Penny Arcade

Gyromancer appears to be the work of a nefarious intellect, when the truth is substantially more beautiful: Gyromancer stands as proof of an interested, active, and present divinity, like spontaneous fermentation.  Such indicators are rare, and when we find them we must cling to them, like hunks of bobbing wreckage.

Because those three days were so dense, memories from PAX are still decompressing and being presented to me with the urgency of the present moment.  So vast (bordering on ridiculous) was this year’s Exhibition Room that I was not able to see the entirety of it, particularly events which appeared and were gone, like the Brink demo.  In what must seem a bizarre inversion, I felt confident skipping the Blizzard booth almost entirely, though it included such unerring projectiles as Starcraft 2, Diablo 3, and World of Warcraft: Cataclysm.  They’re the kind of games that require no explicatory link.  For me, enthusiasm is in fixed supply, and represents an investment of self.  That is why I utilized the “Bet” nomenclature when collating my list.  I’ll buy the aforementioned games, and most likely enjoy them, but there’s really nothing for me to fantasize about.  By comparison, Heavy Rain is the kind of game I would place a few chips on.  It had but a single screen at the event, which strikes me as an injustice, but it’s not an especially mainstream play.

Things that occur in games tend to be things which veer from the routine, just by definition.  There are games which take mundane lives as their subject, The Sims stands out, but those lives are abstracted to a tremendous extent.  Heavy Rain certainly has high drama, but not since Shenmue have I seen a game so obsessed with manifesting the actual world.  Heavy Rain relies on “scenes” as a metaphor for progression instead of an explorable nineteen eighties Japan, sure.  But in their almost romantic devotion to the ordinary, the commonplace, and the real, they are cousins.

The following is a public service announcement.

Releasing your Goddamned reviews for Uncharted 2 more than two weeks before the game’s retail release goes past mean, vaults over cruel, and keeps running past the sign which indicates you’ve entered the realm of bastards.

(CW)TB out.

the waves keep crashing on me

People seemed to enjoy my D&D free fall game so I thought I’d share what I did last Monday. I was inspired after playing some God of War on the PSP to see if I could recreate a classic light/mirror puzzle in D&D. Obviously I could just have them find mirrors and place them in key locations to direct an imaginary beam of light. I wanted to use real mirrors and an actual beam of light though.  I ended up getting a laser pointer and some little 1"x1” mirrors.

The laser pointer I just grabbed at an office store and the mirrors came from my local craft store. I cut up some popsicle sticks and used them as basses for the mirrors.  Next I set up my dungeon using Dwarven Forge Dungeon Tiles but you could just as easily use a hand drawn map. In fact that would probably be easier. I did not account for the unevenness of the tiles. This made it tricky at times to line up the mirrors. I started off by arranging all the mirrors myself and making sure that it was physically possible to redirect the beam through the map and hit all the key locations.

Once I had made sure it worked I removed some of the mirrors. These ones would need to be discovered with perception checks. I also placed some of them in side rooms. The party would need to kill all the monsters in these rooms to retrieve the mirror.

I decided to use the laser in three different ways. First, directing the laser onto doors marked with a special magic sigil would cause the doors to open.

Second, certain large enemies had magic shields around them and these guys could not be hurt until the shield was deactivated by striking them with the laser.

Finally the laser itself would act as a hinderance by dealing damage to any PC that got in its way.  PC’s could use their move action to move with a mirror, however they could only move half their speed. Then it was a standard action to turn the mirror.

As usual, once the players got involved some of my plans had to change.  Rather than leave the laser on and try to navigate around it, they kept sending some one back to shift the first mirror in the sequence.  This essentially killed the idea of the laser as a hazard. In hindsight I should have locked the mirrors in place or just had some unseen monsters jump the player they sent back alone.

Overall they really seemed to enjoy the game and I think the mirror puzzle was a hit.

-Gabe out