Major reasons I’m still playing after a month:
Technical Competence. I ran into very few bugs and only a few interface oddities in a month. This is not something to take for granted and the main reason I see myself playing Rift over LotRO or even SWTOR when it comes out as my side MMO. (WoW is still the rec league “raid for 6-9 hours a week and that’s it” game for me. It’s just that good at that.) Even WoW during WotLK had massive technical issues on 64-bit machines.

To get something off my chest: I’m not blown away by the number of hotfixes Trion put out just because that’s a weakness in their architecture that requires client patches to fix things that WoW probably can just do on-the-fly for the most part. (I don’t know if what Rift calls a hotfix actually is one, but it doesn’t seem like that from my perspective.) I does lead to an impression that they’re “doing things” in the public which is one of many in a long pattern of cleverly Orwellian moves by the team at Trion. Another example is that didn’t have server mergers, they gave everyone unlimited server transfers! And told people to get off certain small servers because they were being switched over to “Trial Servers”. Same effect on the subscriber population, but different PR, which is annoying. But if the real press can’t be any good, why do I expect an enthusiast press to look deep? (Oh right, latent faith in humanity. BAD CAL!)

Feature Parity (for the most part) and more. I can queue for dungeons or warfronts from anywhere, hide my helmet (and shoulders!), use two-factor security, and even read Twitter in Rift. It would have pretty much everything one could ask in a modern MMO if the interface wasn’t so all over the place. Still, my WoW interface has all of one out-of-the-box UI element left (the chat box), so hopefully the mod ecosystem grows into something useful. One nice feature is reactive abilities having their own display when they’re active, although because the interface is a little unresponsive, it does lead to a few problems at times.

Music and Atmosphere. I like how the music changes based on how many mobs I’m fighting and such (which leads to a lot of cool stuff as I’m built to AOE groups of 3-4 down). The music in general is solid without being really overpowering like it can sometimes be in LotRO, which is both good and bad in that game. I also like how the lighting changes when you’re in range of a Rift.

PvE Variety (or Rifts, the good side). If one’s willing to roll with the punches, Rift can offer up a lot of variety. Just last night I started off questing in Shimmersand and an Air zone event started up. I was easily able to get into a group that rode around the zone closing rifts and the like and finally we punched a big boss. It was a lot of fun. After cleaning up a few straggler invader groups I returned to questing and queued for a random dungeon. (Go go machine matchmaking!) Got in, group went well so we did another and by the time I got out there was another zone event going, this time an Earth/Fire one. I didn’t get to contribute a whole lot to this one because I was stuck behind the main clearing pack for the most part, but I still had a good time. So, back to questing. After going along for a while I ran into a group of Defiants opening up Major Rift Tears and I tagged along for two of them, finished up a quest nearby, and then headed to Sanctum to turn in event stuff and crafting dailies. I got to do a ton of different things in a night and the game made it super easy for me to get into and out of groups without having to message people about how much Focus I have.

Major complaints:
PvE Variety (or Rifts, the bad side). The downside of all that cool stuff going on is that if I really just want to do some quests, there’s a chance of running into annoying shit like a zone event or a Major Rift right on top of where I need to be. After many years playing on PvP servers, I’m sanguine about taking what the game gives me, to a point. Rift has definitely been on the wrong side of that threshold more than once.

Melee and macros are awful. I generally prefer ranged character for damage dealing, especially at end-game, but I have no problem leveling as melee. I despise Cleric melee. (I doubt Druid is much different from Shaman and Justicar, but I haven’t played it.) It’s just a mashing a ton of abilities when they’re off CD. There are also so many reactive abilities that managing it all is almost best done by a huge spam macro that has none of the sanity of the current WoW set-up (i.e. one on-GCD spell per hardware event). Just make a big list of things and run with it. Terrible.

Souls. At least part of me really likes how character building works in Rift. Making builds is one of my favorite things to do in games. But the downside of that is that a group can have a “tank” that really can’t tank and that sets are rather limited in what they can do. I’ve seen a lot of people talk about how Rift allows up to five stored sets of souls and how that compares well versus WoW. Really though, one needs a number of sets just to do something as simple as questing and the occasional PUG Minor Rift. And that’s ignoring that one is almost surely dead meat in PvP if not carrying the PvP soul after the initial levels. In contrast, my Hunter’s raiding spec can pretty much handle anything I can throw it into well enough. In Rift, that’s simply not the case, at least as a Cleric. And the team at Trion is almost laughably unconcerned with design elegance; there are kludges and deaths by tooltips everywhere. I can’t speak to serious balancing issues, but WoW sets the bar for “well balanced” incredibly high at this point.

Surprising non-complaint:
It’s not bland. It also has zero whimsy to it, either throughout it like WoW or in specific locations like LotRO with The Shire and Lothlorien but I don’t think “bland” is fair. It’s a very straight take on high fantasy with some technology-indistinguishable-from-magic. The armor isn’t expressly functional, there’s still chainmail bikini bottoms, but for the most part armor proper looks sensible. The story isn’t fascinating, but the game does a good job of highlighting important stuff through “Story” marked quests and loading screen updates on the current plot ala Dragon Age II. I think the lack of whimsy is to its detriment if I were to play the game seriously, but as a casual experience, it’s a nice change of pace.

To start off, it’s mix of both ESPN3 and ESPN Video.  Overall video quality was poor, a good deal poorer than what I get watching either site on my computer.  That is already on top of ESPN’s video quality being worse than what I get from Netflix or MLB.TV over the same connection.  I’m not sure if this is to do with Xbox Live today, when it was appallingly slow, or in general, so we’ll have to see how it shapes up in the long run.  The avatar-populated initial start is just a needlessly overdone way to show you “Top 3 things and a link to everything else”.  Once you’re into the menu structure though, it’s a solid NXE interface, if again, a bit slow on loading the thumbnail pictures.  The video interface itself is your standard Xbox video layout.

On the content side, the ESPN Video stuff is what you’d expect: mostly SportsCenter highlights.  I didn’t find any of their more off-beat stuff like Mayne Street or Sports Science although you can’t find that stuff half the time on the site anyway.  Upside here is that I haven’t run into any ads moving between clips which is quite welcome.

For me, ESPN3 is mostly about live events, and that’s where it tends to have problems.  It can never seem to decide how much bandwidth to use and so the quality changes constantly, and unlike Netflix on Xbox Live, the quality changes mean buffering pauses.  Those are awful at any time, but between pitches it makes me want to drown something.  I’ll see about watching the Lakers game Wednesday night and report back then.

If its a better live experience than the site, even with lower quality, it should be enough to keep my Gold subscription active.

Also, I caught the tail-end of a Michael Sandel lecture on John Rawls regarding “Redistributing wealth to help the disadvantaged.” (or so says the KLCS program guide) today.  I was moved to much pacing and thinking of the deep thoughts and I would write about said thoughts at length but, uh…

“Nobody can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own.”

-Sydney J. Harris

… yeah.

(The subject of my un-novel deep thoughts was mostly about how the arbitrariness of personal attributes and circumstances affects my understanding of allocating “myself” in a (strong) Pareto-optimal fashion and my need for that in the first place.  Then I got stuck in a rabbit-hole trying to show that my need to be Pareto-efficient leading me to say, do activism, made/makes me inherently weaker at that (relative to someone with an similar set of attributes and skills) than someone driven to it because of… empathy, or something.  Bleh.)

Good thing that Sydney J. Harris quotation (or ironically enough, one eerily similar to it) has been seared into my brain for ages, huh?

Finally, for disclosure’s sake: I stole “think deep thoughts” from Scott Jennings.

1. I <3 Samantha Morton in this movie, so much.
2. A sex scene with Tim Robbins in it is weird, full stop.
3. I didn’t like the ending but I thought it was appropriate.  If you’re familiar with the theatrical ending to Blade Runner, you should get an extra kick out of it though.  Well, at least I did.

Worth it?

• If you’re starting up a new game, definitely.  Kasumi is a pretty neat companion both in dialogue and combat, her mission is fun, and the new weapon quickly found a firm place in my Infiltrator’s kit.
• If you’re looking to play this on your Post-Game Save and then go back to something else, I might pass on it until you revisit ME2 or there’s a sale.

Now, onwards in a relatively spoiler-free way.

Yes, that's Legion (I <3 Gibbed's Save Editor)

Kasumi, the character, is quite good.  Even taking her through just an initial visit to the Citadel and Mordin’s recruitment mission I found her incidental dialogue to be some of my favorite so far.  There’s a triggered piece of dialogue on Omega about the use of light that reminded me a lot of my, now, other favorite character to take around, Jack.  Both characters’ statements are from the “bottom”.  They’re not the usual expository lines you might get from fancy-pants characters and also not the “Ooooooooh, so shiny” crap from callow characters (who may or may not be space hicks).  Both Kasumi and Jack give perspectives that usually aren’t given about places and even less often done well in my experience.

In combat her trademark ability is Shadow Strike… which is basically Shadowstep.  It makes her into a very mobile, stealthy, Shotgun-type character (without the Shotgun) able to ruin people’s day down range.  Her loyal power is a flashbang grenade which has seemed useful but I haven’t put much time into it (and I’m too in love with Geth Shield Boost to take it myself).

Meeting the mark.

I was pretty excited by the mission concept when they announced this DLC and my head filled with Leverage and Alias “party heist” episodes.  For the most part it delivered.  There wasn’t nearly as much conversation and subterfuge as I might have hoped for, but that’s been my complaint about Mass Effect 2 all along.  The prerequisite “Get him to talk so we can forge his voice print” conversation was way too short, even compared to the similarly short sequence at the end of Garrus’s loyalty mission.  (I did go for the Renegade dialogue option so maybe I missed out on a longer sequence.)  Without spoiling anything else, the final sequence is a touch disappointing mechanically aside from an awesome cutscene with Kasumi going all Ninja Gaiden. (YouTube video if you have no plans of picking this up.  The first 40 seconds is all you need.)

As for the loot: the SMG is nasty if you’re looking for a mid-range option, likely to replace the has-no-ammo-capacity heavy pistol for my Shepard.  The new casual outfit will only be used occasionally, but it’s a nice touch.

Why yes, I do make this look good.

All in all, a fine excuse to start a new canonical sort-of Renegade Female Shepard that slept with Liara playthrough I’ve had on the backburner since I first finished Mass Effect 2.

(Screenshots taken with Xfire.  All my ME2 screenshots can be found at my profile.)

When I get back to my computer and hop over to my Gmail tab, I’m greeted by “please moderate this comment” email from WordPress. After dealing with the spam, I notice the yellow banner of “New WP version out, update now kplz.” I then hit “Upgrade Automatically” and it all works out (like it always does). (I even updated a plugin auto-magically.)

I was not sure at the time (and am still not) if I should have been more unnerved by a successful or unsuccessful outcome.

If it had mentioned anything about “insufficient data” though, I’d probably still be screaming.

To get something out of the way quickly: I’ve never been good at fighting games.  My ascent up the playstyle ladder usually stops around “find a couple moves that work and stick to them”.  This isn’t through lack of desire to be “good” at fighters.  Before the advent of Internet video though (and honestly now as well), learning about fighting games involved reading ASCII hieroglyphs or knowing someone who could teach you.

(Admittedly, I can talk shop about MMO mechanics with the slightly-less-than-best of them, but the physical act of inputting commands is much less important in WoW than in Street Fighter IV.  MMO play is more about the decisions made before the fight and in-fight decisions measured in seconds versus the fractions-of-a-second scale for a fighting game.)

VF4 had this “Training Mode” that Wikipedia describes best:

The mode consisted of an encyclopedia of fighting game terms, complete character command list walkthroughs, tips on all of the games mechanics, recommended character combos, alternative options for failed combos, detailed command input timings, slow motion for frame counting and timing, and other useful training tips.

The Command Training was really what made it awesome.  You could go through a character’s list move-by-move and learn them by seeing your inputs in real-time and what the move actually was timing-wise.  You could also have the game do the move so you can see what you’re missing.

I’m sure a real person could beat me senseless, but I actually had a lot of fun going through the Quest Mode (going to different arcades, playing in tournaments, and getting customization stuff).  If I ever got stuck, I’d go into the training mode, learn a few new tricks, and get back out and win a couple tournaments.  It was by far the most fun I’ve had with a fighting game which is surprising because the Virtua Fighter series is on the technical-side of the spectrum and I am not technically-proficient in the least.

Now, the lack of such a mode in the next-gen fighters I’ve played hasn’t been a huge deal.  Dead of Alive 4 wasn’t very good and Soulcalibur IV‘s combination of character creation and the Tower mode were a blast to play with.

Enter Street Fighter IV (literally, in the mail today via GameFly).  SFIV’s move list is tiny compared to VF4′s but it is nearly unapproachable.  Its “Training Mode” that I entered into full of hope was just the usual “beat on this turned-off-AI”.  When I go the command list, I get icons that look nothing like the “QCB + K” that the fine folks at Shoryuken tell me is what I need to do C. Viper’s Burning Kick.

(via Kotaku)

Now, it would be awesome if SFIV could tell me what’s wrong with my “QCB + K” action: am I too slow or am I not actually making a quarter-circle-back?  But, instead, I just have a turned-off-AI Ken to beat on hoping that I’ll get it eventually.

Of course, all this time spent raving about VF4′s amazing training mode (that wasn’t carried over to VF5 apparently) could have been spent learning C. Viper or any other character, but SFIV really doesn’t provide the tools that I’ve now come to expect if I can’t just learn-as-I-hit-things.

I have no problem going to Shoryuken or Calibur Forum to figure out what kind of fighter might suit my playstyle best or to learn some advanced techniques or to get down into the nitty-gritty of frame counting, but that isn’t what I’m talking about.

SFIV seems to expect that I know everything as soon as I put the disc in, which along with VF5 not continuing VF4 in having an awesome, robust training mode, is a real bummer.

While it does a lot of neat things with one piece of information: a name, a date, some math, it doesn’t seem to be able to deal with the sets it’s using to produce the information.  So, while I now know that Isaac is the 41st most common name for (male?) births in the US, I can’t get to what the 40th or 42nd names or, what the 41st most common name for girls is right now.

For that, Google gives me good results for “names US births rankings” in no time, and I also learn that the Social Security Administration’s website doesn’t like Chrome.

Thanks to Lifehacker for the idea I’ve shamelessly stolen.

EDIT: Just fixed it today after a rather simple find-and-replace on the wp_posts table.  (Export -> Do Notepad++ On It ->Drop Table -> Import Editted File.)  It was simple but oh so scary.   Let’s hope I didn’t break anything.

Obviously a badass.

Hey… how you doin’?

How you doin’ take two.

HERPES!

ZOMBIES!

Token minority!

What the fuck is up with her eye shadow?

HERPES take two!