Monthly Archives: April 2012

KiaSA Top Tips.

Parents, add a level of MMO adventuring fun to your child’s Easter celebrations by offering them a quest to collect twenty small chocolate eggs which are hidden around the garden. When they come back to you with the basket of eggs, ask them now to go and find five slightly larger eggs which you’ve just hidden in the poison ivy in the same part of the garden. Upon their return, ask them finally to find the one large egg hidden somewhere near the top of the holly tree in the garden, next to the poison ivy.

When they eventually bring you that final trophy, they should be exhausted, battered, emotionally drained but somewhat triumphant. Offer them your thanks. Then throw all the eggs away and give them five pence and a garlic press as a reward.

Yours derivatively,

Watt Arottendev

Things are distinct not in their essence but in their appearance.

April 10th is just around the corner, and I’ve been dabbling in Guild Wars: The Original Series.

During my initial foray I was very pleased to see that ArenaNet can indeed make splendid-looking female armour without it needing to include a mini-skirt, bra, nipple tassels, thong, fishnets, Lycra leotard or nothing but a small strategically placed fig leaf.

Of course, if you want it, you have to buy it from the Guild Wars store.

I’ve also found a new lease of life in Skyrim, with various mods which improve character appearance, as well as the addition of cloaks and other cosmetic niceties, providing a new reason to go adventuring in Tamriel’s wintry province.

All of which is free, and makes me feel somewhat guilty, because I’m happy to give a little extra to ArenaNet seeing as their game and its series of expansions seems worth more than the box prices alone. With all the good will shown towards recent gaming Kickstarter projects, I wonder if players would also pay for mods to their favourite games, especially since services such as Steamworks support it.

Regardless, I’m cosmetically content, and perfectly happy pottering around in DDO, Guild Wars and Skyrim for the time being. In addition, I’m somewhat more hopeful now of being able to create a sensibly attired character in Guild Wars 2 – always nice for someone who enjoys playing female characters for more than the beholding of butt, and who doesn’t want to get hit around the head with a frying pan when their wife witnesses the buxom burlesque dancer in a chainmail thong with which the game has lumbered them.

Hatred is gained as much by good works as by evil

Poor old EA, apparently they’re the worst company in America. Worse than The South California Crack Cocaine and Heroin Company, worse even than pre-tournament favourites Puppy Kicking Inc. (motto: “We Kick Puppies!”), EA beat the Bank of America in the final vote.

Back in 2004, when Erin Hoffman’s EA Spouse post drew attention to the working practices of the industry, and when EA had a reputation of swallowing up and crushing smaller studios, it would’ve made more sense, but since John Riccitiello became CEO in 2007 they’ve improved considerably. Course they’re not perfect, they’re a big company ultimately focused on profits, but *worst* company? How could they possibly earn such a title in a series of internet polls where a comparatively small number of motivated tech-oriented people across the world could easily swamp the… oh… Right. I suppose, in hindsght, those hit hardest by the financial crisis that the Bank of America played no small part in might have been a bit more worried about finding a job, food and somewhere to live than voting in an internet poll. The slackers.

Maybe there’s a little clue to the most monstrous evil of EA in the post on The Consumerist awarding the Golden Poo:

“Traditionally, the Poo has been delivered on its little red pillow. But this year, we’ll give EA three different color options for its pillow, though in the end it’s still the same old Poo.”

Even without the explicit reference it wouldn’t be a massive leap to connect a campaign expressing displeasure with EA to the Retake Mass Effect efforts. At least they’re gamers, though, motivated by their passion for games they love, if perhaps a touch overzealous in places, unlike some other online campaigners. It seems EA have been targeted over the inclusion of same sex relationships in their games, with Star Wars: The Old Republic being particularly singled out by the Florida Family Association. There’s a link in the GamesIndistry.biz piece, I’m not going to replicate it here (oxygen of publicity and all that), but you couldn’t ask for a better example of Poe’s Law. It’s headlined by an image of RuPaul’s head superimposed on Darth Vader’s body and the question: “Will the makers of Star Wars video games create Darth VaPaula, a (mock) transgender version of Darth Vader – RuPaul, for kids to choose as their action character?” I’m pretty sure the answer is “no, you deranged fuckwits”, EA’s Jeff Brown puts it a bit more diplomatically: “In short, we do put options for same-sex relationships in our games; we don’t tolerate hate speech on our forums”.

A cynic might suggest it’s PR driven, with EA pointing to the support of the Human Rights Campaign over their stance in a response on Kotaku to the “worst company” award. With the stock price of Starbucks climbing since a “Dump Starbucks” campaign was launched to protest the coffee company’s support of same sex marriage, possibly in part because of a backlash against the original campaign, maybe it’s just a sensible business decision, but regardless of EA’s motives it doesn’t sound like the behaviour of The Worst Company In America to me.

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.

The broken road wound its serpentine coil between tall fir trees, wrapped itself around hills lush with vegetation, before stopping to drink at the bank of a wide fast-running river, deep in the forest valley below. The warrior stood at the top of the road’s descent, an index finger curled against her lips formed the question mark that punctuated her thoughts – ‘Where do I go?’

A glance behind at the path already travelled, hand sweeping up through thick red locks to scratch thoughtfully, only to find a scabbed scalp amid the matted mass of hair, tongue instinctively feeling for the ragged edges of a split lip in sympathetic accord – she winced slightly at that, spat the metallic taste onto the cobbled road.

No insight came to her. She wasn’t a ranger, couldn’t read any of the natural signs posted in the wild; her forests were found among the fields of battle, where she would fell thorny trees of metal along the banks of rivers that ran red. She shrugged the ache from her shield arm, subconsciously felt for the pommel of the sword which hung at her side, then dragged heavy hide boots one after the other down the hill.

The road dropped sharply around the next bend and plunged into the depths of the forest, trees loomed over the warrior as she trudged on into that verdant primeval hall, the testudo of the high canopy blocking much of the sun’s assault, casting the forest in a fay half-light. The place was utterly alien to her – she may as well have been walking on the surface of Vaklavia, green goddess, hanging always low in the sky to the west; although she could not see the moon now. She was used to the nature of the city, rigid and formal, where the chaos was in the people who lived there; she could deal with people. But the forest… the forest was chaos, it both oppressed and liberated, was ancient and young, raucous and silent. Her head began to spin – the remnants of a concussion? No, she didn’t believe that, she could feel the primal fear waking deep within her chest, could feel its brumal maw closing around her heart.

She knelt then, pressed her fevered brow to the cool earth at the side of the road, tried to focus her thoughts on home – on Marisha, golden hair and marble skin, waiting for her there. She prayed, not to the Gods, for she did not hold court with them; instead she prayed to the forest. She acknowledged the ancient power there, unknowable, yet in evidence all around her, asked it –pleaded with it– for a sign. She opened her eyes. Her gaze fell across the road onto something which was not of the forest. But she knew it. Steps hewn vandalously into the bank, bones littering a path lined by trees which had been hacked and scorched and broken, weeping sap from their fresh wounds. The whole place was a wound. She did not know the forest, but the forest knew her.

Head clear, heart singing, she drew her sword and smiled, and the forest showed her where to go.

I’ve been playing with mods in Skyrim recently. Despite an inordinate number of them being aimed at turning Skyrim into a cross between Conan and Barbarella (you just wouldn’t believe the painstaking effort that can go into modelling a set of three foot long nipples…), I’ve managed to filter things with the help of sites such as the deeply inspirational Dead End Thrills.

Having ‘splungthrust my mods’ as I believe the cool kids say, I tested them out by creating a new character and running through the early content of the game. I have to say, the improvements that these free community-generated tweaks and tune-ups provide are, frankly, astonishing. There’s a lot of untapped talent out there, and games like Skyrim and World of Warcraft demonstrate the level of ingenuity and creativity which can be harnessed when a game is opened up to the community of modders. Admittedly it also reveals the obsession with breasts and butts, but sometimes you have to take the rough with the smooth. Or the unfeasibly large breasts with the beautiful realistic water textures.

What surprised me most, however, was that just a short way out of the tutorial, while wandering down a familiar forest road towards Riverwood, I stumbled upon a path I hadn’t discovered before, and, upon further investigation, a den of bandits. One hundred and fifty-odd hours of play, and I’m still discovering things in this world. Right next to the starter area, even. The path was clearly there to be found, but it wasn’t signposted either by quest or gaudy railroading, I just had to open my eyes to the world, and open my mind to the possibilities of freedom presented by the game of ‘Where do I go?’.

What else have I yet to discover? I may just have to go and find out.

Thought for the day.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but for me Kickstarter is beginning to feel like a number of one night stands. Drunk with beneficent gamer’s glee, I’ve sowed my arbitrary funding oats across a number of projects now, but at mostly $10-$15 a shot I’m starting to lose track of what went where and with whom.

More to the point: in nine or so months I’ll start getting these strangers turning up, informing me that at some point in the past we were intimately involved, that I ‘gave them a donation’, before handing over a little bundle and telling me that ‘here, this is yours’.

I think the idea is pretty much Analogy Complete – it even has that layer of built-in guilt, considering that they did all the hard work over the subsequent months, and I just happened to be there at the start, throwing my sponsorship seed around with wild abandon.

Hmmm, perhaps I should instead start selecting the ‘No reward, I just want to donate’ option, the Kickstarter equivalent of donating to a sperm bank.