Tag Archives: games

Beware the Dread Gazebo, Slayer of Multitudes

Posted on by
Reply

I bought a teapot shaped like one of the most terrible, frightening monsters in the entire Dungeons & Dragons monster list. Yes, it is a frightening object, far more terrifying than the most evil, fiery dragon than you can imagine. It probably is even more fearsome than the tarrasque, although I wouldn’t want to meet one of those in a dark alley either. Or a light alley. Or anywhere, ever.

But my new teapot is way scarier than that. Check it out.

The Dread Gazebo

The Dread Gazebo in Teapot Form

That’s right, my friends. I am now the lucky owner of a teapot shaped like a Dread Gazebo.

The story of the Dread Gazebo hearkens back to the early days of Dungeons & Dragons, and tells about a player who encounters a gazebo and, well. Let’s just say the results are pretty funny.

Now the question is, how do I keep my other teapots safe from the Dread Gazebo Teapot?

Hating the Player, Hating the Game

Posted on by
2

I’m very definitely not picking a political side here, but I do want to bring to your attention this: a political advertisement attacking a candidate for playing World of Warcraft. Not for being an addict, not for ignoring her life to play. Just for playing it.

I don’t know where to begin.

I don’t know if this is just another blatant example of hating youth and everything “kids today” do, or if it’s just an example of a lack of understanding of other people’s hobbies.

Surely an ad like this that targeted someone for being in a football league–that violent, dastardly sport in which people slam other people into the ground in real life!–would be rightfully laughed out of the park. Yet somehow playing a video game that includes virtual violence, in which no one is actually hurt, is different, and deserves mockery and scorn. It makes you unfit for public office, you see!

And please, spare me the “But World of Warcraft is a hobby that eats people’s lives and everyone who plays is hopelessly addicted and spends 16 hours a day on it!”

That’s really not true. While some people do become addicted, there are plenty of casual gamers who don’t spend more time on it than most people spend, say, on television. Assuming everyone who plays becomes some sort of dope fiend, but with video games, is pure ignorance.

People who play WoW and games like it do it for many different reasons. Some like to use the game as a socialization vehicle, because it lets you talk and interact with many other people all over the world. Some use the game to create stories through roleplaying, writing elaborate adventuring stories sometimes resembling “Lord of the Rings.” Some use the game to test themselves against other people in direct virtual combat. Others like to test their skills against the game itself in dungeons or even large-scale raids. Everybody’s different.

Never, ever assume people who love the game all like to do the same things. There are people who hate large-scale raids and dungeons. There are people who don’t like player-versus-player combat. There are people who don’t want to write stories. There are even people who mostly play solo.

Games like WoW appeal to many, many different types of gamers. Claiming that someone is unfit for office because they play WoW is a little like claiming someone is unfit for office because they watch hockey games: It’s just silly.

Can we please have some political ads that actually pertain to the issues, and stop attacking people for their hobbies?

Alarming Trends, and Mr. Rogers

Posted on by
Reply

I never watched much children’s television as a child. At a young age I considered myself too old for a lot of TV shows, such as Sesame Street, because it seemed to be trying to teach me letters and numbers when I could already read and count. And books were far more interesting than television, too.

It occurs to me now I may have missed something good. Mr. Rogers, at least, seemed to be a pretty cool guy. Now someone has remixed some pieces of his show, added autotune, and made a wonderful little song about growing ideas in the “garden of your mind.”

I’m not big on video, but I do have another short clip–a very alarming video of a person wandering up to a volcano to take samples of the bubbling lava lake. This volcanologist survives the experience, but I have to wonder, isn’t this the sort of thing that is obviously stupid? It seems like a Louis Slotin waiting to happen, frankly.

Do we need to put up a sign that says “Do not taunt happy fun volcano”?

And some more links:

  • Here are some more reactions to the “MEN invented the internet” piece.
  • People will kill each other over just about anything, including, apparently, ice cream. The Glasgow Ice Cream Wars were a real thing.
  • The same things people say about those terrible video games is the same thing they used to say about those terrible television programs, those terrible movies, and those terrible books. We all know this, but sometimes it helps to have a reminder.
  • Video games have a peculiar way of telling you a task is urgent and then diverting you away from it with other tasks called “side quests.” While this is typical of a modern work day, when you’re an adventurer tasked with saving the world, it seems a bit weird. Play this tiny, five-minute game. You won’t regret it. (via BoingBoing)

Pants-Wearing Killer: An Addition

Posted on by
Reply

Apparently pants-wearing spree killer Anders Breivik actually played World of Warcraft as time off from planning his killing spree, not as a way to plan it. The news story got it wrong. In fact, most of the entities covering the trial took that same exact slant.

Plus, there’s even quite a bit of confusion on how the other game, Modern Warfare, could possibly be used as a “wargame.” Breivik wasn’t making a lot of sense when he said that, apparently.

I don’t know. I don’t play that game.

I do have to confess, however… I very often do wear pants.

Flying Saucers, Stupid Games

Posted on by
Reply

A few links to get you started on a very windy Easter:

Where Do You Keep Your Socks in a Video Game?

Posted on by
2
Nice Barrels.

Nice Barrels. Mind If I Rob You Blind?

My friend walked into somebody’s house, saw two beer barrels, and opened them up. Inside one, he found a pair of pants. In the other, there was a paint brush. I believe the homeowner was probably keeping his beer in his sock drawer, or maybe the mailbox.

Video games don’t make a whole lot of sense, do they? In real life, even if you could just wander into people’s homes and take all their stuff without any kind of protest, what you’d find in a beer barrel would probably be, well… beer.

This isn’t true of video games, and hasn’t ever been, as far as I know. In the old SNES Zelda, you could more or less wander around in people’s houses and check all their pots and urns for valuables. If you found any, you could just take them, even if the owner was standing five feet away and watching. That’s not really stealing, is it? I mean, they’d object, surely, if there was a problem.

Now we have the game Oblivion, which came out in 2006. My friend (we’ll call him C.J. for now)  was commenting on how strange people’s habits were in the game.

He found one of the characters annoying.

“… so I stole her urn and threw it in the river.”

If life were like video games, we’d go into people’s houses and find urns full of coins, glass bottles full of faeries and beer barrels full of paintbrushes. Nobody would keep pants in a pants drawer or socks in a sock drawer. They’d keep medicine in their grandfather clocks (Final Fantasy VI) and store gold coins in bricks (Super Mario Brothers).

We’d go to work and burn down bushes to try to find secret passages (The Legend of Zelda) or arrange pills (Dr. Mario). At the end of the day we’d put on our raccoon tails and fly home (Super Mario Brothers 3).

Then again, we might come home to find our urns vandalized and our precious paint brushes (so cunningly hidden in beer barrels) stolen by adventurers.

Given games, though, I doubt we’d care.

(Photo borrowed from a pretty cool review of Final Fantasy VI. Check it out!)

It’s Dangerous to Go Alone! Take This!

Posted on by
Reply

Link Visits MaSo.

I hear Link, of the very first Legend of Zelda game – you know, the best game ever – went to visit his mom recently.

Apparently she’s a pretty strong-willed old lady, and just like the old man at the beginning of the Zelda game, she has a few things she’d like to give her son in order to help him succeed in his quest.

Still waiting for the sword, mom. I’m 30, I think I can handle some adventuring right about now!

The Legend… of Awesome

Posted on by
2

Kids today have literally thousands of video games to choose from, from puzzle games to farm simulations to role-playing games to first-person shooters, many with stunning graphics in three dimensions and weird equipment shaped like guitars, magic wands and light sabers.

Maybe they don’t have it so great, though. I don’t think most of them have ever laid their mitts on what I consider the best video game of all time: The Legend of Zelda, the first game of a franchise of great games, which celebrated its 25th birthday this week.

Yep. My favorite game is older than a large percentage of gamers. I guess that makes me an old lady by the standards of the geek subculture. Pretty soon I’m going to be waving my cane and shouting at kids to get off my Internet.

The Legend of Zelda was a two-dimensional, eight-bit Nintendo game with a tinny, chirpy soundtrack that could worm its way into your skull and sit there, lurking, for literally decades. To this day, whenever I get a package in the mail and open it, the treasure-box-opening sound plays in my head.

As plots go, the game wasn’t exactly “War and Peace.” You played an elf named Link on a quest to save Princess Zelda, which you were supposed to accomplish by visiting dungeons to retrieve bits of the Triforce.

The Triforce was supposed to help you defeat Gannon, who was evil. I don’t know how we knew Gannon was evil, but we knew it. Games back then didn’t offer a whole lot of moral complexity or choices — anybody shooting at you was a bad guy, because you were the good guy.

Given the Nintendo’s graphical capabilities, Link was pretty much a little green, brown and peach blob on the screen.

He had a sword. You could get a shield, bombs, a candle, keys and a fire-flingin’ wand later, but it all started when an old man (red, white and peach blob) told you “It’s dangerous to go alone! Take this.” Then he gave you a sword and disappeared.

This sets you up for a life of disappointment, by the way. Never once has a strange person come up to me, said “It’s dangerous to go alone,” given me something cool, and vanished.

I spent many hours in my basement, curled up on the hideous orange shag rug and playing Zelda, and so did my mom.

She spent even more time painstakingly mapping out all the dungeons on graph paper for me, noting secret passages and writing down our nicknames for all the bad guys — shield-eaters, sword-eaters, skeletons, red knights and the much-trickier blue knights, which could turn on a dime and gut you.

My mom served as my patient navigator, helping me fight evil by hitting it repeatedly with sharp, pointy objects. With mom’s help, eventually we collected the pieces of the Triforce, defeated Gannon and saved Zelda, and it was truly awesome, even if Zelda was just a red, peach and brown blob.

So get off my Internet, ya whippersnappers! I have a virtual 25-year-old magic sword and a Triforce with your name on it.

Games, Laughs and Generational Speculation

Posted on by
Reply

A few random pieces of amusement for you, many of them garnered from BoingBoing:

  • Dogs Don’t Understand Basic Concepts Like Moving, a blog post about trying to move two dogs across the country, one of whom has approximately three brain cells and the other, a neurotic, nervous wreck with an anxiety problem. Complete with hilarious illustrations of one dog’s discovery of how to make food. Posts like this are why I don’t have a dog, by the way.
  • Enemy 585 is a platform game (think Super Mario Bros.) in which… you play the platform. I can’t figure out how to get past the first couple of hazards, but you may enjoy the game.
  • Which generation do you belong to? An online quiz game purports to be able to tell you what generation you’re from and what year you were born, to within a few years. Mine said I was 3 years older than I am, but that’s pretty close.
  • Better Book Titles, a site that renames books with the obvious, self-explanatory titles they should have. (Warning: At least one of the titles is crude, and I’m guessing a few others are as well.) For example: Beowulf is “The Danes Outsource an Exterminator.”
  • Finally, here’s a list of iconic newspaper headlines and their front pages. I think they missed the most famous one.

Superheroes

Posted on by
2

I successfully kicked my World of Warcraft habit.

WoW is a Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games (MMORPGs) with orcs and trolls and elves and stuff. There’s a whole mythology behind it, but basically there are two sides played by gamers, both of which try to kill each other, and a whole host of other computer-based baddies, who try to kill everyone.

I used to play quite a bit, usually a couple of hours a day and sometimes more. (If you think that sounds like a lot, how much do you watch television each day?)

Now I’m playing City of Heroes/City of Villains instead. It’s also a MMORPG, but superhero-themed instead of fantasy-themed. It has an even sillier mythology, if you think about it, though, because a. there are about 10 superheroes and supervillains (played by gamers) for every computer-based “citizen,” and b. despite the disparity, thugs still wander around trying to steal people’s purses.

I mean, there are ten people literally flying around just waiting to kick your butt, and you go and steal someone’s bag in the middle of the sidewalk in broad daylight? Ladies and gentlemen, there is such a thing as criminal stupidity.

It’s also weird just to be hanging out in a place that’s nothing but city for miles and miles (minus a few park areas where there are a. trees and b. trees that try to kill you), sort of like the West Coast megalopolis, minus movie stars, pollution and paparazzi.

Now I have a CoH/CoV habit. And I worry about suspicious-looking trees.