I've been meaning to do a lengthy post on Gygax and what gaming has brought to my life. I've been muchly inspired by the post they put up at Black Gate.

I really liked this quote from John O'Neill, so I'm reproducing it here:

"For myself, I learned a great deal at the gaming table, and it has served me extraordinarily well. I'd been a Dungeon Master for over a dozen years by the time I entered the workforce, which meant that I had copious experience bringing people together around a table, gently guiding an argumentative team to the conclusion I wanted, running meetings and giving presentations with virtually no advance warning, and looking poised and in control when dealing with wildly unexpected situations.

"Years later, sitting in Dave Kenzer's office at Motorola as we worked together on a complex investment scheme, I put my feet on his desk and confided, "You know, I've negotiated to buy companies for a quarter of a billion dollars. I've started a few companies, and been on the Board of Directors of more. I've managed teams of salesmen. I studied English in Canada, and got a Ph.D. in Engineering in Illinois. And none of that — none of it — has prepared me for this job as much as being a Dungeon Master."

"That's the first thing you've said about this deal that's made complete sense," said Dave.

Today's the day for my own tribute. But beware.

( click and go make yourself a sandwich, lots of graphics. I'm not kidding. )

So I was looking up some of the voice talent for the Bioshock game on IMDB (it's really excellent, the best I've ever encountered in a game) and found quite the flame war going on about Bioshock supposedly slamming Objectivism. I considered it kind of a jokey toss-off in my earlier post but apparently people are fighting about it.

Objectivism in Bioshock, that is, not my post.

People will always find something to argue about, I guess. But it's a game where you can shoot insects out of your hand, which is getting into Monty Python "giant electric penguin with tentacles that sting people" territory. Not exactly Kant.

After playing through a good part of the game, I'll certify that Rapture's self-destruction had nothing to do with political/economic philosophy and everything to do with nutrition. I've played through five major locations now and my poor character has had nothing to eat but potato chips, cream-filled pastries, and "pep" bars -- washed down with vodka, gin, whiskey, wine, beer, and a thermos of coffee now and then. When your entire population is hung-over and constipated you've got to expect some amount of civil disorder. They're deep under the sea, so everyone's got year-round Seasonal Affective Disorder from lack of sunlight, and I bet that because of the close conditions all the women had their menstrual cycles sync up.

Even Plato's Republic will end up with blood on the walls under that kind of stress.

I recreated a little bit this afternoon with an award-winning XBOX360 game quikthnkr was kind enough to send me to try out. Bioshock is a shooter and a lovely one. The weapons assortment and environment really set it off from even the better high-end shooters these days, like Resistance: Fall of Man or the Call of Duty type games.

I'll talk environment first. After a plane crash you're brought to an undersea world. It's like Ayn Rand and H.G. Wells got drunk and came up with an underwater art-deco utopia. Except by the time you arrive, utopia's fallen apart courtesy of Stephen King and James Cameron.

It's not quite steampunk -- more like radio-tubepunk. The red-carpeted environs look like they came from Sky Captain and The World of Tomorrow. Really gorgeous, except everything's broken up by revolutionary chaos. I kept looking around with my eyeballs instead of paying attention to gameplay, which is some zombie fighting, some Poseidon Adventure/Titanic-type escapes from rising water, and some puzzle solving.

It's rated M. You even get to smoke cigarettes! Edgy, edgy, edgy!

Your weapons are a blend of genetic enhancements (you're always injecting yourself with stuff in the game to give you fun new lethal powers) and plain old guns and clubs. There's a strong survival horror element. I think the main character has a lot more backstory than I've uncovered so far. You don't have tattoos of chain links on your wrists for no reason in a game...

Anyway, I'm sure I'll be buying this and passing quikthnkr's copy on to someone else. Sadly, it won't be Howard. bg_editor is getting his wife and kids a Wii, the pussy.

Having watched several 007 movies in quick succession as I poke out words, I sensed another James Bond post coming on. While more pics of women would be fun, I decided to do a drinking game.

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CG Trailer

The 720p version takes a while to download, depending on your connection.

This fly-through of Khem (principal Stygian city) is worth a look too.

"Bells of war" just doesn't sing, IMO. I would have written "horns" or "drums" but then I'll happily use a cliché if it sounds right.

burger_eater flagged me with this.

It's a "herding cat" game called Chat Noir.

quikthnkr has got to quit sending me HALO links.

I keep not doing productive stuff for HALO 3 geekery. Sadly, mine aren't as good as that blog.

( cut for image size )

Got enough done on Fall With Honor revisions to fire up the XBOX yesterday.

( Console gaming geekery. . . )

I worry sometimes that MMORPGs will kill off table-top gaming. You know, old school, with pencils and papers and funny-looking dice.

That would be sad.

There's a social element to tabletop RPGing that's hard to get from a computer and headset. The jokes, the astonishing exchanges, the excitement of a really great roll or a really poor one.

Plus it's just more fun to create characters and situations yourself, rather than letting a computer do it.

A friend at Pinnacle contacted me today and let me know that there's a brand new, $9.99 full color softback release for Savage Worlds, one of the best and most flexible game systems I've ever played. It's what I used as the base system for the Vampire Earth Role-Playing Game (it helped that they cut me a great deal on the license).

The system is very cool in a couple of ways: you use cards for initiative, which gives it a fun feel and it's easy to keep track of whose turn it is. There's a easy system for determining outcomes with players trying to succeed by rolling a 4 or better on 4, 6, 8, 10, or 12 sided dice (the kind of die you throw depends on your experience and talents). I've never played a game where it's so easy to do a battle involving dozens of individuals. You could do the whole Raiders of the Lost Ark truck chase sequence in a half hour to an hour of game play, easy. I don't know how many other tabletop RPGs can make a claim like that.

Last time I played it, I ran a fun 60s Swinger Super Spies adventure at Howard's, set (where else?) on some Caribbean Islands. Pretty much the highlight of the day for me was when Howard's Kung-Fu Bruce Lee style agent had a duel at an old Spanish fort with an old nemesis from a Tong his character broke up years ago. Howard and I going back and forth in rapid monotones, as though speaking in badly-translated English, had everyone pretty much falling out of their chairs:

EEK: You fool! Surely you must be aware that your innocent skills are no match for my Singing Tiger Style.
Howard: My body and mind keep to one direction, and that direction leads to victory with shame and lowliness being your fate.
EEK: Prepare to have the wind and tears knocked out of you!
Howard: I am ready for the all. Despair has not yet learned my name.

You just don't get that from a computer dialog box reading PWNED!

Trip up to Concinnity was fun. It's a small con that concentrates on gaming. Reminded me of the very first gaming cons I went to as a teen at UW-River Falls. I came as a guest of Matt M McElroy at Flames Rising. Picked up one of their game titles that looked interesting; I'll try and put down a few thoughts once I read it. Fellow panelists Matt Forbeck and James Lowder offered an entertaining discussion, a mixture of game writing, tie-in, and I provided a little perspective on author-created worlds which are feeling like a rarity these days.

Other great thing about the trip was that Chats and I got to rock to Milwaukee's 97.3 The Brew: Aerosmith, Guns & Roses, Heart, Bon Jovi...pretty much anything involving hair, leather, and guitars (yes, you can stream here, for those of you who live in cities that don't rock as hard as Milwaukee). Perfect music for tearing up the interstate in the Pursuit Special past the Mars Cheese Castle and "The Hub" in Kenosha. Kept turning to Chats and saying "Could this station rock any harder?" Turns out it could, when they went into Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody at the WI/IL border.

Okay, I'll admit that Sunday morning The Brew doesn't rock quite as hard as it does on Saturday night. But then when you're waking up in your car with assorted bar stamps and bowling alley pizza receipts stuck to you and a mouth that tastes like an industrial sluice maybe you need to listen to the theme to St. Elmo's Fire to get into gear.