Saturday, June 29, 2002  
10:05 PM
Only 3 more days until GoGamer ships my copy of Warcraft III...

Say as you might about how good games that compete against Blizzard ard, but - but Blizzard can do one thing better than nearly anyone.. Tight Control. The unit movement just feels right in their games. Nobody else really even tries, they just make theirs all feel teh same.

That brings me to another point.. somebody ought to make up a list of all the things you see ALL THE TIME in certian genres (*cough*survialhorrorcontrolscheme*cough*), and then sit down the industry in a room and point them out. To nearly every company that's ever made a computer RPG: YOUR BATTLE SYSTEM SUCKS. You click, and the rest is almost completely out of your control, outside of movement or the occasional spell. There's little strategy and it boils down to basically a stat comparison that could be done in seconds. Games like Everquest reward you for patience on how long you can sit clicking on monsters with no other control- not on any sort of skill. All player qualities get 'distilled' into the stats and you end up with a game that can play itself.
If you're going to do what's essentially a scripted fight, at least make it LOOK interesting, instead of person A and person B occasionally doing a attack animation and then waiting 5 seconds.
If some game does something STUPID that had a good chance of completely ruining the experience, but the game is popular anyway, people just copy the stupidity along with the parts that made the game popular. And nobody ever mentions it. You'll be hard pressed to find a Neverwinter Nights review that actually talks about the battle system. Not the battle rules- they'll go on at great length about how it's D&D 3rd, but they won't mention how it actually happens when you PLAY THE GAME- because it's standard CRPG fare. Keep in mind that they're heaping praise on a game WITHOUT BOTHERING TO TALK ABOUT THE ACTUAL GAMING INTERFACE. As a result nobody pays the incredible annoyance any mind and it just keeps propgating until someday a terrible CRPG battle system will devour us all.

Thursday, June 27, 2002  
2:56 PM
Many Guards shirt is now available.
Edit:
Nuff said.

Wednesday, June 26, 2002  
7:42 PM
You might notice a cafepress link to the side. This'll have a rundown of all the available merchandice, so give it a click.

Monday, June 24, 2002  
9:16 PM
At the request of an email: That Orange is Me merchandice. The shirts have the orange on the front and Khrima's speech on the back. If you have any particular shirt or object

Also, if there's any particular thing you'd like to see available so you cna buy it, don't hesistate to email me about it. I'll take it under advisement and probably get it up....


Next up is probably a remake of the Many Guards shirt, by the way.

Sunday, June 23, 2002  
7:33 PM
Just like to point out the cafepress ADVENTURERS! stores, in case you haven't checked them out yet:
Cast picture
Eternion
Gildward Forever Spoony
I'm With Less Evil
Spybot 5000
BAG Remix! If you have one of the old bag shirts, consider it a collectors item. I lost the file for that one...
The Special Store Including such amazing items as the CHOOKIE FLYING DISC and the Speed Hat!

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