Third life crisis

I am 28 years old.

I own a house and a car. I pay bills for electricity, water and sewer, sewer capacity charge*, cable internet and television, voice over IP phone, mobile phone, rubbish collection, mortgage, property tax, and homeowner’s association dues. They are all automated except for the water bill and the capacity charge. If I forget to pay the water bill, the city will cut off my water. I don’t know what they will do if I forget to pay the capacity charge.
I have been in the workforce for longer than I was at university. I have been a Subject Matter Expert in three technical areas. I have presented on one of those subjects to an audience of 200. I have trained my colleagues in my areas of expertise.
I have been in the same relationship for 2/3 of the time since I became sexually active, and married for half of that time. In the past 6 years, the longest we have spent without seeing each other is 2 days. I cannot imagine how I would live without her.

I am 28 years old.

Most of the “books” I read are comics about wizards. Many of the non-comic books feature people who believe they have been abducted by aliens, or pan-dimensional spiders.
Today I spent 4 hours virtually positioning guns to shoot aliens, preventing them from stealing my stuff. After the first 3 hours, I discovered a sneaky trick which made it a whole lot harder for the aliens to steal my stuff. This made me feel inordinately pleased with myself.
I spend an obscene amount of time watching television. I wish I could tell myself that it’s some form of high art, but 90% of what I watch is crud. I wish I could tell myself that it’s a social tool, giving me something to talk with my friends about, but I watch far more TV than any of my friends. I wish I could tell myself that it fulfills a critical role in my relaxation process, but I don’t have a relaxation process.

I am 28 years old.

When Seth MacFarlane was my age, Family Guy had been cancelled and renewed. Twice. When Freddie Mercury was my age, he wrote Killer Queen. When Johnny Depp was my age, he had played Edward Scissorhands. When Morgan Freeman was my age, he was an extra. When Jim Morrison was my age, he had been dead for a year.
I don’t have a clue what I want to be doing in 5 years’ time. I’m iffy on what I want to be doing in one year’s time. Not being entirely sure on where the apostrophes were supposed to go in that sentence made me feel uneasy.
I thought of myself as being 15-and-a-bit for years. Then I was 22-and-a-bit. I don’t think I can be 22-and-a-bit any longer. Midori says I’m 40-minus-a-bit.

I am 28 years old. I am an adult. And I have no idea what that means.


*My house is in a new development, so the city had to lay a new sewer pipe. To cover their costs, they charge a fee to residents for the first 10 years.

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Be like me, buy a flail!

A few months ago, Robin Hood - the Legend of Sherwood became available on Steam. It's currently on sale for $5. I wrote this email to some friends to express my feelings towards it. While I'm working on some longer posts, I thought I'd share it with a slightly wider audience.

This is a fantastic game, as in the best game EVAR. It was released in 2002 so will run on most hardware that's available today. The story is engaging (if a bit familiar), the control is intuitive, the characters are personable, and the dialogue is funny.

If you have ever played any kind of game, you will like this game and you should get this game and play it and then you should tell all of your friends so that they can play it.

This game is better than ice cream. This game will clean your house for you.

There is a lull in the plot about 80% of the way through. This low point is better than any other game you have ever played.

If I had to choose between never playing this game again and drinking a can of Diet Pepsi, I would drink the Diet Pepsi. And I hate Diet Pepsi with the heat of a thousand hot wings.

When you play this game, you will know what it truly means to be alive. On the fourth Thursday of November, you will list this game as one of the things you are thankful for. You will want to thank me for introducing you, but instead of the traditional blow jobs and cocaine, please send money.

Grotesque Tactics: Evil Heroes

It’s been a while since I did a game review, which is what this blog is supposed to be about. I’ve been playing Grotesque Tactics: Evil Heroes. I was eyeing it on Steam for several months before the Big Sale, and I’m glad I was able to snap it up cheap. I have mixed feelings about it.

The gameplay is very simple – you have many characters who run around and smack monsters. When you smack enough monsters, your characters level up and get more powerful. They have special attacks and equipment which you can also improve over time. It’s almost like it’s an action RPG. There are quests and stuff. It starts to feel pretty samey after a while.

The characters are intentionally RPG stereotypes – the brooding hero, the healing lady, and so on. There are cute jokes and references. The story is not sophisticated – people send you to kill things and fetch other things, and along the way you pick up more party members. There is an evil empire that at some point you will have to defeat, but I didn’t get that far.

The game itself has been a bit unstable, although I’m not sure how much of that is the laptop I’ve been playing it on. It takes two tries to launch it each time – the first time Steam gets stuck trying to install a Visual C++ runtime or something. It’s also plauged with spelling errors which make the experience feel a little unpolished. I stopped playing after it crashed on the same zone a few times in a row.

Overall, I’d give it 6 maidens out of 10. It could make 7 or 8 by fixing the technical problems.

Steam summer sale

I started this blog in response to last year’s Steam summer sale, when I bought an obscene number of games for a slightly less obscene sum of money. This year’s sale has just finished, and yes, a good blogger would have mentioned it while it was still going on. I’ve been a little overwhelmed, though. After a while, all of the different games in a class (World War II first person shooters, sci-fi shooters, Western fantasy RPGs, JRPGs, puzzle platformers, abstract puzzles, and so on) start to blend into one, and I can’t remember whether I’m looking at Dungeon Siege III or The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings.

As well as the blanket sale, they’ve been having daily deals which are even more heavily discounted, and daily challenges, where getting specific achievements in some games will get you points. And what do you points mean? The daily sales and challenges tend to overlap, but not be identical, so there’s a decent sized set of games that you need to get TODAY RIGHT NOW BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE. So far, I’ve mostly restricted myself to getting these daily ones – aside from anything else, I would be irritated with myself if I paid $13 for a game only for it to be available for $11, three days later. On the last day, I picked up a bunch of games that I’ve wanted for a while but haven’t been daily features.

All in all, I ended up buying 57 games, costing something over $320. I can’t tell for sure, because the receipt for one of the days has gone missing. At full price, these games would have been $960. So who’s laughing now, overdraft fees? Using a non-strict taxonomy, there are:

• 17 Action games
• 5 Adventure games
• 2 Driving games
• 6 first person shooters
• 2 Platformers
• 3 Puzzle games
• 3 Puzzle platformers
• 7 RPGs
• 10 Strategy games
• 2 Tower Defences

After all the rush, I’m not sure I can face playing any games for about 3 months.

New things about old posts

Scott Adams is now declaring that his ideas that he posts on the open internet for everyone to see aren't for general consumption, they're for people who are interested in letting their preconceived ideas go to consider the controversial. Thing is, Scott, "men are testosterone-fueled beasts" isn't a new or controversial idea. Sorry. To quote The Dude, "Hey man, why don't you fucking listen occasionally? You might learn something."


And Tree Lobsters understand the trouble with Scrabble.

Introductory posts, part 3. And maybe some content.

So, one motivating factor in starting this blog was the purchase of bucketloads of games as part of Steam's big giant summer sale thing. I put down about $185 and got a bunch of games. Some of which I wanted to get anyway, some of which were bundled, and some of which were super cheap and looked cool. What I'm thinking I'll do is alternate posts about WoW with those about other games I am playing or have played. Then you'll be sorry.

So far the biggest hit of the sale has been Borderlands, which has the RPG-lite feel of Diablo II in a first-person shooter package. It's set on a distant planet called Pandora - no relation to the Pandora of Avatar - which is mostly deserted with a lot of garbage dumps and other post-occupation debris. The range of enemies isn't huge - I'd estimate fewer than a dozen creature types, which is small enough that I really SHOULD be counting them rather than estimating.

The range of guns, on the other hand, is massive. They come in various styles, shapes and sizes, with different enhancements - collecting more damaging, more accurate, and cooler guns is a major part of the game from the beginning on. There are four character classes, each of which has available bonuses to different weapon types - as well as other differences. I've only been playing one class all the way through, and solo at that.

I liked Borderlands on the PC so much that I bought a copy for the xbox - I wanted to play with Midori and having it on the xbox made that more likely. Since cross-platform is an impossible problem to solve, we tried playing split-screen and... it kind of sucked. There just didn't seem to be enough screen space to see the world clearly, or to navigate the character pages. It was massively awkward.

The NPCs are full of personality, and the game is full of the little references that make me giggle so. For example, one of the enemy types is a batlike creature called a Rakk. One of the rakk bosses is called Rakkinishu - which is the name of a Carver boss from Diablo II. (The other little Carvers run around shouting "Rakkinishu!" so you know he's coming. They'd be cute if they weren't trying to cut off your elbows.) In Borderlands, Rakkinishu drops a piece of armor called a "Cracked Sash", which was the name of the WORST item in DII. Just thinking about it brings back memories of looking at the clock to see that it was 3 am and I was still only halfway to Kurast.

I'm going to give Borderlands a rating of 4 bobbleheads out of 5. It gains points for the good things I mentioned in this post, and loses points for the bad things I mentioned. Do I have to write everything twice for you people?

One day I may go back and put some links into this post. I hear that links are good things to have in a blogs.

Ciao,
Dolbia