Intangible Loss

For starters I just got done playing a little bit of Blood Bowl. That game was clearly made for people who already understand the tabletop version. I resent that I now have a game I need to study up on just to play some single player. Once I fully understand the game I think it could be fun...ish. Team customization might be Blood Bowl's saving grace, depending on how much customization is possible, but I haven't checked it out yet because at this point I think most of it would be Greek to me.
     I haven't played a whole lot of Eve the last few days for a very specific reason. If you lose a combat your spaceship and all equipment gets destroyed. I think you can go back and loot your wrecked ship for some little trinkets that may have survived, but for the most part your baby is gone. In other MMOs like World of Warcraft if you get killed you run back to your corpse and respawn. There are some penalties for death, but they are pretty trivial. Eve has very unforgiving consequences for death. It's a game largely about resources and cold hard cash. I want to properly emphasize the gravity of losing the one thing that allows you to continue to gain resources. It is conceivably possible that, if you were a really terrible player, you could reach a point where you just lost your last ship and don't have enough money to buy one. CCP, the makers of Eve, most likely have some sort of fail safe built in, such as they give you a real crap ship if you get your last ship blown up, but my point is this (still), the penalty for death is very high. Not to sound like a crazy person, but although I'm talking about virtual possessions that, in the grand scheme of things, mean nothing whatsoever, there is a very real and frustrating sense of loss when this happens.
     Today was a day of demos. I downloaded the Dragon Age 2, Fatal Inertia, and some Gundam game demos. Fatal Inertia is a racing game similar to Wipeout or Star Wars Podracer or any number of other generic flying-cars with weapons racing game. I was sufficiently underwhelmed. Delete. Gundam was a disappointment also. A few tweaks and it might become a fantastic game, but it was clunky and slow. You pilot your big robot on a large battlefield with literally thousands of other big robots. You press X, X, X a lot, or maybe X, X, Y or X, Y, A if you're feeling a little wacky. Now repeat about 300 times. All it would take to turn this game from dull to incredible is 3 things. #1- speed up the gundam's action and movement. #2- make the generic combos flashier. #3- add more enemy variety. Gundam is a mech game. And by mech I mean giant robot. There are 2 different types of mech games as far as I can tell. There's strategic mech games like Chromehounds of Front Mission, and there are action mech games like Zone of the Enders and Armored Core. Action mech games are broken for me, perhaps forever. That's because I've already played the best one that exists and all others are now held to that standard, and always fall short. Zone of the Enders: 2nd Runner is the best action mech game. Period. The extremely tight controls and the free form combat that has your mech jumping across the screen lightning fast made for an incredibly fun and intuitive combat game. Anyone making a mech game needs to play the hell out of ZOE 2 and take liberal pages from that book.
     Finally, I played Dragon Age 2. I've never played 1, I've been curious because it looks like the fantasy version of the space opera Mass Effect. Mass Effect gets a bad rap from a lot of people. It's one of my favorite games. That's not to say that it is not problematic, but I think the good far out weighs the bad. Anyway. After played the DA 2 demo I Must go play Dragon Age. It seems like it is exactly what I expected and more. Now I am making the assumption that Dragon Age 1 and 2 are not too terribly different, and I'm inferring things from context that I didn't actually see in practice in the demo. But the combat system seems solid and easy to pick up and understand. You control 1 person primarily but can easily switch to full control of other people in your party. There appears to be character loyalty points and a good/evil point system. If Dragon Age is similar in scope to either Mass Effects this is a game I can get 100+ hours of fun out of.

For the sake of posting

I don't know if the trend has become apparent yet, but I am mostly posting about things that happened the day before. So what I blab on about today is usually in the context of what happened yesterday.
     True to form, here's what happened yesterday: Other than spending time at school yesterday I also did a little bit of leg work that I hope will boost my traffic a bit. I submitted myself to some search engines, I posted a link on the Fear the Boot forums, and I added myself to Digg and Stumble. I also tweaked the appearance of Blogsothoth Gaming to make it (hopefully) more user friendly.
     Fear the Boot is my second favorite pod cast. It's all about table-top RPGs (and a little bit more). Even if you're not into tabletop rpgs you could still enjoy the show, assuming you have a love (or at least tolerance) of nerd-stuff. My favorite podcast is Radiolab, an NPR podcast about science-y type stuff. I can't give a better description because words fail to do it justice, but if you listen to podcasts at all I highly recommend it.
     If you don't know what Stumble is than you've never been bored on the internet. Stumble is similar to digg in that it's content is selected and submitted by users with a similar sort of vote system to digg (if you don't know how digg works, ask google). But you install a toolbar, click a button and it brings up a psuedo-random page that can be some of the craziest things. Stumble has led me to some of the funniest things on the interwebs including my favorite flash game ever.
     Uh...anyway, this is supposed to be about games. I played some more Scott Pilgrim yesterday. I am upsettingly close to the end of the game. At least I think I am, I have only Ramona's 7th evil ex to defeat. But I found out something that makes me think it will keep some of it's re-playability. I started up with a different character, just for giggles, and found that the levels seem to change a little based on what character you choose, so maybe that'll be enough to keep me playing for awhile.
     Blood Bowl is making me more angry than it should considering I have yet to play the actual game. I decided yesterday that since the BB tutorial is kind of confusing I should read the manual first. I bought it on Steam, so I right clicked Blood Bowl and hit "Read the manual". It then directs me to the 80+ page rule book for the table-top version! Apparently it is based so closely on the table-top game that they share a rule book. I was not prepared to learn a complex table-top game's entire game system just to play a damn video game! I don't have a problem learning a tome of rules when I'm prepared to do so, but I was caught so off guard by this that I feel like I have to take some time and mentally prepare myself to learn how to play this video game! Am I being dramatic? Probably. But it's my blog, and it's about my innermost thoughts...about video games.
     To conclude, I've been reading a book on my new Kindle called This Gaming Life: Travels in Three Cities by Jim Rossignol. It's pretty good non-fiction. I'm only about 1/3 through but it seems to be about this guy arguing that video games can be good for people. I'm not writing a particularly stunning book review here, but I recommend checking it out. At very least read a review about it written by someone more verbose on the topic than myself.

What a horrible night to have a curse

I got a couple new games I've yet to mention. Just for clarity, almost 100% of the time when I say "new" I really mean "new to me".
     Anyway, I got Scott Pilgrim the game and Blood Bowl. Scott Pilgrim is an xbox live arcade game that is like the old arcade beat-'em ups. Similar to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or The Simpsons but your characters level up and get new skills. The game claims to be 8-bit, and it's soundtrack is certainly made with nintendo-era technology. But the graphics being truly 8-bit? I'm not buying it. They do a good job of making the graphics look like a throw back to 8-bit, but everything looks too clear for me to legitimately believe they didn't supe them up a bit.

I don't know. You tell me. 

     Anyway. I like SP the Game because it's just plain fun. My problem is that after about 3 hours of play I already made Scott max level. The upshot is that the better Scott gets the more fun it is, but I suspect after playing through each level ( 7 I assume ) once I think there might be quite a bit of fun fall off. 

     So Blood Bowl. I got it a few days ago on PC ( from Steam ), I've sat down and tried to run through the tutorial on 2 separate occasions but failed to make it all the way through. Not because it seems like a bad game, but it seems so complex. It's a football game based on Warhammer. I don't know enough about Warhammer to explain so look at the Warhammer wiki. But its basically a football game mixed with a tactical RPG. My impression thus far is that you pick a team made up of orcs, or humans, or undead things, or other fantasy races. You then play turn based football where instead of tackling or whatever, you pummel or kill people...or orcs. But the rules seem so complex that once I'm done writing this I'm going to look up the rules of the game. 

     Finally, the Eve honeymoon is over. I'm still playing it, but I'm past the fanatical overzealous period of an MMORPG during which the power of Eve compels you to play at all times.