Aim For The Heart: January 2009

If you play MMORPGs and haven't watched The Guild, you're missing out on a great series of web shorts. Here's the description from their own site:

The Guild is a independent sitcom webisode about a group of online gamers. It is written for gamers, about gamers by a gamer. Episodes vary from 3-6 minutes in length, and follow the Guild members’ lives online and offline.

The characters are hilariously dysfunctional, and most episodes are laugh-out-loud funny. While the show makes fun of gamers, they do so as gamers themselves. Felicia Day, the show's star/writer/producer regularly mentions playing World of Warcraft, Fallout 3, Rock Band, etc. in her Twitter stream. It's not simply a case of some actor thinking they're so cool by making fun of "those losers who spend all their time on a computer."

Also-and vitally important for the jokes--the lingo is spot on. It means the show is very specialized with a necessarily limited (though quite large) audience. If you don't play MMOs, you simply won't get 80% of the jokes. You won't understand Vork's panic at an unexpected server outage or Clara's remark, "First I had husband aggro, then I had baby DPS!"

They're up to episode 8 (of around 12 or 13) of season 2. You can watch it on XBox LIVE and online, and each episode is around five minutes long. If I had one criticism, it's that the episodes could be longer. I think they could do ten minute episodes without losing the impact of the jokes.

http://www.watchtheguild.com/

You ever have those days when it feels like things are constantly breaking? If it's not one thing it's another. First it was our new oven. Yeah, the one we bought just a few months ago. I used the auto-clean function and the next time I went to heat it, it didn't heat. Apparently it was just a fuse, though, because the repairman was able to fix it easily enough.

But then, I woke up Monday morning to my monitor not coming on. No power, no nothing. It's less than a year old, so that royally sucked. Fortunately it's under warranty, so Samsung is sending another one that should arrive tomorrow. While my laptop is awesome, it's meant I haven't been fully online all the time this week.

I have, in the meantime, rediscovered the joys of the amazing game, Planescape: Torment, though. If you've never played this game before, go find yourself a copy. It's probably one of the top five CRPGs of all times. One of the best stories, with some amazing humor and fantastic quests.

It's also the most dialog-heavy game I've ever played. I won't say they don't make games like this any more (get off my lawn, you darn whippersnappers), because some independent developers do still make games like that. The Geneforge games by Spiderweb Software, for example. Mostly, the reason they don't is that most games are fully voice-acted these days and there's a cost issue involved.

But I'm sure I'm not the only gamer who wishes some games would go back to the Planescape method of having only partial voice acting. I love Fallout 3, but the fact that every line of dialog is spoken means there are far fewer choices available.

Speaking of Fallout 3, I released the first iteration of my mod, D.C. Confidential - Scattered Stories, recently. It's a collection of hand-placed notes, mostly from before the war. My second iteration is ready to go as soon as I get back on my desktop machine. It adds another 19 to the existing 25. I've gotten a lot of compliments on it.