My Life: A Time of Endings

As my life gets more hectic, it's getting tougher to figure out my schedule, especially this week. It's my first 40 hour work week since my last job ended, and in the meantime I'm coming to an end to many things. My D&D game will have at the most 4 games left, including the one tomorrow. Everything from television show episode binges to web series are coming to an end and soon. Honesty, that's for the best, since the above work week means that a lot of what I could take for granted is over. This brings us to the beginnings. Sure, a lot of that are returning television shows. It also means starting a new living situation, though fortunately it might mean just having a new roommate for a few months, starting this new job pattern, and starting studies into a new toolset for a job application. Yes, this is all very complicated, and the message itself is disjointed and a bit directionless. But that's my life as well, and soon that phase will also come to an end. By next week, I at least hope to return to doing these semi-regularly.

Reviews: My First Bethesda, and Still More Zombies. Oh, and my life changes again.

Well, so much for THAT permanent change. The Monday after my last post, I finished my job. Or rather, it finished me. Apparently customer service is not my forte. Not that I mind, though part of me was bothered by the way that situation resolved itself. The real problem was how I had to hit the job running. Week one was "training week," except I had no formal training except for a guide to leaf through. Then during week two, I was tossed to a phone while one of their main customer services representatives was on vacation for more than a week and the entire office was being audited! It never got better. And the entire database was archaic, full of discrepancies and elaborate F key commands that differ for every menu. One day of learning these commands and the myriad exceptions would be enough, but updating the system with a real GUI and links to a map (say, with ties to Google Maps,) would cut the time to handle these questions in half.

Anyway, unemployment returned for a few weeks. I technically started a new job, but I'm in training AGAIN, so we'll see how this goes. So I had a lot of free time to play video games, including last month's birthday present, Fallout 3! This is my first Fallout game thanks to my focus on console games and my first Bethesda for pretty much the same reason. And my opinion? It's pretty good and I CAN'T stop playing it.

As a general rule, this isn't my type of game. Sure, it's an RPG, but it's also a shooter, which are fine except I've played little but them lately. Thank you, XBOX! Beyond that, I enjoy RPGS with strong main characters, but I also am not a fan of the constant sense of loss. In Fallout, you have to worry about how much weight you can carry (except ammo weighs nothing, nice that,) every weapon has ammo, and most importantly, every piece of equipment you have will degrade constantly. You have to constantly progress just to stay in place. Eventually, at least, that doesn't last forever. By the halfway point, the game mercifully gives out enough bonus money for minor, otherwise worthless items and just by adding places on your map. Ironically, the game then goes in the opposite direction in that I get too many rewards. The game has a maximum experience level of 20, making missions beyond that point pointless. That will change only when I spend money to get an expansion pack. As a result, I hit the maximum level after seeing barely half of the entire game! Since I plan on getting the expansion pack eventually, actually playing the rest of the game now would be a waste of the experience I would only get after I bought the expansion pack.

To make up for that, I started a second, evil character and am playing him until I'm ready to get the expansion pack. This time, I went out of my way to avoid experience bonuses, letting me see more of the game, though I still get shocked when I gain nearly an entire level from a single, short quest. Having played this game A LOT now, I can safely say that I'm ready to give my opinion. The best thing of this game is the vast number of options. Sure, you can save a town from destruction by evil forces. Or you can work with those evil forces and even press the button that turns the entire city into a mushroom cloud. The game lets you be as kind or evil as you want. Ally with noble knights in powered armors or massacre the downtrodden for evil indistrialists. Save escaped slaves or be a slaver itself. Return home to save your troubled people or murder and EAT your childhood friend! In fact, the biggest downside to the game (save for a glaring number of bugs still, from people reacting strangely to outright game freezings,) are the lack of options! For my "good person" game, I saved whole cities and am considered a messianic saint, but I didn't feel like I was helping the people overall. Hell, because random encounters get worse to match your level, the wasteland gets consistently more dangerous as you act. Thanks to the open nature of the game, this means tons of unique characters can be randomly killed off.

The one thing I really missed was any form of romantic options. Sure, the romance arcs of similar games like Mass Effect tend to be pretty limited, but at least they gave you an option. If I wanted to date, say, the quirky inventor of your hero's home base (unless you explode said home base,) why not set that up? I understand that no video game can equal your imagination. That's what tabletop role playing games (and, err, your imagination,) are for. But I still felt a bit unsatisfied. Still, that that's the worst thing you can complain about in a game, I'd call that a success.

Slightly less successful was the next game I played, Dead Rising. Dead Rising is a very Romero-esque zombie apocalypse game from Capcom. That was strange unto itself, since it was made by Capcom, who already has a zombie apocalypse series. In fact, they have the series that revolutionized the survival horror genre: Resident Evil. Capcom understandably wanted to make this series nothing like the other one, and in a way it was. Resident Evil was supposedly a survivor horror game, but it was a lot like a normal adventure game full of strange puzzles and labyrinthine police station/dungeons along with super-mutant bosses. If anything, Dead Rising cuts back on the horror in favor of the survival elements. In this one, your goal is mostly just to survive 72 hours and get as many survivors rescued and as many mysteries solved as possible. In many ways, the main enemy isn't the zombie horde, but the clock. Often you have to find a way to escort a horde of survivors with only minutes to spare before the next plot point flag.

The lack of "horror" also makes the zombie fights less horrific, and they knew it, so they made it more fun. Gone are the evolved super-mutants, with only two varieties of zombies: normal slow, shuffling zombies and slightly more aggressive slow, shuffling zombies. Instead, the boss enemies are all humans gone mad or just evil in the wake of the zombie disaster. The game's appeal comes, at least initially, from an endless hoard of slow-moving, shuffling zombies and the myriad ways you can mess with them.

This coupled with the time and survivor escorting elements, however, made for a game that seemed to hate itself. Yes, it's fun wacky times killing zombies en masse with a lawnmower, or running over them with a car, or putting silly hats on them mid-fight, or beating on them with novelty weapons like huge teddy bears, but if you actually try to, you know, win the game, the difficulty quadruples. Zombies you laugh at when you run past become deadly threats to the five or more very, very stupid people you try to escort to safety. And so you have to go out of your way to save them, which puts you in danger as well, and believe me, nothing is more fun than being grappled three times in a row and having to do quick-time events each time. And so you soon realize you have to forget the joke items and focus on real killing weapons like every other zombie game. The main offender here is a single optional boss fight that becomes an easy mode (or at least less hard mode) option. Defeat him and you get unlimited access to deadly hand-held chainsaws, AND you discover a convenient teleporter that gets you from the single farthest point from safety, a point that normally requires traveling though the most choked zombie points or into a battle with insane convicts armed with a jeep and turret, to within sauntering distance of the safe house.

It makes the game hard to appreciate it. I rented it expecting mindless fun and got something often frustratingly hard. The time limit and stupid victims, who eagerly avoided easy routes to run into swarms of zombies and needed help from inescapable grapples constantly, were a nightmare. Literally. There were some rough nights there. As a game, it worked and it was certainly engrossing (both in pun and non-pun definitions,) but it certainly needed just a little more time to get the rough parts out. And the story had issues as well. It was your usual horror movie cheese, intentionally humorous at times, but it had some clever twists involving multiple endings. If you just survive the 3 days, you get a generally positive ending, but if you finish all the story missions, you can get into longer endings involving secret government conspiracies, obvious sequel hooks, and a fairly uninspired final boss fight. What's odd, though, is the endings don't always make sense collectively. I'll avoid spoilers, but just for an example, one character who is perfectly fine in the normal ending becomes a zombie in the good endings, despite nothing remotely related to this changing. Similarly, the game is really vague about just how you become a zombie. Your fellow survivors become a zombie if they are killed by zombies, sure. But you and pretty much every one of them will get at least damaged by zombies, and yet some parts of the game insist that even a zombie bite could infect you. What, were the zombies just gumming people to death otherwise? Is this Schrodinger's zombie apocalypse?

Ultimately, I'd at least suggest people play these games. Fallout 3 is recommended for anyone with plenty of free time, and Dead Rising to anyone without blood pressure problems. And yes, this is at least two updates I merged into one after the first was embarrassingly late. Things have been weird, lately. I'll get into that more some time in a week or so.

My Life: A Change For the Permanent-y?

So, change is happening again! Yay! Yay. First of all, I may or may not have found a semi-permanent job again. That's the good news. The bad news is that, for now, it pays $10 an hour so people can scream at me about garbage. In other words, we're talking about customer service. I'm a temp to hire for now, so I'm temping and may get hired for a more reasonable $13 an hour in three months. Whether I'm up to that is another story, but we'll see. In the meantime, I have a more immediate concern. My roommate is declaring bankruptcy and moving out next month. That's not a big problem, since my lease ends that month as well and I was planning on moving out anyway. That means, however, that I need to find a new place and, more importantly, another roommate. I can find a cheaper place than this, yes, but a cheap place paid by myself is still much more than two people paying for a single place.

So that's my next two panic situations. I have at least one link for the apartment issue that I have to check out tomorrow, so my great fear, moving back with the parents, appears to be averted for now. But it's not so simple. Part of me hopes to live in or closer to the city so I can theoretically enjoy it's presence. But that makes me too far from my current job, so I likely can't keep it. No big loss, but it might mean losing my unemployment. And there's also the cost and hassle of moving. Being a nitwit, I bought a lot of nice furniture, and while I finally paid all of it, it's all really damn heavy. I need either a lot of help or movers. Either way, it'll be trickier, but at least it won't be in the winter like the one time I helped my brother move. And I probably won't need to drag a couch up a balcony by a tow rope and almost drop it on a car. That's a good story, that one, but not one I want to relive with stuff I paid for.

So that's the first two phases of my process. This isn't the best time to finally get back to my D&D game and try to sell my screenplay next year. But, I'm doing it anyway!

My Ideas: Something Quick and Crazy

Like most artists (and wannabes who want to call themselves artists) I get many of my ideas from my life. In my case, though, it tends to be less about my real life, and more about the lives I imagine had things been different. Or, even better, a life that's nowhere near normal and careens headlong into weird. After all, if I can't have a normal life, why not aim for something better? And because I have a decent number of regrets with how my life went, lately, my fantasies relate to how I could alter things if I could start over, armed with knowledge I had (or could get if I had a day to prepare.)

These ideas usually stat with me returning to myself at age seven, right about when my family moves to a new town. That's where I generally pinpoint where things went "wrong" for me. I never really adjusted to a new town, which lead to being bullied and ostracized, which made things difficult in high school, and so on. Now, it wouldn't be rewriting time itself. After all, any change I made could cause some people to die as they otherwise lived, or even prevent them from being born. My niece was born 3 years ago, and I wouldn't want to change anything if it meant effectively murdering her. So instead, I would be reborn in an alternate dimension, where "me number 2" could alter this dimension as I saw fit without consequence.

How I do that depends on how little and opportunity I had. My minimalistic version is mostly a matter of confidence and knowledge. I would approach school, for example, in a more assertive way, and much more importantly I won't give a damn about bullies. I still won't worry about sports, but I can try some that I might enjoy more than friggin' volleyball. You know, martial arts, goofy crap like fencing, even something like track. More importantly, I could focus on my video game interests from a much younger age, learning Japanese and even some programming as early as age eight.

But it wouldn't be my idea if I couldn't exploit it more than that. At the minimum, I could easily use it for simple acts of gambling. I certainly would be one of the few to know who shot Mr. Burns, for example. And of course I'll have at least a general knowledge of who to invest in. Now, my fantasies tend to be far more advanced, including not just one, but multiple iterations of this repeated life, letting me easily track lottery numbers and whatnot. I also included the concept of an extradimensional space that also follows me into the past. This ever-expanding "suitcase" would freeze in time when close, but when opened, I could put objects in for later time-skips. This could include newspapers, textbooks and scientific journals, and other ways to help the people of 1986 thanks to the people of 2009. I could warn celebrities and others of their upcoming deaths to prevent or prepare for them, advance science in 20 year iterations, and even prevent disasters like 9/11!

By iteration 5 or so, my theories become pure science fiction. I could even become a cyborg or something better as early as seven or eight. Eventually, I could even invite people into the extra-dimensional space, letting them travel to other dimensions as well as part of a permanent community dedicated to advancing technology. There is no overt end result, but I hope it ends with understanding space and time enough to end the cycle myself, even traveling to earlier dimensions to help the people I left behind when I traveled into the past; even leaving clones is a possibility. But I also wanted an option to stay behind if I ever was so happy with one iteration that I don't want to leave it behind. In that option, the "suitcase" and all the messages I have in it are left to a normal, otherwise unaware seven year old me and I could continue to live my life.

But eventually, like all my ideas, I eventually decided this could be more than a fantasy. It could be a game idea! The game, tentatively called "New Dawn," takes place in a more limited fantasy dimension, but the idea is the same. The player can improve mental stats and retain memories and evidence to change history, though of course each change results in consequences that the player didn't experience last time. Now, for a video game, a goal might be necessary. Maybe something catastrophic happens right before the time-skip, like an alien invasion or the planet being destroyed, and the player must improve technology or magical research enough to stop this threat, thus ending the time skip. There can even be other people with the same ability, and the player has to compete against them by advancing faster than them or finding them and stopping their progress in some way (erasing their memories? Destroying everything in their suitcases? Just making them happy enough that they won't pass their consciousness to another iteration?)

And because my ideas tend to be weird and focused on relationships, I also had one last addition. Either as the default or as an optional ability, exactly one thing would change about the player with every iteration: the player's gender. This would force a new perspective, and it would potentially open up entire new relationships. I say potentially because I don't even know how to start figuring out the player's sexuality in that situation, let alone that of every potential romantic interested, though in the former the ideal is probably just let the player decide.

Is it a possible video game? Sure, even if that last part might go, and provided the budget for a such an expansive game is there. But it's just as important a thought exercise. What would you do? What are the ethics of removing potential people, or potentially possessing your own seven-year old self? How much of your identity is tied up to your body and your experiences? And after a few iterations, how much of your humanity would be left? After centuries of knowledge and multiple body alterations, would you think of yourself as a person, a monster, or a god? How much evil would you be willing to inflict if you know that, at least from your perspective, it would all be reset? At the very least, it's a good insight into what the hell is wrong with me. As for when the "alternating gender" idea entered into the equation, well, I'll let that one go.

My Life: Suddenly Getting Busier

Well, I wish I can say I was bored lately. But these last few weeks have been crazy. First of all, I began my quest to find a school this fall, should I get the opportunity to do so. I visited six schools in the last two weeks, including Flashpoint, Depaul, the Schaumburg Illinois Institute of the Arts, the International Academy of Design and Technology, Columbia College, and finally Westwood. Phew! I'm tires just saying all that. But I think I narrowed it down to a few schools.

Even so, I haven't even made my most basic decision: what degree should I get? Another Bachelor, a Masters, or just a more informal certificate from an academy like Flashpoint? Before I can even make THAT decision, I need financial information from FAFSA. I doubtlessly need loans to even start this plan. And beyond that, I'll need employment.

Speaking of which, in between panicking over one of the biggest decisions of my life, I actually have become gainfully employed again! For a month. Until the end of June, I'm working in data entry. Unfortunately, the data entry is manual writing, not the obscenely fast typing skills I developed for years. It also means it pays less, but at least it's steady, extending my unemployment while also making more than I did until recently.

And this job gives an hour lunch and two 15-minute breaks, giving me enough time to make phone calls. So I still can decide and make necessary phone calls while working. My creative writing has suffered, however.

So, for the nonexistent people reasind this thing, the question is this: do I get the masters, taking advantage of my bachelor degree in computer science, a more prestigious degree, and largely night classes that allows for more employment opportunities in exchange for a programming-heavy curriculum I'm less interested in, a second bachelor in two years in an art school that's slightly cheaper but has less options for financial aid and a relatively low success rate, but with more hands-on work and internship experience, and finally a very new, very modern academy with its own student loans but with no current accreditation, giving the strongest focus on game development but also the greatest risk? It's a very difficult question, but fortunately I can delay it until I at least get my FAFSA info.

My Ideas: Writing For a Teeny Audience

Earlier in this blog (somewhere around the Revolutionary War, I believe,) I last mentioned my earlier experience as a player of Dungeons and Dragons and other role-playing games. Of course, I never just wanted to play these games. I wanted to run them. This shouldn't be too surprising to any who reads this blog (and other mythological figures.) I not only love the act of creation, I love showing it to the public. I love it when my work is evaluated and, well, recognized. Narcisistic? A little, but that's just a part of being an artist. Besides, if nobody responds to your stuff, you can't improve on it.

Not that it didn't take me a while. I'll focus on the first of my not immediately catastrophic attempt at running a D&D game. There were at least three failures before this point. The first was when I browbeated my friends into the game. Things were already looking bad when one of my friends tore up his character sheet and quit midway through the first adventure. To be fair, he's been known to be a bit overdramatic. It nonetheless lasted for about five or six adventures before the rest of my barely interested friends gave up. Round two was even worse; I got some of my friends (including the guy who quit last time) and the barely interested friends of my brother. It lasted about three or four adventures and ended with the whole party being captured, but at least I got some interesting characters out of that one. Finally, I tried running a game, which eventually became my first 3rd edition game, with the D&D group in college. It went okay for a few adventures one year, but over the summer, two players broke up, one friend quit the group out of the fallout of that, and a fourth left the school, leaving me with about 1.5 players. So it goes.

Finally, after graduating from college, I gave up on the attempt to convince my friends and just posted for ads online. That eventually got me three or four players, and so the game began! This game started with and idea I got a couple of years ago prior. The first adventure used pre-generated characters of a fairly high level and absolutely no relation or alliance. All the characters hunted the Quill of Destiny, an artifact of incredible power that let its user write the future, but only for a limited time. The characters alternated between working together to pass challenges and earn orbs that extend the time they can use the Quill, and happily stealing from each other or fighting to claim the right of the Quill. It didn't help that half the selected starting characters are evil.

And so, at the end of the adventure, three characters made it to the end with the Quill, with one character dead after the others abandoned him to a dragon and another character repeatedly shot by another character. Of those three, two were evil, and they wrote of conquered dragon armies, evil empires built out of the undead, and in one particularly clever idea, day itself would only last a quarter as long as normal. The last guy was neutral and fortunately created some vestige of civilization, albeit underground, which is actually pretty helpful what with the only three hours a day of sun and the almost lifeless surface.

Now that the players could make their own characters, they became special forces for the main underground city. This time, I went creative/weird, and I made them all partially amnesiac. They knew their history, but none of the names of their friends, family, hometowns, etc. It was only after meeting these people that they remembered these names; as if hearing it the first time triggered their memory. Oh, and they all met a strange shadowy figure the day they got the amnesia, saying that they were her children and it was their job to destroy the "usurpers."

The campaign sort of blipped over that last bit for a while, though. It initially is about the characters running a literal underground resistance against the evil orc/dragon and undead empires, but soon they discover a much worse threat. In addition to all the other changes to the standard D&D setting, I included another one; the standard gods were gone, to be replaced by own pantheon. That pantheon consisted of twelve goddesses known as the Sisters. That's right, I got them from the Valley game I mentioned ages ago. But the characters only knew about 11 goddesses. In this world like the original, Bas, the only evil goddess, fell and was forgotten. However, somebody discovered her, and she is slowly rising to power. When she does so physically, she will be a goddess manifest on the material plane, with all the unpleasantness that suggests.

The plot soon revolved on fighting Bas and her forces while simultaneously learning more about the strange world's history. The Quill, it turned out, has been around for millions of years and was created deliberately by a power higher than the gods. Ideally, it appears every time the world was building to an unstoppable climax, leading to a final victory of good or evil. The Quill let some mid-level forces take over and change the story completely, and it would be centuries or millennia before another climax would develop. As a result, there were the ruins of countless civilizations buried in the world, often with advanced technology or other forces unknown to a typical fantasy game.

This time, however, things went wrong. When Bas fell, she made a crater that penetrated many of those ruins, and as she started to recover, she gained access to powers that should have been left alone. And as the players continued their adventures, they discovered more of these ancient land, including an entire hi-tech city (with a nuclear weapon) currently inhabited by the surviving good and neutral dragons.

But all things must end, and this campaign didn't end well, though it came close, right on to the edge. My biggest problem with my longer-lasting games is consistent players. That's what comes from recruiting via online and otherwise using former strangers. Often it's just a matter of time, of course. People get busy, life happens. Occasionally it's the person, of course. In one case, which led to me taking a month off and switching to a game every two weeks instead of every week, a player cussed me out and quit the game after learning I was talking online about weakening his vastly overpowered magical armor. Other times, there were fights between players, and I am not good at conflict resolution, at least not after people are already angry.

But this game died to more traditional reasons. All of a sudden, two players, including the last one to still be there from Day 1, were moving out of state. One of said players was hosting the game for a good year by then, so we lost our regular game site. And that means losing another player who came from the other direction. Half the party gone, we had to end the regular sessions. We tried to at least finish the game by playing online, and for an adventure or two, that worked or came close to it. But in the end, people just drifted away. Everyone was epic level, half the people had barely functioning internet connections or just couldn't show up often, and combat already takes ludicrously long at that stage even before you factor in the delays from online gaming. The campaign's story ended with a few final entries into my enworld-based story hour, using a few comments from the players to modify things. At the most, we were three adventures away from ending the campaign.

That ending has haunted me ever since. What could I have done better? The easy answer, of course, would be to cut out some of the less important adventures, but how would I know when the game would suddenly end? Or I should have accepted that the online game was a half-assed fix at best and sped to the campaign's conclusion, which started with an epic war against Bas and her forces. That led to an actual final battle between Bas herself and the party, of course. But it concluded with the party getting access to the Quill of Destiny just as the two former users and current emperors attempt to use its power a second time. Both sides would attack Bas' own surviving generals, letting the future of the world be rewritten. Now, this last bit I was able to at least do with input from the players, though it resulted in the very climax the Quill was supposed to avoid. So the world of the Quill came to an end, its survivors in a state of eternal "Happily ever after."

As for the amnesia and “destroy the usurpers” thing, it came up much, much later and was promptly ignored by the players. Basically, they were all (or most, at that point) former servants of Lolth, who was pissed that the non-evil underground empire largely consisted of drow who reformed and no longer worshipped her. So Lolth revived her servants in new bodies and altered the memories of everyone on the plane to think the characters, who mostly replaced people that actually died in the real history, were there all along. They never figured that much out, so it never factored into their writings in the Quill, but I thought it was a clever idea nonetheless.

But I wasn't entirely satisfied with that ending, and I assumed neither were some of the characters who didn't write about such things. In the end, it provided me for the initial inspiration of Mesion, the campaign setting I'm currently running. How will it end? I can't say. The characters are 19th level, the world is within months of possibly ending, and in real life, I lost my job and may have to move by the end of August. This could be another heartbreak, or it could be the end I always wanted in my stories. But I'll be sure to say either way, and give a bit more detail about my storytelling method in general, when the time comes!

My Life: Employment For a Bit (Originally to be posted on April 30th)

Well, technically I'm working again. This will be true until, at last estimate, Monday. It's a temp job I got, and it's just basic data entry, but hey, it's a start. And it's more money than I make from normal unemployment. That's the good news. The bad news? My car's engine needs repair that will cost me most of any additional money I make. Also my back decided it hated me. I've had my back go out at times, and it usually was pretty bad; I had to walk with a hunch for a few days, exercise is difficult, and whatnot. But that hasn't happened in a while, and this was different. It felt like my side was the source of the problem, specifically my lower left rib. Ironically, the exercises I used to help my other back problems might have caused this one! Sigh.

But as depressed as I was around Tuesday, I'm feeling a bit better now. My back is at least 30% better, though I'm waiting until at least Sunday to actually get some exercise. And tomorrow's a Friday! Which means something again! Meanwhile, the screenplay I mentioned earlier is finished, or at least its first draft is. Now, all I have to do is get it critiqued by friends and family. From there, I'll do a few more drafts and even try to find an agent. Meanwhile, my next task is to find school, preferably something of the design area. If I can't find a permanent on job by August, my lease runs out in August anyway, so why not? But I'll explore that in details later.