Well, I was inspired by a post I read over on the Quarter to Three forums to try and streamline the time I spend playing video games. The basic premise being that there are only two levels of quality in games: games which immediately (or quickly, at any rate) engage, amuse, entertain you and hold your attention, and those that do not. Essentially, there are only good games, which are great, and bad games, which are not great. With the sheer amount of games being release for the PC and the three consoles, mediocrity, adequateness and "pretty good" games have got to go. I don't have that much time.

So, who makes the cut, and who doesn't? Well, let me elucidate the concept by outlining some classic examples of both categories.

(list below the fold!)

Good

• The Fallout games - engaging and clever from start to finish, never a dull moment.
  
• Morrowind - In addition to being a great game in its own right, mods and vast item collecting potential
  
• Neverwinter Nights - Not the game, but the enormous community mod scene. No game has ever given greater fun/$ value.
  
• Gran Turismo # - leveling up cars: mm mm good
  
• X-Com/UFO unknown - I hate the genre-smash. If you're going to do the genre-smash, here is your target; be this good, or don't bother.
  
• Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 - I'm not a "gameplay guy," but this was fun gameplay, character leveling, and collectalishness to the nth degree.
  
• Any Monkey Island title
  
• Full Throttle
  
• Half-Life
  
• Ultimas VI-VII
  

Not

• Baldur's Gate 2 - look, I know, great story, awesome dialog, memorable characters... bottom line: combat in the infinity engine is as pleasant as being sodomized with a flaming pineapple. If that's your thing, hey, don't let me keep you from the produce aisle.
  
• Final Fantasy X - spent several hours enduring way too many cutscenes about this jackass metrosexual soccer player and his band of merry men to get to the classic FF overmap. It doesn't have one.
  
• Ultimas VIII-Ascension - It wasn't broke. They fixed it. These games represent 85% of all accumulated dissapointment in my life. Thanks, guys.
  
• Any MMOG - If my enjoyment of a game is entirely dependent on the people I play with, then the game is essentially removed as a factor, isn't it?
  
• Tomb Raider - I. Hate. Jumping. Puzzles.
  
• Blood Omen - Gave birth to one of my favoritest game series plotlines ever, but, goddamn, even the cheat codes couldn't make this much DSBS (Dungeon-Slumming BullShit) bearable.
  
• Diablo - ClickClickClickitClick itagainOk, it's dead! ....Click the next one!

So, last week's contestants yielded an even 50-50 split, with Rome: Total War earning a lengthy stay on my hardrive, and Fable going to the big uninstaller in the sky.

Rome is great, Shogun was great (I missed Medieval, may go back around and hit it at some point), I just dig this series. The strategic and tactical portions are both very similar to Shogun, with enough differences to make things new, and, I think, give each game a spot in my heart. The simplified strategic game in Shogun actually appeals to me a bit more, in its board-gamishness; having micro-managerial control of movement within provinces doesn't do that much for me, gameplay-wise, but I suspect it will add more to its longterm depth. Being able to hide armies in forests for ambush and block strategic passes were great additions, and the larger numbers of possible allies/enemies is nice too. As for the battle portion, man, I don't know if I just sucked a Shogun, but while that game had me dreading combat and using auto-resolve, this game has me rushing into ill-conceived attacks just to get to the goods. I'm typically anti-RTS, but I found myself in the kitchen the other night excitedly regaling my wife with a description of how my light cavalry broke the Gallic left flank and was able to envelope the enemy general and his heavy infantry against my spearmen. I'm sure that wasn't the highlight of her night, but damn, dat's good gravy.

You know, it seems like, 2 years or so ago, I was really excited about Fable and Bard's Tale, and I think a lot of other people were, too. Then, well.... (sound of chirruping crickets)(no, crickets don't "chirp," they "chirrup." This is what you get from me, folks: pure Quality). Anyway, one day I noticed that Fable had apparently made its way to the PC, finally, so I, of course, decided to give it a shot. Wow, what a snoozefest. First of all, the setting... has no setting, at least initially. It's a medieval world with random monsters and a "guild of heroes" as a bad plot device. No history, no mysticism, no politics... blah. There's some passable collection components to the game, but not anything beyond the most basic, and the much-touted romance angle is a vapid mini-game with no appreciable impact on the character or the world. The missions are painfully vanilla -- collect some shit, escort some shit, kill some shit. Fable combines enough sparks of life, though, in its wide variety of passably executed half-ideas, to keep me in the game much longer than it did, because the real deal-breaker was the combat system. Boring, boring, boring. The camera sucks, control and targetting are vague, each weapon has one repeatable move and one special move only, and I could not for the life of me get any kind of sneak assassin attack to work. Tedious in the extreme.

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Moved this over from my barely-used, now-defunct livejournal. Post is backdated.
-Fox1

Well, forget using this as my domain front page, I'm using an email address at my domain on my resumes, and the last thing I need is a curious prospective employer checking my domain and ending up at a goddamn Livejournal.

Plus, having a domain forward here increases the chance of someone eventually reading this, and I don't really know how I feel about that. This was always more intended to be a semi-secret little place that I could type out random crap for the sake of doing same, in my never-ending quest to trick myself into writing. I dunno, maybe I should go whole hog and remove the small number of personal interests or whatever those are linked in my profile. Just on the off chance that someone decides to go through every Journal listed under Spaced or something like that. Alternatively, someone spending that kind of time on a task of such dubious worth has a good chance of being the kind of person I have no problem sharing my moderately private musings with.

(more below the fold)
The internet has very profoundly changed the way I look at writing in general, much to the detriment of my own endeavors in the field. I think, growing up, you obviously gauge your abilities in any particular area by what you have available for comparison; you probably do the same thing with your self-worth, too, no matter how much you recognize that as a Bad Idea, intellectually. Well, at Foxville High (note: not its real name), I was easily within the top tier of students, as far as literary and linguistic skill went. No matter the genre, I was better able to form my thoughts, turn a phrase or even crack a joke (a skill made noteworthy by my crushing inability to do so verbally) than almost anyone else I encountered. I'm not saying I was the best, my defensive inferiority-circling-back-to-arrogance tactic stopped short of that type of hubris, but while I would, from time to time, feel that someone else had surpassed my own efforts, I never felt overwhelmed by my peers' collective work such that they were in some nebulous realm above me that I couldn't force my way into.

I used to play the trumpet, too. May parents and I (note: 95% my parents) spent a pretty decent chunk of cash on my pursuit of that skill. No, not pursuit, that implies chase, and effort, and positive actions driving you forward, I was just good at it. Period. Very little effort was needed for me to improve at a pace that always brought me ahead of those around me, to the mythical pulpit of the snotty band kid: first chair (oooooooh). But, guess what, I'm no prodigy, and I wasn't gifted with any incredible innate skill that would drag me effortlessly of to Juliard or jazz clubs or... or one of those fucking ska bands or... something, and eventually, as the learning curve evened out and the field of musicians grew wider, I started to sink back into the pack. By the time I had those cursed metal implements of beautification welded onto my teeth, I had slipped firmly into mediocrity, and secretly welcomed the brass death knell of a senior year spent on the less mouth-destructive euphonium.

Anyway, the point of the horrible one-time-at-band-camp segue was supposed to be part of some larger statement about laziness or intimidation or something, but I started reading an article on Fark about Robert Downey Jr. complimenting some lady's rack on british TV, and that sort of stalled my interest in that narrative thread. Basically, as much as you can come up with an almost infinite number reasons why you shouldn't, if even the random forum members at somethingawful are funnier that you have any reasonable expectation to be, Tycho over at Penny Arcade has pretty much pegged the needle on the usage of unnecessarily large words, and the other (note: far more famous) Matt and his X-E has cornered the market on writing about.... random crap, you start to feel like there's not much left for you to contribute.

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