The Hammer Fell – On Me
Okay, I give. I suck so much at Starcraft that I can’t beat the last Terran mission even by using the resources, supplies, map, and quick build cheats. The only thing left would be to hit the automatic “I WIN” cheat, which sort of defeats any residual point. (One of the “Monty Python” CD games included an “I WIN” button at the very beginning, which if pressed, declared the player the winner, presented a fanfare, and ended the game.)
I’m wondering if I ought to bother with Starcraft II after all. Besides, there’s always Diablo III.
Brief updates
- 08:20 Reading rumor that Diablo 3 will not support LAN multiplayer, only Battle.net multiplayer. This makes kitty sad. #
- 19:25 @meiran Tell her that ‘film noir’ is when the lighting guys aren’t doing their job. #
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And The Heavens Shall Tremble
Today in Paris, at their WorldWide Invitational event, Blizzard Entertainment announced their upcoming game Diablo III.
That is all. (That’s plenty!)
Borgus Reviews of Literature
Finally caught up on my reading this weeked… finished re-reading “The Barsoom Project”, read “Idoru” and “Snow Crash”, and checked out some half-remembered passages in “1984”.
“Barsoom Project” is one of my favorite books – it’s set at a Disneyish corporation that runs incredibly realistic Live-Action Role Playing games in a pair of titanic Star Trek-style holodecks. (Paid for by the movie they’ll edit out of the footage, the home game cassettes, and the novels and tie-ins.) It’s three stories at once – you want to find out how the LARP will work out, who commited the act of industrial espionage that drove one of the last group of players insane, and what the game controllers will do when that player inexplicably pops up again in this run-through of the LARP.
“Idoru” is the sixth William Gibson book I’ve read, and the third in a row that I just didn’t like. In “Difference Engine”, “Virtual Light”, and “Idoru”, he writes of helpless characters who mostly stand around open-mouthed as the book happens around them. It’s kind of dull, and uninteresting… you finish the book thinking, “what was that about, and why would I care?” It’s a darn shame, ’cause “Neuromancer” was so good.
“Snow Crash”, on the other hand, more than made up for that. Excellent humor, interesting characters who matter greatly to the plot, intelligent writing, and intriguing speculation about the fragmentation of human language. I just told a friend that the story “begins with a guy who delivers pizza for the Mafia, and ends with a futuristic Ted Turner’s attempts to enslave the population of the world”. If this is the quality of the author’s work, then I am absolutely picking up “Cryptonomicon” as my friends have been advising me.
Finally, after looking at the portions of “1984” where George Orwell (as Emmanuel Goldstein) describes the method by which the Party came to power and maintains it, I have arrived at the uneasy conclusion that the world is still traveling smoothly in that direction, just a lot of years behind schedule. However, I can’t think of a dang thing I can do about it, so I’m not going to stay up nights worrying about it.
Oh yeah, and I finally beat a sub-boss in the fifth act of Diablo 2 that has been giving me serious trouble on “Nightmare” difficulty. So that’s good.
Catching Up
I’ve actually had a great deal to post in the last week, but I’ve spent most of the week unable to summon the creative juice to sit and really write the entries. I’m feeling a little more in touch with the muse this morning, so hopefully I can catch up a bit on some of the things that have been on my mind.
Today, here at work, I got my first piece of spam from “the widow of a rich African government official who would like my help recovering her funds”. Yeah, “lady”. That’s the one where some people end up broke, and others end up shot. No thanks.
Re-installed Diablo II on my machine twice last night. Cleared the backup files from my boss’s laptop (that’s another story) for space, reinstalled once, got all my old character files off CD, and had it running (almost) happily before I discovered I’d made a major mistake. I won’t go into details, but I had to clear the files and install again. When people bring their machines over tonight, we’ll have to ensure they all the latest patch installed, ’cause that’s the version I have to use to run the game under OS X. I’m looking forward to the game, though character balance may be a bit difficult, since Rain’s favorite char has progressed to level 38, and mine’s up to level 50… and we expect to have at least one complete newbie tonight.
Found out this week that the upcoming OS X 10.2 for my machine, retailing at $130, costs about half that if I’m a student or a civil servant. Hmmm…
Ready to LAN Par-tay
Blizzard Entertainment announced their OS X 1.0.9d patches for both Diablo II and the Lord of Destruction expansion pack. The carbonized patch allows gamers to play the Classic Mac OS version of Diablo II in X and introduce their Barbarians and Necromancers to the world outside Classic.
Half-Life: what most computer gamers are lucky to have
I finally finished Deus Ex last night. It’s a computer game set in a cyberpunk near-future world where civilisation is completely dependent on a futuristic Internet, and a mysterious plague is ravaging humanity – though it seems to leave the rich and powerful untouched. You begin the game playing a technologically enhanced special agent for the UN Anti-Terrorist Organization, but by the end, your loyalties have shifted multiple times as you learn more about what’s really going on and who you really are.
At the end of the game, I had three choices (each of which would require some difficult gameplay):
1) Join myself to the master computer controlling and monitoring the Internet (as the bad guy had intended to), and help it rule the world, hopefully with compassion and ethics…
2) Shut down the computer and help the Illuminati (who aided me through the latter half of the game) to return to secretly manipulating humanity from behind the scenes – with myself as one of the new puppeteers…
3) Destroy the computer in a manner that would wipe out the future Internet and give the world the chance to choose its own path out of the mini-Dark Age which would follow.
In the end, I chose option 1. But boy did they leave themselves plot threads for Deus Ex 2, now in pre-production…
And of course, the week I finially get Deus Ex out of the way, Ambrosia Software releases Escape Velocity: Nova. If one owns a Macintosh, the Escape Velocity games are the kind of games where you sit down to play 30 minutes and come out of your hypnosis 6 hours later; this one’s the newest, prettiest, and plays under OS X…
…what’s that, Blizzard? You say you expect the OS X version of Diablo 2 to be ready in about 15 days? Nooooo….
