I played “Action Scrabble” for the first time today.

It was a bit ad-hoc. I made up the rules in my head a good couple of years ago, and I’ve been challenging people to try it ever since- tonight was the first time I ever found a taker.

Here’s the trick. Every single game of Scrabble I’ve played, I spend the entire game either waiting for somebody to take a laboriously long move, or myself trying to take a laboriously long move. The game is all about spending a long, long time perfecting a perfect move. It’s not about ‘think fast’, it’s about ‘optimizing’.

Okay, you have 7 tiles, sitting, in your hands. You haven’t turned them over yet. GO.

Quickly, put your letters down in the rack. First person to come up with a word gets to lay it down for the initial double-word-score bonus.

Action Scrabble is not turn based. As soon as you have a word, you say “WORD!”, lay down your letters, and write your word down on the scorecard – not the score for the word, mind you, just the word. The first person to say “WORD” when he has a word gets precedence when it comes to placement, but said player must play his word immediately and without stalling. Get your letters. Fast, other players can keep playing while you’re dilly-dallying.

If a word is challenged, it stays on the board until post-game, where you will be awarded its negative value if you fail the challenge. Unless a word is completely implausible (ZYGARF) at which point it is removed from the board and you are chastised for being an asscaptain.

Okay, everybody has their letters down. Try to lay them all down- you get negative points for tiles left over at the end. The last player to lay his tiles down must give up his tiles to the group- first person to play the tiles gets the points, and those tiles STILL penalize the last player!

Okay, game’s over. Score is tallied, either from top to bottom or bottom to top of the word list, using standard scoring rules.

You’ve just played a game of Action Scrabble. It’s like Scrabble, but much, much faster. Incidentally, it’s also more fun, at least if you hate the inter-game waiting.

So, reddit was fighting over consoles versus PC’s, and.. well.. honestly, I’m just tired of seeing this argument. It’s like Mac guys and PC guys having it out- yeah, you have lots of valid points, but so does the other guy.

If you’re a PC guy, there are lots of good reasons to be- you’ve got…

• Steam, with it’s inexplicably good deals and strong community.
• Pirated games, that will give your computer the digital equivalent of HIV.
• keyboard & mouse, all the better for FPS, RTS, MMO and Strategy games.
• free online play, damn you, Microsoft,
• laptop-style portability, if you like casual games or knee-breakingly heavy laptops
• a potentially seamless experience, if you’re wealthy, smart, and lucky.
• a machine for all of your other computering needs, Excel, porn, programming, porn, reddit, porn.

Whereas, if you’re a console guy, you’ve got…

• Party games, for those three dicks at the party who are good at Rock Band.
• The gamepad, for fighting, sports, racing, and lots of other games.
• Ease-of-setup and use, red ring of death? NOOOO!
• The couch and T.V., which you probably already spent tonnes of money on. Fatty.
• Variety, ’cause there are more console games than P.C. games.

They have their flaws, too, but nothing horrifying.

I don’t really see the point of being a zealot either way- go with whatever floats your nubbins, or- if you can’t choose- go with both. (That works for your choice of OS, too.)

A quick summary of the happenings, for those people who weren’t there:

(Angelina) Leukemia, the brave rogue, (Xianny) Eyebrows, the sneaky rogue, (Curtis) Richard, the mage who is also a chef, and (Marcel) The Generic Dwarf, met under mysterious circumstances, ostensibly because they were all seeking fame, fortune, gold, and adventure.

Immediately on their path, they encountered an unfortunate series of Kobolds. The Generic Dwarf stood in the centre of their assault, soaking up damage and occasionally felling a gnome. In his capacity as damage-soaker, his beard was soaked in both napalm and acid. The two rogues popped in and out, dealing minor damage, and Richard felled Kobolds by the handful with his powerful burst attacks. Eventually, the last kobold was felled, minced, and served in a stew that was (everyone noticed) quite delicious.

The characters found themselves upon a small settlement- Winterhaven. While the rest of the team conferred about whether or not the city was safe, Richard merrily waved at the town guard, who waved back. Seems safe enough. The party walked into the town’s tavern and bought a few pitchers of ale. At this time actual beer was brought out (Thanks, Marcel!) and consumed. It was both cool and refreshing.

After a bit of snooping. it was found out that the town of Winterhaven had a tad of a Kobold problem. (Yuh, really?) And if the team would be so kind as to clear out the Kobold’s nest, there would be mad cash in it for them. (Okay, 100 gold pieces and a bottle of fine wine. )

Setting off on the road, the team encountered their second set of Kobolds for the day. The Generic Dwarf went back to taking loads of damage, taking hit upon hit and eventually deciding that it would be prudent to flee. Richard commented that this makes him the “Worst Dwarf Ever”. Without a thick damage soaker to take the front, the brave rogue immediately took a felling blow. In a halfhearted rescue attempt, Richard flooded the battlefield with thunder-wave upon thunder-wave. The Kobolds were severely hurt, but sadly, Leukemia didn’t survive. With naught but a few hit points, a cowardly Dwarf, and sneaky, sneaky Eyebrows, Richard thought that an expeditious retreat was in order.

Richard dashed away, yelling “CHEESE IT!” and leaving Eyebrows the Rogue to his own devices. Eyebrows was knocked unconscious by the Kobolds, and Generic Dwarf and Richard booked it back to Winterhaven.

Upon reaching Winterhaven, Richard and Generic Dwarf stopped to catch their breath, only to encounter an infurated Eyebrows. He attempted to greet them, knife concealed in his palm, but Richard noticed and immediately bellowed “GUARDS!”.

Richard tensed, Generic Dwarf grabbed his Generic Dwarven Weapon, the guards.. guarded… and the session ended, to be picked up next day.

And now for… D&D Tips!:

• The team doesn’t need two rogues. Honestly.
• Wear all the armour you can. Know why the mage survived? Because unlike most mages, he was wearing Leather Armour.
• The only way for a rogue to be really effective is if he has combat advantage -somehow-, usually by flanking. That means you don’t go up and try to deal direct from-the-front damage- you wait for the enemies to engage the Dwarf and then hit them from behind.
• You start out with enough money to buy just about all the equipment you need. Asking quest-givers for more equipment is silly. The following conversation will never happen:
  • Questee: We’re going to need more equipment to do this quest. Hook us up!
  • Questor: Oh, glad you asked. We’ve been keeping this +3 Sword of Poopflinging just in case somebody asked.
  • Questee: Wonderful!

  the same goes for advance payment – especially if you’re a group of shyster-looking unproven heroes. Maybe if you’re super lucky you’ll be able to finagle a few extra coins. If you’re lucky.

• Team needs moar Cleric and Paladin pls.
• If your character is named “Leukemia”, you’re going to die in the first game.

Okay, I’ll admit it- Fallout 3 has been eating an inordinate amount of my time.

Honestly, with new games, I usually don’t spend too much time with them. A few rounds here and there- the novelty pulls me in more than the actual gameplay.

Fallout 3, though, it’s .. well, hours and hours of my life have disappeared inexplicably into the hole of Fallout 3.

There are things in the game that are sorely lacking- the path of vice and evil just doesn’t seem quite as evil as in the other Fallout games. You can’t kill children or pimp out your wife, and the game’s main quest has a good/evil divergence.. but it’s almost at the end, not at the beginning, so the bulk of the game’s storyline only really goes one way. I suppose that games like Grand Theft Auto have raised the bar on our random violent urges, and games like KOTOR have raised the bar on our malicious, brooding, planned evil urges.

Good or evil, your ability to sleep with random women is sorely limited- I mean, you’d think some of the girls in the wastes would want to get with the roaming savior of humanity, an intelligent, handsome 19-year old who is rough around the edges but ultimately good-hearted- one who, in many cases, has just saved their families/lives from roving bands of raiders/super mutants. Maybe it’s the mutton-chops?

The combat is.. well, it’s just hard. VATS is great, but once your action points expire, you either have to fruitlessly fire at your enemies or run screaming into the bushes to restore your action points. A turn-based just-VATS system would be sweet, but the first-person shootery is just clunky and lame. I worked around the problem by switching the combat to Very Easy- which dramatically lowers the hit points of all of your foes, in exchange for a much lower XP bonus for killing them. I don’t know- I find it fun to not be dying all the time.

So, why do I enjoy this? If not for the combat and random viciousness, then what? Well, I like me a good RPG. Fallout 3 is a pretty good RPG. I especially like having a shack in which to store all of my various scavenged swag, junk, and garden gnomes. I like building character stats, acquiring goods in unlikely locations, and saving people from stuff in an almost episodic way.

Not to mention, my character looks like a total badass- although, for a brief while, the best equipment available for my character was Talon Combat Armor and a Motorcycle Helmet, which took my character from looking like a western badass to a .. Spaceball.

Yeah, all the ladies love a Spaceball with mutton chops. I also like how my wearing the armor and insignia of the scariest, most villainous merceneries in the wasteland doesn’t change anybody’s perception of me at all.

So, the fan-translation of Mother 3 (“Earthbound 2: Finally More Earthbound, You Bastards”) is finally complete.

The game took 12 years to actually finish in Japan, and they (apparently) figured that nobody in North America was still interested.

Which, honestly, if it weren’t for the fan translation project, I wouldn’t be. I mean, Earthbound was a great game- very clever, original, and full of great characters. The ability to *pop* underpowered monsters like overfull balloons was a welcome addition to any RPG. On the other hand, it was a *monolithic* grind. I’m really not a fan of having to work -that- hard to beat a game.

So, being as I may be potentially working for a subsidiary of Nexon in the near future, I was thinking that I might take a look at one of their most popular(/advertised) online properties, Maple Story.

If I had to describe the game in two words? Poorly translated.

I can’t even begin to enumerate the almost-but-not-quite-syntactically-correct-English in the game. It’s just a step above Zero Wing in terms of translation quality.

You start off with the MMO-standard almost-nothing-at-all. Here’s your undershirt, shorts, and wooden sword. Go kill snails a bit.

As for the user base, it seems to be composed entirely of the 8-12-year-old crowd, a bunch of whiny, immoral, “r u goin 2 mk fun my bff wh0re?” sort of crew that so nauseates me.

I had some fun attempting to perform a trade with someone while pretending to have no concept of what ‘trading’ is, how one might perform such a trade, what ‘money’ is, what value it might have, that sort of thing. (‘r u stupid?’ “No, I’m just having trouble understanding the concept- in exchange for 2000 arrows, you will give me… money? What is this.. ‘money’?” ‘it’s MONEY!’ “Yes, yes, saying it louder won’t make it any clearer”…)

The game itself is pretty standard MMO fare- hit things about the head and neck in exchange for points, tiny amounts of money, and countless tiny MacGuffins (“Bring me 281,092,102 horbongler pelts!”)

The game doesn’t seem to have any appreciable draw- the community is too downright young for anybody with armpit hair, the gameplay is simple and slow and boring, and .. wait, I just thought of the game’s one saving grace- the game’s appearance is lively and animated. So there’s that. I suppose if you toss a nice ribbon on a pig, you have … one of the game’s early enemies.

Working at EA, I often find myself wondering what my favourite game developed by Electronic Arts would be.

Not a game developed by people who are now owned by Electronic Arts- that’s a pretty big category, dominated by games like Baldur’s Gate 2, Battlefield 1942, and SimCity 3000.

No, my favourite EA game. I’m going to have to say that the pinnacle of Electronic Arts’ sports development had to be Mutant League Hockey.

It takes all of the fun of NHL ‘94, mixed with chainsaws. How could that not be the best thing ever?