No doubt, 2011 has been a rough one for me. There were some major highs, a number of lows, and one hell of a lot of “What-the-fucks?”. It could have been worse, to be sure, but I’m looking forward to what 2012 might bring. Let’s all of us make it a good one, eh?
001.01.12 Happy Twenty-Twelve!
Skyrim Skyrim Skyrim Skyrim.
Skyrim Skyrim Skyrim Skyrim Skyrim Skyrim. Skyrim Skyrim. Skyrim Skyrim Skyrim. Skyrim Skyrim Skyrim Skyrim Skyrim. Skyrim Skyrim Skyrim. Skyrim Skyrim Skyrim Skyrim Skyrim Skyrim Skyrim Skyrim. Skyrim Skyrim Skyrim Skyrim. Skyrim Skyrim.
Skyrim Skyrim Skyrim. Skyrim Skyrim Skyrim Skyrim. Skyrim Skyrim Skyrim Skyrim Skyrim Skyrim Skyrim. Skyrim Skyrim. Skyrim Skyrim Skyrim Skyrim.
Skyrim.
011.18.11 Tim Tam Slam
My local Target stores are carrying Tim Tams. These are chocolate creme sandwiched between chocolate cookies, then covered in a layer of chocolate. A package of a dozen costs two dollars and fifty cents, plus tax.
The Australian cookie technology that makes Tim Tams is sufficiently advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic. You want these.
012.29.11 How about some more Skyrim?
I spent my Thanksgiving holiday in Skyrim. Presently, my save game shows something like a hundred-and-ten hours played. Amy has a comparable amount of time in her game. My console may as well have a Skyrim 360 label on it, because that’s all it’s been used for for the past month.
The game has some pretty big problems: A number of storylines just don’t work the way they were obviously intended (A quest involving finding a serial killer is particularly broken). Most of the dialogue options you have with NPC’s don’t make a damned bit of difference. Most of the quests have a certain samey-ness to them.
The general pattern is this: An NPC asks for an item at a distant location. You travel to the entrance of the dungeon (or fortress or cave or grotto). You kill every goddamned living creature in the dungeon, until you kill a more-powerful boss and then you get the item and take it back to where you started. This doesn’t bother me, because this is pretty much the basic gameplay and the game knows it. Some of the stories break from this, and some of those even work, but that’s the basic pattern, and when they do it it works well. This is mostly how CRPG’s have worked since I played Temple of Apshai in 1982, and that suits me fine.
I don’t much care for complex stories in games. I like those fine in books and movies, but in my games I like to play. Skyrim has story frameworks in it, but the story of the game is what I do in it. Not decisions I make, but what I actually do while I play. I could barely tell you the story of how I came to be the leader of the Thieves Guild, but I can tell you how I snuck past an ice troll while climbing this mountain trail, came back later more prepared, and burnt it with fire. The first one was something the developers wrote into the game, the second one is something that just happened while I was playing.
The written story is the frame that the gameplay hangs on, and Skyrim has enough gameplay (both designed and emergent) in it that I never feel like I’m making decisions that cut off some part of the game to me or will screw me up later. Playing Skyrim reminds me of playing D&D in high school, and is the best computer RPG I’ve ever played.