Game Geek

Way back in the day, in the early days of real time strategy game development, there were two games that came out at roughly the same time: Total Annihilation, and Starcraft. This was a crazy time, when PC games were still king, World of Warcraft was barely even conceived of yet, and cellphones were barely capable of making calls, let alone playing full versions of Final Fantasy or Sim City.

If you haven't played either of these, you're probably too young to remember (damn you young kids) or older, in which case you probably won't give a crap. The two games had some rather profound differences. There were other RTS games out, but they were all pretty shitty. Starcraft and T.A. were pretty much the best ones out there, with Warcraft 2 still getting plenty of play.

Starcraft, which later became the unofficial national sport of South Korea, was a sort of representational game, much simpler in interaction but with far more character development and faction differences. T.A. was aiming to be a lot more big-picture tactical and to have a hell of a lot more options and strategies. Starcraft, by comparison, felt a little childish and simplistic.

Now, keep in mind, that was just my impression at the time. I really wasn't that keen on starcraft, even though I played the hell out of it. I just liked the full on battle feel of T.A. better, even though the game had some fatal flaws with its AI engine once a lot of units started crawling around. Of course, if you look at the sales and continued popularity of Starcraft, and the collapse of Cavedog (the company that put out T.A.), it's obvious which game stood the test of time. There was even a high-fantasy T.A. called Total Annihilation: Kingdoms, which was a bit of a flop, as far as I can tell. Not a bad game, but it was lacking in the charm and character that Blizzard does such a good job of putting inot their games.

I think what it was is that T.A. was an RTS game designed for brainy nerds who over analyze everything. Starcraft was, well, built for a broader mass appeal. Starcraft also had some of the best balanced units across three very different factions I've ever seen.

So anyway, moving on, it's 2010, and there are now successors to each franchise. Starcraft 2 doesn't need much introduction, but Supreme Commander 2 probably does. SupCom is a good game; it's actually put out by square enix, but it's the same head guy who was behind T.A. that got SupCom put together. The combat is awesome. Booming barrages of artillery, massive tanks, missiles, rockets, nukes, giant mecha, etc, etc. It's fun as hell. I haven't played SupCom 1; I didn't even realize it was a successor to T.A. until I saw an add for Sup Com 2. It's good, I enjoy it. The interface is slick and very intuitive, and the fact that you can zoom out to a full tactical battlefield overview is incredibly nice. There are some balance issues though, so it ain't perfect, and there need to be some more options in PvP games.

Starcraft 2 is pretty awesome also, although for different reasons. For starters, the single player game is fantastic. It's actually got a good plot, there are great cut scenes, and there's a system of purchasing specialized upgrades for your forces and choosing missions that's just awesome. Great job on the single player game.

But the combat... it's a little clunky to me. Sup Com 2 just plain has a better combat interface. Some of the restrictions on build queues and stuff in Starcraft seem artificial, designed to just force you to micro-manage stuff that's otherwise meaningless and automatic in Sup Com. I don't really like the restricted units for PvP; a lot of the older units from Starcraft 1 and the single player game aren't available.

So I was really kind of sour on Starcraft 2, for more or less the same reason I was down on Starcraft 1 and prefered T.A.

But I figured I'd give it a chance and keep playing before really rushing to judgement. And that's when I noticed something that will relegate SupCom to irrelevance and keep Starcraft 2 going strong for years and years to come.

Player Designed Content. In SupCom, there is none. You hop in and play, and beat the shit out of other players, and that's that. There aren't any custom maps, there's no extra map packs or anything. What you see, is what you get.

Starcraft 2, however, is now obviously designed with custom content in mind, and people are already taking off and running with it. I hopped into a custom game last night, and found a full-on four man tower defense mod beta map. All of the rules and systems had been retooled, and it was fun as hell. Still a little clunky, still needed some work, and the final tiers of upgrades weren't completely coded, but this was more or less an entirely novel game based off of the mechanics and visual elements from the core Starcraft game. That kind of flexibility is, in a word, awesome. In fact, they've even got a contest to design the best custom map for S.C. 2 already. I don't even think the game has been out for a month.

So SupCom is pretty much doomed, in my humble opinion. The lack of custom content is going to drive people away, as the game gets old and stale. I wish some of the cleaner interface options in it were transplanted over to Starcraft 2, but that tremendous customizability and the easy interface and ability to just hop into any type of custom map trumps anything Sup Com has to offer. It's a pity, because it's a good game, but it's just not going to hold people's interest.

So while Supreme Commander has some better interface options and cleaner combat, it can't evolve organically. Starcraft 2 wins hands down as a better RTS just for how flexible it is and how much cool content is going to come out for it.

If you don't know what a Skinner Box is, I suggest you look it up. Why, you ask? Because This.

That's right, MMO's are like a digital Skinner Box. In other words, a rat in a box hitting a button to get a treat. Hint: You're the rat.

I recently canceled my World of Warcraft subscription (unrelated to that article there, actually) out of boredom. The grinding finally got as boring as watching shit dry, and raiding is sort of like participating in a group game of monkey-hump-the-football.

Even though I've got the sort of OCD personality that I can get hooked on games like that very very easily, I do seem to hit a threshold where I lose all interest. FOr Diablo 2, it was earning the best item in the game. After that, lost all interest. For WoW, it was the 100 mount achievment, and holy shit, what a miserable grind that was. Same deal as Diablo though; once I hit a sort of personal goal I had set for myself within the game, I was done. Actually, same thing happened to me in Fallout 3 and Battlefield 2... once I capped out my level or unlocked all the weapons, nothing. Lost all interest.

Speaking of games, I know I'm late as hell to the party, but damn, Portal is a fantastic little game. THE CAKE IS A LIE.

And speaking of other games, Battlefield Bad Company 2 is terrible. It's as if the developers set out to suck all the fun out of FPS games. I might be jaded because I'm coming from the ADD/Short attention span Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, style of gaming, but damn, Bad Company Two reminds me way too much of incompetent raids in World of Warcraft.

I seem to be into a "tiny bites" style of gaming now, where I'll just do a half hour or an hour of something like call of duty, and then go draw or do something else that's actually somewhat fulfilling. The thought of anything like a three or four hour raid makes me want to strap a helmet on and charge at hard inanimate objects face first until the thought leaves my brain.

Also, when did Cracked get interesting? I still remember it as a shitty Mad Magazine knockoff; the website actually entertains me. When the hell did that happen???

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Now, rambling on to another topic, the little bomber dude up there was a two or three year old pencil sketch I could never get to look right, so I finally sat down during a Livestream session and finished the little bastard up. I think he came out pretty good, and people like him enough that I'll be including him (or critters like him) in Steamvolt.

Also, I used a Netti Pot in an attempt to clear out my residual mucous issues from being sick. It was... odd. Horrible for about two seconds until I realized that my brain just expected it to be horrible. Then it was just weird. Having a deviated septum means that the nostrils behave differently when you're pouring stuff into them, which was frightening and confusing.

The good news is that it seems to have cleared out whatever nasty allergen was stuck up in my sinuses and punching me in the mucous maker over and over again, so I think the discomfort and crying was probably worth it.

Hmm, rereading this post, I can see that it's definitely one of my more disconnected rambling ones. Eh, whatever. Time to go draw when I should be working! :D

I Fixed My Laptop with Floss:

That's right, I said floss. One of the weird things about a tablet PC is the unorthodox hinge system they use. Rather than a pair of hinges on the edge, they need one central hinge contraption that also rotates so that you can put the thing into slate mode. This hinge gets a lot of wear, and seems to collect dirt and debris. Dirt and debris makes hinges not only stick, but make noise. A horrid, primordial screeching crackling sound similar to a combination of nails on a chalkboard and bones being crushed by a rabid hyena. You think I'm kidding? The creaking on my tablet got so loud that I was able to wake a person who was in the depths of a dreamless ambien coma, and coworkers have been giving me odd looks. It was LOUD.

Sadly, there's just about jack shit online as far as suggestions go for fixing this issue. Most suggest just cleaning it out, but other people, like myself, noticed that the solid dry lubricating pad had degraded form use and crumbled away. Not good.

The one thing I did find suggested using, of all things, waxed floss. The floss is actually good for cleaning out the metal residue and dust to stop the creaking, and the wax seems to make a pretty good dry lubricant. So what the hell, I tried it out, and holy shit, it worked. It cleaned out the black metal dust and dirt, and mostly stopped the creaking. The joints were still pretty stiff, even after trying to work the wax into the bastards for a while, so just for good measure I zotted each joint with a blast of dry waxy teflon spray that I just happened to have hanging around from another never-finished project of mine. Yeah, that's right, I have dry wax teflon spray just sitting there waiting for a good use. I'm weird like that.

So anyway, after all was said and done, it works again. I had briefly tried some silicon grease that was used for paintball guns, but it doesn't come even close to the amount of viscosity needed, and the hinge seized up after a day. So don't do that: Floss and Teflon spray. It works, bitches!

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Lemming Toad:

In other news, I drew a Lemming Toad, seen above, who is now up on Mojizu waiting to make the grade (or not). Fun little guy; I tried out some different line colors, but in the end I wound up darkening them anyway. I can't seem to quite hack the light line styles of some other artists yet. Guess I'll try again another time.

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Huge Packages:

And in YET OTHER news, I'd like to give my personal superfluous and completely ridiculous packaging award to Razer for their Mamba gaming mouse. The mouse itself is superb, and I love that I've gone from a chunky 800 DPI to a nearly unnecessary 5600 DPI of sniping accuracy for gaming, so I'll give them a little link/plug here for a fantastic product (I got mine on Amazon; cheaper!), but holy shit guys, did you need to ship the mouse in a giant plastic display case with an honest to god pedestal for the mouse to be displayed on? I get that you want the packaging to be nice and all, but this is sort of a 'fuck the environment and the green movement and all that hippie shit, let's go the other way and just cram as much unnecessary bullshit into the package as we possibly can! SUCK IT ENVIRONMENTALISTS!!'

I mean, the case comes with a little three tire bureau underneath it with drawers for storing the various parts of the mouse. Why you need these, I dunno, because once the mouse is up and running there's no reason to store anything in them. Well, perhaps it could make a poor woman's jewelry case, as I think about it, it's that friggin huge. And the plastic case could probably make a decent planter for, oh, say, some sort of vegetable or herb that needs good root space.

I do get that I'm sort of hypocritical for bitching about excessive packaging when I'm dropping a chunk of cash on a gamers mouse, but still, I think they could have scaled back a little and been a little more environmentally conscious while also saving themselves and the end consumer a few bucks on the over the top packaging.

Well, I'm gonna take the plunge and get windows 7 for my tablet. I've been running Vista, which I got somewhat late in its life cycle, so I didn't have any of the issues that the early adopters did, but for some weird reason Fujitsu installed a 32 bit copy on this thing. I don't know why the hell they did that, given that it's got a pretty beefy 64 bit compatible core 2 duo, but whatever.

So after waiting a little bit, I haven't heard any real horror stories, and in fact, I've heard some pretty positive stuff about the performance of windows 7, so I was considering getting it. What tipped me over the edge was Photoshop CS4, because CS4 has some pretty interesting features I only recently learned about.

Now, CS4 had some little candy updates and perks they were promoting, but there's one feature that really made me happy: They resolved the 66.6% zoom issue. What the hell is that, you ask? Well, I'LL TELL YOU because I'm nice like that. See, when you do digital art, you zoom in a lot. Or at least, I do. The problem with photoshop is that when you zoom to odd values like 66.6% or 33.3% the image gets all chunky and pixelated. This is because they use some kind of crappy 'nearest neighbor' sampling system that makes the image look like garbage.

This has annoyed me for a hell of a long time, and actually has come close to pushing me into the Painter 11 user camp, and prompted me to try out other good programs like Sketchbook pro, artrage, SAI, etc. CS4 finally solved this issue by using OpenGL off of video cards to render the image. This is the same way your video card would render a video game. Pretty slick!

At first I wasn't sure my laptop could handle this, given that it's got an onboard intel chipset, but a few driver updates later and I got the sucker working. HAPPY DAY!

Now, in my research of all of this OpenGl craziness, I discovered that CS4 is also a 64 bit program, and that since I can't drop a video card into this thing, I can at least get an operating system that can use my full 4 gigs of DDR3 ram and take advantage of some nice code optimization that's come out. This may spur me to actually install my larger hard drive that's been sitting in a drawer too. I'd love to have another 300 gigs of storage or so on this rig.

So if all goes well, I'll have Windows 7 and CS4 later this week. I know that being optimistic in the face of anything Microsoft related is sheer folly, but I can't help but be a little eager and excited about a rather significant system upgrade.

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In other news, I have also discovered that codecs are a pain in the ass. Anyone who looks at any amount of porn on the internet is going to find, sooner or later, that they need codecs to watch this junk. The problem with codecs is that they can completely botch up other functions, and slow your system down in the same way that too many active processes can.

Case in point: Against my better judgment, I picked up Fallout 3, because I just wanted to make sure I never ever have any free time ever again, and that my marriage falls apart due to my neurotic game obsession. The game is awesome, but it initially ran like shit on my system. This was disheartening, but I have OCD, so I couldn't just let it go.

So I finally dug up some forum posts about the fact that the Oblivion engine that Fallout 3 is based on does not work will with a codec called Vimeo. The one culprit turned out to be a sound codec that causes the game to hang for a few seconds every minute or so, getting progressively longer and longer after each hitch. There are few things more frustrating than being in a huge gun battle with super mutants and cannibalistic raiders and the game decides it needs a good fifteen second pause to sort its shit out. I found myself tense, waiting for the action to continue, hoping that muscle fatigue wouldn't cause me to screw up my aim and get my little game avatar shot to death.

So anyway, I got a utility to list and disable codecs, and now my entire desktop PC is running better and smoother. Not just Fallout 3, but pretty much everything. Figures, doesn't it?

Maybe there's a lesson in there somewhere about watching too much internet porn.

I used to play Shadowrun back in highschool, quite a bit actually. Fun game; it was the first real successful RPG that mixed high tech and magic into one interesting alternate-earth type setting. Good stuff. We geeked out with second edition, mostly.

So I've been getting way into this whole Paizo/Pathfinder D&D 3.75 thing. It's fun, and interesting, because they're asking fans to come up with ideas and do brain storming to help them develop and re-work the 3.x D&D rule set.

So a company I've not known a lot about till recently named Paizo has decided to put out a new version of D&D. They're doing it under the OGL from Wizards of the Coast. Why would they do this you ask?

Lots to talk about for once!

First of all: D&D co-creator Gary Gygax passed away on March 4th; he is now beyond the scope of healing spells.

Yep, I almost cut my big toe off. It sucked.

The Wife and I finally decided to replace our craptacular old hand-me-down computer desks, if you can call ten pounds of cheap steel and chip board a desk, with actual nice mostly wood desks.

So Wizards of the Coast, the current owners of the Dungeons and Dragons game line, has just put out a new book. This book is called Wizards Presents: Races and Classes. This book costs about twenty bucks. It has no rules. It has no actual game info.