Posts tagged games - Entropy and Ecstasy

Hitman: Absolution

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 21:50:44 GMT

Hitman: Absolution is a stealth/action game about the titular assassin wherein you sneak around trying to kill your way through your former employers after going rogue. The engine is ridiculously smooth, and the game is simply bursting with creative ways to kill your targets, though silently garroting them and dragging the body off to a dark corner to dispose of it is probably the most satisfying. The more linear sections that seemed to force direct confrontation were decidedly less enjoyable. I really wanted 15 more levels like The King of Chinatown and unfortunately, there were only really one or two other spots that came close in the rest of the game.

Verdict

Sneaking around garroting battle nuns and dragging them into the bushes is not quite as fun as bushwhacking heavies and sicking tigers on their friends, but still absolutely worth playing.

Far Cry 3

Sun, 10 Feb 2013 13:30:15 GMT

Far Cry 3 is the most fun I've had playing a video game this year. It is a sandbox where you take the role of an American tourist stranded on an island in the south Pacific that's crawling with pirates, drug dealers, and human traffickers. Your friends are captured by the Big Bad, resulting in your going on a roaring rampage of revenge, rescuing your friends, and killing every pirate you see with a big freaking knife. Kind of like Just Cause 2 meets Assassin's Creed.

Stuff I liked:

The stealth and the recon. There are pirate outposts scattered around the island which you can retake to help liberate the island, and reduce your likelihood of being randomly accosted by pirates. While attacking these outposts, you can carefully sneak up on them from basically any angle, and scope out the position of the pirates with your camera. This gives you a good idea of the lay of the land, how many pirates you're going to need to fight, and where they are.

You can then sneak off, thin out the ranks with your sniper rifle, and sneak up behind guards and stab them in the back. Basically there is actual payoff for carefully studying your enemy and coming up with a plan to eliminate them quietly.

The weapons. While the weapons themselves are not necessarily particularly memorable, you get to pick the load-out that suits your style of play which is something I really appreciate. Lots of games railroad you into carrying the basic assault rifle, and then making you pick through the corpses of your enemies to find the gun that actually suits you. Furthermore most of the weapons are customizable with a number of attachments which gives you the ability to further specialize your load-out to be truly suited to your style of play.

The exposition. While the narrative may be more than a little bit over the top, for the most part the game explains things to you while you have control of your character. This is in stark contrast to Max Payne 3, which bombards you with freaking cut scenes all the time.

Stuff I didn't like:

The story missions. While the story missions aren't particularly bad, they are much more likely to railroad you into blasting your way through tons of dudes, rather than outflanking them, or stealthily taking them by surprise, and I find both of the latter two approaches much more satisfying.

The boss fights. They're a bunch of stupid-god-damned quick time event driven bullshit cut scenes. You know, it might actually be satisfying to sneak up on the big-bad's stronghold, and put a bullet through his head from the next hill over before disappearing into the jungle... but no, you've got to let him talk you to death while you play poker. Fuck that.

Verdict

Sneaking around the jungle and stabbing heavily armoured dudes with a big knife is the most fun I've had with a video game so far this year. You should check it out.

Video Games in 2013

Sun, 10 Feb 2013 11:50:15 GMT

This is a ranking of the games that I have played in 2013. It's pretty subjective and is mostly about how much fun I had while playing it. Also, these are games that I played in 2013, many if not most of them will have come out before then, because there really are not that many games that get me to drop $60 so that I can play them on release day.

Far Cry 3
Hitman: Absolution
Resistance 3
Max Payne 3
Spec Ops: The Line

Tomes of Knowledge

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 21:01:29 GMT

Aura moderate divination; CL 11 Slot none; Price 2,500gp; Weight 5 lb.

Each of these thickly bound books contains a wealth of knowledge related to a particular subject area: Appraise, a single Knowledge, Linguistics, Spellcraft, or Survival. By consulting the tome, a process that takes at least 5 minutes but may take longer for particularly difficult questions, the user gains a +5 competence bonus on related skill checks with respect to a specific question or task. Furthermore, consulting the relevant tome allows the user to retry a previously failed knowledge check, as it may contain knowledge that even the most educated do not know.

Known tomes:

Stop Getting Ripped Off: A Practical Guide to Assessing the Value of Things (Appraise)
The Rarer the Better: Collected Arcana (Arcana)
Aberrations and Oozes: A Field Guide to Dungeoneering (Dungeoneering)
Building Things: Theory and Practise (Engineering)
The Tribes of Golarion: People and Places (Geography)
A Brief History of Time: Thassilon, Earthfall, and More (History)
Philosophiæ Naturalis: A Short Guide to the Natural World (Nature)
The Pocket Guide to Heraldry (Nobility)
Angels and Demons: Outsiders and the Planes (Planes)
Comparative Religion: Understanding the Heretics Around You (Religion)
Metasyntactic Analysis: An Introduction (Linguistics)
What was that? A Beginner’s Guide to Identifying Magical Effects (Spellcraft)
Shelter, Water, Food: Surviving in the Wilderness (Survival)

Requirements Craft Wondrous Item, Divination or Legend Lore, creator must have 5 ranks in the relevant skill; Cost 1,250gp

Pony Express

Sun, 18 Nov 2012 13:13:04 GMT

Hirati wakes up, gets dressed, and walks down to the post office. Like everyday, she grabs hold of the reins of two large workhorses, each loaded down with heavy packs. She concentrates on the stables of the Post Office in Absalom. There’s a brief flash and she’s gone. A second later she arrives in Absalom, exchanges her horses for two fresh ones likewise loaded down with heavy packs, and returns to Katapesh. On her way out, she collects her day’s pay: 5000 crowns, and heads to the Satin Kiss to make her favorite harlot very happy, and very rich.

A level 14 wizard can cast Greater Teleport twice per day, taking two horses each loaded down with up to 2100 pounds of gear. That means that she can move 4200 pounds of gear back and forth between any two cities on the planet before breakfast, spend the rest of her day as she pleases and sleep in her own bed that night. Now she’s going to want about 5,000gp to do it, which works out to about 0.65gp/lb, or 4cp for a letter.

... now that’s not the kind of price you’re going to use to move potatoes or grain, but there are things for which it’s worthwhile. For quality manufactured goods, exotic substances, magic items, and information the timeliness and availability may more than make up for the cost:

Postal service: Letters are collected locally, transported to a hub city where they are routed to the closest post office, and then delivered by horse. Letters might cost as little as 1sp to send, and deliveries between major centers could happen as often as daily. While an unskilled labourer may balk at spending a day’s wages on sending a letter, such a cost would be easily within reach of any skilled craftsman, and not even worth thinking about for a merchant or aristocrat.
Mail order magic items: Wouldn’t the member’s of the Arcanist’s Circle love to have access to the markets in Absalom or Katapesh? Wouldn’t your average adventurer love to be able to procure exactly the item they need, for a fair price, in a reasonable amount of time without having to trek half-way across the continent?
Auctions: Selling something rare, and expensive? Hema’s Auction House will list it for you in Art and Oddities Monthly (delivered to thousands of discerning buyers around the world) as well as handle the bidding by post for a reasonable fee. Looking to buy, a subscription costs a mere 10gp per month, and gives you the opportunity to bid on some of the most beautiful, powerful, and rare objects in existence.

Impractically Large Weapons

Wed, 14 Nov 2012 06:45:42 GMT

A variety of enchantments that allow your characters to wield impractically large weapons:

Light

A light weapon is treated as one size category smaller than it actually is for purposes of determining whether or not a given character can wield it effectively.

Moderate transmutation; CL 3th; Craft Magic Arms and Armor, Reduce Person; Price +1 bonus.

Heavy

A heavy weapon deals damage as if it was one size category larger than it actually is.

Moderate transmutation; CL 3th; Craft Magic Arms and Armor, Enlarge Person; Price +1 bonus.

Massive

A massive weapon both deals damage as if it were one size category larger that it actually is and is treated as one size category larger than it actually is for purposes of determining whether or not a given character can wield it effectively.

Strong transmutation; CL 9th; Craft Magic Arms and Armor, Enlarge Person, Reduce Person; Price +2 bonus.

Steely Myr

Wed, 11 May 2011 21:15:29 GMT

After I played in the New Phyrexia Pre-Release and saw how good Tempered Steel could be, I decided it would be completely irresponsible of me to not build a deck with the copies I own. I put my Tempered Steels together with the Myr Battlespheres and Steel Overseers I've had languishing without a deck for way too long. I still haven't played it against a human, but I'm looking forward to it:

Going Infinite

As I said in my last post, this deck has an infinite mana combo that's there completely by accident. If you can get two Myr Galvanizers and a Palladium Myr on the table and you can tap the Palladium Myr for two mana, use one of the Galvanizer's to untap it, tap it again for two mana and use the second Galvanizer to untap the first and the Palladium Myr netting you two mana and setting you up to repeat the process ad infinitum.

You know what's better than infinite mana? Infinite damage! Thanks to the Myr Galvanizer, the loop not only produces and infinite amount of mana, but also an infinite number of untapped Myr which when you've got a Myr Battlesphere on the table, you can turn into infinite damage.

As I said, this combo is purely incidental. The Galvanizers are in there because they have great synergy with the Battlespheres and good synergy with Myr in general. The Palladium Myr are in there because they accelerate the Battlespheres, Sunblast Angels and Argentum Armors in addition to being something of a threat when Tempered Steel is on the table. There aren't any cards in the deck to assemble the combo and nothing to protect it if it happens into being. All that being said, if I ever happen to put it together in a game, I'm totally going to generate a million mana just to say that I did ;-)

New Phyrexia Pre-Release

Sun, 08 May 2011 15:00:07 GMT

I went to the New Phyrexia Pre-Release at Jim Hanley's Universe yesterday. It was crowded and kind of janky (very NYC), but I got a promo copy of Sheoldred, Whispering One, some New Phyrexia boosters and to play Magic all afternoon. I went 2-2, which I'm pretty happy with considering it was the first time I've played in a Limited event and the games included such crowning moments of awesome as multiple perfectly timed Sunblast Angels and copying my opponent's Platinum Empirion with one of my Phyrexian Metamorphs while I was sitting at 1 life1.

Here's my final fourty:

I was really impressed by the way the Sunblast Angels cleared the board (and in my favour more often than not), how Tempered Steel turned my Myr into threats and how Slash Panther was this awesome threat out of no where (especially when Tempered Steel is on the table). While the Phyrexian Metamorphs saved my bacon a couple of times, they're a little problematic in that they don't really work unless there's something bomby on the table. All in all, I had a blast and it prompted me to dust off my Tempered Steels and Sunblast Angels and build a deck2.

[1]	It only ended up prolonging the inevitable, but I was four turns away from milling my opponent when he drew the last destroy-target-artifact card in his deck.

[2]	... a deck that happens to have an incidental infinate mana combo, but that's a story for another time.

The Humble Bundle 2, Anchoring and A/B Testing

Sun, 19 Dec 2010 15:54:14 GMT

I recently purchased The Humble Indie Bundle 2 after reading an Ars Technica article about it and thinking: "Why the hell not?" The Humble Bundle is a collection of 5 independant games, released DRM free in a name-your-own-price sale with some of the proceeds going to the EFF and Child's Play.

One of the interesting things about the about the pay-what-you-want sale is that the price field is pre-filled with $29.95 as a default price:

Unfortunately for them, $29.95 is actually slightly above my threshold for why-the-hell-not purchases, but it did get me thinking about anchoring:

Anchoring or focalism is a cognitive bias that describes the common human tendency to rely too heavily, or "anchor," on one trait or piece of information when making decisions.

... says the Wikipedia. It actually has a very interesting effect on our perception of prices. Basically, if someone tells you that something was originally selling for $1000, but you can buy it for $500 now, you are very likely to be thinking about how good a deal $500 is when compared to $1000 even though the "original" price could very well be a completely made up number (this is where MSRPs actually come from).

The $29.95 in the box is an anchor. So is the $85 in the copy where they explain the set-your-own-price nature of the sale, but I expect it's a much less powerful anchor as it's not inside the box where you name your own price. Since $29.95 is an anchor, and there is a reasonable expectation that changing it will affect the number/value of purchases, I started thinking about another, somewhat related idea: A/B Testing. A/B Testing, in software development, is the practice of serving multiple versions of your software and seeing if one version works better for some value of "works better".

In the case of the Humble Bundle, I would be very interested to see if changing the value inside the set-your-own-price box had a significant impact on the size/number of purchases. You might have variants with $14.99, $29.95 and $59.95. Perhaps toying with people's cognitive biases is too evil for a project that's supporting not one, but two charities, but I'd still like to see the results of such an experiment, y'know, FOR SCIENCE!

s/the Combine/the combine harvester/g

Tue, 07 Dec 2010 06:51:55 GMT

Image Credit: kenny_lex

I have come to the realization that Half-Life 2 is a whole lot funnier if you mentally add in "harvester" whenever anyone mentions "the Combine":

Alyx: Dr. Freeman I presume? We better hurry, the combine (harvester) can be slow to wake, but once it is up you will have a hard time taking it down.

A letter: Dear Dr. Breen. Why has the combine (harvester) seen fit to suppress our reproductive cycle? Sincerely, A Concerned Citizen.

Citizen: We better hurry, we have to tear down this camp before the combine (harvester) gets here.

Aylx: We know all about you and Breen. You have been a spy for the combine (harvester) the whole time.

Gordon Freeman, the MIT graduated theoretical physicist hero-protagonist, saving the world from enslavement by a piece of anthropomorphized farming equipment.