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In 2015 Electronic Arts, the sole licensees for Star Wars video games, released a Star Wars game that was completely crippled by insultingly expensive loot box mechanics to unlock your favorite characters. As an example: unlocking Darth Vader, while theoretically possible in normal gameplay, would require an enormous investment of time, or alternatively you could buy a couple of loot boxes and hope he pops out. The game I’m referring to is, of course, Galaxy of Heroes, because Battlefront II 2017 was released in 2017.

Side note: Why couldn’t they just keep up the numbering on the Battlefront games? It’s not like there’s an evolving plot to stay on top of. Calling Battlefront 2015 just “Battlefront” (we had to append the year ourselves) rather than Battlefront III didn’t signal a reboot of the franchise or anything. There’s nothing to reboot. You’re either a rebel soldier or a storm trooper, you fight battles on different planets, go. Every release is going to cover the same plot in the same eras, with possibly the exception of newer games including Resistance vs. First Order in addition to Rebel Alliance vs. Empire and Republic vs. Confederacy. Maybe you add some new units or game modes, but there’s not an ongoing story to reboot. Every single one of the games is already its own retelling of the Star Wars octilogy (and counting).

Whining aside (note from ed: this is a filthy lie, whining will remain front and center for the duration of the post), Galaxy of Heroes bugs me because it seems like it might actually be a well made game with a reasonably fun (if blatantly pandering) premise, but then it does the usual mobile game thing where actually playing the game at a reasonable pace requires blatantly extortionate amounts of money.

Continue reading “I Hate EA So Much” →

Usually when I throw something together in an afternoon just to fill out the buffer, I don’t much like it, but I had quite a bit of fun with this one.

Osea is one of the major powers of the Ace Combat setting of Strangereal. Once Ace Combat 7 releases, it will have fought a total of three major wars in just 35 years. That’s a generation and a half, and in that span Osea has fought the Belkan War in 1995, the Circum-Pacific War of 2010, and the Osea-Erusea War starting in 2019. I can’t decide if it’s ridiculous that Osea has fought so many massive, continent-scale wars without any sign of long term damage to its industry or economy or if this is just a natural side effect of all Strangereal wars being decided in about two dozen sorties and thus lasting like six months.

Not to mention that Strangereal is a world where fighter pilots either fly perfectly uneventful patrols or else just sit around the airbase playing video games all day until there’s a major battle to fight. No one ever seems to fly a perfectly ordinary air patrol and actually encounter something. This is true even though it’s standard in the first mission to dogfight a small number of enemy fighters in order to get anyone new to the series used to the basic controls. That would seem like the perfect situation to be on a totally random patrol when you find an enemy patrol and they engage, but it’s usually “enemy bombers are going to blow up our airbase and finish us off completely, Player One, you’re our last hope for survival!”

So here’s the 5e Monster Manuals description of how Chaotic Good djinni view slavery:

The djinn believe that servitude is a matter of fate, and that no being can contest the hand of fate. As a result, of all the genies, djinn are the ones most amenable to servitude, though they never enjoy it. Djinn treat their slaves more like servants deserving of kindness and protection, and they part with them reluctantly.

Look, I realize that D&D alignments don’t correspond with specific, coherent philosophies, so something like “the Lawful Neutral perspective on slavery” doesn’t make sense because Lawful Neutral isn’t just one perspective, it’s a grab-bag of different perspectives, some of which are radically opposed to one another, and exactly which set of perspectives it even covers isn’t even easy to nail down.

All that being said, if your Chaotic Good society is a slave state, we’ve reached a point where alignment doesn’t mean anything at all.

It’s become fairly clear to me that creating a complete adventure in a week is not easily doable in the way that creating a short hex adventure often takes me only a couple of hours. I can still stay on schedule if I finish up the three and a half remaining adventures sometime within the four Sundays left in January, but I’m looking at a reasonably high probability that I will have to push this back to Ostara. I’m not super concerned about that because no one is awaiting the conclusion of this series with baited breath, but it does leave me without anything to post this Sunday. So you get this instead.

So I saw the Last Jedi the day before the writing of this article (December 26th – the holidays have obliterated a decent chunk of my buffer, so this will go live only a few days after). I mostly liked it, especially since unlike the Force Awakens it didn’t have such interminable unoriginality (I am deeply afraid of how Episode IX is going to play out with Abrams at the helm again) but it does have a single fatal flaw that undermines pretty much all of its plot, which is spoilery and will therefore be discussed below the break.

Continue reading “The Last Jedi’s Fatal Flaw” →

Christmas has become a weird sort of zen Buddhist celebration, or maybe an existentialist one. There’s all this ritual and commercialism draped all over it, but the true meaning of Christmas is to find the true meaning of Christmas.

So, playing Ace Combat, particularly Ace Combat Zero, has become part of my daily writing routine, in that I’ll hammer out usually two missions of it before I get started. I’ve written before about how I dislike the game’s final boss quite a bit. I stand by that, but I’ve also discovered something: Pixy’s third phase is easier to defeat the further away from Hard difficulty you get. Now, Hard is the highest difficulty level available at first, but you can unlock two more: Expert and Ace. On Expert and Ace level, Pixy is easier because he is more aggressive, which makes him easier to line up a shot on during the third phase. On Hard difficulty, enemies seem to prioritize self-preservation a lot more than on Expert or Ace, where they’ll gladly suicide rush you if they think they have decent odds of taking you down with them (indeed, probably about two-thirds of my Expert or Ace deaths were caused by enemies who died immediately before or after their missile connected and downed me).

This means that during that third phase, the one where you have to joust with Pixy by flying at him head on, firing missiles, and breaking away before his own missiles could hit you, is much, much harder, because Pixy is most averse to coming at you head on while on Hard difficulty. On Normal (and, I presume, Easy) his reflexes kinda suck and it’ll take him several seconds to realize you’ve locked a missile onto him and he should move – more than long enough to get the lock, fire, and break away. On Expert and Ace, he’s as gung-ho about murdering you as you are him, and will gladly face towards you long enough to get a missile lock and fire at you, which means the joust works as intended: It’s dangerous and can kill you a lot, but it’s not tedious.

The jousting thing also works really well in regular missions on Expert difficulty, provided you can dodge the missiles the enemies fire at you. If you’ve got an enemy on your tail, you can use afterburners to get a bit of distance, turn yourself around, fly back at him, fire missiles straight into his cockpit, and break away before he returns the favor.

Setting and achieving good goals has been a general theme for me in 2017, and now that we’re just about done with it, I thought I’d talk about one of the ways in which I’ve done so. Firstly, most of the advice I have to give is ultimately distilled from listening to Cortex for approximately 90 hours over the course of two years. Provided you don’t have ninety hours available this evening but still want to learn about good goal-setting, let’s talk about seasonal reviews and SMART goals.

Continue reading “Yule Update: SMART vs VAPID goals” →

So every now and again you get an indie-type game whose character creation process is basically just writing down three traits completely freeform and then maybe you have a number. These have not taken off to dominate the market and mindshare of roleplaying games. Seeing as how a good character creation system is often a selling point for video games, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that abdicating the chargen system to the players didn’t really go too well. People like shopping for bits and bobs to customize their character with using a limited pool of resources.

That “shopping spree” sort of rush isn’t the only reason character creation is good for RPGs, though. It also helps to avoid Mary Sue and her overcompensating counterpart Anti Sue. The heart of the Mary Sue issue is that one character is loaded down with so many more special traits than other characters in the principle cast that it becomes jarring and usually comes off as the author showering their favorite character with power and attention like an old couple spoiling their grandkids. By having each special trait tied to some kind of cost based on how special it makes the character and how often that specialness comes up, you strongly curb the ability to make Mary Sue characters.

Continue reading “What Is The Chargen Process For?” →