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zerohour1974 · 5 years

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The Grumpy Git Returns 2

Why is the Tech world so fundamentally broken?

Hello readers I’m back after a major hiatus. What on earth is going on in the world of technology. It’s all going to hell.

You might think what the hell am I on about. It seems things in the industry are completely broken and for all the complaints out there no one seems to do anything about it.

Here are just a few examples...

1) Apple releases Mac Pro with a basic price tag of £5000

What on earth, I would understand such a price point if this was an amazing all singing all dancing machine, but its not. The basic system is an i5 system. Seriously then everything else can be upgraded by Apple or exclusive dealers or it invalidates your warranty and the machine locks you out using the T2 security chip.

Now Apple have been on shaky ground regarding tech for a number of years which problems such as lowering sales of iPhones because by the time they release them they have already been superseded by the competition.

Apple used to be seen as the innovative company of the world, the kings of aesthetic and cool. Now even the hipsters of the world are thinking Apple products are too expensive and not really giving much to the world.

It doesn’t help that every MacOS version is now more like iOS and they are locking you further and further into the Apple Garden. What i mean by that is blocking anything that is not in the Apple Play Store, not supporting hardware (Nvidia graphics cards, Wi-Fi etc.) and now preventing upgrades. Which is alienating their customers...

No one is going to buy the Mac Pro one because the price is ludicrous. Two everyone is speculating Apple is going to change to using ARM processors so the whole system is probably about to change. People got bitten with PPC, only for Apple to switch to Intel and abandon PPC. So they will not get away with it twice.

Apple admit too being a $1 trillion company but how long will it last considering you are further and further alienating your own customers. Now don’t get me wrong there will always be a hardcore group of loyal Apple consumers, but you have to wonder is it enough to keep Apple where it stands.

Personally given their listed losses it looks like the bubble is starting to burst. But equally getting back to the point who seriously believed a £5000 desktop would be seen and thought wow that’s a good idea. The mind boggles.

A lot of people are now building Hackintosh machines because one its cheaper to do so and two for less money you probably get more power than the Mac Pro. Crazy.

2) Software companies putting out totally broken games as full releases at full price.

This one is pretty obvious I can site many examples her but of course probably the biggest known was of course Bethesda’s Fallout 76. Now I’m not going to reiterate its story there has been plenty of coverage about it on YouTube.

Now before anyone starts yes I accept there is Early Access programs on Steam and the likes but they at least admit up front that the item you are purchasing is not the final game and may be subject to change.

However we are seeing more and more companies putting out games that require huge day one updates of several gigabytes. DLC breaking game elements in major ways and live services either not working or not being able to cope with the loads.

Now I admit I am not a programmer and maybe someone who is in the game will be able to shed a better light, but it seems these major corporations such as EA, Ubisoft, Activision Blizzard and more are making millions off the backs of programmers who are expected to deliver higher and higher standard stuff in less and less time.

These guys are being forced into working extraneous “crunch” hours being put under immense stress and not really seeing much in the way of benefits. They seem to take a lot of abuse if the programmer refuses.

2019 showed many cases of ex-employees reporting abuse. Now I know some could be put down to sour grapes but there is a lot to be said about there is no smoke without fire.

It seems many programmers are complaining about their immense pressure to perform. As I said I’m not a programmer so I can’t really say I know. They seem to have no representation in their corner to help them such a union and because a lot of them are freelance many corporations see them as disposable.

This to me is ludicrous. Without these programmers most of these corporations would not have a product to sell and equally wouldn’t exist. So why treat them like dirt, you are cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Also for all things like Fallout 76 proved for all they released a half arsed game and took controversy. Not once has someone said that this practice is unacceptable.

If you bought a Television and when you turned it on it showed BBC1 and BBC2 only and the rest was coming later in a software patch update. You would complain vehemently and take back the television for your money back.

So why can software companies get away with releasing a half finished product.... Which moves us on to...

3) New Linux phones been released unfinished

Linux phones are the latest and “greatest” thing since sliced bread if you believed the hype. Security conscious phones that don’t report everything about you, kill switches to disable base bands so you can’t be monitored at all times and of course its Linux based so the operating system is free.

All sounds good and hence why Purism Librem 5 and the Pine phone both have had a major interest shown in them.

Given all the concerns raised recently regarding Google and how it uses its data and problems such as the many data leaks of various sites. Privacy regarding your data is being raised.

Ironically Microsoft who have admitted they are having Windows 10 report back data are not in these investigations. But hey ho.

However its not the fact its Linux that’s a problem for me. I like Linux but what i don’t get is this new concept of the phone is taking longer than we thought and people are worried. SO what we will do is supply you your phone but most of the software doesn’t work but in the next few months we will implement various features to get it working.

They even give them titles such as the Pine Phone Braveheart Edition or the Librem 5 Spring. Basically a broken p[hone which you have paid money for hoping that eventually it may work.

Once again these phones are hardly cutting edge so even if they do get it working. Half of the tech is at least a generation back.

Now I understand creating a phone and its OS from scratch is hard work and such processed take time. However giving you a shell of a phone and leaving you to wait for the rest is a bit much.

This is similar to the TV but in this case because Linux is open source. Your TV now only has two channels and they want you to write the next bit of the code to sort the programs out. They say it’s a learning experience.

I’m waiting for someone to build a house and then if you want any windows, heating or electric you have to have to either build it yourself or wait for an upgrade. Madness.

4) Live services...

When I started in computing my first machine was a ZX Spectrum 48K it wasn’t amazing but it was a computer. You bought games, you could program it and it was yours to do with as you pleased.

Modern day systems both in the computing world and console world you are signed into agreements that no matter what the machine is. The code involved is the property of X company and although you physically own the machine you can not amend it, alter it, complain about it or they can withdraw your rights to said systems and lock you out.

What? I own a machine but if I do anything beyond your limitations you will sue me. How did this become a thing.

It was bad enough with Intellectual Copyright bullshit but this is getting ludicrous.

They have since took it one step further in games now several of them will not allow you to play them unless permanently connected to their servers or pay an ongoing subscription fee.

Which equally they can close at a moments notice because they decide they don’t like it and you have no recompense. How many games have we heard have been just abandoned by their publishers.

Especially in the MMORPG genre. Games are no longer purchased like tapes with physical medium as now most are download codes in physical cases. If you actually get a physical DVD you are lucky.

However it doesn’t mean squat if you buy the game and the servers no longer exist. Several games have managed to allow people to have their own private servers but many of them don’t exist.

How is this allowed to exist. How are the computer industry allowed to sell products which have no guarantee. Also why is no one questioning this...

If Valve decide enough was enough, they were sick of being blamed for the controversial games been stuck on its site by asset flippers etc., and decided to close down the service.

Sure they would have to give people notice but beyond that they have no obligation to make sure you have access to the games you bought. This to me seems a dodgy game.

And with more services such as the Epic Games Store, UPlay, Origin, and Google Stadia this is only going to get worse.

We need some form of legislation to prevent this from happening. We are losing more and more data everyday on the internet due to leaks, server closures and companies just going out of business. Very little of this software and data is being archived so is lost.

This is a problem. Now I understand people saying it’s my game. But equally you have been paid for said game and now they are saying we cant use it or access it.

Something is fundamentally wrong here.

I could go on with further points such as large corporations closing Software Studios making games and complaining they sold 7 million copies and didn’t sell 10 million copies. Major tech companies refusing to pay taxes but want tax breaks from major governments but that can be the topic for another day.

As I said the tech world is fundamentally broken and needs a shake up. Why are we paying the price for their inability to sort out their problems.

Until next time ...

#grumpy git #technology #broken #fundamentally flawed #steam #uplay #origin #epic games store #Apple Mac Pro #software #programmers #programming #sham #unbelievable

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dramallamadingdang · 6 years

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The post I want to make on the MTS forums but can't...

...because they're touchy about discussing the "p" word. As in "piracy." I understand why they are, but I also think that they're wrong to silence people about "pirating" yet not have a care in the world if people tell others to buy used disks, for reasons that you'll see if you choose to read this thing. But...Their site, their rules and that's cool and all that. I’ve got no problems with that. I just think it’s doing the current (and future) TS2 community a disservice. Hence, this post.

Now that EA has announced that they will no longer give out the TS2 Ultimate Collection, I think it's time to address how to get the game if you don't already have it and want it. Or if you have it but your disks are lost/damaged. Or if you suddenly find yourself with a new machine that doesn't have an optical disk drive and you don't have and/or don't want to buy an external one. Or even if somewhere down the line EA removes the UC from your access, if you have it already and you then can't install it on a new machine. (They'd be entirely within their rights to do that, by the way.) If one is concerned about legality, then one ought to know what actually is legal or not and why and where the shades of gray are, so that you can make informed decisions about what you want to do. So, if you're interested in that, that's what I'm going to talk about in this post.

I'm going to say this up-front, though, as a sort of teaser: Now that EA is no longer giving out the UC like people give out Halloween candy: THERE IS CURRENTLY NO FULLY-LEGAL WAY TO GET OR PLAY THE GAME, if you don't already have it. Yes, the above is true, and behind the cut is why.

Here are my "credentials," if you will: A nice chunk of my income comes from royalties and licensing and stuff. Much such stuff is sold in digital format, music CDs and data CDs of original compositions and stuff like that. I have sued individuals and companies, successfully, who've infringed on my copyrights and/or the licensing agreements that I'm involved in. I'm pretty well-versed in this stuff.

So let's make one thing about this issue clear off the top: You do not these days purchase games or non-game software or movies or music or whatever that comes on a disk or in some digital form like, say, a book you download onto your Kindle. You only purchase a license to use the information on that one, single disk or that you got from that one, single download that you paid for. It's a small but all-important distinction, and it pretty much defines what makes things legal or not when we're talking about getting TS2 now that EA is no longer selling it or giving it away themselves.

Now that EA is out of the picture, at least for now, you have three options for getting the game:

1) Find someone selling disks that you know absolutely for certain have not been used.

Guess what? Still probably not fully-legal. The reason is this: If you're buying from a genuine retailer and not some shady "business" in Taiwan or a guy on eBay or something, EA recalled all new, existing, unopened TS2 discs from all retailers (at least in the US and I believe -- but am not certain -- worldwide) years ago. 2013ish, if memory serves. Those retailers were given full refunds for any unsold discs but were actually not required to physically return those discs. (Because, of course, EA didn't want to pay for return shipping!) They were supposed to destroy the disks, in good faith, in exchange for the refund. Even if they didn't receive a refund, they're still not supposed to be selling disks anymore because they've been recalled. Those disks are not supposed to exist and all end-user (that's you) licenses associated with them are now void. Which means that even if you now manage to find a genuinely unused retail disk, you have no legal license to use the game because EA voided it. They only way it would be legal is if you are buying from an individual (not a retailer of any kind) who bought the game and somehow never installed it...and I'd take such stories with a grain of salt, personally.

Because, remember: You're not buying a game; you're buying a license to use a game, and EA has revoked those licenses on retail disks that were unsold as of 2013ish. Now, is someone going to come pounding on your door to arrest you or to serve you court documents because they’re suing you? Of course not! But bear in mind that if the above applies to you, your game is not fully legal.

2) You can buy used disks from someone. Ebay and Amazon Marketplace and such are teeming with them.

Also not fully legal. Why? Because, as I said, each disk comes with a license to use the game for a single buyer and his/her household. No one else. That's one of the things that the End-User License Agreement says and that you agree to, probably without reading it, when you install the game. So as soon as the original buyer of the disk you subsequently bought installed the game on a machine, that single user license was used up. It cannot be transferred to another person. The disk can be transferred, sure, but not the license to use it, which when it comes to legality is all that matters. So, if you buy used disks, you still do not have a legal license to use the game.

Again, no one's going to come pounding on your door, of course. No one's pounding on the door of second-hand game shops, either, because it's not illegal to sell the used disks at all. But it is legally shade to actually use those disks when you buy them. So, just realize that your game is not fully legal if you bought used any or all of the disks you have. Then move on and don't worry about it...but also don't claim that you have a "legal" game so you're somehow more moral or whatever than people who pirate it. Because that's not true at all. In fact, legally you're in exactly the same boat -- pirate ship or otherwise ;) -- as people who've “pirated” the game. Which leads me to...

3) You can "pirate" the game. Meaning, you can get it via torrenting so that you never have a physical disk and you use a no-CD crack to play the game. Or you can make a copy of your friend's disks. Whatever.

There are multiple legal issues here. I'm not going to discuss why it's illegal to pass around copies of a game. I trust that everyone understands why that's so.

But you might be surprised to learn that it's actually not illegal to download the game illegitimately, for the same reason why buying and selling used disks isn't illegal. But there’s a catch. Again, the issue is that you don't buy a game; you buy a license to use it. So the problem arises, again, from using what you downloaded (or using that copy you made of your buddy's disk), because you don't have a license to do so. Sure, obviously no one would download something that they wouldn't then use, but my point is that if you download the game from a torrent, your legal problem is exactly the same as the legal problem that people who buy used disks have. And at least you, as a "pirater" did not pay someone for your legally-shady copy of the game. No one profited at EA's expense, in other words, whereas someone did exactly that if you bought used disks, especially if the seller didn't originally buy the disks themselves, which is usually the case at second-hand shops.

If you download the game via a torrent (as opposed to making copies of someone's disks), it's illegal not because you downloaded the file but because of the way torrenting works. It works by sharing your incomplete download with other downloaders as you download, as you go along, as well as after you do so, if you continue to "seed" the torrent after your own download is completed. The sharing part is illegal for what I hope are obvious reasons; the downloading part is not. It’s a technicality, sure, but then all of this discussion is.

In the end, the most-illegal thing you can do when it comes to this stuff is not downloading via torrenting but making a copy of your buddy's disks for your own use because in that case you're transgressing twice. And here's why.

There's a thing in copyright law called Fair Use. This covers multiple things, but the relevant bit here is that it allows you to make a backup of digital media that you've legitimately bought for archival purposes. This has always been on the books, as long as there've been digital formats, which goes all the way back to tapes. So if you have, say, a copy of The Lion King on DVD and your three-year-old insists on watching it twice a day if she can and in the process breaks a disk a week, you have a right to make a copy of the original in order to preserve the original. (OK, you're not supposed to make multiple backups, just one, but seriously? The kid breaks them constantly and Disney disks are terribly overpriced. And no, I'm not talking from experience at all. :) ) Anyway, Fair Use = 1 backup of your legitimately-purchased disks.

But then in the 90s the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) came along. (In the US, that is. There's similar bullshit worldwide, though.) Mostly it came about because movie and music distributors (not the musicians, one needs to point out) are absolute control freaks and were really, really pissed that CDs/DVDs are so damn easy to make copies of. The relevant bit of this was that it said, "Nope, no more personal backups for you! At all! And hey! No ripping that CD to put the songs on your phone or MP3 player, either! You gotta buy another copy of the songs from iTunes or whatever it is that we want to make more money from today!" It all comes back to "You don't buy a movie. You buy a license to view the content on that one disk, so if your obsessive three-year-old breaks it you have to buy a new disk every week. Sucks to be you, but it's really awesome for us." (Needless to say, you can guess what I think -- as a musician -- of this bit of corporate greed.)

My ranting aside, the issue now is that it is technically illegal to make copies of disks and stuff that you legitimately own, even for your own use and you never share anything with anyone. Again, no one's going to come knocking on your door, but you should know about this. (Mostly, in the wake of DMCA, court cases have involved small companies that make software that can rip DVDs by decoding/bypassing encryption, not individuals who make or use copies of disks. They know they can’t pursue such individuals in any practical way. Instead, they seek to take away the tools that allow you to do it.) So, that's transgression #1 when it comes to making a copy of your buddy's TS2's disks. The other, of course, is the same as the other points: You don't have a legal license to use that copy of your buddy's disk. So, you're transgressing coming and going, so to speak.

So, what's a TS2 fan to do now? Honestly? All three options are problematic, legally. Unless you can somehow manage to find genuinely never-used disks from an individual (not a retailer), you will not be fully legit. So, if you want to be pure and clean and looking down on all the sinners from your fine high horse, you can't get TS2 now if you find you need it, unless EA decides to distribute it again. But for the rest of us? I'm not going to advocate any particular thing because, as I said, all of the options are shady and more or less equally so and for the same reason across the board. But you have the info now -- if you’ve actually managed to read all this -- and you can make an informed decision for yourself, should you need to acquire the game again. Or for the first time. But for the love of God, please don't go around saying that you're all legit because you bought used disks while that person over there *gasp* got their game on the torrents. Because you're not legit, and you’re not legit for pretty much the same reason as a dirty pirate is.

#sims 2 #this has been your psa for the day #and a rant too #woo!

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caseopening-blog · 5 years

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The War on Made Use Of Gamings

As we plan for the coming wave of future generation systems, we need to be expecting renovations on all the good ideas we connect with the existing crop of systems. Moving on, we anticipate: much better graphics, faster CPUs, more appealing games, you get the idea.

Not everything that we're preparing for will be a progressive activity for pc gaming. A minimum of, as for Sony and also Microsoft are concerned, you can swing farewell to playing utilized games on their systems.

Although these are simply rumors at this point, it wouldn't be surprising if they came to fulfillment. It's possible, specifically when taking into account that numerous game authors have already discharged chance ats the used video game market.

Most noteworthy is Electronic Arts(EA), who became the first publisher to set up the method of billing gamers, that bought made use of video games, a fee to access codes that feature the game.

To clarify, Downloadable Content(DLC) codes are included with new copies of a particular video game and just with those codes, can that web content be accessed.

EA increased its job to include playing used games online. Players would certainly currently have to pay $10, along with the price of the used game that they purchased, to have accessibility to the on the internet elements of their video game.

Ubisoft has given that followed suit, requiring an on the internet masquerade its video games too. You can determine the games which require an on the internet pass as they are the "Uplay Passport," logo design on the box.

Ubisoft determined they would certainly take things an action additionally and carry out Digital Rights Management, a method more often associated with DVD or CD anti-piracy initiatives.

Assassins Creed 2 was the first video game to be impacted by this practice. To play the PC variation of Assassins Creed 2 gamers are called for to create an account with Ubisoft and also continue to be logged right into that account to play the game. That implies that if you shed your net link, the game will instantly pause as well as attempt to improve the connection.

If you're unfavorable adequate to be unable to reconnect the net you'll have to continue from your last conserved video game; shedding any development; you may have made because after that.

That will certainly be the case for every one of Ubisoft's COMPUTER titles, despite one having fun single-player or multi-player. While Digital Rights Management has been used to battle DVD and CD piracy for fairly time currently, this will note the very first time it been made use of for a video game.

Due to Ubisoft's application of DRM, Matthew Humphries of Geek.com, warns that it's viable that at some point also gaming console games will certainly require on-line enrollment play them.

According to Denis Dyack, the head of Silicon Knights, the sale of utilized video games is cannibalizing the earnings of the primary video game market.

He also declares that the made use of the video game market is somehow causing the cost of new video games to rise. There are also reports that the X-Box 720 will certainly accept the exclusive usage of digital downloads as well as not make use of disks at all.

One might argue that Sony has currently laid the ground help stopping utilized video games from working on their future system.

At the minimum, they've already made fairly an initiative to make used video games substantially less preferable. Kath Brice, of Games industry.biz, reported that the most up to date SOCOM game for PSP, SOCOM: U.S. Navy SEALs Fireteam Bravo 3, will certainly call for customers that purchase a utilized copy to pay an enhancement $20 bucks to get a code for online play.

I would certainly like to see some measurable proof to sustain the case that made use of video games are in reality, hurting the sales of brand-new video games at all.

Correct me if I'm incorrect however you haven't heard Infinity Ward grumbling concerning the made use of the game market as well as it affecting their bottom line.

Possibly the problem isn't that used video games have an unfavorable impact on the sale of new games but, the trouble is rather that game developer require to make far better video games that gamers are willing to pay full rate for.

In my point of view, not every game is worth $60 simply because it's the recommended retail price. Looking at points fairly not every game is produced similarly. As a result, not every video game is deserving of costing $60.

I think that the War on Used Games is nothing more than a money grab by developers, distressed that they're unable to capitalize a very financially rewarding market.

To put it in bucks and also cents, in 2009 Game Stop reported almost 2.5 million dollars in income from the sale of utilized gaming consoles as well as utilized games. And also not one red cent of that profit gets to the pockets of game authors.

Greed as the encouraging factor for the statement of War on Used Games is transparent. Especially when you think about that when Game Stop began separating their profits from brand-new video games as well as used video games in their economic declarations, EA after that instituted their 10 dollar cost for utilized video games.

The development in the 2nd version of the video game, which allows you to disembowel your opponents, is sufficient of a uniqueness that I 'd like to play via it at some point. I can acquire it currently, utilized, for regarding ten bucks. My point is that video game designers are not losing cash cause of used video games; you can not miss out on loan you weren't going to receive anyhow.

Unless you have a significant quantity of non reusable earnings and a significant amount of leisure time, you're possibly like me, and also you focus on which games you prepare to purchase and also how much you're eager to pay for them.

You determine which video games are should riches and which video games you 'd such as to play yet agree to await a rate decline before getting them. Then there are the video games which you're interested in, but they tend to fail the cracks because they're not all that high up on your radar as well as you'll maybe select them up a number of months later, or even years after their release, if you ever before picking them up in all.

I find it ironic that the impending death of the used game market can likely mean the death of Game Stop that, ironically, push their customers to brand-new pre-order games and also acquire them at full price.

One would think that game authors would be appreciative regarding this service as well as not dislike Game Stop and also treat utilized video games with such refuse. Pre orders not only help advertise their video games; however, they work as a forecast of possible sales too.

Also Dave Their a contributor for Forbes Online, that explains Game Stop as, "a parasitical bloodsucker that does not do much besides mark up discs and being in the shopping mall," acknowledges the folly of passing the problem of the utilized game market onto the customer.

I've just as soon as pre-ordered a game myself. At the wish of J. Agamemnon, I pre-ordered Battlefield 3, which is paradoxically a residential or commercial property of EA.

I paid full cost for this game and more than happy to do so. In big part, since I was given access to several weapons as well as maps that I would have had to wait to download had I not pre-ordered it. I suggest that instead of penalizing players for wanting to save their difficult-earned cash, the pc gaming industry requires to find out to incentivize players into intending to bet to that 60 dollar price.

I labeled this write-up The War on Used Games in an initiative to be jokingly and poke enjoyable at how whenever the government proclaims battle on medications or horror or whatever it might be, they only succeed in intensifying the problem.

If the gaming sector does indeed go down this path; they'll only harm themselves in the long run, fall short to share in the profits they so greedily fancy as well as worst of all, hurt their consumers, that keep the gaming industry abreast with currency.

It's extremely paradoxical and also in fact very fitting that it's EA that is heading the effort to assault the used video game market when they are one of the biggest beneficiaries of made use of games.

Chips world MD Don Mc Cabe informed Games Industry.biz that EA has what he referred to as a "franchise business software application home" in that they "update their titles; FIFA, Madden; all of these are effectively the same title updated each year. Shutting down the utilized video games market efficiently ruins a tried and real technique in which followers of EA's franchises maintain updated with each of EA's annual releases.

Don McCabe, an exec at Chipsworld, discusses that "customers won't flourish under this new system, as duplicates of the game will certainly shed their resale value.

That implies that ultimately it will be the publisher who ends up shedding money because when merchants readjust their prices to show the rise in price for made use of games, the resale worth of the game will go down and also brand-new games are much less most likely to be purchased.

I'm a follower of numerous EA franchises; I appreciate Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed, and also I'm a resist Sony PlayStation enthusiast. As their client, I'm annoyed and also upset by their current methods. I am afraid wherefore future techniques they may utilize to more suppressor perhaps kill the utilized video game market.

That claimed, I'm confident that these firms will certainly be responsive to the outcry of their clients and also abide by our wants. I beg them to stop punishing their customers for catching what they regard as missed revenues.

They take the chance of not just alienating their customers however, they run the risk of discovering themselves with significantly fewer clients and also significantly fewer earnings. As well as at the end of the day, that's the lower line.

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pillowfluffs · 6 years

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Soulmate!Wonho // Chapter 1

Pairing: Wonho X Reader (female)

Genre: Soulmate!AU, fantasy, fluff, slight angst

Summary: You’re a first year at Mapnerry Academy of the Arcane, in a world where everyone has a soulmate. If you draw on your skin, it show’s up on your soulmate’s skin and vice versa, how magical.. You’ve learned many things growing up, but it seems you’ll learn something pivotal to your life one day while being at home..

Author’s Note: This honestly was supposed to be a short story for my english class but I just couldn’t help myself and I decided to polish things up on my own accord. This is my first official series! I know there’s pigtails!Hyunwoo but I didn’t finish and that was an unintentional “series” I will be posting a new chapter on Saturdays 5:30pm Eastern Standard Time (U.S. Time) ((4:00pm Central Time // 2:00pm Pacific Standard Time)) Please Enjoy part 1!

The small lines appeared on your skin as you sat in the library, studying for a somewhat challenging class you took. Everyone, well about ninety five percent of everyone born is destined to be with a soulmate that fits them perfectly spiritually, personally, physically, every way perfect. Those paired had their skin connected so if you drew on your skin, the drawing would show up on your soulmate’s in the exact same place as you drew it. Luckily for you, you were shown at an early age that you indeed had a soulmate; your soulmate had been drawing on their skin since the moment they could pick up a pen. When the drawings first appeared on your skin, you drew in response, making your presence known because there were also others, the five percent who were born and unfortunately paired with no one. Their fates were destined to be alone, so their abilities as mages were not as full as paired ones. No matter how long it would take to meet your soulmate, everything was destined since birth and even before. The only thing to be let done was time.

You sat comfortably in your seat for who knows what time it was now as your ancient runes textbooks and notebooks sat open in front of you. You needed to focus but the whimsical lines which kept appearing, fascinated you. You’ve been here since the doors opened for the day, first no one but you, but now a good amount of people since it was around the middle of your first year. Since the the library was filled row after row of neatly lined up books with their spines facing outwards and considering how spacious it was, you barely heard any noise, if there even were any being made. The books ranged from centuries old to months old; some more worn out than others. The large windows filled the grand room with a cool light. Archive mages flowed through the aisles, making sure no one was squandering their powers and were returning books to their rightful places. Archive magic allowed the user to convert information to magical data, which can be stored, enabling the mage to gain access to previously stored information, such as magic or in this case, books.

It was your first year at Mapnerry Academy of the Arcane, a school created by the government to enhance the skills of young and promising mages such as yourself and ranked one of the highest and most challenging school to be accepted. It was always your parents’ dream for you to attend this school the moment you were born, so, when you received an envelope saying that you got a full scholarship, they were ecstatic. You applied like millions of others, hoping but also accepting the fact if you didn’t make it, it would be fine. You wished, however, to not go to school; all you simply wanted to do was travel the world, meet your soulmate, do whatever you wished without following any of your parents’ or anyone’s orders on how to use your gift. The way the school’s acceptance worked was based on your level of skill and power. To be honest, you didn’t think your power was all that strong or powerful; it was simply imitationis. You had the ability to mimic the power of anyone else, no matter who they were and how powerful they were. Mages born from paired ones usually have their abilities stemmed from their parents’ abilities. You guessed the only related aspect of your ability to your parents’ were your father’s ability to absorb and redistribute energy and your gift to copy others’ power.

“Holding this power means holding great responsibility,” your parents had always told you, but you saw no problems with your power, as long as you didn’t misuse the powers of the ones you absorbed so far, no harm done. Growing up, your parents weren’t as fortunate as you to be gifted with such a singular and robust power. Your mother was gifted with the power of sanitatem, meaning she could heal others, herself, anyone and anything at any rate she wished, which especially came in handy when it came to health insurance. As for your father, he was given the capability of effusio, the power to absorb any force, elemental or energy, and use it in various ways by changing it throughout their body, and if they were against an enemy, they could use the absorbed energy as an advantage. Your father was often out on missions, which were the only way for mages to make a living; taking on missions put out by less powerful mages. Of course with your father’s power, your mother was his partner in business and life so she tagged along. To be very honest, both your mother and you believe that if she hadn’t gone along with him, he’d be dead by now.

You were often left alone as a child but not completely as your soulmate kept you indirect company and you turned out fine, evidenced by where you were now. The moment you could activate your power, your parents had you mimic theirs so now you could absorb energies and heal others and yourself, which came in very handy when you were left home alone and had to make food for yourself for the first time. Growing up, especially in elementary school, you unintentionally absorbed the powers of almost everyone you made contact with; teachers, friends, family, everyone. The other end never felt anything when their power was mimicked, but for you, it was like a chill running down your spine. Your powers weren’t in control until the end of elementary school as your parents started training you to finely tune your new powers, training you on strategies for defense and offense, preparing for the worst no matter the situation.

Here at the academy, you had a good amount of friends but you never saw them and they never seeked you out so you didn’t really mind. Plus you were one of those kids growing up who got their work done than make friends, so you didn’t really mind having friends or not. School and academics were your number one priority and it showed how well it worked in your favor. Like mentioned earlier, when your parents were out on missions mostly, you had to learn to take care of yourself and not depend on others. Yes, you admitted, it was lonely and you wished your parents were there more often for you, but you were blessed with Wonho, though at that time you didn’t know his name. You didn't know how he did it or if he could feel how you felt but at the very moment you felt your worst, something new would appear somewhere on your body entertaining you. You laid in bed, sat in the kitchen eating, or just doing whatever around the house as you watched as if your life depended on it. It was so intriguing how almost everyone’s skin worked like this. You were captivated with how he chose to draw something; the style, how the ink spread through the minuscule wrinkles in your skin, how he was so creative behind every drawing and doodle.

At this point in your life, you had a good number of powers but you mainly trained the ones you deemed the most essential. The first was demoniaco from the headmaster of the academy, the ability of demonic possession. He, and soon you were able to allow malevolent creatures take over with their own abilities and powers your bodies, allowing you to be a living nightmare in combat. When you received your acceptance letter, you also received an additional letter, requesting a meeting with him alone. Headmaster Voeks, or Jeremiah Voeks and even also known as the legendary prodigium (monster in latin), wished to meet you in person to have a special presentation of your powers. He was a middle aged man, dark black hair with a few light streaks of gray hair showing, but that’s normal for anyone if they were running an academy. His face was stern and serious, slight wrinkling here and there, but that was simple aging, but despite this dark aura, his silver eyes glinted with intrigue. He, as long with all professors at the academy wished for every student to enhance their aptitude profoundly.

Your heart was calm but filled with anxiety as you slowly neared the academy, towering over you as it was immensely larger than you imagined or saw from afar. You remembered visiting this school once, when you were very young. Some things looked familiar and different but it all didn’t matter. The first and last time you were here was when you were about three years old or younger. You easily could’ve teleported to the front gate, but for some reason you couldn’t bring yourself to do so. You pulled your phone out of your pocket, peeking at the time. “11:34 am,” you tucked it back in to your black jeans pocket. You took a deep breath before the gate, your hands clutching on to your black trench coat sleeves, your hands in front of you as you took a step toward the black iron gates. You could practically feel the energy radiating off the gates themselves, most likely acting as a security. You looked around, seeing no one in sight, no one to ask for help. You didn’t know what else to do but to simply trigger the alarm. You slowly raised your left hand, prepared for whatever the security mechanism would do to your body. You pressed your hand slowly against the invisible barrier, instantly feeling jolts of electricity surging through your body, but easily adapting to it due to your electrical ability from your aunt on your father’s side. You were able to promptly absorb almost all of the energy of the electricity, allowing the gate to open with ease. You stepped in as your short heeled ankle boots clicked against the pavement, closing the gate behind you, only to turn around to multiple security mages ready to restrict you, their hellhounds ready to pounce and rip you to shreds. A pang of fear shot through your body as you instantly raised your hands in surrender.

“WHO ARE YOU?” bellowed a mage, his pyrokinesis ability showing as his fists were beginning to glow red. He stood tall, more built compared to the others and even had a different pin on his silver uniform. You assumed he was the leader or captain or something, but pushed this thought aside.

“This doesn’t matter right now,” you thought as your voice choked in your throat. You could see other people looking out through windows, most likely students trying to see what was the commodity occuring outside.

The mages which stood next to him showed their different abilities as well, a blonde one with blue eyes with the ability of toxikinesis, you could see the poisonous gas fogging around his hands, two dark skinned officers with vision abilities, one with heat and the other with freeze. The officers’ grew tenser by the minute; the longer you didn’t respond, the more suspicious you looked to them.

You were afraid, helpless but this was an abnormal feeling. You noticed a smaller officer between the visions. He didn’t visibly have an ability but now it was clear; he was amplifying your emotions and feelings and you filled with fear was not a good thing. Your heart raced heavier and heavier by the minute the longer he stared at you. You felt the electricity beginning to spark in your hands, threatening them as if you were about to attack. They stepped closer, ready to end you as you stood there frozen.

“ANSWER, NOW!” A black haired officer with green eyes whose voice boomed in your ears. His voice was a low deep baritone, powerful for a small built person. His voice made it feel as if an earthquake occured, yet the guards who stood around him seemed as if nothing happened.

“A sonic,” you shrunk to your knees, covering your ears as everything around you rattled. You should have known the moment you saw him open his mouth and how strong it was when directed at you. The guards saw this as a chance and made their way to you, holding you down. They swiftly deactivated their abilities, surrounding you in just a few short seconds.

“End this at once,” a low authoritative voice resonated between the guards. All movement stopped as the guards all looked up as a figure stood at the end of the staircase. Silence filled the atmosphere and all that was heard was a gust of wind and birds chirping in the nearby pine trees.

“Prodigium,” your voice barely above a whisper choked out. A heat of embarrassment washed over you as now you realized how bad it must look; a promising student he believed to be is about to be arrested and most likely thrown off of campus forever.

“Release miss Y/L/N, immediately,” his eyes glowed from a dark brown to a red. A cold shock ran down your spine as all hands released you. You fixed yourself up, your once tucked white shirt had got pulled out as you made your way up the stairs, following the headmaster as he wore a black suit shirt with black pants and shoes. You followed behind on the stairs, watching the steps until you approached the top of the stairs. You were stopped by a figure as you bumped into it, almost pushing you back down the stairs. The figure stood firm. You caught yourself as you shyly looked up to make eye contact with the headmaster.

“Thank you,” you shied away as your hands reached for your sleeves once again. You bowed in respect to who you considered in this moment, the strongest you’ve ever gotten near. He seemed much taller this close than before when you were almost pinned on the ground. He gave off an aura that you could not notably describe; it’s wasn’t all good, but it wasn’t all bad either.

“Please, there’s no need, and follow me.” He turned once again, walking swiftly, hidden doorways and hallways appearing which made it a much faster trip to travel from the front entrance to his office. He wore shoes which clicked against the marble floor as a moderate pace. Despite his long legs, he could’ve easily walk at a pace which you would have to jog to keep up, but fortunately he did not.

You felt tickling lines beginning to appear on your left wrist as you followed behind through the grand hallways with the intricately detailed pillars and doorways, but you were much too captivated by the unique architectural designs in this antediluvian building. Light filled the hallways from the extensive windows, open as some weren’t able to open but they were filled with beautiful stained glass. The ceilings held world renown paintings such as the Sistine Chapel ceiling but with a twist. From what you gathered, it was a history and a summary of the world; how there are the paired ones and the lone ones. Your mouth hung slightly agape your eyes wandered around the sumptuous victorian styled building as students were around every corner, talking amongst themselves, in classrooms. A hum of chatter filled your ears as you tailed behind. The walls a cream color and were decorated with meticulously painted paintings of mages from the past. You walked by the individual portraits hung in dark wood frames which complimented the walls. The walk was silent as your senses were slightly on edge due to the fact that you were in the presence of the Prodigium himself. You made a right turn, passing what seemed to be a way which lead to what you assumed was the library as there were signs on the doors warning those to enter to remain silent. Passing it, there were now only a few students here and there occasionally. You made a left turn into a doorway which appeared in a wall before the headmaster which led down a somewhat dark hallway and led to a broad darkwood door with a single silver doorknob in the center of the door, which seemed rather peculiar to you, but you pushed the thought away as it must have been in fashion when the academy was built.

You stepped forward, but was stopped as an imperceptible barrier blocked you from entering. You looked in awkwardly, unsure of what to do next as you stepped back. Despite you feeling very nervous this morning as thoughts from the night before plagued you the night before, you felt quite tranquil. Some of the thoughts were hypothetical situations such as what if the academy overestimated your ability/ abilities and you were just a disappointment. You got an insufficient amount of sleep the night before one of the biggest moments of your life.

“Please, won’t you come in,” the headmaster made eye contact with you as you stood in the doorway. He waved his hand which a thin black fog surrounded his right hand, deactivating the barrier. You were able to feel the strength and power he held from simply removing the barrier from your way, which was a rare occurrence as you were rarely ever able to feel the power behind the mage.

You stepped once again up to the door, now able to stick your foot through, following your body. A smell of the fresh earth filled your nostrils once the barrier disappeared as the room was much darker than the hallway that led up to this area of the school. You pushed the door closed behind you, a dark aura swallowing you, but candles and lamps around the room lit up immediately once the door shut. The left wall was a bookcase which reached the ceiling, filled with books of all sizes, their spines reading in latin texts such as Possessionem and Mentis Imperium.

“Possession and mind control books.” You walked past, looking at as much as you could. In all your life, you had never really seen a true magus liber (mage book) until now, and they were truly beautiful. The magus libers in bookstores were all simply modern ones that always taught basic skills and training routines; they were no use to you at all.

“Intrigued?” the headmaster stood to your right as you stared at the books in awe. “These books are centuries old, even older than the academy itself.” He looked down to your eyes shining with appeal.

“I’ve never seen real magus libers.” you turned to glance at the professor. “The current ones are too modern and if they do sell authentic ones, they’re much too expensive.” A feeling of disappointment bloomed within you as you looked at the books. You wished so deeply that you could have all these books at home for yourself, but if you did and brought them today, it would cost your life as they were that expensive.

“I see.” he looked back up to the shelf, a sense of nostalgia washing over him as he recalled every exact moment his eyes met these books. “Now, we shall begin what you were truly invited here for.” He gestured to a black leathered arm chair in front of his desk, inviting you to sit as he made his way around his desk which was littered with papers you assumed were other application forms and sat in his own large black leather seat.

You nodded and sat down, ready for anything to he would ask your way. You peeked down to your wrist, seeing small lines creating small flowers and meager shapes. There were about three flowers, two with a stem and one without, but the one without was drawn in a black pen as the other two were drawn in red pens. The shapes were unclosed, not completely finished but you assumed they had a reason for it. You peered up as the headmaster pulled your application form, along with numerous recommendations from multiple teachers, tutors, parents, everyone who was able to write a recommendation.

“You my dear, sound gifted and powerful for your age division of eighteen to nineteen. Never in my time have I ever received an application with as many recommendations and support for a mage as you did,” he sat against the back of his chair, his voice as flat as the papers spread out before him. “You hold the ability of imitationis, mages who hold this gift are one in ten million. Tell me,” he leaned forward, resting his elbows on his desk. “What gifts have you mimicked so far? Please demonstrate the most powerful ones you have so far.” He held his hand palm up, insisting you to exhibit your abilities.

“Um, the most powerful ones in my opinion..” You stood up thinking about which ones you really considered the most powerful. “One which I’ve copied are my grandfather’s aciukinesis when I was eight years old.” You pushed the chair you sat in further behind as you quickly scanned his desk and around to see if there were any sharp objects. “Do you have a blade of some sort perhaps that I may use?”

Without any response, the headmaster snapped his finger, summoning a blade of black steel before your eyes. It was a dagger with a white rose engraved into the handle. You picked up the blade, feeling the aciukinesis essentially turning on as if the ability and the others were a switch inside your body. Your eyes glowed a light blue as you focused on the sharpness of the blade, making it as dull as you could. You rolled up your left sleeve, bringing the blade to your wrist and pulling it across as if to cut yourself. But no damage had been done. Your aciukinesis faded away the less you focused and you placed the dagger back onto his desk.

“Next, from one of the guards earlier, pyrokinesis, but due to the fact that I already had hell’s fire ability, these two simply merged, increasing that power.” You raised your hands up, palms down and fingers spread out, closing your eyes and feel all the space in the room. Silence was the only noise in the room, not a single breath was heard. Suddenly your eyes opened glowing a bright orange imitating the colors of fire. You set the room on fire all around, releasing the hottest flames ever felt, but they had no effect on you as you walked around sticking your hand the flames. The headmaster sat still, observing in silence as not a word was spoken from him since the beginning. You closed the palm of your hand, suffocating the burning flames causing them to die. “With my gift, I am able to control any flame and create any flame.” You walked back to where you stood before the professor at his desk. “And since I can create the flames such as I did just now, I controlled the temperature so if you look around.” You looked around the room, as nothing was burned. “Nothing in this room burned. The flames and the heat had no affect on me so it allowed me to reach my hand in and not feel any pain.”

“But you also said just moments before that these flames did not actually burn anything, so how may I believe your true statement?” His voice remained flat, but you heard there was a hint of interest.

Without speaking, you sat back down in the chair, pulling it back to its original spot and raised your left palm. You opened it causing a flame to spark to life. “If you feel yourself, you can feel that this flame is very hot and if I sparked this earlier, the room would have burned down.” The headmaster reached his hand towards the flame, feeling the heat radiate out of your palm, proving it was lethal. Once you saw that he had evidence, you stuck your hand in and you sat there without flinching for about forty seconds before killing the flame and pulling your hand out. Since it had no affect on you, your hand had black ash on it even though it did not burn anything.

“See? Nothing happened.” You gave a small shy smile, feeling better about this interview. “Now my nex-”

“Enough,” the headmaster’s voice now cold cut you off as he sat back. “Like I said before, you my dear are very powerful, but I strongly believe the abilities you are holding as I’ve seen so far could be much stronger. I hereby accept you into the Academy.” The headmaster stood up and made his way around his desk to shake hands with you. “But I also request you do something for me as I’m sure it will increase your power.”

“Thank you sir, but what is it?” Your curiosity piqued as happiness filled your body. Your head tilted slightly to the side as you looked up into his eyes. Your hands’ stopped shaking as he insisted you to sit once again and he sat on his desk.

“I request you to mimic my demoniaco, with it, I will be your personal mentor which no other student has ever had this privilege. Remember my gift is somewhat rare as well, one in seven million.” He stared into your eyes as his voice made you feel he strongly hoped you would accept. You had always heard stories of the legendary Prodigium eliminating those who stood against him to nothing, how he had immense powers far beyond anyone’s mind, but those were days of the past. And like he said, this would be a very big leap in your power level.

You stood there mouth agape in shock from what you just heard. “Did.. Did I hear that right??” you thought to yourself as you sat there speechless. “Wait but, will be mimicking your ability and you being my personal mentor, does this mean it’ll be like a class?” Your voice raised a frequency as you asked.

“If you would like, I could make it a class but only for you. But if you wish to continue your current studies, we can meet every weekend and practice for about a whole school day.” The headmaster offered. This was a bit to take in, but enough where you could process slowly. “What would you like?”

“Uhm, I don’t even know what classes I will be taking yet. I haven’t applied to any classes nor do I know what they offer.” You’ve only heard about some classes from your cousins, but they were always complaining about how easy it was, but then again, they were really smart. You meant to look up some of the offered courses on the website too, but you wanted to spend this summer before school to yourself, before you were officially on your own at school.

“We can easily fix that right now.” The headmaster stood up, sitting back down in his chair and pulling out a syllabus of the school. “From your records, it seems that you exceled promisingly in the basic necessities of life such as mathematics and language. As you enter this academy, you will be focused on the more advanced classes of somewhat complex subjects such as runes and increasing power capacity. I suggest making our meeting as a class period than a weekend. You would like to explore and make friends, correct?” He spoke so fluidly, as his voice was monotone. He was a living statue as he barely moves any facial muscle when he spoke.

“I guess that would be the best..” You sat and thought. A blossom of worry bloomed as you wondered. “Could I handle it?” The worry died down a bit once you felt lines being drawn on your right thigh now; you couldn’t see it but you had a vague idea of what was being drawn. You placed your hand over the slight sensation.

“I assure that you will be academically fine, and as for your powers, the capacity will increase dramatically. For your classes, you may look over this syllabus tonight, fill in the form at the end for your first year classes, and then return this to me tomorrow. If you mimic, you must come in tomorrow to begin the basics for they are difficult to adapt to.” He slid the brown leather syllabus towards you.

You took the syllabus in your hands, studying it making up your mind. “I’ll do it.” Your eyes locked with the professors and decided you were ready and the only way to be successful in this world was to be powerful. A gentle smile grew on his face as your hand clutched your pants.

“Excellent.” He stood up shaking your hand. You stood as well taking his large hand in yours. You mimicked his ability, instantly feeling a heat wave wash down your spine than a cold one which you normally felt. Your eyes instantly glowed a dark blood red as block fog started forming around your feet. The headmaster was surprised with you at first, unknowingly how fast you mimicked, but now it was clear how you mimicked; by physical touch. A vast amount of power surged through your body as you were becoming unstable.

You felt a darkness taking over and no matter how hard you urged your body to stop, it was no use. It was as if you were beginning to drown, the water entering your mouth and filling your body. You felt a slight pain spreading through your veins, a warm subtleness.

“Y/N,” a demonic voice called your name, pulling you out of the darkness. The fog faded away as your eyes returned to their normal color. You realized your body had gone numb, frozen similar to a statue, your muscles sore. You felt all over your left wrist new lines forming and just knowing the presence of your soulmate through your skin calmed you, physically feeling them appear on your skin was enough to make your day.

“What happened to me?” your voice quivered, fearing that if that were to happen again, how would you come out of it? You wondered if it happened again, what would actually happen and what you could possibly do if you lost control.

“The ability activated immediately. You were beginning your first process of completely mimicking my abilities. This is why you will need the classes as I will be your mentor.”

At that time, there was only about a few weeks of Summer before school began. In those few weeks, you were with the headmaster fine tuning your abilities, learning the additional powers that came with demoniaco. Every few days were new lessons for you as a few days after each new lesson were for your to fine tune the best you could.

Once school began, you moved into your down and due to the low acceptance level, almost everyone had their own dorm room to themselves. Your dorm at the end of the hallway, had a lovely view to a courtyard with a small pond filled with rainbow koi fish, pine trees which were almost taller than the school. Your room was filled with essentials from home such as pictures, pillows and blankets, but they were also filled with your own magus libers, the cheap ones from local bookstores, but also some authentic ones, gifted from the headmaster himself. Stress with the classic schoolwork and testings were somewhat more difficult that you imagined, resulting in the balance of your abilities to be off. You were excused from absences but during those times, you would lay in bed. You laid there for hours throughout the day, eating very little but eating when they told you so. You would talk with your soulmate as you drew on your arm and they would reply seconds later. Though you have not them them face to face, the longer the two of you talked, the longer you felt a stronger connection growing and growing between you two. You realized in those times how you were truly cared for especially by someone you’ve never even met. You were happy as you were fortunate enough to be born paired with someone. As the school year was coming to an end, a few months left exactly, you began feeling a weight lifting off your body, more and more so that you did not need to be sent home. The stress were simply vanishing, but you figured it was most likely because of testing ending. As the year went by, you began feeling dramatic changes with your abilities, gaining more as you made new friends, but to your friends, they just knew you as the mage with the powerful ability of pyrokinesis. The headmaster made it clear that your true ability of imitationis must not be revealed as his reasons were simply because “you never know who you could trust” were his exact words so you did not object. As spring break came along, your arms and legs were filled with new pieces of art on a daily basis. For some reason, bodies connected were also restricted. An example would be that you could not write direct things such as “my name is..” Those types of messages would not show up on the skin but you could spread letters out. Bodies paired are like this because soulmates are supposed to meet each other at the right time they were destined when they were born.

One day as you read in your home basement, the air cold enough for you to have an oversized white hoodie on with a blanket. Your parents had left a few days ago to go on a mission, dealing with thieves in a different country. Most missions were from those in third world countries, mages too weak in ability or lacked the knowledge to train, defend, and use their ability properly. You suddenly felt a peculiar cold tingling on your legs and you placed your book down on a glass coffee table, sliding the maroon furry blanket off of your legs to reveal white flowers painted onto your thighs and calves. As long as it showed on your skin, it would show up on your linked half as well. As you stated at your legs, the white paint showing up, you were able to see some letters forming, unsure if it was coincidence or not, however.

“Is that a..W?” Your head tilted left and right, eyebrows furrowed. The paint stopped until you felt two new marks on your right arm. “O-N.. W-O-N? Are they spelling out their name?” You thought to yourself as you scanned your body for more new letters, awaiting for new ones. There was about a brief pause before you felt more scribbling on your arm. You studied your wrist as you brought it closer. “H..O..” Then the writing stopped as you sat there for a minute or two, a smile creeping on your face. “Wonho?” you said aloud as you sat before you reached for a black pen. You opened the cap, writing on the back of your left hand, “are you ready?” It wasn’t long before there was a checkmark drawn next to the question. You moved the blanket off of your legs, revealing your thighs. You took the pen, drawing out five letters of the alphabet before you wrote out the next five a row below. You reached for a red and blue pen off of the coffee table next to your homework and circled the letters “I” and “S” in red. You spelt out the sentence “Is your name Wonho?” from your leg, switching pen colors after every word. You sat there waiting for a response for a moment or two until he responded “yes” on your knee. Even without knowing this person, your heart felt bubbly inside. It was as if it was swelling even though you did not know your soulmate well.

You sat in the bathroom for who knew how long, writing and drawing back and forth on while also scrubbing things off your legs to make space for more writings. He learned your name and many other broken small details, cause again, you couldn’t straight out facts about yourself to your soulmate, which was the only thing you found strange in this world. The topic of where you went to school did not come up until you were about to pass out from exhaustion. The last word you saw appear on your skin was Mapnerry.

~~~~~

Next Chapter

Masterlist

#Monsta X #monsta x scenarios #monsta x imagines #monsta x fluff #monsta x x reader #wonho #wonho x reader #shin hoseok #wonho imagines #wonho scenarios #wonho fluff #pillowfluffs #soulmate!wonho

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sad-ch1ld · 6 years

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Letter from the Chairman

Hello everyone,

2018 brought some pretty big things in the universe of Star Citizen; our first planet, Hurston, our first major landing zone, Lorville, four new moons, 32 new flyable ships, Face Over IP, much improved performance thanks to Object Container Streaming, Network Bind Culling and a complete overhaul of the game code to run on multiple CPU cores simultaneously. We had our largest CitizenCon to date in Austin, Texas and just recently wrapped up a really fun Anniversary Event. How cool was it to make the journey to Lorville, visit the Intergalactic Aerospace Expo West and get an up close and personal sneak preview of some ships that are coming to the ‘verse, or fly dozens of already flyable ships? It has been exciting reading the posts from people discovering the project for the first time and seeing so many people having a blast playing Star Citizen.

As we look forward to the holidays, I wanted to give you all a couple of updates. The first item of news is the Squadron 42 public roadmap is going live today. As with our Persistent Universe roadmap, this is linked to our company’s internal JIRA tracking system, so you can see at a glance the work remaining to complete the game. It was a lot of work to make sure every remaining task was broken down in detail and estimated to the best of our ability, and the same caveats will apply to the Squadron 42 roadmap as they do to the PU one, but our plan is to be feature and content complete by the end of 2019, with the first 6 months of 2020 for Alpha (balance, optimization and polish) and then Beta.

When we started the campaign for Star Citizen and Squadron 42, I said that the crowdfunding would go towards development of the game, and that the amount would define the scope and ambition of what we were working on. That is a commitment I am proud to say we have been upholding; its why we have over 500 staff around the world working on the games and have spent very little on marketing.

You can see this investment into development in the UK financials that we publish every year on Companies House. In a further effort at transparency we have decided to publish our historical financials from 2012 through 2017 on our new corporate website to allow all of you to see not just how much money we raise via the public counter, but also how the money has been spent globally.

All of our marketing is community focused and viral; events we host for all of you, in-fiction lore, commercials that help flesh out the world, and PR outreach. The fact that we have raised over $211M via word of mouth and viral marketing is staggering and a testament to how amazing a community all of you are. Everyone at Cloud Imperium is humbled to have your trust and support on this journey together.

As a result, we are building two of the most ambitious games ever embarked on in gaming, with budgets that are unmatched by all but the very biggest projects.

Having a great game is only half the battle. As we look towards the release of Squadron 42, we have been acutely aware that having a AAA game that matches the biggest single player games out there only goes so far if no one knows about it. The games we will be competing with for attention have tens and, in some cases, hundreds of millions of dollars of advertising behind them.

Other companies in a similar situation have normally tackled this problem by partnering with a Publisher for the marketing and sales of their game. As you all know I am not in favor of putting my destiny in the hands of a third party. On the other hand, I don’t feel it would be right to go back to all of you to raise funds to market the game to other people; most of you already have a copy earmarked for you and I still strongly feel that the money brought in from our crowdfunding should continue to go to the development of Star Citizen and Squadron 42.

Because of this, we started to investigate ways to raise money to fund the upcoming marketing and release needs of Squadron 42. We turned away some approaches from Private Equity and Venture Capital because we were concerned about them fully understanding what makes our company tick and pushing us towards short term decisions.

During this process we were introduced to Clive Calder and his son Keith, who have both been interested in the confluence of entertainment with the ability to directly connect with an audience online. Clive founded the most successful independent music company, Zomba, which was home to some of the biggest music acts in the world. Keith is an independent film producer whose company Snoot Entertainment’s most recent films are the critically acclaimed Blindspotting and the Academy Award-nominated Anomalisa. During our first meeting, we got on like a house on fire, with Clive telling me about how he wished that when he built Zomba you could have connected to the fans of an artist bypassing the myriad of media gatekeepers in the way Star Citizen does, and which wasn’t possible 15 years ago. Keith and I swapped war stories about the film industry and talked about how refreshing it is to be able to utilize crowdfunding to create a project that normally would fly against what is currently considered mainstream.

During the course of these discussions it became clear to me that if Clive and Keith joined us as investors in our company, we’d have true partners that respected what we had built, but also fully understood the ins and outs and the patience required with a business based on creating entertainment. Taking in like-minded partners helps us solve the need of funding the marketing and release of Squadron 42, but also stay attuned to what makes us special.

So, it’s with this that I would like to announce that we have closed a minority investment into Cloud Imperium US & UK, from Clive’s family office and Keith’s Snoot Entertainment for $46M for approximately 10% of the shares in the Cloud Imperium US and UK companies, which is a testament to the value, future potential and longevity of the company.

As part of this process we’ve taken on two outside board members. The first is Dan Offner, an experienced lawyer and entrepreneur with over twenty years of experience in Interactive Entertainment, who is Clive and Keith’s board nominee and second is Eli Klein, a long term friend who has been acting as an advisor to the company over the past couple of years.

The control of the company and the board still firmly stays with myself as Chairman, CEO and majority shareholder.

We wouldn’t have taken anyone on board if we didn’t feel that they were fully aligned with our vision, philosophy and could add valuable insight in navigating the business challenges ahead.

This investment helps secure our independence. We may not have the resources that an Activision or EA have to launch one of their tentpole games, but we now control our own destiny in marketing Squadron 42, especially as we have a secret weapon: all of you! Between the power of the best community in gaming to help get the message out and these additional funds we will be well positioned to enable Squadron 42 to enjoy the success that it deserves.

Beyond this, this investment gives Cloud Imperium the ability to take the long view when needed and allows us to grow as a company. I couldn’t be happier.

So I would like to welcome Clive, Keith, Dan and Eli to the Cloud Imperium family, and I look forward to great success with them and all of you.

See you in the ‘Verse!

-Chris Roberts

#RSI Comm-Link #star citizen #roberts space industries

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retronator · 7 years

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Here are my first impressions of RIOT — Civil Unrest, which released in Early Access on Steam today.

First some intro, if you don’t know the game. RIOT is the brainchild of Leonard Menchiari, an Italian director/animator who ran an Indigogo campaign for the game back in 2013. He raised quite some dust, since the game approaches a politically charged topic of protests and police brutality. The story even got covered by The New York Times.

The campaign subsequently went twice over its goal of $15,000; still, now being 5 years later, nobody can sustain development for that long on that budget. Not that it was ever imagined it would take so long. The game went through a redesign and code rewrite, and dropped into radio silence for years at a time. Somewhere along the way in 2015 it got picked up by the publisher Merge Games and, after another year of delays, they realized they better not give any new dates out, just a Duke Nukem style “when it’s done”. After yet another year of sparse communication, that day has finally come: we can now play RIOT!

Merge Games sent me a review copy and while I haven’t played a lot yet, some things are pretty clear. The good news is, RIOT is as special as imagined. Leonard brings on a great, minimal storytelling style and the presentation alone sends you shivers down your spine. The atmosphere is at the same time cinematic and very real—you can feel shit’s about to go down. If you’ve ever been in a real-life protest, you know it has a certain electricity in the air. Maybe it only works if you’ve felt it in real life, but the game certainly brought it back for me.

That being said, I understand why they released the game in Early Access—it still has many technical issues. I should say I did play a beta build on macOS though, which doesn’t seem to be publicly supported on the game’s store page yet, so the situation on Windows might be better.

I’m running into constant problems with screen resolution and the graphics engine. Sometimes the game draws things too big so that the text gets out of bounds, sometimes too small, making letters practically illegible. The camera zoom is hard to control and gets stuck too close or too far away. I’ve had the graphics get completely corrupt, after which the game crashed on me. That kind of stuff—exactly why you’d be in EA. Once fixed, these problems will have zero negative impact on the game.

You’ll also need a decent gaming rig. I’m guessing the game is executing some kind of fluid simulation to represent the push-pull between the rioters and the police, which doesn’t seem to be the most computationally trivial thing. I do like the idea of it, as it shows they put some real thought into how to simulate the complex dynamics of such situations. It could also be the graphics’ fault. In any case, they have some optimizing left to do.

Gameplay experience is one of Early Access as well. The learning curve is not as crazy as early Minecraft/Dwarf Fortress, although you are indeed supposed to learn the details through the built-in wiki. Onboarding could profit much from a tutorial with certain actions explained through gameplay. If you just experiment without reading about all the options, you’re often left scratching your head why something worked or didn’t. On the other hand, I like that it doesn’t feel like exact science—group behavior seems exactly as unpredictable as you’d imagine it being in a real riot, while still giving you meaningful control of the situation.

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My recommendation for most players is to wait a bit with purchasing the game. If you’re a backer, by all means go explore it, assuming you can keep your expectations contained and not give the team a hard time for releasing alpha-level of polish after 5 years. When the technical issues are resolved after the backers and enthusiasts give it a go, it should be a better time to jump in for everyone.

I am optimistic that once the rough edges are smoothed out, the game’s powerful emotional impact will find its way to permeate to the surface untained. If you want to support the game in advance, by all means go buy it on Steam right now. It promises that rare breeze of fresh air that expands what kind of stories games can tell.

#Feature #Leonard Menchiari #IV Productions #Pixel Art #Gaming #First Impressions #Released #Early Access

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tearasshouse · 4 years

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Mostly vidya ramblings pt 3C

Previous post here.

Right, software time. A cursory glance at my PSN Profile will show that I’ve met my personal quota of getting the platinum in at least 10 PlayStation titles over the year, with a few PC titles sprinkled in for good measure since hey, I have access to a Windows machine again (though it’s not exactly a games machine, unless your definition of a “gaming rig” is something with a 15W Core i3 and modest laptop Radeon graphics). While I didn’t start out meaning to rank these games, I find I have a tendency to do so anyway and while I’m certainly not saying these games are outright bad, they were absolutely lower on the rung, so I’ve dubbed this part “C” (again, no disrespect to the devs or any who rate these games higher than I do; these are just my personal assessments). These are OK games.

The Darkness 2 (Steam)

Enjoyable, somewhat! I put this down like, ages ago when I picked it up for a song on PC, feeling it was too basic and uh “console shootery” at the time. Often times, having restrictions placed upon something can net great results, and hamstrung as I am by my less-capable hardware, I’ve only been picking up Steam games that could run on lower end hardware, or anything released prior to say, 2015. Surprisingly this runs at something stupid like 200 FPS on my machine with V-Sync off and all settings on High at 1080p, so go figure. Anyway, it’s a short and enjoyable shooter. I don’t know anything about the comics upon which the game(s) are based, but Jackie is a likeable character, the Darkness powers are fun enough, the locations are varied, the supporting cast surprisingly interesting and the plot was actually pretty cool too, with a major sequel hook that we’ll probably never get.

Ori & The Blind Forest (Steam)

It sorta hovers a bit below 60fps while running at 1080p, but it’s all just a bit reductive when one spends more time looking at the framerate counter than playing a game, no? The blessing and curse of PC gaming I suppose. Anyway, as a Metroidvania the game is a bit annoying. As a piece of interactive fiction, it’s too saccharine and feels like a B-tier Dreamworks production for children which, I suppose shouldn’t be a knock against the game but I have to say -- wasn’t my cup of tea. Reminds me a bit of Child of Light by Ubisoft -- gorgeous to look at, benign if not frustrating to play (those escape sequences can piss off), and young gamers would probably find more to like in the...emotional tidbits than most adults.

Crysis 2 (Steam)

So apparently this got delisted off Steam but now it’s back up or something with EA deciding to put their back catalog on the platform or something? Anyway, like this list implies, Crysis 2 is an okay game, nothing more and nothing less. The nanosuit energy depletes a bit too quick for my liking, and you’re really made to feel like a badass only some of the times, in quick and short bursts, not unlike BJ in the new Wolfenstein games by MachineGames (any more prolonged exposure to hitscan weapons and other bullshit will quickly send you to the loading screen). Thing is, I don’t want to feel like a badass only some of the time? I mean, you put a ripped supersoldier type doing the Badass Looking Back At the Viewer Pose on the cover and I expect to be able to do certain things without stopping for a breather every 20 seconds, ya know? If you’re going to give me the power fantasy, commit to it. Or, find ways to keep the flow up and reward mastery to make players earn said fantasy (something the new DOOMs have done and why those have been so successful). I certainly don’t envy game devs for having to balance this shit, but id Software showed you one way of how you might do that while the Crysis games and those of their ilk just feel slow and unrewarding.

Quantum Break (Steam)

Really surprised I was able to get this running on my PC but hey, it runs on the Xbox One so how hard could it be? I dearly love Remedy’s games, even if they’re a bit straightforward at times and you get the feeling they’d rather be in the business of non-interactive fiction than games making at times. Well here is a TV show hybrid! Made exclusively in partnership with Microsoft as part of their TV & STREAMING, TV & STREAMING, SPORTS & STREAMING strategy of the 2010s. I didn’t care for the plot, nor the endless email / audiobook / loredumps scattered around, nor the characters, any of it. I will say the final stage with the super high tech offices was a delight (boy wouldn’t I love to live the corpo life in such beautiful, clean office environs). Lance Reddick was a treat as always. Peter “Littlefinger” Baelish shows up to do a thing. Yeah, it’s a Remedy joint through and through. 2019′s Control was such a highlight for me that I’ll take any kind of prototype-y take on it (and QB certainly feels like a rougher, worse version of Control, at least mechanically).

Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs / Dear Esther: Landmark Edition (Steam)

These titles were certainly...things that I installed onto my PC and sat through... Yes. Look, I’m not one to dog on walking simulators, and I know the devs have faced tough times recently but I still feel these are acquired tastes and could be appreciably improved in too many ways to name. Of the two, Dear Esther is the one I’d rec because at least that one was quite pleasant to meander around in while Amnesia left me disappointed that I’d wasted my time, physically sick with its subpar performance and muddy graphics, flaccid with its stodgy plot and left absolutely disappointed that I’d wasted my time on such a bizarre and confusing payoff towards the end. Chinese Room, I mean this in the most constructive way possible: maybe try a different type of game next time.

Return to Castle Wolfenstein (GOG)

I remember putting in some decent time into the DEMO version of RtCW’s MP mode, being amazed at the time by the particle effects, with child-me just running around the D-Day map with the flamethrower out. Anyway, years later and I finally played the SP campaign. It’s maybe better than Allied Assault’s? It feels more consistently entertaining anyway. Hell I think I like these boomer shooters better than MachineGames’ recent efforts (which isn’t saying a whole lot because I find those games just merely okay). I promise you I’m not just being a crotchety old fart.

Ys: Memories of Celceta (PS Vita)

I’d been playing through this over the spring on my Vita TV, before it bit the dust eventually and I’ve been meaning to go back and wrap up the cheevos. I was a bit lukewarm with Oath in Felghana (my first Ys), but could definitely see the appeal in the series, as boss rush games aren’t really my cup of tea (ie. it’s the journey and not the destination of say, a Souls game that is the meat for me). Definitely a game that would benefit from a 60fps refresh and cleaner graphics than what the Vita can provide. I’ve already got a copy of Ys 8 in shrink wrap and have my eyes set on emulating Ys Seven or grabbing the GOG version. A game where action is king and story or character development is secondary; I would prefer more of the latter to make this more of a JRPG and less of a “predominantly Japanese action game with superficial RPG elements”.

Catherine: Full Body (PS4)

I paid $70 for this on day one and I’ve gotta say... should’ve waited for the price drop. I’m a somewhat lapsed Atlus mark, and I still hold the original Persona 5 as my no. 1 in the PS4′s lineup (with Dragon Quest XI possibly being a tie), yet I bought this knowing it wouldn’t really be for me. Why? High difficulty in a genre I don’t play, like at all, a relatively short clear time (in itself not an issue and frankly welcome these days HOWEVER...), and a somewhat unsatisfying payoff despite being a supernatural romance thriller. I bought this as seed money for Atlus’s P.Studio/Studio Zero, in the hopes that Project Re: Fantasy will knock my socks off just like the latter day Persona games have. Because in spite of the contents not really appealing to me, it’s still supremely well made, and it’s not everyday that games like these get made, so there you go. Look, if I could go back in time and put this money towards 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim, I probably would, but then the Catherine steelbook is ever so pretty...

Tearaway Unfolded (PS4)

The OG game is one of the most charming little 3D platformer/collect-a-thons out there, and as far as children’s games (or er, “games that also appeal to children”) go, more of these and less of those please (your Child of Lights and Oris). I’d go as far as to say the OG version is better than the PS4 version, though the PS4 version is also quite good. Really, if I wasn’t going for that stupid Misplaced Gopher trophy, this would probably be an easy shoe-in for the B-tier list, but I place this demotion firmly at Media.Molecule’s feet. That cheevo is cursed.

The Missing: JJ Macfield and the Island of Memories (PS4)

I’d almost forgotten about this! If that doesn’t qualify for making the C-tier list then I don’t know what else does. I only know of Swery65′s qualities through osmosis, having watched the 2BF’s legendary LP of Deadly Premonition and the gone-too-soon D4: Dark Dreams Don’t Die. He’s an interesting person with interesting ideas but crucially, as a game dev, his output is just... kinda mediocre? If not outright bad? Case in point with this game. It looks and runs like garbo; it plays like garbo; the character designs are cute; the dialogue is pretty good; there is a wonderful and gradual “twist” to the main character that was super spoiled for me when people were discussing and promoting it (like, that is my bad, but also internet discourse on any kind of entertainment media is just *fucked*); there’s a lot of semi-colons in this sentence so I’ll stop here.

And the balls to charge like, what, $40+ for the game on PSN?? I’d gotten it for way less on a sale but in a day and age when $1 could buy you 3 months of Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and MS might also throw in a curio like this in there just to fill in the gaps, it makes you wonder if these kinds of games can ever turn a profit, especially when the end product is this jank. And these are commercial goods, make no mistake, any aspirations to being an art piece or social critique notwithstanding, so that also brings to the fore the whole aspect of pricing games, relative value, production and marketing costs, blah blah.

IF you like something different, can appreciate games made on a shoestring budget with arguably bad gameplay and technical deficiencies, but has...heart? Then look no further to the output of this man. The most C-worthy of all the titles listed here.

#vidya #gaming #tech #tl;dr #long post #games #videogames #2020 in review

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equinoxts2 · 7 years

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10 Questions Meme

I was tagged by @shannonsimsfan and @starrsim :)

Rules: Always post the rules, answer the questions given to you, then write 10 questions of your own, and tag some friends!

Because I was tagged twice and I tend to ramble on, here’s a cut.

Starr’s Questions:

1) How long have you’ve been playing the sims franchise? No idea... about 13 years? My first Sims game was Bustin’ Out for PS2, then my uncle gave me a copy of TS1 Complete Collection which was promptly installed on my late Mac, Terry. I started playing TS2 when OFB was the newest expansion. So yeah... more than half my life.

2) Do you have a favorite sim? why? I love all my Sims! I’ll admit there are some I’d be more likely to reroll a death ROS for than others, but I’m not naming any names. If I do the others will get me. :P

3) What’s your favorite sims career? I don’t really use careers in my game, since Kulo Seeri isn’t the sort of hood that has them. My Sims do have professions and crafts, and I think the one I enjoy most out of them is the not-quite-school run by Otolo zan-Ave and Markal Go. I haven’t shown it on my blog yet, but basically the two elders summon the village kids to their lot with Simlogical’s meeting controller. They offer lessons on various subjects using Sophie-David’s opportunity objects (usually invisible) but for most of the time the kids just run wild together and make friends, enemies and occasionally childhood sweethearts.

4) What’s your CC weakness? Rugs, paintings, hair, etc? CC in general! My good old external hard drive Trixie contains *checks* 190 GB of hoarded stuff. Most of it I will probably never use, but it’s there in case I ever need any of it. This is a side effect of my hoarder nature and obsession with TS2 and I’m not ashamed of it in the slightest. Fun fact: That same hoarder-obsessive nature applies to dice. I have over 1000. Dicedicedicedice... yay :)

5) What aspect of the game have you not played with, or tried, yet? Businesses, vacation hoods, or university. I’ve been wanting to experiment with them for a while but they fit into Kulo Seeri like a foot into a glove. However, that doesn’t stop me occasionally trying to shoehorn bits in - an in-hood “university” might be a possibility for KS, maybe representing a craft apprenticeship. I will have to test that out.

6) When do you usually play? When I’m awake. No kidding - since I’m unable to work due to a combination of autism, depression, social anxiety, semi-regular bouts of ill health, several debilitating phobias and a distaste for the “cog in the machine” life, I am essentially a professional Simmer.

7) What’s your simming routin? (settle in with a drink and a few hours, keep the game open for days, etc) Play in bursts throughout the day, occasionally taking screen breaks to play board games or dice games or kick ideas around with my mum, or to snooze.

8) Do you talk sims with others outside the simming community? My mum and support workers, yes. My mum is probably the non-Simmer who knows most about the game - when she’s home, she’s my go-to person to bat around ideas for KS.

9) Besides tumblr, how else do you interact with the simming community? Through my story blog on Blogger, and also through Plumb Bob Keep and Garden of Shadows’ forums. I don’t know any other Simmers personally, only through the forums and blogs.

10) Why the sims vs other games? It’s pure escapism for me - it lets me immerse myself in another setting without being too focused on achieving certain objectives (the reason I could never get into computer RPGs and still haven’t completely warmed to TS4). I love being able to customise pretty much everything the game has to offer and create new worlds to explore through the eyes of my Sims.

Shannon’s Questions:

1) When you’re playing, do you have the game music on or off? Sometimes I listen to my own music while I’m building, and my Sims don’t really have stereos, so mostly off. I do have a few disguised/invisible stereos but I don’t use them much, and I have - thanks to a tutorial by @greatcheesecakepersona - added my Unofficial Kulo Seeri Playlist to the selection of loading tunes.

2) How long have you been playing your current hood? In one form or another, Kulo Seeri has been around for ten years. I started it in April 2007 as a third rate legacy, and it ended up taking me in all sorts of directions I never expected. It’s currently on Generation 7 and has a lot of in-game history, folklore and dreaming behind it. I love it to bits <3

3) Uh-oh! Your game just exploded: are you going to rebuild or start afresh? Rebuild, of course. I couldn’t imagine being without Kulo Seeri after all this time. Although I’ve rebuilt it what feels like a million times and hate setup and hoodlessness, I’m still too invested in it to let it go.

4) What is your favourite Sims version and why? Sims 2, of course! It’s pure sandbox fun, easy to customise and remove from the default modern setting, lends itself well to a huge variety of playstyles, and IMO it’s got more heart than 3 and 4 put together.

5) What’s an expansion you’d love to see that EA never did for any version of the game? I have to second Shannon’s idea of a prehistoric-style one. I’d also love to see more ways for younger Sims to act out that don’t require modern vehicles or technology.

6) Do you use cheats (apart from building cheats) when you play? Yes, not too often because I enjoy having a challenge, but I do use money cheats (KS doesn’t have money, so I always give them enough to move into their homes) and mood cheats (when I can’t stand to see a struggling family suffer any longer, or I need a Sim to stay awake for a photo opportunity).

7) Do you consider yourself primarily a player, builder or decorator? Or other? Player first, storyteller second, don’t touch Build Mode unless I have to. I’m not bad at building, landscaping or decorating... I just find it tedious and avoid it.

8) Do you play pre-mades, your own sims or a mix? Most of my Sims were born in Kulo Seeri, with a handful of premade Sims (mostly from TS3 hoods) who have moved there over the years. Some of my Sims originate from other players’ games, too.

9) What is your favourite kind of business to run? Or what kind would you like to run, if your game version allowed it? Hmm. Never really done much with businesses, but I’d like to have a small trading post of some sort in Kulo Seeri, once the population reaches the point where it splits into two villages. However, KS culture regards trade as the most unclean occupation, so I’m not sure who’d run it.

10) If you were a sim, what would be your aspiration and lifetime want? Feel free to translate that to your own game version - I only speak TS2! My aspiration is Pleasure/Knowledge, with the Pleasure bit being more “stay at home and play games all day” than “go out clubbing and dating”, and the Knowledge bit being limited to my major obsessions: Sims, dice, notebooks, vintage 90′s My Little Ponies, and Plants vs. Zombies. But my LTW would be "reach golden anniversary” - I am a hopeless romantic despite my asexuality, and I’m fed up of getting close to people (mostly support workers and therapists) and then never seeing them again. I want a long-term partnership like my parents have (over 30 years and counting!) with someone who isn’t a support worker or a therapist or other person who listens to my problems partly because it’s their job.

11) What do you think Sims 5 will be like? *VT Cynic Powers Activate!* It will probably feel more mechanical and repetitive than TS4, and be more goal-orientated than sandbox play. It will probably also have more online features and in-game ads. The hoods or worlds or towns or whatever they’ll be calling them by then will be harder to customise, be designed for legacy style play with some form of annoying story progression, and feature several familiar TS2 premades warped beyond recognition. Modders will find that game behaviour will be much harder to alter, because EA will want to stop fans adding new features so they can release said features as overpriced add-on packs. It will run on patch levels which will force players to update every five minutes, then sneak little bits of the latest pack’s coding into games that don’t have it installed, so that everyone has to have ALL THE PACKS for it to work correctly. (This was one of my major gripes with TS3 patch levels - and then TS4 topped that by adding new functionality into the stuff packs.)

....rant over, time for bed. :)

As for writing questions and tagging other Simmers, that is one area where I fall down, so I’ll leave it there. But thanks again to Shannon & Starr for the tags!

#meme #sims meme #rambly post

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sav2880 · 8 years

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The Good, The Bad, and the Salty: Nintendo Switch

Let’s take a look at the Nintendo Switch in three true dimentions. Two you know. The third, you’ll find out.

First, the topic. Nintendo’s new system, the Switch, a true home/console hybrid that will be released on March 3rd, 2017 for $299. It will contain versions of the console with Gray JoyCon controllers, and with Neon Red/Blue controllers. We’ll leave the other topics for the discussion below.

THE GOOD

The release price is good. While I would have been thrilled if the price was $249 and really undercut the current systems, even factoring in holiday discounts, I am more than satisfied with a $299 price too. For that price, you get a system that is instantly two-player compatible, can go on the road with you, should you desire that, and has Nintendo’s first-party content. If it was any higher than that, I think it would be panned and people would not be able to look past many of the downsides we’ll get to later. At this price, you can.

Zelda looks fantastic! Yes, Nintendo made you wait that entire hour, played the very, very, very long tease before you got to see Breath Of The Wild. When you did though, you saw that it absolutely represents the quality you would expect out of that franchise, and is absolutely worth the $60 game price moreso than any game that’s being introduced at launch. Oh yes, it IS a launch title too. If it wasn’t, we might be rioting right now.

Splatoon 2 looks like it’ll be just as much fun too. This was, I think, the sleeper hit of the entire Wii U library due to the fresh view that it gave first person shooter games with a kid-friendly feel, but still more than enough depth to make it great for all ages. Even if the second game isn’t a graphical improvement, there’s no reason the success can’t be continued going forward.

Bomberman is back!! If any modern system can properly pull off a good multiplayer game like Bomberman, this is the one. The JoyCon split into its two parts is the perfect number of buttons for each player, and combined with local multiplayer, it could be a sleeper hit on the system.

Local multiplayer is always good. The world that most other companies have forgotten, local multiplayer, will be strong with this system. The fact it’s essentially a portable that docks helps this a lot too, because it’s easy to have multiple Switch systems in one place, and you won’t need internet connections to play together. Provided companies support this, it’s a win for the system.

The motion gimmicks are not a bad thing either. Look, this is Nintendo’s niche in the market, and because of how they’re doing it this time, they’ve found a good balance between being able to provide nifty motion-based gaming, but still the ability to have more traditional gaming for more than one player on the same console. The Wii was great for motion, and the Wii U was better for a more traditional gaming experience, but only for one player at a time, a lot of the time. This balances all of that out very well.

THE BAD

A JoyCon is a set, not two damn controllers. I get it. They need to, for posterity, sell both a “L” and a “R” controller. People will lose them, they’re tiny on their own, and if you need to replace one of them, it’s nice to have the option. However, Nintendo is absolutely treating these as two controllers, and pricing them accordingly. I don’t care how much “HD Rumble” you put in that bad boy, or the IR camera that can now tell distance. They are not worth $50 for one-half of a JoyCon set, or $80 for the whole dang thing! If you priced it commiserate to what a PS4 or XBox One controller would be, that might be workable, and I could see $35 for each side in that case, but the price is too much.

Those gimmick games also aren’t full priced titles. Arms looks pretty neat. It’s also a tech demo, and passing it off as a $60 game is criminal. 1,2,Switch was supposed to be the title that shows off all the crazy features the system has, but we have to buy that separately for $50? Part of what made the Wii great was that you got a game in the box that you could immediately use to learn all the cool features. Now, I’m gonna have to pay extra, and realistically, at least 75% of the people buying this system will go straight to Zelda; Breath Of The Wild, and leave 1,2,Switch just sitting on a store shelf, because Zelda! I know you want your standard game price to be $60, that’s fine, but your stuff better be worth that much.

Nintendo Online still makes me nervous as heck, and they’re not off to a good start. They obviously know you and I will be skeptical, because you’re going to get the service for free until the fall. Their presentations have not swayed me so far to put that skepticism away, nor to think that they will offer me a product that compares to XBox Live or PlayStation Plus. Their first act was to say that you get a free Virtual Console game each month. But no, it’s not yours to keep forever (or as long as they run the service). It’s also not yours until you cancel your online subscription. Nope, it’s gone after the end of the month and you have to buy it! If you’re expecting me to pay what I think you’re going to make me pay ($50) for a year of your online, I better get games with it that I get to keep while I’m a member, and while I’d be perfectly fine with that being a Virtual Console game, most won’t. This better either be good, or it better be cheap, because if not, it’ll end up in the ....

THE SALTY

Upon hearing that EA is bringing FIFA to the Switch: Great, there’s another system that they can whore Ultimate Team packs on!

From @shipwreck on Twitter about the price of the accessories (LINK): So if the dock costs $90 and the Joy-Cons cost $80... the Switch is a $130 tablet?

About those translators. Did they get an advance copy of the script, because some of them were not as strong as I would have expected for a worldwide presentation!

Since you’re throwing all these Switch pre-orders out there, think you can print off a few more NES Classic devices while you’re at it?! You know, the freaking single-board Linux device that could make you a small mint?!

On the Splatoon 2 presenter: This is why developers are, well, developers.

On their “innovation” comments: Really, the only thing you could find innovative about the GameCube was the freaking handle on the back?! That, and you found so much good innovation about the N64?! Wait, what?!

Hope you enjoyed the initial run of this, hopefully will have more lists and more saltiness soon!

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dramallamadingdang · 7 years

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Before-bed replies. :)

For @emeraldfalconsims, @tamtam-go92, @scibirg, @didilysims, @penig, @ssatinn, @immerso-sims, and @fuzzyspork...

emeraldfalconsims replied to your link “ModTheSims - (Updated!) Mood Swing + Midlife Crisis”

Tbh, I looked at those and was immediately turned off by the terrible English in the popups. I wouldn't care if it was just the post itself, but I'm the kind of person who wants mods to fix the EAxis grammar errors, soooo...

I get you, but...Really, that's all easily fixable. One just needs to find and rewrite the text strings. I've done that often, especially when I used to use custom careers in my game, many of which included chance cards littered with badly-worded and grammatically-incorrect text written by obviously-not-native-English-speakers. This particular modder is obviously not a native English-speaker and obviously not fully fluent in the language, but I'm all kinds of tolerant when that's the case. With EA? Not so much, but even with them? We all make mistakes and typos from time to time that are missed in the editorial process, even when that process involves multiple people. Also, I'm well aware that my own grammar when yakking online and in forum/blog posts and things like that is far from perfect -- often deliberately so because, let’s face it, “speaking” with perfect grammar just “sounds” weird and/or unbearably pretentious -- so I try to be neither a pedant nor a hypocrite on the subject.

Anyway, yeah...Text strings be totes fixable, m'friend. ;)

tamtam-go92 replied to your link “ModTheSims - (Updated!) Mood Swing + Midlife Crisis”

Those Sound like really great Modus but im always a bit nervous about adding stuff like that to my game...

I am, too, mostly because I already use hundreds of mods in my game, so the outcome of adding new ones, especially those that alter lots of things, is always uncertain.

So, what I do is have a testing neighborhood that I don’t care about. Its associated downloads folder contains a copy of just the Mods folder from my “real” game. I put the new mod in and play with it a bit in debug mode, see if I get error messages or if menu options go missing or any other stuff that’s a symptom of mod conflicts. If I do, I change loading order to see if that fixes the issues. If it does, then I copy the testing Mods folder back over to the folder in my “real” game. If it doesn’t, then I either don’t use the new mod or, if it’s something I really want, I run the Hack Conflict Detection Utility to see if it can tell me what the conflicting mod(s) is/are, and then I decide which I want more. And if the HCDU doesn’t give me any useful info, then I 50/50 until I find the conflicts and then decide between mods. Anyway, this way I find out if I can use the new mod along with those I already have without the possibility of doing any damage to any neighborhood I care about.

tamtam-go92 replied to your photoset “More random captioned pics because, basically, this is a household...”

Hopefully the girls will be old enough when Amalia dies...

Margo was like a day or two away from teenhood when those pics were taken, so no problem. :)

scibirg replied to your post “I'm excited about the olympics too! Especially ski jumping. I love to...”

Did you see the ladies ski jumping? Brave girls!

Honestly, most of the winter events involve bravery. Well, except curling, I guess. *laugh* I guess the worst that can happen with that is you drop a 40-lb rock on your foot or maybe slip and fall on your butt. :) And I guess the cross-country skiing is more physically-taxing than actually dangerous. And I guess the figure skating isn’t that risky, although some of those things that the pairs skaters do look more than a little scary for the female partner. But yeah, the ski-jumpers and downhill skiers and sliders and speed-skaters and snowboarders are all completely nutty in adrenaline-junkie ways that I totally identify with. :D

scibirg replied to your post “dunne-ias replied to your post: I’m excited about...”

Slalom is from Norwegian, meaning ski track with turns. In Norwegian cross-country skiing is called "langrenn" meaning long slide. Probably due to it being used for travelling long distances.

ssatinn replied to your post “dunne-ias replied to your post: I’m excited about...”

We call Nordic skiing "längdskidor" - direct translation would be "long ski". Alpine skiing we call "slalom", no idea where that word comes from though..

Hm, interesting! So in Swedish, any type of downhill skiing is called “slalom?” Because in English that word is reserved for the type of downhill skiing where you’re zig-zagging in a pattern through gates -- as the Norwegian word would imply -- not the kind where you’re just shooting straight down the hill. Or does Swedish have a different word for that, too?

I don’t know why I find stuff like this so interesting, but I do. :) Maybe I shoulda been a linguist or something...

didilysims replied to your post “I'm excited about the olympics too! Especially ski jumping. I love to...”

Woo Olympics! I find just watching the events gives me an adrenaline rush. Watching luge reruns today had me all "oh my-ing" and "oh no-ing" and actually jumping out of my seat a few times. Love those crazy dangerous downhill events. :D

OMG, that poor American luge-slider today! Did you see that? Quite the wipeout she had. Even so, I sooooooooooooooo want to luge. Like, if I could just go and do it once, like how people go skydiving, I totally would. Buuuuuut I suppose it’s something you actually have to learn how to do before you lay on a minimalist sled and zoom down a track of ice at ungodly speeds... :)

emeraldfalconsims replied to your post “I'm excited about the olympics too! Especially ski jumping. I love to...”

It's too bad that marksmanship is so tied in practical applications to killing. It was so empowering for me when I discovered a sport I was actually naturally good at.

That's not really the case, though. I mean, maybe it is in the mind of Joe Q. Public that's been fed a daily diet of crazy people killing other people mixed with glamorized violence in "entertainment," but beyond that, the practical application of marksmanship isn't killing (either people or other animals) but rather marksmanship competitions. Aside from niche things like biathlon, there are all sorts of local, regional, state, and national marksmanship competitions that happen throughout the year, regulated by their own governing bodies. I used to do 3-gun competitions, myself.

Marksmanship isn't about killing anything because when you get down to it, hunting animals -- or even killing a person, if that’s your goal for whatever reason -- doesn't require sharpshooting levels of accuracy, certainly not with automatic weapons. (With those, you just kind of squeeze the trigger and try to hold on while pretending the thing is a garden hose. I don’t like them; I like precision.) Killing just requires doing enough damage, and you can do that without being at all accurate. Marksmanship's about consistent accuracy, often under pressure. Which can have applications in killing things, and can make you better at killing things (ideally things that are legal to kill, of course) but that's not what it's about. I wish more people would realize that. And I wish the NRA would GTFO, but that’s an entirely different subject.

penig replied to your post “Do you know why some custom doors and arches doesn't work in apartment...”

Custom content that was made before AL came out doesn't update and confuses the already-confused apartment code. To reduce annoyance I tend to use Maxis doors and arches inside exclusively. Windows are no problem.

Good to know. :) I guess I never really noticed because I don’t build apartments all that often. Mostly because I think furnishing them is mind-numbingly boring. :) And even when I do build them, I mostly use Maxis interior doors, often add-ons like centered-on-two-tile versions of a Maxis door, but since those use Maxis coding, I’m guessing they don’t present a problem in this regard.

immerso-sims replied to your post “The feel-good song meme. :)”

Thanks. I tried searching for happy songs in my iTunes collection, but I realised I am a total sad/dark/melancholic/whatever songs lover, so I'll pass on the meme :D

HAH! :) But hey, if a sad/melancholy song makes you feel better, I suppose that actually counts as a feel-good song! :)

fuzzyspork replied to your post “Big long reply post about...lots of stuff”

I've had both the high witches (excluding the neutral one because they are apparently very anti-social) on a community lot at the same time several times. If a Sim interacts with whichever arrives first then when enough time passes the other witch will usually show up. I think they must have negative relationship by default, so I've seen them fight! Fisticuffs style though. This is where magic would have been awesome. :/

Really? I don’t think I’ve ever had more than one high witch on a community lot, even when I’ve had playable stay on them for multiple days at a time, like when I send them on a weekend camping trip or what-have-you. Maybe it’s because I pretty much never have Sims interact with the high witches, since I use other means to have Sims become witches? Maybe I should try interacting with them... Although if there’s just fisticuffs as opposed to zapping each other with magic, I suppose there’s not much point. Then it’s just yet another fight between non-playables.

#emeraldfalconsims #tamtam-go92 #scibirg #didilysims #penig #ssatinn #immerso-sims #fuzzyspork #replies

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whimsyverse · 3 years

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So...yeah. I tried to play without mods, I really, truly did, and I enjoyed it for a very, very short while...the game is just such a hollow shell of what it could be, and I love that there are so many amazing people in this community willing to put in the effort that EA won’t to flesh out the admittedly-fun systems they put into place.

I just can’t play this game without mods.

Anyways, just like before, I have a lot of mods, and I like to give credit where it’s due without having to link to the mod pages every single time I reference them like before. So this post is going to be an archive of the mods I’m currently using, both for my benefit as well as to give props to the mods I like. I’m not planning on going into much detail about each mod here...which means I probably will because I always write too much.

Please note, I haven't used a lot of these yet, so I can't wholly vouch for their quality, but they all come from reputable sources with good reviews from other players, so I can at least attest that they work!

(mods in no particular order...or maybe they are, who knows what I’ll be doing by the time I get done with this list?)

Etheria Romance Overhaul - I liked a lot of what I read about this, including a ground-up remaking of the TS3 attraction system (which was woefully incomplete in itself, like everything in that game). I also liked the promise of unbalanced relationships - you liking someone who doesn't like you back. I miss that from TS2. Whatever the case, this is a huge mod that is worth a look for anyone who wants their Sims' romances to seem that much more realistic.

MC Command Center - One of those "everything and the kitchen sink" mods that would take longer to describe what it doesn't do than to try and tell you everything it does. One of the primary things I like it for is that it makes it easier to edit Sims on the fly, which is a pretty big draw for a project like this.

Better Sims - Not gonna lie, this one had me at the name. The promise to be able to add more personality and variety to the Sims in my game was nice too. I saw EA was adding some of this functionality in an upcoming patch, but I'm not holding out hope that they'll do better than this.

Interaction Sorter - There are a lot of social interactions in the Sims 4, and the game does a crap job at sorting them for easy use. Figured this might help.

Little Ms. Sam's mods - Lots of stuff here, some little, some not so little. I picked up a few, including the New Potions mod and the Personal Objects mod to stop people from randomly breaking into my room and using my computer. Ugh. The nerve of some people.

Improved Practical Spells

Mermaids Can Take Mud and Soak Baths

New Vampire Powers

Slower Writing

Wonderful Whims - Another wonderful "everything but the kitchen sink" mod to add some life to the game.

Social Network Interactions Crossover

Autonomous First Kiss - I am always trying to get the game to take a little goddamn initiative. It sucks that everything relies on you pushing things forward, romance especially. I'm always looking for mods to tweak the autonomy just a bit.

Invisible Fence - Stay off my lawn >:-(

Control Any Sim - Another helpful tool for this nightmare project of mine.

Stand-Alone Robot Arm Accessory - needed this for literally only one sim, but it looks pretty neat regardless.

Pack Tests (Frankk) - just needed this to make some other mods work.

Permanent PlantSims (Gulbasaur) - PlantSims should be permanent regardless. Every other occult lifestage is...

Hates Children Tweaks (Zuperbuu) - I grabbed a few random “tweak” mods that improve the performance of certain traits or mechanics, just to improve the experience.

Height Slider (GODJUL1) - A marvelous effort and one of the most popular mods out there for a reason. Not sure why EA hasn’t bothered trying to implement height into the game yet...

Helaene Socials - some tweaks to the social mechanics and some traits and how they interact with each other.

Argue Pack

Emotions

Insult Pack

Good vs. Evil

Neat vs. Slob

Pet Lover

Easy Sentiment Cheats (lazarusinashes) - this one allows me to play with sentiments more easily for the prepping stage.

Mega Siblings (MiraiMayonaka) - makes sibling interactions more interesting.

The Personality Mod (MissyHissy) - another mod that attempts to insert a little personality into the game.

No Mosaic (Moxie Mason) - I’m a pervert, what can I say? (also, the mosaic is a bit unimmersive)

Don’t Prep Food Where You Angry Poop (Scumbumbo) - these two mods are just common sense. I don’t know why, but my sims always seem to go out of their way to use bathroom sinks to clean up after themselves.

Don’t Wash Dishes Where You Angry Poop (Scumbumbo) - ditto

Copy any Outfit (Scumbumbo)

Self Configurable Autonomy Mod (Scumbumbo) - this one allows you to customize the autonomy of sims, which we used to have to download dozens of mods to do!

Menstruation and Fertility (Neon Ocean) - A little more immersion.

No Intro

Walk in Style (onlyabidoang) - Allows you to change walk cycles on the fly (sometimes I just plain forget to set them in CAS)

Personality Please! (PolarBearSims) - another mod that inserts a bit of personality in the game.

Spellbook Injector (r3m) - a mod that allows you to download custom spells (the spells I downloaded follow):

Vampirify (Vampire Creation Spell)

Climatio (Weather-Controlling Spell)

RoM SpellCurses SageProof (TwelfthDoctor1)

Forbidden Spells (Kuttoe)

Meaningful Stories (roBurky) - another mod to make the game more immersive.

Uncomfortable Overhaul (roBurky) - a tweak to the uncomfortable mood.

Fitness Controls (PolarBearSims) - improvements to the fitness mechanics.

CAS FullEditMode Always On (Tmex) - saves some keystrokes!

Simulation Timeline Unclogger (TURBODRIVER)

Robot Dermal (voidsims) - for aesthetics on a couple sims

XML Injector (Scumbumbo)

Storytelling Socials (lazarusinashaes) - for immersion

#simblr #sims 4 #simblog #the sims

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ciathyzareposts · 6 years

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Star Control II

In this vaguely disturbing picture of Toys for Bob from 1994, Paul Reiche is at center and Fred Ford to the right. Ken Ford, who joined shortly after Star Control II was completed, is to the left.

There must have been something in the games industry’s water circa 1992 when it came to the subject of sequels. Instead of adhering to the traditional guidelines — more of the same, perhaps a little bigger — the sequels of that year had a habit of departing radically from their predecessors in form and spirit. For example, we’ve recently seen how Virgin Games released a Dune II from Westwood Studios that had absolutely nothing to do with the same year’s Dune I, from Cryo Interactive. But just as pronounced is the case of Accolade’s Star Control II, a sequel which came from the same creative team as Star Control I, yet which was so much more involved and ambitious as to relegate most of what its predecessor had to offer to the status of a mere minigame within its larger whole. In doing so, it made gaming history. While Star Control I is remembered today as little more than a footnote to its more illustrious successor, Star Control II remains as passionately loved as any game from its decade, a game which still turns up regularly on lists of the very best games ever made.

Like those of many other people, Paul Reiche III’s life was irrevocably altered by his first encounter with Dungeons & Dragons in the 1970s. “I was in high school,” he remembers, “and went into chemistry class, and there was this dude with glasses who had these strange fantasy illustrations in front of him in these booklets. It was sort of a Napoleon Dynamite moment. Am I repulsed or attracted to this? I went with attracted to it.”

In those days, when the entire published corpus of Dungeons & Dragons consisted of three slim, sketchy booklets, being a player all but demanded that one become a creator — a sort of co-designer, if you will — as well. Reiche and his friends around Berkeley, California, went yet one step further, becoming one of a considerable number of such folks who decided to self-publish their creative efforts. Their most popular product, typed out by Reiche’s mother on a Selectric typewriter and copied at Kinko’s, was a book of new spells called The Necromican.

That venture eventually crashed and burned when it ran afoul of that bane of all semi-amateur businesses, the Internal Revenue Service. It did, however, help to secure for Reiche what seemed the ultimate dream job to a young nerd like him: working for TSR itself, the creator of Dungeons & Dragons, in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. He contributed to various products there, but soon grew disillusioned by the way that his own miserable pay contrasted with the rampant waste and mismanagement around him, which even a starry-eyed teenage RPG fanatic like him couldn’t fail to notice. The end came when he spoke up in a meeting to question the purchase of a Porsche as an executive’s company car. That got him “unemployed pretty dang fast,” he says.

So, he wound up back home, attending the University of California, Berkeley, as a geology major. But by now, it was the 1980s, and home computers — and computer games — were making their presence felt among the same sorts of people who tended to play Dungeons & Dragons. In fact, Reiche had been friends for some time already with one of the most prominent designers in the new field: Jon Freeman of Automated Simulations, designer of Temple of Apshai, the most sophisticated of the very early proto-CRPGs. Reiche got his first digital-game credit by designing The Keys of Acheron, an “expansion pack” for Temple of Apshai‘s sequel Hellfire Warrior, for Freeman and Automated. Not long after, Freeman had a falling-out with his partner and left Automated to form Free Fall Associates with his wife, programmer Anne Westfall. He soon asked Reiche to join them. It wasn’t a hard decision to make: compared to the tabletop industry, Reiche remembers, “there was about ten times the money in computer games and one-tenth the number of people.”

Freeman, Westfall, and Reiche made a big splash very quickly, when they were signed as one of the first group of “electronic artists” to join a new publisher known as Electronic Arts. Free Fall could count not one but two titles among EA’s debut portfolio in 1983: Archon, a chess-like game where the pieces fought it out with one another, arcade-style, under the players’ control; and Murder on the Zinderneuf, an innovative if not entirely satisfying procedurally-generated murder-mystery game. While the latter proved to be a slight commercial disappointment, the former more than made up for it by becoming a big hit, prompting the trio to make a somewhat less successful sequel in 1984.

After that, Reiche parted ways with Free Fall to become a sort of cleanup hitter of a designer for EA, working on whatever projects they felt needed some additional design input. With Evan and Nicky Robinson, he put together Mail Order Monsters, an evolution of an old Automated Simulations game of monster-movie mayhem, and World Tour Golf, an allegedly straight golf simulation to which the ever-whimsical Reiche couldn’t resist adding a real live dinosaur as the mother of all hazards on one of the courses. Betwixt and between these big projects, he also lent a helping hand to other games: helping to shape the editor in Adventure Construction Set, making some additional levels for Ultimate Wizard.

Another of these short-term consulting gigs took him to a little outfit called Binary Systems, whose Starflight, an insanely expansive game of interstellar adventure, had been in production for a couple of years already and showed no sign of being finished anytime soon. This meeting would, almost as much as his first encounter with Dungeons & Dragons, shape the future course of Reiche’s career, but its full import wouldn’t become clear until years later. For now, he spent two weeks immersed in the problems and promise of arguably the most ambitious computer game yet proposed, a unique game in EA’s portfolio in that it was being developed exclusively for the usually business-oriented MS-DOS platform rather than a more typical — and in many ways more limited — gaming computer. He bonded particularly with Starflight‘s scenario designer, an endlessly clever writer and artist named Greg Johnson, who was happily filling his galaxy with memorable and often hilarious aliens to meet, greet, and sometimes beat in battle.

Reiche’s assigned task was to help the Starflight team develop a workable conversation model for interacting with all these aliens. Still, he was thoroughly intrigued with all aspects of the project, so much so that he had to be fairly dragged away kicking and screaming by EA’s management when his allotted tenure with Binary Systems had expired. Even then, he kept tabs on the game right up until its release in 1986, and was as pleased as anyone when it became an industry landmark, a proof of what could be accomplished when designers and programmers had a bigger, more powerful computer at their disposal — and a proof that owners of said computers would actually buy games for them if they were compelling enough. In these respects, Starflight served as nothing less than a harbinger of computer gaming’s future. At the same, though, it was so far out in front of said future that it would stand virtually alone for some years to come. Even its sequel, released in 1989, somehow failed to recapture the grandeur of its predecessor, despite running in the same engine and having been created by largely the same team (including Greg Johnson, and with Paul Reiche once again helping out as a special advisor).

Well before Starflight II‘s release, Reiche left EA. He was tired of working on other people’s ideas, ready to take full control of his own creative output for the first time since his independent tabletop work as a teenager a decade before. With a friend named Fred Ford, who was the excellent programmer Reiche most definitely wasn’t, he formed a tiny studio — more of a partnership, really — called Toys for Bob. The unusual name came courtesy of Reiche’s wife, a poet who knew the value of words. She said, correctly, that it couldn’t help but raise the sort of interesting questions that would make people want to look closer — like, for instance, the question of just who Bob was. When it was posed to him, Reiche liked to say that everyone who worked on a Toys for Bob game should have his own Bob in mind, serving as an ideal audience of one to be surprised and delighted.

Reiche and Ford planned to keep their company deliberately tiny, signing only short-term contracts with outsiders to do the work that they couldn’t manage on their own. “We’re just people getting a job done,” Reiche said. “There are no politics between [us]. Once you start having art departments and music departments and this department and that department, the organization gets a life of its own.” They would manage to maintain this approach for a long time to come, in defiance of all the winds of change blowing through the industry; as late as 1994, Toys for Bob would permanently employ only three people.

Yet Reiche and Ford balanced this small-is-beautiful philosophy with a determination to avoid the insularity that could all too easily result. They made it a policy to show Toys for Bob’s designs-in-progress to many others throughout their evolution, and to allow the contracters they hired to work on them the chance to make their own substantive creative inputs. For the first few years, Toys for Bob actually shared their offices with another little collective who called themselves Johnson-Voorsanger Productions. They included in their ranks Greg Johnson of Starflight fame and one Robert Leyland, whom Reiche had first met when he did the programming for Murder on the Zinderneuf — Anne Westfall had had her hands full with Archon — back in the Free Fall days. Toys for Bob and Johnson-Voorsanger, these two supposedly separate entities, cross-pollinated one another to such an extent that they might almost be better viewed as one. When the latter’s first game, the cult-classic Sega Genesis action-adventure ToeJam & Earl, was released in 1991, Reiche and Ford made the credits for “Invaluable Aid.” And the influence which Leyland and particularly Johnson would have on Toys for Bob’s games would be if anything even more pronounced.

Toys for Bob’s first game, which they developed for the publisher Accolade, was called Star Control. With it, Reiche looked all the way back to the very dawn of digital gaming — to the original Spacewar!, the canonical first full-fledged videogame ever, developed on a DEC PDP-1 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology circa 1962. In Star Control as in Spacewar!, two players — ideally, two humans, but potentially one human and one computer player, or even two computer players if the “Cyborg Mode” is turned on — fight it out in an environment that simulates proper Newtonian physics, meaning objects in motion stay in motion until a counter-thrust is applied. Players also have to contend with the gravity wells of the planets around them — these in place of the single star which affects the players’ ships in Spacewar! — as they try to blow one another up. But Star Control adds to this formula a wide variety of ships with markedly differing weaponry, defensive systems, sizes, and maneuvering characteristics. In best rock-paper-scissors fashion, certain units have massive advantages over others and vice versa, meaning that a big part of the challenge is that of maneuvering the right units into battle against the enemy’s. As in real wars, most of the battles are won or lost before the shooting ever begins, being decided by the asymmetries of the forces the players manage to bring to bear against one another. Reiche:

It was important to us that each alien ship was highly differentiated. What it means is, unlike, say, Street Fighter, where your characters are supposedly balanced with one another, our ships weren’t balanced at all, one on one. One could be very weak, and one could be very strong, but the idea was, your fleet of ships, your selection of ships in total, was as strong as someone else’s, and then it came down to which match-up did you find. One game reviewer called it, “Rock, Scissors, Vapor,” which I thought was a great expression.

Of course, even the worst match-ups leave a sliver of hope that a brilliant, valorous performance on the field of battle can yet save the day.

You can play Star Control in “Melee” mode as a straight-up free-for-all. Each player gets seven unique ships from the fourteen in the game, from which she gets to choose one for each battle. First player to destroy all of her opponent’s ships wins. But real strategy — that is to say, strategy beyond the logic of rock-paper-scissors match-ups — comes into play only with the full game, which takes the form of a collection of scenarios where each player must deploy her fleet over a galactic map. In the more complex scenarios, controlling more star systems means more resources at one’s disposal, which can be used to build more and better ships at a player’s home starbase; this part of the game draws heavily from the beloved old Atari 8-bit classic Star Raiders. A scenario editor is also included for players who get bored with the nine scenarios that come with the game.

Star Control strains nobly to accommodate many different play styles and preferences. Just as it’s possible to turn on Cyborg Mode in the strategy game and let the computer do the fighting, it’s also possible to turn on “Psytron Mode” and let the computer do the strategy while you concentrate on blowing stuff up.

Star Control in action. The red ship is the infamous Syreen Penetrator.

Yet the aspect of Star Control that most players seem to remember best has nothing to do with any of these efforts to be all things to all players. At some point in the development process, Reiche and Ford realized they needed a context for all this interstellar violence. They came up with an “Alliance of Free Stars” — which included Earthlings among its numbers — fighting a war against the evil “Ur-Quan Heirarchy.” Each group of allies/thralls conveniently consists of seven species, each with their own unique model of spaceship. Not being inclined to take any of this too seriously, Toys for Bob let their whimsy run wild in creating all these aliens, enlisting Greg Johnson — the creator of the similarly winsome and hilarious aliens who inhabit the galaxy of Starflight — to add his input as well. The rogue’s gallery of misfits, reprobates, and genetic oddities that resulted can’t help but make you smile, even if they are more fleshed-out in the manual rather than on the screen.

Reiche on the origins of the Illwrath, a race of arachnid fundamentalists who “receive spiritual endorsement in the accomplishment of vicious surprise attacks”:

The name “Illwrath” comes from an envelope I saw at the post office, which was being sent to a Ms. McIlwrath in Glasgow, Scotland. I didn’t see the “Mc” at first, and I swear, my first thought was that they must be sending that envelope to an alien. I am sure that somewhere there is a nice little Scottish lady laughing and saying, “Oh, those crazy Americans! Here’s one now calling me an evil, giant, religiously-intolerant space spider — ha, ha, ha, how cute!” Hmm… on second thought, if I am ever found beaten with bagpipes or poisoned with haggis, please contact the authorities.

Around the office, Fred Ford liked to say that the Illwrath had become so darn evil by first becoming too darn righteous, wrapping right around the righteousness scale and yielding results akin to all those old computer games which suddenly started showing negative statistics if you built up your numbers too far. (Personally, I favor this idea greatly, and, indeed, even believe it might serve as an explanation for certain forces in contemporary American politics.)

Reiche on the Mmrnmhrm, an “almost interesting robot race” who “fear vowels almost as much as they do a Dreadnought closing in at full bore”:

When I first named the Mmrnmhrm, they actually had a pronounceable name, with vowels and everything. Then, in a sketch for the captain’s window illustration, I forgot to give them a mouth. Later, someone saw the sketch and asked me how they talked, so I clamped my lips shut and said something like, “Mrrk nsss,” thereby instituting a taboo on vowels in anything related to the race. Though the Mmrnmhrm ended up looking more like Daleks than Humans, the name stuck.

Reiche on the Syreen, a group of “humanoid females” who embody — knowingly, one likes to believe — every cliché about troglodyte gamers and the fairer sex, right down to their bulbous breasts that look like they’re filled with sand (their origin story also involves the San Francisco earthquake of 1989):

It was an afternoon late last October in San Francisco when Fred Ford, Greg Johnson, and I sat around a monitor trying to name the latest ship design for our new game. The space vessel on the computer screen looked like a copper-plated cross between Tin Tin’s Destination Moon rocketship and a ribbed condom. Needless to say, we felt compelled to christen this ship carefully, with due consideration for our customers’ sensibilities as well as our artistic integrity. “How about the Syreen Penetrator?” Fred suggested without hesitation. Instantly, the ground did truly rise up and smite us! WHAM-rumble-rumble-WHAM! We were thrown around our office like the bridge crew of the starship Enterprise when under fire by the Klingons. I dimly remember standing in a doorframe, watching the room flex like a cheap cardboard box and shouting, “Maybe that’s not such a great name!” and “Gee, do you think San Francisco’s still standing?” Of course, once the earth stopped moving, we blithely ignored the dire portent, and the Syreen’s ship name, “The Penetrator,” was graven in code.

Since then, we haven’t had a single problem. I mean, everyone has a disk crash two nights before a program is final, right? And hey, accidents happen. Brake pads just don’t last forever! My limp is really not that bad, and Greg is almost speaking normally these days.

Star Control was released in 1990 to cautiously positive reviews and reasonable sales. For all its good humor, it proved a rather polarizing experience. The crazily fast-paced action game at its heart was something that about one-third of players seemed to take to and love, while the rest found it totally baffling, being left blinking and wondering what had just happened as the pieces of their exploded ship drifted off the screen about five seconds after a fight had begun. For these people, Star Control was a hard sell: the strategic game just wasn’t deep enough to stand on its own for long, and, while the aliens described in the manual were certainly entertaining, this was a computer game, not a Douglas Adams book.

Still, the game did sufficiently well that Accolade was willing to fund a sequel. And it was at this juncture that, as I noted at the beginning of this article, Reiche and Ford and their associates went kind of nuts. They threw out the less-than-entrancing strategy part of the first game, kept the action part and all those wonderful aliens, and stuck it all into a grand adventure in interstellar space that owed an awful lot to Starflight — more, one might even say, than it owed to Star Control I.

As in Starflight, you roam the galaxy in Star Control II: The Ur-Quan Masters to avert an apocalyptic threat, collecting precious resources and even more precious clues from the planets you land on, negotiating with the many aliens you meet and sometimes, when negotiations break down, blowing them away. The only substantial aspect of the older game that’s missing from its spiritual successor is the need to manage a bridge crew who come complete with CRPG-style statistics. Otherwise, Star Control II does everything Starflight does and more. The minigame of resource collection on planets’ surfaces, dodging earthquakes and lightning strikes and hostile lifeforms, is back, but now it’s faster paced, with a whole range of upgrades you can add to your landing craft in order to visit more dangerous planets. Ditto space combat, which is now of the arcade style from Star Control I — if, that is, you don’t have Cyborg Mode turned on, which is truly a godsend, the only thing that makes the game playable for many of us. You still need to upgrade your ship as you go along to fight bigger and badder enemies and range faster and farther across space, but now you also can collect a whole fleet of support ships to accompany you on your travels (thus preserving the rock-paper-scissors aspect of Star Control I). I’m not sure that any of these elements could quite carry a game alone, but together they’re dynamite. Much as I hate to employ a tired reviewer’s cliché like “more than the sum of its parts,” this game makes it all but unavoidable.

And yet the single most memorable part of the experience for many or most of us remains all those wonderful aliens, who have been imported from Star Control I and, even better, moved from the pages of the manual into the game proper. Arguably the most indelible of them all, the one group of aliens that absolutely no one ever seems to forget, are the Spathi, a race of “panicked mollusks” who have elevated self-preservation into a religious creed. Like most of their peers, they were present in the first Star Control but really come into their own here, being oddly lovable despite starting the game on the side of the evil Ur-Quan. The Spathi owe more than a little something to the Spemin, Starflight‘s requisite species of cowardly aliens, but are based at least as much, Reiche admits a little sheepishly, on his own aversion to physical danger. Their idea of the perfect life was taken almost verbatim from a conversation about same that Reiche and Ford once had over Chinese food at the office. Here, then, is Reiche and the Spathi’s version of the American Dream:

I knew that someday I would be vastly rich, wealthy enough to afford a large, well-fortified mansion. Surrounding my mansion would be vast tracts of land, through which I could slide at any time I wished! Of course, one can never be too sure that there aren’t monsters hiding just behind the next bush, so I would plant trees to climb at regular, easy-to-reach intervals. And being a Spathi of the world, I would know that some monsters climb trees, though often not well, so I would have my servants place in each tree a basket of perfect stones. Not too heavy, not too light — just the right size for throwing at monsters.

“Running and away and throwing rocks,” explains Reiche, “extrapolated in all ways, has been one of my life strategies.”

The Yehat, who breed like rabbits. Put the one remaining female in the galaxy together with the one remaining male, wait a couple of years… and poof, you have an army of fuzzy little warmongers on your side. They fight with the same enthusiasm they have for… no, we won’t go there.

My personal favorite aliens, however, are the bird-like Pkunk, a peaceful, benevolent, deeply philosophical race whose ships are nevertheless fueled by the insults they spew at their enemies during battle. They are, of course, merely endeavoring to make sure that their morality doesn’t wrap back around to zero and turn them evil like the Illwrath. “Never be too good,” says Reiche. “Insults, pinching people when they aren’t looking… that’ll keep you safe.”

In light of the aliens Greg Johnson had already created for Starflight, not to mention the similarities between Starflight‘s Spemin and Star Control‘s Spathi, there’s been an occasional tendency to perhaps over-credit his contribution — valuable though it certainly was — to Toy’s for Bob’s own space epic. Yet one listen to Reiche and Ford in interviews should immediately disabuse anyone of the notion that the brilliantly original and funny aliens in Star Control II are there entirely thanks to Johnson. After listening to Reiche in particular for a few minutes, it really is blindingly obvious that this is the sense of humor behind the Spathi and so many others. Indeed, anyone who has played the game can get a sense of this just from reading some of his quotes in this very article.

There’s a rich vein of story and humor running through even the most practical aspects of Star Control II, as in this report from a planet’s surface. The two complement one another rather than clashing, perhaps because Toys for Bob is clever enough to understand that less is sometimes more. Who are the Lieberman triplets? Who knows? But the line makes you laugh, and that’s the important thing. When a different development team took the reins to make a Star Control III, Reiche’s first piece of advice to them was, “For God’s sake, don’t try to explain everything.” Many a lore-obsessed modern game could afford to take the same advice to heart.

Long after every other aspect of the game has faded from memory, its great good humor, embodied in all those crazy aliens, will remain. It may be about averting a deadly serious intergalactic apocalypse, but, for all that, Star Control II is as warm and fuzzy a space opera as you’ll ever see.

Which isn’t to say that it doesn’t go in for plot. In fact, the sequel’s plot is as elaborate as its predecessor’s was thin; the backstory alone takes up some twenty pages in the manual. The war which was depicted in Star Control I, it turns out, didn’t go so well for the good guys; the sequel begins with you entering our solar system in command of the last combat-worthy craft among a shattered and defeated Alliance of Free Stars. The Ur-Quan soon get wind of your ship’s existence and the last spark of defiance against their rule that it represents, and send a battlefleet toward Earth to snuff it out. And so the race is on to rebuild the Alliance and assemble a fleet of your own before the Ur-Quan arrive. How you do so is entirely up to you. Suffice to say that Earth’s old allies are out there. It’s up to you to find the aliens and convince them to join you in whatever sequence seems best, while finding the resources you need to fuel and upgrade your spaceship and juggling a whole lot of other problems at the same time. This game is as nonlinear as they come.

Star Control II takes itself seriously in the places where it’s important to do so, but never too seriously. Anyone bored with the self-consciously “dark” fictions that so often dominate in our current era of media will find much to appreciate here.

When asked to define what makes a good game, Paul Reiche once said that it “has to have a fun core, which is a one-sentence description of why it’s fun.” Ironically, Star Control II is an abject failure by this standard, pulling in so many directions as to defy any such holistic description. It’s a strategy game of ship and resource management; it’s an action game of ship-versus-ship combat; it’s an adventure game of puzzle-solving and clue-tracking. Few cross-genre games have ever been quite so cross-genre as this one. It really shouldn’t work, but, for the most part anyway, it does. If you’re a person whose ideal game lets you do many completely different things at every session, this might just be your dream game. It really is an experience of enormous richness and variety, truly a game like no other. Small wonder that it’s attracted a cult of players who will happily declare it to be nothing less than the best game ever made.

For my part, I have a few too many reservations to go quite that far. Before I get to them, though, I’d like to let Reiche speak one more time. Close to the time of Star Control II‘s release, he outlined his four guiding principles of game design. Star Control II conforms much better to these metrics than it does to that of the “one-sentence description.”

First, [games should be] fun, with no excuses about how the game simulates the agony and dreariness of the real world (as though this was somehow good for you). Second, they [should] be challenging over a long period of time, preferably with a few ability “plateaus” that let me feel in control for a period of time, then blow me out of the water. Third, they [should] be attractive. I am a sucker for a nice illustration or a funky riff. Finally, I want my games to be conceptually interesting and thought-provoking, so one can discuss the game with an adult and not feel silly.

It’s in the intersection between Reiche’s first and second principles that I have my quibbles with Star Control II. It’s a rather complicated, difficult game by design, which is fair enough as long as it’s complex and difficult in a fun way. Some of its difficulty, however, really doesn’t strike me as being all that much fun at all. Those of you who’ve been reading this blog for a while know that I place enormous weight on fairness and solubility when it comes to the games I review, and don’t tend to cut much slack to those that can only be enjoyed and/or solved with a walkthrough or FAQ to hand. On this front, Star Control II is a bit problematic, due largely to one questionable design choice.

Star Control II, you see, has a deadline. You have about five years before Earth is wiped out by the Ur-Quan (more precisely, by the eviller of the two factions of the Ur-Quan, but we won’t get into that here). Fans will tell you, by no means entirely without justification, that this is an essential part of the game. One of the great attractions of Star Control II is its dynamic universe which just keeps evolving, with or without your intervention: alien spaceships travel around the galaxy just like yours is doing, alien races conquer others and are themselves conquered, etc.

All of this is undoubtedly impressive from a game of any vintage, let alone one as old and technologically limited as this one. And the feeling of inhabiting such a dynamic universe is undoubtedly bracing for anyone used to the more static norm, where things only happen when you push them to happen. Yet it also has its drawbacks, the most unfortunate of which is the crushing sense of futility that comes after putting dozens of hours into the game only to lose it irrevocably. The try-and-try-again approach can work in small, focused games that don’t take long to play and replay, such as the early mysteries of Infocom. In a sprawling epic like this, however… well, does anyone really want to put those dozens of hours in all over again, clicking through page after page of the same text?

Star Control II‘s interface felt like something of a throwback even in its own time. By 1992, computer games had almost universally moved to the mouse-driven point-and-click model. Yet this game relies entirely on multiple-choice menus, activated by the cursor keys and/or a joystick. Toys for Bob was clearly designing with possible console ports in mind. (Star Control was ported to the Sega Genesis, but, as it happened, Star Control II would never get the same honor, perhaps because its sales didn’t quite justify the expense and/or because its complexity was judged unsuited to the console market.) Still, for all that it’s a little odd, the interface is well thought-through, and you get used to it quickly.

There’s an undeniable tension between this rich galaxy, full of unusual sights and entertaining aliens to discover, and the need to stay relentlessly on-mission if you hope to win in the end. I submit that the failure to address this tension is, at bottom, a failure of game design. There’s much that could have been done. One solution might have been to tie the evolving galaxy to the player’s progress through the plot rather than the wall clock, a technique pioneered in Infocom’s Ballyhoo back in 1986 and used in countless narrative-oriented games since. It can convey the impression of rising danger and a skin-of-the-teeth victory every time without ever having to send the player back to square one. In the end, the player doesn’t care whether the exhilarating experience she’s just had is the result of a meticulous simulation coincidentally falling into place just so, or of a carefully manipulated sleight of hand. She just remembers the subjective experience.

But if such a step is judged too radical — too counter to the design ethos of the game — other remedies could have been employed. To name the most obvious, the time limit could have been made more generous; Starflight as well has a theoretical time limit, but few ever come close to reaching it. Or the question of time could have been left to the player — seldom a bad strategy in game design — by letting her choose from a generous, moderate, and challenging time limit before starting the game. (This approach was used to good effect by the CRPG The Magic Candle among plenty of other titles over the years.)

Instead of remedying the situation, however, Reiche and his associates seemed actively determined to make it worse with some of their other choices. To have any hope of finishing the game in time, you need to gain access to a new method of getting around the galaxy, known as “quad-space,” as quickly as possible. Yet the method of learning about quad-space is one of the more obscure puzzles in the game, mentioned only in passing by a couple of the aliens you meet, all too easy to overlook entirely. Without access to quad-space, Star Control II soon starts to feel like a fundamentally broken, unbalanced game. You trundle around the galaxy in your truck of a spaceship, taking months to reach your destinations and months more to return to Earth, burning up all of the minerals you can mine just to feed your engines. And then your time runs out and you lose, never having figured out what you did wrong. This is not, needless to say, a very friendly way to design a game. Had a few clues early on shouted, “You need to get into quad-space and you may be able to do so here!” just a little more loudly, I may not have felt the need to write any of the last several paragraphs.

I won’t belabor the point any more, lest the mob of Star Control II zealots I can sense lurking in the background, sharpening their pitchforks, should pounce. I’ll say only that this game is, for all its multifaceted brilliance, also a product of its time — a time when games were often hard in time-extending but not terribly satisfying ways, when serious discussions about what constituted fair and unfair treatment of the player were only just beginning to be had in some quarters of the industry.

Searching a planet’s surface for minerals, lifeforms, and clues. Anyone who has played Starflight will feel right at home with this part of the game in particular.

Certainly, whatever our opinion of the time limit and the game’s overall fairness, we have to recognize what a labor of love Star Control II was for Paul Reiche, Fred Ford, and everyone who helped bring it to fruition, from Greg Johnson and Robert Leyland to all of the other writers and artists and testers who lent it their talents. Unsurprisingly given its ambition, the project went way beyond the year or so Accolade had budgeted for it. When their publisher put their foot down and said no more money would be forthcoming, Reiche and Ford reached deep into their own pockets to carry it through the final six months.

As the project was being wrapped up, Reiche realized he still had no music, and only about $1500 left for acquiring some. His solution was classic Toys for Bob: he ran an online contest for catchy tunes, with prizes of $25, $50, and $100 — in addition to the opportunity to hear one’s music in (hopefully) a hit game, of course. The so-called “tracker” scene in Europe stepped up with music created on Commodore Amigas, a platform for which the game itself would never be released. “These guys in Europe [had] just built all these ricky-tink programs to play samples out,” says Reiche. “They just kept feeding samples, really amazing soundtracks, out into the net just for kicks. I can’t imagine any of these people were any older than twenty. It makes me feel like I’m part of a bigger place.”

Upon its release on November 30, 1992 — coincidentally, the very same day as Dune II, its companion in mislabeled sequels — Star Control II was greeted with excellent reviews, whose enthusiasm was blunted only by the game’s sheer unclassifiability. Questbusters called it “as funny a parody of science-fiction role-playing as it is a well-designed and fun-to-play RPG,” and named it “Best RPG of the Year” despite it not really being a CRPG at all by most people’s definitions. Computer Gaming World placed it on “this reviewer’s top-ten list of all time” as “one of the most enjoyable games to review all year,” and awarded it “Adventure Game of the Year” alongside Legend Entertainment’s far more traditional adventure Eric the Unready.

Sales too were solid, if not so enormous as Star Control II‘s staying power in gamers’ collective memory might suggest. Like Dune II, it was probably hurt by being billed as a sequel to a game likely to appeal most to an entirely different type of player, as it was by the seeming indifference of Accolade. In the eyes of Toys for Bob, the developer/publisher relationship was summed up by the sticker the latter started putting on the box after Star Control II had collected its awards: “Best Sports Game of 1992.” Accolade was putting almost all of their energy into sports games during this period, didn’t have stickers handy for anything else, and just couldn’t be bothered to print up some new ones.

Still, the game did well enough that Toys for Bob, after having been acquired by a new CD-ROM specialist of a publisher called Crystal Dynamics, ported it to the 3DO console in 1994. This version added some eight hours of spoken dialog, but cut a considerable amount of content that the voice-acting budget wouldn’t cover. Later, a third Star Control would get made — albeit not by Toys for Bob but by Legend Entertainment, through a series of intellectual-property convolutions we won’t go into in this article.

Toys for Bob themselves have continued to exist right up to the present day, a long run indeed in games-industry terms, albeit without ever managing to return to the Star Control universe. They’re no longer a two-man operation, but do still have Paul Reiche III and Fred Ford in control.

To this day, Star Control II remains as unique an experience as it was in 1992. You’ve never played a game quite like this one, no matter how many other games you’ve played in your time. Don’t even try to categorize it. Just play it, and see what’s possible when a talented design team throws out all the rules. But before you do, let me share just one piece of advice: when an alien mentions something about a strange stellar formation near the Chandrasekhar constellation, pay attention! Trust me, it will save you from a world of pain…

(Sources: Compute!’s Gazette of November 1984; Compute! of January 1992 and January 1993; Computer Gaming World of November 1990, December 1990, March 1993, and August 1993; InterActivity of November/December 1994; Questbusters of January 1993; Electronic Gaming Monthly of May 1991; Sega Visions of June 1992; Retro Gamer 14 and 15. Online sources include Ars Technica‘s video interview with Paul Reiche III and Fred Ford; Matt Barton’s interviews with the same pair in Matt Chat 95, 96, and 97; Grognardia‘s interview with Reiche; The Escapist‘s interview with Reiche; GameSpot‘s interview with Reiche.

There’s a rather depressing pitched legal dispute swirling around the Star Control intellectual property at the moment, which has apparently led to Star Control I and II being pulled from digital-download stores. Your best option to experience Star Control II is thus probably The Ur-Quan Masters, a loving open-source re-creation based on Toys for Bob’s 3DO source code. Or go hunt down the original on some shadowy corner of the interwebs. I won’t say anything if you don’t.)

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/star-control-ii/

#retro games #dos games #retro #crpg #adventure #amiga #oldcomputers #8bit #16bit #blog #repost

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