Bleeding Fiction

Erik bought the Sim City 4: Rush Hour Expansion Pack yesterday, which contains a number of features that expand the game beyond the normal scope of a Sim City game. That, combined with recent trends from Koei in creating their Romance of the Three Kingdoms games has led me to the conclusion that video games are evolving in such a way that there will soon be only one game, an uber-game, which will combine essentially every video game genre previously known, and possibly some that are as-yet unknown to the eyes of man.

This expands in two directions: outward and inward. Expanding outward you combine the game with, say, SimEarth so that you create not just a single city but rather an entire planet and ecosystem. And if you're playing on a planetary level, why not try to take over the world? Expanding inward you have games that relate to every aspect of the city. Build a sporting area and every game played therein will open up to you. Baseball, soccer, hockey and so on. Go ahead and build yourself a Zoo or an Amusement Park.

But the uber-game won't just be limited to things you can build. It will be truly all-encompassing and will invariably include the detailed life of humans, no matter how unusual or mundane. The game will allow you to drive or fly, will be both open-ended and linear, will be avilable for play online and off and will cover the span of human history (and beyond). More than that, the game will cover not only reality, but the most abject fantasy world.

I do not believe that the uber-game is a myth or a dream. I think it's something that's on its way, an evolution that has been a long time in the coming. Slowly, but surely the uber-game will come and eventually there will be little else save different iterations of the uber-game. Be afraid. Or eager.

I went to the movies today and saw Spider Man 2. Whee! It was a fun movie, filled with fun things. It worked, I think, because (like the first one) it was unabashadly a four-color comic book movie. They didn't try to make Spider Man hip or trendy, they didn't give him claws or guns or put him in leather or any of the hundreds of things they could have done. They just left him as your friendly neighborhood Spider Man, and it worked.

Which is interesting, seeing as I've never really liked Spider Man. I mean I've got to be honest here: the red-and-blue costume and tendency to leave sticky gobs of organic white stuff behind him never really did much for me. Sure, he's got the "with great power comes great responsibility" shtick, but I never really thought Spider Man's powers were all that great. Certainly less so than some other hero I could mention, a hero who also wears read and blue and has his own movie franchise. I mean yes, if I had the ability to perform multiple aerial back-flips and fold myself in half on demand I, too, would most likely put on a costume and use these skills to fight crime. Because that would be cool. But I wouldn't feel the need to be all preachy about it. Plus Spider Man has some of the lamest villians of all time. About the only thing he ever had going for him was the witty banter. Which they kept in this movie, so that just goes to show you that Sam Raimi knows what he's doing.

In other hero-related news, I've actually broken down and bought a copy of the Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game City of Heroes. It's a game that's all about designing and playing your own super hero. Sometimes in a team of super heroes. This is, let's face it, a childhood dream come true. Erik and Ogre have been playing the game for the better part of three weeks and I'd managed to hold off for a while as I caught glimpses of them playing, but there are some things that are just built too deeply into the wiring. Now, as a game it's incredible. It captures, almost perfectly, what you'd expect a game about comic book heroes would capture. It's only flaws are that most of the good names are already taken and there are, as yet, no capes. As a distraction and time-waster the game is very much its own level of hell. I'm going to get back to work soon. Really I will...

Commercials are cool.

This is a cool Zelda commercial. It's from Japan.

No, it's not the Legend of Zelda commercial. I wasn't able to find that. If anyone can find that and give me a link, I'll send them some candy. Or possibly a monkey made of gold.

Leeevers!

I went out yesterday and bought White Wolf's new-ish card game, Pimp: The Backhanding. This is the intarweb, so some people are naturally up in arms about the demeaning and exploitive nature of the game. I will concede now that, if taken seriously, it is. I'll also point out that it's satire and (in my opinion) a successful one. Funny, too. Beyond that, I don't even remotely want to talk about it.

What I will talk about are the rules and Pimp's effectiveness as a card game. I played it once through last night and took a longer look at the rules and cards this morning, as well as trying a quick set up on my floor. You can download the rules from the site, if you want to read along at home.

Every player begins the game with five pimp cards (a posse) and five draw cards (modifiers and dirty tricks). Five ho cards are laid out on the table and the first round begins. Each round has three phases: macking (trying to get a ho to go home with you), backhanding (trying to keep a ho from going home with another pimp) and money laundering (where you add up the dollar value of the hos you've taken into your stable and add them to your total - this is your score).

The macking and backhanding phases are each further divided into four steps. In step one you assign your pimps to a specific ho (to try to either mack her or backhand her). In step two you assign modifier cards (which will enhance your pimp's ability to either mack or backhand). In step three you play dirty tricks (which are just what they sound like) and in step four you resolve your contests. Play lasts for three rounds, and each player gets five more draw cards per round and five new hos come out to get macked on.

We didn't quite clue into the sequential nature of things last night (we had people playing pimps, modifiers and dirty tricks all at once, which led to some awkward game play) but beyond that it went pretty smoothly. My main criticism of the game is that it's not really... exciting. It's actually sort of hard to get a ho into your stable - you see fifteen ho cards over the course of the game, but I don't really expect more than four of them to be won and that might happen at any time. When the final decision on who won is dealt with in a math phase and you can't see someone building to a win before than (like, say, by covering more area of a physical game board or visibly acquiring piles of money and property), it seems sort of anticlimactic.

Beyond that, I think the game's actually too short. With only three rounds of play, there's not really a chance for someone to get smacked hard and make a come back and the odds that any of the special abilities are going to come into play are really slim. This brevity, combined with the sheer number of pimps on the field (every player has five and the draw deck has six more, which means an average of two more come out each round) makes it very hard to strategize and makes certain other cards pointless. There are cards that prevent target pimps from acting in certain phases, but odds are you'll have enough pimps to just use someone else. There are also cards that are just useless one third of the time (i.e. in the final turn of play).

Overall, the game suffers from "White Wolf First Edition Syndrome." Anyone familiar with White Wolf's role playing games will get what I mean, but for the majority of you who aren't, I mean that Pimp is a game that/s incredibly cool in terms of style and concept, but somewhat flawed in mechanical execution and suffers a little bit from lack of focus.

Here are my proposed fixes for the game. The address the problems I raised above and, in my opinion, would make the game more enjoyable:

1. Screw the three turn duration. Play the game until one player reaches a set dollar value (I think 4 or 5 hundred dollars would be right) or until all of the hos have been sucessfully macked. This allows for tension and desperation moves at the end of the game, strategizing through the duration and a long enough game to see more special abilities coming up.

2. Give only three pimps to each player, instead of five. This way you're not always going to have pimps to spare, which will force you to pick your actions more strategically and make certain dirty trick cards more relevant.

3. You can boot any pimp (including one who's been whacked or comes from the draw deck) out of your posse at the beginning of a turn (i.e. before macking) in order to draw a new pimp from the pimp deck at the end of the turn (after money laundering). You have to discard all of his pimp gear, though. This way, if you get a crappy pimp or a one of your pimps gets whacked, you're not stuck with him, but you lose a little something to get a (hopefully) better reward in the long run.

4. (Possibly) Only deal out three cards from the draw deck per turn - part of the process of slowing things down and keeping so damn many cards from being on the table or in play at once.

5. Add more cards to the draw deck. Specifically, dirty trick cards, of the sort that will a) bring pimps back from being whacked, b) let you draw an extra pimp card without discarding, c) affect the hos your opponents already have in their stables and d) affect the pimp gear your opponents' pimps are using.

Now, that said, this is clearly not a game for everyone. It's like Munchkin; if you get why making fun of Dungeons & Dragons in that "kick down the door and kill the monster and get loot and experience" way is funny, you're more likely to enjoy the game than if you don't. If you dig on Dolemite and Avenging Disco Godfather and Pootietang and the Chapelle Show, you're much more likely to think Pimp is a fun game than if you don't. I could see Nick, Ogre, Erik and I playing this game and really getting into it. I could see Zuges joining in with glee. But I think most other friends of mine (including the crew around here) would either be a little wigged out or just not get into it.

So, I don't think I'm likely to play again any time soon. Which is a pity, 'cause now that I understand the way the game's meant to be played, and now that I have some ideas for how to betterify it, I'd really like to give it another shot.

Today I bought (among other things) Werewolf: the Forsaken. Although it seems pretty cool, I am 95% certain that I'll never play this game. Someone please tell me why I bought it?

Also: You Will Never Defeat My Thousand Cuts Style

I should probably confess to the world that I own an X-Box. I got it not long after I got out here to Seattle, in response to a promise I made a while back to The Ogre�. "You need to get an X-Box and X-Box Live," he said to me, "so we can still play video games together when one or the both of us go off to school." Or words to that effect, anyway.

For the past seven months or so, as a three hour time difference and our schedules allow, I've met The Ogre� in cyberspace, where he's proceeded to shoot down my plane, kick me into submission or blow me up with a rocket launcher. I've whiled away the idle half-hour on my own by flipping out and killing people. Mostly my X-Box has gathered dust.

Over the past week, though, my game-playing habits were somewhat dramatically changed by the arrival into my possession of two wonderful games. The first of these is not just super. It is also, as the name will tell you, deluxe. Plus it involves monkeys. These monkeys will not, sadly, steal for me. What they will do, however, is roll around inside translucent spheres atop strange and mis-shapen floating platforms while collecting bananas and attempting to reach the confetti-spewing goal under a strict time limit. The game isn't, strictly speaking, psychedelic, but it skirts the borders thereof with simian abandon.

I also got an exceedingly fun game that has a little something to do with Mythic China. Fox spirits, Horse Demons, dozens of martial arts styles, ancient masters and characters with names like Furious Ming and Radient Jen Zi. Yeah. Folks who've been paying attention to my inchoate ramblings over the last few years will note that I've got a small interest in things pertaining to the style of fiction loosely classed as wuxia. While this game doesn't really and truly capture the feel or spirit of the "genre" (example: no running across the tops of trees), it's cool enough that it's sort of put me in the mood again.

That was an intentionally loaded statement, set there to cunningly draw in your attention whilst I elaborate: I re-read the first two chapters of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms on Thursday night and re-read the first four chapters of the Outlaws of the Marsh, read the prologue of the Deer and the Cauldron and re-read portions of my own initial edits on Fire and Jade today.

Cunning readers will note that I haven't mentioned my first novel in nearly four months, when I said that I hadn't touched it since May. That means that it's almost a year since I actually did any work on the second draft. Which is sort of pathetic. It's not like I haven't been doing other good and productive work in that time, but still...

My trouble right now is that I don't have the time. Or at least I don't have the time consistently. I mean, this past week I managed to play about fifteen hours worth of video games and read four hundred pages worth of fiction, as well as take in a movie on Friday and go out to dinner on Saturday. This coming week, however, I won't have time to do even half of one of those things.

So I could work on Fire and Jade, but it would come in scattered fits and stops, a dozen pages one day and then nothing for two weeks. Since the whole point of the second draft (and for this very, very scattered novel in particular) is seeing the whole picture, turning the parts into something that works together, I just don't think that's going to fly.

I could really use, say, a month off. I'll get one of those in August. The trick is going to be keeping my enthusiasm high until then.

Cairo, Egypt

I'm up a little late tonight, waiting for my laundry to dry. I'm too tired to concentrate on anything serious, so I'm playing a level or two in Tenchu, a game where you are play a ninja and do a ninja's work. To wit: kill people.

Tonight, I discovered a move that makes this job so much easier: it convinces them to kill themselves for you. The feather-lightest touch, and they're turning their blades inwards and running themselves through.

Madness.