Continuing on with the DotHack series, I’ve gone along a little ways, spent some quality time with a system administrator, and acquired the email addresses of two additional Blademasters, another Wavemaster, a new Long Arm, and yet another Twin Blade. For the uninitiated, this is how you gain additional party members: NPCs (other players in The World) give you their email addresses so you can contact them in-game and enlist their aid.

As reported elsewhere, the game mechanics have hardly changed at all from .Hack//Infection, but the plotline really is starting to come into its own. The ability of the Project Dothack folks to dole out information at such a conservative pace serves not to alienate the player, but to intrigue instead. Having watched .Hack//Sign, two episodes of .Hack//Liminality, and an episode of the silly superdeformed Legend of the Twilight Bracelet, I’m still not entirely sure what’s going on.

You may want to chalk that up to stupidity or thick-headedness on my part (I must admit I zoned out occassionally on Sign), though. With about 40 hours logged on this game (total, with Mutation unfinished) I unreservedly recommend purchasing this game.

I finally bit the bullet and purchased the second installment in the .Hack videogame series. The fine folks at Project .Hack quite promptly dump you back into the mix, sending Kite and Blackrose back to investigate the aftermath of Infection’s climax. This time the System Administrators start taking a visible interest in the disturbing recent events, and Kite is put in the rather unfortunate position of being some hacker’s pawn and the sysadmins’ lapdog at the same time.

I’ve only been able to sit down for part of an evening with this game, but as all the game review sites have already said before, there aren’t any dramatic changes in the graphics or interface. For the sake of continuity, this is a good thing. Game reviewers sometimes miss out on big-picture issues such as those that cropped up when the Star Wars franchise of movies switched over from miniature modelling to CG: they don’t look like they all belong in the same series.

Previous games have handled the technological upgrades in their sequels by dramatically shifting the timeline, totally disregarding the previous game, and/or waiting years between releases. All told, I’m happy with the new release simply for expanding my opportunities to carry on my email conversations with BlackRose, Mistral, Piro, and the rest of the gang, even though I haven’t met any new party members. Importing your old save file is a big plus, as I worked hard to get that desktop image and mailspool, darnit!

This time around I hope to actually get myself to use the Data Drain (and its new variant) ability enough to actually see my infection reading increase (I used it quite sparingly in Infection).

File under “Boy is John Stupid”:

Having been a user of Windows XP Home for… the better part of a year now I am embarassed to say that I have finally gotten around to enabling Cleartext on my PC. For those of you who, like me until earlier today, had never heard of this wonderful little widget, Cleartext is the Windows XP analogue for OSX’s Quartz system.

In short, it makes text on your screen look all purty. Try it if you find yourself chained to a WinXP box.

It looks like the Habeas corporation is sticking it to spammers. Good for them. Finally an application of Intellectual Property law I can get behind.

Cidera shut down the satellite news feed yesterday. The announcement included this haiku:

Softly like a Leaf
The Autumn of Cidera
Dishes fall silent

Curse that Albert!

Thus far, my Infection experience had been quite smooth. The handful of times when poor Kite & BlackRose fell in combat, it was always due to an obvious, stupid mistake (the Health Drinks are so nice to have around, I tell ya). Then it changed…

Once you’ve completed three games of tag, you may think that you’ve got .Hack//Infection in the bag. Don’t be mislead. If the fourth game of tag is representative of the difficulty of the rest of this game, I’m not sure I’ll be capable of beating it.

.Hack//Infection has been going nicely for me now, and I am pleased to say that after a weekend of play it holds up nicely.

Transitions between dungeons, fields, towns, the message boards, and email make for a nice staggered pace for gameplay.

Combats have been sufficiently unpredictable to maintain an air of controlled panic. When approaching a magic portal, you don’t know if you’ll be facing four mimics, a pair of hobgobs and a swordsmanoid, or what. This prompts rapid, reactive decisionmaking, which I’ve always found enjoyable for video games in general.

If there’s anything that I have a serious problem with it is the lack of custom keyword combinations that aren’t plot-related in the message boards. You can be assured that (with the exception of Goblin Tag, which hasn’t connected to the overarching plot in a way I can recognize) any premade keyword combo will have a plot element to it. After eight hours of play (not counting time spent after saving, then dying) I’ve come to rely on being able to exhaust my list of premade keywords, then return to my mail and the message board to get a new crop that pushes the story along.

Just one or two red herrings amongst them, resulting in no discernable plot point, would serve to increase the illusion of a non-linear plotline. Of course, an interesting, truely non-linear plotline is somewhat of a Holy Grail amongst game makers, so I shouldn’t hold my hopes out too far.

On a side note, the option to have the original Japanese voice actors instead of the English version is very handy for atmosphere reasons. I always play RPGs with the subtitles on (so I can turn the volume off if need be), and having English subtitles for English dialogue has always seemed… odd to me. Thanks for the choice, Bandai.

Overall Grade so far:

A

I have yet to watch .Hack//Liminality Ep1, as my viewing of .Hack//Sign is not yet complete. My Hong Kong translation of Sign is quite poor (they call Tsukasa “Zea” and Subaru “Une” and Ginkan “Enhan” for reasons passing human understanding, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg). At least they were able to get the names “BT,” “Mimiru,” and “Bear” correct. A review of .Hack//Sign should be upcoming.

More online learnin going on.

http://www.spoono.com
http://www.eyeball-design.com/index3.htm
http://www.eyesondesign.net/
http://www.phong.com/
http://www.shadowness.com/
http://rainworld.com/psworkshop/
http://robouk.mchost.com/
http://www.wastedyouth.org/
http://www.teamphotoshop.com/
http://www.pixelvoid.com/index.php

After toying around a bit with a Progen Warrior and a Jenquai Defender, I’m back with good ole Burrowowl the Terran Tradesman. With the exception of a few boring traderuns (to keep my funds up and my “trade” xp ahead of my combat xp) I’ve been quite impressed by how that game is keeping and holding my interest.

I am easily distracted by bright, shiney objects. When playing Anarchy Online or Asheron’s Call (my previous MMORPGs) even exploring around the impressively vast playfields was rather… tedious. Both had lovely vistas, and some suprising terrain features, but there was something missing.

I think I may had determined what was missing in AO and AC but in’t so much of a problem in E&B: Danger. When warping from navpoint to navpoint through charted territory (or while being guided by somebody whose charts are up to the task) everywhere is safe. Brand new character? No problem, go wherever you want to. But heaven help you if you stop in the wrong place.

Most Sectors have a rather widely varying array of bad-guys wandering around. Stop off at one navpoint in Asteroid Belt Alpha (Sol System) and you’ll be dealing with Combat Level 4-8 Araxias and Piscenes. A mere four navpoints away are clusters of Combat Level 12-18 Red Dragon Pirates.

As a matter of scale, when you are a Combat Level 10 character, a combat level 18 Red Dragon is likely to have your ship disabled faster that you’ll be able to enter warp again (even without navigation, free-warping takes a couple seconds). This means that if you’ve itching to get from cl10 (Combat Level 10) to cl11, you may have to warp or sneak past a bunch of cl23 baddies to find a good hunting area. It also means that if you’re kiting badguys you may accidentally end up in a nest of far nastier badguys ready to hand you your ass.

As a result, simply filling out my charts (hitting the navpoints that my scanners have picked up and looking for others) and occasionally locking horns with what I run into has kept me interested since shortly before the game launched.

Additionally, most usable items you can loot from the wreckage of your foes is manufacturable, adding a strong tinkering aspect to the game. I dig it.

From sonic.help.cgi:

> I am requesting feedback from any and all who have installed the weblog
> , movabletype, at sonic using the option mysql.

> My initial installation, configuration and intitialization of the
> application into my sonic mysql database went without a hitch.

> However, the application hiccups frequently, but inconsidently, when
> attempting to update entries.  The error message indicated that the app
> can not connect to the mysqld host at timber.sonic.net.

This is due to the style of DBI specification in MT.  The fix:

--- lib/MT/ObjectDriver/DBI/mysql.pm~   Tue Sep  3 23:24:42 2002
+++ lib/MT/ObjectDriver/DBI/mysql.pm    Wed Sep  4 12:50:00 2002
@@ -23,7 +23,7 @@
     my $driver = shift;
     $driver->SUPER::init(@_);
     my $cfg = $driver->cfg;
-    my $dsn = 'dbi:mysql:database=' . $cfg->Database;
+    my $dsn = 'dbi:mysql:' . $cfg->Database;
     $dsn .= ';hostname=' . $cfg->DBHost if $cfg->DBHost;
     $driver->{dbh} = DBI->connect($dsn, $cfg->DBUser, $cfg->DBPassword,
         { RaiseError => 0, PrintError => 0 })

This will ensure MT works across all DBI's.


 -Scott