Adventures in Miniature Painting #1

Many of you have been regaled of my tale of woe and despair trying to buy a new camera a few years ago to take better pictures of plastic brick creations.  It basically goes like this:

1. Ask photography enthusiasts about their hobby
2. Look into really high end and super expensive recommended equipment
3. Get really confused learning a thousand things that don't really help
4. Give up in disgust without solving my problem

(If anyone cares, I bought one of these which does way more than I need and fits in my pocket.)

This basically sums up my life with painting minis.  Also, you don't need a DSLR.  The previous go-around, circa summer of 2016, I asked a bunch of my pals who paint, some of them quite well, what I should be doing.  I also started watching how-to videos on the youtoobs as one does.  As one might expect, I was bombarded with a pile of information, some useful, some otherwise.  Problem:  as a n00b, you don't know which things are useful and otherwise.  Hint:  It's because you're a n00b.  

In my case, I spent quite a lot of money and effort going down some bad paths and never finished painting anything.  Then I got busy with other stuff and waited another two years before I tried again.  Some folks might not have ever tried again and that's a sad state of affairs.  I feel like this is a common scenario.  

Since I can't talk about the only thing I'm really qualified to talk about #iworkforacompanywithstupidpolicies I'm going to try talk about this.  In a series.  Because my post count is awful.

Part 2 can be found right here.

True Story

Today I sat in a chair.  It broke.  The universe can be un-subtle sometimes.

Also, I finally realized a lifelong dream.  I finished painting a miniature.

Those two things are unrelated except that I can talk about both of them here.  So there you go.

Kel's Corollaries

You probably already know that I (quite obviously) have played a lot of MMOs but you probably didn't know that I'm almost as infamous for sometimes saying things. What things?  Well, here's a sampling.

You're probably already familiar with this one:
"You can't please everyone all the time."

To this I add the following corollaries which I've found to be largely true:
"You can't please any single person all the time."
"You can't please all people at any one time."

Corollaries, postulates, and Axioms:
"If you're only going to choose one trick, DPS is a pretty good one."
"Dead mobs do zero DPS."
"Living through an encounter is a superpower for a DPSer."

"There are very few encounters that aren't solved by liberal application of overwhelming firepower."

Quotables:
"I can't {heal | DPS |tank} any faster! I'm mashing the button as fast as I can!"
"...it's not as much fun as it sounds." This is usually preceded with a description of a very messy death or wipe.
"There are no unskilled positions." (Wildstar)
"The actors may have changed but the roles remain the same."  True in business, too!

2017 in Review

So remember when I was ultra salty about working for a stupid company that had lame media policies?  Well I don't work there anymore so now a year and change late, here's 2017 in Review.  I've cleverly published this in the past! so it should show up in the right place.


Dungeon Siege III (2011): ***
I don't think I was blogging about my gaming when I played DS1 but DS2 shows up in the first of the award-winning installments of this post, 2009 in Review. I am an unabashed Dungeon Siege fan despite its (many) flaws. DS3 has some nice throwbacks to earlier games but you can only get so much mileage out of name dropping and cameos.

The game is short by old-skool standards but I guess not by today's. I finished in around 16 hours all told in a couple weeks. Given that the game was built by Obsidian, I rather expected the writing to be better. You're beaten about the head and neck with the name of the Big Bad(TM) throughout just about every dialog and I didn't really find any of the supporting cast all that interesting. The art was pretty, the girls in particular, but gameplay was a shortcoming.

I played a long range DPSer which seemed like a good idea right up until the I realized the camera would just plain not show me as much of the field as I wanted more or less negating any bonus from having long range at all. Then there were the times when the auto-targeting system would target a mob I didn't care about as a melee bad carved my poor character up. The most maddening parts were at the end where insta-kills and un-dodge-able attack sequences became very common. Maybe it's easier for tankier types but honestly, the game should be playable for all the main character choices. To add to my frustrations, I frequently got caught on terrain unexpectedly and my character had long ability pauses which made it difficult to do anything with fine timing requirements.

Master of Orion:  Conquer the Stars (2016):  ****
MOO2 is one of my favorite games of all time and it gets installed on just about every machine I frequent. I've kicked around designs of a 4x game (here, somewhere) that mostly crib from that game of the late 90s.  Well, it seems that someone's been thinking the same thing. MOO:CtS is just about the game I've been trying to build for the last decade. It is about as much of a spiritual successor to MOO2 as I think you can get right down to the names of the ship components, buildings, and much of what they do. It's not entirely the same, but it's close enough that I mostly knew what things did before I read their descriptions. I've got some gripes which shouldn't surprise anyone.

I wasn't ever able to figure out tactical combat which sucks because that's probably my favorite part of MOO2. Ships are split into AFAICT tanks and dps but I can't figure out how to make that go. There are also weirdnesses with the way the AI interprets what they should be doing given the ship design which confounds my ability to design them properly. I might get back to it to try to figure it out later except that the game is really, really plodding. My gaming rig is about three years old now, about the middle of the pack of consumer i7s and even on small maps, the game can be extremely slow. I liked the zoom-in/zoom-out between events on the first couple games but add a few seconds pause to each of those and I got real sick of it by the end. This basically meant that I could only play small maps (a crime in a 4x) and playing a long game, say, to get at an end-game win condition, meant a lot of waiting. I would be a lot more forgiving if I didn't feel like I was waiting on the UI so much of the time.

In all, I liked MOO:CtS and I might try it again when I upgrade my big rig. I think my biggest disappointment was that I really wanted to like it more than I did.

Skyrim (2011): ****, ***** with mods
I have generally avoided Bethsoft games because I've known a lot of their ex-pats who say not flattering things about how that company is run. As a result, I've missed out on a bunch of stuff. I do not condone some of the shadier things they or their parent company have done but I can no longer deny that they've made a good game. I've now played through twiceish and I am happy to report that I now understand the memes of 2012 a lot better.

People have described Skyrim to me as "a Bethesda game" which didn't make much sense having never played one. For those who wonder, this apparently means "open world, bite sized chunks of gameplay, overworked voice actors, and frequent bugs/crashes." That's how I'm interpreting it, anyway. I don't think that really does it justice, though. There's a cleverness and subtlety of design that we don't see too terribly often plopped into a world that's as vibrant and alive as any I can name off the top of my head.  And there are bugs...lots of bugs and this after five years of the modding world fixing them.

We'll start with the stuff I didn't like which is a much shorter list than what I did like, just so's I can get it out of the way and start gushing about the best game I played thislastsome year. I found the combat pretty stiff and unrewarding, maybe one step up from DS3 but many, many steps down from Dragon's Dogma which is the standard to which I now hold all action-y combat. The early game feels way too deadly, especially on higher difficulties, and the end game feels way too easy which is doubly bad on higher difficulties. This is largely due to crafting but it's against my alignment to not play to win. I also felt that in the un-modded game there was a lot of tedium mostly due to carry weight. I need to keep all my bug parts, flowers, and rocks so I can make things but then I have to leave a lot of loot behind. Alternatively, I can be diligent about dropping all my bug parts, flowers, and rocks into a container somewhere but then I either have to ferry crap back and forth to the crafting tables or I don't have it with me when I get to a crafting table. I don't feel like this made the game better.

On a better note, I feel that much of Skyrim is pretty well designed. The dungeons and interior spaces are pseudo-branchy enough that they don't seem super linear (even though they mostly are) which has the result that I don't get super lost too often. Most of the longer ones even end in a one-way door or something at the end of the dungeon that dumps out pretty near the entrance so you don't spend a bunch of time re-tracing your steps. Nice. I also like that they're more inclined to show you something going on rather than beat you about the face and neck with it. I view a lot of the encounters as vignettes with a story for me to figure out during/after rather than the more exposition-heavy and front-loaded approaches of DS3 and Amalur. I rarely found myself skipping dialog which meant that the VO didn't annoy me which seems like a good thing for VO to not do. I also liked that there was a fairly detailed set of beliefs and history which can really only come from having five games in the same series, though I don't think Final Fantasy got the note.

I even liked some of the puzzles and mini-games which are things I've traditionally not liked. The lockpicking game deserves particular kudos for not being too brain-bendingly difficult and generally always being a gateway to a reward which takes a lot of the sting out of when it did feel too difficult.

The best part, for me anyway, was the mods. I was going to detail two but at the time of the final editing I'd only written about one and it's been a couple years since then.  So I'll leave you with one.  Inigo is the only follower you'll ever need (no, really).  At the time of posting (spring of 2019) the mod author is still working on him with a V3 release on the way.  I wish him godpseed and such a release might make me re-install and replay Skyrim again.  Yes, Inigo is that good and someday I may talk about how he's influenced some of my other gaming.

Fallout 3 (2008): ***
So as is my wont, once I've played a good game from a studio I'm otherwise not familiar with, I want to go into their back catalog and see what I've missed. As an especially fun note, I'd already purchased Fallout 3. FWIW, I hadn't played Fallout 1 or 2 so other than the superlatives others have heaped their way, I didn't really know what to expect. The short: great world, clearly in the same vein as Skyrim, but far, far more primitive.

I don't know too much about the dev cycle of this game, but it seems like all they really did was stick a very basic shooting mechanic on the game they already had. That's not a criticism as much as an observation but I think it might be the root of what I didn't like about it. The shooting part was underwhelming which, when added with the typical RPG-ness of being utter crap at the game's start, meant that the beginning was way harder than it needed to be.

And if you don't like spoilers, you can skip to the next section.  The ending was shit. The designers or writers or whomever was responsible for it really made a mess.  They telegraph a heavy dose of radiation near the ending so I thought "great, I'll take my super mutant companion who's immune to radiation to pull whatever levers might be needed."  Except that he won't.  No, he gives you a line something like "I wouldn't want to rob you of your glory."  So your character dies.  That's kind of bullshit.

Fallout: NewVegas (2010): ****
The real win for Fallout 3 was the followup made by Obsidian.  Your character miraculously comes back to life from Fallout 3 if you so choose. I guess even they though Fallout 3's ending was crap.  Writing this a year and change after the fact I only have my vague memories of it.  I remember the storytelling as pretty good but it being really, really long.  I played it with all the expansions and modded to hell and much like Fallout 3, it still crashed like crazy.  I recall it being longer than I wanted and Steam says 84 hours played.  It also says the last chievo was awarded in January of 2018 so technically this is in the wrong year.  I'm leavin' it here.  You can't stop me!

2017 not in review

If you were looking for the next installment of my award winning series, well, you're going to be disappointed. There are two reasons for this, one bad and one worse which I'm about to rant about. Suffice to say that my 2017 wasn't as awesome as I'd have liked.

I started the year intentionally unemployed. This has its ups and downs. Fast forward to a mercifully short interview cycle and I left my state-subsidized health insurance and retook my place amongst the gainfully employed. This also has had its ups and downs, though mostly up, save for working a millionty-billion overtime hours. For those wondering, this also contributes to this last year's miserable post count.

I make it a point to not talk about where I work, partly because of NDAs/confidentiality and because it's not usually pertinent to what I'm writing. I've been making games professionally for a long time and have a lot to say about their construction. I've also been playing games for a much longer time and have a lot to say about their consumption.

Many bemoan the state of the gaming press on a regular basis as if that'll fix it. For my part, I'd much rather give examples of what I'd like to see than just wax ineloquent about how bad it might be. So when you look at one of my big write ups, that's what it is: me organizing my thoughts about a thing I spent a lot of time as an expert witness with experience on both sides. I hope it is abundantly obvious that all things said here are my opinion, nothing more and nothing less. In fact, I often note this just in case it isn't clear. On my personal blog. Like a lot of people do.

My new employer has a very specific policy regarding social media of which these un-hallowed grounds are an example. "Thou shalt not, under any circumstances, speak/write/blether about anything within the scope of our business about which our competitors might soever doeth such that we, the employer, might be liable to some greater government function such as the FTC or whatever department draweth the short stick of concern, so sayeth Ye Olde Employment Agreement™, amen." Or something like that.

If you asked, I'd probably agree that thiny-veiled advertisements and corporately sponsored smear campaigns against competitors are pretty awful (curated streaming being a sketchy area). That said, I don't think that anyone with enough brain cells to rub together would have any difficulty determining that the crap written here isn't that. And if that's not the case, then I'm pretty sure humanity is Double-Dog Doomed™.

This is a stupid policy (that's an opinion), one argued from a position of fear and insecurity. In layman-ese, it means I can't talk about games here, which is dumb (also opinion). Games are probably the only thing I'm qualified to talk about with any authority and I have a lot to say about the stuff I played this year (Skyrim, my first Bethesda game, Fallout 3, and Fallout New Vegas) but about which I've put only these words to page. That's why this post is a rant instead of what I'd rather be writing.

I will probably still write up my thoughts though they'll molder with the other dozen-ish pieces I'm still putting together--editing is a bitch, yo. Some day the policy will change because it's stupid (more opinion) or because I've moved on, in no small part because of this ridiculousness (that one's fact).

So for the poor chumps from legal or HR or whomever it is who draws the short stick to police this crap (and yes, I know you do), tell your superiors that it's dumb to give people more reasons to leave your employ--I have enough of them already.

Oh, and in case it wasn't obvious:  all the writings herein are the opinions of the author only.

2019 edit:  I don't work there anymore, so a year and change out, here ya go.