Category: Games

Arcades (Not The Roman Column Kind)

One of the duties delegated to my iBook is to be my main emulation machine. Console systems, the Atari 8-bit, the C64, and others were all part of my early computing and gaming days, and when nostalgia kicks in I like to revisit them once in a while.

Looking through the recent changes to MAME though, I suddenly realized something: I didn’t know these games. Of course you don’t fondly remember everything and at some point it’s no longer nostalgia but merely recent history, but I’d never even heard of most of these games let alone played them.

At some point I fell behind somehow. As a younger kid I was your typical vidiot that you’d find in the arcade in the spare moments of the evenings and weekends, but right now if you stuck me in an arcade I’d stick out like a sore thumb. Somewhere along the way I went from one state to the other, but I couldn’t really tell you exactly when.

So what happened?

1) Time. One of the things you lose as you grow up is all that copious free time that enables you to stand around the arcade for hours at a time in the first place. Maybe just chores at first, but eventually you pile on studies, a girlfriend, a job, other friends, and before long you’re a salaryman fighting to squeeze in any relaxation time.

2) Money. Games started getting expensive near the end of the ’80s and start of the ’90s. Sure, most classic games were still a quarter, but any new games were usually 50 cents, or even a buck for the really snazzy ones. You didn’t really get much value for that money either; whereas a classic game you were semi-decent at could last a while, the new games were over far too quickly if you sucked, and the cost didn’t allow you many attempts to hone your skills.

3) Access. Arcades seem to have peaked in the late ’80s sometime and only shrunk ever since. At the Kingsway mall in Edmonton there were two arcades that I regularly went to back in the ’80s, roughly divided into newer and older games, but it’s been diminished greatly since then. The last time I was there I can’t even remember seeing *any* games (though I wasn’t really looking, either). It’s the same in other malls too — if there are any games at all, it’s limited to a tiny little section with only a handful of the most recent titles.

4) Skill. I have to admit that I’m really not as good at the action-oriented arcade-type games as I used to be. There’s not much point to playing them then if you can’t devote the time to improving yourself, and there’s no fun if the games are ruthlessly harsh on newbies.

5) Age. Well, I’m not getting any younger. The arcade environment just makes it even more painfully obvious how much of a kid’s business it is and makes me feel like even more of a fossil. :-)

6) Home. And finally, what’s the point in going to the arcade when you can enjoy all your old favourites and embarass yourself privately on new titles in the privacy of your own home! Home video game consoles may be what finally killed the arcade for good, and looking back I can’t say I really miss it.

Hidden Quakes

Another game that I’ve recently discovered I have the Mac version of is Quake 3. I knew there was a Mac version of it, but I didn’t know if it was on the discs that I had. I found the CD case and examined it, but it didn’t say *anything* at all about what platforms were supported. So, figuring it was worth a shot anyway, I slapped the CD into the iBook and sure enough, a Mac installer was right there.

I also have Team Arena, since it was the Quake Gold package, but right on the front of its CD it says “Windows 95/98/ME/2000/NT4”. Oh well. But maybe… Sure enough, after sticking it in, there was a Mac installer for it too.

Things get even stranger though. The first thing you do after installing any game nowadays is to go and grab the patches, right? Q3 was still running in Classic mode and was a bit choppy, so I hoped there would at least be a native OS X patch. Well, off to idsoftware.com I went, but oddly enough I couldn’t find any Mac patches at all. There were Linux and Windows patches to bring it to 1.31, but nothing for the Mac. Well, maybe the 1.30 included in the Gold package really is the final version for the Mac, I thought.

After poking around a bit though, there was a file named “Patches and Updates blah blah blah.html”, and it had a URL to quake3world.com’s files section. After a quick visit there I could see that they were actually up to 1.32 for the Linux and Windows versions, but there was only a beta version of a patch to 1.31 for the Mac. It was, however, a broken link. Well goodie. Starting from the front page of fileplanet.com I worked down to the Quake 3 files and, lo and behold, there was what I really wanted: a final, official 1.32 point release for Mac OS X. Ugh, it just had to be FilePlanet…

You’d think that the company’s own site would be the place to go for the latest updates. Or that the biggest fansites would have working links to the right places. No wonder people are wary of gaming on the Mac if they’re going to treat it like the red-headed stepchild…

Killing Time

Flash games are evil. They waste your time and rob you of productivity that could have been put to something far more useful. So here’s a bunch of them.

Bubbles: Similar to the old arcade classic Puzzle Bobble/Bust-a-Move. The instructions aren’t in English, but it’s pretty straightforward: make combinations of three bubbles touching to pop them and clear space.

Orca Slap: The sequel to penguin baseball. This guy apparently intends to make a whole series of 10 of these games.

A variant on penguin baseball. Not PETA-approved.

I Am A Weak, Weak Man

Despite all of my previous complaining, I have bought and am now installing Gates of Discord.

Why? Well, it’s actually pretty simple. Because of those previously mentioned troubles, getting a group nowadays can be fairly tough. When the opportunity to get into a good group does arise though, I don’t want “oh, but you don’t have the latest expansion pack…” to be yet another factor that could possibly keep me from joining up.

Damn, Sony’s got a good racket running here…

Maybe If I Play 24/7…

This is a stack of CDs. CDs containing games. Games which I STILL HAVEN’T FINISHED YET. Some of them I haven’t even *started*.

I never meant to fall so far behind, of course, but then something called EverQuest happened. I still managed to sneak in some time to play other games too, but the vast majority of the time my first impulse was to log into EQ, see if anything was happening, if anyone needed me for a group, etc. All these other games weren’t going anywhere, they’d still be there in the exact same place I saved, but getting things done in EQ often meant being online at the right place at the right time.

Normally that would have just meant that the couple others I was playing at the time would have been the ones to suffer, but of course there’s more than that now. New games were still coming out and I’d hear about them through the usual reviews and word of mouth and felt like they were worth checking out. So, I’d pick up new games, install them and fool around with them for a bit, but…whoops, time to log in for that raid on Chardok tonight. Before long they too would fall to the wayside.

So, now I’ve got this mountainous pile of unfinished games. I haven’t spent as much time in EQ lately so I do have some more time to spend on them, but it’s still going to be pretty slow going. I also still like going back to some of the highly-replayable games like the Civ series and Diablo 2, which doesn’t help work through this pile any.

I’m tempted to say ‘screw it’ to my usual gaming approach and just grab walkthroughs and whip through them all as fast as possible, just to at least enjoy the stories, dialogue, victories, etc…

Neverinstall Nights

For all of the computing progress we’ve made so far, it’s amazing that some things are still so fragile.

All I wanted to do today was install the new NWN expansion, and while it was merrily copying the files to the hard drive it ran into some sort of error and threw up a cryptic dialog box. Normally I’d just restart the install, but oh no, it wasn’t going to be that simple… The expansion pack now no longer recognized that NWN was even installed at all and wouldn’t allow itself to continue.

So, I was going to have to reinstall all of NWN. No problem, I dug out all of the CDs and manuals (damn the bastard who thought printing all the CD keys in the manuals was a good idea) and started a fresh install. After copying all three CDs, it asked for the first disc again, and after putting it in my CD-ROM drive started freaking out. It’s a rather….quirky drive, so I’d gotten used to these little hissy-fits where it would make strange noises, fail to recognize discs, etc., but this time it just sat there continually spinning and making its little choking noises and nothing I could do would stop it; it ignored the eject button, and attempting to bring up the system manager would just hang forever. So, I eventually had to give up and just hit the big ‘ol reset button.

Of course, since the install wasn’t quite finished yet and I’d forcibly aborted it, I had to redo it all over again…

You’d think we’d be able to build tools and programs that are better at monitoring their own state, repairing themselves, and recovering from errors cleanly. We always like to take the easy way out though, and when a simple “eh, just try reinstalling it” works, doing it properly becomes a much lower priority. Especially when it’s just a silly game…

My Love For You Is Like A Troll

There is, of course, another EQ expansion on the way. I can almost remember back after the first one had been released around three and a half years ago, and Verant’s attitude was “Eh, we *might* make another one…” Of course if I had a cash cow like that I’d milk the hell out of it too.

There hasn’t been an official announcement, so for now there’s just rumour, speculation, and a few tidbits discovered in the test code. There will be new zones and spells, as always, some new alternate advancement skills, and the addition of a new class: the Berserker.

Managing classes is a tricky business. The things players do in these games really boils down to one of three areas: Healing, Hurting, and Helping. Thus all you really need are three classes, one to handle each area. That’s a little boring though, so to add some variety you can subdivide and overlap the areas a bit. Hurting can be done through toe-to-toe melee, spells, or minions, which can be separated out into the Warrior, Wizard, and Mage. Take a Warrior and reduce his ‘hurting’ ability a bit, but add a bit of ‘healing,’ and you’ve got a Paladin. Or mix the melee and spell ‘hurting’ abilities and you’ve got a Shadow Knight. The problems are, you have to make each class sufficiently different that they’re not copying each other too much, each class has to be useful for something so that people want to play them, and they have to be relatively equal in power (‘balanced’) so that people aren’t too jealous of each others’ power. There wouldn’t be much point to playing a Warrior if a Paladin could do everything the warrior could do and more.

It’s not clear yet what kind of class the Berserker will be, but just from the sounds of it it’ll probably be a melee damager primarily, maybe with some special skills of some kind. They have to do something to make it different enough from the other classes to make it interesting, though.

Um, I’m Sure It’s Around Here Somewhere…

One of the more annoying things about EverQuest is managing all the little trinkets you pick up. There are quest pieces and spell research components and blacksmithing/armouring materials and loads of other crap, and often it’s hard to keep track of them all. With hundreds of different items and combinations, it’s nearly impossible to even remember if you have certain pieces.

Have I got all the pages to put together to make the Potent Pants of Perniciousness spell? Um, maybe, hold on while I go check all 16 backpacks in the banks of all eight of my characters… And even if I don’t, someone else in the guild might. When combined together we might have enough parts to make a lot of things, but not even know it. It’s hard enough to keep track of your own stuff let alone the rest of the guild.

So, I’ve been working on this. Basically all I have to do is update a text file listing what parts I have, and this script will automatically calculate what I can make from those parts, and also tell me what parts are still missing for other possible combinations. If, say, a beastlord wants some Play Teatime With Animals spell, she can check here and see that I’ve got page 7 for it, Joebob has page 35, and she’ll just have to go and find or buy page 142 to finish it.

Of course that’s being somewhat idealistic. People are lazy after all, so who knows, a week from now I may have completely given up on keeping the lists up-to-date. In fact I’m so lazy tha

No. No. No. No. No. No. No. Oh, Alright.

One feature players had asked for ever since EverQuest launched was the ability to transfer your character to another server. Maybe you discovered too late that your friends were on a different one, or you didn’t get along on your current one, or it was too overcrowded, or something. However, all such requests were instantly denied; Verant didn’t want people hopping fom server to server because the designers behind EQ had a specific ‘Vision’ in mind, a set of principles and ideals about the nature of the EQ world. To them it was more than just a game, they were building virtual communities of people, and to allow such transfers would dilute the community. It would be harder to make groups of friends and keep them together if people were coming and going from the server at will, and it would allow unscrupulous people to dodge their bad reputation too easily. Similar reasoning was behind the decision not to allow your character’s name to be changed — if that character had a reputation, he was supposed to be stuck with it.

Fine, fair enough, it’s their game so they make the rules. The often-mocked slogan of EQ is “You’re in our world now,” after all.

Money talks though, and a few years later they caved in and introduced a character transfer service and a name change service. The catch? Well, there was a price to pay, starting at $50 per request to be exact. A rather excessive amount for what is essentially just fiddling with a few database entries, but a lot of players were apparently desperate for services like this. A fair price is whatever someone’s willing to pay, after all… The other catch is that when your character is transferred from one server to another, he loses *all* of his equipment. You arrive on the other server without even a basic weapon of any kind. This was part of their attempt to hold on to the last shreds of The Vision — sure you could transfer, but you’d have to suffer for it.

Well, the EQ team must have failed their save vs. temptation, because lo and behold, now you can buy a character transfer with items service. For a mere $75 you can move to another server and keep all your stuff, as if you’d played there all along. The Vision is dead and buried, finally. (Whether that’s a good thing or not is debatable; people’s opinions on the Vision varied wildly.)

Those people who bought the previous transfer service and lost all of their equipment in the move must be mightily pissed-off now…

My Cloth Pants Are Rusty

Diablo II has always been plagued by one major problem: cheaters.

In the Open games that was pretty much expected, since it’s impossible to prevent client hacking when the data is saved on your own system and there’s no central server to enforce the rules. The Realm games were supposed to be different though; with them there is a central server and the data is stored at the server end, not on the client. The Realm games were supposed to be unhackable, giving people a place where their accomplishments actually had meaning, items up for trade were actually worth something, and you had to play by the proper rules.

And unhackable they were. For about five minutes.
Continue reading “My Cloth Pants Are Rusty”

More Half-Elf Than Half-Elf

I’ve written before about just what a PITA the latest EQ expansion is, and on two servers they’ve finally managed to jump through all the hoops and complete it.

The goal of the expansion was to free some guy called Zebuxoruk, a mortal who had learned the secrets of the gods and was imprisoned by them in the Plane of Time before he could spread his knowledge. To get to him, you had to work through five tiers of planes, or roughly:

1. Kill various ‘boss’ monsters to gain access to the second and third tier planes.
2. Kill Rallos Zek and Solusek Ro to gain access to the elemental planes.
3. Kill the ‘boss’ of each elemental type to gain access to the Plane of Time.
4. Once in Time, work your way through:
4a. Five trials which have to be completed in around fifty minutes or less.
4b. Fight through five waves where you have to defeat most of the gods you killed to get here all over again, with a couple hours to do each wave.
4c. Fight Quarm, a four-headed dragon that is the combined essence of the remaining gods.

And what happens after you complete all that?
Continue reading “More Half-Elf Than Half-Elf”

So, who haven’t we beat up yet?

Okay, I admit it. I am an EverQuest player. Have been for over four years now, in fact, since shortly after the game was released. I hadn’t even heard about it at the time; I was just bored and looking for something new to play, picked up the box while browsing at Future Shop, and thought “Huh, might be worth a try…”

Now, four years layer, I have a highest-level character, a guild full of long-time (gamewise) friends, decent gear, and an obscenely large amount of total time spent in-game. And yet I haven’t been in EQ for more than an hour in the last three weeks.

What the hell happened?
Continue reading “So, who haven’t we beat up yet?”