Reckoning

Reckoning reviews.
More Reckoning reviews.
Even more Reckoning reviews!
Still yet more Reckoning reviews!
Even more Reckoning reviews, just because.

Some notable comments include this summary from Canada’s from Forbes will become relevant in a minute:

What I can say without a doubt is that Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning is one hell of a fun game, and you should go buy it and play it right away.

And don’t be fooled by the intro — of the entire game, the opening is the weakest. It’s an odd sort of shortcoming. While the tutorial is effective, it was also not very compelling. I like a game that throws me right into the fray with a dramatic opening, and while I think that Reckoning does attempt to do that, it falls short of the mark.

And this part of God is a Geek’s assessment largely echoes my own:

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning is a game blatantly made for fans of the RPG genre and is unforgiving if you aren’t completely familiar with what the genre has to offer. It brings all aspects of it full force, unrelenting in its forwardness. Looking over the sections where the game falls short, none of them are actually things wrong with the game. The battle system and storyline idea regarding fate are just so well thought out and planned that the rest of the game looks puny in comparison, even though they?re solid RPG elements.

Seriously, as a guy who has studied philosophy and theology at some length, the whole “deterministic, free-willed hero in a fully deterministic, inexorably fated world” story concept just messes with my head in all the right ways. And even though I’ve only just finished off the first portion of the main plot, Big Huge Games’ writers have already thrown a couple of interesting implications of that framework my way in the dialogue.

Was Reckoning’s opening the wrong one for the game?

RPGWatch reports on — and echoes — a question posed at VG247, one which echoes the comments from Forbes (above). It’s worth remarking on here as well, because a few people who have commented here after trying the demo expressed similar thoughts: the demo is underwhelming and gives a far-too-linear and limited view of the game.

For my own…well, I far preferred Reckoning’s demo, limited as it might have been, to the demo for Mass Effect 3. And the sense I got from the demo is that it was, indeed, limited…but had been artificially limited as well. Magical barriers blocked the entrances to some parts of the world in the demo, barriers that simply are not there in the release game. That’s not to say that your freshly-resurrected character is necessarily going to be able to weather exploring those areas prematurely, but it is to say that the linearity of the demo is somewhat articficial when compared against the actual game.

Matt Chat reviews Reckoning!

How does Reckoning’s performance stack up?

Quite well, in fact:

In conclusion, it’s safe to say that you can buy Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning on any of the three major HD gaming platforms and you’re going to be in for a real treat. The experience on console is essentially interchangeable where it truly matters, but if we had to make a choice, it would have to be the Xbox 360 release. While the more minor visuals upgrades such as texture filtering and improved shadows are nice, it’s the motion blur and reduced aliasing that makes it the marginally better buy.

This as opposed to PS3, mind you. If you want the game “full glory”, go with the PC version:

But clearly it’s the PC version that’s the one to get, even if you have a relatively modest gamers’ rig — it looks better, it plays better, it just feels right. A mid-range graphics card and quad-core CPU is all you need to effortlessly power past the console versions, and even if you play the game at 720p — a low level setting by PC standards — the improvement is still immediately apparent in comparison to the Xbox 360 or PS3 experience. Scale up beyond that and it’s as though the rich detail of the game is fully unlocked, and you’re enjoying Kingdoms of Amalur at the height of its potential.

I play it on PC, and I quite love it. And contra some reviews, I’m quite content with how the game controls using keyboard and mouse.

How can a game that scores a 4/5 rating also be called “most disappointing game ever”?

If you can answer that question, you can write for Digitally Downloaded.

Breaking the moral choice mold.

Reckoning does it, more or less:

…[Reckoning] offers up relatively few moral decisions that are expressly presented in expensive cutscenes and plot lines, and instead offers them up in proportion to the size of the scenario, whether that’s a small in-game bonus or a world-altering moment. You might not be making a moral decision in every single situation, or an important one at that, but when you do, chances are you’ll think about it more than in many other games. In order to do this, I’m going to use one of the shortest and most insignificant parts of the game to demonstrate this.

An early quest sees the player hunting antelopes and retrieving their heads in order to recreate a folk tale – placing the heads in the right place summons a troll to kill, who guards a magic ring, which is then presented to a damsel. The player is able to follow the quest forward without any dialogue options or cosmetic choices. The decision made available at the end is a simple one, but has more depth than your typical good/evil or saint/jerk response: do you give the ring back to the person who asked you to retrieve it, or do you keep it for yourself?

Right off the bat, we have context. The player has been given a quest that not only has a definite end goal behind it and a set of steps to complete, but there’s also a larger world that it fits into. In the Amalur universe, Fate dictates that the events of stories play out time and time again over the ages – the recreation of this story is something that is logical within the game world, and has been established at the point the player receives the quest.

The way the quest is set up here is a bit more subtle. As a Fateless One, the player’s character is not bound by Fate in the same way that everyone else in the universe is – unlike others, he or she has the power to change destiny and, perhaps more importantly, change the story being retold. The player’s status as Fateless is important, because it gives the choice weight and meaning, The foreshadowing in this case is fairly simple, and admittedly a bit weak, but it does what it needs to, specifically: the player gets the ring as a reward rather than keeping it. Similarly, the consequence is the magic ring the player gets – probably one of the first and best rings the player will have access to (I used it for several hours afterwards).

Reckoning has also been criticized for not offering more profoundly visible impacts of moral decisions, or for having those decisions trickle down through the rest of the game. The early option to either spare the citizens of a town called Canneroc or slaughter them as a means of staving off a boss fight has been used as an example. I passed that point in the game a while ago, and was faced with the decision; I chose to fight the boss character and spare the town. Had I not done so, the town — in which the player can obtain a house, mind you — would have been deserted on my every subsequent visit thereto, and I would have lost access to (at the very least) the healer and merchants therein.

And, of course, the town would have been visibly empty. Presumably, I would have retained access to my house…though if I had not finished upgrading it, I wouldn’t have been able to continue doing so, since I would have also slaughtered the man I would pay to perform those upgrades.

Losing access to merchants and house upgrades seems a small consequence compared to the sorts of moral choices and consequences that BioWare loves to throw at those of us who play their games…but I have to wonder: does the impact of wiping Canneroc off the map have to be any more significant than it is in Reckoning? Does wiping out a small village in a forest need to have world-shattering implications? Or is the fate of the town more or less meaningless in this massive, fully deterministic world at war…and should the massacre at Canneroc leave nothing more than a ghost town in its wake, visited only occasionally by a young soldier who perhaps feels personally guilty, but not so much that he won’t occasionally go back to repair his gear and swap out a weapon for one he’s storing in that house by the bridge?

A New World, Part 1

The latest in trailery goodness for Reckoning:

And if you’re in the US, don’t miss Curt Schilling appearing on Conan.

I’d embed the video, but it appears to be region-locked.

I’ll be traveling for much of today, since it actually takes a damn long time to get from Louisville to Edmonton. So in the meantime, talk amongst yourselves!

I will be here. Except on a United flight.

Should games even bother trying to tell a meaningful story?

Kyle Orland at Ars Technica echoes the musings of David Jaffe:

For decades now, large parts of the game industry have been striving to create games that are more meaningful — games that can speak to the human condition and tell an impactful story that’s deeper than “remember when I shot that guy?” At a DICE Summit presentation today, Twisted Metal designer David Jaffe made an impassioned argument that such efforts have been misguided, and a huge waste of the industry’s time and resources.

Jaffe led off by clarifying that he wasn’t against all kinds of storytelling in games — he had lots of respect for titles like Batman: Arkham City and Skyrim that allow for highly personal, player-created stories that can be as deep as a good novel. He also wasn’t arguing for a return to the Atari 2600 days, where graphics were abstract and most titles didn’t have identifiable characters or environments at all.

But Jaffe did argue vociferously against “games that have been intentionally made from the ground up with the intent and purpose of telling a story or expressing a philosophy or giving a designer’s narrative.” Because no matter how hard we want to fight it, Jaffe said, games just aren’t meant for this kind of storytelling.

Jaffe went on to compare depictions of D-Day in movies to depictions of it in games, and argues that the game player will always experience it in a way that prevents him from fully contemplating the deeper significance of the event. And to be fair, he has a point there, I think. Games will almost always have the player thinking about objectives to complete at least as often as they will make him think about the meaning of the events he is participating in and witnessing, which arguably makes for diluted meaning.

But one wonders if Jaffe’s scope is perhaps too limited — his focus seems to be mostly on AAA titles, and then only on particular types thereof. Within that limited scope, he probably has a point: can we expect Twisted Metal to tell a moving, meaningful, deeply philosophical tale? Probably not.

But what about a game like To The Moom, which despite its short length has reduced everyone I know who has played it to tears? Is that a game that fails to reach its full potential as a vehicle for delivering a meaningful story?

(hat tip: Infinitron Dragon)

In-game romances have officially nuked the fridge.

On Valentine’s Day, RIFT — yes, the MMORPG — set a Guinness World Record for the most in-game marriages in one day:

21,879 marriages took place on February 14, starting at 9am PST. Marriage was introduced in Rift’s seventh major update, Carnival of the Ascended. Each participating player earned a unique in-game title, “The Avowed,” and quite possibly a nagging significant other.

I…yeah, no, I just won’t comment on this any further.

The Origins of Fallout.

No Mutants Allowed has posted the first in a three-part document set from the lead designer of the original Fallout, R. Scott Campbell. It purports to detail the genesis of the game that eventually became known as Fallout, and is evidently quite lengthy. Give it a read, if Fallout is one of your areas of high interest!

Canada wants warrantless Internet spying!

And if you don’t like it, you support child pornography…or…something.

The legislation would require service providers to provide law enforcement with IP addresses, e-mail addresses, phone numbers, and other information on demand.

The bill would also “require ISPs and cellular phone companies to install equipment for real-time surveillance and create new police powers designed to obtain access to the surveillance data.”

Members of the opposition have vowed to fight the legislation. More than 80,000 people have signed an online petition opposing the bill.

Challenged by an opposition member about the proposal, public safety minister Vic Toews cited child pornography as a justification for the bill. Opponents of the legislation “can either stand with us or with the child pornographers,” he said.

Le sigh.

Gaming isn’t the problem in your marriage.

Doing fun things by yourself, in which your spouse does not share, is:

The study explains in its intro that marital satisfaction is “lower for those [couples] with high concentrations of individual leisure activities.” That is, doing fun stuff in general without your spouse will lead to fights and unrest.

This study doesn’t prove that gaming, specifically, is to blame for your relationship problems. Couples where one member spends too much time fishing, shopping, drinking, or even volunteering at soup kitchens and building houses for the homeless on his or her own have been shown to experience marital difficulty, just like couples where one person games and the other doesn’t. Since the study doesn’t compare gaming to other leisure activities, it only confirms that gaming makes your spouse angry, like everything else you might do and enjoy alone.

There is one ray of light: while the study found that a married person’s “satisfaction with online gaming” was a predictor of a discontent, the amount of time spent playing games was not.

And if your wife or husband just happens to be a gamer like you, well…heck, you could start up parallel RIFT accounts!

This makes me ragey.

A research team led by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) recently broke the code behind tiny tracking dots that some color laser printers secretly hide in every document.

The U.S. Secret Service admitted that the tracking information is part of a deal struck with selected color laser printer manufacturers, ostensibly to identify counterfeiters. However, the nature of the private information encoded in each document was not previously known.

“We’ve found that the dots from at least one line of printers encode the date and time your document was printed, as well as the serial number of the printer,” said EFF Staff Technologist Seth David Schoen.

I’d ask if they’re kidding me, but I already know they aren’t. At a previous job, we had a Xerox Phaser-class printer, and I remember my boss at the time wondering what the little series of yellow dots that appeared on every image was. At the time, I didn’t have an answer, and neither did Google…but now we know.

Since I’ll be spending most of today and tomorrow in the air, as it were, there probably won’t be much in the way of other articles posted to the site. That said, I’ll try and check comments from time to time, and will have access to email whilst in airports. Provided said airports offer free wifi. Or if the planes do. But Emirates didn’t offer in-flight wifi on the way to Saudi Arabia, so I don’t imagine they’ll offer it on the reciprocal flight.

I am here.

That said, here’s a couple of amusing things I’ve tripped over in the last few hours.

Drinking an average of six cups of coffee a day reduces the risk of prostate cancer in men.

By up to 20%, no less! And if coffee drinkers do get prostate cancer, they’re up to 60% less likely to die from it.

I’ll be at Starbucks. Do you think the Canadian health care system would pay for my preventative daily venti Pike Place?

Skyrim will break you with dragons!

The game will evidently boast an “unlimited” number of the fearsome flying beasts; they won’t just be area bosses and suchlike.

That’s good…I always wondered what it would be like if the inhabitants of Destard decided to make all of Britannia their playground. Now I guess I’ll get to find out, if somewhat vicariously.

Some contaminants in water can flow upstream, and even up (small) waterfalls.

This puts a new spin on reading tea leaves.

A 20-gigapixel panorama of Wembley Stadium…

…during the FA Cup Final last Saturday. It’s a truly amazing photographic work; check it out. And if you happened to be at that game, find yourself and tag yourself on Facebook.

This is just awesome: a blood turbine.

Read thou of this:

Engineers at Switzerland’s University of Bern have been working on tiny turbines; turbines small enough, in fact, to fit inside a human artery. Working like a blood powered hydroelectric generator, a working prototype — tested in a simulated artery — has been able to produce 800 microwatts of electricity. That’s roughly eighty times the power required to power the average pacemaker; such a device could provide independent, sustainable power to neurostimulators, blood-pressure sensors, and other implanted medical gizmos. Researchers are concerned, however, that a blood turbine’s adding agitation of blood flow might lead to clotting, and are continuing to tweak and rework the design to minimize this risk.

In essence, with one of these installed, pacemakers would become self-powering. Which, if you think about it, is about as close to a perpetual motion machine as we’re going to get, ever.

It’s not the end of the world, but you can see it from there.

An Israeli couple have named their newborn baby girl “Like”, after the Facebook approval mechanism.

She’s going to, like, have, like, serious issues in, like, school and stuff. Like, really.

Seriously, though: what the hell, Lior and Vardit Adler? What. The. Hell?

And speaking of “what the hell?”, look what Zynga’s been up to!

They have wrought GagaVille, a Lady Gaga-themed farm in Farmville.

“There is no curse in Elvish, Entish, or the tongues of Men for this treachery.”

Netflix, not piracy, accounts for the lion’s share of North American internet traffic.

Too bad Netflix’s catalogue sucks in Canada.

Intel goes 14 nm. Moore’s Law groans under the strain.

Is it just me, or is it getting ridiculous (and yet awesome) just how small they can make transistors these days?

Trick pancakes!

There’s a whole blog devoted to them!

Dragonlet #1 loves pancakes, so of course I’m going to have to try and make some of these now.

Entropy is universal across all languages.

Just regular-type awesome, but still:

The amount of information carried in the arrangement of words is the same across all languages, even languages that aren’t related to each other. This consistency could hint at a single common ancestral language, or universal features of how human brains process speech.

Matt Drudge is still the force to be reckoned with online.

He drives more traffic to news sites than Facebook and Twitter combined.

So you’re a rogue state with a great plan: hack the US!

The Americans would like you to know that they’ll respond in a somewhat more low-tech fashion: with bombs.

Ever wonder how Windows 7 knows it’s connected to the Internet?

It downloads a small file from Microsoft, which of course exposes your IP address to the software giant. If that doesn’t sit right with you, there are apparently ways to change where Windows goes looking for the file; you can even point it at your own server.

But was he drinking a nice Chianti?

A Moscow man is busted for eating his friend’s liver…with a side of potatoes. Which, as we all know, is just wrong: the appropriate side is fava beans.

Do be sure to read the comments at the article.

The “crowd effect” — the wisdom of crowds — is a real phenomenon.

But it’s easy to “poison the well”; “even mild social influence can undermine the wisdom of crowd effect in simple estimation tasks.”

This is a real problem in the era of Twitter, it should be noted.

This post brought to you by I can’t believe it’s not a painting:

Not a painting. Nope.

Slave Lake, Alberta, very nearly wiped off the map by forest fires.

“Heartbreaking” is about the only word that I can think of here. Over 30% of the town (population 7,000) has burned down; still yet more devastation is expected beyond that, if it has not already occurred. Blessedly, nobody seems to have been killed (or even hurt) in all of this, and the town has been evacuated. But even so, there are a lot of Albertans right now without homes, jobs, or anything but what little they could stuff into their cars and vans.

So, as I say: heartbreaking. And rather close to home. This Reddit thread is pretty up-to-date with information; check it out if you want the latest details. Offers of prayer, good intentions, positive thoughts, and charity donations are encouraged!

So where am I, exactly?

I’m here (assuming the Google Maps embed works):

16-year old finds possible new cystic fibrosis treatment.

This is cool:

A 16-year-old high school student may have found a new, viable treatment for cystic fibrosis through the use of computer simulations.

Marshall Zhang, an 11th grade student at Richmond Hill’s Bayview Secondary School in Toronto, Canada, used a supercomputer system to figure out how certain drugs react with proteins associated with cystic fibrosis.

Cystic fibrosis is a recessive genetic disease that causes thick mucus to build up in the lungs and throughout the body causing progressive disability and even death. This disease occurs in about 1 out of 3,000 live births, and has no cure.

This kid is…’ow you say?…going places.

Grill the perfect burger!

Sixteen tips. Pay particular attention to #10 (never grill burgers on weak heat), and also #14 and #15. Especially #15, unless the full taste of the meat is unimportant to you.

Manage digital overload!

Not that anyone here has that problem. But I’m sure we all know victims of this tragic condition, right?

The big news this week: Osama bin Laden is dead.

The terrorist mastermind — quite possibly the most wanted man in the world — was killed yesterday in a firefight with US Special Forces soldiers in a city in northern Pakistan, at a compound just outside a military restricted zone. I’ve heard tell that the operation was specifically an assassination; there was evidently no intention of taking bin Laden alive.

He was buried at sea within the 24 hours mandated by Islamic law.

As you can imagine, all manner of things have been stirred up by this. It has emerged that Pakistan’s intelligence service, the ISI, knew about bin Laden’s compound for quite some time, and its proximity to a military installation certainly casts doubt on the idea that Pakistan is a Western ally in the “war on terror”. Recent news concerning the capture of CIA operatives in Pakistan also have to be viewed in a new light.

I have to admit that while I am certainly glad, in a Thane Krios “one less dark thing in the Universe” sort of way, that bin Laden is gone, I have to admit that I am more than a little…put off, let’s say…by the various street celenbrations that erupted all across the US. But then, I’m not an American, and I can’t say that I’d feel the same way had bin Laden masterminded the murder of over 3,000 of my countrymen. I might, but I can’t say for certain.

The (un?)luckiest Twitterer in the world?

A Pakistani cafe owner accidentally wound up live-tweeting the entire raid on bin Laden’s compound, though at the time he seemed to think of it as just some military exercise involving helicopters.

Educational gaming: teaching kids how to avoid landmines.

A team from Michigan State University has developed a computer game that is intended to help Cambodian children learn about the dangers of land mines, and teach them how to avoid the darn things.

It’s election day in Canada.

I got my vote on this morning; results should be in by tonight. Elections in Canada are generally pretty painless things, and usually wrap up pretty quickly.

There are 308 seats in the Parliament of Canada (well, in the House of Commons, one of two houses in Parliament); the governing party needs a simply majority of seats (155 or more) in order to secure power. Minority governments are possible due to the fact that there are currently four major parties vying for the votes of Canadians, all of which are likely to secure at least a few seats in the House. The leader of the party with the most seats becomes the Prime Minister.

The most recent polls show the Conservative Party of Canada ahead of its nearest competitor, the New Democrat party (NDP), by about 5.5%; we can expect this to translate into a Conservative win with between about 130 and 160 seats.

That said, you have to be careful of trusting polls in Canada, because polls (if they are good for anything) only capture the raw popular sentiment in Canada. Seats in the house are not won, lost, or even appointed on a popular basis, though; our electoral system is “first past the post” in nature, and thanks to that fact the final results of an election can often be quite unreflective of popular sentiment.

My prediction, for what little it’s worth: The Conservatives will win around 140 seats, creating a minority government. The NDP will form the Official Opposition, and will threaten the possibility of forming a coalition with the Liberal Party of Canada and the Bloc Quebecois, which would result in the Conservatives forming not the government but the Official Opposition. This tentative alliance will collapse from within before it becomes official.

Wilder speculation: Six months down the road, the Conservative government will fail on a confidence motion, and another election will be held, in which either the NDP (less likely) or the Conservatives (more likely) will capture a narrow majority of House seats, at which point Canada can again enjoy a little governmental stability.

Final note: I wrote this in advance of the results coming in. I’m posting it, so it’s on the record even so, but yeah…I guess I’m not great at predicting election results.It would appear that the Conservatives are headed for a majority in this one, if a narrow one. That said, there are still plenty of polls that have yet to report; things can change. Though if this election behaves like every other Canadian election I can recall, not much will.

Tonight’s post brought to you by foresight:

I think we have all been there at least once...

Has the Higgs boson been discovered?

An internally leaked memo briefly teased the possibility that the elusive “God particle” had been observed in the Large Hadron Collider. Sadly, this is probably not actually the case.

On an unrelated note, my home city amuses me greatly sometimes.

Earth Day was a major flop in Edmonton this year, and not just because the major event to “celebrate” it fell through for a lack of volunteers. No, Edmontonians went one up on that and actually increased their power consumption during the day. (We did the same during Earth Hour earlier this year.)

What kind of gun are you?

I’m apparently an Uzi. I was hoping for a Glock.

Iran has evidently become the target of a second cyber attack.

This time, it’s the “Stars” virus, or some such. One wonders if this, too, was an engineered virus targeting industrial control systems?

Canada does not even rank in the top ten as regards internet freedom enjoyed by its citizens.

This saddens me.

Estonia comes out on top, with the US in the #2 slot.

Neat little app: Barcodas.

It turns superstore bar codes into music, apparently. Check out the video at the link for details.

End of an era: the typewriter is officially no more.

The last typewriter factory in the world just closed down.

Tonight’s post brought to you by accountants:

They ruin everything.

Since I’ll be spending most of today in the air, as it were, there probably won’t be much in the way of other articles posted to the site. Though I’ll try and check comments from time to time, and will have access to email whilst in airports. Provided said airports offer free wifi. Or are in Canada.

I am here.

That said, here’s a couple of amusing things I’ve tripped over in the last few hours.

Ten film & television scenes that were more real than you might’ve known.

I knew about the scene from The Two Towers, where Viggo Mortensen broke his foot (and screamed like he had) after kicking that Uruk-hai helmet. But some of the rest caught me rather by surprise.

Also, Stanley Kubrick was an asshat:

…enforced method acting, which involves surprising actors with unscripted material or setting up particular conditions, usually to breed either friendship or contempt. A notable example would be Stanley Kubrick’s verbal and mental abuse of Shelley Duvall to evoke a more compelling performance as a broken, terrified wife in The Shining.

This is also awesome…

Ye olde gangsta!

Speaking of which…

Several of my friends got a kick out of this back in 1993/1994.

Not amusing: Syrian forces instructed to limit themselves to killing fewer than 20 protesters per day.

I don’t…I can’t even…that’s not a d…what can you…uh…yeah, okay, I guess that’s how dictatorships work, but that doesn’t mean the directive makes any kind of sense. Or is pacing yourself and limiting the rate at which you gun down and stickbeat your own people the key to avoiding having the US intervene on their behalf?

Why, GOG, why? Why do you have all the other [insert word here] Quest games that Sierra made, but not the Quest for Glory titles?

This seriously bugs me; those five games were probably my favourite games to play (after the various Ultimas, of course). Who is the hangup here? Is GOG having trouble getting the games to work? Are Activision just being asshats about releasing that IP for digital distribution? Seriously, guys…I will give you my money. Just…get this figured out, okay?

This post brought to you by “I DID! I DID TAW A PUTTY TAT!”:

Ohcrapohcrapohcrap...

Okay, so I haven’t done one of these in a while. Fortunately, the Internet never fails to provide plenty of odd, interesting, and downright worrying stories to relay.

Want to track enemy submarines the US Navy way?

DARPA has just “crowdsourced” their Anti-submarine warfare Continuous Trail Unmammed Vessel (ACTUV) simulator, which you — the general public — can download and play right from the DARPA website. Do you have what it takes to outsmart an enemy submarine commander and keep him from eluding you?

Oh, and speaking of DARPA…

…their BOLT (Broad Operational Language Translation) robot sounds pretty cool. It “would use language as well as visual and tactile inputs so that it can “hypothesize and perform automated reasoning in the acquired language,” enabling “‘multiturn, bilingual human-human conversation’ between English and Arabic with a success rate of 90 percent.”

Sound familiar?

Proof that ZORK can be ported to Facebook without the need to actually make it an app!

You have been eaten by a Grue.

So it turns out that identical twins…are not genetically identical…

…despite having both sprung from the same fertilized ovum.

Damn Canadians, always upending scientific common knowledge with their “research” and their “findings”. Can’t trust a one of ‘em, I tell ya.

So it turns out — surprise, surprise! — that Charlie Sheen’s live show sucks.

The “Violent Torpedo of Truth” sounds more like a “Epic Paper Airplane of Suck”; certainly not a #winning performance for the incresasingly pitiable Sheen.

Why is Mars so red, anyway?

A naturally-occuring nuclear explosion (!!) of truly shattering force and power may have had something to do with it.

Survival tip: don’t piss off Gurkhas, ever.

Just since the start of this year, there have been at least two news stories in which lone members of this fierce Nepalese tribe (and famed British military unit) went up against 30 to 40 opponents at once and walked away standing, leaving only bodies and fleeing enemies in their wake.

It greatly amuses me greatly that Anonymous seems to be imploding.

The hacker group seems to be splintering into roughly two factions: those who are in it for moral/ethical reasons and wish to use the power of the group to strike a blow against those they see as unjust, and those who are (as the online experssion goes) are “in it for the lulz.”

In hindsight, this probably could have been predicted some time ago.

“Sound” relationship advice from Cosmo

You heard it from Cosmo first, Dragonettes: if your boyfriend/husband is too openly communicative, likes to converse over a drink, displays more sexual interest in you, takes care of his personal image/health/grooming, keeps his electronics to himself, is just all-around happy around you, and if his friends don’t talk to you…he is probably cheating on you and likely doesn’t love you anymore.

In which case, you are perfectly within your rights to seduce his friends, burn his clothes, give away his television, pour chili powder down his shorts, crush his balls in your hands, feed him laxative brownies, and vandalize his face with a Sharpie marker while he sleeps.

What you really want in a man is an aloof, non-communicative, sexually disinterested teetotaler who lets himself go, rarely grooms himself, couldn’t care less for electronics, and encourages his buddies to hang around with you. And if he doesn’t live up to these lofty standards, get — and by ‘get’, I totally mean ‘go completely batcrap crazy on’ — him.

Tonight’s post brought to you, coincidentally, by girlfriends:

That is love, right there.

How to customize your Windows 7 login screen

You know I am going to do this to my laptop at some point.

Ten essential Dragon Age 2 mods

And here’s the stunner: most of them are actually useful. Except maybe the one that turns your war hound into a spider. But the utility for creating a custom Dragon Age: Origins savegame without having to replay said (occasionally quite tedious) title? Worthwhile!

Well, I’m glad I’m a Bell customer!

The Canadian telcom giant is the first internet service provider to back out of the whole “usage based billing” concept that has Canadian internet consumers in an uproar.

If this gets released for iPhone, I am officially done.

I’ve always wanted to give EVE Online a try, but have studiously avoided doing so for fear that I’ll get hooked. Currently, they’re only planning to bring the game to Tegra 2-powered tablets and smartphones, which means I’m safe…but if they ever do release an iOS port, there could be trouble.

Mass Effect 2: Arrival launches today!

The final DLC for BioWare’s award-winning sci-fi epic, Mass Effect 2 is now out. Here’s the trailer:

Tonight’s post brought to you by pandas:

Lots and lots of pandas.

It would be this easy for someone to hack your bank

As one who works in the cyber security industry, I can readily attest to the fact that all the security controls in the world are all but useless against human curiosity…and stupidity.

Speaking of cyber security…

The European Union suffered a massive cyber attack just as the final preparations for the G20 Summit were underway. Evidently, Iran was the source of the attack, according to Comodo.

Mars Needs Moms spaceship concepts

If you’re a sci-fi fan, do yourself a favour and add the Concept Ships blog to your RSS reader.

A stoner sword-and-sorcery movie?

Starring Natalie Portman, James Franco, and some other guy. It looks like Dungeons & Dragons cross-bred with Cheech & Chong, but strangely better.

Oh, and the trailer at that link is probably NSFW. Just sayin’.

Also, the Canadian government just fell

Nothing so dramatic as open revolt — a la Libya/Egypt/Tunisia/Bahrain/Yemen/Syria — mind you. In governments based on the British model, certain bills presented to the Parliament (the rough equivalent of the US House of Representatives, I guess) are what are known as “confidence votes”. Budgets, for example, are always confidence votes.

If the sitting government fails to pass a confidence vote, that is called a “vote of non-confidence”, and the government is considered to have lost confidence of the nation…and, consequently, the right to govern as well. The Governor General (the Queen’s representative) is obligated to dissolve the sitting Parliament immediately in such a case.

And…that just happened up here in the Great White North.

Tonight’s post brought to you by oh good gravy, of course this game has been delayed again:

So it turns out that CTV, the network that carries Big Bang Theory in Canada, is running this contest called “Big Bang Yourself”, in which you inject a picture of yourself into a set and a costume from the series. Points are accrued based on various criteria, and the winner gets…well, okay, let me pause to reiterate something. My wife is a major fan of this show…a fan’s fan, an aficionado, a…she’s pretty much nuts about the show and its characters, especially Dr. Sheldon Cooper.

So naturally, she entered the contest:

Did I mention her favourite character is Sheldon?

Needless to say, she’d be stoked if she could get into the final draw for this thing. Here’s how you can help: click on the above link (here it is again) or the image…daily, if you can. I’ll be Tweeting the link daily as well. Seriously, even just click on it; she’ll get points!

If you really feel inspired, feel free to register for the contest yourself. She’ll get points for that too, and you can have fun creating avatars of yourself in the Big Bang Theory universe. It’s win-win, really. Don’t forget to click around, check out the other submissions, and rate other “Bigbangatars” on the site as well…it all goes to furthering the contest!

Update: Kobra Kai Dragon points out that the contest area is limited. Specifically, it’s limited to…Canada.

Okay, egg on my face. You can still click the link, and I’d encourage you to do so as often as you wish, and she’ll get points for that.

That’s what Jennifer Mercurio, Entertainment Consumers Association vice president and general counsel, is terming the looming Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger v. Entertainment Merchants Association Supreme Court decision, for which oral arguments are being presented tomorrow.

The court will decide whether or not to overturn the decisions of the Northern District of California Court and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals — both of which found California law AB 1179, which bans the sale of “violent” video games to minors, to be unconstitutional.

According to Entertainment Consumers Association vice president and general counsel Jennifer Mercurio, there’s a lot more at stake in this case than whether or not mature titles will be legally withheld from Californian teenagers. Much, much more, in fact — should the Supreme Court overturn the ruling of the two lower courts, certain First Amendment protections currently afforded to video games (and, by association, other forms of entertainment media) could be abolished, completely changing the landscape of the industry.

Mercurio sums it up nicely: “I’d say it’s clearly the most important and influential decision that the video game industry has ever faced.”

“Ultimately,” Mercurio explained, “the case is about whether video games will be protected like other artistic content like movies, music and books. If the Supreme Court finds that violent content is not protected in video games, it’ll only be a matter of time before the question is reopened for the other entertainment media as well.”

My thoughts on the matter are that you’d think this sort of thing would be a no-brainer; there’s really no reason why mature content in video games, of any sort, should not be treated in the same manner as violent content in television programs, movies, music, or books…although I might be careful in playing up literature to too great a degree. Authors can get away with a lot in novels, far more than even movie directors can.

There’s also the question of enforcement. Granted, there are means of policing and penalizing game retailers who sell content restricted under California’s contentious legislation, in much the same way that there are means of penalizing convenience store owners who sell cigarettes to underage shoppers. Those structures are in place already, and should be reasonably portable.

But what about digital distribution which, by some estimates, accounted for 50% or more of game sales last year, and stands to capture yet more of the market this year? We’ve all seen the “age gates” for e.g. the Dragon Age: Origins section on Steam…but really, how hard would it be for anyone with a grasp of basic math to spoof that process? And yet, legally, that would be all a digital retailer would be required to put up to check the age of a prospective buyer.

Now…assuming the Supreme Court sided with the Governator, what would be the outcome?

“Games would become less accessible and more expensive,” Mercurio explained. “Added costs associated with developing, marketing and selling games with any violence in them will be rolled into the price of games and passed on to consumers. We’d also likely see game developers censoring themselves in the creative process, perhaps even making one version for the U.S. and another for the rest of the world.”

“Retailers would probably sell games very differently than we’re used to presently — either creating a separate area for those that might run afoul of the law, and some may choose to cease merchandising them altogether, due to the inherent risk,” Mercurio added.

We see this concept of self-limitation/self-censorship on the part of artists and developers already in other ways. Think, for example, of the “Muhammad cartoons” that were published a few years ago in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. Whether you agree with the intent behind the cartoons or not, and whether you think the explosively violent outrage (resulting in murder, in some countries) that was seen around the world after the cartoons were published was in any way justified, you probably noticed that many media outlets — especially in the United States and Canada — that reported on the matter took extra-special care to a) not re-publish the cartoons as part of their reporting, and b) often took pains to draw attention to that restraint.

I don’t mention that to start a political or religious debate, but merely to give an example of something akin to what Mercurio is talking about.

When the potential repercussions of doing a thing exceed the perceived benefit of doing so, most people will simply opt not to do the thing under consideration. In the case of the Danish cartoons, many media outlets figured that it was better to exercise discretion, even at the expense of elements of the story, rather than risk further violence. Game developers, publishers, and retailers subject to more draconian laws regarding the sale of specific forms of content will take analogous measures, and either limit or outright eliminate the availability of products that would fall under the auspices of the new law.

And indeed, we can already see some examples from within the gaming industry that Mercurio is right in at least one sense, when she talks about developers “making one version [of a game] for the U.S. and another for the rest of the world.” Farenheit/Indigo Prophecy, anyone?

The long-time reader will know that I have a fairly broad selection of daily reads, including many political, religious, and gaming sites and blogs. The long-time reader probably does not know, however, that I also follow a few game blogs of a very different sort. Perhaps I should capitalize the ‘g’, as well; these blogs pertain to Game, the social interaction study and model that is primarily the purview of pickup artists, but also works as a general means to understanding interactions between men and women in social (and intimate) situations.

One such blog is The Spearhead, and I was struck by a post there recently in which the author spoke about his desire to cater to his international visitors by blogging not only in English going forward, but in other languages as well.

Now, I’ve tried before to learn other languages (Ukrainian & French, specifically) and the result has always been the same: I get praise from my teachers for my ability to properly inflect the words I’m reciting, but I’m never able to actually internalize the language in my memory so as to be able to draw upon it outside of the classroom context. In short: I can mimic a language well enough if I have something to read in front of me, but I seem to be completely unable to learn new languages.

Now, in looking at my site reports in StatCounter, I observe that traffic to Aiera comes from many countries. The United States ranks highest, not surprisingly, and is followed immediately by Canada (my home country)…but the remaining eight countries in the top ten are all European:

1. 32.60% United States
2. 12.40% Canada
3. 11.60% Germany
4. 8.40% United Kingdom
5. 4.00% Finland
6. 3.40% Portugal
7. 3.20% Italy
8. 3.00% France
9. 2.80% Ireland
10. 2.80% Australia

Some of these countries are also English-speaking countries…indeed, running the blog in just English, I cater to the national language of 59% of my visitors.

However, I’m thinking it might be nice if I could bring on board two or three (or more) additional editors who would be willing to transcribe — occasionally, if not frequently/consistently — site news from English into German, French, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, or maybe even Finnish. I realize that this would technically result it some duplication of posts and content (given Aiera’s integration with e.g. Twitter, I don’t want to go the route of using the translation plugin that Team Return uses)…but I think it would be a nice feature to offer, even if only on occasion, to some of my visitors from countries not situated on the North American continent.

If you’d be interested in assisting with this endeavour, good reader, either drop a comment below or drop me a line privately.

I’ve signed on as the Technical Officer of a committee that is planning to host a gaming convention in my home city of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. More details to follow, including recruitment/volunteer opportunities.

It seems I just landed back in Canada, and already I’m off again. This is it, the big weekend — as of about 1:30 PM on October 20th, I’ll be a married Dragon. We’ll be honeymooning in Greece, flying into Athens on the 24th of the month.

Which means that I’ll be back at some point in early November (would that I could get more time off of work, but the Jamboree used up all my good graces in that regard).

In the meantime, be sure to visit Dino’s Ultima Page for all your Ultima news needs.

People who wish to post news from Ultima projects are encouraged to do so in the comments to this post. I’ll be sure to amalgamate any news into a formal posting upon my return.