Improbable Insights» Loyd Case on Technology

Dragon Age vs. Mass Effect 2: Character Development

Loyd Case — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 21:59:27 +0000

Both Dragon Age and Mass Effect 2 are Bioware creations, albeit by different development teams with clearly different goals. Dragon Age: Origins is touted as the spiritual successor to Bioware’s first major success, Baldur’s Gate. Mass Effect 2 is an action/RPG hybrid, building on the first game, but enhancing the action bits while streamlining the role-playing.

Both games offer extensive storylines, lots of spoken dialog and some excellent voice acting. Both also allow you to take your character in different directions. Once you get beyond those Bioware tropes, the two games diverge pretty significantly.

I’ve played through both games once, and working through second run-throughs on both games. Given that both games have been reviewed and discussed substantially, I’m going to narrow in on one aspect of the two games: how characters are developed. (Note: there may be spoilers ahead.)

The Character is You – or Is It?

First, let’s talk about the character you play.

Your character in Dragon Age is you. That is, you can customize the look and appearance, and play through any of several origin stories. But your character has no voiced dialog, even when responding to party members or other NPCs who have very distinct voices. I know players who actually read the dialog out loud, to give the character voice.

Mass Effect 2’s character, on the other hand, is Commander Shepherd. Both the male and female versions have voice dialog. (Jennifer Hale, as the female Shepherd, is particularly good.) That choice – using spoken dialog voiced by actors – might mean you have a little emotional distance from “your” Shepherd. On the other hand, you can certainly customize Shepherd’s facial appearance at the games beginning. So it’s something of a mix. I found myself pretty much making the decisions I might make with “my” character.

In both cases, as with any RPG, “your” character may not necessarily behave as you would in a similar situation. After all, it’s a game, so having a little fun by acting differently is part of the oeuvre of gaming.

Still, giving Shepherd a distinct voice does impact the game. Scenes with dialog or cut-scenes resonate differently – perhaps more like a TV show or movie – than the strong and silent type. In some ways, Dragon Age is a little like the Half Life series. Gordon Freeman in Half Life isn’t voiced by an actor. (In fact, Freeman has no dialog whatsoever, so you can only imagine the responses when people talk to you. Then again, Half Life and its sequels are not RPGs.)

The choices made by the two Bioware groups when it comes to the character voicing do create an interesting dichotomy. Mass Effect 2 does feel more cinematic. The cut scenes are much more extensive, the over-the-shoulder view feels a little more movie like, and the interactive scenes where Shepherd is talking, gives the feeling that you’re more “along for the ride” rather than being in the world.

By the same token, the lack of spoken voice for the player character in Dragon Age is at times disconcerting. I would have like a little more in-game emotional resonance, beyond talking to my computer.

Your Party

In both games, non-player characters have vast amounts of spoken dialog. Some players find this insufferable, and try to skip past as much of it as possible. Personally, I love the voices, if they’re well done, and listen to most of the dialog all the way through at least once.

The playable NPCs have much deeper individual storylines in Dragon Age. The options are richer, too – the characters in Dragon Age all seem imbued with very distinct personalities, and can even have emotional cycles – sometimes testy, sometimes receptive – depending on the situation.

In both games, you have to recruit party members, and then do an additional quest for each member if you want to unlock certain abilities. It’s another classic Bioware trope. However, the way those quests are structured in Dragon Age just feels more organic. Often, they pop up during conversation in a very naturalistic way.

Take Alistair in Dragon Age, for example. In some ways, he’s a key part of the story, yet you can also dispense with him if you like. He evolves over the course of the story, and can rise to become a good king – or not.

Mass Effect 2, on the other hand, clubs you over the head with these additional quests. They’re blatantly called “loyalty quests.” They often pop up in your quest log, even before you talk to the party member involved. Perhaps the most detailed quest is Tali’s return to the Quarian flotilla to face treason charges. Yet, Tali doesn’t really change (other than unlocking an ability.)

Then there’s romance.

The way love and romance is handled in Dragon Age is pretty simple: anything goes. That’s a little like real life, and you can happily be heterosexual, non-sexual or gay if you like. It’s still a little on the heavy handed side, but still feels more organic than the Mass Effect 2 romances, which often seem like a puzzle game inside the game. On top of that, none of the romances that count towards the romance achievement can be anything but heterosexual. So it all seems a little contrived and judgmental.

In-Game NPCs

The major NPCs you encounter which aren’t part of your party also seem more developed in Dragon Age. The deepest of these are the two contenders for the dwarven king you encounter, and the fallout from your choices are not so obvious at first.

On the other hand, your interactions with a number of NPCs have potentially far reaching impact in Mass Effect 3. I say “potentially,” because none of the Big Decisions in the original game really seemed to affect the sequel much. Whether you decided to come to the rescue of the council, or let them die had little impact in the overall gameplay. Some of the dialog changed, but there seem to be few repercussions overall. It would have been interesting, for example, if a darker path opened up because the alien races really do hate you for letting the council die.

Of course, there were some big decisions in Dragon Age as well. It will be interesting to see what fallout comes from your Big Decision regarding Morrigan, for example.

Final Thoughts

Both games are actually excellent, and many of the decisions regarding character development seemed to cater to the different styles. Dragon Age is very much a classic computer RPG, and the deeper characters and has a more organic feel. By the same token, not having voice for your character somehow makes the game seem like its missing something.

Mass Effect 2 is a streamlined action RPG, and the fairly shallow character development serves to move the story along in a more cinematic way. While some people may prefer one style over another, I had a blast with both – probably because the experiences were so different.

Ignorance and Analysts

Loyd Case — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 20:50:59 +0000

I was cruising the forums at Quartertothree.com when I came across this gem. It’s a video that ostensibly comments on what games might win Spike TV’s VGA award for best game of the year. However, I’m not going to comment on the game choices, but rather this bit of ignorant commentary that begins around 57:45 in the show.

It’s in response to a question: “What are your thoughts on how PC gaming is dying?”

My first thought: way to pick a loaded question. But then oft-quoted analyst Michael Patcher goes on to demonstrate his ignorance, by saying: “Nobody has a PC that’s faster than a PS3.”

Say what?

Patcher launches into this chewy tidbit focusing on the CPU, rather than the platform. The PS3 has certain computational strengths because of the cell processor, but it’s something of a CPU dead end. IBM recently announcing it was ending its own development efforts on the Cell. As Intel moves forward into 32nm, with the upcoming Gultown, Arrandale and Clarkdale CPUs, the PC processor is still advancing.

The ignorance doesn’t end there. The commentators throw around other juicy bits of misinformation, like “dual quad Pentium 3.2…” “ … that costs $2,000.”

But the PC isn’t just the CPU. Any PC consists of memory, storage, chipsets… and, of course, the graphics card.

Right now, I can build an $800 PC with an AMD Radeon HD 5850 that’s arguably substantially more powerful than the PS3. You can even see it in games that run on both platforms, where I can get higher, smoother frame rates in titles like Borderlands and Dragon Age at higher resolutions than I can on a console.

There are the logical fallacies, like dismissing Starcraft II because it’s irrelevant. After all, “Anything that’s gonna sell in Asia and anything that’s gonna have a subscription” doesn’t count in Patcher’s book.

In other words, a data point that doesn’t agree with the premise isn’t valid. And neither are Asian gamers or MMOs.

At times, it also just gets insulting, like the idea that “the gamer is the guy who’s gonna play by himself.”

Good job dismissing woman gamers and all those people playing online. Say, isn’t one of the Xbox 360’s main value proposition its strength in online gaming?

And to think people pay these guys for their insights.

I’m not going to argue the strengths and merits of console gaming versus PC gaming. That’s a topic for another, more lengthy discussion. Rather, my point is that if you’re getting paid for your insights and knowledge, maybe it’s a good idea to have those insights be, you know, accurate.

Or am I asking too much?

Managing Combat in Dragon Age: Origins

Loyd Case — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 22:06:53 +0000

I’ve been somewhat… obsessed with Dragon Age: Origins lately. The voice acting is entertaining (Claudia Black as Morrigan and Steve Valentine as Alistair, in particular.) The story is engaging. The slightly dark take on yet another Tolkien-esqe fantasy world provides and interesting, if somewhat overwrought, spin on the old fantasy tropes.

I’m also having more fun with combat than I often do with computer-based RPGs. Maybe that’s because I’m treating the combat as if it were really a tactical mini-wargame. Because of that, I’ve been having a blast – and been successful – even in some very tough fights. Here’s what I’ve been doing to be successful.

What follows is my take on effective combat in Dragon Age for the PC version. Combat in the PC game becomes much more of a tactical strategy game than the console version, so bear that in mind. I’ve avoided any plot spoilers, focusing on tactics to take down enemies as effectively and quickly as possible.

What’s Not Here

This is about combat management. I’m not going into details about character builds or what type of mage/rogue/fighter to build. I will talk about specific build traits I found useful, but my general approach to character building is to build a character, not a walking set of stats.

Similarly, I don’t talk much about party makeup. While I would tend to bring along two mages, a fighter and my main character (an elven Rogue), that was more an artifact of the story. For example, I’d almost always bring along Alistair and Morrigan, because I found the dialog interplay between the two of them hilarious.

If I play through again, I’ll probably use a completely different party. On the occasions where I mixed up the party a bit, I did have to adjust tactics (not having a healer, for example, meant bringing along lots of healing poultices.)

Prior to Combat

Before you dive into combat, you should prep the party for combat. But how do you know if you’re going to have a combat?

Easy. Have a rogue in your party. More importantly, have a rogue with a couple of levels of stealth skill. Halt your party, put your rogue into stealth mode, and have him scout ahead. If you’re running through winding passages – all too common in this game – you’ll want to have your rogue be the party scout fairly often.

A rogue in stealth mode (hiding in shadows) will also often trigger enemy spawns. Some enemies can also hide in shadows, or are invisible. But they’ll sense your presence, even if they don’t see you, so they’ll often suddenly appear – enabling you to fix their location.

If have at least two levels of stealth (three is better for this tactic), you can even throw grenades or set up traps to soften up large groups of enemies. When the bomb goes off, they’ll move toward you (the direction from which the grenade was thrown), but still not see you. This allows you to draw smaller groups of enemies toward a waiting ambush.

Similarly, moving a rogue into enemy held areas using hiding in shadows allows you to spot and disable traps ahead of time. Some rooms can be full of various traps, and disabling them makes for a more effective assault when the time comes.

Use "hide in shadows" to scout enemy held territory

Managing Resources by Sneaking

In one case, I ran my rogue through a long series of areas loaded with numerous lesser enemies. At the very end, I ran into a boss battle – which automatically brought my party up to that fight, bypassing all the lesser, tedious battles. Sure, those smaller battles might have generated some experience.

But I was in that particular area with relatively few healing poultices and even fewer lyrium potions (to regenerate mana for my spellcasters.) Bypassing the smaller battles allowed me to husband my resources and save them for the bigger fight.

Buffing the Party?

The idea of buffing your party before entering combat seems like a good one. Spells like Glyph of Warding or Heroic Offense may seem like a good idea before a battle starts. In practice, it’s not so useful. What seems to work better is to pause immediately after entering combat, and applying buffs.

However, beware of the one-action queue. It’s too easy to try to give multiple commands (eg, issue a spell, then tell the character to move), only to realize that the character is moving without casting the spell. You can only queue up a single action when you pause. However, you can pause any time you like, so if you prefer a turn-based approach, just hit the space bar after an action is performed.

Multiplayer LAN Gaming: the Better Experience

Loyd Case — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 21:06:58 +0000

I’m not much of an online gamer. That’s not to say I don’t play online games. It’s just that, when I’m alone, I generally gravitate to single player games. On the other hand, I do like a good multiplayer game, and I get to indulge my desire for playing with others on a weekly basis.

The problem is, though, I’m spoiled.

When we were first looking into buying our house back in 1997, we discovered it had a daylight basement. At the time, I was a full time freelance writer (as I am once again.) The basement doesn’t actually appear as floor space in the county assessor’s report – something about below-grade areas not being considered part of the living space. It’s an odd quirk around here, but then most houses in northern California don’t have basements at all.

The basement was partially finished, so when we moved in, we added carpeting and third wire ground to all the basement outlets. I also added a 200A service to the house, replacing the aging 100A box that came with the house.

The basement has two rooms, a large storage area off the larger room, plus a bathroom and a roomy closet where the hot water heater and furnace live. The smaller room became a spare bedroom while the larger room, with its associated storage area, became my office and lab space. Eventually, when my wife began working out of the house full time, the spare bedroom was converted to her office.

If you want to check out more details on the basement lab, check out the blog post on the http://www.improbableinsights.com/2009/08/17/294/ basement lab.

Ever since the network was set up in the lab, we’ve had LAN gaming sessions most weeks; eventually, these multiplayer gaming sessions were dubbed “Friday Night Follies.” The office space itself is pretty large – 18 x 15 feet or 270 square feet. I’ve added workbenches (http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/categories/departments/workspaces/11723/ IKEA GALANT tabletops with the T-legs), plus a couple of older rolling PC workbenches from http://www.anthro.com/ Anthro, which were part of a budget line the company no longer makes.

I can – and have – crammed up to ten working systems into this space, though the most we’ve had on the LAN for gamin is eight. Most Friday nights, though, it’s just four of us, though tonight (November Friday the Thirteenth), there will be six.

We’re pretty eclectic, though we tend to favor co-op against the AI to playing PvP. We have a mix of gamers, too. Two of them play MMORPGs (one is an MMORPG fanatic), while the third player is like me: single player when on his own, and multiplayer when he comes over to my place.

We have, on occasion, even played an MMO game or two, including D&D Online, Guild Wars and the flawed, semi-tragic failure that was Hellgate: London. That’s the only time I’ve ever really played MMORPGs – on my LAN, with my friends.

I’m completely spoiled by the experience.

The idea of playing online, talking to other gamers through a headset, dealing with lag and griefers, is simply unappealing. I realize I’m also missing out on some potentially great experiences. It all comes down to simple time budgeting: how much time I have for gaming, versus work, versus family life versus other interests. A lot of the time I might spend in online gaming is instead spent with single player games. Lately, for example, I’ve been completely sucked into Dragon Age: Origins.

So maybe it’s a hit on my geek cred that I’m very rarely found in any online games. But then, I’ve got my own LAN party going most Friday nights. How much more geeky can you get?

Paternalism versus Users: Shifting Paradigms in Game Publishing

Loyd Case — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 18:48:54 +0000

An interesting division is happening in game publishing and game development. No, it’s not the oft-mentioned indie game developers versus big game media. It’s not PCs versus consoles, either. In some ways, it’s a return to the past: passive versus interactive, but taken to a meta level.

Over the past several weeks, we’ve seen something of a furor surround the release of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 . First came the news that the latest entry in the franchise would have no dedicated servers – which also meant no user generated maps and no mod tools. On top of that, it was revealed the multiplayer maps would be limited to 9 vs. 9.

The other thing that happened to me last week was listening to latest Three Moves Ahead, the podcast produced and hosted by Troy Goodfellow of Flash of Steel, which was an interview with Chris Park, developer of the RTS AI Wars. It’s well worth a listen.

What struck me was the difference in attitude between Activision / Infinity Ward (developers of Modern Warfare 2) and Chris Park. AI Wars has gotten a lot of buzz, partly because it’s a somewhat different take on the RTS genre, but also because Park and his small team has been incredibly responsive to the AI Wars user community.

At first blush, this may simply sound like another Indie versus Big Publisher dichotomy – but it’s not that simple. Large game developers and associated publishers can also be tuned into their user communities. They may not be able to respond as quickly as a small developer with a single title, but they can still listen.

What’s more, I think, is that it’s also a return to an interesting argument I used to hear back in the heyday of the old Computer Gaming World.

Back then, the idea was that PC gaming – and, by extension, all video games – heralded a new era of interactive entertainment. It was believed back then that electronic gaming was something new, a move away from the passivity of couch potatoes being spoon fed their entertainment by the TV networks.

It turns out, of course, that the writers and editors of that era were working from a set of assumptions that proved incorrect over the longer term. The fight isn’t between interactivity and passivity. It’s between top-down paternalism and grass roots user involvement.

On the gaming front, you now have companies like Activision, taking a highly paternalistic attitude: it’s our game; we know what’s best, take it or leave it.

On the other side, you have developers and publisher who, to varying degrees, let the user get involved. It can be pretty low level stuff, like handing out development tools to the users, as we’ve seen recently with Borderlands, Dragon Age and the Unreal Developer’s Kit. It can go deeper than that, too. Stardock, for example, will get users involved in early betas, and even alphas of a game, as they’re doing with the upcoming strategy title Elemental to get user feedback during the critical stage before the game is feature complete and the design is frozen.

Neither approach offers any advantage in the quality of the game. I have every expectation that Modern Warfare 2 will be a very polished game that offers a great experience. There’s no doubt in my mind that Elemental will also be a great title.

On the other hand, today’s generation of web-driven users who are flocking to social games – which are often driven by the players themselves – signals what may become a sea-change in the overall behavior of the gaming audience. Players will start expecting more responsiveness and less paternalism from their gaming experience.

We’re actually seeing this battle play out in the larger field of new media. Rupert Murdoch, for example, threatens to block search engines like Google from offering search results from his publications. It’s old media, at its paternalistic worst. If articles from Murdoch’s publications never show up in search results, who will read them online? What will advertisers think of this?

How it will all shake out is anyone’s guess. Interactive media, whether it’s gaming or the Internet, is still very much an evolving animal. As the new generation of developers and users connect with each other, it will be increasingly difficult for the old generation to walk back that high level of interactivity and user involvement that’s expected today. The fight will be an interesting one to watch.

Friday Night Follies Takes on Windows 7

Loyd Case — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 01:56:36 +0000

And here’s a shot of the various Windows 7 upgrades. So far, I’ve installed several onto the five gaming systems I have set

up here. Some, of course, have already been running Windows 7, which I obtained from my Technet account, and have been using in articles on Windows 7.

There’s not really a lot I can add to the hoopla about Windows 7. Like any new OS release from Microsoft, there is good and bad. But for our weekly LAN party group, I’m looking forward to moving everyone to 64-bit Windows 7.

Four of five gaming rigs in the basement lab are now running Windows 7.

Windows 7 & Gaming: So Far

I’ve been running games on Windows 7 since the release candidate. Bear in mind that most of my games are either fairly new or, if older titles, have been re-purchased from Steam or Good Old Games. I’ve run into relatively few issues. The most common problem between different titles, oddly enough, is the inability to play the startup video. This is true with Blood Bowl and the updated, free-to-play Dungeons and Dragons Online. As far as problems go, this is pretty minor.

Here’s a partial list of games I’ve played under Windows 7. These are games I’ve actually played fairly extensively, not just fired up and checked to see if they ran:

Anno 1404
Left 4 Dead
Mass Effect (needed to install the free DLC to get it to work — but this may have been a Radeon HD 5870 driver problem.)
Plants Vs. Zombies
Risen
Dungeons and Dragons Online
Demigod
Sins of a Solar Empire
Section 8
Prototype
Red Faction: Guerrilla
Blood Bowl

None of these are particularly old titles. All of these run on Windows 7 64-bit.

Friday Night Follies & the Windows 7 Launch Party

The usual crew was on hand, plus Robert Heron from HDNation. We played D&D online for about five hours.

I’d mentioned earlier that four of five of the gaming systems were running Windows 7. By that, I meant the actual release version; the fifth system is still on the release candidate. All are running the 64-bit version.

We did run into a couple of glitches, but I’m not convinced they were Windows 7 related. D&D Online crashed to the desktop on a couple of systems. Another odd quirk: occasionally the game would spontaneously change resolutions, and you’d see a “window” on your desktop. I put the word “window” in quotes, because it wasn’t a real window. You could see the desktop underneath, but the game was still running in full screen, exclusive. Fixing the problem was easy: press ALT-ENTER twice. The first time would put it in true windowed mode, the second time would kick it back into its original resolution in full screen mode.

The reason I’m unconvinced that this is a Windows 7 specific issue is that we saw the same behavior on at least one Windows Vista system a couple of weeks back. The problems seem to manifest mostly on systems running ATI graphics, though I haven’t tested this extensively to be completely sure — only one of the systems is running an Nvidia-based card (a BFG 275 GTX OC), and it had relatively few issues.

Next steps is to install Windows 7 on some of the other family systems, and see how those fare. One thing is for sure: XP and Vista are done in the Case House. I’ll keep a couple of Vista and XP partition backups, just for testing. But we’ll be a Windows 7 household going forward.

Tactical Combat versus Narrative Roleplaying

Loyd Case — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 19:27:07 +0000

In the past year or so, I’ve been experimenting more with tabletop roleplaying games. The games I’ve been most attracted too are best described as “narrative roleplaying.” In that style of RPG, the players often describe an action during conflict resolution, rather than game it out. Sure, there’s usually still dice rolling to determine outcomes, but the actual conflicts and actions are described, rather than played out on a game board. Good examples of these types of games would be White Wolf’s Scion series and Evil Hat’s Spirit of the Century.

On the other hand, a game like Dungeons and Dragons 4.0 is very tactical. You really can’t play D&D 4.0 effectively without miniatures and a game board. I’ve played through some D&D 4.0 sessions, and found them to be somewhat tedious.

My friend Ron, on the other hand, really loves D&D 4.0. When he’s sat in on some of the games I’ve run, he tends to get bored after a few hours. “It’s your fault,” he told me recently. “Battletech ruined RPGs for me.”

Ninety Seconds in Eight Hours

Years ago, I ran a full-on Battletech miniatures campaign. This was back in the era when the now-defunct FASA Games was still a going concern. I had boxes of Geohex foam terrain. Geohex was beautifully flocked, 3D terrain made of Styrofoam, with modular components, so you could build a large scale game board that looked great. (Geohex seems to have also faded away, too.)

The Battletech campaign ran for about five years. We’d get together about once a month, and roleplay some of the events leading up to what would then become an 8-10 hour marathon of miniatures gaming. We’d be lucky to get fifteen turns done – about 90 seconds of game time – in those eight hour sessions.

I had a great time running those games, and not just because I’d run an entire side (one to three lances of mechs) on my own, against the players, each of whom had no more than two mechs each. But I could never go back to the time where eight hours would mean a dozen turns played.

Whenever I’ve sat in on a D&D 4.0 session, it reminded me of those Battletech days of yore. To be fair, a D&D 4.0 turns don’t take 30-45 minutes each, but they often take a good 15-20 minutes, depending on how analytical the players want to be. A single encounter can still take several hours. Whenever I’ve GMed a narrative style RPG, an entire encounter would take maybe a half-hour.

That’s the time issue. Playing for a full day, and only getting through a single encounter (and a handful of actual turns) necessarily makes the campaign move a little more slowly – at least, if you have an encounter per session.

The other issue is imagination. As soon as miniatures get plunked down on a game board, I start to focus on something that’s like a board game, rather than giving my imagination free rein. That’s why I’ve been gravitating towards games in which encounters and conflicts are described in loving detail by the players, rather than played out on a map board. I can’t say I’m good at it yet, but I have more fun with it. Maybe it’s the writer in me.

Save the World, but Pay Up First

Loyd Case — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 20:36:12 +0000

I’ve been playing a lot of Pirhana Bytes Risen, their new RPG that’s sort of a spiritual successor to the Gothic series. The Gothics (and Risen) adhere to the philosophy that some parts of the world are just off limits until your character becomes more powerful. It’s “open world” in that you can go practically anywhere, but you’re likely to get killed if you go into the wrong area until you’re capable of handling it.

I tend to prefer this to the Bethesda RPG philosophy, in which it doesn’t much matter where you go, the enemies are all roughly your level, though I certainly enjoyed Elder Scrolls: Oblivion and Fallout 3. But there are silly tropes that exist in all computer RPGs that are really jarring.

Like buying stuff.

The majority of RPGs have some kind of shopping experience. This allows you to dump all the loot you pick up and sell it for whatever passes for money, then buy stuff you do need. No computer RPG with a trading system I’ve ever played gets it right, though. Note that I’m talking about single player RPGs, not massively multiplayer online RPGs, though my limited experience with those games also reveal flaws in the buying and selling of goods.

It seems like each RPG has its own set of issues. For example, take Mass Effect from Bioware. I’ve played all the way through Mass Effect four times – more, probably, than any other story driven game I’ve ever played. I thoroughly enjoyed the shiny, science fiction milieu that the designers created.

But buying and selling stuff was needlessly difficult. The user interface, for example, was problematic. Worse, though, was the simple fact that loot became less and less valuable over time. You rarely found something useful dropped by an enemy in the second half of the game, and you almost never found anything good to buy, either.

Risen has its own set of problems. You have infinite capacity to carry everything you ever pick up. I suppose you could abstract that as a sort of D&D bag of holding, but that’s not really the problem. Having a weight limit sometimes adds a set of problems that can be interesting to solve – do I keep this new item? Will it be critical later?

But let’s accept the “bag of holding” idea.

It’s late in the game. I’ve just found out from one of the main NPCs that the very existence of the human race is in doubt. (This isn’t really a spoiler – most RPGs have some such dire predicament at their heart.)

Now, you’d think that, with the fate of the species in doubt, that all my compatriots I’ve lived and work with over time would do everything to help me. My teachers would teach me what they knew. My superiors who were in the know would supply me with every possible resource. After all, the end of the world might be at hand.

But no. I go to one of my teachers, and he wants hard cash for teaching me. The people with spells, scrolls and magic potions want gold, too. The heck with the human race – the retirement fund is much more important.

WTF?

I’m sure there are better ways to abstract these sorts of things. In Risen, you do need to have experience points to learn new stuff. I can accept that – I haven’t garnered the wisdom or hard won practical experience to appreciate arcane knowledge. But give me all your health potions, baby, because I’ll need them in my fight with the forces of darkness.

Nope, sorry, only hard cash for useful stuff.

What was that phrase? “For want of a nail…”?

Building a Lynnfield System

Loyd Case — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 18:31:48 +0000

Shall we build a system?

Recently, I decided it was time to replace one of the gaming rigs in my office LAN. On most Fridays, my LAN party group gets together for what we affectionately call “Friday Night Follies.” I usually build systems out of older parts for the LAN party systems, which are generally good enough for the games we play.

This time around, though, I wanted to build something a little more current. So I decided to build a compact system based around Gigabyte’s P55-UD4 micro ATX motherboard and a Core i5 750. Part of my rationale was to test long term stability. You can run all the benchmarks in the world, but there’s nothing quite like hammering on a system in a current generation multiplayer game to really test system stability.

Case Imperfect

Gigabyte had sent me a P55M-UDR motherboard, the same micro ATX motherboard I showed off in my recent appearance on Tekzilla. I’d been wanting to build a system around this, as well as push the board a bit. I finally freed up some time, gathered up some component that had been lying around the basement lab, grabbed my electric screwdriver and set to work.

The case, a black NZXT Rogue, was something I’d reviewed at ExtremeTech some time ago. It’s an attractive case that would look comfortable in a Section 8 level. It looks cool, and is a fine case to build a system you plan on just running for awhile. Building a system into it does require a lot of screwdriver work. You need to remove screws to get to the motherboard tray (it’s removable), take out screws to remove the front panel, so you can unscrew the hard drive bay to install the hard drive, which requires more… well, you get the picture.

The NZXT Rogue looks cool, but system building takes a little effort.

The other glitch with this case is that some graphics cards are a tight fit. Actually, it’s long enough to handle long graphics cards. However, the printed circuit board on many high end graphic cards sticks up above the PCI slot plate just a tiny bit. With the Rogue, it means you can’t install the graphics card before sliding the motherboard tray in. What you do is slide the motherboard tray partway in, install the graphics card, then peer into the tiny space between the tray and the case, so you can screw down the graphics card. It’s a minor annoyance, but a little forethought in the design could have prevented this.

Like many compact cases, NZXT got a little creative with the power supply location. The PSU lives above the expansion slots so you need to have all the components installed before installing the PSU. That installation actually works better than you might expect, and NZXT even supplies you with an extension bracket if you use one of the more immense kilowatt PSUs.

Once up and running, the Rogue looks good, keeps the internals reasonably cool and isn’t too noisy. I would have preferred to have fans with 3-pin motherboard connectors (at least as an option.) If you’re not inside the guts of the case, replacing components often, it’s a fine little case.

Other parts consisted of gear I’ve had in the lab forever.

I’ve had an excellent Antec Signature 650W PSU just sitting on a shelf, which is a tragic waste of a good PSU.
A 4GB (2 x 2GB) 1600MHz HyperX DDR3 kit from Kingston.
A Western Digital WD7500 AAYS SATA hard drive (750GB, 7200RPM)
Lite-On 20x DVD +/- RW optical drive (IDE)
AMD Radeon HD 4870 1GB graphics card.

Of Mice and Gamers

Loyd Case — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 18:14:25 +0000

Recently, Logitech sent me their G500 Gaming Mouse. The new mouse appears to be a refinement on the original G5 mouse. The old G5 is still the favorite of many a gamer, including Joel Durham. The G5 was Logitech’s first attempt at building a “competition” gaming mouse, complete with adjustable weights, which slide into a small compartment. Later, Logitech shipped the G9, a smaller mouse offering greater precision. I never really warmed up to it, though.

I used the G5 for almost two years. I loved the G5, returning to it after brief flings with the G9 and Razer’s Deathadder. So in theory, I should love the G500. But I don’t, and I no longer use the G5 either. Here’s why.

What happened between the G5 and the G500 was Logitech’s MX1100 wireless mouse.

Earlier this year, I acquired a Logitech Cordless Desktop Wave Pro keyboard and mouse combo. I’ve always been a fan of ergonomic, split keyboards. The Wave Pro isn’t exactly a split keyboard, but offers a good compromise in it’s curved layout with the slight rise at the center of the keyboard.

Included with the Wave Pro kit was the MX1100 mouse.

As a gamer, I’ve never been particularly fond of wireless mice. Older generations of wireless mice introduced slight latencies into mouse movements and button presses. Most users would never notice these, but gamers do. There’s nothing quite as annoying as pressing the left mouse button to fire a weapon, then dying from enemy fire before your weapon actually fires.

I am exaggerating a bit, but only a bit.

As I used the MX1100, though, I become hooked on it. It uses a single battery, rechargeable NiMH AA battery, and isn’t too heavy, unlike past cordless mice I’ve used. The bulky charger stand is gone, replaced by a USB cable attachment that charges off USB power. But I don’t use that, since I’ve got a ton of AA NiMH batteries that are constantly kept charged for some of my camera gear.

Most of all, though, I love the feel of the MX1100. It fits my hand like no other mouse I’ve used. Mouse tracking and button presses seem precise, too. And maybe I’m getting older and notice these things less, but I don’t notice much in the way of lag, as I used to notice with other cordless mice.

When the G500 arrived, I plugged it in and used it for a good couple of weeks, for desktop apps and games. I played a fair amount of Demigod (RTS) and Section 8 (first person shooter) with the G500.