issaferret | Entries tagged with gaming

First session of Lost went marvelously, simply marvelously.

It seemed a little artificial at first - a meet-and-greet set 'historically' a year ago, with all the characters being shortly drawn into playing Truth or Dare... but as Changelings are wont to do, the game became very serious, very quickly. I used it as an opportunity to understand who were my compatriots, we learned about eachother's characters and fleshed out backstory.

I ended up owing one person a forfeit - Danny/Donald asked me to not make any biting comments for 20 minutes, but shortly thereafter, Gim He Dat/Chris was taking too long to think of a question, and I started to snark 'Don't hurt yourse-' and then facepalmed. He's back-pocketing that favor, of course.

In any case, we all got in character and wow, did the game lend itself to vivid and different characters. I can't wait to play more.

I'm completely done with New SMB. I've never _quite_ completely finished Super Mario World because it was Just Too Damn Hard, so that should tell you something about it. However, it was fun, darnit.

Level 8-4 was my bane; one of the coins requires you to be mini-Mario, so you have to fleajump your way through a level full of falling spiderythings to a tiny pipe that's stashed inconveniently under a bunch of moving platforms. I had to have died 20 times trying to get that coin.

Anycase, yay, obsessively completing a videogame. :p

Becky's playing FF8 right now, and I'm going to twiddle a little more with the story I'm planning.

Oh, and Cars was good. Damn fine animation, great acting... story was nothing spectacular, but all in all it was quite enjoyable.

Current Music: FF8 in the background

I'm coming up on the end of Jade Empire here - played through in waaay too little time, mostly because I expected to play again, but they've decided to pull the remarkably irritating 'play with all your weak-ass sidekicks while your main character is busy doing nothing' ploy. It makes some sense, but if I've spent the last 15 hours learning how to work one character, do _not_ _EVER_ take her away from me and drop me with a bunch of people I couldn't even _try_ to play before and am not familiar with at all, and expect me to deal with combats of the difficulty level I'd been facing with the main character. You'll get the finger, and I'll take my ball and go home.

Grr. The game has such good game design up to this point, but some hoops just get my dander up.

... might not be entirely Jade Empire's fault... Becky's not getting in till 11ish.

I've been enjoying Buffy. Not terribly conducive to productivity, but very entertaining, and, as the subject above suggests, it's good cheese. Glad I'm not lactose intolerant. Apparently I've been terribly short on love triangles in my life, cuz I'm finding the relationship dance cute instead of painful or irritating.

Working on a Spycraft setting that may hold my interest - current working name is 'Falls the Shadow'. The major theme is human evolution. My current plan, if my ideas actually become reasonably firm, will be to do some casual writing in the setting before actually writing the characters and the seasons. That'll be interesting. It hasn't yet even come near to beating the 1-week barrier that my short attention span erects. On the upside, the setting has the potential to provide legitimate platforms for some of my favorite elements in storytelling. If I can do it right.

If I continue angsting about my writing abilities, I'll need a smack. If I drop this and wander off like a distracted child, I also need a smack. If I start writing drabbles, haiku, or song lyrics using my world as the setting, I'll need an exorcism. If, on the gripping hand, I actually get something written that works, and get inspired to write game, stories, or both, I'll be getting cookies. Or maybe a nice scotch.

There, one so-so story idea written down already.

Oh, and I _like_ my Umberjack icon. It keeps me warm - I've already been told to die in a fire for it. Go blame Kovalic, though, I didn't come up with it.

Current Music: System of a Down - Old School Hollywood

First, Spycraft. I mounted an assault on the book this evening, trying to get a solid overview of wtf these maniacs were attempting. It _is_ a unique creation, I think, in gaming. Over the last decade or so, I've seen game systems go from the relatively limited and straightforward Dungeons and Dragons 2nd edition system, where combat had few possible actions, and relatively simple rules, to systems like D20 and the contemporary White Wolf systems, where any action is possible, and the poor DM/GM/GC/storyteller is stuck trying to determine how to make a complex action fit into the damn rules, and what dice to roll and stats to add up to give it meaning.

Small wonder RP-heavy types are throwing their hands up and retreating to the simplicity of a GM-fiat system: It's not worth the trouble if the dice seem arbitrary anyway, despite all the efforts of the authors.

( Spycraft rantage )

um... okay, the stuff under the cut is terrbly verbose. The apartment buildings part of the above topic referred to when I _started_ writing this post, wherein I was being vaguely irked by the person _somewhere_ in this complex who's using AIM with all the sound effects on and his/her volume wwaaaaay up. I heard every time a message came in and went out for an extended exchange. Both people were either fast typists or exchanging one word at a time. Why was the sound still on? It wasn't like they were leaving the computer, or even forgetting the other was there for a moment. Mmmnh. Nevermind, I probably don't want to know.

Current Mood: My skull is bulging
Current Music: Flunk- Miss World

Mage: The Awakening came out last week, I guess. Crim mentioned it to me, so I decided to take a quick look at the character sheet. Three things struck me on first glance: Gnosis(wisdom) is now the strength of magic stat, instead of Arete, Entropy is now split into Death and Fate, and Mages gots Mana Points. This last made me giggle, just from the lines that're going to wander up now that we don't have terms like 'Quintessence' to hide behind.

Further reviews will wait till I get the book in hand. This is the one I actually would have an interest in running, and playing, if any.

Current Mood: anticipatory
Current Music: Tricky - Overcome

I would like to illustrate my ambivalence with online roleplaying.

In the last 24 hours, I have been approached by three different RP-quality guilds on World of Warcraft, and actually interviewed with one of them, in character (Sayvil, my warlock, has an interesting character, potentially. Quietly obsessed with control, self and otherwise, because of her constant work with demons and party-managing aggro, disdainful of 'adventurers' who go in, hack everything up, and are pleased with the resulting carnage, and fascinated with money, because of the effect she can have by making and spending it.).

My honest response surrounding these interested parties is:

Flattered
Embarrassed

Embarrassed, I say, because there's a reasonably noisy voice in my head saying THIS IS A CLEAR SIGN YOU'RE ONLINE TOO MUCH. GO THE FUCK OUTSIDE!

This of course, delves not at all into the RP gyrations I get to go through trying to decide who to go with, because I'm currently Daffy Duck jumping up and down on the head of the noisy voice, all the while chanting "Down, down, down, mine mine mine, back back back!"

Current Music: George Carlin - Offensive Language

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Center for the Easily Distracted

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Entries tagged with gaming

Lost

Finished New SMB

Jade Empire decided to piss me off.

Good cheese.

spycraft, apartment buildings.

Awakening

Hm.

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December 2016

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