Unintended gaming computer upgrades

Fallout 4 Garage

I’ve not been able to play Fallout 4 in two days because my computer sort of went kaput on me.

A long afternoon and evening, as well as P26,000 ($550) later, I now have a new motherboard, a better processor, and 16GB of RAM.

I’m still updating my computer to get back all the Windows 7 updates I lost, unfortunately. 🙁

Also, I have to redownload Fallout 4 and my MMORPGs. 🙁 That’s going to take a while.

You Games-Meandering Bastard

Yes,Victor, you games-meandering bastard.

You’re playing or trying TOO MANY freaking games.

You have Borderlands 2, Dark Souls PC, X-Com: Enemy Unknown, and Morrowind (using the Morrowind visual enhancer) to tide you over on the non-MMO front.

Then you have an active sub to LOTRO, which you don’t play actively, and WoW, which you’re having trouble connecting to reliably.

AND you got a year’s membership to Pirate101?!

WHAT THE BLOODY HELL WERE YOU THINKING?!

Now you’re considering getting The Walking Dead and subbing to RIFT and getting the Storm Legion expansion? I mean, I understand wanting TWD, but you could never stick to RIFT!

And you want to go back just for the freaking housing?! What the bloody, bloody hell is churning around in your head?

*imaginary hairpull*

For the love of all that is finger-licking good, like fried chicken, curb your purchases, at least till November.

 

Signed,

Victor’s Meandering Mind.

Get Creative at Green Man Gaming to Win the Skyrim Expansion Dawnguard

Over on the official blog for Digital Content Provider Green Man Gaming, there’s a contest where folks can win a copy of the Dawnguard expansion for Skyrim if they can prove themselves creative enough to earn one.

They’ve set up a scenario that you must face armed with a bunch of random objects, and it’s up to you to creatively get out of a castle or hilariously die trying.

THE SCENARIO!

You are deep within the dark depths of a castle. This castle is inhabited by a Vampire Lord. By sheer dumb luck, mysticism and/or divine intervention (or Daedric if they were bored and wanted to see you squirm). You find yourself cornered in one room, crouched down behind some barrels, with the Vampire Lord nearby. He’s not seen you yet but if you try to sneak or run away he’ll spot you.

Within reach you find the following things (chosen by the workers of GMG with no knowledge of what they’re for) :

A Smurf
A Penrose Triangle
My Beard (it is bristly to the touch, and for the sake of the scenario, assume it’s not attached to my face)
A Flamingo (a living one, not a lawn ornament)
A Star-Nosed Mole
Some Mince Meat
A Batarang Lockpick
A Zombie Tooth
A Flatwhite
A Beach Ball (because Arun is going on holiday)

My submission to the contest:

“I am trapped, and I have all this to aid me?” I asked myself silently while shaking my head. “The Powers that be must truly want me dead.”

Crouched behind a stack of barrels, I know my end is coming near. A Vampire Lord seems to be laughing, as if he can sense life, but is playing with the thought of eating me. The smurf, mole, and flamingo begin to stir from a deep sleep, and so I must reason quickly and risk death in the attempt.

Seeing a bloody beard that appears to have come from a rugged fellow, I slathered the smurf in the blood, blinding him and quieting his protestations by gagging his mouth with the beard. I push him out into view, and watch him nearly trip over himself.

The vampire lord seemed amused at the flailing smurf.. “A bloodied, little blue man,” he mutters, as he picks the smurf up, “is the source of all that life? Amusing…” He spins around, admiring the smurf in light of a fire. “No matter, food is food.”

With his back turned to me, I found myself even luckier than I anticipated. I pushed the flamingo out into the open, and heard it cry as it ran in terror of me to an opposing corner of the room. The Lord turned around at the sound, perplexed at the creature, a miniature leg dangling from its mouth

It was time for the mole.

I stood up and threw the mole at the Vampire Lord’s face. The mole connected, struggling for something to hold on to while scratching the Lord’s face in the process. The Lord was distracted, grabbing the mole and hurling it at a stone wall.

With all my might and speed, I ran to the Lord and tackled it to the ground.

Raising the impossible Triangle of Penrose above my head, I set to work gouging the monster’s eye out with the impossibly swirling, sharp tip of the Triangle. The dead smurf caught in its mouth muffled the screams he made as I mercilessly robbed him of sight. With my would-be attacker incapacitated, I stabbed him in the heart, hoping the legends were true. The monster flails as I rend his undead flesh and sunder bone.

His heart, beating yet unliving all the same, required more force than a triangle could muster. I reached in, ripped it from the creature’s body, and crushed it with the flat end of the Triangle.

The Vampire Lord lay dead in front of me.

I was free to head for the door.

The startled flamingo kept its distance from me as I walked to the door. I grasped the handle and attempted to turn it.

The handle would not budge.

I felt for the lone lockpick in pocket, and took it out. “I wish I knew how to use these blasted things,” I said to myself, putting the lockpick back in my pocket.

Walking back to the barrels, I took stock of my new possessions. I took a swig of the flat white and lured the flamingo back to my corner with some minced meat. Petting my new friend, I rolled the beach ball at him, and he pushed it towards the wall playfully.

“It is going to be a long wait for an adventurer to come along,” I thought.

The ball, the flamingo and I were going to be fast friends indeed.

My Top 5 Non-MMO Video Games So Far

I have played a ton of games in my life, but rarely do I finish games, and even rarer still does a game grip me so completely that I play it more than once.

Here are my top 5 non-mmo video games.

5. Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga (PS2)

Introduced a most intriguing concept to me (representing a world within a world in a game), and was my formal introduction to the Shin Megami Tensei staple of games.

4. Final Fantasy VII (PS1)

First introduced me to the concept of death of a main character in a storyline. My very first RPG. Also, the first game that made me think critically about games and made me realize that some games are more valuable than others in teaching values and life lessons to people.

3. Front Mission 3 (PS1)

Oh god, this game. I spent nearly 250 hours playing both storylines of this game.

THIS GAME HAS FILIPINOS. FUCK YEAH! Bring about the DAGAT AHAS (Sea Snake)!

2. Azure Dreams (PS1)

Were it not for an unfortunate mishap on the 40th floor of a dungeon, I would have eventually finished this game with my +37 Gold sword and my pet kicking ass and taking names.

Also, first dating sim type game.

1. Parasite EVE II (PS1)

I spent three Christmas seasons repeating this game, sort of like a holiday ritual. I loved this game so much because it was always constantly challenging, and I loved the story… and I had a crush on Aya Brea.

BONUS: Fallout 1

Before I ever finished Baldur’s Gate, my copy of the game came with a free copy of Fallout 1. I repeated that game probably 7 times, all with a similar sort of loadout… trying to explore story paths that seemed likely.

Victor’s Final Fantasy XIII-2 LiveBloggery, Part One (END)

Due to how my computer, monitors, and PlayStation 3 are set up, I can actually type this while looking at the television screen showing the PS3 interface. I’ve decided to try liveblogging the first few hours of FFXIII-2 to see if I like playing the game in this manner, and to gauge my personal interest in dividing my attention in this particular fashion in an attempt to try something new and blog more.

How it’ll work: most liveblogs use some kind of software that I have no idea where to get in order to liveblog quickly and efficiently. While I won’t be using that software, I can use their format of updating in tweet-like fashion, with the entries going chronologically upwards from the beginning (the bottom-most entry) to the most recent entry (directly below this paragraph) using military time to denote hours in the GMT+8 timezone.

I’ll begin in approximately 30 minutes from this post, at 19:30, after I grab dinner.

See you folks in a bit. 🙂

————– LIVEBLOG BELOW ————–

22:15 Standing in front of the First Time Gate. Will continue some other time.

22:13 It seems there’s also a map percentage aspect to the game. Can’t seem to trigger 100% on the first map though. Strange.

21:57 There appear to be sidequests for Artefacts and other items. Hmm… not sure what to think about fetch quests.

21:38 Got an artefact… Why not spell it Artifact? Is there a big difference?

21:27 So Snow actually left Serah to find Lightning for his fiance. That’s nice.

21:18 So the moogle is some kind of a treasure hunting device and a weapon. How multifunctional!

21:04 Oh man. I can save anywhere and it saves to the same file I made at the start of the game. That’s cool. 😀

20:57 Crystarium has been altered somewhat. Not sure how to explain it, but basically, each crystal allows you to choose your path of development.

20:48 Staring at a meteorite. Amazed it crashed without making a bigger crater.

20:43 LOL. First non-tutorial boss is called Gogmagog. 😀

20:35 The game uses random encounters that require you to encounter the enemy in a time limit. That’s a nice implementation of two existing battle type tropes.

20:26 Hmm… early enemies dropping Accessories. 😀

20:19 So… they give a brief overview of the ending of FFXIII through dialogue in the first hour. Not bad. 🙂

20:17 And the kupos of the moogle are weird. Some kind of dialogue weirdness.

20:07 LOL. Jumping mechanics included in the game now. 😀

20:05 Live Trigger… Branching Dialog options, it seems.

20:01 Magical Changing Clothes. Go Squeenix go!

19:59 Noel Kreiss…. jumps into a time gate.

19:54 First Tutorial battle of the game completed, Multi-stage, very forgiving, extremely epic.

19:50 I guess they use gameplay footage to allow for cinematic actions. I got to choose how to engage my enemy in the cinema.

19:44 Apparently, the enemy is a fricking Bahamut of Chaos.

19:42 Cutscenes become actual gameplay footage now. Tutorial stage played as Lightning Riding Odin.

19:40 Caius and Lightning fight. Beasties galore in battle. 😀

19:38 Opening Cinematic of the game. Lightning looks over the sea.

19:36 Game gives a bonus reward if you have FFXIII save data, and asks you to create a data file upon starting game. Autosave and manual save is available.

19:34 Game loaded, Opening Sequence playing. Pretty Cool. 😀

19:30 Turning on PS3. 😀

It’s a New Dawn, It’s a New Day, It’s a New Year, There are New Games…

… and I’m feeling good.

—- The Rest of the Post —-

2012 is a new year, and if the naysayers in this world would have it, the last year for humans to exist on the planet.

I don’t want to believe that. I mean, there’s so much to be thankful for.

Like Free Speech, and its counterpart, Using Words Responsibly.

Like Being Happy, and its counterpart, Choosing to be Angry.

And GAMES! Oh so many games!

This year, I choose to speak my mind more about the things that interest me, even if it makes me uncomfortable to open up in that way.

I will play the games I want and I will enjoy (or not enjoy) them at my leisure.

I will respect the minds of others, even if I disagree with their ideas.

I will not limit myself to one avenue of thought, and I will open up to other ideas and not act in a passive-aggressive manner to people of perceived authority.

I will not let the negativity of others invalidate what I feel towards a game.

I will balance my gaming with healthier pursuits.

I will finish that first book that’s been in my head and evolved since I was a kid.

I will define who I am by what I do and think, and not by what people think of me.

I will play more Final Fantasy XIV and maybe even get Final Fantasy XIII-2 on the PS3.

I will experience games I never thought to try out. That may include superhero MMORPGs.

I will keep writing about games!

I will stay smiling and awesome, the way I envision myself as being for the rest of my life.

Shower Thoughts Week: Differences in Freedom and Structure and the Nature of Play

Stabbing Dragons in the face in Skyrim

Shower Thoughts Week will feature a week-long series of of posts discussing ideas about games after having thought about them while bathing.

Skyrim, Star Wars: The Old Republic (SWTOR), and Saints Row: The Third are three games that are currently on my mind. The entertainment value of these three games is rather high, though these games share differing amounts of freedom and structure in their gameplay mechanics. I wanted to spend a few moments talking about my thoughts regarding these games from an “I’ve just had an extremely long thought experiment in the shower and am struggling to recollect my thoughts” sort of frame of mind.

A person’s need for freedom and structure is so closely intertwined to an individual’s personality that talking about freedom and structure in play is something that ought to be handled with a certain delicacy.

As human beings, we paradoxically delight in finding a singular purpose to drive us, yet wish freedom in choosing our path towards achieving a goal. As people who play games, we find ways to extend the reach of our minds beyond what we perceive to be possible, enough to slay dragons, fly ships in space, and freefall in a near endless drop while gunning down enemies with no regard for conventional reality. Combine the two and multiply them by the number of gamers in the world, and you have a staggeringly large permutation of people who want to be satisfied by playing a game, but by various means. Increase the stakes exponentially with shifting tastes in entertainment, and you have a logistical nightmare for a single mind to handle.

Game developers in this day and age have realized that striking that balance in gameplay that allows for a game to appeal to every gamer at every time is next to impossible. To remedy this, they have perfected the means by which a “large enough” number of gamers can find enjoyment from play long enough for the next DLC or content update to be released for them to further support their continued enjoyment, a trait especially noticeable in MMORPGs. Either they choose that method, or they reward a gamer for possessing obsessive or addictive behaviors that make them wish to continue playing a product beyond its ability to bring joy into a gamer’s life.

As current preoccupations of a lot of gamers out there in my circles, Skyrim, SWTOR, and Saint’s Row: The Third are examples of three games that, at least for the purposes of the thought experiment I had, attempt to combine freedom and structure in different ways.

Skyrim possesses a large, epic, and foreign world with supposedly infinite quests. What I think actually happens is that the game places players in a large world, gives them the tools and understanding for advancement, and gives them structure through quests and freedom to skip quests and change tactics to suit their changing needs. The game doesn’t necessarily “end,” but when you have run out of a strong purpose to play, the game ceases to hold the same allure until a new downloadable content pack is introduced that extends the experience of purpose.

SWTOR takes a different approach. Provided with (I believe) 17 planets to explore, the game focuses on providing players with purpose by focusing on a strong, fully-voiced story to mitigate the feeling of repetitiveness brought about by having only a limited number of quest types. Instead of saying, “This is a world, have at it,” SWTOR says, “This is your tale, experience it.”

Of the three games, Saints Row: The Third is perhaps the hardest to explain properly. Freedom and structure are more or less balanced here, with a supposedly large number of activities to experience and enjoy in a relatively smaller-scaled area (compared to the scale of a country and 17 planets) like a city. The difference is that this game instead gives you the equivalent of contemporary wish fulfillment by providing you with an exaggerated and amoral real-world scenario, as if the game is saying, “This world is your oyster, enjoy the experience.”

In each game, freedom and structure combine to allow many people to find a respite from the stressors of the world. Enjoying a game and sharing the experience in a healthy fashion, however you choose to do so, is the nature of play. One of the end results of this healthy play of games is the passage of time, and these three games all allow for the passage of time to happen with a sense of fulfillment and relaxation.

There is an issue, however, when we overthink the nature of play (Ironic that I’m overthinking the nature of play to get to a point, but such is life). When we obsess over an aspect of a game, whether it be min-maxing a character, or hardcore raiding, or ganking, we diminish the fun behind the play. When we chastise others for enjoying a particular game because we think their game is horrid or lesser than our own, we cheapen the nature of social interaction derived from playing.

It doesn’t matter how different one game is from another from a functional standpoint, as they all serve the same purpose of allowing us to go beyond ourselves and enjoy a new experience with others sharing in that same joy. We do the games we play a disservice by enjoying them in complete solitude and isolation, or worse yet, at the cost of another person’s enjoyment of his choices.

If there’s anything I’ve learned this evening from taking a shower and thinking about video games, it’s that the freedom of our lives and the structure we ascribe to it are meant to be tuned and balanced, and we should try to find that same balance when we interact with other people in our day-to-day, whether it be through games, Twitter, emails, or showering with them interactions in the physical world.

In Skyrim: Going Down a Dark Path (spoilers)

Right now, I’m relatively powerful, but I still have trouble killing dragons. I have shiny Dwarven armor, and steel armor everywhere else, and I have a home and hearth for my use.

One of the issues I’ve not grown accustomed to while being in Skyrim is the nature of unintended consequences and everlasting regret. In life, you sometimes make a decision to alter the course of someone else’s fate, for good or ill. The thing is, it’s hard to make recompense for doing so, and harder still when you realize that, by trying to do something good, you’ve gone down a darker path than you would have realized.

In my travels, I had heard about a young man named Aventus Aretino, whom people were saying was disturbed. I hesitate to call him a boy, as he is too far gone in vengeance to be called innocent, and too far hardened to be the type of child who plays in the streets of a simple town.

I sought him out and found him trying to perform a ritual that would summon a dark power to aid him in a simple matter. I stepped in to try to stop him, and was instead mistaken for the dark power he sought.

With hope in his eyes, Aventus begged me to slay the headmistress of the orphanage he was heading to at the end of a week. He said that the headmistress was a cruel woman, and hinted faintly at the abuse of orphaned children.

Dark as his methods were, and strange as his request was, I remained silent, which he took as acceptance of the task. I needed to clear my mind of the darkness, and investigate if his allegations were true.

Heading to the orphanage, I found myself plagued by the thought of a child so warped by sadness and longing that he would drive himself to such dark methods to find peace. I needed to know the truth and let the authorities know of the travesty being committed if it were true.

The orphanage was quaint, but serviceable and, unlike the headmistress, was warm enough for the task of caring for abandoned and orphaned children. When I entered the main room, I heard the headmistress berating the kids and telling them they were unloved and that no one would ever adopt them because she would stop any attempt to do so. It broke my heart to know that Aventus’ claims rang true.

I was about to step back outside when the assistant of the headmistress attempted to talk to me in an attempt to explain the aberrant behavior. I knew she didn’t believe what she was saying, and so I remained silent.

I looked for a constable in that dark night, but none would talk to me about the events I had seen. It was as if the world had abandoned these children for an unknown purpose, and I could not do anything other than choose the happiness of the children and of Aventus with the assistant headmistress or the life of Grelod the “Kind.”

I went back into the orphanage that same evening, sneaking past the sleeping children, and ultimately, sitting behind the headmistress for what seemed like an eternity. Perhaps the unknown purpose the world had left for these children was to take me down a path of sadness as well, but I didn’t know it then. All I knew then was righteous anger mixed with the need to weigh my actions.

In any realm, there is free will that, in hindsight, feels like an illusion. We are bound by our minds to follow the path laid before us by our conscience, and whether we flounder or not in attempting to follow it, that is our path as set by our selves, immutable except through the loss of memory.

I gave up the path of law for the path of righteousness, or so I would have myself believe. I froze Grelod the kind that same night as she slept. I left the house, with no one the wiser. My transgression, I knew, would not be realized by anyone. Only that she had drowned in her sleep, frozen and blackened all over from debilitating frostbite.

The end of Grelod the kind was swift and merciful, I forced myself to think, and no one would know, I reminded myself.

I went back to Whiterun, to my own home, in the light of the morning. A courier had left a message for me as I entered the house.

Someone knew. Someone had come to tell me that they knew, and no amount of sleep or meditation would allow me to forget that like Aventus, I too had begun my way down a dark path.