Played: Paranoia

Greetings, citizens! This guest blog is brought to you by your friend The Computer! Comments are mandatory!

For those of you living under the rubble of ROK complex for the past 20 year cycles, Paranoia is a tabletop Rocket Propelled Grenade, or RPG, that takes place in the exciting world of Alpha Complex. Alpha Complex is inhabited by the genetic progeny of the sole survivors of the commie mutant invasion of [DATE CLASSIFIED], who all work together to make Alpha Complex a cleaner, happier, and less treasonous place to survive within! Don't worry, sub-ROK complex citizens, Troubleshooters will be arriving to rescue your DNA soon!

To The Computer's mind, the Paranoia RPG, specifically in its most recent incarnation, has the most brilliant game mechanic this side of Panty Explosion. Other, less fun RPGs give lip service to a Golden Rule: The GM is always right. Yet in practice these less fun RPGs often descend into arcane rules arguments, as both players and the GM battle over the modifiers that affect monk skills while upside down in a black hole. Paranoia bypasses this hurdle entirely, as players are forbidden from knowing the rules. Knowledge of the rules requires Ultraviolet clearance. Players suspected of understanding the rules are subject to punishments that range from character death to worse.

What's worse than a dead clone, citizen?

Players who argue about rules are obviously unhappy. Therefore, their characters are unhappy. The Computer doesn't like it when citizens of Alpha Complex are unhappy. In order to improve their attitude, The Computer might ask a citizen to visit the nearest karaoke booth and perform a song on this week's Top Happy Playlist. Obviously, failure to keep your rock meter out of the red means you're a commie mutant traitor.

And since this is Paranoia, the GM might not give any notice about what songs are on the list, or that this is likely to happen in next Sunday's session, anywhere other than his blog.

This has been The Computer. Thank you, Canned Food and Weakpuns! Remember, comments are mandatory!

Played: Kingdom Of Loathing

This month began with Narraptor revealing his addiction to Leveling. It's only proper that it ends with my own tearful confession.

I've been playing Kingdom Of Loathing off and on for over a year now. It's a free web based game, where your tiny stickman adventurer boozes, eats, and kills their way across the kingdom. Eventually, you climb up to the naughty sorceress' tower, kill her, and jump into a portal leading to heaven. Then, you start the process all over again, but with one of your previous abilities permanently added to your new level one character. There are a few differences, but the second verse is pretty damn close to the first. Also, the thirteenth is pretty much the same as the last twelve, but my character is a lot better at making mixed drinks than he used to be.

There ought to be a sane reason I still play this. World Of Warcraft kept me around long after it had lost it's luster, just from the co-operative gameplay and it's financial simulation aspects. Meanwhile, Kingdom of Loathing is a very solitary experience if you don't hang out on the forums, and it's marketplace might be robust, but it is also painful to use.

Then again, they try to include new content every Tuesday, usually based around enriching the lives of lower level players. This certainly beats the content drops of WOW, which hit once every four to five months, and 90% of it is designed solely for the top 10% of the players.

Played: Arkham Horror

Game On!

I recently finished a game of Arkham Horror. This counts as a victory, as previous attempts ended when one or more participants suddenly realized that they actually hated the game, and would run off screaming.

Arkham Horror was originally designed in the '80s, when the quality of gameplay was judged solely by how many cardboard tokens were crammed inside the box. There are tokens representing life, sanity, cash, clues, monsters, portals to other dimensions, free passes to avoid being sucked back into these portals, good magical sigils, bad magical sigils, horror, terror, closed doors, the numbers one through three, and "The Button". If you get bored with that, you can play around with the baker's dozen of card decks, or the character sheets for the players and the elder god that's trying to break into the world and eat its cookies.

Everyone at the table plays a group of god-fearing 1920's archetypes, running around town and putting paid to the tentacular ner'do'wells that keep popping up around the place. Eventually, your goal is to jump into portals leading to various lands of dread, survive two random encounters there, and then turn off the portal by reading a book at it or shooting it down. In other words, it's exactly like the way I ran Call Of Cthulhu when I was in high school, right down to the importance of keeping a stick of dynamite with you for special occasions. What this has to do with horror is anyone's guess, because a Will -2 roll is only so unnerving, even when it's backed up by the threat of losing your last brain token and being sent to the asylum for the fifth time.

In short, this is the kind of game designed for fans of this kind of game. It seems enjoyable enough, but it's ultra-cooperative feel actually causes the game to drag in the end. You have a pretty good idea whether everyone wins or everyone dies, so why continue? Also, if your gaming opportunities are as limited as mine, Arkham Horror will have to compete with games that don't require players to remember when the Horror Meter causes the Terror Meter to rise, and exactly how big the Outskirts Stack can become before it causes the General Store to close up shop.

PAX?

Is anyone else going to the Penny Arcade Expo? If so, we need to talk before hotel reservations are finalized. Like, stat.

For those of you unfamiliar with the con, it's the annual gaming event put together by the guys at Penny Arcade. There are video game tournaments for those so inclined, and exhibitors offering first or second looks at their upcoming titles. But Mr. Bile and I are more about the music. In addition to PAX alumni MC Frontalot, the NESkimos, and Optimus Rhyme (non-embarrassing nerdcore hip-hop, heavy metal covers of video game music, and a rockin' live band, respectively), this year's lineup includes Freezepop, who you might know from bonus tracks on Guitar Hero I and II, and Jonathan Coulton, the man who brought you "Code Monkey", "Re: Your Brains," and a folk-rock cover of "Baby Got Back."

There's also a very friendly open-gaming room and the Omegathon, where randomly selected attendees compete in front of an audience of 20,000+ in tabletop and videogame challenges. Last year's contest included pre-release Guitar Hero II tracks and Tetris. I'm no prognosticator, but something tells me Carcassone or Catan might be involved this time around. At least, I hope so, because my name is in the hat.

Oh, and Will Wheaton will be there, if you're into that kind of thing. And by that kind of thing, I don't know what I mean. I can only assume that if an appearance by Will Wheaton whets your appetite, you have your reasons.

So there you have it. Several perfectly good reasons to vacation in Seattle the weekend before Labor Day, even if you've never heard of the Fruit Fucker 2000.

The Awesome Power Of The 80s

"Only A Lad" (presumably "as made famous") by Oingo Boingo is on Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80s. You can read it on Wikipedia or hear it with your own ears.

I finally have a reason to learn how to use the orange button. Truly, this is a great time to be alive and own a toy guitar.

Next Week On Canned Food And Shotguns

I hate to write about blog business, but I suppose it's inevitable every once in awhile.

New content has been a bit irregular of late. Let me assure you that this does not represent a decreased level of commitment among our contributors. If anything, it's the result of being too self-critical. Few people may know this site exists, but we hold ourselves to pretty high standards nonetheless. Sure, I could post my gut reaction to Spider-Man 3 (The musical parts everyone else hated? Aside from Topher Grace's Venom teeth, those were the only parts I liked.), but if I have nothing constructive to add to the conversation, what's the point? This was never meant to be a forum upon which we vented Interlard opinion.

At the same time, all our contributors have been going through employment fluctuations. It's an unfortunate confluence of events to be sure, but I trust our readers will understand that these things happen. When the dust settles, things should get back to normal...at least until August, when we decide upon the blog's ultimate fate.

In the meantime, I propose that next week is Whatcha Been Playin week. I have my three P's (Peggle, Puzzle Quest, and Paranoia) to discuss, and I'm sure Mr. Bile and Tom Foolery are playing something, otherwise they'd have commented on this post by now. Blogs that aren't this blog are encouraged to contribute as well.

Game on?

Poison Fire 2004 US Tour

Some people send you links to pictures of cats or obese obscenities. Me? I'm getting into the habit of posting links to animated maps made by paranoid people.

Click here to see a chronology of the nuclear history of the United States. At one time it was a work in progress, but I suspect progress has been stalled for a few years now. The timeline ends at 2004. That's too bad, because midi sound effects would do wonders for it.

No Spoilers

I'm going to break a rule here and not spoil something--unless you consider knowing how awesome something is before you see it a spoiler. If that's the case, skip to the end.

(non-spoiler warning)

I know some crazy people have been hating on it all season and embracing the answers served up on a platter by Heroes (can't wait to see how the fans turn on it halfway through season two!), but Lost is the only serial drama I can think of that has topped its season finales two years in a row. Yes, The Shield has mastered the art of melodramatic anti-climax, and each season of The Wire actually has an epilogue. But to the best of my knowledge, no television series has ever managed to produce compelling cliffhangers post season two. After that, it's always a gun to someone's head, or a division closing for the second time, or someone gets engaged and pregnant and kidnapped in an episode that will change everything until things revert to normal in mid-September, when said character gets rescued in the first ten minutes, rejects their engagement, re-takes their pregnancy test, and discovers it was all a dream.

Yesterday's season finale of Lost was as jaw-dropping as the end of Twin Peaks. But unlike Twin Peaks and its '90s-'00s kin, Lost is in its third year and the network has signed up to see it through to the end.

(non-spoiler warning ends)

If, for some crazy reason, you haven't seen Lost or just gave up at some point, you have until February to catch up. You have no justifiable reason not to.

Played: Sam And Max: Season One

FOR THOSE WHO CAME IN LATE...

1: Lucasarts releases their latest adventure game, The Curse Of Monkey Island. The game announces that it has arrived to kick ass and take skeletal limbs, and it doesn't need another skeletal limb.
2: Blizzard cancels their own Warcraft Adventure game, reportedly because they didn't think it would be as good as Curse Of Monkey Island. (The story of Thrall's quest for kingship will eventually be told the way it was meant to be, by the intervention of high-level time travelers on the quest for mad lootz.)
3: Lucasarts releases Escape From Monkey Island. It disappoints.
4: Lucasarts cancels Sam & Max 2, so that they can concentrate more time on creating the ultimate Hoth experience.
5: Adventure games flee to Europe, briefly forming a light jazz ensemble with Cindi Lauper.

Cut to now. The company Telltale Games releases Sam And Max: Season One as a series of six 'episodes', released about once a month. Surprisingly, they keep to their schedule.

Reportedly, most of the changes that were made in later episodes were due to customer request. For example, nobody at Telltale Games ever thought that reusing the exact same jokes for the exact same items would ever get old. Also, their reaction to demands for better puzzles was fulfilled by making a joke about how simple most of the puzzles were. Also, a dying child used the Make-A-Wish foundation to insert a "Wardrobe Malfunction" joke into episode four, as one last act of spite against an unfair universe.

Each episode lasts about one hour longer that it ought to, mostly taken up by walking back and forth between Sybil's and Bosco's. There are some good jokes, and some decent (though easy) puzzles. Which is good, because the exceedingly simple game structure means that whenever you get stuck, you have absolutely nothing to do except to stew in your own frustration.

In short: Sam And Max won't hurt you, but it will disappoint. I'm not ready to blame polygons for killing the adventure game yet, but it's mighty tempting. I'll let you know after Season Two rolls out.

Zerg Rant

Forgive me. I know it's hypocritical given my vehement, entirely non-apologist proselytizing of Lost, but allow me to rain on someone else's period. No, I'm not going to rant about Heroes. This goes out to South Korea.

And I meant "parade".

If you keep up with this type of thing, by now you've seen the trailer for Starcraft II. If not, you can check it out...oh, here. Or keep reading and I'll spoil it for you. It proves beyond a doubt that power armor is stupid. You're wearing a metal suit that has to be screwed together by robots, which means you can't take it off, yet your face is protected by a mere retractable shield. What happens if just one of your mechanical legs goes bad? Or if your faceplate gets splattered with luminescent blood? Do you drop to your knees and wait for a drone to come patch you up? I'm guessing this is why people who read Starship Troopers had such a problem with the movie. The trailer doesn't even hold up to suspended disbelief--video game suspended disbelief.

And yet you can clearly hear people cheering in the background throughout.

Here are two ways to interpret this reaction:

1. Imagine a world where every new version of Carcassonne/Puerto Rico/Ticket to Ride or any other well-balanced German strategy game was announced as the Second Coming via full-motion video or...

2. Imagine a world where people took non-player characters ripped off from Warhammer Fantasy/Whatever K seriously and wanted to know what happened to them.

Both options are pretty embarrassing.

I haven't played Starcraft since the single player campaign refused to acknowledge my accomplishments ("I must sacrifice myself to destroy the hive." "Dude, I already killed it!"), but I'll give the multiplayer the benefit of the doubt. Given its longevity in the international market, it may well be the closest that any RTS has gotten to board game perfection. Fine. But you know what? When I discovered their was a deluxe version of Kill Dr. Lucky, I only went "Woo!" in the privacy of my own home. It was not a spiritual experience.

As for possibility number two, you've got to be kidding. "Yay! We get to find out who lives and who dies no matter what we do!" In WOW parlance, this is "lore". In real role-playing games, we call that rail-roading.

I'm disappointed. Starcraft II, World of Starcraft, Diablo III...I was crossing my fingers for something new. Bookworm Adventures and Puzzle Quest deserve more hype than this announcement.

Half-Viewed: 28 Weeks Later

Welcome to life 28 weaks later. Everything will be fine as long as you stay inside the Green Zone and are willing to forgive yourself for what you had to do to survive the zombie plague. Today's rage round question, for free re-admission to the next movie you choose to see at your friendly neighborhood theater chain: "Who is the real monster?"

A. Man, again
B. Children
C. Cheating
D. Not being able to see what the hell is going on
E. All of the above (i.e. stupidity)

The correct answer, with less emphasis on man in general and more on anyone who decided to move back to zombie town, is "E". Please leave the theater and collect your re-admission pass. We look forward to seeing you next weekend with a more lenient attitude toward the plot holes in Spider-Man 3.

Tiles Of Dread

The ceiling tiles of my apartment are beginning to bulge downwards, reaching hungrily for my unwashed laundry. I blame ghosts.

In the beginning, I thought to cover up the water-damaged tiles with Lordi posters. But there's too much damage, and not enough poster to go around. Besides, where the hell is Lordi, anyway? The arockalypse seems to have been postponed until later in the year. We have been given no excuses as to why Mr. Lordi couldn't be bothered to fly to America. Hell, he flies upon wings made from stolen dreams, so there's really no reason why he couldn't come on time.

Perhaps we have failed him in some way. This is about the only reason that I'm willing to accept. Even that might not suffice for Narraptor, but he places the very highest standards on his monsters.

Mario Mints Money

In one of Harry Turtledove's alternate universes, a series of subtle changes during the Civil War caused a ripple effect that eventually led to a world in which I could do complex mathematics without tragedy occurring. Moreover, in this alternate universe, I happen to be a businessman working at a box company, with a big 'ole picture of "Stone Cold" Locke with the caption "Never Give Up!" hanging in my cubicle.

In honor of this alternate me, I still read up on business news that catches my fancy. For example, the site Information Arbitrage. About every fourth post I confess that I have no idea what the hell he's talking about. Usually that's followed up by a post about video games. For example:

Gaming and Razors: A Hopelessly Broken Metaphor

A loose summary of the article would be this: Spending a billion dollars on developing a system, and then expecting to recoup this money through games that are primarily made and sold by other people is not a very good market strategy.

This brings up another point in my mind. So, the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3 have better graphics and computing horsepower than the Nintendo Wii. But of course they do. The Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3 come from the future. When both were introduced, they were stuffed with technology that had not yet become viable to be mass produced for the consumer market. That's why each of those systems was sold at a loss.

And why would they do this? Because both Microsoft and Sony expected their cyberpimped systems to be so impressive that it would instantly devastate any company that tried to produce a game system using present technology. Neither company has spent their millions expecting never to get them back. The reason they subsidized their systems is because they expected to get those millions back from you, on top of the millions you already would have given them.

Things have not worked out quite like they hoped. Meanwhile, Nintendo circumvented the whole "Ante a billion dollars or fold" trap that was set for them by inventing a stick you can wiggle waggle.

I can remember the days when Nintendo was the giant monolithic bully of a company that lusted for the blood of their enemies. But damn if I'm not rooting for them these days.

Midnight Is Movie Time

I haven't seen Spider-Man 3 yet. Please let me know if there are any moments in the film that the previews didn't spoil. So far, the reviews have led me believe that the only unexpected event is when Peter Parker starts an emo band called "The Venoms." Also, let me know if there's anyone left on Earth who hasn't watched the film yet. It's only been twenty four hours since it came out, but I'm already feeling left behind.

There are still plenty of films left this summer for me to enjoy a day-one midnight showing. I'm not sure if I'll be able to do it for Pirates 3, though. I'd likely spend the entire night scanning the crowd, looking for an excuse to yell at the first guy talking trash about the second one.

I can probably wait until Harry Potter 5. For once, I can meet my fellow moviegoers with open arms and tell them, "You know what? I'm perfectly fine with the fact that you never read the Harry Potter And The Order Of The Phoenix. Hell, I wish I hadn't."

The Post Of Three Things

Thing One:

Looking for a work-safe site to obsessively visit every 420 seconds at the office? Check out the Global Incident Map. It tells you what shit is going down where, courtesy of Google, flashing icons, and a guy browsing the Internet for news stories every day. Take the 420 seconds with a grain of salt, though. I haven't seen much of a change in the last 24 hours. Either the world is considerably safer than I thought or someone's on vacation. Look on the bright side. Maybe it's both!

Thing Two:

Skip this Thing if you don't want my wife to ruin Lost for you, too. If we choose to believe what we've been told by The Others, their primary purpose is to find a way for women to conceive and give birth to children on the island. Now, this can't be the whole story--it doesn't explain their interest in Walt, for example. But let's say it is. If that's the case, why didn't they just come out of the jungle and offer the crash survivors to join them for hamburgers and Dharma rum mai tais in their love gazebos? "Hey, you're all pretty hot and, trust us, we've been here for years, no one's coming to rescue you. Why not come to our resort hatch and get laid?"

This approach could still have a lot of intrigue...

Sawyer: Someone stole all my condoms! Whoever it was, give 'em back!

Paulo: Those weren't your condoms. Things have changed. They belong to the group now.

Sawyer: Look, I don't what y'all do down in Brazil, but where I come from they're one-use only.

(Sayid pulls Jack aside)

Sayid: I suspect The Resort Staff of stealing the condoms. If they don't want us having access to safe sex, we need to know why.

(Jack confronts Ben in The Resort Hatch game room)

Jack: Give us back our condoms!

Ben: Why, Jack? Don't you have a latex allergy? What would you need them for?

Jack: [doesn't ask any relevant questions]

Ben: I know all about you, Jack. Your ex-wife, your aborted affair with the daughter of a mysterious philanthropist. You aren't getting any here. Why do those condoms mean so much to you?

Jack: Because if I'm not having sex, no one else should experience unobstructed physical pleasure! Bernard's getting more action than me!

Thing Three:

I have edited my previous post on my leveling addiction. The conclusion is now more in line with my original intent--to explain in the most discursive way possible why I haven't finished Oblivion. It will probably be edited again, but in case it never makes it into the final version, here's a comment I deleted about end-game content in World of Warcraft:

"You might as well pay $150 to choose Warrior, Wizard, Valkyrie, or Elf in Gauntlet, then sit back and shoot or pick up whatever the guy standing behind you at Shakey's with pizza in his beard tells you to."

This Is My Brain On Leveling

My name is Narraptor and I am a level addict. I have a myriad of vices, but in terms of hours logged and opportunities for social interaction wasted, I've spent more time sitting in front of a computer screen playing with myself than sitting in front of computer playing with myself.

The last 20 years are lost in a haze of disposable party members and experience points, 50+ hour orgies of monsters dying that invariably ended in hasty anti-climaxes, abrupt conclusions always leaving me craving that next fix. I can't remember exactly how it started, but my sponsor Wikipedia helped me piece together a likely progression of events.

Although I was first exposed to leveling in Telengard, given the randomness of the encounters and the lack of a quicksave, the concept that there were character levels and attribute improvements waiting beyond level one never connected until years later. I vaguely recall that my interest in the Advanced Heroquest board game, a curiosity eagerly encouraged by overly-permissive family members and elementary school enablers, lead me to my first epiphany that characters could improve as a result of their exploits, as opposed to just bumping their heads on platforms, robots, light fixtures, or falling down holes. But it was probably my impulse purchase of the D&D Basic Box set that started my addiction.

(Impulse purchase, indeed. Games Workshop and Waldenbooks knew what they were doing, with the former's cheap, entry-level plastic minis and the latter's fantasy sections filled with stories about Angst Elves who no one understood but their magical cat familiar and trusty scimitars...and maybe their best friend's girlfriend, who might realize one day that the guy who she goes to with all her problems is really the man for her.)

Might and Magic III, Ultima VI, Eye of the Beholder, and Bane of the Cosmic Forge--I played them all in a two-year period, xp'ing out on weekends and school vacations while listening to the best of the '70s, '80s, and '90s. I was so high on level advancement that Peter Cetera seemed cool, and probably was compared to me. I not only played through several Gold Box games, I played silver box games like Hillsfar. I struggled through the broken Worlds of Ultima, the bugs of Space 1889, and Spelljammer: Pirates of Realmspace just to get a fix.

Of course, with prolonged abuse came greater tolerance. After high school I needed a more potent product, and I found it in Fallout and its sequel, Planescape, and Baldur's Gate II. So many party members! So many opportunities for micro-management! So much leveling! I did dozens of "one more turns", collecting every resource and throwaway magic item and all the gold xp Heroes of Might and Magic II and III had to offer, even when my level cap was met. What started as an addiction became certifiable OCD--Obsessive Completist Disorder. I found myself psychologically incapable of completing a game without clearing every zone of fog of war, calculating maximum experience points and skill bonuses for greater leveling efficiency, and completing every side quest.

Thanks to the crackdown of the Console Enforcement Agency, the hardcore RPG is a thing of the past. Whether imported or grown domestically, the product available is either embarrassingly incomplete or cut with real-time combat. I've tried permutations of the genre, but because of OCD, I can't enjoy them. Leveling is just a $14 a month prelude to actual content in World of Warcraft. The character options in Fire Emblem and Disgaea are so close to infinite that leveling would be rendered meaningless even if the reward wasn't to click through a thousand ellipses. And as much as I've tried to have "fun" playing Oblivion, it's the first game I've ever played where character advancement is punished.

I am Narraptor, and this is my brain on leveling.