As my play-experience has been maturing this past month, I’m finding more to like and less to dislike about FFXI than I had initially expected. I’m still chafing at the flagrant recipe-following tendancies that a great many players have (see previous reference to fansite resources). This results in areas such as the Valkrum Dunes being chock-full of adventurers, including a lot of my fellow Windurstans. Meanwhile the Tahrongi region (right next door to the Sarutabaruta Plains, the heartland of the Republic of Windurst) is neglected to the point that none of the civilized kingdoms exert control over it.

Many of my brave young countrymen are making a long voyage by sea to Selbina in order to partake in a quest to acquire the “subjob” ability. A similar quest is possible closer to home, but our blackmages, warriors, and monks have been emigrating steadily at the behest of their web-found follow-the-instructions recipies. The result of this has been neglect of our own hinterland. How are our Dhalmel herders to get Papaka Grass? Who will ensure that our books of lore and magic are properly accounted for?

As a Windurstan nationalist and patriot, I find this to be inexcusable, and am doing my utmost to remedy the situation. Alas, game mechanics restrict Expeditionary missions to citizens that are both powerful and in high regard (level 25 and rank 3 required), so I have only been able to participate thus far by thinning out the Goblin, Dhalmel, and Rarab populations of the Tahrongi Canyons and Buburimu Peninsula areas. Keep those signets up, folks!

Life in Vanadiel has been going pretty smoothly. I’ve left behind my Bastokan warrior to join an old coworker and friend on a server he’s sharing with some of his friends up in Portland. A little readjustment was necessary, as Windurst has a much different feel than Bastok. Lots of tarutaru, a lot less Quadav.

As expected, the year this game spent in the Japanese market has made for an extremely smooth US/Canada release. Luckily, the Japanese players have been living up to their national reputation for courtesy. The autotranslation dictionary is going to take me some getting used to, but I’m getting a lot of use out of some key phrases I know off the top of my head. Nihonjin desu ka? Wakarimasu. Sumimasen.

Numerous fansites and resources are available online, including Stratics, Allakhazam, and Warcry. I’ve found these to be handy with the crafting aspects of the game, but the mission and quest system has been quite well-crafted. Almost every interaction with an NPC that wants you to do something gives you at least a very strong hint as to what you need to do. My main problem has been the number of “Harutoto Ruins” you can go to in the Sarutabaruta Region, which was rather confusing while I was trying to complete my first mission for my country.

It’s the 28th, Final Fantasy XI day. Ever since I played Asheron’s Call during its early days, I’ve thought it would be great if Square or Blizzard were to throw their hats into the MMORPG arena. Well, it turns out they’ve both done so, with Square having successfully released Final Fantasy XI last year in Japan. As with all things Final Fantasy, we had to wait for quite a while here in the US (those of us not willing to import a copy and play with a dictionary on our desks, that is). From what I’ve heard from folks that have been playing it, it may almost live up to the hype.

Expected problems are the same you’ll find in Everquest, Asheron’s Call, Anarchy Online, Dark Age of Camelot, Shadowbane, Earth & Beyond, and Shadowbane…

1. There will be complaints of lack of content (this will be allayed by the fact that the underlying game is over a year mature in Japan, so there’s a lot of content already present that other such games have lacked at launch time).
2. There will be obnoxious power-gamers who will abuse the game mechanisms to create insanely-powerful characters that will spend months complaining about the lack of high-level content.
3. There will be obnoxious wannabe power-gamers complaining about every minor glitch that you, a more reasonable gamer, would have passed without batting an eye.
4. There will be mooches running around trying to beg equipment, advice, and emotional support from you.
5. There will be tedious combat in which one presses an attack button and waits for the critter to fall over. The critter will then be looted, and the cycle restarted.
6. The gaming company will react to any complaints about game mechanisms by changing rules. All players that had an advantage under the old mechanisms will cry bloody murder.

There are other likely problems (ah, system requirements…), but before this game hit the US market the underlying system had been in use for over a year across the Pacific. It was made to be used with 2002 hardware by a fairly broad market. It requires an 800MHz processor and 128MB RAM. Oh my.

And so it comes to pass that I’ll be purchasing another MMORPG. I fully expect to enjoy it greatly for at least several months before the other players drive me away. Some day I hope an MMORPG will come along that doesn’t coddle problem players. Some day I hope that the makers of such a game will let the game stand on its own merits rather than give in to the demands of a vocal minority of whiney and abusive players. Perhaps Final Fantasy XI will be such a game. My Japanese isn’t up to the task of checking out the existing FFXI forums, so I don’t know whether this will be the one. I’m cautiously optimistic.

Gather around, little boys and girls, and let me tell you the story of an astoundingly useful, but troubled website. wifimaps.com is a lovely resource for warchalkers everywhere, fuelled by the generous contributions of wardrivers and access point hosts throughout… everywhere.

I take that back. They appear to have no data for Kyoto or Tokyo, in lovely Japan, but I’ll forgive them that because they’re the only resource that’s been able to locate hotspots in Seal Beach, CA for my next trip to visit the twins. With any luck I’ll find an analogous resource before my trip to Japan this winter. Otherwise my Dell’s wifi card is going to get one heck of a workout in a couple months, as I wander around Gion searching for an open node.

But back to the story at hand. These kind folks put together an amazing database of wireless access points from wherever folks have chosen to submit the pertinent MAC Address, address, and/or GPS information. This enables people on the road to quickly determine the location of a place they can get online with a wireless devices such as a laptop or palmtop computer. Such access points include people’s homes, offices, and chic coffee shops all over the place that have (either intentionally or by neglect) created a free access-point. Alas, the usage and database outgrew the software and hardware that ran it. For months, we were without wifimaps.com loving. There was much tearing of clothes, gnashing of teeth, and the women lamented.

Last week they made their triumphant return. Rising up from the ashes, wifimaps.com stands proudly before the masses, doling out valuable information at absolutely no charge. I understand that my employer is interested in contributing colocation and bandwidth services to this project, which may go some ways towards keeping wifimaps.com available for years to come, much to the joy of WiFi mooches everywhere! Don’t you love happy endings?

This weekend the Mrs. and I picked up Jak II for our gaming pleasure. She really got a kick out of Jak & Daxter, playing it all the way through several times, and I rather dug it as well. Like Jak & Daxter, much of the gameplay is classic platform-adventure in 3d. However, the main hub of the game is a city that you cruise around in, ‘jacking zoomers and wrecking havoc as you go around, a la Grand Theft Auto 3 (but without the Cop-B-Gone tokens).

Once again we see very smooth gameplay, this time with a slew of new gameplay features (including the “Dark Jak” alter-ego mode, the introduction of weapons, and the more free-form hub system) all nicely wrapped around an unusually good plotline, complete with character motivations (shock!). As a sequel to a very much child-oriented Jak & Daxter, Jak II has a much more mature plotline.

By mature I don’t mean tits & ass (that’s a plotline aimed at thirteen-year-olds): I mean that the storyline isn’t aimed at eight-year-olds. Jak’s quests are motivated by vengance, and his missions come from rebel strategists, mobsters, and mission objectives reflect the motivations of the folks doling out the work. Jak’s incentive for fulfilling these missions? Information that’ll lead him to vengence against the evil Baron that performed scientific experiments on him for two years.

So far I’m 26% through with the missions in the game, and I give it an unmitigated A+ for style, depth of content, and implementation. Good work, folks.

tlanks to the kind folks at Certicom, I’ve got my little Pocket PC 2003 device up and running through a Sonic.net Hotspots AP. It took some doing, as this connection requires proper IPSec tunelling, and the buit-in PPC2003 VPN client only handles PPTP and L2TP. Thanks Certicom! I’ll buy the non-beta version as soon as it’s out.

Go, go gadget counter-worm! Apparently some clever monkey out there decided to use the RPC vulnerability inherent in unpatched Windows 2000, XP, NT 4, and Server 2003 systems to counteract the effects of another worm that has been in the news lately and causing all manner of problems for folks that don’t keep their systems updated, their computer consultants, and their overburdened ISP tech support departments. Some will say (and probably have for a few hours already) that fixing a worm with another worm is highly unethical. By what ethical standard, I am unsure. If well-executed, it would seem to fulfill the criteria of the Principle of Utility quite nicely. This is widely accepted as one of the most reasonable ethical yardsticks available these days, so I’d be interested in seeing where that debate ends up taking us.

Update your Goddamned computer. If you think that running automated updates is a pain, trying waiting on hold for a half hour to talk to your ISP’s tech support only to find out that they aren’t going to fix it for you. You see, when some script kiddy finds out about a system security problem in a popular operating system or software package, he will exploit it. In most cases, either the folks who made that software already know about and have made fixes to it, or the folks who make popular antivirus software already have their programs set up to defeat the damned thing. Oh yeah, and firewalls are good. You can get one for free, too.

</rant>

After setting it aside for a couple of weeks, I picked .Hack // Mutation back up today and something rather odd happened: I beat it. The first installment of this series was rather easy. Maybe even a little too easy. The second installment definately had its moments where things got a little touchy, and “ressurect” scrolls were being burned like Harry Potter books at a fundamentalist Christian bonfire. What turned out to be the final boss, Magus, was definately a thorn in my side. After trying unsuccessfully four or five times (and having to run through a rather large dungeon and cinematic sequence to restart the fight, no less), I had actually become frustrated enough with the fight to take a .Hack vacation for a little while. It turns out I just had to be cautious and patient, two virtues that were never simultaneously required elsewhere in the game. By diligently knocking down Magus’s spawn with Kite, while BlackRose chipped away at the big boss and Mistral hung back on healing duty (with the help of a Rig Geam spell effect), I was able to knock the bugger out without ever being seriously endangered by the bastard. Ok, I had to use a single ressurect scroll after I used Data Drain on the bugger, but my other two characters were in excellent condition at the time. As promised, the plotline has improved and is now genuinely intriguing (a big change for console RPGs), and I very much look forward to Outbreak, which should be on the shelves in early to mid September.