Monthly Archives: March 2008

Renegade master.

Back once again with the ill behaviour.

I returned from a business trip last night; long hours, delighted customers, huge traffic jams as you’re trying to drive home after a rather choppy flight. It’s all good fun.

I fired-up the ol’ Google Reader this morning to be greeted by 250-odd posts, so there was a good hour or so lost there as I tried to catch up. Apparently Arthur C Clarke died, who knew? Thank the blogosphere for the ten thousand posts about this, otherwise I might have missed it like I missed the death of Gary Gygax, surely at least one person would have posted about that? (For those of you reading in black and white, that last sentence was painted in glorious Technisarcasm ®).

A quick peruse of my web-comic list next, which I try to read as regularly as possible; currently I’m reading Penny Arcade, VG Cats, xkcd, Chainmail Bikini, Perry Bible Fellowship, Looking for Group, The Order of the Stick & Dark Legacy.

And now I’m writing this post. After which, seeing as it’s a bank holiday weekend and the weather is quite nice outside, I should go and do something productive.

Like a five man instance run in WoW. Or watching the episodes of Dexter that I’ve recorded.

Thought for the day

Up with the Zeitgeist as ever, I was catching up with some WoW articles about some “ubah” guild somewhere abandoning raiding, and general griping about the difficulty of high end raiding and not being rewarded enough for it compared to PvP/heroic 5-mans/spending the same amount of time getting a second (or quite possibly first) job that actually pays real money. I got to thinking… what if it’s all a psychological experiment? There’s Nick Yee’s classic Everquest as the Virtual Skinner Box, maybe bleeding edge WoW raiding is a continuation of the Milgram experiment being performed on the dev team, they’re being ordered to inflict progressively greater tedium on raiders to see if at any point they’d question the orders or refuse to implement them. No dice so far, if the 2.4.1 patch notes mention that wiping in Sunwell Plateau will result in progressively greater electric shocks to players, I reckon the authorities might need to step in…

Worlds of Fantasy on the BBC

The BBC have been doing a series, Worlds of Fantasy, about… err… Worlds. Of Fantasy, strangely enough. Unfortunately they stuck them on at the same time as Torchwood, and I never got organised enough to record the repeats, but huzzah! for iPlayer. The first was fairly so-so, looking at child heroes. The second was better, devoted to Tolkien and Peake with contributors including the incomparably magnificent Joe Abercrombie. The third I found most interesting of all, what with goodly chunks of, amongst others, Pratchett (I thought Hugh Jackman’s rig in Swordfish was ludicrous Hollywood invention, turns out they just got PTerry’s actual setup and scaled it down a bit), Moorcock, Lemmy, Richard Bartle, World of Warcraft, Lord of the Rings Online, and Neil Gaiman (I’d like to withdraw the previous labelling of Joe Abercrombie, he’s in fact comparably magnificent to the comparable magnificence of Neil Gaiman). Anyway, I’d entirely forgotten about it as per usual until Melmoth mentioned it, and I just caught it before its seven days on iPlayer expired. If you happen to be reading this within about 24 hours of the posting date, you’ll be just in time, otherwise sorry! It was good, though.

Charge of the Hellgate Brigade

Melmoth and I were cruising the underworld, as you do, searching for the head of some undead abomination called Neville Bamshute or something. Rounding a corner, we briefly glimpsed some glowing yellow text in the distance indicating Lord Bamshute was down the end of that corridor before about seven hundred flaming balls of death slammed into us. Turned out Lord Neville had company, a whole bunch of Bruisers or Maulers or something; whatever they were, they fired spikey balls of flaming death that exploded with a most alarming lethal radius. Being the veteran muhmorpuhguheristas that we are, we know the drill: pull the minions away to clear them, then take down the boss. Step one is a bit of a challenge, as The Bamshute and his posse are at the end of a long, narrow corridor about 41 metres away, and our demon-smiting rifles have a range of 25-30 metres. Each pull therefore consists of small-scale re-enactment of the Charge of the Light Brigade with me representing the 4th and 13th Light Dragoons, Melmoth as the 8th and 11th Hussars and an assortment of bots and drones filling in for the 17th Lancers, zigzagging down the corridor wildly firing, hoping a few Bamshutettes will notice and lumber down the corridor to be picked off. Several deaths in, we pretty much get the hang of it, pulling away groups of three and four and gunning them down. There’s no let up in the barrage of shot and shell, though, so we pause to take stock. Are the minions respawning, or are there just hundreds of the damn things? It’s a bit difficult to tell, what with them all huddling around at the end of the corridor of eternal peril and not standing conveniently still for a head count (“Undead fiend one?” “Here, sir!” “Undead fiend two?” “Present!” “Undead fiend three? Has anyone seen undead fiend three?”) Melmoth volunteers to take a look, and in a series of impressive corpse-spawn-jumps gets close enough to report that they are, indeed, respawning. Fortunately Neville Bamshute didn’t appear to regenerate his health, so the encounter was merely a tedious battle of attrition rather than physical impossibility.

Time for Plan B, then. Unfortunately it turned out Plan B had originally been devised as a contingency plan for Hitler focusing on a Mediterranean strategy with the aid of Mussolini, Franco and Petain’s Vichy France, and thus wasn’t much use against Herr Bamshute. Plan C was a slight improvement. Codenamed “Yo! Bum Rush the Show”, Plan C involved firstly exclaiming “Yo!”, then proceeding to bum rush the show (where in this particular case, Neville Bamshute was “the show”). In the “Bloody April” of 1917, the average life expectancy of a new Royal Flying Corps subaltern on the front line was eleven days. For a participant of Operation Yo! Bum Rush The Show, the average life expectancy was eleven seconds. And that included the corpse run. That gave just enough time to knock down Neville’s shields and perhaps a sliver of his health, so he was being whittled away, but it was a slow process. After two and a half weeks, with his health bar still around 75%, we huddled up to formulate Plan D.

Some rummaging around my pack turned up a rocket launcher, a couple of machine pistols, a rocket pistol, a lightning gun, a toxic lance, a watering can, a complete collection of National Geographic magazines, March 1974 – February 1978 (apart from the July 1977 issue), a bag of strawberry bon-bons and an anvil. Not so much use… but underneath those, a sniper rifle! Something with enough range to hit Neville Bamshute without having to rush halfway down the corridor of eternal peril. Enter Plan D, “All The World’s A Stage”, wherein Melmoth and I are putting on a show for the world’s rowdiest audience. The moment they catch sight of you they start flinging rotten tomatoes (giant, exploding rotten tomatoes that do significant splash damage), but fortunately quite slowly, giving just enough time to get off a shot at von Bamshute before legging it over to the wings on the other side of the stage before the wave of devastation crashes past where you were just standing. A quick pause to get the breath back, then it’s back the other way to repeat the performance. I like to think we had a straw boater in one hand and a cane in the other and did a little dance (either side of the whole sniper rifle business), but the lack of an emote system in Hellgate put a bit of a crimp on that. Still, even without the dance, the health-whittling went significantly faster without corpse runs every eleven seconds, and His Bamshuteness finally exploded in a shower of loot. A couple more suicide runs cleared the now non-respawning Bamshute-groupies, and it was home for tea, cake and carting four slightly-dripping decapitated demon heads off to some portal somewhere to summon Neville Bamshute’s boss. What could possibly go wrong with a plan like that?

Thought for the day.

Compare and contrast:

In PvP you start out as the lowest of the low; your entire aim at this time is to struggle and fight fruitlessly against those who are already established in order to improve your standing, while the established take great delight in picking on you and impaling you with their purple weapons. Eventually though, through nothing more than attrition and sticking in there, you become one of the established and powerful people yourself, at which point you take great delight in punishing the newcomers; for is it not the case that you had to go through the self same thing? And thus the newcomers feel the sting of your purple weapon.

In the archetypal all-boys boarding school you start out as the lowest of the low; your entire aim at this time is to struggle and fight fruitlessly against those who are already established in order to improve your standing, while the established take great delight in picking on you and impaling you with their ‘purple weapons’. Eventually though, through nothing more than attrition and sticking in there, you become one of the established and powerful people yourself, at which point you take great delight in punishing the newcomers; for is it not the case that you had to go through the self same thing? And thus the newcomers feel the sting of your ‘purple weapon’.

PvP: the homoerotic boarding school simulator of MMOs.

Reviewlet: Russell Howard

I went to see Russell Howard, sometimes known as “the young blonde one off Mock the Week”, the other night. Didn’t quite catch the name of his support act, Mark someone, but he wasn’t bad; bonus geek points for the first mention of a Slingbox I’ve seen in stand up comedy.

Russell himself has an amazing energy, a quick “any questions?” to get things going leads into a gangsta-aunty-on-facebook riff and then he’s freewheeling away, no obvious structure, no stopping to think, barely a pause over the next hour and a half. He never loses the audience, though, sweeping us along with him. If there’s any theme to his material it’s of hopefulness and optimism, child-like wonder, of things being great and magical. Great performer, very funny.

Hi, friend.

Ahhh, the wonders of spam, specifically that relating to atomic number 79. Such consummate use of the English language to convey golden messages of wealth and prosperity to their captivated, and captive, audience. Take the following example, the like of which would make Keats and Wordsworth flush with embarrassment that they had ever dared attempt prose, having now existed in the presence of the writings of the Lord God himself, made visible to the weeping, unworthy eyes of man:

Dear players: Website [www.wearemorons.eu] gold price EUR 0.02/G, delivers goods the speed to be quick, what do you also hesitate? Please heartily purchase.

I must try making a hearty purchase some time. “Ho, ho, ho, noble shop keep! A flagon of your finest Diet Dr Pepper, and for the exchange of which I shall thrust upon you this note to the value of five of the Queen’s pounds sterling! Huzzah!”

If you hear about a strange man being arrested in London on charges of ‘unnerving a serving member of the public with abstruse verbiage’ in the next few days, give me a wave.

Do feel free to share any comedy marketing lines from your favourite game.

Dancing about architecture (with an otter)

I was channel hopping the other day and found a programme on The Biography Channel about Guns N’ Roses, so settled down for a bit of late 80s nostalgia with a can of Tab Clear and a packet of Pacers. The narrator sets the scene, we get a few interviews, there’s some generic heavy metal guitar noodling in the background, we reach 1987 and the release of Appetite for Destruction and… more generic heavy metal guitar noodling. Not a single note of an actual Guns N’ Roses song (well, I say “not a single note”, there might’ve been plenty of notes from their songs, just not necessarily in the same order, as I believe Oscar Wilde might have said. If he was paraphrasing Eric Morecambe.) Guess they didn’t want to pay the royalties or were caught up in hilarious legal wranglings or something. It was all interesting enough in a drink-and-drugs-and-rehab-and-riots way, but if talking about music is like dancing about architecture (as either Elvis Costello or a whole bunch of other people (but apparently not Oscar Wilde) said) then a documentary about a band not featuring their actual music is like dancing about architecture and holding up rather poor quality pictures of buildings, only not the actual buildings you’re dancing about (then taking an otter to an ice cream factory).

It reminded me how great the Classic Albums series was, granted working on the slightly smaller scale of a single album compared to an entire career, but the few I saw were superb, particularly The Dark Side of the Moon. That was like the World Architecture Interpretive Dance Champion performing alongside a renowned professor of architecture giving a particularly fascinating presentation about architecture. Then taking an otter to an ice cream factory.

[The whole otter/ice cream factory business stems from the typical problem of using analogies in a message board discussion, where the analogy become ever more elaborate and eventually everyone’s just arguing about that instead of the original subject. One particular discussion a few years back about writing web pages in a WYSIWYG HTML editor vs a text editor developed into an ever more elaborate scenario where the former was like riding a bicycle compared to the latter being walking, and then different journey lengths over various types of terrain were introduced to represent different styles of web pages, and content management systems were possibly trains while emacs and vi were tanks that could easily cross any terrain but were too busy shooting at each other to do so… it was all a bit weird. Anyway, Melmoth then chipped in with “Using an HTML editor is like taking an otter to the ice cream factory, wrapping it in carpet and using it as a kite.”, variants of which are now deployed as standard whenever analogies start getting too elaborate.]

History is a guide to navigation in perilous times.

Welcome back! Or at least, it would be if you’d gone anywhere, but you didn’t did you? Hmmm, ‘Hello’ just doesn’t seem dramatic enough; ‘Well met’ is a bit too amdram, and ‘Ahoy!’ usually dictates that one’s next action is either a boarding of your galleon to plunder it for treasure, or the exchanging of rolling yarns about the fish that got away (probably Zoso trying to debug something) while smoking a pipe and pulling on one’s beard. How about Good Bloginsday? That’ll do.

So, a very good bloginsday to you all.

More about reasons for absence, apologies for such, whys, hows, do you mind if I don’ts, acceptances of apologies, invitations to tea, and excuses about stoves to avoid commitment, later.

Before all that, today’s question: where’s the satellite navigation for my corpse runs in Hellgate?

Zoso and I have been pottering around slaughtering zombies, beating off demons through the persuasive employment of rounds and rounds of explosive-tipped military hardware, it’s the standard thing for a couple of guys with time to kill on a Saturday evening:

“Any plans for tonight? I thought we’d go out for a beer and hit the pool tables.”

“Well we could do that. Orrrrr! We could run around in the local forest, open a bunch of random crates in the area until some Class 1 military hand cannons ping out of one, then search through some underground tunnels, hopefully encountering a rift in the cosmos that takes us into one of the tiers of Hell, and then slaughter all the minions of Lucifer Morningstar that we find there, until we’ve either killed them all and looted their demonic hides, or we run out of ammo and are overwhelmed, and hence spend the rest of all eternity writhing in unbearable agony as our skin is flayed from our bodies while imps rub salt and lemon into the wounds and demons sing Cliff Richard’s number one singles at us. What do you say to that, eh? EH?!”

“Well… I was sort of hoping for a quiet evening, just have a pint, play some pool, perhaps catch a film, maybe meet-up with the rest of our folks, you know.”

“Orrrrr! We could run around the London Underground, equip ourselves in hi-tech armour and weapons, fight our way through hordes of undead and flesh eating monsters which, if we survive, will allow us to travel through a portal in space and time and find ourselves face-to-face with a mega demon of the highest tier of Satan’s army. We can then pit our nigh-on useless weapons against his infinite powers of damnation, and possibly stand a chance of gaining untold riches, but more likely find ourselves being used by him as toilet paper, experiencing pain and suffering beyond belief in the few moments before we are incinerated by his unholy fiery arse. Eh? Am I selling it to you? EH?!”

“Look, I really don’t thin… toilet paper for a fiery-arsed demon, you say?”

“As hot as the sun, and as hairy as a yak that’s overdosed on Regaine!”

“I’m in! Just give me a few minutes to strap myself into an impossibly tight leather suit with a few token pieces of plate armour on the joints that offer no protection whatsoever!”

“Right-o! I’ll grab my demon slayer!”

“That’s a small pencil”

“I know! It’s as much good at slaying demons as anything else; these are otherworldly uncelestial beings, do you really think a gun is going to harm them?”

“Man, you could at least sharpen it.”

Five seconds in to the post and I’ve lost it already. Zoso! I’m blathering again!

Anyway, we were playing Hellgate and I’d run off like a loon in entirely the wrong direction while Zoso methodically made his way through the map. I inevitably gained the attention of several (hundred) members of the flesh-eating fraternity of Epsilon Alpha Tau Pi Epsilon Epsilon Pi Sigma; you’d think that they’d pick a shorter frat. name considering half of them don’t have lower jaw bones. Suffice it to say, I died. Now, Hellgate is an interesting beast in that it doesn’t provide any indication on your mini map as to where your corpse might be when you’re very far away from it, so you have to rely on memory and luck to get back to it, especially since some of the maps in the game are bloody huge. However, you might just be lucky enough to have a friendly Zoso around, so that when you’re lost and running around like a… like a… well, like an incorporeal spirit without its corpse, I suppose, your friendly neighbourhood Zoso can find the corpse, and then guide you in because you can always see other team members on the mini map, even if they are a clueless ghost.

So Zoso’s directions were warped upon entering my mind (who would have guessed that of me) and went something like this:

“Turn left at the next canyon”

“Continue straight on for five hundred yards.”

“In two hundred yards, keep left.”

“Keep left.”

“In three hundred yards, go around the hill, second exit.”

“Take the exit.”

<Melmoth takes the wrong exit>

“Turn around when possible.”

“At the hill, go all the way around, third exit.”

“At the swarm of Epsilon Alpha Tau Pi Epsilon Epsilon Pi Sigma members, turn left.”

“In three hundred yards, you have reached your destination.”

“You have reached your corpse.”

So there’s your answer; never go out into the field of combat without a Zoso: the satellite navigation of Hellgate corpse runs.