Super Mario Bros Wii

Now how many times have we purchased this game? It seems they make a new Super Mario Bros for each platform...not that you can blame Nintendo, since people keep buying it. So I bought it.

Sadly I haven't been able to experience the multiplayer, being too cheap and lazy to buy extra controllers and invite people over, so I'm not even going to talk about that. Instead I'm going to talk about...100% completion, and lives.

Oh, and Bowser.

While I understand 100% completion, the only rewards for 100% completion should be bragging rights awards. New skins, new character, whatever. But don't lock significant chunks of content behind it. Super Mario Bros Wii has eight worlds, and when you complete the eighth world, you gain access to world nine. So far, so spiffy.

But then it turns out to play a given level in world nine, you have to achieve 100% completion in a corresponding earlier world. To play 9-1 you have to 100% complete World 1. At the moment I've only unlocked 9-1 because I am by no means a platform god...and that's probably the only bonus world I'll see. Which is a shame, because it's a hard, interesting level with new setpieces. Instead of making it so I won't see a large chunk of content (Super Mario Bros Wii, 100% completion aside, is not an incredibly long game), they could give out...oh, infinite mushrooms in your "backup powerup" screen.

Because you'll be using a lot of these backup powerups if you're like me. Who wants to be tiny when you enter a world (and not small mushroom tiny, either)? Every time you die you're reset...and what's up with having lives anyhow? They're so absurdly easy to get that it's nigh-impossible to run out. They're not a limiting factor, so they serve no purpose. Heck, they even have a video in the game on how to get infinite 1-Ups. I suppose it's mostly an artifact of the original but...come on, if you keep green mushrooms around, change their nature!

Now that that's out of the way, Bowser. He's by far the best part of the game. Homage to the classic cutting-the-drawbridge thing...and then he grows enormous and pursues you through his castle. He blows up bits of the scenery and sends lava waves you have to dodge. It's amazing and showcases a lot of what they could do with Mario but don't. Dynamically destructible environments, manipulating mob abilities into helping you, and seriously epic bosses.

In the end, it's probably not quite worth the money, but it's worth a rental or waiting until the price comes down a bit. Unless you have friends to play with, and then the multiplayer might be fun. Though I've heard tell of some problems with it too...

Dragon Age, Torchlight

So I picked up two games recently; Dragon Age and torchlight.

Dragon Age has been pretty thoroughly hyped, what with all the emphasis on your character origin and how it affects the story. And I must say it's a really well-done game. My favorite thing is the banter between your NPCs. It seems every pair of NPCs has a long list of running conversations that are frankly hilarious. Especially Zhevran, who is a lech, and Morrigan, who is snark personified (and voiced by Claudia Black). But as I'm playing it, I'm having less fun than I really should. Part of this is combat - I realize this is squad-based combat, and you're supposed to micromanage. But really, I have enough to do just fiddling with my mage and trying to avoid catching my own party in friendly fire with my absurdly overpowered AOEs. Having to stop all the time to keep everyone focus-fired on one target or not run off into an AOE effect that's already in place or the like quickly saps my enjoyment from combat segments. Everything else I like, but there's so much combat.

Conversely, Torchlight is nothing but combat. The storyline is thin-to-nonexistent, but as a concentrated Diablo you don't really expect much. And the combat is fun. It is of course just one player, but you have lots of options (with a diablo-style class and skill system), and they're all fun. Good loot, and very very easily moddable. One thing that I disliked about Dragon Age is that there was no way to respec. At all. And there's no way to tell without experience which skills are valuable and which ones are underpowered. Torchlight had no respec option to begin with, but the modability meant that they could release a respec mod very quickly. So far as I can tell, Dragon Age is not hugely mod-friendly.

While I like them both, I think Torchlight is actually better value for money.

Risen

So I've been playing Risen a bit. When I say a bit, I mean, "I haven't even gotten to start the major story yet." But there's a good reason for that.

When you start out, it's decent. There's a tiny little intro where you learn how to equip items and basic combat. You learn how to pick up items and about your inventory. And then someone decided to hell with tutorials, we'll just leave everything else vague.

For example, you will level rather early on, as is common in these games. However, upon leveling, there's no tutorial popup on what you should do. I tried "C" for my character screen and yes, it does pop up what look to be my levelup stats...but there's a lot of unexplained skills there. Not that it matters, because I can't do anything to any of them.

Soon afterward you encounter an NPC who claims he'll lead you where you want. Now, the dialogue implies that you're choosing sides here - either the rebels or some sort of shadowy government-type dealio, or you can stay neutral. However, if you want to be a mage which I did), you have to go to the town. So I asked him to lead me there and he sent me on to a farm, where I'd have to complete a few quests to get led the right way.

Here's where things break down. The quests are just text with no area markers as to where you might want to go. If you open a chest in someone else's house, that's bad. They come and beat you down. That's fine...except there's no warning, so if you accidentally click, you're screwed. They won't talk to you afterwards at all. You don't get told until much later (and by a random NPC you may never talk to) how to fix that.

Once you complete the quests you can get led to the town, where you have to pay 100g to get in. Presumeably. You can dismiss the NPC before you get there, and I did by accident (again, no warning as to what might happen), so maybe if he's there it's cheaper, but it's entirely possible not to have 100g. I don't mind choices like this, but in a game I want to make them with full cognizance. Don't punish me for not being prescient.

I still wanted to try playing a mage, but good luck on that. You're told that somewhere, there's an NPC that can train you to be a mage. And that's it. Town full of NPCs, no direction, no way to ask questions. I ran across a lot of side quests (and two non-mage trainers), but why would I want to do them with my starting skillset, that I can't level up?

And another thing. Alchemy. Lots of games now seem to have plants and whatnot in the world that you can collect for alchemy. But you can start doing this very early on, with no way to know how alchemy works, when you'll be able to dispose of these components, what their relative worth is, or what the worth of alchemy in the game is. Oblivion did it quite well, by introducing it very early, but everyone else doesn't seem to catch the hint.

Anyhow, I'll try and continue playing it but wandering around a town empty-handed and directionless is not my idea of fun.

Publishing

The only way an author can get credibility is to be published by a major company. The question is (or maybe, should be), why?

The limited distribution channels for other forms of consumable entertainment have been breaking down. Games no longer have to be published by EA to be taken seriously (Braid, every iPhone app ever). Same thing with movies (admittedly to a far lesser extent, but see Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog). But any novel that's not published by a major distributor is ignored if not derided for its amateur nature.

Let's not kid ourselves: publishers are for-profit organizations. When Harry Potter was popular, they published awful kid-wizard dross. When Twilight was popular, they published awful vampire dross. There's also the fact that if you're not a very, very popular author, chances are you'll see maybe $4000 from a book. Yes, publishers soak up a lot of the profits. And you need an agent to deal with the legalities and rights negotiations.

Then there's having to go through editors. It's true that the vast majority of books need a professional quality editor (though from what gets published sometimes you wonder if they took that day off). However, an editor will often make changes based on what he thinks will sell. This may not be the story you want to tell - and do you want to sacrifice your vision for $4000?

All this publisher control means that the author has no ability to do something crazy like distribute it for $1.99 on iTunes. No, on iTunes they're nearly the price of a dead-tree book. Ebooks are better sometimes, going as low as paperback prices. But it's the publisher seeing that money - if an author released their book as an iPhone app for 1.99, he'd see that $4000 from 1400 downloads. Somehow we need to separate book quality from publishers.

Amazing

While I hate linking two gizmodo posts in a row, this particular application is incredible. If automated image manipulation technology is advancing this fast, purposeful image manipulation should be even more powerful. I love the lowering the barriers to content creation.

I saw this coming

Magazines moving to digital distribution. Newspapers and magazines have been in a pretty severe decline recently, and this is only bowing to the inevitable. The question is whether they can deliver content on par with free sites like, shall we say, Gizmodo. Of course, it's entirely possible that they'll go with the free distribution/advertising model.

I just question whether companies familiar with dead-tree distribution will have the same efficacy with online distribution. For one thing, the barriers to competition are far, far lower online. If they can't offer something unique, they're going to run into a lot of problems.

16 more years

That's four more presidential terms. I'm really excited about all these longevity discoveries, because the longer we live, the more medicine will help us live longer. And if they're being worked on now, then they'll be available in, say, a decade. And that's basically when I'll want to start seeing 'em. Anders Sandberg has already done a lot of thinking about life extension, and I of course agree with him that it's a good thing. I'm not sure I understand people who argue that putting off death cheapens human life. Entropy will get us all in the long term.

Aion

I played a little bit of Aion. Only the first four levels, so I can by no means remark on the whole game. It plays very much like WoW or, more accurately I think, LOTRO. The interesting bit of its combat is the idea of 'chaining,' though I'm sure it's not new. One combat ability unlocks only after a first ability. With several options for each of those, you could build a reasonably flexible series of combat chains. Of course, you don't want too many...

The other thing that struck me is the way they treated wings. The fact that players get wings upon level 10 is a big selling point for their game, but I'm not sure why they waited until level ten. With wings integral to combat and crafting, why don't they start you out with them from the get-go? Or allow you to play them in the introductory sequence before depowering you, giving you a taste of what you're working for? I might try to get to level ten and try out the wings, but I think they messed a trick by not putting them in early.