Category Archives: Games

Donald Trump – Chaotic Evil

I thought it would be fun to pigeon hole the presidential candidates into their respective Dungeons & Dragons alignment.  I recognize that these aren’t going to be perfect, but it’s one of those things that are fun to game out.  All references to alignments can be found on Wikipedia.

When I said these aren’t going to be perfect, that was in respect to all the other candidates.  Donald Trump fits the definition of Chaotic Evil to a T.  Check this out:

A chaotic evil character tends to have no respect for rules, other people’s lives, or anything but their own desires, which are typically selfish and cruel. They set a high value on personal freedom, but do not have much regard for the lives or freedom of other people. Chaotic evil characters do not work well in groups because they resent being given orders and do not usually behave themselves unless there is no alternative.

Is that not spot on?

No respect for rules? Check. Check.

Other people’s lives?  Just read his Twitter account which I am not linking to.

Anything but their own desires, which are typically selfish and cruel? Check.

They set a high value on personal freedom, but do not have much regard for the lives or freedom of other people? Check. Check.  Check.  Really, there’s way too many examples of this.

Chaotic evil characters do not work well in groups because they resent being given orders and do not usually behave themselves unless there is no alternative?  Witness his fairly laid-back attitude at the Convention (at least by Republican Convention standards, that is) versus his actions both before and after, for example.

And yet, some polls have this man in the lead to be our next President of the United States.  With Brexit, we were finally able to lord our political superiority over the United Kingdom for the first time in decades.  Now we’re just going to throw that superiority away by electing Joffrey Baratheon.  What a total waste of a good lording.

Because Of Course

And what shows up the day after I get back from GenCon?

image

Exploding Kittens. Well played, Exploding Kittens team. Well played.

Game Review: Starcraft II: Heart Of The Swarm

A new series in which I review games that came out years ago.  I rarely play video games anymore.  So when I do, it’s guaranteed to be a game that I can get for cheap.  Which also means that it’s going to be years old.  Thus, “Heart of the Swarm”.

As I precursor to playing “Heart of the Swarm”, I also replayed the excellent “Wings of Liberty” human campaign that came out even more years ago.  Story wise, I think I liked “Wings of Liberty” better, though both have an entertaining storyline.  My biggest problem with the “Heart of the Swarm” storyline was Kerrigan’s voice acting.  It came off as kind of one-dimensional to me, which is normally fine, but here we have a woman going through a pretty big transformation and driven by hatred but still mostly talks in the same steady voice without a hint of inflection.  A small point, but bothersome to me.

The gameplay for “Heart of the Swarm” is solid, but incredibly easy.  I played through the entire thing on normal difficulty in a weekend with each mission taking on average well under 20 minutes.  Never once did I feel like there was a danger of me failing.  The Zerg is incredibly unbalanced in its favor.  The game introduces this concept of evolution for each of the zerg units which I think is the unbalancing factor.  You mean I can choose to make zerglings both able to respawn and able to jump up cliffs?  Yes please!  You don’t need any strategy at all.  Just build a bunch of zerglings with a bit of air support and go.  And it should be noted that I am NOT a terribly good player.  As an example of how easy the game is, I replayed the final mission in order to score me some extra Kerrigan achievements and I decided to play it with only Kerrigan and zerglings.  I completed all objectives in 25 minutes.  With no air support under my control.  That’s kind of ridiculous and what made me decide to write about the game.

Another problem with the game is the achievements.  In “Wings of Liberty”, many of the main gameplay achievements are actual achievements as opposed to getting them all just for playing the game.  “Heart of the Swarm” tends towards the latter.  First off, you can play on normal mode and get all of them.  “Wings of Liberty” had some hard mode achievements thrown in.  That’s fine and all, want to make the achievements more accessible to more casual gamers, but I was able to get a vast majority of the achievements without much effort at all.  The handful of achievements that I didn’t get in the first run through were ones that you really needed to know what they were first in order to get them.

All in all, despite my complaints, the game is pretty awesome.  I don’t think I will ever tire of watching a zergling rush in action.  It’s so pretty.  One thing that I will say about “Heart of the Swarm” that I didn’t experience when playing “Wings of Liberty”, I finally have an itch to play multiplayer.  I’m not sure I want to go down that rabbit hole.

You Want To Play This Game

Imagine you’re a cat.  What do you do all day?  If you said, “knock shit off shelves and make a general mess of the place”, this game is for you!  Introducing Catlateral Damage, the game where you are a cat and you have two minutes to knock as much crap on the floor as possible.  It’s a Flash game and requires the Unity 3D extension, but trust me, it’s worth it to try it once or twice.

Time To Make You Dorks Jealous

Who has two thumbs and got an invite to the beta of Elder Scrolls Online?  This guy! *points to self*

The Elder Scrolls games are some of my favorite games I’ve never finished.  Open ended game worlds and I don’t get along very well.  Or maybe we get along too well.  I usually end up getting lost in the world after playing for 100 hours or so and have a hard time remembering what the storyline quest was.

For the online game, it looks like they are planning on only one seamless world instead of multiple shards.  It will be interesting to see how long that lasts.  It looks like all of the races are represented and they’re loosely broken up into three alliances.  It’s hard to tell how that will work.  Maybe that’s the PvP teams or something.

The game also appears to be one of those open class games similar to the stand alone games which I’m excited about.  Of course, it also means that it will likely suffer from horrible balance issues or everyone ends up being specialized the same.  I think I’ll start with a High Elf mage before I inevitably end up playing a fighter because Elder Scrolls doesn’t seem to do mages well.

An open ended world with open ended classes.  Sounds right up my alley.  I know what I’ll be doing this weekend.

What Should I Play Next?

Ok, dorks, I recently finished playing Bioshock Infinite and found it a great big barrel of meh after really liking the first two.  I currently have a large catalog of games that were on sale on Steam that I need to get through.  They include:

  • Assassin’s Creed
  • Assassin’s Creed 2
  • Fallout 3
  • Fallout: New Vegas
  • L.A. Noire
  • Mass Effect
  • Mass Effect 2
  • The Witcher 2

Sound off and let me know which is most worthy of my time.  I paid for all of those slightly more than what I would normally pay for one game.  This reflects both my lack of game playing initiative and my cheapness.

What Am I Wasting My Time With Now?

That would be Civilization V.  It was on sale for crazy cheap on Steam.  I basically don’t buy any games anymore unless they’re below $10 on Steam.  As I don’t feel as much like gaming as I did when I was younger, there are usually good games to be had from a few years ago cheap.

I just finished my first game; Romans, chieftain, huge map, continents, max opponents, normal speed.  Needless to say, I whooped some civilized ass and ended up with a science victory.  It took 16 hours.  The victory conditions seem pretty balanced.  I was only a few turns away from a culture victory and I had the UN already built even though I was too busy steamrolling over everyone to get the diplomacy victory.  My only regret is I didn’t get to attack with my giant death robot before the victory.

As with other Civilization games, this one is a giant time suck.  You will start playing only to realize that it is suddenly six hours later and past midnight and you still just want to do one more turn.  Ok, maybe another.  This is the last one, I swear.  Somebody take this computer away from me!

It’s been so long since I’ve played a Civ game that I don’t know what’s new and what’s not.  There are no stacking of military units anymore.  That seemed new to me.  There is also the ability to befriend a bunch of City-States which are computer players that don’t grow beyond the original city but can give you some cool bonuses if you’re nice to them.  There are no transport units anymore nor are there traders or diplomats.  Everything is done through diplomacy which seems a little too simplistic.  Cities now have built in defenses.  It actually takes some planning to conquer a city if you’re evenly matched scientifically.  The research tree seems more slimmed down than I remember it with far fewer dead end techs.

All in all, it’s a very entertaining game.  I’m sure I will waste days of my time playing it.  Not bad for $10.

This Looks Gorgeous

Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch is a new game with animation by Studio Ghibli.  You may know Studio Ghibli as the creators of “Spirited Away” and “Princess Mononoke.  They are the most creative animation studio in the world.  This game seems to be no exception to that.  It is just beautiful.  Alas, it appears to only be for the Playstation 3 so I will never play the game, but those of you with PS3 systems should definitely check it out.  Studio Ghibli deserves all of your money.

I sense a great disturbance in the force

Star Wars: The Old Republic has gone free-to-play.  I sense a giant time-suck in my future.  As if millions of hours suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced.  I haven’t created a character yet, but I’ll be on Jedi Covenant if anyone reads this and wants to join me.  Let me know your character’s name.