Do you choose from one of five listed actions, or number 6 and be creative! If number 6 you have to flip back and forth through the book to find entry #42 (because they helpfully don’t tell you what page that is on) and that entry tells you… that you are out of luck because you are playing a solo choose-your-own-adventure module and to go back the beginning and suck it down and choose one of the other five choices.

Yeah… Great way to introduce players to the creativity and freedom of a RPG game.

As it is, the new D&D Starter Set is poorly laid out. The choices of where to put information and rules are confusing, the lack of page number references in the players book in particular are frustrating as you flip around to find the next entry. In terms of introducing players to the game it is an embarassingly poor tool compared to the old old Basic Set red box from the 1st edition era (which way back when I used to introduce quite a few friends to the hobby, and to freak out the librarian at my grade school).

In fact, the poor layout seems to be a theme for the Essentials releases as the Heroes of the Fallen Lands book is so awful that it gives me a head ache just trying to use it. It is a 360′ish page trade paperback soft-cover rule book, so right up front I have to say that you aren’t going to be able to flip to a specific page and lay the book down in front of you and actually make use of it. It simply won’t stay open or on the correct page.

On top of that, if it is a tool for introducing new players to the game it is a poor substitution for the 4E PHB. The way the book is organized, the lack of differentiation between the fonts used for headers making it look cluttered and hard to spot things on a page, the way the new class features are listed in the book in a order that requires you to flip around wildly while making a character, and to an extent the order the chapters are written in all contribute to being a less clear, more confusing, book for new players to struggle to use to make their first characters than the 4E PHB is.

Which is all the more frustrating because the DDI Character Creator tool hasn’t been updated with this info yet (and no date for that update has been given since the info won’t even show up in the DDI Compendium for another week).

The poor layout, poor typography, and poor DDI support aside the actual content feels both slightly over-powering and somewhat incomplete compared to the PHB classes. For example, the Mage build for Wizards seems to be quite superior at first glance to any of the implement wizard builds when you start looking at the specialty powers you get and the additional at-will, though at the same time the book only has 3 schools of magic to be specialized in (though a 4th “The Pyromancer” is up on DDI right now) and relatively little support in terms of feats (the rules for Mages imply you can have more then one school, but I can’t find any way for that to actually happen as I expected it’d be a feat). There are however feats for wizard implements (orb, staff, etc.) but the only mention of what implements even are in the entire book are one small entry in the keywords section and mentions in the gear / magical item section.

All in all, the book is just confusing and I imagine will perplex new players more than help them get interested in the game. For existing players it serves as a source of new ideas for character builds, but again the layout of the book is so poor that I can’t see wanting to actually use any of the info until it shows up in the DDI tools and I can just print of what I need from there.

The Rules Compendium volume is a mixed bag. On one hand, it is a well organized listing of the rules from the various books released so far. Just the rules though, how things work and not listings of every ability, spell, etc. On the other hand, I expect it’ll fall out of date within a six months due to errate being released or new keyword or ability or effect type comes out that won’t be covered in this book. It also means you are basically buying a copy of rules you already have again, just collected neatly now into one small easy to carry trade paperback.

The other problem I have with it is that there is some stuff that just isn’t rules but is fluff that is included in it. The default set of 4E gods aren’t rules, they are names with some vague traits attached. Descrptions of the three official 4E campaign settings also aren’t rules, neither are the vague guidelines re-printed from the DMG on suggestions of how to run a campaign and maybe the stye of one to run.

All in all, I don’t think the Rules Compendium is a bad book but just isn’t a great one and given the format (trade paperback) it’ll be a little more ackward to update when errata comes out then I find the full size hardbounds are (where I usually have the errata tucked inside the back cover and sticky notes on the pages that have been errata’d to remind me about it).

The Dungeon Tiles Master Set: Dungeon though I am finding rather nice. It came in a sturdy box which is big enough to hold all of it’s tiles and at least two or three of the older released tile sets. I haven’t gone through it yet to identify how many of the tiles are re-prints of older out-of-print sets and how many are new ones but all in all the quality of the tiles are good, the box is sturdy and can actually be used as a large tile itself given the grind terrain printed on it. For it’s cost, I imagine I am going to get far more use out of it than anything else I purchased in this order.

• Apparently unable to destroy or sell buildings, which means you can get screwed economically when a building you needed 1000 years ago no longer is worthwhile but you are stuck still paying for it. Even worse when you have Puppet’ed cities buildings tons of expensive to maintain but worthless buildings.
• Diplomacy is vague and confusing. It is hard to tell if you are getting along well with another Civ or not. It may be all down to the actual words that show up in diplomatic conversations and that may be the only way to see if they kind of like me or really like me. It is clear when they dislike you though, HOSTILE shows up next to their name in the diplomacy overview and you start getting messages from them insulting you.
• Maintenance costs are unclear. I know I am paying upkeep on my troops, but how much for each troop? How is it figured? What is the formula? Same thing with upkeep on tile improvements, I have a really hard time making sense of where all of those expenses coming from so I similarly have a hard time in reducing the expenses.
• AI still needs work during battles. Seen too many times now when the computer marches to battle with their ranged units in the front which just get cut down in seconds because they are worthless at melee combat. Or the computer will throw one troop at me at a time instead of moving in a group of troops supporting each other with flanking bonuses. Albiet, I haven’t tried anything above King difficulty yet so maybe at the highest difficulties the AI finally gets it togethor, but it is embarassingly bad at the lower ones.
• No clock in the UI. Seriously. Civ 4 had an option to show a clock and what time it is and that’s the only thing that kept me at times from staying up far far far far far too late playing. (I was already up far far too late, but the clock kept it from getting worse). There is a Mod that adds a clock to the UI (and I can always bring up the Steam overlay) but the mod disables earning of achievements and tracking of gameplay time in Steam and I don’t remember to check the overlay that often. I really hope that a clock gets added back in via a game patch soon.
• Happiness can be counter-intuitive. I fight a 1000 year war, I loose cities to the AI, and my people get happier because suddenly I have fewer cities and less population. But I win the war, I take the enemies capital and my people get angry with me because I won and now have an additional city and more people within the empire. Very odd and not really what you’d expected.

But that’s it. Those really are my only complaints about Civ 5.

Otherwise, the game is great. The streamlined tech tree means that you don’t feel like there are ever worthless dead-end techs that you have to suffer through. The hex grid makes for a much better world map and along with the one unit per tile change makes for much more tactical combat (which is really rather fun). Resources are actually much more important now then they were in Civ 4, you actually want to fight over them and accumulate as many as you can.

All in all, I think Civ 5 is a great game. Just a great game that needs a bit more polish to smooth off some of its burrs. Some things are rather opaque which should be clear, and some things just work in oddly counter-intuitive ways.

You definately need to play it far differently than you played Civ 4 or you will literally run yourself into the ground and defeat yourself without the AI having to lift a finger against you.

It was one of those rare games in recent years where it is clear that the developers really wanted to make a “good game”. I find that I have to put that in quotes because far too often of late it seems that game makers seem to mistake “good graphics” with a “good game” (thank you Squenix…). However Valkyria Chronicles (hereafter referred to just as VC1) really nailed it.

The game play was fun, the story was interesting, and the characters were ones that you actually found yourself interested in and really wanting to see what happens with them.

It should come as no surprise then that VC1 did amazingly well in Japan where it spawned two manga series, an anime, and two sequels. One of the sequels is this game, Valkyria Chronicles 2 on the PSP. The other sequel Valkyria Chronicles 3 is still in development right now.

Valkyria Chronicles 2 (hereafter VC2) on the PSP actually fares pretty well in comparison to VC1. The game mechanics are basically the same with the biggest change being the large maps being divided up into multiple smaller ones that you move between. They re-worked the class system to try to add some more variety to your squad and tactics. And the graphics aren’t quite as good because of the PSP hardware (but if graphics are all you care about then you can fuck off and die and go back to masturbating to FF13 cut scenes).

The downfall of VC2 in my opinion is actually in the story. The story is still good, the cast of characters is still interesting, but it seems like when games go from consoles to portables that for some reason the developers often feel the need to kid’ify the games. So while VC1 was the story of a nation at war and all hate and violence around that, VC2 is much more focused on the school antics and life of a group of military cadets in training two years after the war.

While there is a war on in VC2, a civil war this time that is actually racially motivated, the delivery and feel of the game feels far far too light-hearted at times with a cast of main character that are all somewhat of a cliche versus the rather refreshingly original main characters in VC1 (well, at least the VC1 characters felt less generic / cliche’d if not entirely unique creations ).

That said, being able to play VC2 anywhere that I take my PSP with me really does in my mind cancel out any of the games other negatives. It isn’t perfect, and I think I still do like VC1 far better (because of the story more than anything else) I do think that VC2 is one of the better PSP games that I have played and it is going to be spending a lot more time in the months to come in my PSP.

If you like tactical games, a good story, and fun gameplay then the Valkyria Chronicles series on the PSP (and PS3) are definately worth checking out.

As an aside, while Valkyria Chronicles 3 doens’t have a release date yet it has been confirmed as being on the PSP and being set during the same time period as VC1 and with a plot and storytelling that are more similar to VC1 than VC2. Just a long wait now for it to get localized in the US.

One of the games we’ve been chattering about is StarCraft 2 and a couple of the other people have been doing league 3v3 play. Had been invited to join them to make it 4v4 but I passed as my SC skills weren’t quite up to par (imho) to be a good part of their team. So I’ve been playing a bit more of the campaign (which really has nothing to do with multi-player tactics) and some multi-player matches against the AI. Still not sure my macro/micro skills are back up to par yet but getting better.

DDO has my human monk leveling slowly up, but also just started a warforged wizard/rogue. Very much a ‘flavor of the month’ build but it looks to be pretty solid for solo’ing and I can finally get all those damned secret doors my monk could spot but not search for due to shitty seach skills and not enough skill points. Game remains fun, ended up joining a guild over there to have people to chat with and the group looks to be pretty fun.

Just bought Borderlands this past week. Ended up then playing it for 6 straight hours before realizing it was 2am and I needed to sleep. Very fun, well designed content where the bits are just the right size that they don’t drag on for too long and you never realize how much time you are spending on them. Going to do some co-op this weekend with some of the IRC crowd I think. Will be interesting to see how it fares in multi-player play.

Did the first of the ‘feature episodes’ last night in STO. “Cold Call” I believe the name of it was. Did it on Advanced difficulty because I didn’t think to change it before I went into the mission. If I’d realized there was so much ground combat in it, I may have as I find the balance on ground combat is a little off (bridge officer AI not being smart enough to remove themselves from AoE effects or to seek cover without being told) though I find space combat on Advanced to be almost too easy. That said, this mission was a nice change of pace. The Breen made for an interesting new enemy to fight, though the bosses AoE attack was a little harsh as it was able to one-hit KO four of my bridge officers at once. The space portion turned out to be a surprisingly good challenge on Advanced. First time in a long time that I did a space battle on any difficulty that I actually felt challenged with. Kind of wish I could replay just the space portions of it. The next feature episode either came out today at noon time or comes out tomorrow at noon.

Other than that, working towards a Dark Sun campaign for 4E D&D. Should be interesting to see how it goes. Trying out some home rules with it to get it feeling more like the 2E setting in terms of character power vs world difficulty. Also using the old 2E books to get the game actually feeling like Dark Sun’s gritty dangerous dark world on the brink of collapse again and not 4E’s goofy mix of Conan’esque sword-and-sorcery meeting Al-Qadim arabian nights.

Will write more about that later, for now I am off back to either SC2 or some more Borderlands. Will decide while I go to get a coke.

But I still, even counting for my unrealistic expectations, hoped for more than what the book has in it.

I’ll start with the good points:
The rules for Thri-Kreen and Mul character races are both well designed and the are in the PHB3 style of having one fixed stat bonus and a choice between two stats for the 2nd bonus.

The ‘Character Theme’ rules are a great idea and something that I’ll likely reverse-engineer and use for non-Dark Sun campaigns as well. Themes are basically archetypes, or background careers, for your character. Or you could consider them to be like Living Greyhawk meta-orgs. Basically an idea about who your character is, but they are broad enough that they aren’t class restrictive. They include things like Dune Trader (merchant/agent), Athasian Minstrel (assassin/spy), member of the Veiled Alliance (revolutionary anti-defiler group), or Templar (servant of one of the sorceror-kings).

The new build options for Fighter (Arena Fighter), Warlock (sorceror-king pact), Shaman (elemental spirit), and Battlemind (Wild Focus) are also all pretty good and except for the Warlock one I could see using them in other settings as well.

The Feats section offers some good support for the Dark Sun options, though suffers badly from it’s somewhat cluttered organization (I wish they’d pulled all the weapon path feats out and listed them seperately).

The primer about the world is somewhat mediocre. It doesn’t give much detail on any specific locations, which I suppose allows DMs to customize the world as they see fit, it also lacks pretty much all of the style that the “Wanderer’s Journal” (world book) had in the boxed sets for 2E.

And that is where my criticism of the book starts…

It feels sterile. It is missing a lot of the life and art and style that the original 2E setting books had. The prose is lifeless and flat, the art lacks the edge that the old Baxa and Brom art had (I wish they’d just re-used that old art for the most part), and a lot of the little flavor details from the setting are missing.

Such as the coinage. Athas (the Dark Sun world) is very metal poor. The original 2E setting reflected that by having the coinage be ceramic bits and pieces. Specially glazed ceramic coins made each year that were designed to break into 10 small bits for trade. It fit the setting, made it an interesting change of pace, and has been completed ditched in 4E by having the game use the standard default D&D currency instead.

Defiling originally happened with all magic, unless you made an effort not to. Now instead, it is an option that you can choose to do with your Daily Arcane attack spells. Something that was a huge part of the setting (do you defile or are you a preserver?) has been marginalized to completely and turned into something akin to the Warlock Dark-Pact where it damages party members (yeah… they aren’t going to be too keen on that for very long).

Some things that should have been illustrated also simply weren’t. Specifically riding animals, something that players should be able to expect their character to know about, only have a brief short text description and a mention that full stats on them are to be found in the “Dark Sun Creature Catalog” (which I still need to get as the gaming store closest to me didn’t even order any copies). I know what a Kank and a Mekillot are because I played 2E, but newcomers to the setting are going to have no clue what sort of animal they are riding.

I’d describe the difference between this 4E book and the old 2E setting as the difference between someone giving you a copy of their vacation schedule listing where they were going to be and when, and someone showing you a documentary movie they made of their vacation in vibrant full color with lots of insight into the little details and quirks of the place they went and the people they met.

My summary then of the “Dark Sun Campaign Setting” book then would be that it is mechanically well written, includes a good brief overview of the world, but lacks all the wonder and style and personality that it really needed to describe the setting to people new to Dark Sun. Fans of the old 2E setting who still have their old gaming materials will be able to use the book to run a 4E game with some slight adjustments (changing the currency around back to the 2E currency, etc) but new-comers to the game world will probably have a hard time viewing it as anything other than “D&D in the Sand”.

The bad news is that advancement is borked both via the ‘Leve systems odd reset timer (8 per 48 hours) and that you get only around 8 hours of full exp per week before your exp gain quickly throttles down to very very low levels. Along with this is the fact that the Gathering classes suffer a pretty unfun deteriorating rate of return for the time spent gathering. You get good results early on, but pretty quickly you are just mining for fishing bait instead of metal ore.

Aside from the weird design decisions with advancement (and no, this isn’t me whining about it, that is really how the lead developer described advancement as working) the UI for the game is almost brain-numbingly bad. And I don’t think it is going to get much better because the game is being designed for PS3 play as well so naturally the PC users (to not have an unfair advantage) have to jump though UI hoops that are just unnecessary and ackward to deal with. Unneeded confirm buttons, unnecessary levels of menus, lack of ability to just simply drag-and-drop items around. The UI would have felt shameful for a MMO years ago, now it simply feels unforgiveable.

That said, I still have a copy of the CE of the game on pre-order, and I do still intend to be there for the headstart and give it a solid try for at least that first month, but the chances of my subscribing and playing the game past the first month feel like they are dwindling the longer I am in the beta and testing the game.

So to make it clear, I really like Cryptic as a studio and enjoy their games.

With that in mind, STO has had issues.

Crafting was poorly implemented at launch, and has only gotten somewhat better (I pursue it half-heartedly and never feel like I am missing anything by doing so).

There is a lack of content that isn’t as bad as COs, but still leaves you feeling like you have to either play every single episode with every character you play through the game or spend hours on repetitive PvP or rather bland Exploration missions (admittedly, I’ve played tons of exploration content and tend to enjoy it if for no reason other than never knowing entirely what to expect when a mission starts).

Diplomacy gameplay that has been added in also feels lackluster. It is clear they have some idea of what they want to do with it, but there is so little there right now and what their is end up being a grind of explore missions in the hope of getting Diplo EXP ones.

Klingons just finally with Season 2 got some PvE gameplay that isn’t just exploration / random encounter grinding. It’s a step forward for them, and the bits of it that I’ve played through so far have been well done, but it should have been there at launch.

The character creator, which is one of the best aspects of the game and something Cryptic always does very well, still lacks simple things like color-blindness mouseovers so you can tell what color you have selected and there still exists problems with some of the options where you get additional drop-downs showing the name of the mesh/texture that shouldn’t be visible to the players.

And the thing is, at the heart of it all, there is a good game here. A good game, some good ideas, I absolutely love space combat (ground combat still needs work but can be fun), a lot of the Federation episodes have great stories in them, but it just needed probably another six months in development and a lot more time and attention spent on it.

The good news is, the game is getting better. Season 1 and 2 had a lot of good improvements and moved the game forward. I look forward to the UGC and being able to create stories within STO of my own. They’ve talked about working on ground combat and I look forward to the changes they will make.

If you had a sub, and unsubscribed, it might be worth coming back to STO to see if the changes make you stick around a bit more. If you haven’t bought a copy yet, keep an eye on the game and look for a free trial to give it a go. I’d have a hard time recommending the game without reservations right now (it has gotten better, but it isn’t ‘great’ yet) but Season 3 will arrive sooner or later and maybe I’ll change my mind on recommending it then.

And now, I have to work for a living. Thank god it’s Thursday and the end of my work week…

Champions Online is still fun, though some of the Monster Island quests got a little stale. Several of the new quest lines were truly irritating in that they basically meant going to a map, exploring it, going back to your contact, and then heading back to the exact same map again and basically doing it over again with maybe a couple new glowies to click. The old existing content is still good, but the new content is… Meh.

The Blood Moon event coming up in CO is a bit… Hrmph… Tried it on the test server and the best thing I can say about it is that I am glad the event has at least a week left to be worked on before it goes Live.

Still looking forward to the STO (Star Trek Online) beta starting, been watching a lot of Deep Space 9 in the last couple of weeks to get back up to speed on my Trek-fu. Watching “You Are Cordially Invited” in season 6 right now, the marriage of Worf and Dax, where the male members of the cast take part in a Klingon bachelor party which turns out to be less of a bachelor party and more of a four day torture session.

Looking forward to “In The Pale Moonlight” which is several discs further into this season and which was always one of my favorite episodes.

Mid-term for the class I am taking is on Tuesday. Been sick for the last couple of days so not studied as much as I would like, also missed my Thursday class which was supposed to have been the review before the mid-term. So at this point not expecting to do as well on the test as I would like to do. Blegh.