Thalen

#Blaugust Day 23: Sound and Fury

August 23, 2015August 23, 2015 by Thalen

The Hugo Awards were presented last night at WorldCon, and a lot of people were waiting to see how it would all shake out. If you haven't been following the whole Puppies mess, the short version is that a group of SF authors who have been previously nominated for Hugos but didn't win decided to run a nomination slate to try to get things they like on the ballot. They've tried this for a couple years without much success, but this year the combination of a racist, loudmouth author running a related slate and gaming's own 'organization' of reactionary misogynists getting involved did the trick. The Hugo nominations were gamed.

A lot of people freaked the hell out and declared the Hugos destroyed, or ruined, or what have you. Last night proved that wrong. A number of categories had no award, but that's happened before and will again, just possibly not in the same numbers. The big award (Best Novel) was awarded to a book that is by all reports amazing, and basically none of the slate nominees got a thing. The main result of this whole thing was to highlight just how few people bother to nominate for the Hugos and to sell a heck of a lot more supporting memberships to this year's convention than any previous (though the total number of people voting was apparently only about half the number of memberships; about 11,300 memberships were sold, and just short of 6,000 ballots were cast.)

The part that really fascinates me comes from the voting and balloting statistics that are released each year once the awards have been handed out. Going through the nomination numbers, it looks like a little over 200 people voted a Puppies slate, and about 160 of those voted the racist asshole's version. 6,000 ballots were cast in the final vote, but only 200 or so people were able to game the nomination. Admittedly this year's vote total is skewed by people who specifically voted either in support or protest of this whole nonsense, so let's look at the 2014 totals. 3,587 total ballots were cast last year. So about 6% of last year's total vote. That's all it took.

And that's the lesson of all this. Angry assholes are really good at being loud, puffing themselves up, and making themselves look bigger than they are. The jerks on your game's forum or on Twitter or wherever? They're a minority making themselves look like the majority through volume (in both meanings of the word). They only win if we stand aside and let them.

#Blaugust Day 22: Thalen Reads Choke

September 5, 2015August 22, 2015 by Thalen

We can spend our lives letting the world tell us who we are. Sane or insane. Saints or sex addicts. Heros or victims. Letting history tell us how good or bad we are. Letting our past decide the future. Or we can decide for ourselves. - Victor Mancini

Choke is a book about salvation.

It's also a book about sex addiction, dementia, suffocation, rocks, and chocolate pudding. But the over-arching theme is salvation. The power that saving someone gives you over them, but also the power the saved has over the person that has, in saving them, taken a measure of responsibility for them.

Victor Mancini is a sex addict and a med school dropout. He works at a colonial village with his friend Denny, who he met through an addiction recovery program. He never knew his father. His mother was in and out of jail throughout his childhood for 'acts of social rebellion' of the Project Mayhem sort; swapping colors of hair dye in store, giving LSD to zoo monkeys, and so forth. Now she's slowly wasting away in a home for those with dementia. To support her, Victor chokes in restaurants.

What Victor has learned is that he can pretend to choke in a restaurant and when someone 'saves' him, they feel a responsibility to him. They keep in contact with him, send him a card with a check on his birthday, ask how he's doing and if there's anything they can do to help. He's choked thousands of times and uses the income from that to pay for his mother's care.

At the care center, other patients with dementia keep mistaking him for someone who wronged them in the past. He ultimately plays along, accepting those sins onto himself and giving the patients a kind of closure. He meets a doctor who claims she can cure his mother. The doctor just needs Victor to have sex with her. He learns that his mother has a diary (written in Italian) that contains some shocking secret about his heritage. And Victor begins to question who he really is and what he can do both for himself and for others.

If you've seen or read Fight Club (and seriously, you should do both) then you should have a pretty good idea of the type of book this will be. By turns hilarious and disturbing, and often both simultaneously. Loaded with sex, but almost never sexy. Ultimately it's a book about a man learning the truth about himself and taking some control of his life. I think I actually liked Choke a little better than Fight Club. It was a bit more optimistic in the end; with a 'we could go anywhere we want from here' feel.

Next up I'm going back to the classic science fiction; Philip Jose Farmer's Hugo-winning To Your Scattered Bodies Go, the first book in the Riverworld series. Come back next Saturday to see how I like it!

#Blaugust Day 21: On the Vanguard

August 21, 2015August 21, 2015 by Thalen

Last night ended up being given over to Mass Effect 3; more specifically the multiplayer mode. I had never tried it before but hearing so many good things about it combined with Ash's recent foray back into the games led to me joining him, Tamrielo, and Kodra for a couple of matches.

Well, I say the night was given over to Mass Effect; most of that time was spent wrestling with the unwieldy beast that is Origin. I had to download the game, and for some reason Origin refused to acknowledge that Ashgar and Tam were friends, so they couldn't invite each other into a game. It took awhile but we finally got it straightened out and could actually play. It didn't enhance my opinion of Origin any, however.

It's not just me, right? You see it too?

Once we were in I was presented with a bunch of classes. I figured Soldier would be a safe middle of the road bet and started out with that. The first mission went okay for the first waves, but then we let ourselves get a little too split up and died one by one on the sixth. I was trying to snipe, but I had trouble finding good sight lines. Still, it was fun, and I got enough experience to hit level 3.
Between missions I decided to see if I had enough credits to buy anything in the store. I didn't, but I did have some free boxes to open; presumably from DLC or something? From one I got a very nice assault rifle, and from the last I pulled a Cabal Vanguard unlock. That immediately raised my Vanguard class to 8, so I decided to try it out in the next mission. Skimming its powers gave me the impression it was meant to be a close range class, so I equipped a shotgun and my new assault rifle and off we went.

The second mission went a lot more cleanly than the first. People went down a few times but got healed, and it started to look dodgy on the retrieval wave we got when two of us went down and stayed down. We made it through though and the remainder of the mission went nice and smooth. Between the Vanguard's teleport, the shotgun, and a paralyzing blade power I felt like it contributed a lot more the second time around.

Overall, it was a fun night that reminded me that multiplayer FPS games can be a lot fun with the right teammates. I'm looking forward to playing more.

#Blaugust Day 20: Record Keeping

August 20, 2015 by Thalen

It seems like at any given point I have sufficient brain space for at most two mobile games. I think the energy mechanic most of them use is a lot of the reason; I feel like I'm wasting resources if I let my energy fill completely and sit there for a while. Currently one the two games I'm playing is Fallout Shelter. The other, which I've been playing for a couple of months now, is Final Fantasy: Record Keeper.

From what others have told me, previous mobile Final Fantasy games have not had a good track record. Final Fantasy: All The Bravest appears to be particularly reviled as a mindless cash grab. Happily Record Keeper is a lot more engaging and requires actual strategy to play. The real-money aspect is a bit pricey, but the special currency (mythril) comes at a decent pace in game and you can absolutely play without ever spending cash.

The basic premise of Record Keeper is that there's a world that maintains records of important battles throught the multiverse in the form of magical paintings. Some evil force causes these to be damaged and so you must travel into the paintings and experience the battles they record to restore them. The battles reward equipment and orbs which are used to create all the classic FF abilites that you can then equip. Completing paintings gets you special rewards including rarer equipment and orbs, and most importantly new characters.

This, to me, is the main draw of Record Keeper; the ability to build a stable of your favorite characters from across the Final Fantasy milieu and relive fights from the various games with teams built out of that stable. Boss fights typically have the same tricks and special features they had in the original games, and Dr. Mog, your mentor, can provide tips for each boss fight before you go in if you don't already know how it works.

Quistis, Arc, Gordon, Lightning, and the Warrior of Light
face Medusa in the Tower of Owen

The monetization, like a lot of Japanese based games, is a gacha system. In this case what you're randomly getting is equipment from the various games, ranked from 1 to 5 stars. 5 star is the best, but also the rarest. You get one free draw a day, which could be anything (usually 1 or 2 stars, but I've gotten a couple of 4 star items that way) or you can buy draws that are guaranteed to be at least 3 star. If you pay cash for this, it works out to $3 for a single item or 11 items for $30. A bit pricey for my liking but you can get plenty of draws using in game currency.

Along with the regular paintings, there are also events running on a regular basis. These are usually themed on a particular character or characters and let you unlock new characters who aren't available through the normal paintings. Right now the Lightning event is just about to end, and an Aerith event started a couple days ago and runs for the next week or so. If you miss a character, it'll eventually come back around again, but the character unlock is usually fairly early in the set of event fights with rare equipment and orbs as rewards for the really difficult ones.

You can finally get her back

All in all, Final Fantasy: Record Keeper is a really fun game that will hit anyone with a love of Final Fantasy right in the nostalgia. If you decided to give it a try, using this link to get the game will get both you and me a little added mythril so you can start drawing new equipment that much sooner. Check it out!