A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

I sunk the better part of the last two days into Baldur's Gate. Yesterday I found myself wrapped up enough in it that, while riding on the T, I continued to feel real existential dread over my decision to accept a ranger and mage into my party over a probably stronger cleric. (The game limits your party size to six characters, so when you make new friends who wish to join you, you must kick people out. The dialogue strongly implies that the game will give you opportunities to reunite with these ousted characters later on, though.) Thankfully, I'm at a good break point right now, having completed the first dungeon (along with a goodly number of side-quests), and confident in knowing where I'm supposed to go next, thus not leaving me slavering for More Carnage. Watch as I Take Out The CD and Put It Away For Now.

Meanwhile, in the world outside of my head, things move along. Matt Sargent, arguably the most powerful voice in the world of Perl & XML, has responded the book draft, um, a little too late for our tastes, but there you go. We (which is to say I, assuming Erik is still feeling overburdened) now have today to decide whether it merits changes drastic enough to pull the book from production. I have not read it yet. I do this thing now.

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First I say that last night was cool. Went to the MFA to see Outstandingly Entertaining Short Films, in a party led by cthulhia and populated by a sizable subset of the usual cthonic posse. I was nervous about seeing "Bullet in the Brain", because I had heard the original short story read on the radio show "Selected Shorts", and as the title suggests it involves, um, massive neurological trauma, which is a squicking point for me. I ended up enjoying the very nice film, of course, though I question the filmmaker's decision to flesh out the main character a little more with an introduction that makes him seem more contemptible. Was it meant to cushion the blow? Shrug.

There are no photographs of me wearing the 5,000 admission collar clips that cthulhia pinned on me as we wandered the museum, picking them up off the floor as we admired ahht. Sorry. magid thought that it looked like an urban interpretation of a shark's teeth necklace.

I bought Baldur's Gate yesterday for about $25 at MCenter. The knowledge that BG2 was OS X native lured me into the store, but that game was also twice as expensive. BG runs OK under classic mode. My main complaint is that there's no obvious way, perhaps no way at all, to background the game; to get to anything else on your machine, you must save and quit. Enh. This game has a 1998 copyright date on it; this was well into the days when many, perhaps most computer users expected to have one window on their desktop dedicated to continual information flow from the Internet. Then again, this was back when very few people had broadband access at home -- I didn't -- so the idea of isolating one's machine from the Net for awhile wasn't completely alien. But now, the game asks me to forget about my incoming email while I'm playing. Foo... if I wanted to do that, I'd go play a human-enabled RPG.

Also, having a broken CD drive latch makes a painful experience out of playing games that rely on disk swappage. Sigh. I'll fix it when next I get money, maybe.

I distinctly remember reading a magazine review of a computer game some dozen or more years ago which opened with the reviewer sighing about the 15 floppies that poured forth from the box upon opening, and his prediction that games would have to start moving toe CD-ROM as a standard format pretty soon. Well, that happened, of course, and it's been the norm for a long time -- no longer do you see boxes with 'Super CD-ROM Graphics!!!' splashed across them. So then: where are the DVD games, eh eh eh?

Anyway: I am so far interested in how the game's story seems to be evidence of a feedback loop from Japanese CRPGs, which of course are based around the game mechanics of earlier Western CRPGs. But compared to, say, "Pools of Radiance", this game plays a lot like a "Final Fantasy"-type game. You start off with a single, young protagonist (though you get to make any flavor of AD&D2E PC for this, where a J-CRPG would just hand you one) under the tutelage of an elderly master, when Disaster Strikes, and you must Flee the Village where you have spent All your Life, and then the game's master baddie shows up to stomp the both of you. (Dollars to donuts says that the master baddie actually isn't the endboss, who is a much greater evil than the master baddie is working for.) You flee, and quickly make Quirky Companions, and so on. This is like every pre-1990 Jackie Chan movie I have ever seen.

Right now I'm at a part where a bad guy is killing me repeatedly. Maybe I should have not picked a 4-HP gnome illusionist as my hero? No matter; the frequent death reminds me of the more important things I've been lining up for myself. Let's see what else I can do today.