What´s my/your current reading/viewing/playing amusement?

[Dave Syrinx]

I took the risk of updating my Windows 7 to Windows 8 prewiew. Now, I have access to IE10. I don´t usually use IE, I prefer Mozilla.
I thought it would be nice to try out the latest Microsoft has to offer, though.

At the moment I think it works out OK. I´m hesiatant to the app idea. All my programs are changed into apps and I have an ipad look to my interface.
In a way I have an App-top right now.

I understand the Windows 8 is supposed to be run on a touch pad, but it does work for laptops too.
It takes some tweaking to feel comfortable, though. Sadly, I miss my old laptop.

The problem with trying out new things is that you never know how it will work out.

I still have my old files so there won´t be any trouble keeping up with my games. When I wrap my head around the change, I´ll update the Nam scenario.

Cheers!

[Mr. Handy]

Is there any idea Apple came up with that Microsoft hasn't stolen?

I started reading Monstrous Regiment, a Discworld book by Terry Pratchett. It came out eight and half years ago, but I never finished it. I'm woefully behind in reading Discworld books.

I finally got a chance to play the Mage Knight board game's introductory scenario yesterday, and it was a lot of fun. It's a fantasy game of exploration and conquest (though conquest is purely optional in the first scenario, where the focus is on exploration). There are many options and different ways to play. I'm still learning the rules, and the intro doesn't introduce everything in the game, so there will be more to discover when I try a full game scenario.

I'm still not quite done Civ IV, though I'm getting much closer now. I'm in the middle of the Industrial Era, though I had to delay winning in order to research Biology and Medicine so that I could get my population up higher. Otherwise, I would have fallen under the 60% necessary to win the vote (with Egypt's help). Egypt likes me well enough and hates the Aztecs. They converted to my religion for 410 gold once my Open Borders mellowed them enough (I still had about 3000 left), and that got them happy enough with me eventually to agree to a Defensive Pact. They just converted back to their old religion shortly after that, but they're still okay with me. The Aztecs hate me even more for forming the pact, but if they go to war with one of us it'll be both of us fighting them, and my infantry can crush them easily. I just researched Physics, which gave me a Great Scientist for free that I'll use to speed up researching Electricity. That'll take a few turns, and then I just need Radio and then Mass Media (which is much easier to research than Radio) before I can build the UN. I may not be able to win tonight, but it should be tomorrow or soon after.

[Dave Syrinx]

I purchased an anthology at the library the other day. "The mommoth book of fantasy". Reading through the short stories in it I found a gem.

"The Moon Pool" by A. Merritt. The story begins with the vanished expedition of Dr David Throckmartin. The site of the expedion is placed on the Island of Ponape.

Half way in I feel it connects well with the mythos, and being published in 1918-1919 makes it a candidate for a classic era scenario.

Over and out!

/Dave

[Kadael]

I was looking around the local library for something to pass the time with. The selection was disappointing (six copies of Animal Farm and no 1984?!).

I vaguely remembered reading some Raymond Chandler when I was younger, and the library had precisely one copy of Trouble is My Business.

Cue new Philip Marlowe/protagonists who were later given his name obsession.

[Mr. Handy]

Murray would definitely be into that.

I put Monstrous Regiment on hold partway through because I checked out a book from my library, which has a much better selection (though much of it had been put away in storage for most of a year while they were doing renovations that have only recently been completed): In the Presence of Mine Enemies by Harry Turtledove. It's an alternate history novel set in 2010 where America stayed neutral during WWII and Germany won, and it's about Jews secretly living in Berlin. After that, I plan to read Ruled Britannia by the same author. The alternate event in that one is that the Spanish Armada defeated Drake's fleet in 1588 and Spain went on to invade and conquer Britain, and William Shakespeare is one of the central characters.

The Mage Knight board game is awesome! There's a steep learning curve and it takes a long time to play and needs a lot of space, but it's an awful lot of fun. I played a full game, where you have to conquer two cities in three days and three nights. It seems impossible when you're just starting out and not very strong (even orcs aren't pushovers), but you can grow your power pretty fast and it wasn't long before I was able to slay a dragon. I lost my first full game narrowly. I lucked out in being able to conquer the weaker of the two cities in the final night. I thought there wouldn't be any way I could conquer the second city, but the city I did conquer allowed me to buy an artifact by spending gobs of influence, so I did it, burning some movement cards to get enough. The artifact actually gave me a chance to take the second city because by sacrificing it, I could keep the defenders from fighting back and only had to worry about causing enough damage to destroy them. Without the movement cards, I thought I'd never reach it, but I used a skill to get a new spell, which made another spell available that would let me reach the city. I bought the spell at a mage tower I had taken on the way to the second city, but I had to use cards I needed for the attack to get it and my deck was nearly empty. I launched a desperate attack on the last turn of the game, but I couldn't destroy all of the defenders. I'm playing a second full game, and despite a tough initial setup I managed to get off to a rolling start. The third and final night is just about to start, and I'm poised to attack the first city. This time I may succeed, as the two cities are very close together and I have a lot of cards that can help me, including that same artifact that I was lucky enough to find in a dungeon. I just have to stop making stupid mistakes.

In my Civ IV game, the Aztecs still gained population a bit too quickly and had just enough to stop me from winning the vote, but I realized that this would happen shortly before getting Mass Media and hastily assembled an invasion fleet. I found a weakly defended city (just three spaces away from their capital) and snatched it, and that was just enough to tip the population balance in my favor. I was able to hold it against counterattacks that were halfhearted (I had been expecting serious resistance). I kept flooding in infantry and artillery, and my forces had marched right up next to the Aztec capital and were about to attack when I won the diplomatic vote. Guess the Aztecs saw reason and surrendered before I crushed them. I started playing Elemental: War of Magic's campaign mode, which also serves as a tutorial, but it's a big disappointment. The game still has bugs even after being patched up, and some things are just plain broken. There is no sense of scale in the economy, as personal wealth and your nation's budget are one and the same, and even a simple staff or a piece of salted pork costs the same as the annual output of a gold mine! It's still fun, and I intend to finish out the campaign, though it may be some time before I play it again. I much prefer Master of Magic, which also has a wider variety of stuff in the game. After I finish this game, I plan to play Civ IV again with the Beyond the Sword expansion, which adds so much that it's like a new game. I'll keep the same difficulty level for now but use the next larger map size with more rivals.

[Dave Syrinx]

"Let´s see if we can give this world another day.", character 1.

"Who talks like that?", character 2.

Priceless!


This quote and the gallery of characters in the movie Battleship, including Alexander Skarsgård and Rhianna - make it a fun to watch film. I won´t go in to politics of the movie. For me it´s an alien invasion and the response by a handful of characters.

[Kadael]

Poked around on the Interactive Fiction Database and found a couple games I hadn't played before - Shrapnel and Insight. I enjoyed them both, though I had more feelings about Insight:

1. Confusion
2. Confidence
3. Shattering of aforementioned confidence, due to confusion
4. Disappointment
5. Realization
6. Frustration
7. Utter bewilderment
8. Jon Ingold is evil
9. Jon Ingold is evil
10. Jon Ingold is evil and clever
11. Satisfaction

It's one of those games.

Unrelated: I'll be starting my game here soon. Experiencing pre-Keeper nerves. Wanting to triple-check everything.

[Dave Syrinx]

I´ve only played The Lurking Fear set on Miskatoic Campus. Enjoyed it immensely. I´ll have a look at Insight.

[Kadael]

Be warned: it's not a game that can only be played once. It's essential that you play it several times, to fully grasp the evil.

[Dave Syrinx]

Eh, Insight... The dude don´t understand English! What?!

OK, the commands are clunky as expected, but dang! It´s confusing as you said. I´ll get back on that

[Dave Syrinx]

Hmm, investigated and tried to get back to the interview room. Mission finished. I´ll have another go tomorrow. Didn´t solve the case today.

[Dave Syrinx]

Btw Kadael, did you know Mr H has written some interactive fiction? I guess he has a link somewhere to his scenario.

The end of it all

(Found it, but he has written other stuff too.)

[Mr. Handy]

Yeah, I've been writing interactive fiction for over 30 years, but I'm not as old as you might think. I started when I was about five years old after discovering the first Choose Your Own Adventure books in kindergarten. My early works weren't very good, but I've gotten a lot better since then. Somewhere I've posted a list of the stuff I've written since the mid-1990s, on Yog-Sothoth.com in one of Yockenthwaite's blogs here. I've written computer IF games as well on my old Apple IIc. I grew up on Infocom games and similar IF games in the 1980s, and I've played a lot of them.

I'm more than two-thirds of the way through In the Presence of Mine Enemies. About a year has passed in the story, and things are changing gradually, but I think the pace will really pick up in the rest of the book in order to resolve things.

My plan in Mage Knight worked like a charm, and I conquered both cities with two turns to spare. I've played Elder Sign again and won; it's a lot easier playing solo than Arkham Horror. I've played Castle Panic again, which is also pretty easy, and I played another game of Pandemic with the On the Brink expansion, but I narrowly lost. After I play again and win, I want to try Space Infantry with the advanced rules and then play Mage Knight again.

My PS3 died again last week. It didn't even last three months, and I lost another DVD that got stuck inside it. Luckily, it's still discounted so I can buy another copy without spending as much. Apprently there was also no warranty on the PS3, or on any online purchases from GameStop, but at least they're giving me a refund anyway. I ordered a used PS3 through Amazon from a guy in Hawaii that still has three months of warranty left on it, and he threw in an extra controller, a cooling fan (which will hopefully keep my system alive longer), and a whole bunch of PS1, 2, and 3 games. It was supposed to be a backwards-compatible 80 GB model, but it turned out to be a 60 GB model like the two I had that died.

I finished the campaign in Elemental, which was easy but time consuming. Now I'm looking through the expansion changes before starting a game of Civ IV with Beyond the Sword added. There's a lot of cool new stuff.

[Kadael]

Wow, that's really cool! I've done a little work with both traditional IF and choose-your-own adventure, but I have yet to finish anything. I don't personally know anybody with an interest in those kinds of games. If I'm lucky, they know what a grue is.

Those old books were silly. I think in at least one, it was impossible to get an ending that resembled winning.

[Mr. Handy]

I'm in the middle of watching There Will Be Blood, which is great so far. I bought two DVD boxsets that were on sale last week (Knight Rider Season 2, which completes the series for me, and The Fall Guy Season 1, which is the only one available in North America), and when you buy two things they had a special deal where you get your choice of one of about a dozen movies for free, and I chose this one.

I've got a huge collection of gamebooks, though it's by no means exhaustive. The Way of the Tiger series was great. There are only six books (I'm missing Book 5, which is supposed to be the best), and the sixth one ends on a cliffhanger, which I've heard was intentional. Maybe that's the one you mean. The Lone Wolf series is epic and features a living, breathing world. Mongoose Publishing is editing and rereleasing them with bonus adventures in hardback collector's editions, and I purchased a deal where I get them all as they come out. However, they're going much, much slower than they promised. They were supposed to release one every month or two, but it's been almost five years and they're only up to Book 17 (there were originally 28, and the author is working on four new ones). They came out fairly quickly initially, but now we're lucky if we get more than two per year. They're also full of errors. Even when they've corrected errors in the original books, new ones have crept in.

I also have some solo adventures for various roleplaying games. The only one I have for CoC is Grimrock Isle, as the others are out of print and I haven't found them. I do plan to write some solo adventures myself if I ever have time. If you look at the list in that link, you can see that I've written some for GURPS, but I haven't had time to do that since 2001.

[Kadael]

I have yet to come close to finishing the Lone Wolf series. I love it, but it keeps killing me.

[Mr. Handy]

I know what you mean. I was extremely lucky just to get to Book 17, let alone actually complete it with my veteran character who has been through all of the books. I start over from Book 1 whenever I die, and there are a lot of random instant deaths that are unavoidable. Many of them are in the first five books, which isn't so bad, and there are none in Books 6-12, but the Grandmaster series (13-20) has a ton of them. Book 17 is one of the deadliest, and I think I'm out of the woods, though I have the sneaking suspicion that I might not have the right disciplines to avoid random instant death in Book 18. If I do manage to get this character through the end of Book 20, any deaths after that point will restart from Book 21, as I'd actually be playing a different character. I've never played any of the books after 20 (and I've only played the abridged US versions of 18-20, plus it's been many years since I played those), so I'm really looking forward to them.

You can read and play Lone Wolf (and Joe Dever's other gamebooks) here on Project Aon for free, legally.

[Kadael]

That's actually where I've been playing them.

[Kadael]

I borrowed The Little Sister from a friend who likes Chandler as much as I do. I'd read it once a few years ago, and finished re-reading it today. It didn't make any more sense, but I still enjoyed it.

My friend assures me that The Long Goodbye is less complicated, so that's what I'll be reading next week.

[Dave Syrinx]

I guess I´m holding the banner for easy Reading . Never read Chandler… Took an English literature course at college, though. My bed stand has Baldacci´s Divine Justice on it. It´s about a government wet jobs specialist going below radar and trying to remain unnoticed. Doing horribly...