Merry Christmas, O Thief of Time!
More present blogging. I have a love/hate relationship with Sid Meier’s Civ series. It would be too simplistic to say I loved 1 and 2 and hated 3 and 4, but it’s not too far off.
Civ is basically two games for me. At first, it’s like an ant farm…exploring, building cities and then making them pretty with roads and farms and things. I interact with my neighbors as little as possible.
Then, when we get to modern-ish times, I look around at the rest of the world. If I’m lucky — due to chance and geography — I’m the most advanced civ on the planet. Then I end the game crushing my opponents like bugs.
Man, I loved that animation at the end, with the guillotine descending upon the heads of my enemies. More smiting!
Well, as of Civ 3, some a-historical lefty idiot got hold of the gameplay. All civs advance technologically at about the same rate (Huh. I guess Firaxis never heard of Papua, New Guinea). This totally ruined the “crushing my enemies like bugs” part of my fun.
Worse, the AI in Civ 4 was so aggressive, you had to build settlers like a madwoman and fling them all over the world or you’d be squeezed right off the continent, so that one even ruined the “ant farm” part of my fun.
So! Civ 5? Very, very pretty. Easier to learn and maneuver. So far, though, it seems to suffer the same aggressive AI and lack of civilizing unevenness.
Ah, but one of the best parts of the franchise is how modifiable it is. The early versions, the text and pictures were simply left lying around where you could get at them and fiddle. I discovered this quite by accident and had a stoat of a time with it.
I would replace my preferred ruler picture with my own face and called myself the Grand Exalted Queen of Clan Weasel or something. Then I’d change the conversations. Instead of, “would you like to trade iron for furs?” I’d make Bismarck say things like, “I say, what fetching panties, Weasel. And how jaunty they look on your head!”
This could be awkward if I forgot what it really meant, but totally worth it for the enhancement to gameplay.
Modifying the new versions is more complex, but there’s much more you can do. Firaxis is wise enough to encourage modding and provide tools to make it possible to get under the hood. There’s even a Civ Mod Wiki going. Stand by for weasel enhancements.
CRUSH THEM! CRUSH THEM LIKE BUGS!!
By the way, it’s clearly Patrick Stewart doing all the voiceovers, but he’s not credited on the box or anywhere else I can find. Odd. Must be a contractual thing.
December 31, 2010 — 12:14 am
Comments: 25
TIMESUCK!
Behold, Scrabb.ly, the massive multiplayer online Scrabble game. That’s a zoom-out snapshot of the map, showing our little corner. It’s a couple of months old now, and whole thing is much, much bigger — passed four million tiles on Sunday. Kind of cool to look at.
Because it’s multiplayer, the rules — and strategies — are a little different. It’s always your turn. After the first word you play, you can only play off the tiles you’ve already played. Other people’s tiles appear grayed out. The only way to play their tiles is to bridge your word to their word — and then, you only free up the one tile you touch.
In other words, if you get surrounded, it’s a stone cold booger to break free.
The square in the middle, up there? That’s us about an hour ago. We had to spell like a bastard to get down and below that guy on the left, spelling at us hard. One day, I’m going to wake up socked in tight, several tiles deep, and it’ll be all over.
So the strategy is: make word shapes that are easy to build off, and spell your way away from the continent. Fast.
You code monkeys may enjoy this article on the why’s and how’s of building Scrabb.ly.
October 27, 2010 — 9:58 pm
Comments: 28
…and it only took me 24 years…
I bought my first computer in 1985. It was completely retarded. It could do nothing. But I didn’t know that; I thought I was Buck Fucking Rogers. After several months of booting it up and staring at the C:> prompt, though, even I got a little restless. Then I went to my first computer fair (goodness, I was impressed by the smell and, for some reason, the fact there were several nuns attending) and bought a fistful of shareware programs on floppy disk.
One of which was a game called Hack — thereafter known as The Game That Ate A Year Of My Life. I still have that original floppy, by the way, which may be the world’s only surviving copy of the original IBM port. Wish I could read it.
Anyhow, Hack (later Nethack) was an astonishingly complex game. I won’t even say “for the time” — it’s still one of the richest gameplay universes ever hacked together (which is why, incidentally, it was called Hack). It’s the familiar Rogue formula — you go into a dungeon, fight monsters, retrieve an amulet and skedaddle. But the wands, potions, magic scrolls, traps, monsters, characters, weapons, armor, food and everything else you encounter along the way are designed to interact with each other in all sorts of ways, planned and not planned.
Nethack is one of my all-time favorite games, one I’ve been playing since 1200 baud was smokin’ fast. — Actor Wil Wheaton
Because Hack was different every time. It wasn’t played on a fixed layout; the program had a formula for generating random dungeons. It could do things that surprised its own programmers (though the development team was famous for anticipating just about every weird-ass thing that might happen in gameplay).
Because it was essentially a game of text messages, it could be HUGE and hugely complex, even on the most primitive PC’s. But your character was a letter that you moved around with the arrow keys, so it was easy to learn and visual enough to kick your imagination in the ass.
In short, NetHack 3.1.3 is the most elaborate role-playing environment you are ever likely to explore. This is a place to return again and again, each time for a different experience. You’re really going to have to play it for a year or two and see for yourself. — “Fatal Distractions” by David Gerrold
The journey was so much fun, I happily played it for 24 years without ever winning a game. Oh, I got close. I once escaped the dungeon with a cheap plastic imitation of the Amulet of Yendor. Several times I got the amulet but did something incredibly stupid on the way out — stepped on a dead cockatrice and turned to stone, or ate one too many food rations and choked to death. This is a phenomenon known on Usenet as YASD — Yet Another Stupid Death. And every new incarnation of the game was more complex and added sidequests and pitfalls.
Thank you for the latest release of gradewrecker. My GPA just went in the corner and shot itself. — USENET posting, author unknown
Meanwhile, Berkeley began to ship its version of Linux with Hack on — my old friend, the simple original version that ate my 1986. I discovered it by accident on one of my shell accounts. And a mere two years and several hundred games later — this Sunday, specially for the solstice — I finally escaped the dungeon with the Amulet of Yendor!
It was…a howling letdown. After all the late nights, the YASDs, the near misses, the little dogs and shopkeepers and orcs and killer bees and demons and dragons, it all boils down to this:
Now what? Trying to beat the newest (and last) version, of course.
June 24, 2009 — 8:23 pm
Comments: 33
Here, kid — go play with a nut on a string
Behold, conkers. Horse chestnuts. Allen brought them up. British schoolchildren once played a game where they threaded chestnuts on a string and took turns swinging one against another until one or the other cracked.
Apparently, the main thrill was getting your knuckles rapped with a near miss. Which is why I say “played” — HealthNSafety Nazis have outlawed them in many school jurisdictions. Or mandated — yes — safety glasses.
Wikipedia (where I nicked these nifty photos) has a surprisingly interesting article on the game, including trivia. Which is how you know a Brit must have written the article: International Conker Championship trivia. More lily-gilding than most Americans can manage.
Go read it. It’s too hot in here to excerpt.
Incidentally, sending me home with a pocket full of conkers every Fall, as Uncle B does, is muy illegal. You’re not supposed to smuggle nuts across international borders. I told him he’d made me an accidental scofflaw. And he said, “what’s a scofflaw?” And I had to explain that scofflaw is a bogus, make-believe word for people who broke a bogus, make-believe law.
July 8, 2008 — 3:42 pm
Comments: 9
Kicked to the curb: the Doomercycle
Today is garbage day (and a very happy garbage day to you). This week’s Casualty of the Week: the Doomercycle.
Let’s see. Doom was released in 1993, so it was maybe thirteen years ago I wondered if I could cross-breed a bike with a mouse and come up with a way to get some exercise while fragging zombies. (Whoop! There it goes. I just heard a door slam and looked up to see the Doomercycle ride off into the sunset. That didn’t take long. G’bye…! <snf>)
See, one variety of mouse works like this: it’s got two little spoked wheels inside, one for uppy-downy and one for sidey-sidey. When the mouseball moves, it turns those wheels. Each wheel has an LED on one side and a sensor on the other. So when the wheel turns, spokes interrupt the light, and the sensor sees blink-blink-blink and it knows you’re moving.
That wouldn’t be quite good enough. That would tell the sensor how fast you were moving, but not in which direction. Each wheel actually has two sensors; when it sees AB-AB-AB it knows you’re moving forward, and BA-BA-BA means you’re going backward.
I thought…spokes. Wheels. What if you took the uppy-downy wheel, and put the sensor on one side of a real bicycle wheel and the light on the other? That would give you running forward and backward, all you need for Doom. You could perch the keyboard on the handlebars for all the other commands. I went to Starvation Army and picked up the used exercise bike you see above for $15.
It took a couple of tries, but as it turned out, no soldering was necessary. I was kinda bummed, to tell you the truth. It was too easy. See, there was a little socket where an odometer or something used to go, and all I had to do was jam the mouse’s own uppy-downy wheel into it, and duct tape the circuit board in place around it. Voilà!
I had feared all along there would be a scale problem; that the wheel would move too fast and overwhelm the sensor. But, no…it worked eerily well, right out of the gate. It recognized slow, fast and in-between. It played a kick-ass game of Doom.
I can’t say as I got miles of exercise out of it, though. In order for the wires to reach, all the components were balanced precariously against each other. Too much enthusiasm would’ve put a handlebar through my monitor, or sent me ass over teakettle into the radiator. Eventually, I used it with a laptop balanced across the bars, but that was VERY insecure. It needed a sturdy platform or something, but the proof-of-concept was enough to scratch my itch. Then laptops stopped having serial port and that was that.
But it worked! So nuts to my boss, who laughed! And, dammit, my electric sneakers would’ve worked, too! I’m sure of it!
August 20, 2007 — 6:11 pm
Comments: 22
Life and Death (now on 5 1/4″ floppies!)
Behold! One of the many ancient boxes of software that hit the junkpile this weekend: Life and Death for the IBM PC. This was a 1988 surgery simulator. Games of the era were always a disappointment; software boxes promised so much and computers were capable of so little. I had an instinct that it was all headed someplace good, and I kept hoping the next game I bought would keep its promises, but they were all bitterly stupid. Bitterly, expensively stupid.
L&D was no exception, but it was cleverer than most. It had some nice touches. They tucked a surgical mask and latex gloves in the box. The instructions included a pretty good history of surgery. The copy protection dealie was in the form of a little pager.
Gameplay didn’t entirely suck, either. Basically, you had two operations you were capable of performing: an appendectomy and some brain surgery thing I don’t remember very well. The game was in two parts. In the first, you examined patients until you found one who needed an operation you could perform. Then you did the operation.
It was a matter of memorizing the actual steps in the actual operation: grabbing the right loop of intestine, popping out the bit with the appendix in, propping it up with gauze, clamping it off…and so on. During which, the EKG would occasionally spike or the patient’s BP would drop and you’d have to shoot him up with the appropriate counteractant.
The flaw, as with so many computer programs, was that it wasn’t enough to know what you needed to do. You needed to know how to tell the computer you had the right answer; which precise, non-obvious clump of pixels you had to touch to activate a particular control. And it all happened in realtime. If you killed somebody (this happened a lot), they sent you to ‘tard medical school for a while before you could come back and try again.
I think I had a 286 at this point — a surplus, genuine IBM AT from work. Home computers of that era could make boops and beeps at various pitches, simulating music, but they absolutely could not deal with an analog signal, play recorded sounds or mimic speech.
So about two in the a.m., I use my simulated hand to palpate a virtual abdomen, and the patient screams, “ooo!” I think I screamed “ooo!” too! Hell-o? Computers cannot do that! I poked that poor virtual lady with the bum appendix over and over to make her squeal. It was a grinding, unnatural sound, like they’d overclocked a chip or thrown the transmission into reverse or something…but unmistakably a human voice. A female human voice. Amazing.
I bet it took one whole floppy disk to make it do that.
August 13, 2007 — 6:28 am
Comments: 28
Shall we play a game?
Oh, man. Here’s one for the I Wish I’d Thought of That pile: Victimhood Poker. Ever wonder why it’s okay when Muslims stone women to death, but not okay when they murder dusky persons in Darfur? It’s because blacks rank higher than Muslims, but Muslims rank higher than women. Word.
Get complete rules of the game at the Dicks List.
Finally, player 4 receives a hand of Black, American Indian, Muslim, Transgendered and Gay. This is the most valuable 5 card hand in the game of Victimhood Poker, and is commonly referred to as a Brown University Bash. A Brown U. Bash is worth a whopping 58 points, since a Gay Transgendered Black Native American Muslim is the best initial victim possible in the game.
Found via Small Dead Animals, my favorite Canuckian blog.
June 4, 2007 — 8:18 am
Comments: 8
I. Rule. The. World.
I’m bored with me and my stupid problems. I’m going to play computer games tonight.
I bought myself a copy of Civilization IV. I know, I know…it’s a two year old game now. I’m too old to pay gamers’ money for video cards these days, so it’s the geriatric lineup for me.
Actually, I bought myself two copies of Civilization IV. Because why? Because I’m a drunk, that’s why. I ordered one copy and several days later, I woke up thinking, “I bought something neat on Amazon ‘buy it used’ last night. I wonder what it was?” I didn’t check. This happens to me a lot, and I never second guess it. I walked around for days with a happy “a special surprise is in the mail” feeling. Then it came.
If I lived in Puritan times, they’d make me spend the rest of my life with the game box pinned to my hat and “Putrid Drunkarde” sewn across my pinafore in lime green cross-stitch.
Anyhoo. I was a huge fan of Civ I (and II). It was like a magic ant farm. I could explore the world and nurture my people and build a great civilization. I was far enough ahead of the AI that I never got my ass completely kicked and most always played until the time limit ran out with no clear winner. I cultivated my cities, conquered a little around the edges of my territory, enjoyed watching my nation grow from mud huts to space stations. I was a benevolent, leisurely dictator. It was the game SimCity should’ve been but somehow never was.
And every once in a while, I would draw down a happy, blessèd game, where accidents of geography and the luck of the draw handed me the ultimate prize. Where my more tech-savvy rivals spent the Dark Ages kicking each other’s asses and the only nations left standing by Victoria’s day were relics of the stone age, shaking flint spears and ululating while Mighty Exalted Weaseltanks squished them like bugs.
I. Ruled. The. World.
Good times.
When I got Civ III, I was delighted by the graphics and thoroughly pissed off by the gameplay. It was as though Sid Meier had let loose a bunch of ignorant twenty-something kindergarten teachers on his AI. Suddenly, the NPC’s were horribly aggressive about territory. No more leisurely exploration of the planet; if you didn’t plop down half-baked cities as fast as humanly possible — some time before the Iron Age — your neighbors swiftly corraled you within unsustainable borders.
And technology? Every culture in the world developed scientifically at exactly the same pace. The reviews described this as “more realistic.” Meh. Anybody at Firaxis ever heard of Papua Fucking New Guinea?
So I held off on IV. The reviews were glowing, but they glowed for that turd of a III, too.
Wish me luck. I’m…umm…screw it. I think I’ll just read a book tonight.
May 2, 2007 — 5:55 pm
Comments: 8
Wherein Weasel makes a fancy party hat
Sarah D. to the rescue. She teleported me out of the naughty scary place and into a community college for Second Life newbies. Here you can click on various kiosks and posters to download notecards explaining how to do stuff. There are live classes. Nobody is wearing exogenitals. It’s cool.
Then she took me to the closest sandbox. A sandbox is an area in which you may create and manipulate objects. She reached into her inventory, flung a ballpark frank on the ground, scaled it to the size of a sofa and sat demurely on the edge of it, typing explanations at me with hairy paws.
I should mention, communication is by ascii text (for now). When you hit the chat button and type, you hear clickity-clickity sounds and your avatar hands rise up and play air-keyboard. You look like the silly boo-boo you truly are. It’s hysterical.
Then my hour was up and I had to go.
Next afternoon, I went directly to the sandbox. Right click on the ground and choose “Create” to get the modeling menu. This resembles, not surprisingly, a cut-down version of an application like 3D Studio Max. You got your shape primitives (“prims” in SL-speak) — spheres, cubes, toruses, whatever — that you stick together and carve 
away from and apply textures to in order to build stuff. There are many textures already in your library for free, or you can upload new ones of your own (for a $L fee). There are also particle systems and atmospherics (fire, water, smoke) and behaviors (scripts), but basics first!
First, I jammed a red sphere onto a marble cone and made a pretty party hat. Whee! I’m a beautiful fairy princess!
When I model something in Max, I typically see four windows simultaneously: my object from the front, the top, the side, and the camera’s point of view. Here, you have to pan your camera around continually to get the same 360º understanding. Working from the front, my hat appeared to be jammed firmly on my head, but the overhead view revealed that it was flying fifteen feet out in front of me. Mmm. Rookie mistake.
Next, I applied one of the textures I found in my inventory. 
It was called moss-something. It was a mostly alpha (i.e. transparent) rendering of some hanging Spanish-mossy stuff and, applied to my compound object, the red stayed red, the green stayed green and transparent transparent.
Neat. This was a jaunty, plumey effect. I look like Koo Koo the Bird Girl! Thus, delighted with myself, ended day 3.
Wednesday is, apparently, Retarded Day on Second Life. They do system overhauls on Wednesdays, after which nothing works for shit. Or so I gather from reading the angry comments on their blog. Never mind. My task today was a simple one: build a hat better suited to my dignity and station in life.
See you soon! Why? Because we like you!
March 8, 2007 — 2:14 pm
Comments: 9
On the grid, off the grid
I’m only allowing myself an hour a day on Second Life. I know my obsessiveness too well. Let’s not wake up that monster.
After I got dressed, I was whisked away to a place called Orientation Island. Unfortunate name; I wondered if I was being sent to take gay lessons. But no, it’s a series of twelve basic skill tutorials. You get a star for completing each one, after which, the instructions say, you are given a passport and allowed to wander freely around the world.
I got eleven stars, but it wouldn’t give me the twelfth. Flying. Yes, you can fly…very cool. But I flew through that stupid tutorial six times and it wouldn’t give me my goddamn star. “Stuck,” I thought. These programs do get stuck. Maybe if I asked it to teleport me home — wherever that is — and back again, it would reset itself.
Uh-oh. When I got home (where is that, anyway?), I did a search for “Orientation Island” to teleport back. It returned, like, a hundred of them. And I was refused permission to enter every one I tried. Did I have to find the particular Orientation Island I started on?
Just for shits, I tried going someplace totally different, at random, and it let me. I found myself standing in some kind of public square, empty but for me and a person with breasts and an enormous set of male genitalia worn on the outside of its pants. Golly, Toto. I don’t think we’re in the tutorial any more.
I’m free!
But I don’t have a passport.
Swell. I’m an undocumented avatar.
— 8:08 am
Comments: 1