The Con Report - Sunday

Sunday

Breakfast was good, and the coffee quite drinkable for once. I wonder if they can be persuaded to have streaky bacon as well next time... ( Click here for full story )

The Con Report - Friday

Friday

Seven AM. Up, dress, toothbrush, breakfast. Discover that Hilton Metropole has very friendly restaurant staff, quite good fried potatoes, and abysmal coffee.( Click here for full story )

Dead Monkeys

Someone once said, when confronted with calamity, “This too shall end”. Unfortunately I can’t remember the exact words, but the idea was that sooner or later, even the worst circumstances end. Quite often, as far as I can tell, by getting worse.

The point – and unfortunate corollary – is that not only bad things end.

That, then, is the foundation of the traditional Dead Monkey Party. A distilled summation of the con’s insanity, it basically involves a bunch of remarkably sober congoers getting together to convince themselves that the Con ain’t over ‘til we say it is.

And it’s always, without exception, fantastic.

It started soon after the closing ceremony. I was in the bar – because the bar do chips; as some of you will know, I can’t be bothered with booze, particularly given what I’m like sober. I suspect combining my usual level of bonkersness with alcohol would cause some sort of supercritical event. And if you doubt that, just consider that on just two portions of chips and a can of Coca-Cola I was leading a procession marching towards the DMP, singing Colonel Bogey in Dwarfish[1]. Loudly.

We reached the door to Lancre Forge. They were all in step, to my astonishment. They performed a perfect Right Wheel when I bellowed the order, halted as the book prescribes, and even executed a textbook dismissal. I was terribly impressed. It got us some odd looks – admiring, I shall assume – from those already at the party, and we headed in to join the fun.

By the way, if you’re ever at a party where there are lots of lunatics and almost as many balloons, avoid having chandeliers. There will invariably be multi-ball games of whatever it is, and I was starting to get rather nervous by the end of the evening. I still get chills at the sound “clink”.

Where was I?

Oh yes. I got chatting to Cat – who was investigating the goody bags – and after a chat with Martyn we seemed to get assigned to running Walk The Walk. Well, someone got assigned to it, anyway, and we had a whole bunch going, but I’m not sure anyone’s really clear on who – if anyone – was really in charge.

It started out as a perfectly sane, ordinary game[2]. Then I got into designing the course. The first course – which I didn’t set up – was fairly easy, and guided through it by my distinctive bellows, Essy completed the course with considerable aplomb.

That’s when things started to get silly.

The courses gradually got trickier. We used flipcharts as obstacles, angling them away from the correct route to subtly guide walkers into the walls. We set up dead ends, obfuscating the easier route and nudging players towards more obvious but much harder routes[3].

“Hey,” someone said, “this is a garden, isn’t it? Postman trying to reach the letterbox. We need a dog.”

So we got a volunteer, scrawled “DOG” on her forehead, and set her to hounding the walkers. Then we got a cat – Cat, of course – who pawed and clawed at walkers as they went by. We cast someone as a plank, lying treacherously across the path. When Kai ran the course, we blocked the route entirely, forcing him to go under one of the flipcharts.

Think that sounds silly? Well, we were just getting started. The air gradually filled with our evil laughs, as we added insane neighbours with shotguns[4], balloons on the path, random underwear models posing in the garden, the evil Cossack neighbour...

Then I had a brainwave. We set up a fairly easy course, with an almost empty section in the middle, occupied by just three lone flipcharts. Very, very easy to negotiate.

Until the walker had been blindfolded, at which point three of us each picked up one of the flipcharts and started shuffling them back and forth across the course. Moving obstacles. And you might think there are very few things as funny as hearing the guide shouting “RUN! RUN FASTER!” – but sillier was to come.

You see, by now we were completely bonkers, and Cat and I reached the same evil plan at pretty much the same time. Great minds, and whatnot.

It was a great plan. Sheer genius, a scheme of such beautifully evil simplicity that we just couldn’t resist.

So we set up a course. It looked fiendish; leans, jumps, covered sections, double-backs, dead ends... I’m not convinced it was even completable. Well, I know for a fact it couldn’t be completed; we’d removed the postbox. But that’s beside the point.

We found a victi... volunteer, let him get a glimpse of the course, blindfolded him... What he didn’t know was that his guide was in on the scheme. She – one of the Irish sisters I mentioned in my Panel Game article – had a marvellous streak of evil, which she locked and loaded as she lined him up at the start of the course.

Meanwhile, the rest of us were quickly and quietly removing all the obstacles. Every one of them. And we were getting the camera phones ready.

What happened next... well, it should be on Youtube by the time you read this[5]. But she ran him through the most evil non-existant imaginary course her magnificently twisted brain could produce, and it was great. “Duck! Step over the plank! Lean to your left! Forwards! No, faster!”

Then he finally got back to the finish line, the blindfold was removed... I’m not sure the words “you bastards” have ever been so funny.

Anyway, after that nobody wanted to do the course, and we couldn’t be bothered setting it up again anyway, so we set up a bunch of dragon racing. One of the dragons was retired with a broken neck, but other than that a good time was had by all.

Then what... oh yes, Twister. There’s always Twister. But even Twister loses its charm after a while, so we manufactured a net out of flipcharts and settled in for a game of volleyballoon, which worked rather well.

By the way, if you’re ever at a DWCon and someone offers you liquorice, decline.[6]

Anyway, by that point during the evening, the crowd batting balloons around in the middle of the room were hitting the chandelier rather more than was probably good for it, so we of the evil dispositions decided to absent ourselves before anything happened to it.

So we retired to the bar, and the proceedings there are more interestingly described in my Panel Games witterings. So have a look at them instead. Go on, shoo.

So, Mass Effect,
then. A game that got so much right, and so much wrong.

Oh, it’s a great game, no question about that. The graphics
are unfailingly gorgeous, the story is engaging and well thought out, and of
course the dialogue has the quality scripting and voice acting that we’ve come
to expect from Bioware.

In fact, if you only play the main story, there really is
very little keeping the game from perfection; it is then perhaps a bit short,
but there’s still a good ten or twelve hours’ play there. I could mention the
phenomenal settings of the main story sites, particularly the inside of the
Citadel; I could mention the fun mod system for weapons and armour, with
effects that can actually be seen; in fact, I even enjoyed driving the Mako,
but maybe that’s just me.

But then they go and do a whole bunch of things very
slightly wrong, which isn’t a problem in itself; lots of good games have done
things very slightly wrong and got away with it. No, the problem is that
they’ve done things wrong that we know from previous games they can do right.

Take something as simple as the setting, for instance.
Previous games, particularly the KOTOR series, have consisted of lots of
worlds, each highly individual, with every area and subquest visually distinct.
It’s great, it gives every single location a feel of its own, and adds to the
believability of the universe.

And in Mass Effect,
they’ve continued that; the Prothean city on Feros, for instance, is little
short of spectacular once you get out of the catacombs, and the planet which
kicks off the endgame is a lush, overgrown ancient high-tech city that really
wouldn’t look out of place in some sort of sci-fi Indiana Jones. Bioware really
do know how to make spectacular settings.

The problem is, the individual locations are limited to the
main plot locations. All the other planets you can drive around on are
basically the same craggy-mountains-with-flat-bits painted different colours
and with different weather. Every time you land on a planet you can be fairly
sure that you’ll find two ore deposits, one to three pieces of wreckage, and
some form of habitation. About half the time they’ll throw in a bloody great
Tyranid Graboid thing to liven things up.

At least, though, the planets look different, if only thanks to the incredible sky textures. The
real trouble starts when you go indoors.

Indoors, you see, anywhere that’s not on the main plot
thread, there are really only five interiors. Dank Mine, Big Warehouse, Spaceship,
Big Room With Pillars and... er... okay, four interiors. They’re not even
retextured; they’re just those same four interiors with different arrangements
of the same props and furniture. They don’t even retexture them or change the
layout to make them interesting.

Which is fair enough, I suppose. It saves time and money in
development, and after all, it’s not like anyone’s going to try to complete all
the side quests, is it? Oh, hang on...

The bottom line is that the side quests quickly become a
case of going through the motions; go in, get the crate in the empty first
room, kill all the enemies in the big second room, move on to the two back
rooms and use the object there. Roll a D6; on a 5 or 6, spawn half a dozen
extra enemies. Lather, rinse, repeat.

And that’s a shame, really, since the actual stories on
these side quests could be great with a bit more attention to setting. They’re
varied and fun, with everything from hostage negotiations to a droid that’s
gone round the twist. But they’re wasted on the identikit school of level
design.

The other major annoyance is the inventory system. First it
imposes a maximum 150-item limit, then it concludes that if you reach that you
have to discard items from the stuff
you’re picking up before it’ll let you in to the list of lower-level things
that you’d prefer to throw out. It’s infuriating, particularly as you don’t get
the option to “Well, I’ll put it down on the table here and pick it up when
I’ve cleared my backpack”. You either cram it into your inventory or you break
it down into “omni-gel”, some sort of magic goo that seems to work for
everything from repairing a carburettor to decrypting a computer lockout.

And that brings me to another thing. There’s a cute little
hacking minigame – “cute”, of course, until you’ve done it three or four times,
at which point it becomes a sort of mind-numbing frustration that you have to
indulge in because you’ll never get enough omni-gel to crack open the crates. The
problem is – showing a curious degree of laziness again, like the identical
interior locations – that the same minigame is used for everything. Hacking a computer? OK, run the hacking minigame. Found
a crashed probe? Hack into it to find, er, a medallion? Never mind. Found a BIG
LUMP OF SODDING ROCK that you want to survey? Get a hammer and chi... no, wait,
silly me. Run the hacking minigame. Obviously.

It all works, but the little niggles add up to a sort of
grating undertone of “this could be such a good game if” buzzing through your subconscious.

It’s such a shame, too, because I really do love this game.
The production design is great (I challenge anyone to not like the design of
the Normandy, for instance, though
the interior layout is clunky), the graphics are great if you’ve got the
computer for them, the story and acting and most of the controls are great...
So why did Bioware, of all people, let the game out with all those annoying
little bits? They can do so much better – we’ve seen them do so much better! – but instead they let the kernel of a
fantastic game out with rushed and irritating bits tacked on that do little but
drag the immersion and enjoyment down.

It’s rather like a Lamborghini with one of those dangling
tree things on the rear-view mirror, or a town square Christmas tree decorated
with bin bags and old shoes. Like Star
Wars with CGI, or a great bacon buttie that someone’s flung pickles into.

Oh, it’s still great. It’s just not quite as good as it
should have been.

Opus skrev:
hur ohyggligt dåligt självförtroende måste man inte ha för att bära massa saker som man inte på något sätt förtjänat ? Varför inte bara acceptera att man inte har vad som krävs ?

Du får gärna förklara hur det har med självförtroende att göra. Jag simulerar RMP för att jag ser upp till dem. Jag bär de märken jag gör för att de reflekterar rollen jag spelar. Ja, det finns två sidor på mynt, men du pratar om helt olika mynt.

Opus skrev:

Torak skrev:
Fast då undersöker ju jag ämnet rätt rejält innan, så jag vet att jag beter mig korrekt när jag representerar de förbanden

så du representerar ett förband när du spelar airsoft ? :roll:

Opus skrev:
Alla har ju olika referenser att gå efter....ett skyttemärke kan ju betyda jätte mycket för en "malaj" samtidigt som det för en jägarsoldat, inte betyder ett skit. Med all respekt för ATC...men att förtjäna något där kanske inte kräver lika mycket jobb som att tex förtjäna något inom SAS ?

Whistler skrev:
Absolut, och om det var jag som sjöng mitt på dagen och någon nattjobbande bad mig dämpa mig så skulle jag självklart gjort det, eftersom jag inte anser att han bör lida för något jag gör. Man ska inte förvänta sig något av andra som man inte kan leva upp till själv, därför anser jag att man till viss del kan förvänta sig en förståelse och respekt för det som man själv lever upp till.

Whistler skrev:
Vem har sagt att jag har planer på att få honom att må dåligt? Att jag säger att jag inte tycker det är okej, och därtill ger skäl till varför, bör vara tillräckligt för att han ska respektera detta och undvika att stöta sig med mig som medmänniska. Om han, som du säger att han full rätt till, bara skiter i min åsikt och väljer att ändå fortsätta med det som stöter mig, ja då anser jag att han har förbrukat min respekt och det är DÄR han gör fel. Har man gjort ett misstag och lärt sig av det och åtgärdat det så anser jag misstaget som försumligt, men att göra misstaget och skita i konsekvensen, det är som att förstora misstaget direkt i ansiktet på den det drabbar.

Whistler skrev:
Återigen, jag är beredd att göra honom till viljes om han tar illa upp av något jag gör. Om jag fortsätter göra det även när jag upplysts om hur han känner om det, så tycker jag det är helt logiskt att jag tappar hans respekt. Därför anser jag mig kunna förvänta mig det omvända. "Behandla andra som du vill bli behandlad".

Whistler skrev:

Twist(?) skrev:
Det kanske är jätteviktigt för honom att göra sin impression. Har du ens tänkt på det? Dessutom, att du tar illa upp och angriper honom när allt han har gjort är att försöka hedra ditt gamla förband, är det rättvist tycker du?

Whistler skrev:
Väljer de att förlora {respekten} så måste de göra ett medvetet val om detta, då jag inte anser att ett misstag som reparerats är skäl nog för att förlora den.

Whistler skrev:
Förutom mig? Var står det? Jag har till och med skrivit att även jag skulle uppskatta en impression om den gjordes på avstånd, precis i samma anda som de som kontaktats av de i tråden som gjort impressions, t ex Torak. Jag tvivlar dock starkt på att desamma kontaktade individer skulle känna samma sak om de under utövande av sin egen hobby på sin egen fritid stötte på en sådan företeelse, för jag skulle inte göra det.