There’s nothing much there yet, but the Bollywood3d web site is live. One Sanjit, apparently associated with the effort, commented on my last post on the subject. He mentioned that, yes, it’ll be possible for people in the U.S. to play, so I’ll be watching very, very closely.
2 comments July 31st, 2007
Here’s a complete spoiler for the answer to today’s challenge in the Ultimate Search for Bourne.
We’re in New York City now (the metropolis that was the solution to yesterday’s puzzle), and the briefing tells us to head back to Dater Notes to check Nicky Parson’s (buckeye2099) profile. As I guessed yesterday, the photo of a napkin with a rough map with Broadway on it (and a kiss) scribbled on it is the key. It’s named with one of Bourne’s earlier aliases—John Michael Kane (as a reader pointed out in yesterday’s comments; thanks John!). The briefing explicitly tells us to key the photo’s URL into the image processor.
Applying filter C reveals the solution: Madison Square Park. Paste this into the communication panel, and we’re done.
Edit: Note that commenters discovered that the photo can be displayed without the “www,” but the image processor requers it. Use the URL
http://www.daternotes.com/images/profile_photoAlbum/
JOHN_MICHAEL_KANE.jpg(with no line break, of course) in the image processor if you want to get it to work. You can also right-click on the link and choose “Copy Shortcut” or “Copy Link Location” or your browsers equivalent and paste it into the image processor.
If I ever said it looked as if the puzzles were getting harder, I take it back. This is absurdly easy!
Since we’re in a new city, we only get one camera. I went with the obvious choice: Madison Square Park.
7 comments July 31st, 2007
Simonc at GameSetWatch has some interesting thoughts on whether free games are a threat to the AAA game publishers. He concludes that some consumers may “get their ‘fill’ of games from the free Flash-based ones.”
Personally, I think the competition driven by free (or ad-based) games put out there by non-game companies to drum up business for their main business lines will only force the real AAA publishers to innovate (or find innovation and exploit it), and the best games will continue to thrive as they outpace the free loss leaders (though they may put in more and more ads, till they become as bloated with product placement as hit movies are today).
Wind-up toys, once a mainstay of toymakers and a delight to children, are now shoveled over the counter along with Happy Meals. But the best toymakers have gone on to create innovative and genuinely fun new toys over the years.
Add comment July 30th, 2007
People have long discussed what it’s like to play a character of a different sex in an MMORPG, and there’s not much left to say on the subject, but a post by the Infamous Brad about the treatment of his female character in City of Heroes made me realize that men playing women may be shocked my something that’s all too familiar to women players.
Brad argues that, when other (male) players think the player is a woman, they will treat that player as stupid or, if the player is assertive, call that player a bitch. To such assholes (as Brad accurately dubs them), women players serve as viable flirtation targets, and possibly as audience for long-winded instruction they don’t need. But the assholes simply don’t think real women deserve respect.
I’ve found this to be completely true, I’m afraid. About half my MMORPG characters are female, and players usually assume (wrongly) that there’s an actual woman player behind the character. When they do, some—not the majority, but a significant minority—treat me like a fool.
To some degree, I think it’s mostly players like the Infamous Brad and me—men who convincingly play female characters—that make a stink about this sort of thing. My wife plays, and plays female characters almost exclusively. She gets this sort of treatment all the time. But she doesn’t say much about it. I suspect that’s because she already deals with it in real life. Let’s face it; this sort of treatment isn’t at all unique to the anonymous online worlds where we slay dragons.
It’s endemic to academe and meeting rooms, too.
There are women players who roll with the punch, others who make a fuss even at the risk of being branded a bitch. But men simply don’t expect to have their ideas and suggestions dismissed without being considered. When men speak, they expect their contributions to be given due consideration. When they participate in an activity, they expect their efforts to be equally valued at least until they prove themselves unworthy.
So for us men, it’s absolutely shocking when we encounter it online. For women, it may be enraging, but it’s not altogether surprising.
Women simply don’t get respect from everyone. They consistently get dismissed, ignored, ridiculed for no other reason than that they’re women. Not by everyone, no. But there are enough assholes, online and off, that the experience can’t be all that unfamiliar to most women.
The real point, here, is that convincingly playing a woman may give men a chance to experience the downside. (The upside—free crap in exchange for typing /dance and acting like a complete moron in major in-game cities—is well-documented and not all that much of an upside.) Men, it’s your chance to do what Eddie Murphy did on Saturday Night Live so many years ago. (Go watch the video if you haven’t seen it. Hilarious.)
So if you’re a man eager to experience to prejudice and condescension women face regularly, roll up a female character and play her well. This is an interesting wrinkle to the roleplaying aspect of these roleplaying games, one that’s not truly available to tabletop gaming or online games with voice chat (but that is available to online interaction outside of games).
As a humorous endnote, I’ll mention here that I’ve had good success being perceived as a woman player when I play woman characters. I attribute this to a lot of the same things Brad mentions in his blog post. But I never expected it to have anything to do with my training as an editor.
Apparently, though, grammar helps! Several years ago, while playing my main in Dark Age of Camelot, a female mercenary, I formed a pretty good online friendship with another player. Eventually, he worked up the courage to ask if I was really a woman. I don’t know why, but I told him I was. “i knew it,” he wrote. “want to know why? because of the capitalization and punctuation. men don’t do that.”
Add comment July 30th, 2007
It’s been a busy weekend, so I’m just catching up with my posting.
I have to admit, though, that one of the things that kept me busy over the weekend was Space Taxi 2, a worthy sequel to the original Commodore 64 action game that came out in 1984. In a fit of nostalgia for some of the games I remembered playing in my teens—games that don’t seem to fit neatly into a single category—I Googled Space Taxi and discovered that Twilight Games has made a shareware version available for download.
The Commodore 64 was a wonderful platform for innovative computer games in the 80s, and the original Space Taxi was a prime example of why. Sure, the graphics look horribly dated, now, but I remember being impressed that the passengers actually talked in the game.
More importantly, the gameplay was a pleasant challenge. You piloted a thruster-powered taxi, ferrying passengers from platform to platform while avoiding obstacles. Using thrusters, which accelerated you only gradually, made the game feel very different from just about anything else (except maybe Lunar Lander) in terms of control. I think the top speed of the car was limited by the size of the level (hitting the edge was fatal) rather than the power of the thrusters. Gravity behaved realistically, too. Stop giving occasional up-thrusts, and your cab would start to sink toward the bottom of the screen%mdash;or wherever the gravity source for a particular level was located.
The challenge wasn’t in being super-fast or mashing your joystick button. Sure, your fuel gradually depleted and you earned less money per trip if you took too long. But surviving without crashing and making deft, gentle landings made for a better chance of success than mindless speed.
I’ve just described Space Taxi in detail in a review about Space Taxi 2 because the latter is pretty much exactly the same game. The graphics are significantly updated, the physics feels a bit more realistic, and the possibility of mouse-based control has been added, but the gameplay, down to some exact mission layouts, is identical. When I started playing, even though it’s been twenty-three years since I last played, I knew exactly what to do and how to do it.
I have only one real complaint: you can’t see the whole level at a time. The screen scrolls as you fly toward the edge. I experimented with windowed and full-screen mode, and neither seemed to allow me to avoid this. On levels with lots of obstacles, it becomes almost impossible to negotiate some tricky paths without having failed them once before. Seems to me it would have been a simple matter to shrink everything down just a bit so the entire level could be viewable at once.
I asked my wife to give the game a try. She’s a gamer (now), but she’d never played or even heard of Space Taxi. She gave it one try—and we both had some good laughs watching her cab careen wildly about the screen as she got a feel for the controls—and then declared she’d had enough. Her number one complaint was that her fingers hurt from using the arrow keys (I asked her not to use the mouse so she’d have to use the landing gear, an added dimension to gameplay that’s eliminated in the mouse-based version). Perhaps if we’d used a real keyboard instead of the laptops, this wouldn’t have been a problem.
She, too, disliked being unable to see the entire level at once, and in the end decided that as it got more and more difficult, she’d find it less and less fun. I disagree; I think as she got a better feel for the cab she’d find that the game favors finesse. The game has thrills, but they’re the thrill of successful and diligent navigation, not near-impossible button mashing.
Twilight Games has a free and very enjoyable demo available for Windows (nothing native for Mac, I’m afraid). You have to shell out twenty bucks for the full version. Seems a bit pricey to me, but since this game (more a remake than a sequel) updates the game without ruining what made it fun, I may just be tempted.
Add comment July 30th, 2007
In today’s challenge in the Ultimate Search for Bourne, which I’ll spoil completely here. Having solved the Day 10 puzzle, we’re rewarded with a video congratulating us on finishing up with London. Our briefing tells us Simon Ross has led us to a briefcase belonging to Jason Bourne that contains a crossword puzzle, then links to it here and advises us that we have lots of tools to use to figure out the answer.
Once again, the crossword puzzle (which is surprisingly easy) is basically a red herring. Some words are already filled out (like “silencer” and “terabyte”) and the correct “canada” has been crossed out. The word “metropolis” made me suspect the correct answer right away, but so far the puzzle itself doesn’t really matter. The key is not to solve the puzzle or use any fancy Google Searches on the words. All you have to do is process the image in the Decryption image filter and the answer appears, a de-scrambling of seven random letters from the puzzle.
And that answer is New York. Pop it in the message transmitter, and you’re ready to place your cameras.
I won’t be too surprised if this puzzle features in an upcoming challenge in the next few days, with a slightly more involved solution involving actually solving some of it, or at least with hints pointing to some of the completed clues. We may be going back to Nicky Parson’s Dater Notes profile, too. There’s an image with “Broadway” scribbled on a napkin arranging a meeting. There are other Broadways in the world, but New York’s is probably the most famous. The question is, who’s John Michael Kane (the filename of that photo)?
My spy shop guess from last week didn’t work with camera placement, so I went with my two successes (the London Eye and Waterloo Station), then chose St Paul’s Cathedral and the Tower of London since they’ve been mentioned before.
5 comments July 30th, 2007
Okay, this trailer for the 2007 Beowulf movie looks pretty cool. I have no idea what they’ve done to the story. I mean, I saw Grendel in there, and the dragon. And I can guess at which actors are playing which characters.
But this is something very, very different from the original poem.
I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. The poem is, like, 1500 years old. They’re allowed to make updates and play with a classic. And if Neil Gaiman had something to do with the adaptation—which he did—it will probably be a spectacular film.
But also a strange one.
Add comment July 27th, 2007
Just a quick mention of an episode of the Heroscape ScapeTalk podcast featuring a twenty-minute interview with Heroscape designers Chris Nelson and Craig Van Ness. If you enjoy the game and you’re interested in hearing some thoughts from two key designers, be sure to check it out. They mostly talk about the upcoming Heroscape Marvel Edition, but there are a few other useful details in there . . . and a funny quiz.
Add comment July 27th, 2007
More than twenty years ago, Orson Scott Card published Ender’s Game, so why am I reviewing it now? Well, partly because, after twenty years, I suspect that some few newer fans of science fiction may actually not have encountered the book yet. But I have a better reason.
Ender’s Game is the best science-fiction novel focused on games and gaming that has ever been written.
The book isn’t just about games, which is part of why it succeeds. It recounts the experiences of Andrew Wiggin, who goes by “Ender.” Only six years old, he’s taken to a Battle School in orbit around Earth to train for an officer’s position in the International Fleet, the united interstellar army dedicated to defending humanity from the hostile insectoid aliens known as Buggers.
Games serve as a primary means of education in the book. Students spend their free time playing video games in a shared arcade or on their own “desks”—effectively, networked laptops. All the games, apparently, teach small lessons in strategy, tactics, and even more academic subjects. Card gives us just enough detail about the video games that we can imagine them as fun and innovative, even after twenty years of innovative game development have elapsed.
The book focuses especially on a zero-G battle simulation game that is the obsession of all the students. Divided into armies, the students vie with one another to achieve top rankings in various categories. Naturally, Ender performs exceptionally well.
But the game sounds damn fun. Card believably explores the physics of the game, imagining what would and would not work in such detail that you can almost feel the thrill of tactical combat. Someone could easily use the book to make a top-notch video game today. Almost all the design work is already done within the pages of the book.
I’m not much of an athlete (and I never want to be a soldier), but if I had the chance to participate in a zero-G game of human pseudo-soccer with guaranteed non-lethal guns and suits that freeze when they’re hit, I wouldn’t hesitate.
Games even influence Ender’s psychological growth. A vivid fantasy roleplaying game effectively serves as Ender’s personal psychiatrist, though he doesn’t realize it. And although the book came out well before MMOs had grown into their own, this psych program has surprising multiplayer dimensions. But that’s part of one of the book’s big twists, so I don’t want to go into detail.
The story itself is compelling enough that I’ve managed to convince many readers who dismiss science fiction as “kids stuff” that some of it is damn fine literature. Indeed, Ender’s Game has everything such readers fear: laser guns, bug-like aliens, spaceships, and more.
But it also has real heart. Card gives Ender, his classmates, his family back home, and his instructors real stories. Not one comes off as a two-dimensional villain, and the heroes carefully examine their own motivations, not taking their successes for granted for even a moment.
Card also engagingly tackles tough philosophical issues surrounding war. It presents a “just” war, but doesn’t shy away from the fact that war is awful and that even a just war is barely just. As does Ender, the book struggles to find new ways to solve problems, new resolutions to age-old conflicts, and new understandings of just why people fight and why they might not always have to.
Whether in the skirmishes in Battle School or the Usenet flame wars Ender’s siblings conduct back on Earth, the book wrestles with philosophical questions as part of the story. The narrative doesn’t come to a screeching halt while the author climbs on a soap box. In fact, the books seems to be a genuine exploration on the author’s part of some tough questions, not a final statement in the matter.
(In the past two decades, Card’s politics have become, to me, thoroughly reprehensible, though he and I may have started out with similar viewpoints. I can’t understand why he believes what he does today, knowing him through his work and a couple of brief personal encounters. But I know he believes it, and sincerely, so I won’t attack him for deceitful motives.)
Card clearly loves games. (They’ve featured big in some of his other books, like Lost Boys.) In fact, as I understand it, he’s worked a bit in the video game industry.
In Ender’s Game, he presents a convincing case for games as educational tools. Sure, they’re being used to train soldiers. (Aside: America’s Army was a marketing tool, not a training tool.) But the book makes you believe that games are a powerful learning tool, maybe one of the most powerful.
With the MacArthur Fellowship granting over a million dollars to fund a school exploring games as teaching tools (the latest I’ve read about it is here, in an article by Robert Torres, one of the recipients, though it’s been in the news for weeks) and scientists and game companies alike exploring and marketing “serious games,” it’s astonishing to look back twenty years and see such a powerful argument in favor of educational games.
And I’ll reiterate here as I did before that the games are fun.
The book is fun, too. If you haven’t read it yet, grab a copy and settle down for a just plain good read. And if you have, maybe it’s time to read it again. Even when you know all the surprises and twists, you’ll find pleasure in watching the story unfold. And it’s fun to spot the gaming innovations that Card didn’t imagine. While reading, ask yourself if the book would have been different had someone put out a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game in 1985.
Add comment July 27th, 2007
| I don’t just like games; I’m a foodie as well. On Fridays, I publish a drink or cocktail recipe that I enjoy as an accompaniment to some sort of game. These aren’t necessarily drinks I’ve invented, but they are superior potations that gamers who tipple are liable to enjoy. |
In a far-future science-fiction roleplaying game (it was basically the Traveller
She drank—often and heavily—as one of the few escapes from the discomforts of her physical disadvantages and the need to keep her illegal genetic modifications hidden. Loyal to the long-dead civilization of her ancestors, the Greeks, influenced her choice of potables. She opted for the strongly anise-flavored ouzo.
I don’t like anise. And I’ve never tasted anything with a stronger anise flavor than ouzo. Inspired by the (apocryphal?) story of method actor Dustin Hoffman insisting on eating garlic soup while he starred in Death of a Salesman
Many countries have a national anise-flavored drink (Sambuca, pastis, raki, anisette, and so on). This Greek variety is very sweet without becoming syrupy. As I said, I’m no fan of anise, but I actually do like ouzo from time to time. (My wife hates olives but love olive tapenade, which tastes more like olives than olives themselves. Perhaps this is a parallel case.)
I’ve never been to an ouzerie (nor to Greece, for that matter), but I can recommend that ouzo is best enjoyed cold, with a small glass lasting a long time.
And I can certainly recommend bringing a character-appropriate snack or drink to the gaming table (with enough to share for those who are interested, of course). For instance, I knew a guy who brought pickled herring in sour cream to any session in which he played his Viking character. This Scandinavian delicacy repulses most people who hear about it (though I loved before I became a vegetarian) energized the roleplaying. The other characters were from more “civilized” parts of the game world, and the rising smell of vinegar-preserved ocean fish and thick sour cream added greatly to their disdained reactions to this northern barbarian.
Next time I play, I think I’ll create a character who enjoys outrageously expensive single-malt scotch!
Add comment July 27th, 2007
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More than twenty years ago, Orson Scott Card published 
.) In fact, as I understand it, he’s worked a bit in the video game industry.