.
So c'mon everybody!
Let's play some SWG!
Or that Tubba Lava game!
Or let's get the admins of Eve to give us the cheat codes or whatever!
Or even Anarchy Online, with its weirdo graphics from 1982!
"Nice helmet!"
"thx!"
We just got so many options here ahaha.
Edit: Oh man, the Collector's Edition of Tumbler Rumbler is going for 14.99!
Dude, at that price, it isn't even worth it to go through all the crap you'd have to go through to make friends with somebody just to get one of those cutting-edge Friendship Keys for free heh.
Plus, the Authentic Scarf and Hand Painted Pencil Sharpener or whatever you'd get with that is prolly worth at least that much ahaha.
C'mon, we'll have the whole place to ourselves!
I'll even let you drive the Obi Wan Space Station Wagon!
Or that newer version of it that tilts all crazy that only has one working brakelight!
Bet they haven't fixed that yet!
Wonder if they still have that Nude Bug?
Boy its hot out here in the desert of Tatooine.
Mind if I take my pants off?
My legs are all sweaty.
Don't worry, we all come equipped with tighty-whities in this game!
Heh heh heh heh heh.
Goddam, I wanna play some kinda non-sword-n-orc game but there ain't a lot to pick from.
There's the Matrix, but I done that as far as its gonna go.
And there's uh, Eve Online, but I don't wanna play a game where I gotta just sit around and wait for stuff, I wanna get somewhere when I play, y'know?
So that pretty much rules that one out, unless we can get the admins to give us the cheat codes or something, which is a distinct possibility heh.
And then there's that new Richard Garriot Tabernacle Rasta game, which seems kinda cool but it doesn't let you move your UI around yet because the Creepy King is too busy preparing to go into outer space for real to fix that kinda lame-n-earthly problem shit ahaha.
And they ain't got Mechs yet, just the Promise of Mechs.
Which is better than no-promise-at-all, which is what it seems like you get with that UI problem heh.
"OH MY GOD THIS GAME HAS SO MUCH POTENTIAL THERE'S HARDLY ANYTHING ELSE TO IT!!!"
I mean, seriously, how hard is something like that UI thing to fix?
Maybe an hour of work.
And that's if you are high on something when they ask you to do it heh.
That seriously doesn't bode well for my impression of the combined technical aptitude of The Team ahaha.
I bet it would be fun to play for a little bit anyways, though, y'know, the maps look really good, at least, it kinda reminds me of Autoassault, which really was a fun game, at least for a little while, even though it didn't look like it was gonna be.
And they got that Alphabet Soup Magic Puzzle game we could play in there that teaches you Richard Garriots Alien Language and gives you special powers that aren't anything like the Force from Star Wars *rolls his one good eye*
Prolly wouldn't cost us nothing either, they got some cutting-edge-game-dev-idea "friend-key" system, we'd just have to suck up and make some friends with people who actually bought that game, pfft, that's easy, those guys are prolly starved for friendship heh.
Welp, there goes that plan, sorry ahaha.
Let's see, what else is there.
Oh no you don't, nothing with that Anime shit innit, man, I gotta draw a line somewheres, I can't just have you drag me into some Bottomless Abyss of Suck where our hair turns blue and wavy and our eyes get all big and cute and we just fall into the Suck forever and ever and listen to lame philosophical stuff that makes about as much sense as the lyrics to a Def Leppard song or anything anybody said in the sequels to the Matrix while bunny ears grow on our heads ahaha.
Man, at least SWG has spaceships we can actually steer AHAHA.
Yah see, its like, if you like scifi, you are totally fuxxored as far as this MMO stuff goes, wut iz up wit dat!
How can there be guys that say stuff like "oh, that orc stuff is so lame."
What the hell game are they playing that doesn't suck worse than the million billion orc games?
I musta missed something.
Maybe they play City of Heroes, that was pretty fun, I mean, its not scifi, and it got boring about as quick as Autoassault, punching thugs out over and over again until blood came out of your eyes, but it was pretty fun.
Superjumping around on the buildings was really great, though.
Meh, I don't wanna do that again.
So c'mon everybody!
Let's play some SWG!
Or that Tubba Lava game!
Or let's get the admins of Eve to give us the cheat codes or whatever!
Or even Anarchy Online, with its weirdo graphics from 1982!
"Nice helmet!"
"thx!"
We just got so many options here ahaha.
Edit: Oh man, the Collector's Edition of Tumbler Rumbler is going for 14.99!
Dude, at that price, it isn't even worth it to go through all the crap you'd have to go through to make friends with somebody just to get one of those cutting-edge Friendship Keys for free heh.
Plus, the Authentic Scarf and Hand Painted Pencil Sharpener or whatever you'd get with that is prolly worth at least that much ahaha.
Unnecessary Evil
Y'know Mego said something about just wanting to play games with his buddies, and not wanting to be stuck hanging around with everybody else's bad-mouthed thirteen year old kids.
And besides making me wonder if I have a special dispensation or something that allows me to be bad mouthed and not offend anybody just because I'm a little older than thirteen, like mebbe I purchased an Indulgence for it, back in the olden days, on one of the many occasions where I got drunk with a band of singing pirates and narrowly avoided getting a tattoo and losing a few teeth to scurvy, or something, I dunno, but whatever, besides that, it made me think about a bunch of other stuff.
First off, I get that same feeling as him all the time, I mean, that's something that just about every sentient being prolly feels every once in a while, wondering why these games aren't entirely instanced and "by invite only," or something.
Oh sure, we know the guys who make games think that one of their retention mechanisms is the "friends we make in these games," because of the way we always fill out that exit survey, which is a total lie, y'know, its just the lie we pick that makes us look the best from the selection of lies they've provided, but besides that business type stuff that has nothing to do with our fun, we gotta wonder why they always make these game suck with over-crowding and shit, 'cause it would be so much better for us if it wasn't like that, right?
"The only reason I don't quit this game is all the friends I've made!"
"Liar!"
"stfu nube!"
There's more than one argument to that, too, 'cause an area that's supposed to be "desolate" or something shouldn't look like a Mardi Gras Parade, crammed with people in glowing purple shoulderpads doing grabass emotes to each other.
But I also know that if I give in to that feeling, then I'll sorta isolate myself, and only hang out with my buddies, and things will stagnate.
Much like being trapped in a tupperware container with no holes punched in the lid.
Well, if you were on the side of the Bacteria, insteada the Life Destroying Pursuit of Freshness and Preservatives, or whatever, at least.
Anyways we all know that New Blood is a good thing, that's an easy one, if I was some kinda isolationist I woulda missed out on meeting a lot of awesome people.
Like Mego, for instance.
I woulda also missed out on meeting a lot the idiots that make you lose your faith in humanity, so there is a delicate balance that needs to be struck there, heh, y'know, you need to find a diamond while wading through the shit every once or while or you'll think there aren't any diamonds in the shit at all.
But that's just the price you gotta pay for finding diamonds.
And the diamonds wouldn't seem that great if they were mixed into a big pile of diamonds, insteada a big pile of shit, y'know?
So there's that, too.
And whatever the case, these games we play could do a lot more toward providing structures and guides that'd give everybody roles that suited them and establish relationships between 'em that put everybody into teams within a larger team and gave them all a sense of community, insteada having everybody mostly just get in each other's way and annoy each other all the time.
Or insteada just giving up without even trying to do that.
Well, without even trying to do that besides the half-assed merchant-like "trade services" way they make people "dependent" on other people and "forced grouping" and crafting that requires mats from other kinds of characters and shit like that.
I mean, seriously, there's so many potentially fun things that haven't even really been tried at all yet with that kinda stuff.
Like, for a simple example, you know how guys have spoiler sites with maps and stuff, and everybody's all like, I need it, but I don't like that I need it, 'cause it ain't ideal.
And instead having the spoiler guys being looked at like "villains" that "spoil" the game, there could be a division of the Wizard's Tower that was the Cartography and Exploration and Historical Department, where you could go to look things up and get hints from those guys.
And in that way you'd sorta incorporate their interests into the game.
'Cause the guys who figure that stuff out really aren't bad guys, they're actually Explorers that wanna share the stuff they figured out and help other players out, y'know?
Why force them into some kinda Underground Out-of-Game Black Market of information when you could bring them into the fold and strengthen the game in all sorts of ways?
Doesn't make any sense ahaha.
Yah, you'd have to design the game around something like that from the beginning, prolly, I dunno its something you could just "tack on" to an existing level treadmill whack-a-mole game, I mean, I dunno, mebbe you could.
I'm not talking about anything crazy here, I've seen this done already, even going all the way back to UO and EQ, there's was a lot of things like this, but for lots of different reasons, it fell apart.
In EQ, it was partly crowding, and partly the way that terrain, once conquered by the Big Guys, lost all its potential to drive the Little Guys to band together through Adversity.
And there was other reasons it broke down, too.
But those are all things that are fixable through better designs.
Another thing that Mego's thing made me think of was something that I heard Raph talk about once, the way that some folks are wandering from game to game, looking for a home.
And that makes me think about the way that a game really needs to provide whatever it takes to lock in the folks that make a game a home for a group and retain those people at all costs, so that the more "exploratory" friends have a place that they can always go back to and knock on the door of a mansion and find a familiar face.
That has to do with that colonization stuff, again, crafting and ownership or whatever, I think that's really the strength that EQ2 has that holds it together.
There's a lot more to that subject but I think that if I kept going I'd offend somebody I like 'cause my current understanding of it is kinda vulgar and rough around the edges so I think I better just stop right here heh.
Anyways, its kinda funny how all the little complaints and broken things we all shrug at and put up with as a "necessary evil" are actually where all the fun stuff to think about is ahaha.
And besides making me wonder if I have a special dispensation or something that allows me to be bad mouthed and not offend anybody just because I'm a little older than thirteen, like mebbe I purchased an Indulgence for it, back in the olden days, on one of the many occasions where I got drunk with a band of singing pirates and narrowly avoided getting a tattoo and losing a few teeth to scurvy, or something, I dunno, but whatever, besides that, it made me think about a bunch of other stuff.
First off, I get that same feeling as him all the time, I mean, that's something that just about every sentient being prolly feels every once in a while, wondering why these games aren't entirely instanced and "by invite only," or something.
Oh sure, we know the guys who make games think that one of their retention mechanisms is the "friends we make in these games," because of the way we always fill out that exit survey, which is a total lie, y'know, its just the lie we pick that makes us look the best from the selection of lies they've provided, but besides that business type stuff that has nothing to do with our fun, we gotta wonder why they always make these game suck with over-crowding and shit, 'cause it would be so much better for us if it wasn't like that, right?
"The only reason I don't quit this game is all the friends I've made!"
"Liar!"
"stfu nube!"
There's more than one argument to that, too, 'cause an area that's supposed to be "desolate" or something shouldn't look like a Mardi Gras Parade, crammed with people in glowing purple shoulderpads doing grabass emotes to each other.
But I also know that if I give in to that feeling, then I'll sorta isolate myself, and only hang out with my buddies, and things will stagnate.
Much like being trapped in a tupperware container with no holes punched in the lid.
Well, if you were on the side of the Bacteria, insteada the Life Destroying Pursuit of Freshness and Preservatives, or whatever, at least.
Anyways we all know that New Blood is a good thing, that's an easy one, if I was some kinda isolationist I woulda missed out on meeting a lot of awesome people.
Like Mego, for instance.
I woulda also missed out on meeting a lot the idiots that make you lose your faith in humanity, so there is a delicate balance that needs to be struck there, heh, y'know, you need to find a diamond while wading through the shit every once or while or you'll think there aren't any diamonds in the shit at all.
But that's just the price you gotta pay for finding diamonds.
And the diamonds wouldn't seem that great if they were mixed into a big pile of diamonds, insteada a big pile of shit, y'know?
So there's that, too.
And whatever the case, these games we play could do a lot more toward providing structures and guides that'd give everybody roles that suited them and establish relationships between 'em that put everybody into teams within a larger team and gave them all a sense of community, insteada having everybody mostly just get in each other's way and annoy each other all the time.
Or insteada just giving up without even trying to do that.
Well, without even trying to do that besides the half-assed merchant-like "trade services" way they make people "dependent" on other people and "forced grouping" and crafting that requires mats from other kinds of characters and shit like that.
I mean, seriously, there's so many potentially fun things that haven't even really been tried at all yet with that kinda stuff.
Like, for a simple example, you know how guys have spoiler sites with maps and stuff, and everybody's all like, I need it, but I don't like that I need it, 'cause it ain't ideal.
And instead having the spoiler guys being looked at like "villains" that "spoil" the game, there could be a division of the Wizard's Tower that was the Cartography and Exploration and Historical Department, where you could go to look things up and get hints from those guys.
And in that way you'd sorta incorporate their interests into the game.
'Cause the guys who figure that stuff out really aren't bad guys, they're actually Explorers that wanna share the stuff they figured out and help other players out, y'know?
Why force them into some kinda Underground Out-of-Game Black Market of information when you could bring them into the fold and strengthen the game in all sorts of ways?
Doesn't make any sense ahaha.
Yah, you'd have to design the game around something like that from the beginning, prolly, I dunno its something you could just "tack on" to an existing level treadmill whack-a-mole game, I mean, I dunno, mebbe you could.
I'm not talking about anything crazy here, I've seen this done already, even going all the way back to UO and EQ, there's was a lot of things like this, but for lots of different reasons, it fell apart.
In EQ, it was partly crowding, and partly the way that terrain, once conquered by the Big Guys, lost all its potential to drive the Little Guys to band together through Adversity.
And there was other reasons it broke down, too.
But those are all things that are fixable through better designs.
Another thing that Mego's thing made me think of was something that I heard Raph talk about once, the way that some folks are wandering from game to game, looking for a home.
And that makes me think about the way that a game really needs to provide whatever it takes to lock in the folks that make a game a home for a group and retain those people at all costs, so that the more "exploratory" friends have a place that they can always go back to and knock on the door of a mansion and find a familiar face.
That has to do with that colonization stuff, again, crafting and ownership or whatever, I think that's really the strength that EQ2 has that holds it together.
There's a lot more to that subject but I think that if I kept going I'd offend somebody I like 'cause my current understanding of it is kinda vulgar and rough around the edges so I think I better just stop right here heh.
Anyways, its kinda funny how all the little complaints and broken things we all shrug at and put up with as a "necessary evil" are actually where all the fun stuff to think about is ahaha.
Monkey Vs. Robot Vs. Vampires
They used to think that Human Blood had some kinda magical life-giving property to it, something that made Vampiric Immortality make sense.
It was reasonable to think that, y'know, since every time anybody started leaking blood, back in the olden times, for whatever reason, there was a good chance they were gonna croak, or at least not feel like dancing a jig to a Sea Shanty.
But nowadays vampires are just a bunch of things that go around getting excited about drinking motor oil out of robots that are far more complex than them on a mechanical level, when you compare digestive systems and stuff.
And we're sorta stuck with that, even though it doesn't make a whole lot of sense, because "eating someone's life force," insteada drinking the motor oil out of their fuel lines or biting into their braincase and sucking out their central processing unit, doesn't look that cool on TV.
It was reasonable to think that, y'know, since every time anybody started leaking blood, back in the olden times, for whatever reason, there was a good chance they were gonna croak, or at least not feel like dancing a jig to a Sea Shanty.
But nowadays vampires are just a bunch of things that go around getting excited about drinking motor oil out of robots that are far more complex than them on a mechanical level, when you compare digestive systems and stuff.
And we're sorta stuck with that, even though it doesn't make a whole lot of sense, because "eating someone's life force," insteada drinking the motor oil out of their fuel lines or biting into their braincase and sucking out their central processing unit, doesn't look that cool on TV.
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
Older Brothers Disease
One of the coolest things I ever saw was on the Vampire Bloodlines forums.
It started out as some guy saying that that level with the Haunted Hotel was the scariest goddam thing ever, and that he couldn't play through it, and then a bunch of folks started commenting on how great that level was, and comparing it to other "scariest goddam things in gaming history."
And then one of the game designers showed up and told the original guy that it was the best compliment he could ever imagine getting, and that he'd take the guy's savegame and play through the level for him and save it so that the guy could get on with the game.
As an Older Brother, I love to scare the living shit out of people, that's just one of those immutable laws of nature and shit, y'know, I grew up torturing the crap out of my little brother with all sorts of overly-complicated scare thingies, until I started feeling sorry for him heh.
Like this one time, in the middle of the night, when he was sleeping, (we had to share a room 'cause we were poor y'know), I made my bed look like I was still sleeping in it by lumping up the sheets, and then I crawled under his bed and I lifted the whole thing up in the air and shook it all Linda Blair Exorcist style.
That's a goddam horrible way to wake somebody up, with him screaming to the lumped-up sheets in my bed for help, and getting no response, as if I was dead or something, haha, awyah, and I know I'll be spending a few thousand eternities in hell paying for that one heh.
But that's just the kinda shit that all Older Brothers do, man, we're just designed like that, so I know I won't be burning alone down there in the inferno of Little Brother Justice or whatever ahaha.
Anyways, I try to keep that shit in check, as best I can, 'cause I know its more of a curse than anything, y'know, you don't make yerself any friends doing that kinda shit to people all the time, that's just like going around and giving folks titty-twisters or something.
And some folks really can't handle a scare at all, its downright dangerous to scare 'em, 'cause their fragile psyches can permanently crack like eggs and shit, so there's that to worry about too.
But sometimes, when I think about making a game, I think about how much fun it would be to use the goddam things to scare people to death, and what a great compliment it would be if your shit was so scary that you actually gave somebody a heart attack and killed them.
Okay that's horrible, I know, I'm already adding a few thousand years on to my Hell Sentence for just thinking up that one, but I can't help it, y'know, I'm an Older Brother, man, I got that Older Brother Disease, I got that Evil Blood running through my veins and shit, all I'm really wondering is whether or not scaring somebody to death is considered murder or not ahaha.
I guess nobody has ever died from watching a scary movie, but a scary movie never made my heart jump like the shit that made me gasp and toss my mouse up in the air in that Aliens Vs. Predator game, either.
And then there's the stuff in that one Asylum-slash-Orphanage in Thief 3, thats another "classic" one, the Thief games had a lot of that awesome Older Brother Scare shit in 'em, although a lot of 'em were slow-building scares that just made you wanna get the hell outta some place as fast as you could.
MMOs seem to steer clear of that shit, like they'll lose customers or something if they do it, and mebbe they would, I dunno, mebbe the crowd that likes Scares is some minor subset or something, I know my stalker Ex-girlfriend totally hated that kinda shit, even though she's scarier than hell to me heh.
There was some dungeon in EQ1 that made her cry once, that's a pretty good compliment in my book ahaha.
Anyways, what got me thinking about this junk again was the way that the spawning system for LOTRO wights totally takes the scare out of 'em, y'know?
There's a few good ones, like the ones that crawl outta the ground when you go up to a tomb door, but just having them all wandering around on the lawn so you can see 'em coming from a mile away is a total buzzkill, I mean, it seems like they oughta be something that you don't see coming, something that suddenly lurches out at you from around a corner and twists its neck with a hideous cracking noise or something, y'know?
Or at least something that operates on a scarier level than just spawning every-so-many-feet and wandering around randomly or whatever, y'know, like, if they all shuffled along in the same direction, then that would be scarier, 'cause it'd seem like had a purpose, or something.
I dunno, whatever it is, it just set something off in my brain that it wasn't right, y'know?
And then I started thinking about how scaring the living shit out of people was probably against the MMO Designer Code of Ethics or something anyways, 'cause hardly anybody ever does it, even though these games are almost entirely about fighting monsters heh.
And I know there's a good reason not to do the Scary Thing all the time, 'cause I know that even if it isn't scary, grim and intense and stressful dirty-murky-dark-n-muddy environments wear away at you after a while, they're just depressing or something, and nobody wants to be stuck hanging out there and stuff, its the same kinda thing that makes the suicide rates go up in gloomy places where it drizzles all the time, you need breaks from that junk where you get to go and hang out in the Beer Commercial Sunshine Land of Sky Blue Waters or the Happy Green Ewok Village or something to let your nerves settle back to normal and recharge or whatever.
But you'd think there'd be at least a few more scare-the-shit out of you moments and a little bit more of an appreciation for suspense and all that than there seems to be with all these games fulla monsters, y'know?
Especially in anything with zombies and ghosts and shit, I mean, wtf are people who really hate being scared (and don't love-to-hate being scared or something heh) doing in a zombie-n-ghost fighting game anyways?
I mean, seriously, c'mon, get outta there and leave that shit to the Older Brothers heh.
And Older Sisters, too, now that I think about it, there's no sense in being sexist about it, I just didn't think through it 'till now.
Anyways its not that I haven't seen some pretty great stuff, in LOTRO and WoW and all that (EQ had a shit ton of that kinda stuff), its just that, in general, its always so goddam tame that's its almost like its ruining the whole point of having wights and whatever in the first place, and it seems strange to have such a total disregard for it if ain't on purpose, and none of it matches up to how scary shit is in the really scary games.
There's no moments of impending doom like when they rolled out the AT-ATs in Empire Strikes back, or little cinematic bits like they did in DOOM 3 (and a lot of other horror games) when they introduced some new robo-alien-demon (bleh) menace and froze up your controls (grr! nooo!), or anything like that.
And I just thought it was interesting to think about what the self-imposed limits are with that scare-the-shit-out-of-you kinda stuff and why its different in MMOs than it is in single-player games 'cause they think they'll do better and appeal to a wider crowd if they don't scare the living shit out of them or something heh.
Maybe that's true, but I'm not sure that's right.
And if that's really the way its working, its just gotta burn some of the Older Brother Game Devs up that they gotta hold themselves back like that when what they really wanna do is make people have heart attacks and fall out of their chairs and throw their mice up in the air and shit heh.
And I wonder if a game that was "Too Scary For Some People To Play, You Need To Sign This Release Form" would really do better or worse than a game with yard after yard of random whack-a-mole monsters spawning on a lawn and wandering around aimlessly with their hands in their mouths and junk ahaha.
It started out as some guy saying that that level with the Haunted Hotel was the scariest goddam thing ever, and that he couldn't play through it, and then a bunch of folks started commenting on how great that level was, and comparing it to other "scariest goddam things in gaming history."
And then one of the game designers showed up and told the original guy that it was the best compliment he could ever imagine getting, and that he'd take the guy's savegame and play through the level for him and save it so that the guy could get on with the game.
As an Older Brother, I love to scare the living shit out of people, that's just one of those immutable laws of nature and shit, y'know, I grew up torturing the crap out of my little brother with all sorts of overly-complicated scare thingies, until I started feeling sorry for him heh.
Like this one time, in the middle of the night, when he was sleeping, (we had to share a room 'cause we were poor y'know), I made my bed look like I was still sleeping in it by lumping up the sheets, and then I crawled under his bed and I lifted the whole thing up in the air and shook it all Linda Blair Exorcist style.
That's a goddam horrible way to wake somebody up, with him screaming to the lumped-up sheets in my bed for help, and getting no response, as if I was dead or something, haha, awyah, and I know I'll be spending a few thousand eternities in hell paying for that one heh.
But that's just the kinda shit that all Older Brothers do, man, we're just designed like that, so I know I won't be burning alone down there in the inferno of Little Brother Justice or whatever ahaha.
Anyways, I try to keep that shit in check, as best I can, 'cause I know its more of a curse than anything, y'know, you don't make yerself any friends doing that kinda shit to people all the time, that's just like going around and giving folks titty-twisters or something.
And some folks really can't handle a scare at all, its downright dangerous to scare 'em, 'cause their fragile psyches can permanently crack like eggs and shit, so there's that to worry about too.
But sometimes, when I think about making a game, I think about how much fun it would be to use the goddam things to scare people to death, and what a great compliment it would be if your shit was so scary that you actually gave somebody a heart attack and killed them.
Okay that's horrible, I know, I'm already adding a few thousand years on to my Hell Sentence for just thinking up that one, but I can't help it, y'know, I'm an Older Brother, man, I got that Older Brother Disease, I got that Evil Blood running through my veins and shit, all I'm really wondering is whether or not scaring somebody to death is considered murder or not ahaha.
I guess nobody has ever died from watching a scary movie, but a scary movie never made my heart jump like the shit that made me gasp and toss my mouse up in the air in that Aliens Vs. Predator game, either.
And then there's the stuff in that one Asylum-slash-Orphanage in Thief 3, thats another "classic" one, the Thief games had a lot of that awesome Older Brother Scare shit in 'em, although a lot of 'em were slow-building scares that just made you wanna get the hell outta some place as fast as you could.
MMOs seem to steer clear of that shit, like they'll lose customers or something if they do it, and mebbe they would, I dunno, mebbe the crowd that likes Scares is some minor subset or something, I know my stalker Ex-girlfriend totally hated that kinda shit, even though she's scarier than hell to me heh.
There was some dungeon in EQ1 that made her cry once, that's a pretty good compliment in my book ahaha.
Anyways, what got me thinking about this junk again was the way that the spawning system for LOTRO wights totally takes the scare out of 'em, y'know?
There's a few good ones, like the ones that crawl outta the ground when you go up to a tomb door, but just having them all wandering around on the lawn so you can see 'em coming from a mile away is a total buzzkill, I mean, it seems like they oughta be something that you don't see coming, something that suddenly lurches out at you from around a corner and twists its neck with a hideous cracking noise or something, y'know?
Or at least something that operates on a scarier level than just spawning every-so-many-feet and wandering around randomly or whatever, y'know, like, if they all shuffled along in the same direction, then that would be scarier, 'cause it'd seem like had a purpose, or something.
I dunno, whatever it is, it just set something off in my brain that it wasn't right, y'know?
And then I started thinking about how scaring the living shit out of people was probably against the MMO Designer Code of Ethics or something anyways, 'cause hardly anybody ever does it, even though these games are almost entirely about fighting monsters heh.
And I know there's a good reason not to do the Scary Thing all the time, 'cause I know that even if it isn't scary, grim and intense and stressful dirty-murky-dark-n-muddy environments wear away at you after a while, they're just depressing or something, and nobody wants to be stuck hanging out there and stuff, its the same kinda thing that makes the suicide rates go up in gloomy places where it drizzles all the time, you need breaks from that junk where you get to go and hang out in the Beer Commercial Sunshine Land of Sky Blue Waters or the Happy Green Ewok Village or something to let your nerves settle back to normal and recharge or whatever.
But you'd think there'd be at least a few more scare-the-shit out of you moments and a little bit more of an appreciation for suspense and all that than there seems to be with all these games fulla monsters, y'know?
Especially in anything with zombies and ghosts and shit, I mean, wtf are people who really hate being scared (and don't love-to-hate being scared or something heh) doing in a zombie-n-ghost fighting game anyways?
I mean, seriously, c'mon, get outta there and leave that shit to the Older Brothers heh.
And Older Sisters, too, now that I think about it, there's no sense in being sexist about it, I just didn't think through it 'till now.
Anyways its not that I haven't seen some pretty great stuff, in LOTRO and WoW and all that (EQ had a shit ton of that kinda stuff), its just that, in general, its always so goddam tame that's its almost like its ruining the whole point of having wights and whatever in the first place, and it seems strange to have such a total disregard for it if ain't on purpose, and none of it matches up to how scary shit is in the really scary games.
There's no moments of impending doom like when they rolled out the AT-ATs in Empire Strikes back, or little cinematic bits like they did in DOOM 3 (and a lot of other horror games) when they introduced some new robo-alien-demon (bleh) menace and froze up your controls (grr! nooo!), or anything like that.
And I just thought it was interesting to think about what the self-imposed limits are with that scare-the-shit-out-of-you kinda stuff and why its different in MMOs than it is in single-player games 'cause they think they'll do better and appeal to a wider crowd if they don't scare the living shit out of them or something heh.
Maybe that's true, but I'm not sure that's right.
And if that's really the way its working, its just gotta burn some of the Older Brother Game Devs up that they gotta hold themselves back like that when what they really wanna do is make people have heart attacks and fall out of their chairs and throw their mice up in the air and shit heh.
And I wonder if a game that was "Too Scary For Some People To Play, You Need To Sign This Release Form" would really do better or worse than a game with yard after yard of random whack-a-mole monsters spawning on a lawn and wandering around aimlessly with their hands in their mouths and junk ahaha.
Not Enough Portable Holes
"Okay I've got fifty feet of rope."
"Dude that's like two hundred pounds of rope, ain't it?"
"I dunno."
"I got a bag of fifty iron spikes and a hammer we can use to pound 'em into rocks and stuff so we can climb."
"I got a ten foot pole to check for pit traps and stuff."
"Dude you are gonna get seriously tired carrying a ten foot pole around."
"How many iron rations do you got?"
"I got ten."
"What the heck are iron rations anyways?"
"I dunno, I always imagined 'em as a brick of orange play-doh, jam-packed with a day's supply of nutrients, wrapped in aluminum foil, even though I know they din't have no aluminum foil back in the ancient times."
"Yah, it was prolly wrapped in iron foil, back in them days, hence the iron rations bit."
"How much water do you got?"
"I got a wineskin with seven days worth of water."
"Dude that's like twenty-one gallons of water or something, ain't it?"
"I dunno, I just paid for it and marked it off on my character sheet."
"..."
"Mebbe I just carry all that water on my horse."
"Is he bringing his horse down into the dungeon?"
"Uh... yes?"
"Dude, you are the one that made this game, you coulda added more water fountains and ladders and whatever and then we wouldn't have to carry all this crap around with us all the time."
"Yah and we carry all this crap around and then we always find out we need sixty feet of rope and a twelve foot pole to do anything."
"Yah this game sucks."
"Dude that's like two hundred pounds of rope, ain't it?"
"I dunno."
"I got a bag of fifty iron spikes and a hammer we can use to pound 'em into rocks and stuff so we can climb."
"I got a ten foot pole to check for pit traps and stuff."
"Dude you are gonna get seriously tired carrying a ten foot pole around."
"How many iron rations do you got?"
"I got ten."
"What the heck are iron rations anyways?"
"I dunno, I always imagined 'em as a brick of orange play-doh, jam-packed with a day's supply of nutrients, wrapped in aluminum foil, even though I know they din't have no aluminum foil back in the ancient times."
"Yah, it was prolly wrapped in iron foil, back in them days, hence the iron rations bit."
"How much water do you got?"
"I got a wineskin with seven days worth of water."
"Dude that's like twenty-one gallons of water or something, ain't it?"
"I dunno, I just paid for it and marked it off on my character sheet."
"..."
"Mebbe I just carry all that water on my horse."
"Is he bringing his horse down into the dungeon?"
"Uh... yes?"
"Dude, you are the one that made this game, you coulda added more water fountains and ladders and whatever and then we wouldn't have to carry all this crap around with us all the time."
"Yah and we carry all this crap around and then we always find out we need sixty feet of rope and a twelve foot pole to do anything."
"Yah this game sucks."
Transdimensional Conundrums
In a Parallel Universe, Dundee didn't take the job with SWG.
And he didn't become a "space guy" at all.
And instead, he kept working on his piddly little experimental UO emulator server, and fooling around with Permanent Death, and his Estate Idea, and Weapons With History, where a weapon, over the course of generations, would keep track of all the things it killed and the folks who used it, and became a magical Orc-Slayer Sword, once it killed enough Orcs, that may be passed down from father to son, or recovered from the famous tomb of a dead player, but it would only "light up" and show its magical nature if it was held by someone from the family, or something like that.
And all that just came from from meditating and musing about ways to make lewt and treasure more interesting, and how to store a player's "advancement" in something else besides a "level treadmill," y'know?
And then there was his Organic Dungeon Spawning thingie, where Dungeons would spawn dynamically and begin to build in strength, and eventually threaten nearby player-made towns, with "scouts," at first, and then sieges, eventually, unless something was done to stop them.
Which was an idea that was almost borrowed by the guys that did Horizons, but then they gave up 'cause it was too hard to do, or whatever, and they made yet another static etch-a-sketch game world where everything respawns and endlessly erases everything the players do, even though, if you think about it, that isn't acutally any different than make everything out of dynamic puzzle pieces that can go together in different ways, from a technical perspective, except in how you keep track of the meaning of it.
Well, as long as you think about it ahead of time.
Just like Dundee's Anamorphic Terrain thingie and the random dungeon stuff (that we had twenty years ago in Daggerfall heh) isn't really really any different than arranging the entrances and exits to a series of "instances" made out of dumb little bricks with some spawn points that you may or may not use.
And then there was the Divination thing, where Wizards would get Divinations about relics and artifacts like Orc Slayer Swords in the Tombs of Dead Player Heroes, that would start quests, at the cost of owing a Demon something, and eventually Demons would become strong enough, through this mafia-like procession of owing favors, to open a gate and attack the town.
Which would make the Wizard pretty unpopular with the locals heh.
Awesome junk like that.
I think its kinda weird that Dundee became a space guy, 'cause I always thought of him as more of a "let's all ride around and seige castles" 13th warrior No-Elves-And-Barely-Any-Magic kinda dude, but with the "success" of Jump to Lightspeed and the friends he made and stuff, everything that happened makes sense.
Although his current interest in social-networks or whatever is completely bizarre to me, I don't get that at all, even when I think about the experiments he did with Player Policing and stuff, 'cause those were all in-game sorta things, and not out-of-game sorta things, well, at least in my mind, and I'm not a big fan of all that out-of-game baggage, I tend to think of all that kinda stuff as crutches players constructed to get around gaping holes in the game's logic and signs that something in-the-game is broken or at least needs some smoothing-over.
But I'm weird, y'know, there are very few people who share the context that I look at everything from, and the list is always growing smaller, 'cause the crusty old jaded gamer guys don't really tend to share all the experiences they're drawing on, y'know, 'cause it'd be so much work to spell it all out and you'd prolly forget about ten million important points anyways so why bother heh.
But we do need to bother, or we're gonna lose all that info, and pretty soon there won't be anybody that knows what usage-based skill stuff is, all the different benefits and things that suck about it, and the improvements Dundee played around with, automating things, and the offline "training" bit that was sorta half-adopted by Eve Online.
And eventually all that junk will have to be rediscovered the hard way, when it might've been really useful, as an option, earlier on.
Its still the only way I can see newbs and high level guys grouping together more-the-merrier style where everybody gains something, y'know, 'cause everybody gets experience just for swinging at the monster, and not just killing the monster.
And the Weapons With History thing is an example of using the power of computers to go somewhere farther than we ever could've gone with Pen and Paper, and not just "doing as good" as Pen and Paper, y'know?
Same with filling a graveyard with the grandfathers of the current players, and having your players really be the guys that make the History of your game, that junk is awesome with a kind of depth that we could barely scrape our nails into with Pen and Paper stuff, 'cause it'd be such a pain-in-the-ass to keep track of all that shit.
Yah, we all hated keeping track of how much water and iron rations you needed to drink and eat and shit, let alone how many orcs you killed, but pretty much every computer game keeps track of how much orcs you kill, even though they hardly do anything that makes sense with it (like giving you a +3 bonus against Orcs as an Orc Slayer or something heh).
Anyways I think about that Parallel Universe sometimes, the one where Dundee is still Dundee, and still grinding away at his piddly little Experimental Server, and what a lucky bastard that Parallel Universe Version of Me is, having all that fun, doing junk at least ten years into the future of the shit I'm doing over here in this crappy Parallel Universe where everything got all fucked up ahaha.
I mean, seriously, all that junk I been talking about was from like ten years ago in this timeline, and that was just the beginnings of where ever we woulda gone by now.
And I think about what we traded all that for, and I'm like, totally fucking bummed man, we got totally fucking screwed in that deal man I mean we got seriously donky cocked ahaha.
And its the same thing with Sunsword, who keeps saying he needs help, and between all of us, we know so many awesome people when you think about it.
I mean, really think about it, that's always was our real super power.
But I dunno how to help him and bring it all back together, even though I love the guy.
And now I'm at the point where I'm staring back down the timeline and trying to make a course correction to swing us toward the good spot a little, if I can.
Like some kinda multidimensional madman ahaha.
But how hard would it be, really?
How hard is it to fix everything and get all the ducks in a row and just make everything right?
Not that hard.
We ain't trading anything really wonderful for it, I been giving this current state of affairs a chance for years and years now but shit seems all fuxxored up to me and I haven't seen anything really good and worthy of all the powers behind it come out of it yet.
We just gotta make up our minds and do it.
And so what if you starve (heh), as long as you advance your art and are remembered forever as a champion of some great 'cause who died a righteous death in battle, or even not remembered at all except as some dude that saved the whole town of whatsitsnuts from whatever that bad thing was that one time, back in the days before all the new people showed up ahaha.
Life is just a sitcom throughout the Multiverse, in each and every one of the different Parallel Universes, but in some of 'em, they're doing really awesome shit, that's way more fun than the shit we're doing, and I'm jealous.
How about we make those other Parallel Universes jealous of us for once, man.
Or, maybe I'm just not patient enough, if you need an easy out ahaha.
And he didn't become a "space guy" at all.
And instead, he kept working on his piddly little experimental UO emulator server, and fooling around with Permanent Death, and his Estate Idea, and Weapons With History, where a weapon, over the course of generations, would keep track of all the things it killed and the folks who used it, and became a magical Orc-Slayer Sword, once it killed enough Orcs, that may be passed down from father to son, or recovered from the famous tomb of a dead player, but it would only "light up" and show its magical nature if it was held by someone from the family, or something like that.
And all that just came from from meditating and musing about ways to make lewt and treasure more interesting, and how to store a player's "advancement" in something else besides a "level treadmill," y'know?
And then there was his Organic Dungeon Spawning thingie, where Dungeons would spawn dynamically and begin to build in strength, and eventually threaten nearby player-made towns, with "scouts," at first, and then sieges, eventually, unless something was done to stop them.
Which was an idea that was almost borrowed by the guys that did Horizons, but then they gave up 'cause it was too hard to do, or whatever, and they made yet another static etch-a-sketch game world where everything respawns and endlessly erases everything the players do, even though, if you think about it, that isn't acutally any different than make everything out of dynamic puzzle pieces that can go together in different ways, from a technical perspective, except in how you keep track of the meaning of it.
Well, as long as you think about it ahead of time.
Just like Dundee's Anamorphic Terrain thingie and the random dungeon stuff (that we had twenty years ago in Daggerfall heh) isn't really really any different than arranging the entrances and exits to a series of "instances" made out of dumb little bricks with some spawn points that you may or may not use.
And then there was the Divination thing, where Wizards would get Divinations about relics and artifacts like Orc Slayer Swords in the Tombs of Dead Player Heroes, that would start quests, at the cost of owing a Demon something, and eventually Demons would become strong enough, through this mafia-like procession of owing favors, to open a gate and attack the town.
Which would make the Wizard pretty unpopular with the locals heh.
Awesome junk like that.
I think its kinda weird that Dundee became a space guy, 'cause I always thought of him as more of a "let's all ride around and seige castles" 13th warrior No-Elves-And-Barely-Any-Magic kinda dude, but with the "success" of Jump to Lightspeed and the friends he made and stuff, everything that happened makes sense.
Although his current interest in social-networks or whatever is completely bizarre to me, I don't get that at all, even when I think about the experiments he did with Player Policing and stuff, 'cause those were all in-game sorta things, and not out-of-game sorta things, well, at least in my mind, and I'm not a big fan of all that out-of-game baggage, I tend to think of all that kinda stuff as crutches players constructed to get around gaping holes in the game's logic and signs that something in-the-game is broken or at least needs some smoothing-over.
But I'm weird, y'know, there are very few people who share the context that I look at everything from, and the list is always growing smaller, 'cause the crusty old jaded gamer guys don't really tend to share all the experiences they're drawing on, y'know, 'cause it'd be so much work to spell it all out and you'd prolly forget about ten million important points anyways so why bother heh.
But we do need to bother, or we're gonna lose all that info, and pretty soon there won't be anybody that knows what usage-based skill stuff is, all the different benefits and things that suck about it, and the improvements Dundee played around with, automating things, and the offline "training" bit that was sorta half-adopted by Eve Online.
And eventually all that junk will have to be rediscovered the hard way, when it might've been really useful, as an option, earlier on.
Its still the only way I can see newbs and high level guys grouping together more-the-merrier style where everybody gains something, y'know, 'cause everybody gets experience just for swinging at the monster, and not just killing the monster.
And the Weapons With History thing is an example of using the power of computers to go somewhere farther than we ever could've gone with Pen and Paper, and not just "doing as good" as Pen and Paper, y'know?
Same with filling a graveyard with the grandfathers of the current players, and having your players really be the guys that make the History of your game, that junk is awesome with a kind of depth that we could barely scrape our nails into with Pen and Paper stuff, 'cause it'd be such a pain-in-the-ass to keep track of all that shit.
Yah, we all hated keeping track of how much water and iron rations you needed to drink and eat and shit, let alone how many orcs you killed, but pretty much every computer game keeps track of how much orcs you kill, even though they hardly do anything that makes sense with it (like giving you a +3 bonus against Orcs as an Orc Slayer or something heh).
Anyways I think about that Parallel Universe sometimes, the one where Dundee is still Dundee, and still grinding away at his piddly little Experimental Server, and what a lucky bastard that Parallel Universe Version of Me is, having all that fun, doing junk at least ten years into the future of the shit I'm doing over here in this crappy Parallel Universe where everything got all fucked up ahaha.
I mean, seriously, all that junk I been talking about was from like ten years ago in this timeline, and that was just the beginnings of where ever we woulda gone by now.
And I think about what we traded all that for, and I'm like, totally fucking bummed man, we got totally fucking screwed in that deal man I mean we got seriously donky cocked ahaha.
And its the same thing with Sunsword, who keeps saying he needs help, and between all of us, we know so many awesome people when you think about it.
I mean, really think about it, that's always was our real super power.
But I dunno how to help him and bring it all back together, even though I love the guy.
And now I'm at the point where I'm staring back down the timeline and trying to make a course correction to swing us toward the good spot a little, if I can.
Like some kinda multidimensional madman ahaha.
But how hard would it be, really?
How hard is it to fix everything and get all the ducks in a row and just make everything right?
Not that hard.
We ain't trading anything really wonderful for it, I been giving this current state of affairs a chance for years and years now but shit seems all fuxxored up to me and I haven't seen anything really good and worthy of all the powers behind it come out of it yet.
We just gotta make up our minds and do it.
And so what if you starve (heh), as long as you advance your art and are remembered forever as a champion of some great 'cause who died a righteous death in battle, or even not remembered at all except as some dude that saved the whole town of whatsitsnuts from whatever that bad thing was that one time, back in the days before all the new people showed up ahaha.
Life is just a sitcom throughout the Multiverse, in each and every one of the different Parallel Universes, but in some of 'em, they're doing really awesome shit, that's way more fun than the shit we're doing, and I'm jealous.
How about we make those other Parallel Universes jealous of us for once, man.
Or, maybe I'm just not patient enough, if you need an easy out ahaha.
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