Why I will never play the Age of Conan MMO

Conan as he is meant to be: covered in blood, holding two gore-soaked swords, with a barely-dressed woman jonesing for a helping of his steely thews. (ironically, image taken from a video game)

Some people, particularly people who know about my fondness for both computer games and Conan, have suggested that I might look into the new Age of Conan Massively Multiplayer Online game. I've heard that the graphics are great and that the gameplay will be a lot of fun. To begin, let me say that I don't think I'll ever play any MMO again; at least, I hope I won't. To say I got burned playing World of Warcraft is an understatement: I got flame-charred. Games like that only give you the illusion that you're playing; you're just pushing the game through its paces, either succeeding in killing-this/going-there or going back to try again, like a glorified version of Chutes and Ladders.

So then, why does a Conan MMO offend me so much? When I was a lot younger, I used to look forward to the coming of the "Bookmobile" because the library in my little desert military base wasn't much for adventure stories, but the Bookmobile had so many fun books, not least of them books with a strong, brave man on the cover holding a sword! And so I was introduced to Conan, and I thrilled at the far-fetched tales of his wanderings and adventures, swept away to a heroic time and place. I must have read a dozen of those novels at least. Conan will always have a place in my heart assured for him just for that.

Now, I have rediscovered Conan in the stories by the man who created him: Robert E. Howard. Unlike the novels I read as a boy, these stories aren't just "doing Conan," expanding a world of adventure and fantasy. To Howard, Conan meant something: it was about the heroic struggle of a single man against the world, a real man, as Howard himself might have put it. Howard believed that civilization was a corrupting influence on what it really meant to be human, and he used Conan to strike back against a world he hated for its destruction of individuality and spirit. A Howard Conan story is more than just a remarkably visual and gripping read that I see reflected in the fantasy genre all over; it's a deeply-felt story of a time Howard longed for, when a man's worth truly mattered. And it's come to mean much the same for me: I, too, wish for a time I could be something more than just a nearsighted, skinny lad with no prospect of anything magical in his life. Sure, Conan would have bent me in half like a blade of grass, but at least I would have had that chance to stand up and be something.

And that is why I will not be trying the Age of Conan MMO.

A little rage

Every now and then, I feel the world is utterly lacking in vitriol. So, here's a little soapbox ranting for the cheap seats. Are we all paying attention? Do all children have splatter-shields on to protect them from flying spittle? Good. Let's crank this puppy up.

If you're going to criticize a blog, do it with a little good spirit. Although it's always fun to completely put down a stranger behind your veil of anonymity, you should be a man and consider that this other person had the guts to come out and say something to the world. Perhaps he or she didn't say it the best way it could have been said, but anyone deserves points just for saying something. The basis of this blog, for instance, is the notion that any thought, no matter how random or obtuse, may be worth preserving. Of course it's rather arrogant to assume that people will be actually interested in me, but arrogance is fun. As is cannibalism. But before we get too far off topic, let's get back to the issue at hand.

Specifically, my goat was gotten by the fact that my good friend's first post on a popular steampunk blog received a rather biting comment from a fellow with a moniker which I'll admit already shows that this person admits the unusually harsh content of the remark. I won't repeat the comment out of deference for this person; I wouldn't want my own comment over-analyzed on a blog without my knowledge, so I won't do it to this person. I'll merely say that I felt personally hurt by the comment because it implied the post was below the standard in quality set for the blog; I think that, even if a first post fails in living up to one's expectations, one could at least give a critical comment and wait for a second post before reaching for the torches and pitchforks. Yes, I take that kind of thing personally. No, the Lord Admiral and I are not the same person.

That being said, this person does make a legitimate point about the reduction of the post having led to a bit of decline in its quality. Damn the common man who can't read better than a chimpanzee! Let's put some meat on these cyber-bones!

Yes, you can attach cyber- to anything.

Mmm, cyber-pizza.

Uwe Boll PS

The biggest criticism against Uwe Boll... okay, let's be honest, ONE of the biggest criticisms, is that he completely misses the point of the video games he's making movies out of. However, his latest movie, Postal, has the following movie summary on imdb.com:

The story begins with a regular Joe who tries desperately to seek employment, but embarks on a violent rampage when he teams up with cult leader Uncle Dave. Their first act is to heist an amusement park, only to learn that the Taliban are planning the same heist as well. Chaos ensues, and now the Postal Dude must not only take on terrorists but political figures as well.

Uwe Boll, I tip my hat to you, sir. Having played the festering, maggot-ridden corpse of modern video game decay that is Postal and, more appropriate to the film, Postal II, I feel I am in a position to tell you that you, sir, have perfectly captured the essence of that game. Your movie sounds every bit as awful as the game.

The First Horseman?

Now, I have never seen an Uwe Boll movie from beginning to end. But I'm told he's awful. And from what I have seen of his movies (mostly movies that ended up scraped off the inside of the toilet seat and stuck on the SciFi channel in between other crappy movies) proves that the general consensus that he's the most talentless director since Ed Wood could well be true. You do have to give him some props for getting angry enough to beat up five of his critics in real-life boxing matches, but then again, if that's the point you have to go to to make people stop making fun of you, you should probably re-examine what it is you are doing in the first place.

That being said, I found a hilarious tidbit on the internet (as I tend to do, from time to time). Petitiononline.com is a place for people with gripes to start petitions, after which they find out how few people actually give a damn about what they've spent the last few months bitching about. However, the online petition to get Uwe Boll to take his hands (some say tentacles? elder god Boll?) off of movies permanently has over 283,000 signatures as of this moment. Considering this suggests that 283,000 people have actually seen a Uwe Boll movie, that's pretty amazing in itself.

Comments on the petition left by signatories include:

Please stop before more damage can be done
My ass could make a better film than you Please, just stop. There is no need for you to make anymore films.
The film world is just fine without you.
Your movies make me feel funny

And, perhaps the comment that sums up how most people seem to feel about Uwe Boll:

All your films are penis


Please note, Mr. Boll, if you find this, that I haven't seen your movies, I just think this interesting web trend of wanting to track you down and fillet you like juicy carp guts is hilarious.

New digs

I moved into a new apartment last week, and I helped my mom move from her house to a new townhouse, which is what sucked away the majority of my time. Although it was wonderful to have help from a number of my friends, I still put in a huge amount of time, and at the end of it, I was so exhausted I just felt like crying. That's something pretty wimpy for me to admit, but there you have it. I also convinced her to take the huge television I bought for her. I have to come up with all sorts of excuses and reasons she should have it instead of giving it to me; she seems to think it's just too big. Well, that's the whole point!

What I didn't do today was go to see Wil Wheaton at Supercon. Someone else did, though. And I'm insanely jealous. Most of us know Wil as Wesley Crusher from Star Trek, which means a lot of people think he was annoying. I disagree: he was the character we all would have been on the Enterprise: the geeky kid just happy to be there, wanting to have adventures all the time. And I think that's the reason people are down on Wesley: they see themselves in him.

That being said, Wil also has a cool blog, in which he reveals himself to be a monster geek. I'm not one to talk, having an arcade machine emulator on my computer and having spent quite a bit of time over the last couple of weeks playing Berzerk (Chicken! Fight like a robot!), Sinistar (Beware, I live!), and Pole Position (Mutteroo muttera mumblerar). But Wil has actually made something out of it.

I spent the better part of today reading Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's The Watchmen. I feel very Rorscach at the moment. That character is probably the best thing about The Watchmen, although I think that the book, more than any other graphic novel I know of, truly gets at what it means to be a superhero.

I'm also feeling pretty cyberpunk. One of these days, I really have to teach myself to do art, so I can make comics.

A dearth of blogging

I haven't been blogging because I've been very busy and very away from my computer. But this doesn't mean that I haven't been having brilliant thoughts, thoughts even far more brilliant than the ones I've gotten down on this blog in the past, just that I haven't had the chance to immortalize them in digital form.

And let's be honest, this blog will probably be gone in a year anyhow.

But there will be more blogs coming soon! Probably.

I finally got around to seeing the new Guy Ritchie movie Revolver. I think I've finally decided, about an hour after I finished watching it, that I didn't like it.

In Honor of Mother's Day

In honor of Mother's Day, I wanted to express my deep appreciation for my own mother. It is thanks to her that I developed my lifelong interest in books, and if I ever actually finish and publish a novel, I'll have to dedicate the first one to her. I was a pretty mixed-up kid, and it was my mum's constant support and faith in me that helped me become the mixed-up young man I am today.

Also of note on Mother's Day is another story about deep devotion to a mother. Robert E. Howard, tough-guy Texan and writer of the Conan stories and other tales of hard men, was devastated by his mother's long convalescence. When she slipped into a coma the doctors said she wouldn't come out of, Howard went outside and shot himself. I find that deeply moving, and it shows that even the manliest of men can have a huge soft spot for his mum.

Isn't blogging great? Where else could I write a suicide story in honor of Mother's Day?

The Worst Movie Ever?

Netflix introduced me to this movie. I haven't seen it, but I'm sorely tempted to, just so I can die halfway through and have the following movie summary appear in my obituary:

"Truck (Isaac Hayes), an ex-football star working as a bounty hunter, is on the trail of a violent pimp named Gator (Paul Harris). But when Truck and his partner finally get their man, Gator's woman (Nichelle Nichols) and her pimping friends put a hit out on them. Now, the hunter has become the hunted, and Truck will have to survive the wrath of the baddest pimp ever -- a menacing thug named Blue (Yaphet Kotto)." (copied from Netflix)

Watch the trailer on Youtube. It will kick your ass. Of particular interest is Nichelle Nichols, also known as Star Trek's Lieutenant Uhura. Apparently, she wasn't just a black woman who played an important part on a starship and inspired young minority women all over the world. She was a pimp with a hooker called Colonel Sanders.

High School seemed like such a blur...

Today I was watching Smallville and just reflecting on the way high school kind of flashed by for me. I never had a lot of friends and I certainly never even came close to dating. I never raised much hell and the gutsiest thing I ever did was stay in the school all night for a math competition. Now, I'm starting to think that even though I got the grades, I wish I would have spent less time on my studies and more on just being young. Those days, when everyone lives with their parents and sees each other every day, when it feels like friendships will last forever and everything matters, will never be here again. I don't know if I'll ever have as tight friendships as I did in high school, and they could have been a lot tighter. High school is the great equalizer: not everyone goes to college, and there, everyone is divided by subject. In high school, someone of every sort is there, the jocks with the nerds, the preppies with the losers. And I could have been a lot more part of it. Instead, I worried about what colleges I could get into and how many scholarships I would get. I was more concerned with scores (and video games) than with just being a kid and hanging out with my buddies.

And I think that was a huge mistake. So the lesson is that sometimes I should take my eye off of the goal and just enjoy what I have now. Because those stories about inedible cafeteria food and the Homecoming dance are indelible.

Even if the story is that there was no story.

New D&D Edition

I was thinking about pre-ordering Dungeons and Dragons: Fourth Edition on Amazon.com today, but there's really only one thing holding me back. No, it's not that I might not play it because I'm just too hip to play a game best left for stinky men in cloaks who live with their mothers: that really is a non-issue, man. I'm just as likely to make time with an elf as a real girl, so why not just go with it?

No, my problem is much more nerdy. I'm concerned that they'll whip out 4.5 edition right after fourth, just like they made 3.5 after third. I'd end up buying all the books, and then I'd have to buy all of them all over again for the half-dozen or so tweaks they throw in because they didn't playtest the shit properly.

Let this be a lesson to you, Wizards of the Coast. As the old saying goes, "once burned, twice shy." You'd be sitting on my pre-order dough right now if you just stuck it out instead of dropping that 3.5 edition stinker on me. I'm doubly shy because I actually waited to buy third edition and ended up going straight to 3.5, which turned out to be a very good decision.

Or, depending on whether or not I want to believe all that extra book-buying was intentional, it might be "Fool me once, shame on you...."

The system is flawed

Netflix thinks I'd give the Gummi Bears cartoon series a rating of 4.2/5.

Clearly, something has gone very, very wrong in the world. It's like a disturbance in the Force. It made me feel almost bad to tell the system that I'm really not interested. Almost like I was saying no to a part of childhood....

Not that I ever watched that show. Okay, maybe once. But I was young and foolish. I also watched He-Man.

Yatta!

So I had not one but two separate nightmares last night that I did very poorly in that second class I told you about. In the first nightmare, the class was being taught by some awful woman in a classroom completely unlike any I have been in. She told me that I had never turned in my paper, and I said that I had it on the website, but I couldn't for the life of me find the website again, so the remainder of the dream was about simultaneously trying to find the paper on a hard drive or find it on the website. In real life, I handed it in physically, so I don't know where that idea came from. Maybe from the fact that I hate it when my students hand in a paper online rather than handing it to me! Anyway, the second dream was me trying to convince my teacher that I had the paper in, because she was about to give me a C- because I hadn't found the paper, and meanwhile the next class was coming in and she was trying to shunt me off. In the third dream, I was a pirate coming in to port and trying to find the inn where I would be staying for the night.

But this morning, I checked my grade, and guess what? All your English classes are belong to me! I am the Duke of English, A Number One!

Now it's time to get down and boogie.

The problem with not wanting to get up in the morning is that I have all these weird dreams. But really, why wake up? So I can hang around playing video games and watching movies? I need a new hobby.

Thoughts on a modern boy's education

Now, I don't say this to brag. I say this because I'm scared, and it's one of the most uncomfortable things about being me.

Up to this semester, I had taken five classes as a graduate student: Topics in Creative Writing (Fiction), Folklore Seminar (Supernatural), Poetry Writing, Practicum in Teaching English, and Topics in Creative Writing (Nonfiction). I got an A in each class. Now, I have another A in Topics in a Poetry Writing Workshop (it's written "Poetry Writting" on my unofficial transcript; sometimes I feel like I go to a Mickey Mouse college). I only have one more grade to get, and that was in my hardest course this semester. Most of the time, I wouldn't worry so much about getting an A. That's life; every now and then, I don't do as well as I would have liked. And this semester, it wouldn't be because I wasn't good enough, it would be because I frankly didn't try as hard as I should have.

On the other hand, it's a matter of pride now. Once I have a streak like that going, I'd feel like a failure if I didn't keep it up. I can't stand being anything but the best. I don't say this gladly; I recognize it as a personal weakness, but as far as weaknesses go, it's a much better one than mediocrity or apathy. In fact, I feel a bit sick to my stomach thinking about it. For the time being, I'm glad my last grade hasn't been posted. Once it is, I won't have to worry about grades again until the end of the summer. Yay!

Of course, that presupposes that I won't start worrying in advance...

In quest of Steam-powered Happiness

So, no thanks to my good friend the Lord Admiral of Her Majesty's Airship Fleet, I've been looking into the steampunk thing recently. For those of you who don't know what that is, take one part Smashing Pumpkins's "Tonight, Tonight" video, one part Jules Verne, one part Charles Dickens, and one part Wild, Wild West, stir very thoroughly (to break up any chunks of Kenneth Branagh from the latter part), and voila! steampunk. Of course, I've known about this for a few years now, and I've read the first "major" steampunk book, The Difference Engine, partly because my lord and master (William Gibson) was one of the people who wrote it. But I haven't really gotten into the whole thing until the Admiral encouraged me to.

Part of my looking into this thing has involved some awesome art, notably a steampunk Dalek.

But most importantly of all, I've been looking for a video game that uses steampunk. Those of you who play World of Warcraft already know what I call steam-pathetic: steam-powered stuff that clanks around, but with none of the elegance or wonder of the Victorian age, and completely lacking that amazing quality of Victorian culture that true steampunk should embody.

That's exactly what I found in Silverfall. The game is a pretty average Diablo-clone. The graphics look good, the characters being the high point, but the story is flat as a Japanese woman, and the voice acting is laughable and pretty spotty:only the most major conversations have a voice element, the voice actor frequently says things differently than the text does, and at one point a character said "cur-stal" instead of "crystal," which really makes me wonder who they get to do these things. Then there was the biggest turd: the monsters level up with you and respawn in all the zones. That's right: when you first leave town, you fight level 1 or 2 zombies. Later, when you leave the same town the same way, you fight the same zombies, except now they're still your level. This completely takes away any point in levelling up and getting new equipment! In fact, you have to struggle to get new equipment just so you can keep killing the same monsters you were killing five or even ten levels ago! It's as if everything cost more just because you got a raise. Imagine if you had to write the exact same paper every year in high school and college, except it got a page longer every year. Yeah, that's basically the same thing. Then, to put the final nail in the coffin, there wasn't a hint of Victorian culture anywhere in it. Sure, there was the very most basic glimpse of steam-powered stuff (a steam-powered chainsaw sword being the high point) and the promise of a flying steam-city as a later base you can visit, but overall, I found it to be a very disappointing mix of World of Warcraft steam-powered gizmos and Diablo. Steam-pathetic indeed.

Then I tried Arcanum. If I can say one thing for Silverfall, it has very nice cell-shaded 3-d monsters and characters. Arcanum is the opposite. Sure, it was made five years before the other game, but its graphics are pre-Diablo. Can you say Fallout-riffic? The story had some very promising Victorian elements, though, even though the first town I came across was more Wild West than Victorian London. Then again, a Wild West character might be very at home in a steampunk adventure as a gunslinger/mechanic. Hmm....

All in all, I might actually buy Arcanum. Its graphics were pathetic one-dimensional crap and the story had me yelling "CHOO CHOO!" because there was no way off the train tracks, but at least it had that hint of Victorian elegance.

And you have to admit, trains are pretty steampunk.