Games

Doctors and Dwarves, hi ho

It’s funny, when you’re at the “student” age it’s pretty much impossible to figure out who will go on to have a career in research, and who won’t. A friend did his doctoral dissertation last Friday (“Integration of Broadband Direct-Conversion Quadrature Modulators”, Helsinki University of Technology), I attended but didn’t really follow much of the discussion – broadband transmission and IC design theory aren’t my strong points. Anyway, the thing went fine. It was weird seeing him there, and remembering the guy who we had partied with so often and so long ago – let’s just say that at the time, the idea of him doing this would have sounded very bizarre. A bunch of us were laughing and saying things like “who would have thought?”. That’s the way the world turns, I guess. It’s a huge accomplishment in any case; pretty much anyone can graduate, it “just” takes lots of work… but getting a doctorate, that’s something that not everyone can do at all, even if they wanted.

The post-party was fun; not because it was anything special as a party, but because I got to see and talk with some people I hadn’t met in a while. That’s always good.

The next day, Janka stayed horizontal nursing a killer hangover she had somehow mysteriously acquired (I blame poisoned wine, it’s the only logical explanation…). I shambled upstairs sometime around noon and got to installing the new DVD burner I had bought to replace the ancient Samsung. Things went fine… and lo & behold: Neverwinter Nights 2 actually started up with this drive! Much rejoicing.

The SecuROM guys actually got back to me with an alternate binary I could try, I told them “thanks, but already got it to work”. Nice response, anyway, can’t fault them for that even though I really do advise people to be careful when buying games with this copy-protection, especially if your hardware is a bit older. Copy-protection schemes that end up hurting the honest customers are a very. very bad idea.

Anyway. About the game. It seems there is a universal law that says that second versions of games tend to be very good (whereas second versions of, say, movies tend to suck). It holds true for System Shock, it holds true for Baldur’s Gate, and it holds true here. Where the first Neverwinter Nights has hobbled by a crappy single-player campaign and ended up being more a technology demo than a game, here they have corrected that failing. The game looks gorgeous (assuming powerful graphics card) and the campaign is actually pretty good. So far, at least. Oh, it’s cliche city, but this is D&D and cliches are part of the fun. So once again we have some ancient evil returning to life, some mysterious artifact pieces, and “only you can save us!”. Shocker.

The thing that made Baldur’s Gate 2 so much fun were the various well-written NPCs that you could team up with (“Go for the eyes, Boo!”), and that facet seems to have been carried over here. Unlike the first game where you were pretty much solo, here you can have a party of max 4 people. The NPCs so far have been stereotypes, but fun stereotypes. There’s a semi-psychotic dwarf, a teenage half-demon thief, a “holier than thou” elven druid, and lots of others. The hard part is actually trying to decide who to include in the party, four members max doesn’t give you too many options.

I had intended to do a lot of stuff over the weekend but ended up playing NWN2 for most of it. Guess that says it all, it’s a pretty good game – an it’s hard to quit, there’s that “I’ll just do one more little quest” factor. It’s no BG2, at least not so far, but it has promise.

Some small negatives, of course, every game has them. The camera is a bit funky, and needs some getting use to (and even then annoys now and then). The framerate tends to crawl a bit in the more complicated locations, but there I can blame myself since I have enabled most of the eye-candy – framerates aren’t that critical in a game like this, anyway. The “AI” of your party members can be… “interesting”, and you pretty much have to run all spellcasters in “puppet mode”, otherwise they will decide to throw area-effect spells at the worst of times and do other bizarre stuff. No showstopper bugs so far, in fact very few bugs found in general. I did run into a “need to reload an earlier save” situation once when I decided to be preemptive and fireball a suspicious-looking group of thugs from the distance. Turned out that wasn’t such a good idea, I was supposed to talk to them first…

It also needs to be noted that at least to the point I have played to , the game is very linear. Maybe it will “open up” later on, but I’m not counting on it. That’s another reason why BG2 is Superior(tm). […]

SecuROM Blues

Well, feeling fluish and generally not all that hot I got the urge to play an “old-fashioned” singleplayer computer RPG, and since Neverwinter Nights 2 had just come out that seemed to fit the bill perfectly. I didn’t much care for the first NW, the single-player campaign (what little of it I managed to wade through) was pretty poor – but I’ve been hearing good things about this sequel, and the “number 2’s” in computer games generally tend to be good (unlike movies). Compare Baldur’s Gate (so-so) to Baldur’s Gate 2 (imho the best computer RPG to date), for example.

Anyway, found a DVD copy of the game and went home, got a cup of nice hot tea and started the install. No problems, and the game included an autopatcher (nice!) which promptly downloaded and installed the latest patches. So after some wait time, I’m ready to play the game. I click the game icon, and wait… and wait… and suddenly I get a popup that says “Disk cannot be authenticated” or some such. What the hell? I try to disable the antivirus and try again. Same result. I reboot and try again. No luck. I download and install the latest firmware on the DVD player. No luck.

Time to Google. That gives me the NWN2 “self-help” support forums, where it becomes clear that the culprit is the infamous “SecuROM” anti-copy system. I had heard horror stories about it before, and have run into many “boycot game X because it has SecuROM” petitions. I’m starting to understand why. Here I am, with a perfectly legal, just-bought DVD of a game, with an obviously good DVD (since I installed from it), which refuses to run because of some idiotic “copy-protection”. So again we have pirates playing the cracked version for free, and the honest customers getting the shaft.

The problem in all probability is my ancient Samsung CD-RW/DVD drive, it’s old and slow… but that’s beside the point, the media obviously works on it, the SecuROM shit doesn’t.

I tested the game on Janka’s machine, works fine there. So again, the problem seems to be SecuROM not liking my DVD bay. Fine, I’m not wild about it myself and the things are pretty cheap, so I ordered a new faster one from Verkkokauppa and will install it over the weekend and try again. I also followed directions in the game README and make an analysis dump and sent that to SecuROM. Today I got an email from them saying “sorry you are having problems, our devs will get back to you”. That’s something, at least.

I have hope that the new DVD bay will fix things and I can finally play the damn game, but this is annoying, and a prime case for why copy-protections just don’t make sense – there are cracked copies of this game all over the net (yes, I checked), and the only ones being harassed here are the actual, honest customers. Grrrr.

No comments on the game itself, yet, other that the quick look I got on Janka’s machine. The camera controls seem a bit funky, but it does look good and I hear the campaign is actually pretty good. I’m not expecting BG2 quality here, just solid gaming. […]

Foot in grave, head in clouds

find yourself in the middle of a storm
you thought you were hard
but you’ve barely been formed
see who you are as your future is faced
it’s not that far
no step is retraced

today you’re safe
tomorrow who knows
guarantees are fool’s gold
34 turns to 43
see my mistakes
don’t become me

– Curve, “Storm”

In a few days I’ll be 40. Scary, a bit… I find it hard to think of myself as “old”, I don’t feel old. I wonder if I’ll feel the same when I’m 50, will I start feeling like an old man? Maybe, maybe not. I’m halfway convinced age is a mental thing – I’ve known so many people who have just turned 30 and feel so… “adult” in a bad way, in that static, “we don’t do that anymore because we’re adults” way. On the flipside, I’ve known and met quite a few people way over 60 why are still bouncing around and refusing to let that “age” thing get in the way of the interesting stuff in the world. Oh sure, different things start to interest you as you get older, and you tend to get a bit more lazy about many things; that’s normal I guess. I just wonder why some people seem to lose the drive, the need to see and do new things, or at the very least to constantly try to improve themselves.

…on the other hand, I understand it fully. It’s just so easy in our modern world to take the path of least resistance. Don’t exercise because “you don’t have time for it”, don’t travel or do interesting stuff because “we have kids and it’s just too difficult”. Don’t study new things because “just don’t have the energy after a full day’s work”. Just go to work, come home, eat unhealthy snacks, lounge on sofa and watch TV no matter what’s on, go to sleep, rinse and repeat until you’re an overweight, vaguely unhappy, colorless “consumer”. You decide to do all the fun stuff “when you have time” or “when you have extra cash” or “when you’ve retired”… then if that mythical time when you have extra time and money actually materializes, you’re just too tired and old to actually do anything much anymore.

And it’s never your fault. You’re seriously overweight and in crappy shape? “Well, I have bad genes and just naturally gain weight, and who has time to go to a gym”. You can’t get a new job because you don’t have skills anymore? “Well, they didn’t teach me all that new stuff at my last job, I can’t be expected to read up to it on my own” Your social circle is tiny? “Well, I don’t have time to meet new people with this hectic job schedule, and most people don’t understand me anyway” You have no idea about other places and cultures? “I don’t need to travel, I watch the news on TV; if I’m wrong it’s the fault of the biased media” And so on and so forth.

It’s always easy to find someone or something else to blame for the things that are wrong in your life.

I’m pretty happy with my life, so I’m not looking for culprits. Yet. Just you wait…

On a semi-serious note, maybe that’s one thing that a youth spent reading Heinlein gave me, a belief in that everyone should take responsibility for their own life and actions, and that the freedoms we tend to have in the modern world should be counterbalanced by responsibilities. It’s a worldview that can be viewed as a bit “conservative”, and maybe it is, but in any case my worldview is a fairly crazy mix of the conservative and the (ultra)liberal. They are not opposing forces, necessarily.

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In other news, next Wednesday our band of stalwart heroes (your truly included) boards a plane bound for Torino, Italy, where we’ll spend the following days playing at the VTES European Championships. Should be a fun trip by all accounts, I haven’t been to an EC before.

I’m still not sure what I’ll play there. I have an Anarch Daughters of Cacophony deck that needs some tuning but could work, it’s fun to play. I also have a weird Laibon Salubri-Antitribu + Harbringers deck, which is fun but needs a lot of work to make it competitive – it lacks focus. I’ll probably build a few other decks, too, and decide what my main deck will be at the last minute. […]

VTES 3rd edition prerelease

We had the prerelease tournament for the 3rd edition of VTES Sabbat yesterday at Fantsu. The turnout was pretty huge, we had 41 players in total. Much fun, we played 3 2-hour rounds (after drafting the boosters and using random precon starters). Kari Mäkinen and Tuomas Vuokko emerged as the winners, each got 3 game wins (i.e. won every one of the three games. Kudos. I personally got zero points, which I partly blame on the Tzimisce deck which simply didn’t have enough intercept to deal with the Malks, and partly on bad drafting. Naturally my playing had nothing to do with it… :)

The set looks pretty good; it brings a lot of previously hard-to-get old cards back into circulation, brings us a ton of new group 4 Sabbat vampires, and there’s a pile on brand new library cards. I especially liked the Master card that allowed a combat “intercept” for political actions, with no intercept needed. I suspect we’ll be seeing that one a lot in tournaments. I also suspect the Helicopter will become popular. We’ll see. […]

Ropecon VTES tournament report

The tournament report for Ropecon 2006 is starting to be in shape. I’m still hoping to get the last few deck listings and maybe a few more pictures, but those are small details. I’m glad I took the trouble to write down a transcript of the final round (never did that before); it’s fun to read it now to get an idea of what actually happened, and apparently other people have liked it too. […]

Nobody here except us zombies

It’s over, just got home – the rest of the gang headed off toward the restaurant and GoH dinner, I was/am just too tired to go. About 4 hours of sleep last night, bracketed by turns behind the info desk, followed by a Rage tournament, followed by the con shutdown and cleanup stuff… well, let’s just say that my t-shirt says “It’s Alive!” but I consider that to be a gross distortion of the actual truth. So I’m sitting at home reading my email and waiting for the sauna to warm up, and wondering how many hours I’ll manage to stay up before I really have to hit the bunk.

Good con, as pretty much always. It’s a staple of the Finnish rpg scene, and I mean that in a very positive way. Weekend full of games, friends, people-I-like-but-see-too-rarely, semi-strangers, and general weirdness. And coffee. Oh yes.

Hamster! A Dentist! Hard porn! Steven Seagull! […]

VTES tournament over, thanks all

Ok, we had an absolutely huge tournament last night, with a record-breaking 95 players in total. Was a lot of fun (yes, even just to watch) and everything went great. The final round stretched till 3am, so when we got home we pretty much collapsed on the bed. I’ll write up a tournament report some time next week, a lot of stuff I want to report from that game in detail. I’m hoping to get deck lists from the players in the finals and maybe to get some photos from the people who were there with cameras. Will have to ask around.

There are still some unclaimed EC-qualifier t-shirts and a (very) small cash runner-up prize for the guy who came 7th. I’ll post the details on the Con intenal TV, and later here if I don’t find the right people at the Con.

Now having a quick cup of tea before heading back towards Dipoli. […]

Ropecon almost here, woot

Ok, Ropecon is almost upon us again. Thanks to the server crash I had lost all my normal printouts and sheets for running a VTES tournament, so I spent most of last night creating them from scratch. I think I now have everything ready, including an “ugly-but-it-works” player randomizer script written in Ruby. Looks to be another big tournament, we already have 56 preregistrations as of this writing. Nice.

I picked up the prize support stuff from White Wolf from Fantsu yesterday, turned out to be a big and heavy box. Mostly that was because this is (for the first time) an EC qualifier, so we have a pile of t-shirts for the people who qualify (top 25% based on total scores for 3 rounds). There’s also 2 new promo cards, and some boosters for the finalists. Thanks to WW for the support, once again. The EC-qualifier t-shirts look pretty cool, they have the anime-style picture from one of the new(ish) Ahrimanes cards on the back (“Ahrimane Protectorate”) . As an additional bonus, I get one too – regional qualifier game organizers automatically qualify themselves, too. Which is nice, since there is no chance in hell of both running a tournament of this size and playing in it.

At the moment my schedule looks somewhat like this:

• Friday 16 - 16:30 - arrive at the Con, set up camp at the registration table upstairs
• Friday 18(ish)- the tournament begins
• Saturday 02(ish) - tournament is over, lots of bleary eyes and people running on pure caffeine
• Saturday - do Stuff(tm) at the con
• Saturday 19- 23 - my turn at the Info desk
• Sunday 07 - 11 - at the Info desk again, after a luxurious 6-hour sleep
• rest of Sunday - play in Rage tournament (if I have time), do some more Stuff(tm).

See you there. […]

Pale people in black, with cards

Looks to be another big Ropecon VTES tournament, the pre-registration page already has 42 entries. Nice.

Haven’t done much about the tournament yet other than to gather those pre-regs, but tomorrow or Thursday I’ll have to gather up the required pile of Stuff(tm) and print out another ton of Stuff(tm). Work work.

The prize support, EC qualifier t-shirts, and other stuff is still at Fantasiapelit, I’ll have to arrange to pick those up, too, before Friday. Janne has (again) done a great job in providing logistics for the tournament and communicating with White Wolf, thanks are due in that direction. […]