On Dragon Age: Journeys

 That's how they getcha.

I've been avoiding Dragon Age: Origins.  Don't get me wrong -- I love Bioware as much as, or perhaps even more than, the next guy.  I even played Jade Empire.  But when I found myself choosing a new game, I settled on the devil-may-care wit of Nathan Drake over the blood-besmirched plate-mail of this fellow, whoever he is.

You know I'm right.

I'm more of a Final Fantasy guy, as you may have guessed.  All my occidental swords-and-sorcery needs are fulfilled by Warcraft.  And then this happened.  Dragon Age: Journeys, a well-designed casual RPG built by something called EA2D.   It's pretty!  It sounds good!  It's fun!  Dang it all.

While you're watching The Biggest Loser, 

we're gonna killify things and loot their steaming bodies.

(If there's any doubt left in your mind that EA will someday control all of mankind's dreams from atop a sheer platinum tower, please cast it aside.  Seriously, what else to Potter addicts, chop shop owners, and regular people have in common?  They have been right all along; it is, indeed, in the game.)

So fine.  I play their little flash romp through a few times.  No big, right?  No need for me to fall into the endless pit of expense that is DAO right?  One might think that, but no.  No, the sly devils at EA added a few achievements to this little gem, and once these are successfully completed, content is unlocked in Origins.  I am now the proud owner of a Helm of the Deep, an Amulet of the War Mage, and a snazzy little belt called Embri's Many Pockets.  This for a game I don't even own.

...yet.

Audiobooks and the Nintendo DSi

Perhaps this is what getting old feels like, when the people you idolized in college end up holding the mike on Morning Edition.

I went through my standard morning routine: breakfast, cleanliness, then the drive in to work listening to whatever I've DLed on to my flashcard and jammed in the DSi.  This time it was a Neil Gaiman NPR piece on audiobooks.  "Ho ho," I thought.  "If only our dear Mr. Gaiman knew I was listening to his story in the same way I listen to audiobooks!". 

Podiobooks, to be precisely correct.  Over the last few months I've been... ripping?  burning?  let's just say "moving" Nathan Lowell's solar clipper series to my DSi.  Podiobooks breaks their content up into roughly 30-minute segments, which makes for very easy file management.

There are a few complexities involved in moving audio to the DSi.  My process is as follows:

1 - Download the desired audio files to my laptop.
2 - Convert them to the required mp4 format using Foobar.  (Vive la open source!)
3 - Drag and drop on to the flash card.
4 - Pop it (out of the lappy) and lock it (into the DSi).
5 -  Plug a male-to-male headphone cable into the "Aux In" port in the car.
6 - Enjoy some space-faring adventure. 

This is my first experience with audiobooks, and I have to confess to being completely hooked.  Lowell's story, a melange of the high seas (think Master and Commander) and deep space, is pocked with memorable characters and is heavy on the dialogue, which makes for a listening experience somewhere between an old radio drama and a campfire story.  Reading it as a novel would be a very different experience; I would expect more detailed descriptions of the environments, and perhaps some of the more often repeated phrases (e.g. in Double Share, the protagonist shrugs.  A lot.) would fly past without notice like the ubiquitous "he said" does.  This begs a question as to whether or not the accessibility of the spoken word due to more developed technology is bringing about something akin to a revival of a near-dying art (which is addressed in Gaiman's piece).  The listener certainly feels more of a connection to the author than seems likely via the page, at least not until PhD-levels of repeated readings. 

As for the DSi's sound function, I call it a win.  I have had no issues with the sound quality, though admittedly spoken word doesn't necessarily require hi-fi-phononess.  The interface is easy and seems made for episodic content.  So give it a go.

Playstation Network Trophies on Facebook

Now all can know of your gaming
greatness.

"Should I activate the PS3 trophy posts on FB?" a friend asked.  I answered quite strongly in the affirmative.  All of my social-network-capable friends and family get a little ping each time I knock out an achievement, download a demo, or buy a new song for Rock Band.  This can't be any more annoying than updates on people's mafias, right?

The response, in the main, has been positive.  There has been some teasing to be sure, but far more conversations have been prompted:

• so what do you think? is it all it's cracked up to be?
• what are you playen (sic) bro
• hey they dont have this demo in the UK :(
• How far have you gotten? I'm actually having dreams now about assasinating (sic) fat Italian dudes via a blade to the face.

 See?  People talking about your favorite hobby.  Now Blizzard needs to add this function to Warcraft...

myNotebook: Blue for the DSi

So close to being truly useful.

Come on, Nintendo. There should really be no need for me to carry around a notebook anymore. That valuable pocket space should be reserved for the DSi only.

The latest in a string of weekly updates carefully designed to bleed my wallet a few bucks (sorry, I mean "DSi Points") at a time tells of a new lifestyle app -- myNotebook: Blue. (Apparently Green and Red are to follow at later dates. Why? no clue)

Now, this is exactly the direction in which the DSiware apps should be headed. You've got a great touch screen, wireless, and an SD slot; there's no reason the DSi can't be used for increasingly useful purposes. myNotebook, unfortunately, falls a bit short of the mark.

It's a scratchpad. A nice scratchpad, to be sure, and useful as such. Multiple pens styles and colors, auto-storing pages, and a simple interface see to that. And for two dollars, might as well go for it.

Notetaking nuts will be a little disappointed. Is there a memory limit? Why can't I use the DSi's keypad? I want to archive my notes -- how? Can I organize them? Again, as a temporary scratchpad, myNotebook is fine, but I want a little more.

I've complained about this before. Just take MS Notepad and put in on the DS. Let me type away, then either send my file wirelessly or store it to my SD card. Do this for me, Uncle N, and I will never be seen without your product in my hands. Perhaps a future myLifeCollected app will fulfill this seemingly simple need.

And another thing -- why do I have to unlock different ruling styles? What do you want from me?

At long last

Long-time B A Starters will remember the Great Debate over whether or not videogames are art. After much discussion and refining of definitions, my statement was "not yet". Maybe they can be, but no one's come up with anything so far that makes me say "yes".

I'm pissed at myself for not knowing anything about Jason Rohrer until Alanna lent me December's Esquire. I read the article and played Passage, and now can quite firmly state that there's at least one person out there making art in this format. (The person who made The Majesty of Colors counts too -- a post for a later date)

Before you go any further, I recommend giving Passage a play. I read the summary in the Esquire article before I played it and wish I hadn't. Still, despite knowing the point before going into it, I still had an emotional reaction to the game.

Passage provides you with choices. Do I hunt for treasure chests, or do I explore the world? Should I marry? If I do, it becomes harder to get the treasure but more rewarding to explore. But no matter what you choose, you will subtly age and die. Unceremoniously, suddenly, irrevocably.

For the first time in a lifetime of videogaming, I found myself reflecting. I have had a lot of reason to consider my choices recently -- career, personal, spiritual -- and this 5-minute game resonated with my meditations. It's an interactive Beethoven's fifth; go ahead and make your silly little choices -- fate will win and they will have done nothing to change that. All you can influence is your own experience, and try to do as much with your 5 as possible.

I'll be keeping an eye on what this gent produces. If you find anyone else out there working to communicate emotion through the interactivity of videogames, do please throw a comment my way.

Juicy

When I heard Penny Arcade was going to step out of the critic's bubble and release an actual game, I expected a goofy title containing a surfeit of dick jokes, oblique Lovecraft references, and general oddity. Upon downloading On the Rain-slick Precipice of Darkness: Episode One, I was pleased to find that not only were the aforementioned qualities to be found in abundance, but that the game happens to be one of the most enjoyable I have ever played. Buy it right away.

The real key is the battle system. Rainslick uses a combo turn-based and real-time approach (like FFX-2 or FFXII) and features limit breaks, summons, and a quick-twitch block ability which cuts down on the unavoidable finger-drumming time. Much, much better than I expected from a $20 game.

Naturally, the art is going to be a major part of a title based on a webcomic. I would almost compare the experience to Okami, in that the sense of playing the comic comes through very well.

In addition, Rainslick seems tailor-made to avoid my pet peeves and tickle my pet fancies. For example, you can save anywhere. Screw that 'save-point' bullshit. There's stuff to unlock, stuff to find, stuff to upgrade. All kinds of stuff.

One note: many reviews describe the game as steampunk. This is not true. Zero steampunk. #1 - It's set in the 20's. #2 - None of the playable characters are scientists. #3 - No brass. #4 - Too many mimes.

And how does one not love a game that features the Fruit Fucker 2000?

On the Fly

Damn it, Nintendo. You came frighteningly close to changing the world.
Why? "Why?" I ask you. Why could you not go the extra step? You make the DS. You give it a touch screen and some decent processing power. You wave that special wand of yours, the one that has "The Breaker of Ground" etched down the side, and bless the thing with wireless connectivity.

Visions of people on subways having pick-up games of Mario Basketball during their commutes, of people at coffee-shops wi-fiing it up to race against their friends in Budapest, Lima, and Des Moines, of heply-dressed urban teens walking down clean sidewalks with your machines in their long hands flickered in your eyes. A gaming revolution.

As what I assume must have been a throw-away feature, you toss in Pictochat, the software that sets up local chatroom so kids can IM each other during recess. And here's where you flub it up. You can now compose messages on your handheld device, but the wi-fi doesn't work for it. Users can't IM each other over the internet. I can type up an email, but can't send it to anyone.

I've done a decent amount of composition on PDAs. It's great -- you can get a few lines down wherever you are. My PDA went all fritzy recently and had to be sent to the Heaven of Broken Electronics That An Unmarried Geek Would Keep In a Box Somewhere But A Married Geek Throws Away. And here I am with a handheld electronic device with a primitive word processor on it, and damned if I want to keep what I write. One half as expensive as a PDA, and which runs games with great awesomeness. I'm not even asking that you put a calendar etc. in there (which of course you should). Just unlock the stuff you've already got.

Fie on you, Nintendo.

Nav was curious.

So, I checked out the hydroball mod for JK2. I have issues with it.



#1 - No bot support. When I loaded up the map and threw a few bots in, they tried to kill each other at the spawn points outside of the arena instead of playing. At a couple points, one of them wandered into the tank and flopped around, unable to figure out the throw-the-ball-into-the-goal strategy. So, if I want to play, I need to find a multiplayer server. This is a dangerous game indeed, as people seem to go completely loco when online. Either that, or as people discuss their lives instead of playing the game we're all here to play, it comes out that they're twelve. I did try to find a server, but it looks like the hydroball scene has moved to Jedi Academy.



#2 - It's only barely blitzball. There's no stopping and picking your action by the numbers, just swimming around. Pbttthtt. If I can't use a venom pass, I can't be bothered.



So, looks like I'll have to borrow Greg's copy of JA and go from there. Again with the keeping you posted.