/var/log/orava

Rounding up a week of vacation for me was Finncon (the annual Finnish science fiction convention) at Tampere. No “must meet” authors there this time around, but since our summer place is near Tampere anyway we decided to go, spending the nights at out place. Glad we did, Finncon was ok but nothing special and the merged Animecon meant that the place was crawling with (mostly very young) anime/mange fans. I joked that my “Finncon ‘91” t-shirt was older than the median age there…

…but that didn’t really stop me enjoying the con, mostly as a “relaxing weekend away from home”. Attended some entertaining talks and panels, saw a few nice short films and met some people I don’t otherwise see all that often – and we must not forget the artistic highlight of the con, the no-budget short film “Atlantiksen Jumala” from Petri Hiltunen and the gang. Horribly and intentionally bad as always, but also entertaining because of that.

Nice vacation week otherwise, too. Time sped by fast, I managed to do a very small fragment of the things I had intended to do but that’s normal. Now it’s back to work for a couple of busy weeks, then two more weeks of vacation right after Ropecon.

First published by White Wolf’s Black Dog subsidiary, HoL is an (in)famous parody of lots of roleplaying games that happens to also be an rpg in itself. I’ve even heard that some deranged people have managed to play actual games of it… though this may be on the same validity level as reports of Bigfoot. There’s also an expansion game called BUTTery HOLsomeness, the name of which should give some indication of the level of humor here. Yes, we’re deep into Beavis & Butthead and South Park territory.

Fortunately I happen to love South Park and actually find parts of Beavis & Butthead funny, so I found this thing to be an extremely funny read. The humor does get a tad repetitive at times, and the fact that it’s hand-written & drawn instead of typeset makes it exhausting to actually read… but it’s still funny as hell, mostly.

So, what’s it about? Seems that in the far future, a bored teenager has conquered the known universe and rules over it as Emperor, under the polite fiction of a Confereration of Worlds (C.O.W.). There’s also a universal church (& fast-food franchise), ruled by a Megapope. There are some invading aliens called the S.N.E.E. (Sedud Neerg Elttil Esoht, or “Those Little Green Dudes” written backwards). Everyone is gloriously happy (officially), and the ones who aren’t are shipped to Human Occupied Landfill (HoL) which may or may not be Earth. Nobody cares.

Player characters are all people or creatures who have been sent to HoL. Their life sucks, and tends to be nasty, short and brutish.

Oh, and only men (or at least, “non-women”) are sent to HoL. It’s never made clear what happens to the women, but they don’t enter HoL – leaving the stage clear for one of the gangs of HoL, the Sodomy Bikers. Yes, the name says it all. There are also other gangs roaming about, but none of them are friendly. The game itself is mainly an exercise in “kill or be killed.” You have wonderful skills like “Operate Starship and Chew Gum at the Same Time”, “Making Sharp Things Go Through Soft Things That Scream and Bleed”, “That Psycho Bruce Lee Shit” and “Whining Until You Get What You Want”. Among others. The pregen characters include a pedophile priest, a gamer geek and Elvis. Yes, Elvis.

The BUTTery HOLsomeness book adds actual character generation to the game, with a random background generation that spoofs the one in Traveler (yes, of course you can die during it!). It also contains personal totem animals, like the “sloth” and the “bush baby”.

The whole thing is hard to describe, but damn funny – if you’ve read or played enough roleplaying games before. The humor will probably be pretty opaque otherwise.

Song of Susannah is the penultimate book in the Dark Tower series, and it suffers a bit from clearly being “part one of the end”. It ends in a cliffhanger, and even though it’s looks as thick as the other books that’s actually due to the large font used in the paperback version I have – it’s a shorter affair than most of the other books in the series. It’s also mostly situated in our world (or at the very least, one that’s extremely close-by). That’s not a bad thing in itself, it just means a small change of pace.

The story picks up right after Wolves of the Calla, after the final main event in that book. Susannah/Mia are now in New York (one of them), and must come to an agreement within their own head as to who is in control, and what to do. Mia turns out to be slightly different from what we were led to believe, in an interesting way. Roland and Eddie go to deal with the rare book dealers met earlier, and Callahan, Jake & Oy are left to try to rendezvous with Susannah (or Mia, as may be).

It’s a good enough read and moves along nicely, despite feeling like an “inbetween book” now and then. The inclusion of characters from King’s other books picks up pace here, and the story actually has some of the characters meet King himself. Now, in lesser hands this would be horrible, here it sort of works; King isn’t presented as being exactly an idealized person in any way, and there is some sort of method to the madness. I’m not sure if all these metalevels are really good for the story, honestly, but it keeps rolling along well enough. The interconnectedness of the multiple worlds, with shared characters, some of which may (or may not be fictious), does add an interesting twist – especially since it’s not totally who is in charge here, the creator or the created.

As before with the series, some of the foreshadowing is a bit overdone. King tends to do that in other books, too.

One more book to go till the clearing at the end of this particular path. I have to admit that the last book will have to be really crappy to ruin this series for me, it’s been quite a ride despite some minor faults here and there.

Why have I missed this? Joss Whedon’s new miniproject, Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog is now online – for a very short time. The first two acts are now available, and the third and last one goes live on Saturday. Then on Sunday, it all goes away, to return later in DVD (and perhaps commercial download) form.

Check it out now, or be forced to wait a while. It’s brilliant and funny, as par for the course for Joss. Hey, it’s an Internet-based superhero musical, those things always rock.

(thanks to Henri for the heads up)

A funny thing happened some months back. I was hunting for a copy of Knights of the Old Republic on eBay since I heard so much praise for the game, and found one on sale for a reasonable price. The same guy was also selling a copy The Witcher, so I went “might as well check it out” and got both games. I didn’t know much about the Witcher… a friend had praised it to me, but Yahtzee’s typically hilarious Zero Punctuation review gave some pause. Sure, he hates most games, but still…

Anyway, the games finally arrived and I checked them out. KotOR had very dated graphics (no surprise, it’s a bit old) and pretty cheesy dialogue. It seemed fun enough, but after playing a bit I decided to check out Witcher. Some time near midnight, I noticed I was still playing and KotOR was the loser here.

Despite being sceptical, I have to say I liked (and still like) the Witcher a lot. Some of the complaints about it are quite justified. The controls and inventory does take a bit of getting used to, it is huge and slow-paced, some of the dialogue is extremely corny, and it does seem that being a scar-faced & white-haired swordsman is an instant sexual turnon for the babes, which can get a bit silly at times. To me, none of those quibbles got in the way of enjoying the hell out of the game.

It has a nicely east-European feel to it (natural due to the developer being a Polish game house), and is much more related to Conan-era sword & sorcery -fantasy than D&D fluff. Taken in that context, the big-chested babes lining up to have sex with the hero actually are quite in-genre. To be honest, I found the open inclusion of sexuality in the game quite refreshing, most fantasy games totally ignore the whole thing and go the “family friendly” route. It’s nice to find a somewhat more “adult” game now and then – even though some parts of said game may come off as a bit juvenile.

You play Geralt, who is a “Witcher”: a bio-enhanced & sterile member of an ancient order of monster hunters. Some bad guys organize an attack on the order and steal some stuff, and it’s off you go to fix things. The whole thing is based on some fantasy books by Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski, apparently. Haven’t read them.

The best thing about the game (other than the babes lining up to… ahem) is the shades-of-gray morality and freedom to do real moral choices (sometimes with no easy answers). There is no “good” or “evil” here. It’s also a damn good-looking game, which never hurts. The plotting is pretty ok; there are some “FedEx quests”, but also some more interesting scenarios.

By the way, the U.S. version (which I got) is slightly censored – the pin-up pictures of the girls you sleep with are not quite as explicit as in the European version… so get the Euro version (or Enhanced, see below).

One additional small negative that needs mention: the difficulty varies wildly. Some fights are dead easy, some are extremly hard and need a zillion reloads to complete… which is especially galling if the fight in question happens to automatically start after a cutscene, so you’re forced to watch the same cutscene (with dialogue choices to make) N times. Grah. Fortunately the really hard bits seem to be rare.

I played the thing quite a bit, but then heard that the developers are working on an Enhanced Edition. Apparently the reason the English version of the game has pretty corny dialogue is that a large part of the original (Polish) dialogue is left out, and what remains has been “dumbed down” a bit – this new version includes a redone version of the dialogue and voice acting, which should enhance things and make some of the dialogue less cringe-worthy. In addition, it should include some more content, some gameplay enhancements, even better graphics, etc. In short, I decided that the game is so good that I want to wait until the new version is available (in September) and then start over with the game.

So yeah, I’m buying another copy of the game, when it becomes available. That’s pretty rare, for me.

Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t (quite) a new Baldur’s Gate 2… but it does come close, at times. Much better than Neverwinter Nights 2 in any case. I was extremely impressed, despite some small flaws.

Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition is probably the most-hyped and also the most controversial new tabletop rpg product in recent times. Is it any good? Well… yeah. Kinda sorta.

I stopped playing/running D&D ages ago, when AD&D 1st edition was the current one. It was a fun first tabletop rpg game, but the limitations of the (frankly crappy) ruleset had started to grate at that point. I moved on to Rolemaster, and then on to other games. I mostly skipped the 3.x phase, and don’t really know much about that ruleset; or let’s say: I know enough about it to know I don’t much care for it.

Honestly, I doubt that I would have picked up this new version had not Amazon had an amazingly low (preorder) price for it; I got it for under half price as compared to local game stores, and that’s including shipping. At that price, I went “hell, why not” and ordered the thing. I have to feel a bit sorry for game store owners, there is no way they can compete with that kind of price competition.

Complaints about this version abound on the net. It’s gone very far in the WoW direction. It’s dumbed down. It has nothing except combat.

You know what? The complaints are mostly correct. It has taken a lot of cues from WoW. It is pretty dumbed-down (or “simplified”, if you prefer). And it is pretty much only about combat.

Thing is, I’m not seeing those as being totally negative things. Trying to appeal to the WoW crowd does make a lot of sense. Tabletop rpgs still offer a lot of things that you simply cannot get from WoW (or such), and lowering the barrier of entry makes all kinds of sense. The dumbing down is a mixed bag. One one hand, at times the text reads like it’s aimed at 8-yr olds, which is extremely annoying. One the other, the mechanics seem pretty smooth, and I have no love for 3.x’s complexity (which to me gives very little in return). The rules feel pretty slick, in fact, in spite of the steals from computer games (aura effects, group roles, easy healing, etc). The game wants to emphasize fun, it seems, and that’s good in my book.

About the combat… well, hmph. I’ve never really seen D&D as anything but a fantasy combat simulator, to me it’s never even tried to much support the roleplaying aspects. So the fact that 4e is pretty much a fantasy combat simulator and in some respects more tactical board game than roleplaying game doesn’t surprise me much or seem all that odd. On the other hand, I can well understand people who have gotten used to running more “serious” games with the 3.x ruleset being turned off by this new incarnation. In addition, this edition is even more geared towards using miniatures than any previous one.

To sum: to me, 4e looks pretty sleek, and it seems designed to do the lightweight dungeon romp thing pretty well. On the other hand, it seems very lightweight and at times I get the feeling it’s aimed at younger kids. I can understand the criticisms it’s receiving, but I can also understand the praises. What you think of this game depends a lot on what you’re expecting and what your background is.

The core rules here seem very fun and sleek, like I said, and I might even try to run a purely-for-fun dungeon romp with this at some point. I get the feeling that the game succeeds in doing what it sets out to do, provide a easily approachable tactical dungeon monster mash game, with some light roleplaying elements included on the side. It’s just that what it set out to do doesn’t match what some people would like. C’est la vie.

The books are the classic three. First off, a Player’s Guide which details the character options, the main rules, and most of what you really need in order to play. Second, the Dungeon Master’s Guide which contains detail on running the game and some additional rules, and finally the Monster Manual, with lots of stuff to kill. Production values are high, as expected, and the organization is mostly good. Small negative points for the lack of a good index, spells are organized by level and if you want to quickly find a given spell you have to resort to leaving through the book – which sucks. The Monster Manual is nice in that it gives lots of variations of each beastie, no longer do we have the uniform “all instances of a given monster are the same” thing. Points for that.

Trying to look at this game objectively: it seems to be a professionally designed game of dungeon looting, with heavy emphasis on tactical combat. The rules give the impression of being quite heavily tested, and play balance has won out over realism in all cases (not that D&D was ever realistic in any degree whatsoever). It seems like a fairly solid game, and perhaps later supplements may even widen the focus a bit, so one might actually call it a “roleplaying” game without putting tons of conditionals and disclaimers all over the place.

If you’re heavily invested in the 3.x ruleset and like it, you probably won’t like this new version too much.

So: purely as a game, I’ve give WotC pretty high marks for this. It’s still D&D, but it has been heavily tweaked to do at least one thing (dungeon crawls) very well and it contains some nice new innovations from computer games and some indie games. The price of that is some amount of “dumb-down” and the near-lack of meaningful non-combat options.

In the “black marks” department, we have the whole heavily bungled launch, the whole poison-pill GSL license drama (which shows the weasel lawyer side of WotC/Hasbro pretty clearly), the bungled and buggy “D&D Insider / Gleemax” web support thing, etc etc. But all of that is topic for another discussion.

Character Compendium 1 is an old supplement to 1st edition Heavy Gear – and it’s really, really good. It’s also the only “character compendium”, so the number “1” is a bit redundant.

In a nutshell, this is a list of NPC characters. Some are movers and shakers in the HG world, some are just normal everyday people. So far, so good… but what makes it so good? The same thing as with most HG books: amazing amount of interesting detail. All characters have a “chesspiece” symbol next to them, denoting their importance to world affairs and the metaplot should you choose to follow that. Each is given a long writeup and most are given full stats. Most NPCs here are gathered into groups, and include relationship maps inside the group. Characters are given a multitude of options on how to use them in a game (as “ally”, “enemy”, “resource”, etc). As noted, the amount and quality of detail is just amazing.

This book is quite integrated with the Heavy Gear game world, and while you could use this as a general NPC resource for a scifi game, you’ll get the most mileage if you use this as intended, as an NPC resource for Heavy Gear. Simply put, this is probably the best book of this kind I’ve ever read. Far from being dry and boring to read (as I feared), it turned out to be quite fascinating.

Books of this quality are the main reason I love Dream Pod 9 games.

We spent the weekend sailing, out by Nauvo. A friend offered us a weekend trip on their family’s 30ft sailboat and we jumped at the chance. It’s been a while since I’ve done any sailing, so it also took a while to remember which rope did what… In any case, lots of fun and I managed to totally scorch myself. The weather forecast had been a bit on the gloomy side, but fortunately the actual weather was great; it rained a tiny bit Friday evening but Saturday and Sunday were in full “scorchio!” mode.

Now feeling a bit tired after the long weekend, good thing we have these “weekday” things during which we can relax…

Even though I’m still a bit pissed off about Björk’s cancelled gig, stumbling on the Black Cab Sessions did brighten up the day a bit. Cool idea, some guys in London decided they’d try to pursuade visiting bands they liked to sing a song in the back of a cab. Nobody gets any money (except the cab driver), and everyone does it for fun (or because it’s weird, or for publicity, or whatever).

They have actually managed to snare in some bands I like a lot. The National (see below) is brillant and moody, and The New Pornographers, Death Cab For Cutie and My Morning Jacket are all great.

Not to mention poetry in motion, in the form of Benjamin Zephaniah. Whoah.

As an aside, The Bleeding Heart Show has been running through my head all week. Love that song. I’ll have to get the album, and some of Neko Case’s solo stuff too.

We have arrived
too late to play
the bleeding heart show

Goddamnit, just heard that Björk has had to cancel her Helsinki gig due to voice problems. I was a bit afraid of this, she had cancelled some of her previous shows on this tour due to the same reason, but I was hoping she’d get better for Thursday’s show. No luck.

…and of course, Blondie (which was my second choice for concert for Thursday) is now sold out.

Gah.