Gah. I've been doing more book reading lately and thus the to-be-reviewed piles begins to loom. Let's talk about Born Standing Up, Steve Martin's memoir of his early stand-up career.
I have to admit, I went into this book thinking it was something different than it was. I thought the focus was on comedy, how it works and why it works. There is a discussion about how his stand-up evolved and what Martin was thinking as created his style, but that's not the bulk of the book by any means. Furthermore, that's more of a historical note than a comedy How-To. It's a fascinating topic and his presentation is insightful, but it ends up being a documentary of how Steve Martin reacted to the comedy of that time. If you were going to do comedy today you'd have to react to the comedy of today – meaning you'd have to build off or react to Martin's work. From that perspective knowing his thought process back then isn't really practical information. As I said it's fascinating to read but I had gotten the impression that it there was practical information on creating funny material in the book, and I don't think that's accurate.
I've always enjoyed Steve Martin's stand-up and sketch work, as well as his earlier movies. (I don't think I've seen anything he's done from in the last twenty years or so.) The book does a good job of presenting his start going all the way back to working in Disneyland when he was ten years old. I was only seven when The Jerk came out, so I've always seen his comedy after the fact, usually by many years. I think I was in college before I saw the "Wild And Crazy Guys" skits. Seeing how his comedy evolved and where he started is interesting and he tells it well in the book.
I enjoyed the book. It's a pretty quick and light read. It's not what I thought it was going in but even as a historical note seeing how Martin played with comedy is interesting. I tend to think of that oddly literal and deadpan style Martin has just being fully formed. He does a good job of walking through how that evolved from the standard comedy routines he knew and presenting his style as a journey. If that sounds interesting to you then I think you'd enjoy reading this. It's more of a memoir and less of an analysis of comedy but it's a fine memoir, and chewing on the techniques presented can yield interesting insights. The glimpse of how Martin approached his craft is intriguing and I think worth the time to read.
Read moreThe Sky, From Above
Wil Wheaton tweeted this article with astronaut photographs yesterday and it's completely awesome. As an adult I complain about how the shuttle program brought NASA to its current cul-de-sac that we're Constellation-ing our way out of, but those pictures of launches sure bring me back to being a little kid and watching that very first flight. Back then I thought the shuttle was amazing.
Read moreD&D Reviews - For Real This Time, No Fooling
OK so yesterday's post was originally intended to be a book review amalgam before I put on the rose-colored glasses and got out the scrapbooks. Today I want to talk about a pair of book(let)s and I may talk a bit about the first 4th edition module.
The books are called Wizards Presents Races and Classes, and Wizards Presents Worlds and Monsters and together they are the bulk of the "preview" materials for 4e. The module serves a bit of this as well - it's called H1 - Keep on the Shadowfell. I call them book(let)s because each book is only about 100 pages long. At first I was sort of dubious about them, and I still think they are badly titled. But they aren't really a "This is wizard and look we had somebody draw a picture!" What they are is actually a series of essays by the people who created 4th edition. (Well and to be fair, there is a "This is a wizard" component.)
Sticking with wizards, there are six pages about wizards in the Races and Classes book. The first two are clearly going to be in the Player's Handbook and are pretty much "So you wanna be a wizard? This is what you'll do." and some pictures. But then there's a half column on the role of the wizard in combat and talking about how the wizard now has an implement such as a wand or orb (Pratchett fans will wonder if the the implement has a Knob on the End) and that implement shapes what the wizard does. Next up is some "crunchy" (i.e. full of rules information) details about the changes from 3rd to 4th edition, including why the changes were made. Next up is discussion of how the wizard class is balanced against the other classes, both how it worked in 3rd edition and what they changed for 4th. The point I'm trying to make is that while yes these books do cover the fluffy "Wizards cast spells and suck at combat" aspects, there's also a good bit of crunchy "this is how 4th edition works" and a whole big helping of "This is what the design goals of 4th edition are and how we got there." It's almost like these two books are the directory's commentary track of the Player's Handbook. For somebody like me with a more than passing interest in how gaming sausage gets made this stuff is just great.
The split of the books is a bit odd. I actually read all of the Races and Classes book and the first quarter of the Worlds and Monsters one before I got the logic. They talk about how 4th edition was developed by two teams - a mechanics/rules team and a flavor/creative/art team. The first book was written by the mechanics team and the second by the creative team. This makes a lot of sense but it's not said explicitly anywhere. Once I got that it was a lot easier to flow with which topic was covered where. I think this is even further obscured by the fact that the "Races" topic is the blurriest and it's what the first book opens with. Are dwarves and elves mechanics or flavor? The answer of course is "Yes". The book focuses a bit more on the mechanics side of the fence but it dabbles more in flavor than the other sections do.
The second book shows a lot of good thought. The whole planar system has been redone and one mantra was "lose pointless symmetry". Did anyone ever really adventure in the Positive or Negative Material planes? Even most of the elemental planes were cast in a way that A ) made them uninteresting and B ) made them impossibly difficult to use. "So it's an endless plane of fire? The ground is fire, and the air is fire? And this rock? No, it's fire too huh? And we can't breathe, because of the fire? What a great place to go." Instead now they have a plane called the Feywild which is an eerie mystical echo of the "real" world. All of the fey/faerie creatures come from the Feywild, and ancient elven (technically they are eldarin, but that's a technicality) cities might exist in the Feywild except for the solstice when they materialize in the real world for just one night. Bam! Already that has more adventuring potential than the Inner Planes ever got in 20 years of D&D.
I'd say if you have any interest in D&D, or even much of an interest in game design as a topic this are worth reading. I really liked reading them, and if it wasn't clear already they really piqued my interest in reading the actual rulebooks.
Read moreDungeons & Dragons - A Retrospective
The Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness
JP asked about my opinion of the new Penny Arcade game, officially known as "Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness". I've finished the game although I'll probably play through it a second time, because I didn't unlock the "bonus comic" which I'd like to see.
It's an action RPG and the combat is grounded in the recent Final Fantasy titles with a dash of new real-time gameplay added. Now, a competent action RPG on the 360 isn't something to sneer at but without the Penny Arcade humor there just wouldn't be enough game here to justify a purchase. The combat action is interesting and it gets a bit frenetic as you're deciding what moves to use next, whether to heal a character or unleash a special attack and all the while timing blocks against enemy moves. So far what I've written could describe Diablo, but there's no random monsters and there's little to no loot. There are inventory items to buff or debuff stats, as well as bandages and a handful of things like oranges (which distract robotic enemies - and if that doesn't make sense then you don't read Penny Arcade ;-) ) as well as explosives. But there's no armor or gear. You can upgrade the weapons of your three characters, but each has a unique weapon and there are two upgrades for each and it's all strictly linear.
There aren't any random encounters and I'm of mixed mind about that. On the one hand the incessant "take two steps and stop to fight a monster" gameplay of a Final Fantasy is usually why I stop playing it (and the other reason is that I get ahead of my character levels because I haven't fought enough random encounters). From that perspective it is refreshing to have each encounter matter. But on the other hand it really makes the role playing element of the RPG seem hyper-shallow. You may thing that's a odd statement to link the RP elements to random encounters but no random encounters means no random loot drops as well, which means there's no glee in finding a better rake then the rake you started with and there's no telling your friends how they need this particular item because it's +3 versus mimes.
OK, so it's a shallow RPG game with an interesting combat mechanic and a fairly limited amount of content. Why is that exciting? The answer is that it really does feel just like the comic. You're fighting mimes (and you learn of the dark god the mimes worship, one who wants to bring silence to the world). You're fighting what amounts to steampunk Fruit Fuckers. You're killing hobos in order to make sure they don't indiscrimately pee on the important "urinology" research of the local scientist. (Which is to say that he pees on things. But he pees scientifically see and that science makes all the difference.) Much of the world has little custom descriptions and many of them are funny. If you're the sort of player who will get a kick out of reading the description of every crab on the boardwalk in order to see every crab joke then you'll enjoy the game. If all you want to do is level up and grab all the phat loot (I've put my time in the Barrens chat channel, I know how the kids talk these days ....) then you're going to find this a fairly thin experience.
All the reviews I've read basically say "If you enjoy reading the comic you'll like the game." and I think that's mostly true. The one exception that I'd make is that if you enjoy the comic and you'd enjoy an action RPG then you'll like the game. I know people who read and enjoy the comic who aren't going to enjoy the actual futzing about picking out attacks and managing their healing items and the like. Perhaps they'd like watching somebody else play it but I do think there's a weird disconnect between the casualness lightweightness of everything except combat and then the hardcore multitasking of the combat system.
The demo lets you play the whole tutorial and by the end of that you should have a good idea whether you'll like the game. If you have a 360 go ahead and check it out.
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