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I grew up in what I consider to be one of the best eras in gaming, namely the mid to late 80s and early 90s. This was the era of the 8 bit and 16 bit juggernauts by Nintendo and Sega, and while it was years later when I first experienced it NEC as well. However there was something else going on that damned near knocked me out of console gaming entirely. In 1991 my family got our very first computer, a no-name 386 16 mhz with a massive 90 mb hard drive and 2 mb of ram. There was no sound card and we were still several years ahead of CD-ROMs being a thing that you would regularly see in a computer. However the same friend of my dad that used to send him home VHS tapes filled with movies from HBO, used to send me floppies loaded with games for me to play on our new computer. Howard was a member of a BBS, an through that he would get all sorts of things some what I would later learn as “Warez” and others something called “Shareware”. For those not old enough to remember this era, the idea was simple. A company would release one fully playable level of a game and distribute it freely on Bulletin Board Systems and FTP sites. Folks would download it, play it, and if they liked it you could buy a code that would unlock the full version of the game and let you play the rest of the levels. They also distributed their entire catalog of games in an ASCII text file format along with all of the pertinent information on how to purchase the games. Being a teenager and not having access to a credit card, it would be years before I was able to play the full versions of most of these games. For example I played Spear of Destiny long before I actually played any level of Wolfenstein other than the first one. The same is true with Doom and having played Doom II before the later episodes, in part because in both of these cases they got a physical release stocked at our local Walmart that didn’t require me to convince my parents to give someone a credit card number over the phone. The first of these titles that I played were the original Commander Keen and Duke Nukem, and I remember at the time not being able to understand why these games were not released for the Nintendo or Super Nintendo. I was completely unaware of the proud history of effectively home brew game development on Computers like the Atari ST, Amiga and Commodore 64 because I simply wasn’t exposed to it at the time. All I really knew was the original Atari 2600, and then the 8 bit and 16 bit era consoles. It was after I got access to the internet that I more or less descended into the madness of all of the other options and got heavily into the Amiga scene when I picked up a 3000. At this time however it was extremely common place for ALL major game releases to offer a freely downloadable demo. When CD-Rom entered the scene is was extremely common for a Games magazine to have a pack in CD filled with demos of various products that were either out or coming soon.

This wasn’t just a computer thing either. During the PlayStation and Dreamcast era, I remember demo cds for both systems in regular circulation. I used to subscribe to a PlayStation magazine, and each month there would be a CD included that had short demos for a lot of the titles that were just about to release. Once you moved into the PlayStation 2 and Xbox era of game consoles, the demos existed but were significantly less common. When you arrived at the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 era, the concept of downloading a demo had more or less been forgotten by developers. The era of try before you buy was a thing of the past, and this was also the era of several game releases becoming controversial for not quite living up to expectations.

While none of this is Shareware, I find it interesting that at some point over the last few years something changed. Nintendo Handheld devices have often had downloadable demos to sort of whet your appetite and get you interested in buying the full game. When Nintendo released the Switch I started noticing how many of these first party and major third party games had a fully playable demo that you could download ahead of time. Not only was the game playable, but often times you could pick up where you left off in your save file giving you further incentive to pay some money to continue that gaming experience. For example I absolutely played the Demo for Trials of Mana, and while I decided to start fresh after-all with a different party, I could have easily just picked up where I left off.

This is a trend however that might have been happening under my nose for longer than I realized. Now that I look around it seems like there are many digital storefronts offering demos, and that might be what ultimately changed. Digital distribution, just like in the golden age of shareware, has become more a primary means of getting titles out to the public. It costs money to press a demo cd and distribute it out to the stores, but uploading a demo version to a store front is effectively free. It feels like maybe we are just about to go through a second age of Shareware, and while you are not downloading the games from some University hosted FTP server that you found through Gopher, you are still downloading them freely. So if you are curious what is available in demo form you can check out the following Storefront links that should in theory bring you right to the demo sections.

• Nintendo E-Shop Switch Demos
• Steam PC Demos
• PlayStation 4 Demos
• Microsoft Xbox Demos

As someone who often writes impressions of games that he is enjoying, I should start digging up links to see if demos are available for that game. I can write all I want to tell you how cool I think something is, but giving you access to download freely and see for yourself is significantly more powerful.

For years in World of Warcraft our character has been referred to in voice dialogs as “The Champion”. I believe this more or less is just an easy way of addressing the character without actually having to care about whatever your character’s actual name is. Actually you are being called by your name in the text messages, but I want to focus on this concept of the Champion for a moment. Essentially this to me is the Warcraft version of the Warrior of Light. We play this character who is constantly put upon by the leaders of our faction or whatever other groups we find ourselves wrapped up in. While the game doesn’t necessarily call this out, we are clearly more pivotal of a character than just being another soldier in the army. Which has lead me down a series of ideas for a World of Warcraft expansion I would like to see. After a decade of being pushed into making decisions we had no control over, our Champion effectively leaves the service of whatever faction we were part of. In doing so we move to an island with a Tuskarr fishing village and some ancient ruins, with the goal of effectively “retiring”. You would go through some initial set up phase of making yourself a home on the island and maybe doing a few quests to help the locals. After a short period of time Magni would show up telling you about some grave new threat that he needs your help with. You begrudgingly offer to help, but you tell him that you are going to do it your way or not at all. This begins a sequence of events where you effectively build your own faction, that take up residence on the island. First you would need to go recruit someone who can create a portal network, and I am thinking you would maybe have a series of options based on your past experiences in the game. For example if you were exalted with Suramar you could go on a mission to recruit Chief Telemancer Oculeth to come help you set up the network. My thought being that these missions would work a lot like the recruitment missions in various RPGs like Mass Effect, where in order to convince them you have to go do some other things for them. After getting the teleportation network set up, you could start drawing upon your past experiences… recruiting folks from your Garrison, your Order Hall, or even individuals that you encountered during the War Campaign. Each bond you created would strengthen your island and open up new options. I am thinking for a system as detailed like this that the Island probably needs to exist an account level, which I realize would piss off the roleplayers… but the level of detail I am visualizing would be a major pain in the ass when it comes to trying to level the island up for alts. Maybe you could have a point based system and that the points themselves are shared at an account level, allowing each character to make their own specific choices. Ultimately the sequence would involve you negotiating with both the Horde and the Alliance and deciding whether or not to include them in your plans. Essentially you are throwing off the shackles of red versus blue and instead creating your own faction that gets to be created in the way you see fit. The other thing that I would love to see is quest to recruit grandmasters from various tradeskills. In order to start the quest you would need to have mastered that tradeskill on one of your characters, and probably have to craft some difficult to make items to prove your worth. However upon recruiting them they set up shop on your island and start offering that tradeskill to all of your alts. So if you want to craft some armor for a lowbie, you could just walk up to the vendor and access blacksmithing or alchemy or any number of other trades. My idea being that the island as a whole would have a shared crafting inventory that you could just dump your resources into and offer it up to any of your characters. At this point you will realize that I have not talked at all about the bad guy we would be facing… because in truth that is irrelevant. This would be setting up a new structure for the game going forward and shifting us away from dictating a specific faction narrative to players, and instead allowing them to choose their own path. Sure it would be way more complicated to create content for… but it would also feel immensely better for those of us who throw some serious side eye each time one of our faction leaders makes horrible decisions for us and we have no real say in what is going on narratively. I don’t love the Night Elves… but I would have never willingly taken part in the burning of Teldrassil for example. I also would have told Genn to go fuck himself when he goes on an anti-horde rant as an Alliance player. I realize I will never see content like this in World of Warcraft, but man it would be awesome if we did. The game needs to evolve past the simplistic us versus them story-line. The game feels best when we are all allied against something stronger than ourselves be that the Scourge, The Legion or the Old Gods. Shifting the story to be about the evolution of what started out as your vacation home, to turning into a fledgling island nation… would be an interesting story to experience. I also have some ideas about the mysterious ruins on the island serving as effectively a Diablo style endless dungeon where the progression of the island unlocks new areas of the dungeon to explore and with it more interesting loot available. The island could even have a shared Guild Hall available that would show up on the islands of everyone in a specific guild and zoning into it would take you to a shared instance for just your guildies. There are so many possibilities, but mostly I just want to walk away from the mistake that was Battle for Azeroth and forcing a specific PVP story down our throats.

I thought I would start off this mornings post with a picture of one of my coworkers sleeping on the job. The cats are still confused as hell as to why we never leave the house and go to work. The funny bit about this is that Kenzie and Josie tend to hang out with me in my office during the day and Mollie the skittish cat hangs with my wife when she is downstairs. This has actually been pretty great for Mollie since she is actually getting time to play and be cat like without being freaked about the other two being around. Usually Josie sleeps up behind one of my monitors as shown and Kenzie sleeps on an old PC Case box that is sitting beside me that she adopted at one point and now as a result I cannot get rid of it. As far as our well being goes, we are doing pretty good. We have been in limiting outside trips for a few weeks now and both my wife and I are at home for the foreseeable future. I’m working remotely and as a teacher she has not reported back from spring break yet with that whole situation sorta being up in the air as to how it is going to work. We still have quite a bit of food and plenty of other assorted products, but I figure at some point over the weekend we are going to have to either make a trip out to a grocery store or luck out and get an order in on one of the grocery pick up sites. We got our first order like that on Monday and were a little frustrated that they didn’t attempt any substitution of items. For example we ordered a specific type of butter just because you had… which they apparently were sold out of but they had other salted butters that eventually my wife went and picked up. All in all we are doing pretty well, which is not meant to tempt fate but more just to give a general status update. The world around us however is not doing so hot. The Governor made a declaration that any non-essential business is to remain closed, which effectively means if you are not involved in food cycle or involved with critical infrastructure like hospitals then you are effectively closed. For a long while the part that was disturbing about this is how I knew things were getting bad but the world didn’t seem to reflect that yet. It reminded me of being in a Zombie Apocalypse movie but one where everyone tries to pretend that the Zombies aren’t actually a thing. However since the most recent order the world does in fact look changed, and everyone sorta seems to eye every other human being with suspicion. Other than having trouble with a frame of reference for what day of the week it is, I am doing fairly well with social isolation. Given my druthers I would spend all of my time at home anyways, so giving me a reason to do so doesn’t seem to be impacting me nearly as much as it is some of my friends. I am also super lucky in that I get along well with my spouse and we are more or less treating this like one long extended weekend. Because she has a better immune system than I do, she has been the person to go out in public for the majority of the needed trips. However I did make a trip to the local comic shop that was closing for twenty one days as per the order so I could settle out my pull box and make sure she went into the lock-down with some additional funds. As far as Blapril our moved up running of the Blaugust festivities… we have quite a few signed up and ready to participate with still a bit of time to get new folks signed up. As of the time of writing this post we have twenty three, which is down a bit from our normal Blaugust runs. However last Blaugust was among the lowest as far as participation goes, so we might just be in a bit of a blogging slump. I did also completely spring this thing onto the community without much warning, but hopefully as we get started more folks will show up and chime in. Here is the list of participants so far.

• Belghast – Tales of the Aggronaut
• Bhagpuss – Inventory Full
• Cali – Diary of a Guildleader
• Chestnut – Gamer Girl Confessions
• Discgrace – Daily Creative Thing
• Easha and Poppy – Glittering Girly Gwent Gaming
• Elio – The Path They Walk
• Everwake – Everwake’s Internet Adventures
• Jen Thorpe – Book of Jen
• Joar – WoW Alt Addiction
• Krikket – Nerd Girl Thoughts
• MagiWasTaken – indiecator.home.blog
• Mailvaltar – Mailvaltar – MMOs and other stuff
• Naithin – Time to Loot
• Paeroka – Nerdy Bookahs
• Panda Steve – Panda Steve Types Stuff
• Roger Edwards – Contains Moderate Peril
• Shadowz – Shadowz Abstract Gaming
• Stargrace – Nomadic Gamers Eh!
• Syp – Bio Break
• Tessa/Endalia
  • Narratess
  • Princess in a Castle
• unwiseowl – leaflocker
• Wilhelm – TAGN

Regardless of numbers we will have a good time going through the process that Blaugust is. It will serve as a delightful distraction to the things we are going through on a day to day basis.

I don’t have a pithy image to go with this post, but yesterday we officially went on remote protocols. Like literally everyone out there I am dealing with life in pandemia, where social distancing… that thing the introverts and anxiety ridden among us have been practicing our entire life. I am officially sitting in my work place and yes I am wearing pants. Well that is a slight lie because I opted for shorts instead of my usual jeans, but I am properly dressed. I attempted to maintain as much of my morning routine as possible as I got up, showered, left the house, picked up breakfast and then instead of driving to the office I drove back home. What makes it doubly odd is that both my wife and I are now remote workers for the time being, though currently she is on spring break. I had the sudden realization yesterday that managing a team of 16 remote employees is going to be an awful lot like leading a raid group. The challenge of leading a raid is that you effectively have a group of unpaid volunteers that you somehow are trying to get working towards the same goal with nothing but text and voice chat in order to wrangle them. When it comes to actual employees at least there are some financial hooks that you have that you can flex, but otherwise I think remote work is going to feel extremely similar. While we swapped Discord and Ventrilo for more professional tools like Microsoft Teams… the theory is very similar. While sitting down to write this I am already connected in with my team and answering some initial tech support questions as we attempt to make sure everyone can get into their machines as intended. Kenzie is extremely confused because she knows that I should be leaving my office any minute now and continues to pace around as if to remind me that I have to run out the door. Hopefully at some point she will settle in on her box beside me and chill. The thing that concerns me the most is that it is only 7:10 and I already feel pretty isolated. I have a feeling that we are going to have to keep a chat going or something in the background that folks can drop in and out of just to have some human contact, which is bizarre for me to admit considering that I can go hours without saying a word on most days. I pitched this concept as a grand new adventure to my employees. We come from a very “butts in seats” culture where if you are not in your seat at a specific time then you must not be actually working. One of the biggest complaints that I have heard over the years is that we don’t really have a good remote work option, and as a result this is now our chance to prove that things can in fact get done when we are all in different locations. So my hope is that we can embrace this opportunity and show that productivity comes in a bunch of different packages. This is either going to go amazingly well or backfire horribly, but I believe it is going to be the former rather than the later. Just the fact that I can work from cocoon like darkness of my office is a major upgrade to the harsh brightness of the fluorescent light sea of cubical. Some parting thoughts however. I did some research going into this situation and one of the things that I found helpful is a pamphlet that community veteran Sanya Weathers created with some of her tips and tricks from a career of working remotely. She is currently selling it on Amazon Kindle for a little under $3 and then planning on donating the proceeds to her local food pantry. I ended up taking this version, converting it to PDF and then sending it out to my employees and putting in a donation through her coffee link for each of them and a few more just in case it spread within the company. I found the advice to be invaluable and the writing style was easily approachable and as such I am hoping it helps my crew in making the adjustment. The thing is… at this point none of us know how long this is going to go on. It is wrecking the daily routine and as a result we are going to have to find a brand new one. I also fully expect that this blog is going to shift around a bit as a result given that my gaming patterns are being interrupted as well. Yesterday was so draining that I more or less melted into the sofa when I got home and did the whole dozing in and out of sleep thing until we finally decided to go to the bedroom around 9 pm. I maybe knocked out a few quests in Elder Scrolls Online, but my appetite for gaming was minimal just due to the sheer exhaustion of existing in pandemia. We are in the time of community spread and I hope we all make it out okay on the other end. I am going to continue to talk about the things that concern me but I am likely not going to be promoting posts like this one. This one is only for the folks who read me on a daily basis.