JetFable’s Gamer Writer’s Block

As you all know, I can’t get away from writing for that long. It’s a mental disease, but at least it’s one of my better ones (yes I have a lot more). Someone once complained that my blog is devoid of pictures, so recently I’ve included more. It doesn’t in any way enlighten anyone who wants to read my words of wisdom, but I guess, it’s easier on the eyes. The theme today is virtual world, if you haven’t guessed already. As somewhat of a big gamer, I guess I still amaze myself that till this day I haven’t really touched an MMO, I guess it has something to do about being a writer. I’ve often believed that no good stories can be told on an online game, because no good story can come out of a world with more wanabe heroes than villains. But in any case, a virtual world is good for a lot of things, like conducting a job interview.

Read Wall Street Journal’s article here. Personally I hate job interviews, I usually don’t perform well at them, because I usually dont know crap about my craft. I am a writer not an engineer but all the interviews I have attended are enginnering related to a certain degree. I’m not sure how well a virtual job interview will work, I am not sure what the point of it is. I mean dressing up your avatar and than navigating it through the interview room, might as well do it in a chat room, without all the fancy graphics. I do believe it may work to a certain extent in tech-related jobs, as those candidates who did not know how to properly navigate an avatar are immediately crossed out as idiots, but then, how well does an avatar’s behavior reflect the real person’s. An avatar can’t really pick his nose and smell bad. Its like having your first date in 2nd life, does it really work? Sure it works if you never have to deal with that person in real life, but if you had to, just think about this, have you ever met someone that you disliked at first sight? I make split-second judgement on people all the time, you can’t exactly do that in a virtual world. When you’re hiring someone, their personal manner, attitude, quickness, humor, curiosity, and a few dozen other traits are really important, you get none of that online. But then I think it might work if you need to hire a brainy enginner that you don’t have to interact with much, usually how well they present themselves is indirectly proportional to how smart they actually are. In any case, I like the idea of telecommuting because I hate sitting through traffic everyday (idiots who drive to work, yes, you), and I certainly love the idea of working in a virtual office.

Well, there are people who log onto virtual worlds when they get back home from their day job, and there are people who work like a slave in the virtual world. This New York Times article interviewed a few chinese gold farmers who worked in terrible condition getting worse than minimal wage. It is an interesting read.

And a while ago I read about BBC’s article about Germany’s investigation into child pornography in Second Life. Sure advertising and selling child pornography (of real children) in a virtual environment is wrong, you get no argument from me. But what about sex with an underage avatar, turns out in Germany you can get 3 years jail time. I am talking about virtual sex (which isn’t sex) with an underage avatar (a child-lookalike thing which may be controlled by your grandma) gets you 3 years of real ass-raping in jail. Sure, pedophilia is really sick, but where do you draw the line? Is virtual rape really rape? I mean I can’t imagine anyone getting scarred emotionally from a virtual rape. I can’t even begin to describe what that is. Afterall, virtual death is not even remotely close to real death. I think whats fair is not real jail time, but virtual jail time.

Rockstar’s violent yet brilliant game Manhunt 2 been issued an AO rating and officially delayed maybe for eternity, since both Sony and Nintendo will not allow selling of an AO rating game. This reminds me of a message board posting about the first Manhunt, as some parents were disgruntled about Manhunt teaching kids that a plastic bag could kill someone (as Plastic bag is one of the execution method in the game). This is one of those times when I seriously doubt the average American intelligence. Not knowing that a plastic bag could kill is almost saying you didn’t know you needed oxygen to live. Yes, a bag could kill, but so can your mom’s bent-up dildo.

And finally, I want to talk about Denno Coil (電脳コイル), a science fiction anime that gets its idea from the matrix but yet manages to seperate itself from the rest of the crops. It talks about the advent of augmented reality (AR), somewhat a fusion of reality and virtual reality. Here everyone wears glasses to see and interact with the virtual world placed on top of the real world, resulting in a half real and half virtual internet city. Compared to all the matrix clones that I have watched during the past years, this feels like somewhat of a refreshing revelation, which I highly recommend. Well then, until next time.

I spent considerable times mucking around with old games lately, after I discovered the gem of ScummVm (more about that later), and began to ignore my Xbox, even though I really think I bought it to play remake of old games like Pacman and Prince of Persia. Pacman Championship, well playing that on a Hi-Def TV, its an unparalleled experience, yes, I was critized multiple times for not including Pacman in my 30 best of all time list, but then, I am digressing. I want to talk about Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny, the remake, Lazarus, which can be downloaded here. If you don’t know anything about Utlimas, you should stop reading here, you probably should stop visiting this blog all together (well, actually no, read the next article). Lazarus is a essentially a mod that runs on the Dungeon Siege engine. I can’t believe I own this piece of junk that’s Dungeon Siege, its an abomination of a game, a sorry excuse for a Diablo rip-off, and I can’t beleive people are making a movie out of it (well, yes, actually I can). But the remake of Ultima 5, well, what can I say, the game is so awesome it is essentially heaven on earth, pure bliss. You owe it yourself to go buy a copy of Dungeon Siege just to play this game.

Team Lazarus spent 6 years on the game, yes I know, those people don’t have lives. Here’s an Interview with the creators. But most of them now got real jobs in the gaming industry because of this project, and yes, even the original creator Richard Garriot aka Lord British played it and had good things to say about it. If I only have 1 word to say about this game, well, other than awesome, its professional. The resulting product is so professional that you can’t really tell its a fan-made game. Lazarus was a very faithful remake of U5, but molded in the image of Ultima 7 (which is believed to be the pinnacle of the series), running on a 3D diablo-like engine. I think what Lazarus looked like was what fans or even Lord British himself envisioned U9:Ascension to look like, and yes, there was screenshots of the cancelled early project before the real abomination that is U9 developed by EA came out, yuck, there is that word abomination again. Lets go over the good things, and then to the bad things, and then go back to the really good things.

OK, the simple good things. The original Ultima 5 had real day/night cycle, branching conversations, an awesome story, that’s all in the game, plus much much more. None of these elements were in the original Dungeon Siege. I don’t know how team Lazarus did it, but they did it. Each NPC in the game has their own background story, and you talk to them ala asking about the name/job and then important keywords popup. No more typing like the old Ultimas, here you just click on the words like U7. Everyone has a different portrait, and I don’t know where they found this artist, but he/she is definitely better than whoever that worked in Origin, and yes the art looked better than the U6 ones. The sound is stellar, remixed from earlier ultima tunes, I don’t know if there are any original composition here, but I don’t really care, its top-notch as it is. The writing is better than perfect, I have found bugs in the game but so far I haven’t found any grammatical error, and I personally think the writing is much better than the original U5/U6, maybe on par with U7 and Serpent Isle, if not better. There’s so much dialogue to read sometimes I have to skim through some of them. Each person in Lazarus has something to say, and they have a personality, unlike modern RPGs like Final Fantasy and Oblivion which just populate the world to make it look populated, in Lazarus, from the innkeepers to the weapon-smithy to their grandmother’s cat outside, has something important to say and you don’t want to miss it. Karma remains in the game, just like Knights of the Old Republic, each action has its consequences and you can complete the game via the evil ending (which was not in the original, here’s a fun read of the anti-walkthrough). Combat is quick and painless, well it is a diablo engine afterall, so I won’t dive into it too much. Ultima was never about the combat, but the exploration.

I can go on forever about the good, but its time to dive into the bad. The game brought back another essential Ultima experience, that is, that my machine feels inadequate to run it. The framerate is choppy and the loading takes forever. It remided me of the old Ultimas, which the 3 year old computer I had was never good enough to run it. Sure now I haven’t upgraded my computer for 5 years, but Dungeon Siege 1 engine itself is more than 7 years old, why is my machine which could run Dungeon Siege perfectly, is now churning on Lazarus? I have a simple explanaion for that, Lazarus has much more infomation, it needs to keep track of day/night cycle, where every NPC and everything items you dropped is, and the draw distance needed to play the game is much greater than DS, well, reasons or excuse, it doesn’t make it better. Sometimes in order to reload a save, I can go boot up Oblivion on my Xbox and finish a quest before Britania loads up on my laptop, well I am exaggerating, but you know what I mean. Other than that, lets go into the bugs, since the developers left the scene after the 1.2 build, bugs discovered afterwards are not corrected. Yes companions disappear after you left them on the beach, yes that happened to me, I left my beloved Julia and viola she was gone, I had to reload a save or forever miss her. Someone suggested killing them first and stash their body somewhere and then ressurect them later, but if you value your companion, I would suggest not to let them go, that or save often (on different saves). Though not in the original U5, I would have liked an option to ask them to return to the place where they joined, or go to headquarters (like Suikoden) would have been much more convenient. There are some mods which really enhance the gameplay experience, and they can be found on the forums (yes people actually mod a mod). I find the following mods necessarily: bug fixes for 1.2 and font changes (speak for itself), enable journal hotkey for pocket watch (this is a time saver since you need your pocket watch all the freaking time), decrease food consumption rate (woh, that saves a lot of headache, you can’t imagine how often your gang starves like junkies), magic ring which enable spell casting without reagents (you can’t imagine how convenient this is, you need at least one for a mage which you can equip with fireball spell). Buying reagents and food is a drag on the gameplay experience, and the mods fix that. Now lets blend a little good with the bad, sometimes questing is a drag, its often a good thing more than bad. NPCs you want to talk to won’t talk to you when they are going from their house to work or to eat, sometimes they eat for an hour and tell you to come back later. Sometimes they have important things to say only when they are at a specific location (like come back to the tavern when I am there and I will tell you a tale), you always have to basically stick around and explore and wait for the NPCs, and sometimes well, its a quest itself to find all the characters you can interact with, good thing they had that food consumption mod, otherwise you’d run out of food just waiting around talking to people, and soon you’d run out of money buying food. I find that pausing during the coversation branching screen is a good way to save time, the only downside to that is that the ambient music goes away. But this is pretty much essential, because if time flows normally when you talk, sometimes the person you talk to will walk away and resume their normal routine even while you are stuck in conversation mode, and that is a bit strange to me, because there’s so much info to read in each conversation, after you are done talking, everyone could be gone and asleep. I guess that’s a limitation of the DS engine, that the NPCs don’t stop in the track to talk to you, and they have to resume their routine when time passes, but well I’m fine with it as long as the “pause” works. Combat on normal is quite hard, and I find it that on easy it is a bit more enjoyable, at first I think the game had trouble remembering where I set my combat difficulty, and I was stuck in hard (normal) situations for a few times before I had to reset it and save and save and save again to get it to stick (well could be just me). There’s no carpet flying from the original U5, no moon orb teleportation, and there’s no ship combat, and driving a ship is now more a drag than ever but thankfully you don’t need that much of it. And why the hack do you need to post a guard when you hole up and camp? You will never get attacked, ever, which is more a good thing than bad, but i guess another limitation on the DS engine. Quests are harder but in fact more enjoyable to the original U5, and there are much more with much better writing, and you cant blindly type keywords to get quest items before actually learning about them, since there’s no typing now. Like in order for you to get the Grapple from Lord Michael in Empath Abbey, you have to first buy a ship’s deed and travel on boat to Buccaneer’s Den, there you need to talk to a pirate/mayor when he’s only on the docks and not in the tavern to get him to talk about the secrets of wooing this barmaid into telling you secrets, and their you can find out from her about someone else who knew Lord Michael having the grapple, while in the original game you just walk up to Lord Michael and type grapple and voila, you have it, take the fun out of things.

Ultima 5 Lazarus brings back memories, of the days when i was immersed in the gameworld of Ultima, which brought me to fantasy, gaming and even writing. I can’t stop saying good things about this game, if I had to rate it out of 10, I guess I will give it a 9.9 (because of the bugs). Now so far I’ve only played through half of the towns and 1 dungeon, I wish I had more time and the loading was not as long, but I do need more sleep, and I need to work.