This guy has declared that gagh is for pansies!
http://oskarpannier.com/en/monster-meal/
These guys eat land-roving electric eels.
Also check out the other comics here, this crap is the beast kind of nerdy funny: Nerdy, funny
truth.
In more zany news, I have an inexplicable urge to construct and use a catapult that lobs angry honey badgers at stuff. Also, RPG. Rocket Powered Grizzlies.
The Call of The Wild Ordnance.
Saturday, October 25, 2014
Friday, October 17, 2014
Random Horrible Idea
The gist of it is this: Random scenes of carnage and lootiful lootiful shinies dropping from all sorts of lootiful games, with this as the background song:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_wFEB4Oxlo
Salvador laying waste to midgets, demons exploding into goodies, somebody shouting Draugr to death, The Warrior exploding into guns everywhere, somebody getting stabbed by a Tonberry, the Badassasaurus tearing around, more shinies spraying everywhere. You get the idea, I presume.
NOTE: I don't own the above video, but you just have to hear it to get the idea.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_wFEB4Oxlo
Salvador laying waste to midgets, demons exploding into goodies, somebody shouting Draugr to death, The Warrior exploding into guns everywhere, somebody getting stabbed by a Tonberry, the Badassasaurus tearing around, more shinies spraying everywhere. You get the idea, I presume.
NOTE: I don't own the above video, but you just have to hear it to get the idea.
Tuesday, October 14, 2014
Game Economics
NOTE: This is not a Wreckonomics post.
Been tearing about in Adventure Mode on Diablo 3. They've added randomized dungeons chock-full (chock!) of shiny goodies, especially on the quite lootiful Torment Difficulty. Unlike Best Shooter Ever, they ramped up the difficulty but clearly remembered what this whole solo play concept is, and actually made the legendary drops more frequent but also more meaningful. Gearbox needs to take notes, especially since this is the big daddy of procedurally generated goodness.
Lootiful is my new favorite not-a-word now.
Unfortunately, they added a mechanic that I honesty am quite ambivalent about. There is a new secondary currency called Blood Shards. They're mysterious shiny bits of mystery, and since Scooby Doo isn't around, nobody really knows what the hell they really are. Their only function currently is for this 'gambling' mini-game. Pay X shards, get a loot drop. One might get better goodies doing this on the insano Torment 3-6 settings, but right now it's really just been a roundabout way to turn shards into crafting materials, which already grow off trees at these levels. Literally, tree demons drop this stuff.
It got me into thinking. Games have been trying to do secondary currencies since friggin forever, but they've very rarely done it right. Some examples, both good and bad:
Borderlands 2: Several secondaries, particularly Eridium, Torgue Tokens, and Seraph Crystals. Eridium started as the stuff for extra storage space and therefore useful, plus needed for access to the main bonus boss. Later on, you got more bonus bosses that require Eridium to access, plus whole extra things like chests that enhance results and redonculous gambling machines of goodness, keep the stuff relevant and useful. Tokens were used for specific vendors, mostly granting access to some nasty legendaries with minimum fuss, and were very easy to farm. Crystals...well they were also used for special DLC vendors, but you either burned ridiculous amounts of Eridium to get them, or fought bonus bosses at max difficulty. This requires a party to pull off, so frankly Best Shooter Ever dropped the ball for forced lone wolves like me there.
Final Fantasy VII: One secondary, GP. This stuff is pretty much putt-putt tickets for the Golden Saucer fun dome of terror. Spend cash on the games there, do good, get GP. Chocobo Racing (but not betting in CPU-only races) was very profitable for this stuff, especially for folks going for the Golden Chocobo. The real use for GP was the Battle Arena, which had it own secondary (tertiary?) system called battle points that vanished if you left the lobby (total bullshit). You got Cloud's level 4 limit break plus other nifty toys there. Overall, the whole thing was fairly well done, since it really just amounted to getting goodies from doing random fun stuff, without slurping up your cash supply.
Star Ocean: The Last Hope: One secondary, Fight Tokens. While I do feel this game gets a lot of undeserved hate for not being Final Fantasy (and I smell that not the FF7 remake a lot of RPG nuts want), it has some flaws, some stemming from being a Square B-list title, some just quirks gone wrong. One flaw is Fight Tokens. You get them from fighting in the battle arena, and spend them at one specific vendor for specific goodies, most of which only available from there. The flaw is that to get the stuff unique to this place, you need to either do Disgaea-style uber-grinding so you can afford them when they're useful as upgrades, or wait until the post game, then uber-grind the arena, but with less hassle. In either case, the rewards (from the shop itself) are very underwhelming, and really the stuff you get are only good for crafting, and arguably not much good for that. Glorified putt-putt tickets, given out for really boring grinding. Bleh.
SaGa Frontier 2: One secondary, Chips. I already covered this in the Wreckonomics article for the game. To wit: You turn most of your gear into chips, which you can either convert into Crowns (the primary currency), with better rates for higher amount of chips, or use them (plus crowns) to make nifty high-level gear. What you can make is dependent on your overall chip-stash size and in-game skill levels. You really don't have much choice about getting this stuff, which can be a pain since that means either whaling upon critters until your weapons break for chips or finding the very vendors that convert stuff directly into chips. The whole system really feeling like an attempt to both avoid the usual RPG lol-heug gold inflation problem and give a bit of magic-ey, crafty flavor. Okay overall, but kinda feels half-assed. Still not sure if right cheek or left cheek, though.
One final example, that doesn't really fit in.
Secret of Evermore: Instead of secondaries, we actually have four primary currencies: Claws, Jewels, Gold Coins, and Credits. All four are indigenous to one particular region of the game, and there are merchants that exchange one currency for another (typically in the listed order). Money was earned in the usual manner (i.e. killing stuff). This was actually very workable overall, and helped give some character and contributed to the whole idea of diversity the game was going for. Pretty well done, though I still can't figure out who decided individual jewels are crappier that gold coins in value. Maybe the money jewels are flawed, or really cubic zirconium or something. Other interesting economic features included a (limited time) trading bizzar where you could exchange one commodity for another, in hopes of various stat-bonus goodies, plus a token (spheres of annihilation if I remember correctly) usable in only one instance, in this case a cool undead ferryman doing business in the desert. Technically a secondary, but really just a macguffin.
Anyway, as you can see, secondary currencies in games are not a new thing, but really, it's very rare for a game to do them any better than "Meh." Hopefully Blizzard gets its crap together about it. Maybe use it as an in-game fee to actually trade legendaries between players (dammit Blizzard). Currency is only any good insofar as it actually being used and valued through use.
Been tearing about in Adventure Mode on Diablo 3. They've added randomized dungeons chock-full (chock!) of shiny goodies, especially on the quite lootiful Torment Difficulty. Unlike Best Shooter Ever, they ramped up the difficulty but clearly remembered what this whole solo play concept is, and actually made the legendary drops more frequent but also more meaningful. Gearbox needs to take notes, especially since this is the big daddy of procedurally generated goodness.
Lootiful is my new favorite not-a-word now.
Unfortunately, they added a mechanic that I honesty am quite ambivalent about. There is a new secondary currency called Blood Shards. They're mysterious shiny bits of mystery, and since Scooby Doo isn't around, nobody really knows what the hell they really are. Their only function currently is for this 'gambling' mini-game. Pay X shards, get a loot drop. One might get better goodies doing this on the insano Torment 3-6 settings, but right now it's really just been a roundabout way to turn shards into crafting materials, which already grow off trees at these levels. Literally, tree demons drop this stuff.
It got me into thinking. Games have been trying to do secondary currencies since friggin forever, but they've very rarely done it right. Some examples, both good and bad:
Borderlands 2: Several secondaries, particularly Eridium, Torgue Tokens, and Seraph Crystals. Eridium started as the stuff for extra storage space and therefore useful, plus needed for access to the main bonus boss. Later on, you got more bonus bosses that require Eridium to access, plus whole extra things like chests that enhance results and redonculous gambling machines of goodness, keep the stuff relevant and useful. Tokens were used for specific vendors, mostly granting access to some nasty legendaries with minimum fuss, and were very easy to farm. Crystals...well they were also used for special DLC vendors, but you either burned ridiculous amounts of Eridium to get them, or fought bonus bosses at max difficulty. This requires a party to pull off, so frankly Best Shooter Ever dropped the ball for forced lone wolves like me there.
Final Fantasy VII: One secondary, GP. This stuff is pretty much putt-putt tickets for the Golden Saucer fun dome of terror. Spend cash on the games there, do good, get GP. Chocobo Racing (but not betting in CPU-only races) was very profitable for this stuff, especially for folks going for the Golden Chocobo. The real use for GP was the Battle Arena, which had it own secondary (tertiary?) system called battle points that vanished if you left the lobby (total bullshit). You got Cloud's level 4 limit break plus other nifty toys there. Overall, the whole thing was fairly well done, since it really just amounted to getting goodies from doing random fun stuff, without slurping up your cash supply.
Star Ocean: The Last Hope: One secondary, Fight Tokens. While I do feel this game gets a lot of undeserved hate for not being Final Fantasy (and I smell that not the FF7 remake a lot of RPG nuts want), it has some flaws, some stemming from being a Square B-list title, some just quirks gone wrong. One flaw is Fight Tokens. You get them from fighting in the battle arena, and spend them at one specific vendor for specific goodies, most of which only available from there. The flaw is that to get the stuff unique to this place, you need to either do Disgaea-style uber-grinding so you can afford them when they're useful as upgrades, or wait until the post game, then uber-grind the arena, but with less hassle. In either case, the rewards (from the shop itself) are very underwhelming, and really the stuff you get are only good for crafting, and arguably not much good for that. Glorified putt-putt tickets, given out for really boring grinding. Bleh.
SaGa Frontier 2: One secondary, Chips. I already covered this in the Wreckonomics article for the game. To wit: You turn most of your gear into chips, which you can either convert into Crowns (the primary currency), with better rates for higher amount of chips, or use them (plus crowns) to make nifty high-level gear. What you can make is dependent on your overall chip-stash size and in-game skill levels. You really don't have much choice about getting this stuff, which can be a pain since that means either whaling upon critters until your weapons break for chips or finding the very vendors that convert stuff directly into chips. The whole system really feeling like an attempt to both avoid the usual RPG lol-heug gold inflation problem and give a bit of magic-ey, crafty flavor. Okay overall, but kinda feels half-assed. Still not sure if right cheek or left cheek, though.
One final example, that doesn't really fit in.
Secret of Evermore: Instead of secondaries, we actually have four primary currencies: Claws, Jewels, Gold Coins, and Credits. All four are indigenous to one particular region of the game, and there are merchants that exchange one currency for another (typically in the listed order). Money was earned in the usual manner (i.e. killing stuff). This was actually very workable overall, and helped give some character and contributed to the whole idea of diversity the game was going for. Pretty well done, though I still can't figure out who decided individual jewels are crappier that gold coins in value. Maybe the money jewels are flawed, or really cubic zirconium or something. Other interesting economic features included a (limited time) trading bizzar where you could exchange one commodity for another, in hopes of various stat-bonus goodies, plus a token (spheres of annihilation if I remember correctly) usable in only one instance, in this case a cool undead ferryman doing business in the desert. Technically a secondary, but really just a macguffin.
Anyway, as you can see, secondary currencies in games are not a new thing, but really, it's very rare for a game to do them any better than "Meh." Hopefully Blizzard gets its crap together about it. Maybe use it as an in-game fee to actually trade legendaries between players (dammit Blizzard). Currency is only any good insofar as it actually being used and valued through use.
Thursday, October 9, 2014
Brain Barf
So here we are again...
Still tearing about in Diablo III. My Crusader has proven to endure like a boss, vindicating my giving him the name Tankred. In funnier news, I wound up with a Puzzle Ring that didn't have horrible stats, so now my big grim do-gooder is being followed around by his loyal treasure goblin, Giggles McLootsalot.
A funny glitch happened, too. I was tearing around a graveyard, laying waste to zombies. One of the shambling dead got a hilariously funky death animation, where his head and body went in different directions, but the neck remained intact, resulting in a corpse with a neck at least 20-25 feet long slapping up against a wall. That's right, the Nephalem just kicked the shit out of an undead Mr. Fantastic.
Some quiet insanity has been percolating in my head, mostly with some of the weirder, darker bits, in mind. Even in a setting grim enough to warrant comparison to 40k (including massive pauldrons as a status symbol), who in their right mind makes a huge boiler room cavern thing full of bones from all sorts of creatures underneath their city? That is not how fossil fuel works. And why?
In less funny, but no less mockery, I read an old issue if Game Informer I had at work. This was from the glorious period where they had a damn sense of humor, and the funniest geek captions. One article was about the then-new release of the 360 version of World of Tanks. The guy writing it gave off this whole vibe of passive-aggressive apathy, whining about how dated the graphics work, but you got a chance to have "nuanced" shootouts. then he proceeded to prove a complete lack of fact-checking, misspelling the M3 Stuart and referencing a "German UC 2-pdr." The UC 2-pdr is a British vehicle. Both of these mistakes were in the same damned sentence.
But hell, the loser snidely stated he didn't care about the historical side at all, despite the simple fact that in-game, there isn't exactly a mountain of lore or even a database to root through. Almost everything is historically based, but to get more that a short blurb, you have to actually research things in the real world. Everything he said amounted to what felt like a bizarre hipster-esque complaint that he couldn't have killstreaks and teabaggings, so it didn't belong on consoles at all. Just not vapid enough for him, I guess. Thank God that it was not a full review with a score, and that nobody listened anyway, from the way things went for the game afterward.
Oh, and he whined about the kiddies getting on the mikes and using their paltry profanity prowess to cover their immaturity like it was specifically endemic to World of Tanks. Idiot.
The lesson here, kiddies, is that if you don't like a game, say you don't like it. There's plenty of games out there I've played and filled with indifference, some with even outright loathing; but I was intelligent about my criticism. Acting like an egocentric, self-important twit with a spoiled sense of entitlement and "I'm too smart for this crap, my audience is a bunch of morons" simply because you either didn't like something or felt like half-assing a job is something best left in the pits of Facebook and 4chan.
The sad part is that current GI issues are all pretty much nothing but this...bizarre mess. It's like a glimpse into an alternate universe were Yahtzee isn't allowed to swear like an angry sailor and stuck doing free-verse at nighttime coffee joints. All the honest hostility has been replaced with passive-aggressive hipster cattiness.
Not that us Philistines would get what they're whining about. Also, Philistines were actually a helluva lot more advanced than most people realized, so nyah.
Still tearing about in Diablo III. My Crusader has proven to endure like a boss, vindicating my giving him the name Tankred. In funnier news, I wound up with a Puzzle Ring that didn't have horrible stats, so now my big grim do-gooder is being followed around by his loyal treasure goblin, Giggles McLootsalot.
A funny glitch happened, too. I was tearing around a graveyard, laying waste to zombies. One of the shambling dead got a hilariously funky death animation, where his head and body went in different directions, but the neck remained intact, resulting in a corpse with a neck at least 20-25 feet long slapping up against a wall. That's right, the Nephalem just kicked the shit out of an undead Mr. Fantastic.
Some quiet insanity has been percolating in my head, mostly with some of the weirder, darker bits, in mind. Even in a setting grim enough to warrant comparison to 40k (including massive pauldrons as a status symbol), who in their right mind makes a huge boiler room cavern thing full of bones from all sorts of creatures underneath their city? That is not how fossil fuel works. And why?
In less funny, but no less mockery, I read an old issue if Game Informer I had at work. This was from the glorious period where they had a damn sense of humor, and the funniest geek captions. One article was about the then-new release of the 360 version of World of Tanks. The guy writing it gave off this whole vibe of passive-aggressive apathy, whining about how dated the graphics work, but you got a chance to have "nuanced" shootouts. then he proceeded to prove a complete lack of fact-checking, misspelling the M3 Stuart and referencing a "German UC 2-pdr." The UC 2-pdr is a British vehicle. Both of these mistakes were in the same damned sentence.
But hell, the loser snidely stated he didn't care about the historical side at all, despite the simple fact that in-game, there isn't exactly a mountain of lore or even a database to root through. Almost everything is historically based, but to get more that a short blurb, you have to actually research things in the real world. Everything he said amounted to what felt like a bizarre hipster-esque complaint that he couldn't have killstreaks and teabaggings, so it didn't belong on consoles at all. Just not vapid enough for him, I guess. Thank God that it was not a full review with a score, and that nobody listened anyway, from the way things went for the game afterward.
Oh, and he whined about the kiddies getting on the mikes and using their paltry profanity prowess to cover their immaturity like it was specifically endemic to World of Tanks. Idiot.
The lesson here, kiddies, is that if you don't like a game, say you don't like it. There's plenty of games out there I've played and filled with indifference, some with even outright loathing; but I was intelligent about my criticism. Acting like an egocentric, self-important twit with a spoiled sense of entitlement and "I'm too smart for this crap, my audience is a bunch of morons" simply because you either didn't like something or felt like half-assing a job is something best left in the pits of Facebook and 4chan.
The sad part is that current GI issues are all pretty much nothing but this...bizarre mess. It's like a glimpse into an alternate universe were Yahtzee isn't allowed to swear like an angry sailor and stuck doing free-verse at nighttime coffee joints. All the honest hostility has been replaced with passive-aggressive hipster cattiness.
Not that us Philistines would get what they're whining about. Also, Philistines were actually a helluva lot more advanced than most people realized, so nyah.
Friday, October 3, 2014
Diabolic Ramblings
Been tearing about on Diablo 3 some more. Cleaving a bloody swath through the hordes of wickedness and grabbing all the shinies doesn't really get old, to be honest.
Whether any of us admit it or not, a typical playstyle for just about everyone is smash-and-grab with capers. I still like having crafting along for the ride, especially since it's reliant on recycling excess goodies. Diablo is actually a good deal more upfront about the whole thing. Tristram's economy is based on looting dungeons, pillaging monsters, and robbing the dead. Even all the heroes and followers, who really come across as people that don't give a kobold's ass about filthy lucre, tear about and take everything that isn't nailed down. The scoundrel seems to be the only openly greedy one of the bunch.
By the way, the Crusader/Templar bromance the dialogue implies is fricking hilarious, but hell, closer to reality when it come to warrior types. Just no air guitar, please.
In other news, my thumbs kept mysteriously sliced open. Took two damn months to figure out my apparent subconscious emo tendencies were actually my belt developing some ever-so-slight burrs on the buckle. Wish the truth hadn't been so costly, though; tons of bandages and an out-of-print Videssos book all bloodied up now. Still better than finding a secret stash of Green Day and black candles hiding somewhere though. September's very over, so I'm awake now.
Whether any of us admit it or not, a typical playstyle for just about everyone is smash-and-grab with capers. I still like having crafting along for the ride, especially since it's reliant on recycling excess goodies. Diablo is actually a good deal more upfront about the whole thing. Tristram's economy is based on looting dungeons, pillaging monsters, and robbing the dead. Even all the heroes and followers, who really come across as people that don't give a kobold's ass about filthy lucre, tear about and take everything that isn't nailed down. The scoundrel seems to be the only openly greedy one of the bunch.
By the way, the Crusader/Templar bromance the dialogue implies is fricking hilarious, but hell, closer to reality when it come to warrior types. Just no air guitar, please.
In other news, my thumbs kept mysteriously sliced open. Took two damn months to figure out my apparent subconscious emo tendencies were actually my belt developing some ever-so-slight burrs on the buckle. Wish the truth hadn't been so costly, though; tons of bandages and an out-of-print Videssos book all bloodied up now. Still better than finding a secret stash of Green Day and black candles hiding somewhere though. September's very over, so I'm awake now.
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