games

Last night, I wrote up a different approach to a long-running idea in my head:

[RFC] GameAPI: Embedding RPGs into Drupal: I am pregnant (woohoo!). In six short months, I will be disappearing from active duty in the Drupal community for a good long time. I'd like to discuss a desire I've had for years and years, only reworked for our beloved codebase. In short: an HTML based browser role playing game, though ultimately an API.

Shortly thereafter, it was blogged on The Escapist, one of the most popular "new games journalism" magazines, of which I'm a regular reader (for both the articles and the pictures):

Browser Wars: I was recently pointed over to this posting regarding embedding a game engine in Drupal. Which would make it easy for people to design content and get it up and running in the style of MUDs. Now, that is of course asking for a lot of random crap to be put out there, but it also opens the door for interactive storytelling with the addictiveness and ease of entry of a browser game. Of course I may just be thinking that turning a CMS into a game hosting system is really cool.

And yes, I am pregnant. And I'll be disappearing from far more than just Drupal.

I've released a new Perl script today, wowquests.pl: a World of Warcraft Quest Tracker, which collects quest and zone data from Allakhazam's site and tabulates it into a small and compact list, suitable for printing. You can see the quest output for Morbulin, my level 58 Troll Shaman, here. Quests with asterisks next to them, I've completed.

How's it work? Welp, this is largely because I looOove collecting stats. Ever since I started playing World of Warcraft, I've been keeping track of what quests I've finished, on paper. Now, with this script, I just print out the master list, circle the ones I finished, and feed those quest IDs back into the script the next time I run an update (every couple of months or so). Those IDs are then asterisked and counted: so far, I've finished 526 quests available for the Horde.

Yes, there are in-game-client, user-contributed, mods for this. However, none of them allow you to enter in previous quest data, before you started using the mod. So, until I start a new character (probably a blood elf, though, if sbp ever gets on, we'll be Alliance), this is more than adequate. I looVe lists, I do.

As I wait with bated breath for MAGNA CARTA: TEARS OF BLOOD (November 8th, 2005) and DRAGON QUEST VIII (November 15th, 2005), I picked up Rockstar's new game, THE WARRIORS yesterday. Horrible mistake. Long loading times ("Yes, I know, I died. Can't you cache the damn level?!"), annoying missions ("I just want to FINAL FIGHT shit. Stealth sucks!"), crappy split screens ("HELLO?! I can see Player 2! REMOVE TEH SPLITZERS K TNKS"), pointless announcers ("Yes, I know, I died. Please don't make me listen to your whole spiel before I can choose 'continue'.) and repetitive voices ("I get it! Looking for Maria is an in-joke from WEST SIDE STORY. ROFFLE. Shut the hell up!") do not a fun game make. I'm trading it in today for SOUL CALIBER III.

I play World of Warcraft, as does everyone else. For some odd reason, I've just decided "hey! screenshots are fun!" even as those who said that years ago are now groaning in despair. Attached is a screenshot of the Wickerman Festival near Undercity (click on the image for Satan-sized version.) which'll be ending shortly; this is also my submission for this year's Halloween screenshot competition. Wicker man festivals really DO happen in real-life, and have been, for a long, long time. I first encountered them when I watched the insanely excellent THE WICKER MAN many years ago.

I'm a big fan of music/dance games, so naturally, I bought Karoake Revolution Volume 2. And I gotta tell ya, you haven't experienced Morbus until you've seen me bellowing Britney Spears (like "Baby One More Time" and "Toxic") at the top of my lungs.

This has been going on for a while (just ask the inhabitants of #apache on irc.freenode.net), as well as this IM paste between Rael Dornfest and I:

(10:51) Morbus Iff: man, oh man.
(10:51) Morbus Iff: i played a demo of Britney's Dance Beat for PS2 last night for two hours. and it was a demo. it had one song. i listened to the same britney spears song about 60 times in a row. and then, i added the game to my amazon wishlist.
(10:52) Morbus Iff: boy oh boy.

And yes, I did eventually get Britney's Dance Beat, both for PS2 AND Gameboy.