(no subject)

For some reason, learning that Deus Ex notes on the PS2 memory card which endings you successfully hit made me want to put the effort into doing all three, so I just sunk an hour into it.

I did the "Helios" ending yesterday. The "Illuminati" ending may actually my favorite of the three now, not so much for content as for presentation. The "Dark Ages" one is so extreme that it seems pretty damn out-of-character for the hero to willingly accomplish, and indeed he isn't given any lines of dialogue for it; I can't imagine how he'd justify it. But it sure is pretty to watch.

OK, really really done with this game now. Good job, Ion Storm. Rest in Piece. Daikatana!!1!

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Trivia: the lead producer of the game is Warren Spector, who until recently I knew only as one of the developers of Toon, the one role-playing game I feel I've ever successfully GMed.

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The last time I GMed a Toon session was maybe six years ago. The only thing I clearly remember was daerr's character (a walking, talking six-sided die) solving the party's problem of needing to cross the Pacific Ocean by using his roll of TP to soak up the water so they could walk across. This just blew my mind because he actually had the TP written on his character sheet beforehand, and it was so obviously the correct solution, though one I did not foresee myself.

I still have the character sheets from that, I think, somewhere. I recall xymotik was a pollutant-spewing East German car. I can't remember what you other guys were, sorry.

ENH

I was up until 3 playing with Flickr, which I finally got around to exploring. (I sent in my account-confirmation email from 11 months ago and it still worked. Good on ya.) Within minutes I had hit my monthy bandwidth limit (and this is how it is different from, say, LJ free accounts) but knew I'd be purchasing a paid account the next morning.

Now I have, and the first thing I discovered is that the site is broken and I can't edit or organize any of the photos I uploaded last night. RRRRR stop holdin out on me mannnnnnn. Incredibly frustrating. This was the reason I woke up today.

Flickr

OK, just spent half the day nursing my headcold by pounding my mid-2000-to-present photo archive into Flickr. (Someone posted a workaround for its brokenness today, and since then it's been working slightly better.) I'm not done tagging everything but I need a break.

Most of the photos are four or five years old. Warning; some may contain 4-5 year old images of YOU. (If you don't like a photo you appear in, let me know and I'll snip it out of the public gallery.)

Etwas aß Ihren Kopf!!

Hmf. As part of my personal FPS renaissance I picked up "Return to Castle Wolfenstein" for PS2 last week. It kind of sucks. Which is too bad, because it's very pretty, and the fun parts are fun. But it does several Wrong Things. Among those I've encountered so far:

* Your HUD turns into a red cross-circle when you are targeting a bad guy, which is standard practice. It turns into a "no" symbol for good guys -- which is also red. In the heat of battle, there is no real visible difference between the two symbols. Why didn't they color the "don't shoot this thing" symbol green? Because the thought of a green "no" sign is strange to them? Pfui.

* Shadows are fine (entirely appropriate for this game, indeed) but there is way too much utter blackness. It's often hard to tell what's a doorway and what's a wall in shadow. When you walk into walls your dude just treadmills in place while the blackness fills your screen, so to test whether a black wall is actually there or not you have to walk into it for a second and then turn around to see if you've actually moved anywhere. I wasted about 20 minutes of realtime searching for one level's exit because it was hiding in shadows like this, and I don't think it was meant to be a puzzle.

* This is my biggest complaint: insta-death traps everywhere. They're no fun in IF, and I don't think they're any fun in FPS games either, for approximately the same reasons. You didn't do anything wrong, you just went around a corner or pressed a button and suddenly spikes fly from the walls or flames roast you or whatever, and back you go to your last save game. At least a couple of times my guy just said "ugh" and fell over dead, without even any visual or sound cue as to what happened. I swear it's like Rybread Celsius was on the design team.

I mean, this game contains player deaths that look like bugs. Surely the playtesters complained about that?? When I find myself saving my game not so much to store my progress but because I might Nethackishly die at any moment, that's bad.

Flickr binge

Actually spent all day yesterday goofing around on Flickr. I have over 200 photos up there now, including many of the ones that I used to host on the jmac.org gallery (a spit-and-glue system that fell over for the last time several years ago). Reminded myself of my enthusiasm for Orkut, at first. Flickr is a somewhat more healthy obsession, though; a lot less wanky. It's also a lot more work! I think I'm a little burned out on it already...

The tagging system is pretty neat, useful both for making one's own photographs searchable (something I've already found utility in) and for the pleasure of seeing what photos other people have assigned the same tag. For example, I have a couple of shots regarding the local subway system that I've tagged 'T', and when I asked Flickr to show me some other pictures tagged 'T', I was delighted with the results... lots of pictures of the letter T, from all over the place. And peoples' T-shirts.

It is interesting to me how photography seems to be yet another thing I basically stopped doing around the winter of 2001. It's like I squeezed out those two books, and my creativity for small, simple things has never quite recovered since.