Where Tennis, Gin and PC Gaming Dance a Merry Waltz

I like tennis. Women's tennis, to be precise. I don't have time for the men's game because it takes far too long and I'm usually busy working. I work as a proofreader, translation-checker and - for shits 'n grins - I'm a writer. First novel's in the oven. I also like gin, although I don't get as much of it as I want or need or think I deserve. Expensive stuff, gin, and most of my hard-earned goes on my two brilliant little boys. When I'm not working, getting drunk, watching tennis or playing with my kids, I also really enjoy PC gaming (and the occasional Wii-ing). Oh yah, I live in Poland. Viva Las Polska, I love this place.

Sunday, February 10, 2013

Thoughts on TERA, or, THOUGHTS ON tera



Computer Games: Clearly, it's violent, horrifying images like this causing mass-shootings
and vehicular homicide. Being run over by hot-air balloon furniture is no laughing matter.
So TERA, Enmasse Entertainment's carefully adapted Unreal 3-powered MMO boob simulator by Korean ex-Lineage III devs. You may remember that said ex-devs were accused by NCSoft Korea of stealing arm-loads of Lineage III assets as they fled their jobs to form their own outfit, Bluehole Studio. Final thoughts on that matter can be seen here, on their own blog, and here, at good old Massivley.com. But I’m not interested in all that, I’m just here to spew some thoughts out in-between pages of this boring German thing I’m supposed to be proofing. (There’s a TL;DR at the end of this piece if you haven’t got the time or inclination to wade through this sprawling mess).

To be honest, I wasn’t that interested in TERA to begin with. I really don’t like that Asian art style at all – it’s either cartoony, big-eyed paedo-bait, or all pseudo-renaissance mash-up with 80’s pretty boy pop-star haircuts – all of which leaves me colder than an Eskimo’s eyelids. But, being a devout Massively reader and Longtime Player of Online RPGs in Good Standing, I followed its announcement and development enough to know what was going on with it.

A couple of weeks ago I was reminded of its imminent F2P re-release, and then again a couple of days before it did that very thing, re-branded as ‘TERA Rising’. So, being the bored magpie that I am, I decided to give it a whirl. That’s the beauty of Free To Play – even if you believe the whole system is Satan’s own screwgee (more fool you), it still lets you try something for free, rather than making you roll the dice on up to fifty smackers (or 150 smackers over here in Polarbearland) for something you’re not sure about.

Well, just my experience downloading the client could fill a blog post, but instead I’ll give it a modestly-sized paragraph or ten. The client is 27 Gb. Now, I’m a bit of a freak about client sizes, because I’ve got a raggedy-ass collection of hard drives that are bursting at the seams, and the 200 clams I’d need to buy a new HDD are too much in one go to justify most days of the year. So, I spend my time shuffling and juggling (and rearranging my drive space, haha).  And so it took me a fair old bit of fyku-myku to clear the space for it, and on a drive that’s already lost sectors to time and service.

Not pictured: Various external drives, stacked precariously one
on top of the other like those turtles in the Dr. Seuss book.
So I gets the thing down the pipe eventually. It goes pretty fast – about one meg twenty most of the time – but then drops to a crawl when all the local squares come home in their Audis to surf timid porn and football results. Well fuck me if it doesn't hang installing. So I re-start the launcher and it takes an eternity to check its work and get its bearings again – much longer than any other MMOG launcher/patcher I’ve used. Eeeeeeeeventually, I notice that what little extra space I had on the drive (I think I’d cleared about 30-32 Gigs before launching this Korean shit-rocket) had dwindled down to the last 6 megs or so!

It turns out that what you really need is 50 Gb, because the download then unpacks itself onto itself prior to installing, leaving the original archives in place – thus nearly doubling the space requirement. Now, on the official forums there’s some debate about this. All the douche bags with terrabytes of vacant drives they bought because they’re still living with their parents (or because they’re students) are vigorously shouting down the working stiffs like me who – after 20-odd years of system reqs listing the total amount of HDD space on the box, including the unpacking and installing (which usually takes place in a temp folder somewhere else anyway) – are mildly surprised about the unexpected doubling of the quoted 27-30 Gb. To further muddy the virtual waters, there is apparently some difference in client sizes between the direct digital download and the official torrent. Well, I could go on about this, but it’s moot now, so let’s move on.

Needless to say, I finally got it installed, patched and booted. The launcher, I have to say, is one of the prettiest I’ve ever seen, and defaults to a quite stunning and unexpected full-screen size. It didn’t even occur to me to re-size it down to normal until I noticed some malcontents bitching about it online.

TERA’s awesome launcher. That, by the way, is the whole, entire screen.
1920x1080 of launcherness.
The intro video is lo-res, typically cheesy and somewhat underwhelming. But the character creation is mind-blowing. Character models have that gloriously solid Unreal 3 feel to them, even if they are the usual collection of anthropomorphic dog-panda-cats, under-age girls, and snooty-looking elves. The human males are quite well proportioned, although the females are the usual deformed physical stereotypes – boobs like small Hondas bursting out of postage stamp-sized ‘armour’. Even so, I went with a human female, in line with Core Design’s venerable ‘Lara Croft Principle’ – if you’re going to be staring at a digital avatar’s backside for hundreds of hours, you may as well make it an appealing one.

Once I’d named my appealingly deformed physical stereotype, I was then asked whether or not I wanted to do the Prologue, which presents itself as a kind of tutorial. Obviously I said yes, and was surprised and delighted to find myself shipwrecked on a beach in the pissing rain, surrounded by the dead and dying, with a hotbar crammed full of skill icons. Apart from the hotbar thing, it’s not unlike a holiday in Gdańsk.

Now then, when you take your first steps in any 3D MMOG, you’re going to be standing off to one side fiddling with your UI for a bit, getting all your options and keybinds sorted, and this is no less true in TERA. The UI in TERA is pretty damn good, I think. Bear in mind that I am, rightly or wrongly, comparing the game to the army of Korean-‘em-ups out there, including supposedly AAA titles like Aion, to which you could probably most fairly compare TERA since they’re both originally Korean games that were then radically overhauled in conjunction with American teams to make games that are as appealing as possible to Western gamers. (For the record, I think TERA edges Aion slightly in overall presentation and combat, although Aion is more user-friendly with the rest of its non-combat business – more on that later).

TERA also uses a Dungeons & Dragons Online-style system of direct mouse-look, with alt or Esc popping up a shit-load of menus and a cursor to wave around. The mouse-look is because TERA’s big selling point is its “action combat” (something they’re constantly shouting about, whilst DDO players quietly grind their teeth). What you aim at is what you hit (WYAAIWYH – not quite as catchy as WYSIWYG, but what the hell). I haven’t tried a melee class yet, but I can’t imagine it somehow, in spite of the fact that I’m quite comfortable with WYAAIWYH melee in other games. Possibly because I’ve already been tainted by the sight of a Popori Lancer (TERA’s animal race), which is a furry ball armed with an enormous jousting lance. The effect is... ridiculous.

Action! Combat! Action Combat!
Back to the Prologue! You go through about 15 minutes of running around this wet beach getting your shit together, eventually coming to a boss fight. A really big boss fight. It's great that they whip out a bit of Epic at that early point, and it’s also at that point that you start thinking about Vindictus and other more recent online MMO action-‘em-ups. I got pasted by this boss, because to be honest I was overwhelmed by the number of skills I had for a n00b character, and by the differing means of activating them – hit-mouse-over-hit, hit-and-hold, timed release etc. The default LMB attack is okay against regular mobs, but against a big bastard like this end-of-tutorial villain, it’s quite lame. Still, you get through it, get treated to more lo-res video and a bit of in-game cutscene, and rub your hands with anticipation because you just know you’re about to be dumped into the world proper, to get on with the actual 1 to 60 we all know and love.

And then – shock! – you’re there, but you’re wearing crappy gear and have precisely one skill on your hotbar. WTF? After the in-your-face noise and spectacle of the Prologue, you’re suddenly reverted to pleb status out of the blue, and frankly it’s confusing. Opinions on the forums and in-game chat are mostly that yes, it is a bit strange and that the whole thing could be better. Fortunately, the Prologue is optional, so when you get going with the alts (default 2 max for free players, more purchasable from the shop), you can skip the whole miserable thing and just kick-off your career as an eight year-old telegraph pole-wielding magical child prostitute in rags, as you should do. Aha.

Having a lovely time in Margate, Wish you were here XXX
Well, okay, that was weird, but soon forgotten in the absolute magical joy that is running around killing things in TERA’s world. Yes, the action combat works, and yes, it is awesome. It begins well, and gets better. Suddenly, your high-MP fireball can be totally wasted because the mob decided at the last second to blow his nose or step around an orc turd. It adds a little extra visceral thrill to combat that lock-on tab-targeting lacks, especially since everything is plastered with bright, colourful, hi-res textures. Monsters are big and chunky and you can’t clip through them. The world is pretty good too, although there are invisible walls around a lot of the cliffs and precipices, and jumping a couple of meters down from one place to another results in your character being ‘grabbed’ and re-oriented into a fixed-animation landing. I didn’t describe that very well, but trust me, it’s quite distracting. On the visuals front, my knee-jerk response was “Allod’s chunky colourfulness with RIFT’s crispy, detailed textures.”

The questing is pretty good too. All mob names and items of significance in your quest log are clickable, which produces coloured dots on your mini map showing their location. It’s much more elegant than, say, LoTRO’s coloured ‘zones’ on their world maps. Harvesting resource nodes takes place without the need for extra tools – your harvesting gear is automagic. This is a Good Thing. You can buy cheap and varied crystals to plug into your weapons and armour that have positive effects – also a nice touch. There’s a stamina system in place that slowly debuffs all your vitals the more it wears out, but it’s tied-in with a cool campfire system too, and is not at all a burden the way it is in Allods or FF XIV. Very good. Money flows in pretty steadily, mainly because only about 1 or 2/10 item drops will be for your class, so you get lots of crap to sell quite quickly. Even better. I made it to the capital city with my first Gold already in my pocket, which is always nice.

A quick word on the weapons and armour etc. They don’t change much early on. In fact, apart from one significant model change, the only other thing that changed in 12 levels was the colour of my bows and (skimpy) clothes. I’m no great loot maniac myself, but it’s always a little disappointing nonetheless when the itemisation starts off sooo slowly. One thing a lot of people have said is that level 20 is the kick-off point for lots of different things that make the whole business a lot more fun, like more varied itemisation, a glyph system that allows you to customise your (more and better) skills, and various other fun things. So that’s something to look forward to.

I may have whinged about the millions of gigabytes TERA eats, but to paraphrase Sir David Lean, you can see every one of them up on the screen. The world has weight, everything feels solid and moves convincingly. Even the tiny anime porno chics.
Overall, I’ve been really enjoying myself. I got a horse mount for free when I reached the capital, which is cool, and the city itself looks great too. Nothing can touch the elaborate beauty of Divinity’s Reach in Guild Wars 2, or even the simple cosiness of good old IF in WoW, but this place is pretty damned good too.

The biggest disappointment so far is the crafting. I had picked up a ‘Go and Meet the Crafting People and Make Some Crap’ type quest just prior to leaving “Newb Island” and hitting the city. When I got there I was given a box of supplies and told to make a standard-issue Leather Cuirass (one size fits all). Well, I couldn’t interact with my free supplies box, so I figured I’d just buy the extra bits from the vendor and DIY it. So I did – 10s, gulp. Made one Cuirass, realised then that I had to make 24 more, spent ten minutes frantically trying to make my freebie mats work (without success), and another ten minutes Googling before I found one single post on the entire Interwebz asking about this:

“...[these] quests require you to craft 25 items ... each one requires 5 of two different items bought from the vendor, one costing 59c, and ther costing over 1s. This means 125 of each to complete the quest, totalling over 2g spent per quest! The reward, is 1000 XP and 100s. Is this intended?”

Yes, it’s mind-bogglingly stupid (almost as stupid as the solitary answer to that guy’s post). And also, it served to burst my happy little TERA bubble. It reminded me that despite huge amounts of coolness, polish and happy touches, this is still a shoe-horned product, with many cultural squared-off edges trying to force themselves into my soft, round, European hole. I felt annoyed and somewhat depressed as I ran back to the bank to deposit all my mats and sell off the one (unusable!) Cuirass I’d made. Unusable! The crafting system is so cack-handed, it couldn’t even fob me off with a hand-made shirt after asking me to spend  all my money to make something because my n00b mats supply didn’t work! (Coincidentally – and not to its advantage – reminding me of many of the dates I’ve had over the years).

A Peanuts-style black, squiggly cloud hung over my head as I headed off to my first proper ‘zone’ on the main landmass, and marred my next ten minutes of half-hearted play before I logged off in a funk to come and write this epic bit of nonsense. I will come back to TERA, probably in a couple of days, because it’s got a lot going for it. In short, I feel that it’s at its best when you’re out in the field, fighting, and at it’s worst when you’re fumbling around trying to organise your non-combat life.  That’s the part which GW2 does so well. Still, let’s see what the future brings – although I suspect that as soon Beta Weekend 2 for Neverwinter rolls around in early March, I’ll be cleaning out a good 27 Gb of space from somewhere nearby...

PLUSY: Awesome (if hardware intensive) GFX; Lots of classes and races, great character creation tools; Exciting combat (really exciting!); Anime stylings (if you like that kind of thing).

MINUSY: Typical ‘chainmail bikini’ style chics; Crap crafting; Stingy loot itemisation; Anime stylings (if you don’t like that sort of thing); Annoying X-Box pad UI element that I can’t hide.

Wednesday, January 2, 2013

The Wall Joke, and a Musical Interlude

Old Gold.
So, it's 2013, let's get this show on the road already. Today I found two things which made me very happy (and it's not even one o'clock yet!). The first is the above comic masterpiece. Yes, it's old, but the presentation here is particularly fine. It comes to us today courtesy of Redditor CHIM-CHIM, here.

The second thing I found comes to us courtesy of those musical American opinion-dividers, Green Day. Now, I've never been a fan of them per se, but I've always enjoyed the hit singles. I remember back in '92, in college in Florida, they were very hot with all the art students. I understand that since then, they've evolved (which is the worst thing any artist can do in the opinion of some of their fans (c.f. The Clash, Weezer et al)).

Anyway, I don't give a shit either way, I just like what I hear, and I heard this one on ESKA Rock whilst putting the dishes away this morning. Here it is - Stray Heart.

Bad heart, come back here at once!

Saturday, December 15, 2012

Seinfeld: The Keys

Pictures courtesy of the ever-brilliant http://seinfeld.wikia.com/wiki/WikiSein

Of all the very many brilliant TV comedies we've had over the years, Seinfeld remains my absolute favourite. It is, to me, the funniest thing that's ever been shown on the ol' boob tube. The history of my favourite comedy shows begins - in terms of things we could realistically discuss - with M*A*S*H and Taxi, proceeds to The Flintstones (I had VHS cassette collections of home-taped M*A*S*H and Flintstones that took up an entire wall in our old living room), hits Seinfeld and much later Futurama and Curb Your Enthusiasm. But when I sit down to watch re-runs of all these, it's always Seinfeld that produces the most belly laughs. Genuine, uncontrollable, loud-and-proud laughs. 

So it was last night with two absolute classics from series 3: The Limo, wherein Jerry and George are mistaken for white supremacists (Cut back to the limo, George is reading, quietly horrified, from O'Brien's speech. George: ...and the Jews steal our money through their Zionist-occupied government and use the black man to bring drugs into our oppressed white minority communities. Jerry: You're not going to open with that, are you?); and The Keys, wherein Jerry tires of Kramer's abuse of being Jerry's official spare-key holder and demands them back, thus triggering a chain of woes as George, Kramer, Elaine and Jerry all squabble over who has who's spares.

I'd like to now present, courtesy of that online treasure trove, seinfeldscripts.com, my favourite scene from The Keys.  A little set-up for you: Kramer, quietly disgruntled about having his key-holder privileges revoked, gets his spares back from Jerry and then meets with George at their favourite haunt, Monk's Café, to give George his spares. Of course, for Kramer it's not just a simple matter of who has who's keys...

The coffee shop. Kramer plunks his giant keyring on the table in front of George.

GEORGE: Gee, Kramer, I uh... I don't know what to say.

KRAMER: Say yes! Yes, George. Yes!

GEORGE: Should I give you my keys, is that the transaction,trading keys...? Because Elaine has my keys.

KRAMER: Well, you can get 'em back.

GEORGE: I suppose I could.

KRAMER: Because you see, George, having the keys to Jerry's apartment? That kept me in a fantasy world. Every time I went over to his house, it was like I was on vacation. Better food, better view, better TV. And cleaner? Oh - much cleaner. That became my reality. I ignored the squalor in my own life because I'm looking at life, you see, through Jerry's eyes. I was living in twilight, George. Living in the shadows. Living in the darkness...like you.

GEORGE: Me?

KRAMER: Oh, yeah. I can barely see you, George.

GEORGE: Alright, stop it Kramer, you're freakin' me out.

          <The waitress comes over>

WAITRESS: Hi, are you ready to order? 

<George tries to order,
but 
Kramer waves her away>

KRAMER: (moves over and sits next to George):
         Do you ever yearn?

GEORGE: Yearn? Do I yearn?

KRAMER: I yearn.

GEORGE: You yearn.

KRAMER: Oh, yes. Yes, I yearn. Often, I...I sit...and yearn. Have you yearned?

GEORGE: Well, not recently. I craved. I crave  
        all the time, constant craving...but I
        haven't yearned.

KRAMER: (in disgust): Look at you.

GEORGE: Aw, Kramer, don't start...

KRAMER: (moving back to the other side of the
         booth) You're 
wasting your life.

GEORGE: I am not! What you call wasting, I call living! I'm living my life!



KRAMER: OK, like what? No, tell me! Do you
        have a job? 
GEORGE: No.
KRAMER: You got money?
GEORGE: No.
KRAMER: Do you have a woman?
GEORGE: No.
KRAMER: Do you have any prospects?
GEORGE: No.
KRAMER: You got anything on the horizon?
GEORGE: Uh...no.
KRAMER: Do you have any action at all?
GEORGE: No.
KRAMER: Do you have any conceivable reason for
        even getting up in 
the morning?

GEORGE: I like to get the Daily News...

KRAMER: George, it's time for us to grow up -
        and be men. Not 
little boys.

GEORGE: Why?

KRAMER: I'm goin' to California. You know,
        I got the bug.

GEORGE: Yeah, I think I got a touch of        
        something, too.

KRAMER: No, the acting bug. Ever since I was
        in that 
Woody Allen movie.
GEORGE: "These pretzels are making me
        thirsty"? 
That was one line!
        You got fired!
KRAMER: I know, I know, but man! I never felt
        so alive! 
Now, are you coming with me?

GEORGE: Uh, no, I'm not.

KRAMER: Alright, suit yourself. But let's keep
        this between us - 
we're key brothers
        now.

<Gets up to leave.>

GEORGE: You're not really gonna go to
        California, are you?

KRAMER: (points to his head): Up here, I'm
         already gone.



 <Kramer exits>

It's a masterclass in comic timing by Jason Alexander and Michael Richards, as well as in good writing (script credit for the episode goes to Larry Charles). Kramer's badgering of George and George's subsequent crumbling during their rapid-fire exchange on the same side of the booth; Jason Alexander making the hoary old 'bug' gag work with the blithe pathos that is George's stock in trade; the comfortable familiarity of the characters with each other (it's entirely Kramer to have a spiritual revelation about something as mundane as holding a friend's spare keys, then trying to 'save' a friend, as well as this being a fun way of explaining his insane neighbouring behaviour throughout the entire show); Jason's throw-away of the 'Stop it, you're freaking me out' line, accompanied by a bit of nervous glasses-cleaning; the punching of 'crave' and 'yearn' (classic Seinfeld humour); George's petulant reaction to the idea of growing up; the moment of mutual recognition at Jerry's impeccable cleanliness... it's all sooo, sooo good.

Of course, you can watch the whole scene on YouTube - the clip I found is only 240p and ran a little out of synch when I checked it just now (although that's most likely my problem). Do yourself a favour and check it out right now!



Friday, November 16, 2012

Wizards Can Do Anything (Eventually)


Wizards Can Do Anything
The whole book is illustrated beautifully throughout, by the talented Dariusz Twardoch
                                 
So, funny thing. Someone sent me a link to this little beauty today. In a nutshell, it was my first book editing assignment, which after seeing the English translation, became full-on ghost-writing.

It's a fantastic children's story, written by a really nice guy called Dariusz Chwiejczak. We worked on this together back in Q4 of 2007. Every Sunday we would have epic telephone conferences about the text; my changes, his ideas and so on. He was very engaged in the process and it was truly a great collaboration that bore an English fruit which I think may even have had a slightly different taste to the original.

That original version was a self-published run of hardbacks in Polish. He then commissioned an English translation, which is what I worked from. I still have my hardback copy somewhere. Unfortunately though, the timing wasn't quite right back then for an  electronic edition, and after a while it sort of disappeared from sight. Until now (I assume).

I have extremely fond memories of that project, unlike about 90% of all the work I've had since then which has had no greater effect than slowly eroding my will to live. Seeing 'Wizards...' up there on Amazon filled me with an alien feeling I haven't known in an absolute age: Pride.

Hey, you gotta get a little duma now and then, right?






Thursday, November 15, 2012

FIRST POST! /golfclap

If you've read one post on this blog, you'll have read them all. Sit back and watch an endless array of Agnieszka Radwańska pictures blur before your eyes. Or maybe just two or three, depending how motivated I get with this thing. Probably just two then. So, sit back and watch two pictures of Agnieszka Radwańska and a few aimless thoughts about being drunk, working, playing computer games and ogling WTA stars. Sometimes all at once.
Fun things that happened today: Did loads of work (a tourism mobile app, an iOS game and a boring financial thing); watched two episodes of The Big Bang Theory (yes, I am that hip - Bazinga!); added another couple of thousand population to my Sim City Social city over on Farcebook; started this blog, and added the words 'WTA', 'Agnieszka', 'Radwańska' and 'blog' to Chrome's appalling EN dick-tionary (warning: dick jokes might be a thing with this blog, I'm not sure yet. Maybe just a passing phase I'm going through).

Fun things that happened this week: Hacked my Wii, allowing for infinite varieties of Mario to be played with the kids; rooted my phone, allowing for infinite near-identical apps to be crushed into its tiny memory at once; updated Guild Wars 2 with the Lost Shores shit without any of the slowness or problems other people seem to have had, and saw a brilliant shark movie on PULS that I hadn't seen before. Sharks - particularly Carcharadon carcharias - give me the horrrrrnnn, yes they do.

Fun things that happened this month: Screwed up yet another wonderful relationship with a dear friend; drank loads of really good unpasteurised beer (less gas, more taste); watched some brilliant tennis at the WTA Championships in Istanbul, and... ehhh... probably some other things too, but fuck it, that's good enough a cross-section of my activity to give you some idea of who I am, and whether or not you wanna stick around.

Well, that's enough fun for one post, especially a First Post (omg lol etc). See you anon.