In an attempt to use up some of my rapidly dwindling free time, plus some of the proceeds from finally turning my candy-concession change into Amazon credit, I recently bought books by two new fantasy authors – The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss, and The Blade Itself by Joe Abercrombie. Based on reviews (including comments here) I expected one to be a bit of a curiosity, OK as an alternative to TV or games but ultimately unsatisfying, and the other to be significantly better than that. That’s pretty much how things turned out, but not in the way I expected.
Archive for the ‘diversions’ Category
In my never-ending quest to be geeky in more ways than anyone else on the internet, I’ve invented a chess variant that incorporates the RPS dynamic while still (I hope) remaining playable. RPS is not only a game in its own right, and apparently one that some people take rather seriously (there’s also a 25-gesture version), but it’s a dynamic that appears in many other games. In wargames it’s often a range/mobility/defense triangle. For example, in a medieval wargame, long-range archers might be devastating against low-mobility infantry but vulnerable to high-mobility cavalry, while those cavalry in turn can’t get past the strong defense of massed infantry with pikes. Here’s how you apply the same idea to chess.
- Paper = pawns. Rock = rooks and queens. Scissors = knights, bishops, and kings.
- Members of every class can take other members of their own class, plus the next one in the circle. For example, a pawn can take another pawn, a rook or a queen, but not any of the “scissors” pieces.
What this does is make a lot of capture/recapture scenarios asymmetric. A pawn attacked by a knight and defended by a pawn is still vulnerable, because the pawn won’t be able to recapture the knight. This has some less obvious effects on strategy.
- Some openings become much less effective. For example, Philidor doesn’t work because it’s an instance of the example above. On the other hand, Ruy Lopez still works because the pawn is defended by a knight, and Petroff still works because it’s more of a counterattack.
- Bringing the queen out to b3 to attack b7 (one of my favorite motifs) is no longer as effective because the queen can’t take the pawn at b7. On the other hand, bringing the queen out to the king-side might be more effective because it can’t be harried by a knight. This also makes the fianchetto more risky, since the bishop won’t be able to defend a knight at c3/c6/f3/f6 that’s threatened by a queen.
- A lone king is no longer helpless against two united passed pawns, because it can approach or capture the frontmost without being in check.
The last point I think is particularly important with respect to changing how endgames work, and how players maneuver to get a favorable one. At first I wasn’t wild about kings being so totally helpless against rooks and queens, but then I realized that such endings are generally a foregone conclusion anyway. They’re only tedious, not difficult, most of the time. Making them less tedious doesn’t seem like such a bad thing after all.
Some day when I have some spare time, I might take an existing chess program and modify its move generator to eliminate certain captures according to these rules. The position evaluator will be a bit askew, so the program won’t play strategy well, but most programs can beat me easily on tactics anyway so that’s unlikely to be an issue.
For a long time, I’ve told people that I avoid online multiplayer games (except chess) not because they’re uninteresting but precisely because they are interesting and I didn’t want to get addicted the way so many others have. Well, I guess I’ll have to find another addiction-avoidance strategy, because I’ve started playing Dofus recently. Apparently it’s pronounced doe-fus, not dew-fus, but I’m sure the latter pronunciation is common among players of more “serious” MMORPGs (as though running around killing imaginary dragons with imaginary swords isn’t pretty silly in its own right). In fact it’s the un-seriousness of Dofus that I find attractive. Most of the names are palindromes, anagrams, puns, or funny references, though many are French and so less obvious. There’s good entertainment to be had just by reading the descriptions of items being advertised on the trading channel of the in-game chat system. The cartoony drawing style might not appeal to some, but it serves well enough, and I actually like the turn-based tile-based combat system. It’s less frantic than most games, more like a board game than a brawl. These factors are also intimately tied to the fact that the whole thing is Flash-based, which makes it playable on just about any platform; since I use Linux day to day and don’t care about pretty pictures all that much, it’s a tradeoff I thoroughly applaud. (Wakfu, from the same company, seems to be essentially the same game with better graphics at the expense of becoming platform-dependent.)
One thing that’s a bit sub-optimal about Dofus is a relative dearth of information for noobs – by which I mean particularly people who are not only low-level but entirely new to the game and perhaps the genre. Even the most basic guides seem to assume that you recognize the significance of certain game-play elements, though there’s no real reason to suppose a true noob would know that. As one noob to another, then, there are some tips.
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I’ve always had a weakness for “make groups to clear the board” kinds of games, from Tetris to Zuma, Sokoban to Shisen-Sho. Lately I’ve been playing Colored Symbols II, which is a variant of SameGame which comes in many forms. One feature is a high-score list, and I’m proud to announce that I now hold the global all-time high score of 3156. I pretty much lucked into it, really. The game dropped a killer combo right into my lap at the outset, and then all I had to do was not screw it up. Nonetheless, it’s something to be proud of for at least a few seconds.
OK, I’m done.
Here’s the best article I’ve seen yet related to the lamented passing of D&D co-inventor Gary Gygax.
Those few doughty characters and doughy players who survived the experience did so by the application of techniques like driving livestock ahead of them into the tomb to set off the traps, which strikes me as a bit less than heroic. I’m not an expert on fantasy literature, but I don’t remember a scene in Lord of the Rings where Gandalf prods 50 head of cattle into the Mines of Moria to serve as Balrog bait.
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July 28
I’m very excited! The cataloging of the entryway has been completed, and a graduate student, Bill, will be entering the dungeon itself for the first time today! He requested a goat to herd into the dungeon ahead of him, but I pointed out that goats are valuable.
The title should tell most of my readers everything they need to know about why I haven’t been writing much lately. I’ve been a fan of the Civilization series for a long time, having played all four of the main titles plus Alpha Centauri (including Alien Crossfire) and a few inferior knockoffs from other development shops. Civ2 will probably always reign as the best game for its time. It fixed some of the major combat-system warts in the original, such as spearmen defeating tanks, and added a whole bunch of other neat stuff. Spies were more fun in Civ2 than in its successors, and there were several other interesting units. I was always fond of paratroopers as instant city garrisons, and wonder why they seem to be absent from Civ4. Civ2 also made diplomacy more interesting, though the “everyone hates you” phenomenon was still gallingly prevalent, and having to manage happiness as well as money presented an interesting challenge. Taking a slight detour, Alpha Centauri’s “design workshop” that let you design your own units based on components absolutely rocked, and is still unique among the group. AC also had a few other conceptual improvements that I’ll get to later, and might be the best game overall. Civ3 had diplomacy that actually kind of worked, enemy AI that wasn’t totally stupid, and the new dimensions of resources and culture. It almost seems like it should have been better than Civ2, but somehow I just never got into it as much. That’s about enough history, though. What about Civ4?
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I’ve always known my taste in music was a bit eclectic but I always thought it was the combinations (e.g. Kitaro to Guns ‘n’ Roses) more than the invididual songs/artists. Then again, maybe not. Every once in a while I go to CD Baby and listen around. Their “new arrivals” pages, arranged both by time and by genre, offer a great browsing experience. Usually browsing is all I do, but every once in a while I buy a batch of CDs – why there always seem to be batches that appeal to me all at once instead of just one at a time is another mystery to me, but that’s the way it works. In my latest batch, I was a bit surprised that four out of five were so new and/or obscure that CDDB didn’t know about them yet. Even more surprising was that the one hit wasn’t for Bethany Curve’s Flaxen (even I had heard of BC before); it was for Ether Aura’s Crash. I guess I’m just so far out at sea musically that I’m not even sure where the shore is any more.
In case anyone is curious, the others are Riverine by Autumn’s Grey Solace, Different Stars (2004 Nettwerk version) by Trespassers William, and Wait for Someday by Half Light. All of them are in the shoegaze/dreampop/ethereal area, heavy on the reverb and (except for Crash) seriously down-tempo. Interestingly, Crash is probably my second favorite despite being the oddball of the bunch (or maybe the one non-oddball). So far my favorite is Different Stars, which is also the slowest of a slow lot. “Haunting” is a good way to describe it, unless “soporific” works better for you. As far as I’m concerned it’s great stuff.
As though playing Civilization IV won’t be bad enough, I found this little snippet in an interview.
Civilization 4 will be the most moddable version of Civilization ever. Players can edit basic stats and attributes in XML files. On a higher level, much of the game will be exposed to Python so modders will be able to edit events and have more control over how the game works. On an even higher level, we are planning to provide an AI SDK to allow experienced programmers to dig very deep into customization.
Wow. I’ve always thought it would be great fun to create a new AI for Civilization or some similar game, and the fact that the SDK might be Python-based is just gravy. I can see having a ton of fun with this if they actually follow through on this plan.
Now that I get most of my news and commentary online, one of the few things I tend to look at in the Boston Globe every day is the chess problem. Many times, I’ve thought there was an alternate solution that was just as good as the one given, and every time I’ve been wrong…until now. Here’s the position:
The proposed move is Qe1, threatening both to pin the black queen with Bb4 and to capture the bishop at b1. Why settle for just gaining a bishop, though? There’s another move that gains much more, as I’ll explain “below the fold” so people will have a chance to solve it themselves.
A while back I ordered a set of Stephen Donaldson’s Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, which I remembered rather fondly from my teen years (and possibly even early 20s). As a break from reading more serious things – Fate of Africa – is next up, I read the first of the series (Lord Foul’s Bane), finishing last night. My reaction can basically be summed up in one word.
Blech.
What was I thinking when I was a kid who thought these books were great? Did I really have so little idea what made a book worth reading? I’ll get some minor quibbles out of the way first.
- The best-known criticism of Donaldson is that his writing is pretentious. One chapter started with “the sky was embittered with an excess of gall” or something like that. Maybe that’s wrong and I’ll correct it when I get home, but I think the reason I can’t remember it exactly is that it’s so bad my memory rebelled. Phrases like that are all through the book. The dialog is often of that stilted portentous type for which some have criticized Lord of the Rings, only several times more so. Characters don’t discuss anything; they practice oratory on one another.
- My other minor gripe is with the setting. It’s all very well to set out to write an epic and to foreshadow mysteries yet to be revealed, but you don’t have to remind the reader in every single paragraph that it’s an epic. Tolkien was truly the master at this. While LotR is obviously epic in scope, and embedded within an even larger epic that is the history of Middle Earth, the focus on the characters is never lost. He writes about real people living in a complex world, not a complex world that just happens to have a few people in it. Donaldson’s references to yet-to-come characters and places come so thick and fast, and are so clumsily obvious as teasers for the next book, that the plot and characters suffer.
That last sentence brings me to my major criticism of the book: the characters are awful. It’s not just that Thomas Covenant is a jerk who does great harm to others, as many have noted (especially with regard to Lena). I don’t have to like the main character to enjoy a book, but it would be nice to understand him. Besides being a jerk, Covenant is the most incredibly self-absorbed character I’ve ever encountered. He wallows in self-pity and self-doubt even as people are making life-and-death decisions, sometimes even as they’re dying around (or for) him. It’s obvious this book was written in the era of narcissistic navel-gazing, but even that’s not what I really dislike about the characters. What is really bad about the characters, from a literary point of view, is that they act so arbitrarily. Covenant has these random, often violent, outbursts that hardly seem justified by what had preceded them. Even worse, other characters just blithely and inexplicably seem to accept this. They don’t seem to be shaken by it, and they try to be befriend our little sociopath despite them. The one exception seems to be Atiaran, who just kinds of runs hot and cold for a while and then goes off to sulk in the corner. There’s also arbitrary behavior unrelated (or almost unrelated) to Covenant. What the heck is up with Variol and Tamarantha? Was that supposed to be dramatic? It was stupid. Their actions are neither foreshadowed nor explained afterward, nor even particularly relevant to the plot. It’s the literary equivalent of interrupting an action movie with a scene of kittens being drowned, as a facile nod to providing emotional context.
In the end the best thing I can say about Lord Foul’s Bane is that it’s no Ruin Mist, but that’s damning with faint praise indeed. Nothing can ever touch that piece of crap for sheer ineptitude. Donaldson wasn’t trying to defraud anyone when he wrote the Chronicles. He’s not a fake author just out to make a buck. He’s a real author – just a bad one.