Games

Playing with toy soldiers

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I’ve been swamped at work lately and didn’t have the time to put up these photos. I’ve always had a fascination with miniatures, especially Warhammer 40k, but I’m well aware of how expensive and time consuming getting into the hobby will be. This is why something like BattleLore is the next best thing. It’s a simplified wargame that you play with plastic miniatures on a game board. My wife and I tried it out at CarcaSean last Saturday (handily they already had the board and pieces out for a game of their own).

My first surprise was that the miniatures are really, really tiny. I mean, I’ve looked at photos of them on the net, but you have to hold them in the hand to realize how small they really are. I guess the size is necessary to fit the more than 200 figures into the box and to keep the game board at a reasonable size. After all, each hex needs to be able to hold four infantry figures.

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The second surprise is that contrary to my expectations about it being a complicated game, it’s actually quite easy to set up and the game flows smoothly once you understand the basics. Granted, we’ve only played the first two scenarios, so we haven’t gotten into the Lore stuff yet, but we’ve had a very enjoyable and the number of scenarios makes this a very promising long term prospect. With all the extra Lore and War Council added in, this will be a game with plenty of legs indeed.

We liked it so much in fact that we’ve decided to buy a copy of it. We’ve said as much to Sean. The only problem is how to store the huge thing. I don’t think stuffing the miniatures back into the box once it’s been opened would be practical so we’re going to have to get a big table to put everything on. We’ll probably get around to that by the middle to end of this month. As you can see, Sean hasn’t bothered to paint his figures and I doubt I’ll ever get around to it myself. I can just imagine the difficulty of trying to point the tip of the brush at just the right spots on the little things!

In the meantime, it seems that my long ordered copy of Arkham Horror has arrived, so we’ll be going on Saturday to pick it up. So many games, so little time!

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Games

Research & Development – The Mod

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I’ve been playing an awful lot of strategy games these days, so getting through Research & Development over the weekend made for a nice change of pace. It’s a mod that requires Half-Life 2: Episode 2 and it’s been winning praises all over the net. It can be downloaded for free from ModDb. The main focus of the mod is on puzzles. There are action sequences as well with plenty of enemies out to kill you, but the player never gets an actual weapon. Instead, with the help of the trusty Half-Life 2 gravity gun, you’re supposed to use your wits to figure how to defeat your enemies and get to the next area.

The most fervent of the mod’s admirers have compared it to Portal, but I wouldn’t go quite that far. For the most part, the puzzles are cool without being really clever and are difficult enough to be satisfying to solve without being too frustrating. The hardest part is probably figuring where to go next, as opposed to what to do, as sometimes the only exit from an area is a tiny crawlspace. The lack of any narrative hurts it too. At least Portal cleverly put its puzzles within the context of a scientific experiment that’s supposed to be filled with puzzles.

All in all, a mod that’s well worth downloading and checking out, especially if you liked the puzzley elements of the Half-Life 2 games. Personally, I liked the action elements more than the puzzley ones, so I’m somewhat lukewarm on this mod. Not bad for a relatively short game, but I wouldn’t want to devote the time for a full length version. It certainly is a very impressive effort for just a one-man team. Just be sure to play in short bursts or your brain might hurt.

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News & Politics, Science

Recent Interesting Science Articles (July ’09)

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Three articles this month and all of them are related in some way to the study of human nature. The first article touches on an explanation of why depression occurs from the perspective of evolutionary psychology. The second one demonstrates that humans really are that irrational when it comes to making economic decisions. The last one is on how caffeine might hold the key to curing Alzheimer’s disease.

The first article is from The Economist and covers a theory by Randolph Nesse of the University of Michigan. Dr. Nesse thinks that depression can be thought of as being analogous to physical pain. Just as pain serves to dissuade us from doing things that cause us physical harm, so depression serves to dissuade us from doing things that cause us mental harm. By this, he means specifically the pursuit of unreachable goals. Since pursuing goals that are ultimately unreachable wastes precious time and energy, he theorizes that depression exists as a mechanism to inhibit doing so.

Continue reading Recent Interesting Science Articles (July ’09) →

Personal Life, Philosophy

Married without children

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This post was prompted by a recent thread on QT3 which quickly spiralled into a decidedly heated discussion about the sometimes condescending attitude that some have towards others, especially married couples, who choose not to have children. Someone also linked to an excerpt of a pretty interesting article on the subject which seems to have attracted a great deal of comments. My wife and I have been married for three years now and we happen to be one of those couples who have decided not to have any children ever.

Personally, I can’t say that we’ve gotten the level of grief that some similar couples on QT3 seem to have had over this decision, but I can certainly say people often seem befuddled when we tell them about our decision. At the very least, this tends to open a gap between ourselves and friends of our age who have gone on to found families of their own with children. As I posted on QT3, children are the main topics of conversation in many social circles and not having children of our own means other people have a hard time relating to us and inevitably leads these friends to drift away.

I don’t care to go into the details of our personal reasons for not wanting to have children. But I do want to point out that I feel that this is a very personal issue over which no one has the right to judge anyone else over. While few people would go to the extreme of accusing childless couples of shirking from their responsibility of replenishing the human race (though some do, even on QT3), many more seem to insinuate that not having children automatically means leading less fulfilling, less worthy lives and that is something to be pitied.

I don’t really have the energy to reiterate through the myriad arguments of why not having a child can be a good thing (you can read through that QT3 thread and the comments on the above-mentioned article for that), other than to note that it’s probably the single most environmentally friendly decision a person can make if you’re one of those green types (which I’m not). I do want to note that ultimately, from a moral dimension, none of that should matter. Having a child is a personal and private decision that should have no bearing on whether or not you’re a good or a bad person. Unfortunately, many people don’t seem to agree with me.

Games

Region-locked saved game woes

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Look what I received last week! Despite my earlier comments about Freedom Unite only adding minimal stuff to the existing Freedom 2, I ended up buying it anyway. It’s my first purchase from Youbeli.com after its merger with Pcgame.com.my too. Oddly enough I thought that the purchase had failed when I was led to an error screen after inputting my credit card information but someone called me the next day to confirm the details.

Of course I bought Freedom Unite only because I knew that it had a saved game transfer function so you could bring over your existing character from Freedom 1 or Freedom 2 with all of his or her gear intact. Except when I tried to actually do it, it didn’t work. After a bit of investigation, I found that this was because the copy of Freedom 2 I’d been playing is an EU-region version while the copy of Freedom Unite I’d just bought in Malaysia turns out to be a US-region version. While the PSP itself happily acknowledges that there’s a Freedom 2 saved game file on it, Freedom Unite simply won’t recognize the file as a valid saved game to import from.

This means that I’ll have to restart my Monster Hunter career basically from scratch. This actually sounds more daunting that it really is. Even though I’d put more than 30 hours in Freedom 2 I’d only ever worked up to the Elder 3 quests. Now that I’ve developed the skills necessary, I’ve managed to reach the Elder 2 quests in just a couple of days of playing. Plus, this gives me a chance to diversify away from the noob-friendly longsword to the formidable but incredibly unwieldy greatsword.

The biggest visible change, apart from some very handy tools to make inventory handling easier, is the addition of the felyne comrades. So far, my pet cat doesn’t seem to very good at actually fighting (he can’t even kill a vespoid mosquito by himself!) but he’s proving to be a very handy distraction for the monsters. Still, it seems that I need to be careful whenever he decides to toss bombs arounds because that thing can hurt even me when it lands too close! More updates as I get further into Freedom Unite.

Games

Total War in space!

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Sword of the Stars is a game that was first released way back in 2006. Despite its promising premise and a design that initially appealed to me, I held back from buying it due to the poor reviews it received. Then there was the matter of the minor controversy it generated on QT3. One of the game’s designers had the unfortunate tendency to take criticisms against the game rather poorly and had a habit of getting into flame wars with potential customers.

But it was when the designer decided to pick a fight with QT3 owner Tom Chick that the consensus on the forum turned against it. Tom Chick, a freelance game reviewer, had delivered a less than flattering review of the game. The designer responded by accusing Chick of being biased since he was involved in writing the manual for Galactic Civilizations 2, which can be seen as a direct competitor to Sword of the Stars. You can still read Chick’s reply to that accusation here.

Continue reading Total War in space! →

Philosophy

When suicide is the right choice

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This Foreign Policy blog post chose to highlight the cost of assisted suicide in Switzerland, but what struck me most about this news item was really how dignified the couple’s choice was and indeed how touching. The wife was aged 74 and suffering from terminal cancer with only weeks left to live. The husband was aged 85, going blind and deaf (which must have been especially painful given that he was a prominent conductor) and simply did not want to live without her, after having been together for 54 years.

This isn’t terribly surprising coming from someone like me, but I most definitely would want this option to be available to me. I can imagine few other cases that would serve as a better example than this one of why choosing to take one’s own life can sometimes be just the right one.

The unexamined life is a life not worth living