Chatty’s Dream Design Project: An Interactive Primer-RPG
Tomorrow will be one of the year’s slowest days on the Bloggosphere: the American Thanksgiving weekend. Of course, that’s when I feel the biggest urge to write in a long time.
But that’s never stopped me before.
So after asking my Twitter readers for inspiration (thanks Christian), I settled on a question that’s been on my mind for a long time:
Given no limits in ressources, time and talent, what would you design?
Hmm, that’s an easy one; I’d design something along the lines of the “Young Ladies’ Primer” found in Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age. The Primer was a nano-computer with one main function, to act as an interactive smart-book that taught children through a long interactive storygame.
So when I say I’d like to do something like that, I’m not thinking about an actual book-shaped computer made with nanotech (although it would be cool), rather I’d like to do something that could, eventually, evolve into just that… with a tabletop RPG spin.
Here are the basic pitching points:
- An application for a tablet PC like the iPad or the equivalent
- The app features a richly illustrated (animated?) adventure story aimed at tweenagers, I’m thinking 8-12.
- The story progressively becomes fully interactive as a CRPG with elements such as dialog choices, character sheets, conflict resolution mechanics and character growth (XPs).
- The game should last between 5 and 10 hours depending on side-quests completed.
- A simple, yet complete set of tabletop RPG rules that allows readers to continue the adventures of the characters of the story
- Stats for all main characters for the story and rules to make new ones.
- A primer to teach parents how to play tabletop roleplaying games with tween-aged children, complete with advice on preparing new stories, inserting educational content (if needed) and letting the creativity of children drive the show.
The tabletop game would most likely be narrative-driven. So far, the mechanics that I envision fitting the most with what I need is is John Harper’s Lady Blackbird as it has just the right amount of rules element (fitting on a demi-page) to make it into really enjoyable roleplaying game for people of all ages.
I don’t know if the technology is there yet or if parents would be interested in this, but as a customer, I’d snag such a product (and pay more than once for different stories) in a minute.
What about you? Do you like the idea? What elements would you like to see in such a app/story/game?
More importantly, if you were asked the same question I was, what would you design?
I Am Not An Atomic Playboy
The key to my heart is, well, my heart. I need to have an emotional connection to something or I’ll get bored. That’s why it’s really not a surprise to me that the right music in something that’s otherwise mediocre can win me over, and the right music in something really great can push me into being a rabid fan. I had to watch Star Wars: Episode 1 several times before I was sure it was bad. Stupid John Williams.
When I was a kid, music in videogames was kind of a new thing. Some games would play a little electronic ditty during intermissions, like the Pac-Man series. (My favorite is the first one from Ms. Pac-Man.) Once the 80′s got rolling, we started seeing a lot of cool music showing up in games. I can distinctly remember trying to stay alive long enough Spy Hunter to hear the totally sweet synthesized guitar solo in its version of Peter Gunn. When I was 10, I remember renting a very difficult and frustrating game. I probably would have returned it and never played it again if the music hadn’t sucked me in from the first 5 seconds. That game was the original Mega Man, and I really wish somebody had included the instruction manual because I didn’t figure out until weeks later that I could steal the bosses’ weapons. That game (and all its sequels, especially Mega Man 2) and the Castlevania series had me riveted to the screen. And boy, did I do a lot of forgiving things I didn’t like based on the music. Like the beginning of the Frankenstein level with all the water and the bats. And Elec Man. CHEATING. ALL THE TIME.
Bejeweled 3′s Secret Link To My Past
I eagerly await each Wednesday, because that’s the day Xbox Live releases its new Arcade titles. This week’s was Bejeweled 3, the trial version of which I decided to download because I haven’t had played a decent brainless casual game in awhile. It was Butterfly mode that did me in. Jewel-butterflies float to the top of the screen where an evil spider is waiting, and you have to clear them before one gets eaten. My emotions have already been compromised by this situation, and then the music hits me. It’s new age-y and cool. It starts slow and swells right about the time that first butterfly nears the top. I feel the adrenaline surge through my hands and my resolve turn to steel. You will NOT have him, spider.
So, I bought Bejeweled 3. Fortunately, the rest of the game had some fun new modes and even the original can keep my 3 year old enraptured (especially the fire jewels that blow up). I spent several hours just playing and relaxing and trying to figure out who wrote the music for the game. It seemed really familiar for some reason. My best guess was Andy Pickford, who I listened to quite a bit in my “new age” music phase a couple years ago. When I finally summoned the willpower to get up and find my phone so I could look it up, the answer shocked me. It was written by a guy named Peter Hajba (aka Skaven) — who was one of my heroes when I was a teenager. And he did the music for the previous Bejeweled game too! How did I miss this??!!
Most kids want a car when they graduate from high school. My parents got me a computer instead. At 66mhz, with an insane 16MB of RAM, it was an impressive machine at the time. This was when I got a modem and was first introduced to the BBS scene, and one of the things I liked to do was look at software demos. Not trial versions of software, mind you, but more demonstrations of coders’ capability to push computers to do more than they really ought to be able to do. Some of the best demos out at the time were by a group called Future Crew, of which Skaven was both a coder and a musician. He, along with Purple Motion (also of Future Crew) were writing music I’d never heard anything like before. Future Crew’s demos utterly blew me away (and the rest of the world too, as they won several major demo competitions). Their demo Second Reality literally redefined for me what I thought my computer was capable of.
Little Moving Numbers That Turn Into Music Somehow
Good ol' MultiTracker.
This was also the same time in my life that I was writing music regularly. I didn’t have any training beyond three years of band back in jr. high school (bari sax FTW!), but I immensely enjoyed composing. Most of the other parts of my life found its way into my music, which at age 17 consisted entirely of videogame references, horror movies, and karate. (It is not all that different today, except I probably watch fewer movies now.) Back then, I used a program called MultiTracker Module Editor to take a bunch of instrument sound samples and mess with their pitch and smush them all together to make music. Sometimes it was awful, but sometimes it wound up beautiful. Sometimes it was both. I was part of a group called Tranzik ƒ/X, with some of my friends from far-off (30 mins away!) Bloomington, IL. We’d share everything we wrote between our BBS’s. We were pretty small potatoes, except for my friend Quarex, who got into the Kosmic Free Music Foundation. I’m not sure if anybody but our local group heard my stuff, but it was still exhilarating every time I uploaded a song. I entered a couple of composers’ competitions (with a song about cyborg Kris Kristofferson, no less!), but didn’t even place in the top 100. At one point, I had dreams of writing music for videogames, and almost got my wish when a friend of mine started coding a RPG. Unfortunately, as things do with college-age people, we got distracted and nothing ever really materialized.
I’m not really sure why I stopped composing, but I get the bug every now and then. The last time it hit me was in the middle of one of my favorite D&D campaigns of all time, after an epic battle. MultiTracker didn’t work so well under Windows XP, but there was a module tracker called ModPlug Tracker (now called OpenMPT) that I could use. I wrote the musical score to that epic battle, and it was sufficiently awesome that my DM rewarded my character with an awesome dire flail blessed by his god. (Which is, in part, where my twitter username comes from.) That same year, I decided I needed to write my own version of the wedding march for my wedding. (I didn’t get any dire flails out of that one, but I got something better.)
Programmed For Awesomeness
This finally brings me back to Bejeweled 3. Skaven wrote the entire soundtrack using OpenMPT, the same software I’d used to compose my wedding music. Yeah, I realize it’s a little bit like making a ragecomic in Photoshop and then pointing to the cover of Wired saying “OMG THEY USED PHOTOSHOP TOO!” — but for those of us involved in the demoscene back in the day (even as tangentially as I was), it’s still really cool to see the old ways alive and well. Perhaps the coolest part about all this for me was a noting that Skaven used a library called BASS to dynamically call different parts of his songs at different points in the game. That part of the butterfly game where the music rose and grabbed me by the heart? Not only intentional, but triggered programmatically. I didn’t know how to code back when I first started writing music. Now I can use both skills to make something awesome. I can be more Skaven-y than I was before.
Just what this turns out to be is anybody’s guess, including mine — but the concept of in-game music for your D&D game that the DM can adjust in the middle of a battle without cutting the song off makes me very excited. If nothing else, this has convinced me I need to start composing again. Maybe some generic in-game battle music for people to use. Maybe love songs for githyanki.
My point to all this? Nobody told me I had to have a point when I took this gig! But if I were to have one, it would be that I really started to enjoy D&D when I realized it was OK to bring what I was passionate about to the table as a player, and to see what other people did too. That’s why I get bored with pure stats, and why I like playing with real live people. For me, it’s nonsequiturs and possibly now music. I’ve fought in a lot of epic imaginary battles, but the one I wrote the music for will be etched in my memory forever. For you, it could be upholstery. If any of you can apply square foot gardening or hang-gliding to your game, please take pictures.
P.S. Skaven, you’re still my demoscene hero. Thanks for the inspiration all these years.
P.P.S. As for the rest of you: go purchase Skaven-music. ALL OF IT.
Photo Credit 1: A still from Future Crew’s Second Reality
Photo Credit 2: A screenshot of Renaissance’s Multitracker Module Editor
Review: “Dark Delve”
I was checking my email yesterday when I saw a request to review an Xbox indie game called Dark Delve by a fellow named Mark Harvey. He even sent me a code to download it for free! Given our corporate policy to give great reviews to anybody who gives us free stuff*, I hope that my immortal soul was worth the $1 cost of the game.
Let me start this by saying I have a weakness for indie games, especially “studios” that are a one-person operation. I grew up on shareware games from the early days of PC gaming, back when 256 color VGA was a luxury. I played my c64 so much I broke a Wico Bat Handle joystick. THAT IS VERY DIFFICULT.
In the early 90′s, I used to run a BBS. I made sure to keep my filebase stocked to the brim with shareware games. A few software companies like Apogee, Id Software, and Epic Megagames put out some “commercial quality” games (remember Doom?), but there was a huge explosion of hobbyist coders releasing some really cool games. (One of my favorites was Galactix.) Even back then, these smaller games didn’t usually have the smooth polish of a commercial game (or especially a console game) — but they always had something compelling about them that kept me coming back.
For awhile now, I’ve been watching the Xbox Indie Games marketplace with more excitement than their regular fare. Sure, a lot of crap comes down the pipe, but occasionally I find something that transforms me back into a happy teenager and evaporates all my time for a day or two. I’m happy to say Dark Delve fits squarely into this category. [Read the rest of this article]
A Joyful Noise
I detest labels. Always have, always will. In high school I played D&D and worked with computers, but I wasn’t a geek or nerd. I excelled at sports, but I wasn’t a jock. I hung out with some people who were on the fringe of “normal society,” but I wasn’t a stoner or slacker. I did well in classes and got decent grades, but I wasn’t a preppy. But then again, neither were the people who were being called any of those names by other people who were themselves being called other names. Labels were just crutches for people who wanted to make themselves feel better about who they were, when they didn’t need to feel bad about anything at all.
So today ends what is being called “Speak Out with Your Geek Out,” and I am neither proud nor ashamed to say that I play roleplaying games, board games, card games, and other activities that some people consider geeky. When I play or run RPGs, I absolutely talk in funny voices and act out what my characters are doing and saying. I do so in public, and I don’t really care if I look like a fool. An NPC in a game I was running recently did the “dance of shame,” and you can damn well bet that I did that dance to—just like there was no one watching, baby! If that makes me a geek, then a geek I am.
Despite the flak I took in the 1980s for playing D&D, along with many others who shared the hobby then, I can honestly say I am a better person for my experiences with the game. Having some “normal” people telling me that I was going to hell or was mentally unstable because I played a game gave me an appreciation for all the people who did play the game. Even though these people might have been different, might have been what is now called a geek, they were certainly no more terrible than those who were judging and condemning without knowledge or experience. [Read the rest of this article]
The Geek Way
In most dictionaries, the definition of “geek” is way behind the times. It’s still classified a pejorative term that implies negative qualities or insular, intellectual behavior. Synonyms include dork, freak, nerd, and weirdo—basically a social misfit.
The reason I say this sort of definition, and the people who still use it, are behind the times is because geek has been moving toward chic since Revenge of the Nerds (1984) was in theaters. As the dorks of the 80s grew up and became business leaders, computer specialists, game designers, scientists, writers, and other sorts of accomplished professionals, “geek” has become synonymous with success and disposable income.
The word is also used in common parlance to denote someone who is passionately enthusiastic, in a positive way, about a subject, job, or hobby. You can be a kayaking geek, a computer geek, a yoga geek, confectioner geek, and so on. In fact, most mature geeks I know fit into a range of geek types rather than single-minded enthusiasts. Plenty of “cool people” self identify as some sort of geek.
I’m a gaming geek. Chances are, since you’re reading this, so are you.
Other than being passionate about games, gaming geeks are often considered to be extremely cerebral and introverted. We can be pedantic, judgmental, and cliquish. All these traits can lend to the social-misfit stereotype, especially in a culture where “intellectual” is sometimes touted as an unfavorable trait. The basement-dwelling troglodyte cliché persists despite the fact that geekdom has crossed innumerable boundaries.
The worst boundaries I see in my gaming life, however, are those limits we gaming geeks impose on ourselves. Again, we can be pedantic, judgmental, and cliquish, as well as hyperintellectual and plain snobby. Rather than retain a sense of wonder and experiment, we can adhere to onerightwayisms and badwrongfunisms. We define ourselves as simulationists or gamists, roleplayer or tactical, video gamer or tabletop gamer, as if those terms have any extant value beyond the realm of personal preference. Forgetting that our games and their settings are imaginary, we look for truths in them and about them. Such “truths” are no more existent than the made-up milieus to which we apply them. (Stephen Radney-MacFarland of NeoGrognard is a great one to discuss this subject with.)
Don’t feel persecuted if you believe you’re in such a category. I’ve been there, too. But I’ve been blessed with diversity of exposure and experience that has made me see the error of my ways. In the domain of personal fantasy and fun, the only right way is the one on which the participants agree. “Official” stances, canon, metaplots, and rules be damned.
All games I’ve played had their value and an influence on my beliefs and design methods. In Wizards R&D, I’ve gotten strange looks because I said I like GURPS. Sure, GURPS isn’t any form of D&D, but it has its virtues and flaws, just like D&D does. Playing GURPS, even as dungeon-crawling fantasy, is less abstract than playing D&D in a similar mode. But GURPS, and its first cousin Savage Worlds, suffers from static disadvantages that characters can have, the roleplaying of which is governed only by the vigilance of the GM and player.
FATE (Dresden Files RPG) and Cortex+ (Leverage RPG and Smallville RPG) handle the flawed character better through use of dynamic currencies that encourage implementation of the flaws in the game. Each of these games has something D&D could learn from, and has or will in my home games. (These games can also learn from other games, as I hear Margaret Weis Productions might soon show us.) Similarly, if I were ever to run a Pathfinder or 3e D&D campaign, I would derive some of that campaign’s GMing tools, such as monster and NPC design, from 4e D&D.
The point is: As my repertoire of played games expands, including videogames, so does my viewpoint on how games might be designed and played. I’ve learned you have to play a game to have the most qualified opinion on it. Reading it or looking on from the outside is not enough. Claiming to like or dislike a game, implying your opinion is somehow educated, without experiencing that game is disingenuous. (I did this in a review of Mutants & Masterminds, the flaws of which show up pretty quickly in play—for example how Toughness works.) Saying your way of playing is somehow the one true way is snobbery.
When it comes to D&D, or any RPG really, I have yet to see a wrong way to play.
My friends and I, as kids, flipped through the 1e D&D monster books, which for us included Deities & Demigods, with our 10th-level characters to find a creature we couldn’t beat. Of course, we had unbalanced characters. I’d like to have met a 10-year-old D&D player in the 80s who didn’t. We added all sorts of stuff to our game from everything we read, saw, and listened to. Yes, some of our characters had lightsabers, and others had boots like Gene Simmons of (makeup-wearing) KISS. To more than a few of us, that stuff is still cool.
As countless other grognards and game designers have admitted and opined on, we ignored parts of older D&D that were too arcane for us. Weaned on basic D&D, and without the cash flow to assemble armies of lead figurines, we took to Advanced D&D with that simpler sensibility. We rarely used the battle grid, although the game and its statistics called for it even then. Therefore, we ignored weapon and spell ranges, and we fudged whether monsters ended up in blast radiuses. Now that I think about it, even with our lightsaber-wielding uber-characters, we emphasized what was fun for us.
That’s the key, I guess. And lots of styles can be fun.
My teenage simulationist streak is what got me into games such as Rolemaster and GURPS. Back then, I might not have tried James Wyatt’s Random Dungeon(TM), which has about as much story as Hack or Rogue. (Both of which are fun, as is JW’s Random Dungeon.) I would have appreciated Mike Mearls’s love of dungeon crawling a lot less and been unwilling to participate in a 3e reboot game he ran. In fact, I might have disdained the typical limitations of convention play. It would have been snobbery and my loss in every case.
Play style is just that. If you aren’t participating in a given game, it’s not within your purview to judge that game negatively unless you intend to be unkind. (You can judge, in a general sense, any game you’ve played, especially with reference to your preferences.) In my mind, this point of view applies to published products that don’t seem to be your style.
Fourthcore, for example, is hardcore, meat-grinder dungeon crawling in the vein of Tomb of Horrors. To some, it’s an experiment with the boundaries of 4e D&D. For a few, it goes too far afield. To me, 4e always contained the possibility of Fourthcore or something like it. My current DMing style is more along the lines of an action/adventure novel or TV series, but I appreciate the fact that D&D, among countless other RPGS, is pliable enough to accommodate so many ways of having fun. Furthermore, I can participate in alternative styles as the opportunity arises.
Just like any of us can be more than one type of geek, and most forms of geekery have positive traits, every game has a range of possibilities. What you prefer might be different, but we geeks can learn from one another, and we gamers and game designers can learn from all sorts of games. Experimentation and exploration expand horizons. Nothing is sacred; everything is permitted. Of course, none of us has the time to try everything, but all of us can avoid negative prejudgment, whether of other people or games. Instead, we can emphasize the positive aspects of our differences, gaining some wisdom in the process.
I want to thank those among you who have taught me new possibilities. I also want to thank those of you who have graced my game table or network connection with your presence. I’ve stolen good ideas from all of you, or recalibrated my thinking to accommodate a new idea of yours, just so you know. So, I owe you one.
This is my Speak Out with Your Geek Out participation. Why don’t you speak out, too?
Let Sleeping Dukes Lie
When I was but a lad of 14, I used to play a lot of shareware games. It was much easier to convince my parents to pony up $2 for a disk full of PC games than it was to get them to blow $50 on another NES game. At the time, I was very much into games like Commander Keen and Jill of the Jungle. It was also about this time I played a little game by Apogee Software called Duke Nukem. It was pretty typical of PC platform shooters of the time, but I will confess to enjoying the crap out of it and its sequel. I liked the game’s catchy title and the main character’s crew cut and really didn’t think too much about it after that.
Imagine my surprise 5 years later when Apogee (now 3D Realms) drops another Duke Nukem game. This time, it’s in 3D, the graphics are better than Doom’s, and there are scantily-clad women. Also, he swears. Then I remember I’m 19, and these things aren’t really all that new to me. I regard Duke3D’s more lascivious offerings as an interesting novelty, and move on to more important things. Like blowing up aliens. Even back then I remember rolling my eyes at some of the jokes. Pigcops? Really? And with no other accompanying animal-stereotypes? I was at least expecting to kill some rabid were-weasel lawyers.
It does bear saying, though, that the joke where he threatens to rip off a boss’s head and *OMG S-WORD* down his neck and then does (complete with newspaper to read) may have been the hardest I have ever laughed. If you’re going to go over the top, go all the way.
After that, well, you’re all familiar with the story. Poor ol’ Duke got cancelled and sold to other companies and cancelled and put through the most spectacular development hell any of us have ever heard of. I was incredibly worried the day Duke Nukem Forever came out last month. I was about 12% sure the world was going to end. Conversely, after the Worst Development Cycle Ever, I was over 90% sure Duke Nukem Forever was going to be really terrible.
It wasn’t terrible. It was worse than that. It was disappointing. [Read the rest of this article]
Review: Battle Tag (by Ubisoft)
The odds are that you haven’t heard of the game Battle Tag that was released by Ubisoft in November of last year. How do I know that? Because so far it has only had what must be called a “soft release” and is only available through Ubisoft’s online store or in stores in Canada and Texas. Aside from some attention garnered at E3 2010, there’s not many ways you would have heard about this game. What’s surprising about this is that Battle Tag is far and away the best laser tag game I’ve ever played and may even be one of the best back yard experiences I’ve had in my entire life.
I found out about this game because my wife and our friend Joshx0rfz heard about it from a mutual friend and immediately decided it would be perfect for my birthday party last weekend. They kept it a secret from me, but through some hints I had an idea of what was going to happen, but Battle Tag was way beyond anything I expected. The key element that sets this game apart from other back yard battle games is that Battle Tag requires you to use computer software hooked up to a Ubiconnect antenna. The included software lets you name players, set up teams, and change many of the elements of the game such as health, ammunition, rules for each game such as Free For All or Team Frag, and even set the beam power depending on if you’re playing indoor, outdoor, in bright light, or in the dark.
With a company like Ubisoft behind the game, I was not surprised to find that the software made the game feel more like all of our favorite FPS games than a simple game of laser tag in our back yard. In addition to the software and the ability to customize the details of the game, it also incorporates small plastic boxes for home bases and reload stations which you tap to the bottom of your gun to respawn or to reload your gun. In addition there are eight different game types out of the box that includes one or two which involve shooting the Ubiconnect antenna or tagging specific bases as a part of scoring for that match. For our first outing with the game we stuck almost entirely to the Team Frag game type, but once I got home and looked at the different variations I decided that we definitely need to try them all.
Specs and Details
The one major downside to Battle Tag is without a doubt the cost, but when you consider how much you would spend on playing laser tag at an arena or paying for paintball equipment and course time to me it still comes out ahead. Battle Tag costs roughly $60 per player and the current software handles up to 8 players so the investment you’re looking at to get the most out of the game is steep at around $500. The two player starter set costs $130 and includes two vests, two guns, one CD of the Battle Tag software, one Ubiconnect antenna, two bases, and two ammo boxes. There is a single vest and gun expansion as well as a med-kit and two extra bases expansion but both appear to be sold out (from everywhere, unfortunately) at the moment. [Read the rest of this article]
Review: D&D Daggerdale
Those of you out there that said 4e would make a great video game? Well, turns out, not so much…
D&D Daggerdale is the newest D&D video game release from Atari, available for download on PC, Playstation Network, and Xbox Live. We played the Xbox version, using review copies provided from the publisher. A “hack and slash” style game (in the same genre as Diablo, World of Warcraft, and to a lesser extent older D&D games like Neverwinter Nights and Baldur’s Gate), the game is touted as the first game to use the D&D 4e ruleset (though the connection is loose, as we’ll discuss) and set in the Forgotten Realms. The game features single-player, local 2 player, and online up to 4 player modes. Both Bartoneus and I played a bit of single player before joining up later on for a 2 player online game. Collectively, we played probably about an hour and a half of actual game play, leveling up to 2nd level before calling it quits for the night, covering the same ground multiple times for reasons I’ll discuss. [Read the rest of this article]
Why KmartGamer Needs To Send Me to E3: A Love Story
Listen up, KMartGamer. You need to send me to E3. It is your destiny.
You might be wondering how I can make such a bold claim. Clearly, you need a demonstration of my power.
About Me
I was born into a loving Midwestern family in 1975. My parents were soon replaced by a TRS-80 Color Computer II, and I suckled at its digital teat until I reached manhood. In 1980, I suffered a severe allergic reaction to some some medicine, turning me into a tiny, red, and itchy replica of Frankenstein’s monster. To make me feel better, my grandmother bought me an Atari 2600 and a pack of frozen peas to put on my feet. I do not think she knew what she was doing at the time, just as Pandora did not as she freed all the evils of the world. Wait, this is probably not helping my case.
I’ve been obsessed with gaming in various forms as long as I can remember. I played that Atari 2600 long past the years where you could still buy one in a store. I used a nigh-indestructible Wico Bat Handle joystick until it broke – 15 years later. My roots are deep. Pixels flow through my veins. I know about videogames. All of them. OK, I am exaggerating slightly, but my brain is packed with data that only comes in handy at conventions, back-alley nerd fights, and in situations where I am trying to bamboozle someone into sending me to E3.
If I had to pick a genre, I’d have to go RPG. I started reading my brother’s D&D books when I was about 8, and I’ve been playing tabletop games on and off ever since high school. I like a lot of different types of games, but the necessary ingredient in a game to keep me up at night is a good story. I like games best that mix my videogame chocolate with my RPG peanut butter. Consequently, I’ve loved every SSI gold-box game and everything BioWare has ever made – sometimes in ways it’s probably best that I don’t blog about.
Speaking of blogging, I’ve been causing words to appear on the Internets for almost a decade now. At first, it was just blogging so my family and friends could share in all my misadventures. In 2003, I started playing D&D with some friends of mine and we enjoyed it so much that we started a website called Stupid Ranger, a gaming site devoted primarily to helping D&D players enjoy their game more. That’s when things started getting weird. People were reading the stuff we wrote. Then companies would send us stuff to review By the following year, we found ourselves interviewing some of the staff that worked on the current edition of D&D. That was also the year I got to play D&D with Gary Gygax and Tracy Hickman (if only for about 5 minutes before everybody died). Those were heady days, filled with love and combat. Everybody had enough hitpoints, and there was a d20 in every pot.
A little over a year ago, I found myself wanting to reach a larger audience and blog about more varied things, so I asked the proprietor of this here gaming blog Critical Hits if there was any room for someone of my particular talents. There was, and my life since has basically been me living out one teenage gaming fantasy after another. I attended Dungeons & Dragons Experience back in January, and got to hang out with the Wizards of the Coast R&D team for a couple days. I made some friends there and got to play Secret Games and get perspectives on all the things I loved so much that I would never have been able to get otherwise, and then share them with the world at large. Also, I ate quesadillas in front of the WotC guys often enough that they made fun of me. It was awesome. I’ve also been invited to playtest for Wizards of the Coast, which I can’t say anything else about due to a very scary- looking NDA.
In short, 15-year-old me thinks I am totally awesome. Please do not crush his dreams.
Why I Want To Go To E3
I want to see new stuff. I want to be there when new games and products get announced and feel the rush of the crowd’s excitement when it happens. I want to play stuff that isn’t finished yet. I want to meet the people that made the stuff I love so much. There are a lot of seriously awesome things slated to come out this year, and going to E3 would let me drink right from the fountain. The original Shadow Complex was a tasty blend of everything I enjoy in videogames, and I’d love to know more about its upcoming sequel. I want to soar into the heavens with Bioshock 3. I want to scroll some elders. Five times. And I want to see what Bungie is up to now that they’re not doing Halo. (Did somebody say Myth: The Fallen Lords Kart Racing?) I want to know if Nintendo is going to make a console that doesn’t look like crap on my big screen TV. Will it be three Gamecubes stapled together this time? Four? I want to see weird new control mechanisms and watch as the first humans outside of the development lab look like idiots. I want to look like an idiot as well. I want to throw myself into the MCP of video games and bring freedom to the system. I want to take all these experiences and share them with the world.
Also, I want to see if I can get my inner 15-year-old to explode.
How I Found You
My sister-in-law found a link this morning to your article about your E3 contest. She didn’t read it. She just saw the word “gamer” and sent it to me. Sadly, this means I only found out about KmartGamer and CheapAssGamer today, so any attempts at brown-nosing via a deep knowledge of your sites and community I was going to do would look rushed and very unconvincing. I will simply have to woo you with my charm and pure animal magnetism instead.
Why I Want You Specifically To Send Me To E3
Your name has “mart” in it. I remember putting Zelda II: The Adventure Of Link on layaway at our local K-Mart when I was 11. Also, none of the other major department store chains even gave me the chance to go to E3 on their dime. And I asked.
Congratulations! For all these reasons, I’ve chosen you to send me to E3!
It also certainly doesn’t hurt that an officially-sponsored gaming blog for a big department store chain appears to have been written not only by actual humans but (*gasp*) actual gamers. I also very much appreciate that you’re going to let the winners blog about whatever they choose. This makes me confident that a trip to E3 with you would be a win-win situation for you, me, and the readers. (Wait, does that make it a win-win-win? I don’t care.)
So, How ‘Bout It?
I’m a gamer’s gamer, I’m nothing if not entertaining, and I’ve done this before in a slightly different flavor of gaming. You need an RPG specialist. I double specialize in RPGs. (That’s an RPG joke. See? I am brilliant!)
Send me to E3. I’ll do you proud.
Photo Credit
Danny’s PAX East 2011 Recap
Just over a week ago we returned from Boston and from my first PAX ever, which I’m very happy to say was incredibly fun for both myself and my wife from start to finish. Without a doubt the highlight of PAX East for me is much the same as other conventions like GenCon, and that’s meeting great people and getting to play games with people that I don’t normally have the opportunity to game with. However there are a few big differences that I noticed which really made PAX East stand out from the other conventions that I’ve been to.
First and foremost PAX East is very clearly a convention designed with gamers in mind, and this concept oozes through every aspect of the con that we experienced. The amount of open console and computer gaming is absolutely staggering, if you wanted to go to the con and do nothing but play console games you could do it and have a hell of a time while you’re at it. I’m talking about an entire hallway of rooms set up with hundreds and hundreds of TVs and computers alongside libraries of nearly every game you could wish for, all there simply for your entertainment and enjoyment!
Who Knew that Gamers like Playing Games?
As if the amount of electronic gaming was not enough, a section of the convention center main hall as large as the exhibit hall itself was willed with tables and dedicated to open tabletop gaming of all kinds. When we first arrived on Friday morning this area was mostly underutilized but through the rest of the convention the area was packed to the brim with thousands of gamers playing various card games, board games, and roleplaying games. It should be no surprise that this room became our designated meeting area, as several of us would stake out a table and sit down to gather friends through the next few hours as they inevitably walked by.
One of the best decisions made about this room, that I hope to see replicated at places like GenCon someday soon, is that a handful of local gaming shops had sales booths set up around the open gaming area. If that doesn’t sound good enough to you, the real icing of the set up is that these vendors often stayed open well beyond the exhibit hall closing which I’m sure only benefited them as gamers seemed incredibly eager to buy all kinds of Magic: The Gathering cards and various board games well into their evenings of frivolous gaming. It was at several of these booths that I did the majority of my shopping at PAX East. I finally purchased a copy of Fiasco to play with friends when Dave isn’t around (who likes gaming with him, anyway?), but the item that made me positively giddy as a school girl was the brand new, still unreleased, boxed set of Battletech from Catalyst Game Labs which I was very happy to get my hands on. A full review of that boxed set is coming very soon, oh yes!
The Exhibits, Let Me Show You Them!
Throughout the three days of PAX East I spent a lot of time around the exhibit hall, but as a matter of choice I decided not to spend any of that time waiting in line. Let me assure you that there were plenty of lines available for waiting, and almost as many that I would have been very eager to join, but I couldn’t allow myself to waste much time at the convention waiting to see a video of a game or play a few minutes of a game that I would inevitably see/play in the next few weeks anyway. The consistently biggest line definitely belonged to Star Wars: The Old Republic, which even had a waiting line during the hours the hall was open early exclusively for press.
The nice thing about not waiting in line to play The Old Republic is that there were still several places that you could watch those people who had waited in line playing the game, and several monitors playing awesome trailers and gameplay footage of the game. For the most part everyone that I know who watched the game at this booth is dying to play the game, and probably the best way for me to summarize it is that it looks like the ‘World of Warcraft’ of Star Wars MMOs. [Read the rest of this article]
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