lategaming

Last weekend we picked up Mario Kart for the Wii for a fiver after trading in two games that we neither liked nor played (Wabbit Wampage? Cars?) and I must say it was the best fun I’ve had since I bought the device (over a year ago) and discovered Wii Sports.

The game isn’t as ‘fast’ or ‘frenetic’ as playing the game in the Arcades (which was also a lot blurrier and more confusing) but it’s hard to beat for playability especially when the other racers are friends of yours (or friends of friends).

In addition to the single player ‘Win the Cups, unlock the racers’ game, you can have up to 4 players on one Wii (as long as you have enough controllers) and you can also play on the WFC network getting up to 8 human racers either from your friends list (requiring the sharing of a Kart friend code) or playing against the multitudes of people out there in the real world.

Races, battles and coin collecting games were all good fun. I’d played half a dozen games at the weekend which meant I wasn’t totally unprepared for the game and Paul showed me some tricks (like the jump boosts, firing backwards etc) while we waited for Lee to plug his Wii into his projector at home. Once in, selection of games was very easy and there was little or no latency in the service.

Last night I hooked up with Paul, Lee and Tanya to play Wii Karting. Lee and Tanya were at home in London on Lee’s Wii showing that two people can play online from one Wii. Two people or more playing on one 32″ TV is not the best experience and can be somewhat confusing so I applaud Lee’s idea of hooking up to a projector. It would make a difference. Paul and I were online from home - him in Mallusk, me in Bangor.

The ’signpost’ communication method isn’t the best however with only a limited number of phrases available so it’s not taking advantage of the social vibe that the ‘Mii’ avatars could provide. Maybe at some point in the future they’ll provide voice chat but that’s in the future and not right now. I’m told tales that some enterprising folk are using their XBox systems as voice chat relays so they can play Mario Kart and laugh at each other. We were all Mac people so we fired up iChat (voice) and regaled each other with insults and guffaws as we dumped turtle shells, bombs and banana skins on the other racers. I reckon Skype voice would work just as well.

As for racing itself - it seems slow when watching someone playing but it gets very quick when in the race and you know you’re half a lap behind and every corner counts. The game balance is helped by the use of “weapons” like the banana skins I mentioned and homing turtle shells and other methods of wiping out other people. Every time you get hit, or stunned, or squashed or shrunken it slows you down and the sound effects are excellent.

The tracks also, range from odd to excellent and in fact none of them are bad in any way. There’s a lot of colour and some people may feel seasick with it (luckily I don’t suffer from that), there’s enough variety and obstacles to keep it from being a dry race and it seems to push the Wii in terms of what it is capable of.

Is it worth getting the wheel? I don’t know. I’ve played it with the wheel and with a third party half wheel and I think that it might be worthwhile not getting the wheel unless you want the whole experience.

All in all, it’s an excellent game and my interest in it is magnified by the potential for playing online against friends.

A recent thread on TheRPGSite talks about sexuality and sexual and/or gender bias.

Art

Cheesecake art in fantasy is a real issue. I thought it was mostly gone but there’s heaps of the damn stuff out there. You know - the male characters are ripped with muscles, the female characters are showing cleavage. It’s because the target audience for the games are adolescent males.
e.g.

That cover made quite an impression on my adolescent psyche.

Evolution

Men evolved to hunt and kill things. Women evolved to raise the children. For whatever reasons in the past, its bot a recent thing. And arguably its unnatural - look at lion prides, the women do all the hard work and the men lie around and yawn impressively.

I don’t want this to get into an argument about capability: males and females should not be in competition in certain areas. Strength for example, some women will be stronger than some men but men can achieve a higher extreme of strength than women. On the flip side, men cannot give birth or sustain another life from their bodily secretions.

Content

RPG games tend to have a lot of combat. They tend not to have a lot of romance. The thread discussed homosexual relationships but it became apparent that for a lot of people, role-playing games are not where sexual elements are discussed. It’s just not a part of many games.

Her Indoors told me she likes the ‘girly’ novels she likes because they cover themes which she says fulfill a level of escapism and cover life events that she will never again experience. Falling in love for the first time, having an affair, having to choose between two suitors. These are the stories she enjoys. They’re certainly more believable or perhaps ‘down to earth’ than the stories I enjoy (interstellar wars fought by galaxy spanning empires? secret agents working to stop the encroach of extra-dimensional aliens?). Are there many games which cover this area? Only one that I can think of. A game of “Romantic Fantasy”. It still involves a lot of swords and struggles so I don’t know how it fits in with the whole ‘romance’ thing.

Is this the central reason why the hobby is dominated by young males? Because we like the fights, the power and the glory? It becomes our escapism - so should we not cater for their escapism?

Wouldn’t there be room for a game where we take our relationship maps and our GM-less story-driven games with conflict escalation and use them to model something other than fights in the playground?

The model of relationships. The first kiss. The first time you realised you liked someone. The first time you were jealous for the affections of another. The first time your heart was broken.

Fights in the Playground. Maybe that’s exactly what we should be modeling?

Balbinus on RPG.net responds to someone asking for sourcebooks about running a campaign about the whole concept of PSI powers:

“IMO the best is a game called 23rd Letter, it’s basically Firestarter (the Stephen King book/movie) the rpg. Probably OOP but available I would have thought on ebay.”

Thanks, Balbinus!

It’s not out of print! You can buy The 23rd Letter from Key20!

http://key20.com/product.php?productid=403

…that the citizens of Perugia compelled the surrender of the citadel of Gerard du Puy, the cardinal-nephew of Pope Gregory XI, during the War of the Eight Saints with a trebuchet nicknamed the cacciaprete (”priest chaser”)?

I think that the modern day Catholic Church has dire need of this.

Today I had lunch with Mike and Jim in Kainan Cafe.

We then went round to Forbidden Planet where I refrained from buying a lot of stuff.

This is self-control, I tellya.

Found this gem when I added Pooka’s blog to my blogroll.

“In 1901, New Year’s Eve, the Stars Were Right. The Great Old Ones Returned, bringing with them all manner of being from their starry prisons. Fortunately for humanity, while the Old Ones were certainly horrible to look upon, they were not nearly as great as they would have had us believe. Intergalactic layabouts, Cosmic conmen, and Trans-temporal thieves, the Great Old Ones may be functionally immortal, but they also happen to have little work ethic.”

It’s a setting into from Spirit of the Century. Read more here.

Made me laugh. In a crowded office. Terribly embarrassing.

I’m arrogant to believe that I can write and, to be honest, most of the time the feedback has been pretty good. I like writing, it’d be nice to do it for a living (and not the stressful but boring job at $BIG_COMPANY) but them’s the breaks. In my spare time I write a lot and only a small fraction of it makes it to the blog here.

I have noticed, however, that my layout and design skills need some exercise and possibly even some help. I can appreciate good design, I just have issues doing it myself. Part of this is inspiration and part of it is time (which I have less and less of) and skill (my photoshop skills are not legendary).

Looking at the character sheets I left for download earlier this week, they belie their age. They were done in 2000 or so and were definitely more ‘tell’ than ’show’. That’s the first thing. They look like Civil Service Sickness Benefit forms. I was sent a character sheet recently that was 7 pages long and full colour. I’ve seen the pre-gen character sheets for Everway. I think I need to raise the bar considerably.

I also need an artist in general as PJ is now going to be too busy and I don’t know anyone else who knows how to hold a pen.

A real shame.

I don’t blame anyone really. Sometimes I get angry or depressed and curse my friends, my family, the company, the system, the church and anyone else I can name. But it’s a short madness and like all things, it will pass.

I haven’t slept very well in the last few days. Bouts of lethargy and a resolute stubbornness seem to possess me on these cold mornings. The coffee is too bitter and the crispy flakes of golden corn taste like ashes and feel like razorblades. It has been the same with every meal in the last week. The meat is dry and powdery, the vegetables hollow and watery. I leave most of my food untouched, I clean the plates and I plan my next repast.

I read my mail in the morning but today I let it wait until after lunch. Such is my decadence and freedom. There were some offers of cut-price firmware, live-feed porn and a flyer advertising pressurised space on a new station about five million miles from me. We wouldn’t be alone in the dark any more.

Of course, none of it does me any fucking good.

This station won’t go online for about two years and I’ll be long gone. I logged onto ChatNet and scrolled through the thousands of messages. One read, “Space Age Boy seeks Earthy Girl for Zero-G Hijinks”. That made me smile. Ten million years of evolution and still men were firing out crap chat up lines to lonely women. Was this more or less effective than a wooden club?

There was a long thread about some poor shithead stuck out in the dark, spinning around Jupiter in a damaged pod and a quickly decaying orbit. Some pitied him, some laughed and I really wanted to say something smart, something cutting that would make them blush, make them shut up, make them think. Someone had even managed to get a picture. It was a poor likeness, stupid office party from six years ago. One another thread they were running a numbers game on how long it would take for the pod to burst, how long it would be until Jupiter was seeded with my blood, sweat, piss and tears. I took a few moments and used a few tears. Nothing dramatic.

The problem with this situation is that there’ll be nothing left. I hadn’t been to the Clinic, hadn’t left my legacy in a little cup so there wouldn’t be another me. There wouldn’t be enough left of the pod to scratch an obituary and so the ChatNet onlookers would be my only witnesses. I tapped out a quick message to anyone who could read. Something simple, something regal. It would take a week to hit the Net but by then I’d be spread into a fine mist by hurricane winds in the upper atmosphere of a star that nearly was.

I can’t be saved.

Earth and Mars are months away. The closest transport could get here in time but then wouldn’t have the fuel or the facilities to effect a rescue. And if they tried, they’d join me in this slow doom. At least they are close enough to actually talk to me. I hate the heavily punctuated conversations with my family on Earth. My family haven’t called in two days. I was the black sheep of the family when I took the job and staying i touch seemed nothing more than a formality. The Company was good enough to provide me with a Counselor. She’s in her mid-forties and very good at her job, telling me to express myself, that it’s alright to cry and that it’s wrong to bottle up my anguish. After the third session even she stopped calling.

There’s a girl on that transport. She’s lovely. I know she’s just trying to comfort me but we have long talks in the evenings, we play chess and I dream of her when fatigue finally overtakes me, Her signal is getting weaker as Jupiter creates too much radio noise. I’ll see her tonight, tell her I love her and say goodbye. I’ve never said that to anyone before. Never wanted to. Never needed to. But if I don’t say it tonight then I never ever will.

Through the three-inch reinforced plastic windows I can see Jupiter with it’s great glaring red eye. I’ve never seen it so large, stretching to create an everlasting dusky plain beneath me. I’m not within the orbit of Callisto on the way down. Spiralling down.

I don’t remember a game I allegedly ran over a decade ago. Nothing at all memorable.

I think it was a superhero game/

That worries me.