The Build from Hell: Part VI: Batman: Arkham City

Isn't it nice when things just work? You get in your car, turn the key, and the engine doesn't tell you that your log in information is incorrect. You pick up the phone, push some buttons, and don't have to enter your 20-digit hexadecimal product code to complete the call. You turn a knob on a faucet and don't get a message that you've used water in the maximum number of approved sinks.

This is the way computers should be and, until recently, the way they had been working for me. That all changed with The Build from Hell.

Back in part I, I mentioned that one of the things I wanted to do on the new HTPC was be able to play vidjimagames. A nice new processor, with a good graphics card would make it faster than my desktop, and ideal for playing any games that support a controller.

Around this time, I was working my way through Batman: Arkham City, sequel to the game-of-the-year Batman: Arkham Asylum. I loved Arkham Asylum and pre-ordered Arkham City on Steam as soon as it became available.

The Resident Batman-lover, that is Anne Marie, forbade me from playing either game without her present at every moment. This usually meant me sitting at my desk, with her sitting behind me, looking over my shoulder. A workable solution, but not ideal. This seems like the perfect game to be able to sit on the couch and play with my wireless controller.

So I install Steam on HiFi and begin downloading the many billions of bytes necessary to play the game. While it's downloading would be a good time to explain Steam Cloud.

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Shocked and Appalled

Star Wars: The Old Republic launched about a month ago (motto: "What Would WoW Do?"). There is much that can be said about the game, like EA's general jackassery, the fact that it is simultaneously the fastest-selling MMO and failing to meet sales projections, whether or not a game of that scale is sustainable, how successfully Bioware integrated their "fourth pillar" of story, or myriads of other topics. Many others are talking about such things, and perhaps I will weigh in later. But for now, I wanted to focus on one particularly shocking and appalling aspect of the game.

The artists at Bioware decided, it seems, to give one of the six Star Wars movies particular attention. One scene from one of the six movies. One costume choice from one scene from one of the six movies (I think you see where this is going).

Slave Leia costume, seen modeled here by the Murloc's cosplay friend Christy Marie.

Apparently, Bioware thinks that this costume comprised fully three quarters of the Star Wars films, despite the fact that the costume only has a combined 150 seconds of screen time, "including facial closeups and shots of stunt doubles and visual effect images," according to Wookieepedia. Every planet in the game has at least one scuzzy dive populated by alien slave girls doing erotic dances while wearing this costume.

So shocked and appalled by this blatant objectification of women, er, aliens, er, females, that I decided to bring this shocking and appalling art choice of the game to your, and hopefully national, attention. And to properly convey the shockfulness and appallation of this singular-minded part of the game, I had to, for the greater good, record the shocking dancers doing their appalling stripteases, then go through, frame by frame, to find the most shocking and appalling segments, which I have saved to animated images, so you to can be made aware of how shocking and appalling this game is.

Shocking and appalling images after the jump.
(Maaaaaaybe NSFW, unless you work at a strip club.)

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Please Do Not Plant Bombs in the City

So the Murloc and I have been playing Star Wars: The Old Republic. For those of you not in the know, it's  the Star Wars version of WoW. I may talk about it in more depth later, but for now, there's a particular quest that caught my attention and I had to highlight it.

Here's the quest text:

"Dear New Yorkers. Al Qaeda has left several bombs in Times Square. We think we got them all, but if you happen across any, could you please pick them up and drop it off in one of the handy bomb-disposal bins we've left around the city?"

The mission requires that you locate four bombs stuck to walls, lamp posts, and other features of the city and take them to a bomb disposal unit, which deactivates them with the sound of a garbage compactor.

I swear, every time I picked up one of these, I heard Yakety Sax

 Once you've removed the bomb from its place, a one minute timer starts, after which it will explode, damaging you for about half health. The bomb disposal unit is centrally located, a quick jog away, but shares a 5-10 second cooldown with all other players in the game. That means that once one player has activate it, no other players can use it for about 5-10 seconds.

Some days, you just can't get rid of a bomb.

This must have been a fun quest to do immediately after launch, when a dozen other players are trying to get the quest done. I imagine a queue of players standing at the bomb disposal unit trying to get rid of them, and all waiting for it to refresh. Sort of like a game of hot potato with explosive consequences.

Diablo III Beta: First Impressions

For all zero of you who are interested.

[Editor's note. I started writing this after first playing it in September. Then I forgot about it.]

So, after a furious weekend [circa Sep. 9-11] of computer-playing, I managed to complete the Diablo III beta with all five character classes. It was hard work, but someone had to do it.

So here are my impressions.

In a word: "visceral". Everything packs punch. Every ability and spell. Every hit and kill has a wonderfully satisfying "thwack" behind it. Corpses flying; blood splattering; stone crumbling; book cases exploding. Everything feels weighty.

Class I'm most unexpectedly impressed by: Wizard. I did not like the wizard when I played her at Blizzcon a few years back. She seemed under-powered and uninteresting. But after dispatching approximately 4,294,967,296 enemies by shooting LIGHTING out of my FINGERTIPS, I am a changed man. And the way the lightning crackles when disintegrating enemies? Magnifique!


Class I'm most unexpectedly unimpressed by: Witch Doctor. I fell in love with the witch doctor at Blizzcon some years ago for one simple reason: Flaming Skulls 'o Doom. Unfortunately, that spell is not available in the beta. While fun, the witch doctor just lacked the oomph of the other classes.

Class I'm most expectedly impressed by: Demon Hunter. Exactly as awesome as I expected.

Design decision I'm most disappointed in: Lack of level-up choices. The original Diablo had skill points, earned upon level-up, that could be assigned to the attribute(s) of your choosing. Diablo II had skill trees which were actually the inspiration for and predecessor to WoW's talent trees. Diablo III? Nuthin. No decisions or choices are made upon leveling up. Instead, you are given a fixed train of progression. You have no choice in which skills you get next, and have no ability to put points into particular abilities. Instead, you are assigned a new skill, and merely have the choice of whether or not you are going to use it.

Add on to this the fact that, in the beta, you only have two, then later three, skills that can be active at once, and there isn't a whole lot of variety in character builds. Of course, in the final game, you'll have a couple dozen skills from which you can choose six active abilities, then customize each one with a runestone. Blizzard has stated the number of possible character builds, and it's somewhere north of the number of elementary particles in the universe.

Biggest adjustment: The concept of "lagging out" of a single-player game. What do you mean I can't play by myself because I couldn't connect to the login server? Why do I need to login to a single-player game? Why do I have latency when I'm by myself?

Exhibit A for why Blizzard should just make the WoW movie themselves, as a CGI film: This trailer, unveiled at this years Blizzcon.


To wit:

Photograph or CGI rendering? Does it matter at this point?

Approximate number of hours I will lose to Diablo III, upon release: 65,536

What's Wrong with this Picture?

I snapped this screenshot of Bejeweled 3 right after the words "No more moves" appeared and right before the gems exploded off the screen. See anything wrong?

Double-ewe tee eff, Popcap. Double-ewe tee eff.

(For those interested in what causes this bug to occur, it sometimes happens during a cascade. In the middle of the cascade, the words "no more moves" appear, yet the cascade continues. When it finally comes to rest, there might still be moves, but the "game over" flag has already been tripped. It appears that their algorithm that checks for game over conditions only checks if valid swaps can be made, and does not check if gems are already matched.)