Still no NWN. Something odd I’ve noticed about people with this game though. A number of people won’t buy it because it’s $59.99. I have a 30% off coupon for Best Buy and I think it won’t be full rpice day one, so it’s less of an issue, but some people refuse to pay more than $40-$50 for a game. Others claim “this game sucks!” or “this game kicks ass!” right before or after they indicate that they don’t own the game yet. Remember – there haven’t been any reviews of this game yet, so people are mostly “rating” their game based on their affection for the genre or based off of previews. The most interesting however is the sheer number of people who refuse to buy the game until it gets a patch or two. No one has had the game long enough to have huge issues but yet the public is so distrustful by and large of 1.0 releases that they’ll stay away until the inevitable patch, especially for games where the “day one patch” is a custom.

Oh well, perhaps tommorow…

Yeah. So, I called Best Buy at 11:30 and they said they didn’t have Neverwinter Nights in, but that they would have it “soon”. K, so there went my lunchtime plans. Just as well, though – shit blew up here shortly after and it took until now to sort it all out. I’m going to call Best Buy again at 4:30 and see if they have it yet – I’ll pick it up on the way home. Failing that I’ll call at 8:30 since they close at 9.

I started to wonder if I was being a little too obsessive with this game but then I noticed GameSpy, whose website color is mostly green, went purple for the day in honor of NWN.

OK, I meant to post again yesterday but it just didn’t happen. In any event, no Neverwinter Nights yesterday.

The Neverwinter Nights Forums have these special forums where you can only post if you have the game – it verifies this based off of your CD Key. Yesterday someone posted at about midnight – they were the first one to get the game. I think they’re in Israel, which is (I think) ahead of us, time-wise. In any event, it will be interesting to see if the thing gets to stores today. Apparently Best Buy’s policy (as per BB employees on message boards) is to put the thing out for purchase when it comes in, not to wait for any specific date. Also depending on whom you talk to the game “ships” today, meaning that it probably won’t be “in stores” until tommorow. Of course if BB puts these things out as soon as they get them then if they get the game at 4 PM then it might be on shelves at 5 PM. My Wife works until 9 PM tonight so if the game came out today I could come home and play it and not be ingoring her.

Of course I also realize that it’s not that big of a deal that it gets in stores today. This game isn’t the Second Coming like some make it out to be and its not like I haven’t salivated over games before and then largely ignored them when they came out. Still, I’m interested to see how reviews of this one pan out – I keep hitting the game sites regularly. It’s kinda like Episode II – I’m so excitied about this game my biggest fear is to read bad reviews of it, even though I realize its the gamers, not the critics, that matter. At least when a PC Game is reviewed it’s by someone like you – when a movie is reviewed it’s done by some stuffy old fart who hates it when the movie has little in common with artsy-fartsy stuff like The Remains of the Day.

Hoo boy it’s been a while since I posted here, eh? Oh well, been busy as usual – must have been since I got a promotion/raise recently. Now I’ll quit bitching about being broke so much.

In any event, I’ve preordered Neverwinter Nights at Best Buy. Yeah, I know I said I’d never shop there again. Yes, I know at one point I had “scruples” when it came to where I shopped. I believed that you bought your comic books at a comic book store, your video games at a video game store, etc. You didn’t buy all your stuff at Wal-Mart, you supported the “little guys”. Of course, since Babbage’s, the local video game store is owned by a gigantic corporation (Barnes & Noble) that’s less of an issue. Since I rarely buy comic books, I don’t know where I’d buy them if I did though I would probably head on down to the local comic shop. However the real issue is that I used to think that before I had to work for a living. Now that the money I’m spending on this I worked for myself and I have to weigh it against other factors (like food) my ideals have changed. Now I’m up for the lowest bidder. In a recent PC Gamer there was a 20% off coupon for Best Buy, so it winds up being the cheapest deal in town, despite being $5 more expensive than other places in town. Plus Best Buy had a deal where for $10 you bought a pre-order box with the Aurora toolkit on CD (beta version as it turns out), a poster and an “exclusive adventure” to download after June 20th (which will be posted to the web within minutes I’m sure).

So now I’m stoked – it’s been a while since I bought a game as soon as it came out. Of course, I don’t have anything to base it on – the game hasn’t been reviewed yet (though Gamespot has given it positive first impressions) so I’m buying it more or less based off of previews (2 years’ worth).

I think I’ll post frequently this week as to my status with the game.

When id Software discovered in the early 90’s that people were hacking their copies of Wolfenstein 3-D to add new levels, they decided that not only was it not a bad idea (to let people modify their end copy of a game) but that they were going to specifically code DOOM to allow for user-created content, such as levels, graphics and sounds. Quake upped the bar by allowing people to modify a portion of the source code of the game, allowing user modifications to even change the type of game. The culmination of this thinking were games like Quake 3: Arena, which is hailed or criticized (depending on your take on it) for being less of a “game” than a “platform” for user modification (read: the game was intentionally “less finished” since the users would customize it anyway).

A game called Neverwinter Nights, however, looks to raise this bar even more. Neverwinter Nights is a Dungeons & Dragons game (literally – it’s a licensed title) from the makers of the Baldur’s Gate series (also a D&D game). However, whereas Baldur’s Gate was a single/multiplayer game where players all played together, the multiplayer portion of Neverwinter Nights (there’s going to be a similar single-player element as well) will have one character who is the “Dungeon Master” (like the pen & paper D&D game) and the other players are the characters themselves. To this end, while I believe there are no plans to allow people access to the source of the game, the amount of support for user created content is unprecedented. Bioware has been writing and publishing modeling tutorials for over a year now and just recently released the beta version of the Aurora toolset (all 241MB of it) that they have been using to develop the content of the game.

The part that makes this all interesting is that Neverwinter Nights hasn’t been released yet. It hasn’t even been finished yet, nor does it have an ETA for when it will be.

So I downloaded and started playing around with it and it’s a very good toolkit for creating content, though they stress that there is a chance that something will change before they ship the game and that anything created with it won’t work in the game, but if they don’t “break” this editor before they ship the game then they stand a good chance of having user created content available as soon as the game ships. It’s tricky but intuitive. One of the things that makes level editing a pain for most games and for most people is the fact that nothing is assumed – you want a level to look a certian way, you have to do everything yourself. This level editor, however, does a lot of the work for you. If you make a door, it makes another room, as well as all the changes that come along with that change. There are some who would say this “dumbs down” the process and makes it to where any idiot can make a level/adventure, this is precisely the point.

One of the ideas behind Dungeons & Dragons was that of customization – write your own adventures, etc. Your local comic book store sells graph paper for this reason. However, Bioware is trying to make this the most customizable game ever. The recent RPG Morrowind has a pretty good editing tool for it that you could make a whole new game with and this is good, but it’s not what people really want. People really want to make small contained adventures – and this is what the Aurora toolkit affords them. Instead of making a game and throwing tools out there randonly or making a game that is supposed to be done and making the users finish it off, Bioware is making a product with the intention of being a platform from day one – like what id Software wound up doing with Quake 3, but more overt about it.

The bottom line for me is that if playing this game is nearly half as much fun as it is designing it, it’s going to kick serious ass.

And now an ode to my favorite magazine, PC Gamer.

For eight years now PC Gamer has been putting out their magazine. The publisher, Imagine Media, found itself in the early 1990’s putting out a number of PC Gaming related magazines – one for hints, one for strategies, one for reviews – and decided to combine them all into one publication. One BIG publication. Basing itself on the notion that “simplest name = best magazine” (i.e., the best PC magazine is PC Magazine, etc.) they named it PC Gamer. It came monthly and it had a demo diskette (a floppy diskette). I still have some issues from that first year and it’s both funny and sad how it worked – at the time DOOM was just taking off and the PC game industry wasn’t nearly as big as it is now, so they were hurting for advertisers. Consequently, a lot of the ads were for “adult” CD-ROM titles. Ironically, with less going on in the industry the magazine had more pages per issue then than it does now, but more on that later.

The demo diskette came with every issue for subscribers, but on the newsstand there were two editions, one with the disk and a “solo” edition without, which was a few bucks cheaper. After the first year they added a third edition, a CD-ROM edition. The CD-ROM had more goodies and demos and was cheaper for the publisher to make, plus it took advantage of CD-ROM technology, which was relatively new at the time (spurred on by Myst). After a few CD-ROM issues, however, PC Gamer decided to discontinue the floppy disk version of the magazine – they didn’t want to publish three different versions, game demos that could fit in 1.44MB were harder to come by, and bookstores started to not want to carry any magazines that had floppies in them, so the floppy disk version was decomissioned.

The CD-ROM was full of demos every month, and it was powered by a graphical DOS frontend called NeoBook, which was a frontend tool (by the makers of NeoPaint, a damn spiffy DOS bitmap editor). The discs were labeled “Disc 1”, “Disc 2”, etc. until around thirteen discs in, when they started being labeled “Disc 2.1”, “Disc 2.2”, etc. This was the point in time when they ditched NeoBook and went for a Macromedia authored Windows frontend. For a while the navigation of the disc was even a game itself – one whose conclusion resulted in a contest. The “receptionist” in the game was replaced by Coconut Monkey, a little monkey (carved from a coconut) that would “gladly help you but…I have no hands”. Now every time the frontend changes (meaning the navigation of the disc has been changed again) the version number jumps again (I believe they’re into 7.something now). Originally the disc came with the same “PC Gamer Globe” front every time and came in a paper sleeve. Then at some point they started putting graphics and text on the disc. For a brief period they ditched the paper sleeve in favor of a clear cheap vinyl one, but then they went back to paper sleeves. They also place patches and “exclusive levels” on the discs, which is nice, except for the fact that the patches are quickly out of date and the levels usually show up on their website anyway.

Something interesting I’ve noticed about the paradigm of demo discs. Back in the pre-web days, when Compuserve charged $9 an hour and 14kbps was considered speedy, the demo disc was a godsend – even the floppy disk version. As the CD-ROM era came along and the size of the computer game outpaced bandwidth, it was even more important. Nowadays, however, broadband is common and hard drive space is plentiful (thank God FMV died out) and so it makes more sense to download a demo once it comes out instead of waiting for it to show up on the PC Gamer CD-ROM. Additionally, the game scene is much more connected now – when a demo comes out Blue’s News has it posted right away – back then we didn’t know what all was out there. Ironic then that the choice for demos was download, then CD-ROM, now download again. Perhaps when/if the PC Gamer demo disc goes to DVD it will be relevant again. Not to say it’s irrelvant now – demos aren’t always on the web forever. Once I got a CD burner I became obsessed with backing up everything, including the dmeos I downloaded. It then occured to me how wasteful this was – especially since they’re on the PC Gamer CD’s I have anyway. Therefore, I keep the CD’s and once a demo I’ve downloaded shows up on the disc, I delete it from my hard drive.

Half of PC Gamer is the review section. Back in May 1994 when it started, 88-100% was considered “Editor’s Choice”. Why 88% and not 90% I don’t know, but the other “brackets” (above average, average, etc.) were in 10% brackets, with the bottom 0-39% being “don’t bother”. In 2000 or so they re-did the system and made 90-100% “Editor’s Choice”. Of course, after being in print for so long and having editors/reviewers come and go they’ve had some reviews come back to haunt them, such as the horrible Outpost getting a whopping 96% and the now-uncool slideshow Myst getting 94%. The highest rated game ever in PC Gamer history is Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri with 98%. Half-Life and Sid Meier’s Civilization II are tied for second place with 97% each. Two games, whose names elude me, tied for lowest rating at 4% each. These days it seems to be harder than usual to get an Editor’s Choice award, though oddly enough there are less sub-40% games nowadays.

No game has ever been rated higher than 98%, though a running gag did get it’s due, so to speak. In a parody of “vapourware” titles like Daikatana, Duke Nukem Forever and Battlecruiser 3000AD (games that take so long to make their status is constantly in doubt) PC Gamer made their character Coconut Monkey a game developer writing a game called Gravy Trader, which has been in development for “a decade or two now”. When I renewed my subscription, I got a paperback book from PC Gamer called the Reviews Guide – every review from May 1994 to April 2001 (all 1,600+ of them). Imagine my surprise when I saw Gravy Trader not only reviewed but given a 101% rating. Of course, the release date was May, 2010.

The other half of PC Gamer is the news sections – the articles, the interviews, and the scoops. This to me is the most interesting part of PC Gamer – today we live in an online world. Seemingly, as soon as a game developer does anything it’s reported on the web sites. And yet, PC Gamer continues to get exclusives. They keep getting exclusive scoops – most recently they were the first to report the existence of Elite Force II, EverQuest II and Rainbow Six III. This is all the more impressive given that it is a monthly magazine with a 4-6 week lead time – to keep developers quiet to everyone else, and to not have internal leaks – is a testament to the magazine. Of course, it does have its drawbacks – giving PC Gamer an exclusive is no guarantee. They were given exclusive rights to report the existence of the Half-Life spinoff Gunman Chronicles, a mod-turned-game, and then totally trashed it in a review. In its early years, the magazine was even notorious for trashing games which had been on its cover – referred to as the “cover curse”.

Imagine Publishing merged with some other publishers, so the magazine PC Games was assimilated. At some point Imagine also discontinued their PC Accelerator magazine as well, turning those subscribers into PC Gamer subscribers as well. At this point PC Gamer announced it had 375,000 subscribers and was the best selling game magazine of all time – now it has the by-line on its cover “Thw World’s Best Selling PC Games Magazine”. Imagine also published Next Generation, a platform agonistic magazine, The Official Dreamcast Magazine and The Official Xbox Magazine. It cancelled ODCM when that console went away and cancelled Next Generation when that magazine ceased to be profitable. Now Imagine only publishes platform-specific magazines and oddly enough, this has turned me off to most platforms other than the PC.

PC Gamer has been around for a long time and, unlike other magazines, does not cover a platform that will go away. The fact that it is a consistently good publication is impressive – the fact that it stays relevant is amazing. If you like PC Gaming, do yourself a favor and check it out.

The one channel I really wish I watched more often, and by that logic I feel all the more bad about when they’re having a rough patch, is TechTV. It seems our favorite channel is having issues and issuing layoffs. It’s a damn shame, because while I can understand the problems they’re having (it only makes sense that the channel that covers the tech industry has issues once the tech industry goes into a slump) they really do need some help. They tried a 9.5 hour show called “Tech Live” to run during the day but it’s been cut to thirty minutes – since all the dot com people have to go get jobs now, no one watched the show. The Screen Savers has basically sucked since Kate Botello left it, and now I’m wondering about Extended Play since that show only turned around once she went to it.

I guess I’ve always suspected they were having problems – they’ve never really had the big advertisers. They tend to get ads for things of the “Call in the next ten minutes and we’ll double your order…” variety. They put on hours of shows about how to tweak your system and then they sneak in there an hour long infomercial for some prebuilt computer retailer. Plus, nearly every news story they used to do had to end with the commercial involvement the entity in the story had in the channel – of course now there’s less of that (can’t imagine why…)

Plus another problem is simply the target audience. Computer users (yours truly included) tend to be an exclusive lot – lots of know-it-alls. I had a friend who was a complete Microsoft Whore, and he thought everyone on TechTV was nuts for “jumbling the facts” regarding Microsoft and being too pro-Linux. Go to a Slashdot thread and you’ll see people who believe quite the opposite – the channel is too MS-centric. There’s just no pleasing the end users. I find myself watching the Call for Help show thinking the person who mans the helm is a moron with no idea what he’s talking about. That’s the other problem – nerds tend to quibble on even the smallest of details.

And now the big problem TechTV has is that of programming, or lack thereof. The Tech Live stunt was a good way to cover the fact that they didn’t have too much of it. They tend to run the same shows multiple times a day (which lots of networks do) but they simply don’t have enough of them and with the tech boom winding down it’s going to be harder to fill hours with shows about idiot web pages and yet another has-been music artist turning to MP3 (Willie Nelson). The hell of it is that when they want to, TechTV can make some of the best shows on TV. The show Big Thinkers is on par with most brainy PBS affairs, Extended Play is something I watch religiously, and John Dvorak’s Silicon Spin was great (thought it looks like it’s been cancelled now).

But what to do with all that excess time? Well lately on Friday nights TechTV has been trying different things. They air an occasional tech-related movie. They re-run a Nova special. This weekend, however, they’re starting a 14-episode rerun of the old show Max Headroom. Max Headroom was of course the pseudo-CGI characyer that, along with Cocaine, Regan and Nintendo, epitomized the 1980’s. Few people who watched his Cinemax shows and his Coca-Cola commercials realized that it was originally a British television show. Produced in 1984, it took place in the not-too-distant future (thought the “20 minutes into the future” line was obviously a bit pessimistic) where television channels were small governments, off-switches on television sets were illegal, and ratings were literally to kill for. When a network reporter got too close to the truth of an internal conspiracy to cover up Blipverts, 30 second commercials crammed into one second with the unfortunate side-effect of causing viewers to occasionally explode, the resultant chase causes him to suffer a concussion. With him in their clutches, the network gets an internal hacker to probe into his mind and re-create what it knows in a computer simulation – but the simulation (Max Headroom himself) gets loose and the rest is history.

ABC picked up the pilot and made 14 episodes, but cancelled the show and the 14th episode was never aired, prior to Bravo’s resurrection of the show in the early 90’s. Now it looks like TechTV is reviving the show, if for no other reason than to get some more viewers and fill some more time. I personally thought Max Headroom was great, disturbing and funny television, on the order of a less violent Robcop. I’ll be taping (and possibly downloading) the episodes this time around, and doing my best not to remember the New Coke ads.

This comic summarizes EverQuest and other MMORPG’s in a nutshell to me. Am I wrong? Are there possibly MMORPG’s out there that are fulfilling? Possibly, but I’m not going to pay monthly fees to find out.

Something I’ve noticed. I’ve told a few people about my new monitor and after I tell them the size and the price we paid for it, they ask the brand name. Now, this one stops me because I’m not sure. The monitor has a “TTR” on it, but I’m not sure if TTR is the manufacturer or the name of some incarnation of some company that UCS own/owned and they put their name on it. I know one company UCS owns is Rentsys, who rents out computer systems, so TTR may have been a former name of theirs (I know KeyTrak, the company I worked for for two weeks brands their own PC’s and monitors this way). Even if TTR is the company though, it’s not like Sony or Samsung or some company you’ve ever heard of. Then I realized – I don’t know who manufactured the monitor I had before – it was just the right size and price in Best Buy (yeah I know, BB sucks). I’ve never had any conversations about monitor makers with people. I would imagine if I had a $3000 plasma flatscreen then I would be interested, but I’m not. So, at what size do people start to wonder about manufacturer? I guess it’s 21″ because after that the size gets rediculous (not to say 21″ isn’t already rediculous) and so people start to wonder about other things.

I wonder how feasible it would be to install an older card in a PCI slot and get my dual monitor on…

Oh, what’s sadder than someone paying $14,000 for one of the few remaining 200 Apple I computers? When it’s seen as a disappointment because old Apples used to go for $50,000 or more.

I want to tell you how cool my wife Wendy is. The company she works for periodically has auctions for old things like furniture and computer stuff to its employees. She called me up to ask me if I wanted anything. I didn’t figure there would be anything worth getting (or at least nothing I could think of) so unless she spotted something really cool not to worry about it. She spotted a 21″ monitor and signed up for it. It was a silent auction – one where you place your name and bid on a list and wait. Someone else comes along and outbids you. And so forth. She called me and told me, but noted “I didn’t know if you wanted a bigger monitor.” My response? “HELL YEAH! I NEEDS MORE RESOLUTION!”

She also put her name down for some office type furniture which she wanted. The auction was over at 6:00 and she got off work at 5:00. She went down and she knew a way to win at least one thing (the monitor or the furniture) – stand next to it to intimidate potential bidders. They would see the name on the list, the name on the tag, and then feel too bad to bid. She really really wanted the furniture, but she decided to stand next to the monitor for me. Her bid was up to $55 ($5 increments). Someone bid $60. She bid $65. She stood there and stared down bidders (not really) while tons of people swarmed the furniture she wanted. 6:00 came and we won the 21″ monitor for $65, and someone walked by and informed her we had won the furniture as well. Life is good.

So I got it home and it’s huge. It takes up most of this desk. It’s dingy and the little pull down thingy is half-broke. It had no power cord or VGA cord, I had to dig some up. And it originally hated my Encore card (a reboot synced them up). But man, once I got it hooked up and calibrated with Photoshop and the control panel – it’s huge, and it’s specatcular.

Yeah, my wife rocks like that.

I just played some games on it and since I don’t have the juice to run most games higher than 1024×768, I’m suddenly a big proponent of Full Screen Anti-Aliasing, so that’s next on my list. However, I have NO complaints – this monitor kicks ass and having games playing this big is amazing.

Oh, and I’m now running 1280×960 resolution, so I finally have some screen real estate in VisualStudio.NET, or anything else for that matter.

Can you tell I’m a wee bit happy?

Update – here’s a Slashdot post by the guy who got arrested.