#i can barely remember locations in games that i HAVE played through. treasure finding quests arent fun for me i hate them

[claitea]

i got to the hateno tech lab in botw and now i am. already stuck. what place do i go to next. i feel like going for divine beasts or whatever is Not great when i have 5 hearts, no stamina boosts and die to one hit from blue bokoblins

[zippdementia]

Part 20 Alignment May Vary: The Red Eye Watches You

Welcome to the ongoing adventures of Abenthy, Karina (Seeker of Callax), and Tyrion, as they hunt for the fabled Tomb of Haggemoth in order to save Abenthy’s friend Zennatos, to find and bring to justice Karina’s old commander who betrayed her, and to create an epic song for which Tyrion will forever be remembered. Last time they were about to leave the newly rejuvinated desert of Thud with their bounty from the Grey Tomb and head for Celaenos, a monastery of good knights where, in a library, there are to find their last clue to the location of Rori Rama, the final resting place of Haggemoth.

As GM, I’ve pulled back on rolling for random sea encounters. We are late in the adventure now, and there is good momentum built up. To throw in another encounter will, at best, slow us down and, at worst, accidentally kill the party, which is something that at this point I’d like to reserve for the remaining two main locations, not some random fight against a sea siren.

I was, in reading the possible encounter list, intrigued by one of the possibilities: a friendly bronze dragon. Encounters with dragons are going to be a big part of Red Hand of Doom and I thnk this would be a nice lead in to that. Also, Bronze Dragons are enamored with rare and unique treasures and as it happens Karina is carrying around the Rod of Storms.

The Dragon slides into the water, its gigantic body pushing through the water with slow deliberation. In only a couple strokes, it is at the Ghost Ship (now named Tywin’s Vengeance) and only now do the adventurers realize how truly huge the creature is. It leans in close, its head tilted so that one gigantic eye, large as a horse cart, stares at Karina.

“I smell the magic on you, little one,” he says.

The Rod of Storms is a cursed legendary item, one of a kind, meant to give Udo the Grey control over the weather. With it, he altered the atmosphere of the green land of Arctavia, slowly transforming it into the desert of Thud. He never had full control over the Rod, though, and it comes with a heavy curse, ensuring that any who carries it will never be free of the damp and the cold. In addition, using the Rod is difficult and can backfire, releasing powerful uncontrolled lightning, wind, and thunder magics. Only a legendarily powerful mage could hope to control it... or something which had direct communion with the weather, like a Bronze Dragon.

Karina is not fully aware of the Rod’s curse, but she does remember the warning in Udo’s tomb: “Beware the Rod of Storms, I created it but was never its master.” I decide this is an interesting opportunity for her to steer the course of the game. The Bronze Dragon, Sauros, wants to trade the location of one of its treasure stashes for the Rod of Storms. Meta-game, the decision is this: keep the Rod of Storms and both the power and risk that comes with that, or trade out a very powerful weapon for the promise of future riches (which I will create as a side adventure at some point after they find the Tomb of Haggemoth).

Karina chooses to give up the Rod. It’s the safest choice, actually, and gives me a little more control over the adventure, as the Rod is one of those wild card items that can turn the tides massively either in favor of or against the players. It forces bad weather, too, which can affect future scenes. On the downside, it is always fun to play with legendary items and tons of side adventures can come out of the mahyem they cause. For a little fun, and to share my pain, I give Karina a flaw: Having given up this powerful item, she feels its loss palpably, and believes she has made the wrong decision. She becomes obsessed with finding another powerful item like it, to replace its loss.

Sauros gives one more cryptic clue before departing. He tells Abenthy that there is a Red Eye watching over him greedily, that the Eye symbolizes great power and a dire destiny, and that Abenthy can learn more at the Monastery.

With that, the players move on to Celaenos.

Shackles of Gold

The Island of Celaenos is a rather austere, craggy piece of land jutting sharply from the ocean. There is barely enough vegetation to support the goatherds who live there and the place has a shabby, drab air about it. There is a small rocky harbor and a single impoverished village. Looming over the harbor On a nearby hill is the fortified monastery of Celaenos, where the Knights of Celaenos dwell. Their flag—a black field with a Red Half-moon and two stars—can easily be seen by any approaching ship. The harbor has a tiny dock, which can only be approached by Jollyboat or Dinghy. There are two tatty-looking vessels in the harbor, and one of them looks familiar to the players who have encountered the Ratzotto pirates before.

The people of the village respect and fear the Knights of Celeanos, and they are generally furtive and close-mouthed around strangers. The Knights are putatively in control of the island, but it is rare for them to ever leave their monastery.

The players make their way to the monastery, Karina using her magic to disguise herself as a tall Amazonian woman. They gain admittance to a vestibule which—with the doors closed behind and in front of them—seems like a deathtrap. Above them, through a glass window, two knights stare solemnly down at them. They wear white half capes, capes which cover only their right side, leaving the red and black doublet underneath visible. The crossbows they hold and the swords on their backs are of the finest make.

“Who are you? Why do you come here?”

The voice comes from a newcomer to the room. Opening the door and speaking before even fully entering the room is a young, blonde knight. His eyes, a bright blue color, hold no love or joy in them, and he stares at the players suspiciously, waiting for their answer.

This is Dickon, and he will come to play a strong role in what happens to the party at Celaenos. For now, after hearing they wish to use the library, he begrudgingly takes them to the Abbott. The Abbott, a powerfully built knight named Mordekai who looks younger than fifty years of battle hardened life would usually leave a man, is friendly and eager to banter with the party. His mood shifts, though, when they mention Zennatos.

“Scum. Thieving scum,” he hisses.

Turns out, the book that began this whole quest was stolen by Zennatos from the Celaenos monastery. The book had a curse on it, and this is what has compelled Zennatos to find the Tomb of Haggemoth, for only by doing so can he be cured. Not only is Mordekai not inclined to help anyone associated with Zennatos, he also warns that the quest for Haggemoth rings of a cursed, evil, thing:

“Think about it. A quest that is started by reading a cursed book, compelling good men to die for cursed men, sending them to a place rumoured to exist, to a tomb of a powerful mage, one who was banished from his own people... what sort of creature, tell me, would lure good men to their deaths?”

While they are debating this. A servant comes in, and Karina happens to recognize the bracers she wears: the same ones, at least from the look of them, that Rose used to control her servants back in Ottoman’s Dock. Karina bristles and accuses the Abbott of keeping slaves. 

Aaaaaaand... shit. It kind’ve goes downhill from there. The Abbott, as might be expected, does not appreciate being accused of slavery by strangers who are known associates of a thief. The party, for their part, is vastly suspicious based on seeing the pirate ship in harbor and the bracers, but willing to concede that a conspiracy could be going on under the Abbott’s nose. Abenthy uses his powers to try and detect evil on the man, gain some insight into his motives, but the Abbott only exudes an aura of good. 

The end result is that the Abbott refuses them access to the library, but says he will consider their words, and will send a verdict for them in three days. Dejected, the party heads to the only inn in town.

Cover Bands Suck

“How about some music?”

Tyrion looks around at the few sullen customers in the rugged tavern, the wood exuding the smell of sea, salt, and stale ale, and decides that livening up the place can only gain them favor. He gets up from the party’s table and heads to the corner of the barroom, passing three disheveled men with familiar Rat Tattoos on their necks.

“This is a cover of an old song, hope you know it, hope you like it!” he says in a chipper voice, and begins to play.

The Ratzottos are not impressed. They almost immediately begin calling out expletives and taunts, challenging him to “play faster!” or “play better!” and “cover bands suck!” Finally, one of them picks up a full bottle of rum and chucks it across the room.

And I roll a critical hit.

The bottle karoooms off of Tyrion’s head with a dramatic spray of blood. The music ends in a haphazard jangle of notes and piratey “yar har hars!” Tyrion is nearly killed, taken down to one hit point. And then all hell breaks loose.

Abenthy launches himself at the pirates, fists out and slamming into flesh. He takes on two at once: one a scraggly scrapper who first threw the bottle, the other a hook-handed man who uses his disability as a boon, scratching and clawing with his metal hook. A third, a hulking black man with a braided beard, charges him from the side. Karina tries to launch into combat as well by getting fancy with parkour (one of her flaws), but only succeeds in dramatically flinging herself unceremoniously over the bar and into a shelf of bottles. 

The tide turns when Tyrion uses his dissonant whispers to send the scrapper into a fit of brain bleeds, breaking his spirit and turning him into a slobbering mess. Abenthy uses COMMAND to halt the other two, and Karina puts the icing on the cake—trying to be dramatic again, she flourishes her blade, accidentally rolls a critical hit, and tears out hook hands’ eye. After this, the pirates are ready to talk under the influence of Abenthy’s Zone of Truth. What they learn distresses them.

Seems that these pirates are part of a slave ring being run from within the monastery. No mention is made of the Abbott, instead it seems that a man known as “The Seneschal” is behind the slave ring and coordinates it from within a secret cave underneath the monastery, accesible from the sea. And in three days, they are to meet the Seneschal there and prepare for “a special shipment.” Three days... the significance of the number does not escape the attention of the group. Three days is how much time the Abbott gave them before a promised response to their problem. Seems like someone has overheard of this and decided to act first.

Abenthy rewards his informants with a trip to hell—murdering the pirates and sending their souls to a master he himself does not fully understand. But this time, it feels more right than ever, like he was meant to do this. Karina and Tyrion look on, nervously, not altogether comfortable with their friend’s newfound bloodlust.

Then the players prepare for sleep, feeling that they have enough information to get the drop on their foes, not realizing how powerful the evil is that targets them, not knowing they are already one step behind in a game being played out by experienced schemers.

Next week, Weave a Song for Me.

[ciathyzareposts]

Game 367: Taskmaker (1989)

This is a pretty morbid way to organize your “to do” items.

         TaskMaker

United States

Storm Impact (developer); XOR (publisher)

Released 1989 for the Macintosh Remade and re-released as shareware in 1993

Date Started: 15 May 2020

          TaskMaker is a slick little game, probably the best I’ve played so far on the Macintosh. It uses the platform’s strengths in graphic detail and sound but offers a fuller RPG experience than most Mac games of the era. While it has that inescapable “cutesy” look of most Mac games, it’s relatively long and hard, and it has enough good, new ideas to break out of the “Ultima clone” status that you might otherwise assign it at first glance.

           It’s typical of a Mac game to offer menu options for movement. At least this isn’t the only way to move.

        We owe reader LanHawk yet another appreciation pin for tracking this down, in this case writing to the original developer for the files. Because almost everything written about the game is about the 1993 version, being able to cover the original is a nice coup. I’ll have more on the development and the two versions on a subsequent entry; I’ll probably take a run through the 1993 version while I’m covering the game rather than saving it for 1993.

      The backstory is relatively short: The land was once at peace, under the direction of a wise king. When the king died, the “governing body split into three confrontational factions.” The main character is an adventurer who remembers the way things used to be. He decides to restore order by becoming Master of the Land, but lacking experience and guidance, he seeks out the TaskMaker, an advisor of the former king.

            The TaskMaker introduces himself.

       Character creation is a process of selecting a name, then selecting five personal attributes from a list of 20. Your selections calibrate your maximum totals for seven attributes: food, health, spirit, strength, agility, intellect, and stamina. Current totals for these attributes are represented with a bar, and they deplete as you walk around the kingdom and fight. You find various potions and objects to restore lost attributes. Most important are those that restore health, because it depletes fastest in combat, and food, because everything else can be restored with rest.

           Creating a character. I imagined this one something of a bard.

         The game world is a relatively small 100 x 100, dotted with castles, dungeons, towns, and caves. The TaskMaker lives in a castle to the center-east of the land, and the basic setup is that you go to him, he gives you a quest, you go out into the world to find and complete the quest, and you return to the TaskMaker for a reward and the next quest. Quests take place in towns or dungeons. The game doesn’t make a lot of distinction between dangerous areas and safe ones, as dangerous monsters can appear in towns or castles, including the TaskMaker’s, and NPCs can appear in dungeons. 

            The game opening has you sailing to the TaskMaker’s shores. Too bad you don’t get to keep the boat.

         The equipment system is pretty advanced, offering slots for helmets, armor, cloaks, amulets, belts, gauntlets, bracers, boots, rings on both hands, and an item in each hand–either a weapon and shield, a two-handed weapon, or dual-wielding two weapons (I found the latter to be much better). No matter how much money you make, the shops (which only show you items you can afford) always seem to have a better item available. 

            Buying items in the shop.

Choosing between two helms.

           Monsters are a mix of traditional (goblins, orcs, kobolds) and somewhat original, although most of the original ones are also kind of silly, like happy faces and evil computers. I haven’t met any so far with much in the way of special attacks or defenses. None of them seem capable of magic or attacks at range, for instance. They’re simply differentiated by how many hit points they can whack away in a single combat round.

            The “Evil Mac” is a goofy enemy.

            Combat is of the early Ultima type, where you hit (F)ight and hit the creature in front of you, although it has a little more complexity with spells and usable items. Combats are quite tough, even well into the game. For the first few hours, I had to repeatedly use what we might call “exit-scumming,” by which I would lead an enemy to the exit of an area, fight as long as possible, retreat to the outer area, rest, and re-enter to continue fighting. This is made possible partly by your one advantage: you can carry a huge amount of equipment–more than 60 items. That’s enough food, potions, or whatever to outlast any enemy. But I occasionally found myself in impossible situations where enemies would appear both outside and inside at the same time.

            Battling some goblins on a bridge.

        This is where we get into another of the oddities of the game: when you die, you don’t die permanently; you go to Hell. You can escape Hell by fighting your way through demons and solving a maze (if you die in Hell, you just reappear in Hell), but you then have to go find your non-equipped equipment back on the surface. You also lose your gold in the process.

              Wandering through Hell’s maze.

         This system unfortunately introduces a weird way to cheat. The game tracks the world state independently from the character state. This theoretically allows you to have multiple characters active at once, although I don’t know how this works with the TaskMaker. Thus, if you die and reload instead of escaping from Hell, you’ll still find a pile of equipment where your character last “died.” You could use this to infinitely replicate useful objects like potions or expensive objects that you can sell at the store. I didn’t deliberately cheat this way, but it’s annoying and hard to get out of Hell, and there were times that I reloaded and then picked up some of my old, duplicated items if I happened to come across them. To avoid temptation, I’ve been trying to reload before I die in times when death seems inevitable.

The separation of character from world means that you can also take advantage of commands to reset a particular map or the entire game world, keeping your character as-is. It’s a good option if you want to clear the same dungeon twice, finding double the treasure and experience. 

           Little piles of stuff mark the location of previous deaths.

          The controls are quite good, offering keyboard backups to all of the menu commands. Spells are cast with SHIFT and the first letter of the spell. There’s an “Invoke” spell that lets you type in your own spells that you might find during the game, but it apparently also a way for the developer to introduce cheat codes and interface changes. I’ve been slow to explore spells; the one I’ve used the most is the “Strike” spell which casts a bolt at enemies. I tend to use it on fleeing enemies so I don’t have to chase them.

Sound is also quite well-done. Much of it uses spoken voice recordings. (In fact, one voice they used, a deep bass, sounds eerily like my own.) When you first start the game, the voice says, “TaskMaker.” A different one says, “What is it?” when you use the (I)dentify commands. There are screams for deaths on both sides and solid attack and spellcasting effects.

The TaskMaker’s first task was to retrieve a package he left in Skysail Village. It was in an area of the village amidst a horde of monsters and required me to figure out a switch puzzle. The game is fond of puzzles involving doorways blocked by electric forcefields for which you have to find a switch to deactivate. When I returned the package, he rewarded me with five “Instant Vacation” scrolls, invaluable items that replenish all of your meters.

     His second task was to retrieve a chessboard in his own castle. It was in an area north of the bar. Getting it involved fighting a few monsters, but it was otherwise pretty easy. He gave me a double-bladed sword.

         My reward for the second quest.

       For Task 3, he wanted me to travel to some silver mines, where he owns a share, and kill some conspirators who had taken over the mines, bringing him back a golden chalice as proof. This was a tough mission; the mines were full of numerous tough monsters, but also some nice treasure rewards. By the time it was done, I had mostly magic gear and a magic sword in each hand. The TaskMaker’s reward was a suit of platemail, a huge armor upgrade from the leather I was wearing before.

          Battling a “war wizard” in the silver mine.

         I’m still working on Task 4, which is to find an unknown magic item in the “sands of Porta.” He indicated he doesn’t know where the item is buried, so I might be “in for a lot of digging.”

           The TaskMaker gives the fourth mission.

        As you quest, you amass experience and gain levels (I’m on Level 7 now) and your attributes increase. I guess they must increase proportionally to the skills you actually use because my spirit and intellect (which governs magic) have barely gone up but my strength, agility, and stamina are almost at maximum. Health and maximum food didn’t budge for a while but increased a bit during the last few hours.

      Other features of the game: 

       The game tracks your karma based on how many good, neutral, and evil creatures you’ve slain and other acts like stealing from shops and houses in town.

            Checking out my personal statistics. I’m “basically good.”

         There’s also a score. It increases every time you solve a quest or kill a creature and slowly decreases as you move around in between those moments. High scores are tracked on a scoreboard.

There’s an “identify” command that will tell you what’s in front of you. An “action” command will use it if it’s usable.

A “get info” command tells you a bit about the history of whatever area you’re in.

         The TaskMaker’s castle.

          The game has its own “runic alphabet” used for shop and city signs. It’s not translated in the game manual, so I suppose you have to figure it out by noting the runes in places where you can guess what they’re saying. I haven’t been bothering with them, but I wonder if I’m missing hints and clues because of it.

         As I’m in Skysail, I’m guessing those runes say “SKYSAIL.”

           NPCs aren’t terribly valuable in this game unless you bribe them by giving them things. Even then, they rarely tell you anything you need to know.

              The game pokes fun at Lord British. I didn’t realize his adoption of a more executive role was well known in 1989.

          If you drink alcohol, you start to go the wrong direction when moving. I think Ultima introduced this, but I don’t remember what edition. IV, probably.

There’s a fun system where you can find valuable objects like gold bars and necklaces and “cash them in” at ATMs. It feels like ATMs were pretty new in 1989. I think my Maine hometown may have only gotten one that year. 

             Finding an ATM in a dungeon. This dungeon happens to be full of treasure, so it was a relief to find it.

          There’s a set of miscellaneous game options I’ve never seen in any other place. I feel like every game could benefit from these. I don’t know what “wandering monsters” does, though. Un-checking it doesn’t seem to stop them from appearing.

            Setting various game preferences.

          A shop in the castle offers an invisibility cloak. If you put it on, the shop will no longer transact with you because you’re invisible.

          Come on! You’re the one who sold it to me!

            I rather enjoy this basic approach: offer an open game world with a variety of small missions. You don’t have to follow the TaskMaker’s quests exclusively; nothing stops you from simply exploring the towns and dungeons in a random order, or even from solving some of the quests before the TaskMaker even gives them to you. We’ve seen this approach before, going all the way back to Akalabeth, but this is perhaps the first game to use it with such a variety of lengths, difficulties, and objectives.

         But while I’m having fun, it’s tempered by an inability to ever feel like I’m getting more powerful no matter how much my statistics and inventory increase. Every time I think I’m doing well, some new enemy suddenly pops up in a familiar location and kicks my butt. Frankly, if it hadn’t been for the extra Instant Vacations I’ve been able to loot from locations where I’ve died, I’m not sure I would have been able to make it this far. I think eventually a cycle of starvation and poverty would have put me in a permanent downward spiral. I’ve watched videos of the remake, and it looks like the developers took the edge off the difficulty level between the two, although the remake still seems challenging.

     The number of entries will be determined by the number of tasks, I guess. Ten would be just about perfect. I suspect the TaskMaker is going to turn out to be evil based on the things he’s having me do and how he reacts if I happen to pop by with a task unfinished.

      Time so far: 6 hours.

                source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/game-367-taskmaker-1989/

[viralhottopics]

Six-month-long stretches of seven-day work weeks and looming deadlines: What it takes to be a strategy guide author

Image: Christopher Mineses/mashable

Ancient map-making required mastery over the disciplines of mathematics and astronomy, the means and courage to venture into dangerous uncharted territories, inhuman patience, artistry and attention to detail, and the ability to perch on the cutting edge of every new technological advancement your cultures most talented minds could muster. David Hodgsons job is arguably more difficult and certainly more tedious.

Hodgson makes video game strategy guides which, much like ancient cartography, is a lost art of primitive methods and painstaking processes.

Not that Hodgson would complain. He started working at gaming magazines in the 90s, but was always drawn back to the world of strategy guides. Currently working on contract for Prima Games, the largest strategy guide publisher in the US, he gets access to some of the biggest games in the world months before the public. And he slaves over their every detail, spending months and months gorging on each new obsession.

I think it’s one of those jobs that you kind of have to pinch yourself, he told me in his workshop a converted guest house behind his Spanish-style Southern California home. The room is equipped with comfortable seating, a large wraparound desk housing three monitors, countless books most of them strategy guides lining floor to ceiling shelves on one wall, and various macabre knick-knacks, from Lovecraftian posters to the crown jewel: Two replica Egyptian sarcophagi flanking the flatscreen like golden guardian deities.

It’s one of those jobs that you kind of have to pinch yourself.

Exact statistics about strategy guide sales are closely guarded info, Douglas Walsh, another longtime strategy guide author, told me over Twitter. As you can imagine, the sales today have consolidated around a few big hits: Skyrim, Grand Theft Auto, things like that, he said. [Sales] have also dropped off considerably, especially for shooters. The Call of Duty and Gears of War books sell a fraction of the copies they used to. But a big hit, especially as a Limited Edition hardcover, can crack Amazon’s top 25. Fighting game books in particular (and Skyrim, GTA, etc.) have even cracked the top five.

Despite those isolated successes, the number of guides produced each year is down along with sales to about 60 every year, half of what the figure was in the PS2 era, Walsh said.

Like vinyl records, the strategy guide as we once knew it all but died as a medium with the internets rise, transforming by necessity into a niche market for hardcore collectors and hobbyists. Hodgson said hes one of around a dozen remaining strategy guide authors.

In the middle of the afternoon, the rays of golden California sunlight barely grazed the exposed rafters of Hodgsons lair. He wore a black t-shirt with the words Who are you a ghost of? a reference to his brother Ian Hodgsons experimental musical act, Moon Wiring Club, described on its own labels website as confusing English electronic music. Hodgson often speaks wistfully of his succulents, and hes frequently sarcastic, though in the dry English way that you barely register after a while.

Each guide Hodgson authors is a massive undertaking involving a six-month-long stretch of seven-day work weeks and looming deadlines, gargantuan organizational conundrums, word counts and page limits, two-week spans of 12-hour days spent hunched over monitors far from home in a game studios back room, trying to beat every quest in a 100-hour RPG. Hes been doing this long and well enough with somewhere over 100 guides to his name (he lost count around 80) that he gets to pick what games he tackles. He mostly chooses massive role-playing games like The Witcher 3 and Fallout 4, simply because he loves diving deep into overwhelmingly huge projects. These are the types of games that seem to get more complex with every release. Each new feature Hodgson must chronicle and quadruple-check is another grey hair in his tangled beard.

I have a very understanding wife, Hodgson said.

***

The process of creating a video game strategy guide is shockingly complex. Look, for example, at what it takes just to make the hundreds of maps that go into the average guide on which Hodgson works.

In the old days the 90s hed draw maps freehand on graph paper and hand them over to a designer. But the games back then were significantly smaller than the ones he writes guides for now.

He starts by doing fly-overs in a special debug version of the game that still contains developer tools, taking screenshots of every single inch of the games exterior locations. In the case of Fallout 4, that included 3.82 square miles of irradiated wilderness and crumbling city streets.

What I’ve done is I’ve flown over the entire tiles of the map, multiple times, inch by inch. I do a north-south pass, I do an east-west pass, over the course of a week, he said. This isn’t playing the game. This is me floating above each sector in the game and plotting it out.

This isn’t playing the game. This is me floating above each sector in the game and plotting it out.

The game wont be out for several months, and its still very much in development, which unfortunately means that dozens of the points he and his assistants and co-authors have plotted in these exteriors could change.

Then you have 500 maps that need to be drawn of all of the different interiors in the game, he continued. You have to figure out first how many interiors there are in the game. So you go to every location in the game, and you see how big it is, then you estimate it, then you tell [strategy guide maker] Prima, ‘It’s going to be about this big. Find more mappers please.

At this point, hes still far from done. I’ve figured out how many primary locations there are. I’ve then figured out how many secondary locations there are that don’t appear on your worldmap. Those are just like, Oh, it’s a shed. Does it appear as an icon on the world map? No. Shit. Well, it has to go in the guide, he said. I’m talking about stuff that isn’t even a quest-related location. I’m talking about a pond with some barrels in it. Maybe he doesnt have to be that thorough not all strategy guides take inventory of every nonessential part of the environment the author can find. But thats just his personality, and its part of the reason hes so good at this job.

With the exterior and interior maps more or less complete, the rough versions based on screenshots are sent to a team of around 20 designers. Its now been weeks since Hodgson first received the early build of the game, and he hasnt even written anything yet.

He hasnt catalogued, sorted and described every single gun, sword, helmet, potion, blueprint, material, artifact, food, enemy, character, spell and skill in the game; he hasnt completed every possible branch of each and every quest, mission, side-quest, bounty, treasure hunt and optional objective; he hasnt compiled strategies for every mini-game, tactics for every boss, solutions to every puzzle and tricks for every fight; and he hasnt taken the hundreds screenshots that need to accompany it all.

A lot of it isnt playing a game necessarily its just checking something in a game and then checking it against an Excel document or a map or something like that, he said. If Im playing Skyrim for 6,000 hours over ten months with a co-author, Im not Woohoo! playing Skyrim; Im going here and checking to make sure that the guides accurate at that location.

The part of my brain that says ‘You don’t need to be this meticulous’ doesn’t work.

The games change in sometimes major ways, even after the guide goes to print. In that case all they can do is update the guides online component and point readers to the web should anything in the final book prove inaccurate. Whenever possible, though, Hodgson redoes a lot of work every time he gets a new build. For 2001s 007: Agent Under Fire, for example, he had to retake all of the screenshots two days before the game was going to go to print because they changed the color of one of the lasers, he said.

The part of my brain that says ‘You don’t need to be this meticulous’ doesn’t work, Hodgson told me.

***

Hodgson began working in the video game industry in the mid 90s after graduating with a history degree from the University of Sheffield in South Yorkshire, England. Hed wanted to become a history teacher, but instead used a PlayStation fan zine hed started called PlayStation Frenzy to get a job at Maximum, a new gaming magazine from a media company called EMAP.

He wrote massive 40-page features on individual games a precursor of things to come in his career while living on a disused German fishing trawler called the St. Michael that he says was moored illegally on the River Thames in London. They had to siphon power from a nearby car scrapyard.

It sounds quite idyllic, but it wasn’t, he remembered. It was dripping with different weird poisonous acid from roofs that hadn’t been sealed, and it was sort of slowly dissolving.

I kept my PlayStation, but not my sanity, he continued.

Maximum folded after seven issues, and Hodgson went on to a brief stint at Official Nintendo Magazine before receiving a call from Dave Halverson, publisher of the popular GameFan magazine.

Hodgson moved to LA and worked on his first strategy guides at GameFan for games like Super Mario 64, Soul Blade and Doom 64 under the magazines GameFan Books division. He flitted among various publishers and magazines until 2000. He called Prima, at the time one of the biggest strategy guide companies (its main competitor, BradyGames, would later be bought by publisher Penguin Random House and folded into Prima). He sent Prima his Metal Gear Solid guide, and they assigned him Armored Core.

That was 16 years ago and I’m still doing it right now, he said.

***

Hodgson flipped lovingly through his creations as we chatted, pointing out where hed embellished a simple description with some flowery joke, or where hed really gotten into it and written entire sections in the voice of a character from the game.

That love goes both ways CD Projekt Red, developers of The Witcher 3, built Hodgson his own tribute in the form of book merchant Marcus T.K. Hodgson, a character in the games Free City of Novigrad.

We just wanted to honor David for all the awesome work he does, CD Projekt PR Manager Radek Grabowski told me over email. This is just a tribute.

The Witcher 3 tributes Hodgson in the form of book merchant Marcus T.K. Hodgson

Hodgson seems to always go above and beyond. His humor is often self-deprecating, but hes also proud when he talks about some of the things hes accomplished within the limited medium of strategy guides, like the note he received from Hideo Kojima about his Metal Gear Solid guide in 1998.

Strategy guides were usually just go here, do this, go here, do that. I wanted it to be a bit more of an ‘official mission handbook.'”

He loved the guide. He liked the fact that I’d put box-outs for the history of the forklift truck in the first level, Hodgson said. Strategy guides were usually just go here, do this, go here, do that. I wanted it to be a bit more of an ‘official mission handbook,’ we called it. Kojima said hed shown the guide to his mother, who didnt really understand video games but of course knew what a book was.

For 2004s Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II Hodgson planned and orchestrated an easter egg on the strategy guides DVD pack-in: Pressing a secret combination on your DVD player remote results in a special menu where you can access videos in which the voice actor for HK-47, a popular droid from the games, quotes other famous fictional robots and AI. Hodgson was excited to get the voice actor involved for a secret he deemed so obscure although his assertion that Nobody A) cares or B) has ever found that, because we never published the easter egg code is more self-deprecating than accurate, based on the above YouTube video and this forum thread.

But he nevertheless lit up when he talked about it, or about the more creative work hes gotten to do, like A Fractured Land: Tales of the Northern Realms, a 96-page lore book that came with the hardcover edition of the official The Witcher 3 guide, or The Improved Emperor’s Guide to Tamriel, a 224-page illustrated guide to the lands of Bethesdas The Elder Scrolls Online that was packed in with the games Imperial collectors edition.

Hodgson wrote the Emperors Guide in character as the scholar Flaccus Terentius, conjuring the characters imagined journal entries as he walked the games fictional lands. It has annotations like Strange to find such Daedra worship among the devout, nestled next to detailed sketches, diagrams and paintings.

I studied history. Its sort of finding the evidence for something and then writing about it, and that was my transferrable skill, Hodgson said. If I wasn’t going to become a history teacher, I was going to maybe become a travel writer or something like that. And in a sense I am, except the places that I write about don’t really exist.

But travel writers dont go to Paris and painstakingly catalog every street sign and boulangerie.

Though travel writers much like strategy guide authors have been made obsolete. Why read a book about a place when you can simply search for photos of it on Instagram? Likewise, why buy an expensive book when everything you could want to know about every game ever made is a Google search away?

For one thing, you only have to look at one of Hodgsons guides to see the value for collectors and hardcore fans. And while the internet is always playing catch-up to catalog new releases in YouTube guides and Wikis, the official strategy guide arrives on day one (or earlier). That makes the physical strategy guide, ironically, the first choice for players who want instant, day one gratification.

“There’s a nice archaic nature to strategy guides that I enjoy. I can write about something that’s cutting edge, like Fallout 4, but I can publish it using 16th century technology.

Hodgson has his own reasons. I can’t show you the writings I’ve done for Maxim.com and Gamespy, because those sites aren’t there anymore, he said. Stuff disappears when you’re on the net. But this Akuji the Heartless strategy guide on paper, or in fact the Fallout 3 strategy guide that’s in the Library of Congress. So even after the bombs drop and we’re in the future apocalypse, you can go to the bunker down below the Library of Congress or even now, if you’d like to do it properly [and] you can search my books out. I think I’m the only person who will ever do that, but there’s a nice archaic nature to strategy guides that I enjoy. I can write about something that’s cutting edge, like Fallout 4, but I can publish it using 16th century technology.

***

Hodgson works on guides ten months out of every twelve, and he rarely plays video games for fun anymore. At the end of a long stretch, Im just sick of staring at screens, so I just go outside or I go and buy another aloe tree or an agave or a different type of succulent, he said. I maybe go on Facebook, but just to see what some of the people that I never get to see do. Friends.

You are suffering from extreme fatigue, and the dogs looking at you going I need to be fed and walked. Immediately, he said.

But if he quit tomorrow, hed still play games after a six-month sabbatical, at least. After your first week [off] youre just like Ah, sort of semi-retirement, this is great. This is fantastic, he said. And then another week goes by and youre sort of starting to get an itchy feeling. Cabin fever sets in. Youre like, whats next?

Hodgson recently wrapped up work on the Complete edition guide to The Witcher 3 and the official Watch Dogs 2 strategy guide, and at the time of writing hes putting the finishing touches on his Ghost Recon Wildlands guide. You can find his work wherever strategy guides are sold.

Mike Rougeau is a freelance journalist who lives in Los Angeles with his girlfriend and two dogs.

WATCH: ‘LOTR: The Fellowship of the Ring’ changes its magical pace from the book

Read more: http://ift.tt/2mXDYk7

from Six-month-long stretches of seven-day work weeks and looming deadlines: What it takes to be a strategy guide author

[csgnewstuff]

Mayhem Mansion - Extended edition - Darsycho

Doom 2 - Single Player - ZDoom Compatible - 36.37 MB

In all my years of reviewing /newstuff crap, sometimes I come across something so different that I have no idea what to make of it. Usually, that implies something negative. But this time, I was very surprised - someone had made a TC that is like no other TC for Doom, or any game for that matter - where any sort of seriousness is thrown out the window with a bizarro impostor taking its place. That would be Mayhem Mansion, which I keep wanting to call Maniac Mansion, because it reminds me of Maniac Mansion if it were done in the mid 90s during the height of the "Doom clone" phase. Apparently, Mayhem Mansion is based off a very obscure 90s Doom clone named "Exploding Lips". It was released at the time when Quake II was already dominating the market, and UT99 and Quake III were just around the corner. Bad time to release a Doom clone. But "Exploding Lips" was not like other Doom clones. It had floating lips. And walking TVs. If that sounds weird, this is the tame part. Enter Mayhem Mansion: Extended Edition. Upon first glance, I thought this was going to be a lame jokeWAD. And I can see evidence that one could call it a jokeWAD. But this isn't a joke as much as it is a different reality altogether. A reality of dancing televisions, floating lips, a cat having his birthday, flying toast (complete with cape), an evil toaster that makes said toast, a chibi pinky that runs on its hands, shadow blobs, helicopters with faces on them... and that's not even a third of the monstrosities I saw while playing this. By the way, the cat wasn't a monster, he was just a cool cat. So let's go down my "list": plot, graphics, gameplay, levels, major problems, major letdowns, why I liked it, why I hate it, why you should stop letting me do /newstuff reviews, what I ate while playing it, what channel I was watching, which episode of Matlock I like best, wh-fine... Is there a plot? How the hell should I know? You're stuck in a mansion and you want to investigate it, unearth a conspiracy, I guess,,and then try to save the planet. Typical 90s game stuff. The plot is the sanest thing here. It's everything else that's fucking bonkers. Graphics wise, the textures are from a mash of different sources, with a lot of textures from Freedoom. Yes, this actually works! Those Freedoom textures fit in perfectly in that "Doom clone knockoff" kind of way. Aesthetics range from dark tunnels to garish mansions, with spooky "Blood"-like cities... and, of course, the occasional full-on, opium-inspired eye-rape. I can't go far too into that concept without spoiling the game, so I won't. But I can talk about the proportions: they're all over the place. It's intentional. The mansion is haunted, so things are bound to be HWACKY. 3D floors are used sparingly, but when they are used, you won't even notice. Nothing is in this TC just to show off the port. We're past that, aren't we? Gameplay is simple Doom action with crazy (weak) weapons, some serious, some hilarious. The enemies are equally crazy, and all of them have a weakness. You'll need to know these weaknesses, apparently, because not only do you need to do that to save precious resources, the bastards will drop an item, usually a coin. A coin? Yep. You spend those coins in shops scattered throughout the levels. There are many of them in the game, and you never seem to have enough, given that the shops are price gouging the hell out of you. There is no healthy competition in Mayhem Mansion. You gain coins by picking them up, opening up treasure chests, or, as I said before, defeating each enemy a certain, unique way - more on that later. Okay, let's just get the negatives out of the way now. Weapons. "Oh boy, here we go". Graphically, there's no excuse for any of the primary weapons taking up half of the screen. This is one of the game's main problems, but since the rest of the game is just ever-so-slightly terrible, I have to assume that this was intended. What's not acceptable, again, is the weak feeling some of the weapons have. You start with a basic magic boomerang projectile, which, luckily, never runs out. That's good because you're going to be spamming this. A lot. And while it works well on the first monsters you encounter, it quickly becomes useless. The rate of fire is too low, and there's no way to charge attacks. There is an upgrade to the boomerang, but I don't get the chance to use it before the episode ends, and I have to start the next level with absolutely nothing. What a buncha shit. There are some really funny spells you can learn to cast later on, some of which had me literally laughing out loud. And perhaps my biggest problem with this game: The weapons feel ineffective to the point of frustration. As I said before, there is a gimmick in which certain monsters are weak to certain weapons, but this isn't really obvious, other than they fall quicker and drop a coin. And you'll need every single fucking coin you can find or create - else you're going to be running out of ammo, fast. This happened quite a lot in my first play-through. In fact, this is my primary problem with this mod - the ammo balance in the levels is beyond terrible, and you can't carry very much with you. Which means that everyone who plays this will be leaving valuable ammo behind that can't be obtained later when they need it, because that would involve backtracking all the way around and through the levels, and hopefully remembering where the ammo locations are that weren't picked up. I hate that. Don't make me do that. Else the game turns into a boomerang flingfest, where I GamePro it: throw boomerangs at a monster until it dies. Enemies span the gamut from hilariously useless fodder to "annoying as mo-fuggin-got-dam-shit". Especially the books. Those cheeky fucks swarm you in an instant, and they can teleport, just to make things even worse. The majority of the higher-level enemies are walking doors, in which the best method of dealing with them is to keep your distance and never let go of the fire button... unless you didn't buy any ammo and run out FFFFFFFFGHHGGHBBL But here's what saves the entire thing: quests. Mayhem Mansion is full of things to do, things to find, switches to throw, and this never lets up. There is even a key chase, where you have to chase - yes, chase - a sentient running key. I can't make this stuff up. Scattered throughout the mansion (and other levels) are ringing phones, which give you either valuable info, or to indicate a secret nearby. There's a huge portal bit too where things flip upside down... and I just realized, there is so much to this mod that I'm already doubting myself if what I remember actually happened, or was it another mod entirely, I just remember two bedrooms. Was there a kitchen? I distinctly remember breaking into a kitchen and talking to a bunch of aliens... hmm...and something about kings. I don't even remember. By the way: skeletons happen. Lots of skeletons. Which, by default, means I cannot hate this mod (by decree of the Skeleton Army) and I must recommend that everyone play this immediately. So, in a nutshell: Pros: Skeletons Cons: Who cares, there are skeletons Play this NOW. ... If you're really wanting to play this, let me give you an actual review (that matters). You're going to find the actual "Doom" part of this to be the most frustrating part, to the point of just turning the thing off. It took me an entire minute to fell an Anvil Bat with the default boomerang attack. The weapons, while funny, are frustrating to use, and one even requires you to pick up the ammo it drops - which can be somewhere you can't get to. Magic is scarce, and the weapons that use it are very magic-hungry. The damage the magic weapons do is not apparent in any way on monsters that do not have visible and audible pain states. This feels extremely lazy to me, and I don't know if I'm doing any damage, or if any shots are landing. This is NOT acceptable. On top of all that, the weakness system isn't obvious, and you might, in the heat of the moment, use a magic-heavy attack on a monster that isn't even affected by it. I give high marks to originality, music, mood, aesthetics, and even monster variety and map design, but the main part - satisfying weaponry - well, it's just not there. Taking a minute and a half to kill two small-ish monsters with easily dodgeable attacks gets old really quickly. The game needed some "fodder" to keep it going between major monster encounters, and Maniac Mansion has very little of this. If satisfying weapons were to be found later in the maps, why does it take so long to get to them? Making the player suffer with insufficient weaponry is not how to pace a map. The Shotgun in Doom is so good, yet the equivalent in Mayhem Mansion feels so useless. I barely used it on anything but the books, because I found out its weakness was the musket. And it's the only one I remember, aside from the handwalkers being weak to boomerangs. The rate of fire is abysmally slow. Some weapons take way too long to use again, even if they are weak weapons. One weak boomerang per two seconds is not good for a starting weapon, especially when the main attack, a knife, barely does anything, and since most monsters are not to be knifed, what's the point? Requiring shootable switches deep into the wall to be hit with the utmost precision is very hard with a weak projectile weapon. One shootable switch took me 30 seconds to activate until I hit just the right angle. And even then I need to backtrack to find out what the switch opened - unless a script activated with some text on screen to tell me what had changed, and where. So, here are my suggestions for improving this mod: For weak weapons, increasing the rate of fire may help. Give a charge-up attack to them. Add some visual feedback for the player to know if he's doing any damage whatsoever. Increase the ammo capacity or just put more ammo in the maps. Explain the Armor system better. I kept acquiring armor - what does that do? Does it add to the total or is it like Doom's armor? And why so many armor suits in the first four minutes of play? None of that makes sense to me. And now to admit - I cheated. How? Well, I went into the WAD and changed some of the weapon stats. I made the boomerang attack faster, I also increased the damage, and I made sure that visible blood would spawn on each successful hit. I also reduced the rate of fire to the musket/shotgun and fixed that terrible spread. Before, I couldn't use that gun in anything but close quarters. I also increased the speed of the bow. It's a BOW. Slow projectiles and "bow and arrow" don't mix. It's still too large of a projectile, though. I also LOWERED the weapon coordinates to saner levels where I could see. This took maybe 20 minutes, half of that looking at the wiki on which setting did what. After ironing out all that shit, I played the whole thing and I loved it. This is a great mod. It just needs a little more polish. Now, I'm off to play the whole thing again to see if I missed anything!

http://www.doomworld.com/idgames/?id=18458