Fallout, ID4 part 2 and 3, and my kid scares me...
I'm wondering if the proposed MMO based on "Fallout" isn't doomed to failure. The legal wranglings between Interplay and Bethesda continue, though Bethesda hasn't gotten its motions to stick, but it's probably damaging enough. Other than "World of Warcraft," it seems like making an MMO is almost a labor of love rather than a way to make a huge pile of money these days. So there's the fragility of the marketplace, but then you have to couple it with the die-hard "Fallout" fans who Interplay wants their MMO to appeal to. This will be hard for a number of reasons:
- MMO's have a difficult time with "real" role-playing elements. In all of the Fallout games, few people wear "plot armor," which means if you kill Quest McGiver, McGiver stays dead the rest of the game and his quests aren't accessible, and/or it can cause changes in the game. In an MMO, killing an NPC is about as feasible as wearing a hole in a brick wall with a drinking straw, so save your mini-nukes for something with stats.
- The world. The world never changes. Hard core fans of F1 and F2 pretty much disliked Fallout 3, but even they had to at least like the fact that you could nuke an entire town (though the reasons for doing so are pretty slim) and all the quests that went with it. As with the previous point, either you have changes that exist for everyone, or it has to be an instance for just you. It's hard to be proud of a smoking crater you can't show to your friends.
- The modding community has a Nuka-Cola truck full of content. From just adding places for the player to call "home" to whole new areas to quest in and explore, fans of all flavors of "Fallout" are cranking out improvements, tweaks, and expansions to the existing engines. And they're free. I'm not sure what could entice them into a more-or-less static MMO game, but I wish Interplay luck.
That last item means Interplay had better have one heck of a character creating module; a lot of modders are serious about their in-game look, down to tattoos, eye coloration, choice of cartoon pony-themed outerwear, and the ability to, ah... "engage in rigorous physical activities of a nature not usually allowed by the ESRB." I do have to say that thanks to the Fallout series and "Oblivion," I've become something of a mod addict, and it's made me purchase the odd game in the hopes that someone out there will vastly improve it, like my recent purchase of "Half-Life: Source," inspired by a 'retro look' at the game. It's a port to the Source engine that Valve's other games run on (though it doesn't change much of the gameplay, really), which means there are now high-resolution textures I can download for it. Of course, the long-awaited mother lode of a mod is still coming from the Black Mesa project. Again, it'll be free, but that means it gets done when it gets done, which may be even after Half-Life 2 Episode 3 comes out.
And not to shill for Steam even more, but they've got a "Scary Halloween Sale" going on, which includes the awesomely moddable (and still really well-written) "Vampire: Bloodlines" for 5 bucks. Even the "Railworks" train simulation game is trying to liven things up with a zombie apocalypse scenario. That may be a level of excitement the user base isn't prepared to handle, but no law can prevent it being unleashed upon them.
Fox is planning on two sequels to "Independence Day." These may or may not have Will Smith involved. As a "story guy," I can see not needing, well, any of the previous cast to have a good movie, since the events were worldwide. Sure, it'd be a great tie-in to have someone show up and maybe explain how a Macbook could deliver a virus to an alien computer, but you could pretty much start from anywhere on a post-invasion Earth. Probably the hardest thing will be to avoid any anachronisms between our modern world and one that was kind of brought to a halt (at least for a while) in 1996. Maybe Apple products would have advanced at the same rate, buoyed by an ad campaign called "I'm a computer that saved the planet, I'm a PC," but if nothing else, it'll give the TV Tropers and Movie Mistakes people something to chew on, should they finally get made.
It's almost time for trick or treating, and I ran across yet another gallery of pumpkins carved in a way that's relevant to our interests. I tried the two-tone pumpkin technique last year, and it worked really well. I believe these are the instructions I followed. They don't last as long, since more of the moist pumpkin bits are exposed to the air, but they really look cool until the rot and mold set in.
A side note about mold: If you're in a college that's somewhat isolated from hotel space, like Maryland's St. Mary's, a well-planned outbreak of mold could let you trade in your dorm room for a cabin on a cruise ship. Start carving those pumpkins, freshmen!
A friend of mine who owns enough guitars, and does so happily enough that he has spaces on the wall to hang them, tells me that the new game "Rocksmith" is worth your time if you want to dabble at learning how to play a guitar. His positive review stands in contrast to that of this guy on Kotaku, but his review agrees with one major thing my friend told me: It kind of helps if you don't already know how to play a guitar. The biggest advantage to the game, which makes sense, is that if you even remotely enjoy it, you'll practice on it. He hated the drudgery of sitting down to practice chords, but to blow an hour on a video game? Sure. He does advise picking up a guitar separately rather than going for the one that comes with the game, as he says you can get a better instrument than theirs for a significant savings, especially if you (or someone with more expertise) can guide your wallet to the right axe. We're getting closer to the day when I'll finally be able to use my XBox to learn how to play the harp. Yay, the future!
So now I've got to get back to writin' stuff, drawin' stuff, and figuring out where my kid is learning the weird things he's saying. I'm sitting with him at lunch, doing a crossword puzzle on my phone. Just for laughs, I'm calling out the clues and then the answers so maybe somewhere down the line, he'll remember that a three letter word having to do with someone from Yale is always "Eli." Anyway, one puzzle clue was "Anderson's 'High --'" and the answer was three letters long. Trying to think of an answer (which was "tor," and I still don't know what it means), I said out loud, "High..." and Josh looked up from his food with all the wisdom of a two-year-old and said "noon." I had him repeat it, just to make sure I wasn't hallucinating. "Noon," he said. Then he laughed at me and went back to eating. I'm not sure what's more disturbing: The thought that my kid might have data in his brain that shouldn't be there, or that if reincarnation works, movie trivia is eternal.
Forget stacking chairs and pulling people into TV sets, having a toddler who knows about Gary Cooper's career circa 1952 is what "Paranormal Activity 4" should be about. Anyway, some less disturbing things, via that other repository of human minutia, the internet:
- From now on, if I say I want a book lamp, I mean one of these.
- I now feel completely incompetent with my new-fangled ancient-as-heck motorized wood lathe when this kind of lathe has been around for centuries. Nice chess set, too.
- You may be sick of zombies, but they're estimated by some to be worth $5 billion to our economy. So support your local undead by preparing to un-support them, I guess.
- "Cat Sagan" wants to take you on personal voyage on his starship of imagination. Or maybe his owner has a green screen and just likes music by Vangelis.
- Some amazingly awesome parents (who are apparently good with costume-craft) dressed their toddler daughter up as all 11 incarnations of The Doctor.
- I bet "Doctor Goo" even has one of these on her porch right now.
- And rather than smash that (or any other) pumpkin this year, watch the infinitely cooler pumpkins smashing at 1000 frames per second, instead.
- Orange Gravity may seem like a typical physics puzzler, but once gravity starts to be altered, it gets a bit more challenging.
- My FISS characters in ps238 may only be up to (around) 84, but the BBC has a method to see what your number in the order of human population might be. We get our 7 billionth person next Monday or thereabouts, so everyone send them a card or something.
- I thought the bloggin' genius behind "Hyperbole and a Half" was just off writing her book, but it turns out she's been battling depression. This turned out to be cool, because she turned it into a kind of super power, becoming something like Batman. Only less sane. :)
- Race to be the first to fall the farthest in Plumet 2. Unlockable characters, achievements, and gravity!
- I'm still trying to find some good articles on what kind of t-shirt designs constitute parody vs. trademark/copyright violation, but I like the catch-22 for Best Buy over a send-up of their stores in a recent TV ad. Scroll to the last paragraph for the punchline.
- And while the BBC may have removed some of my t-shirts from the space-time continuum, they have no soul or sense of artistic merit if they try to kill this awesome laser-cut TARDIS clock. Extra timey-wimey thrown in at no extra fee, or so I'm told.
- Artist Alex Wer has a business of custom pumpkin carving. His website has a categorized gallery of his impressive body of works. And remember: If there's a design you don't like for whatever reason, maybe someone commissioned it so they could watch it slowly decay on their porch.
- Lastly, you can now play a simulation where you're that spider-vampire... thing you've always dreamed of being. In Draka, you cut and spin webs to bite your intended victim, bringing them into your undead spider-vampire-thing world.