12.16.2008 - Terrence Marks:

I tried playing Mabinogi. It appears to be a social game. Appearance is customizable, but every time you change your skin tone or hairstyle, your clothes change randomly too, making it difficult to really tell the difference. I was blocky and my shirt was a radioactive gumdrop blue. I felt like a cartoon man in the real world. You can choose your character's age, from 10-17. Their target demographic, I assume. If you're over 18 they assume you'll be out smoking, joining the marines, or one of those other things we keep minors from doing. I played for half an hour and I'm not sure if I fought anything. The first quest I got was "get five chicken eggs and hand them to me". I'm used to games where they start you killing stuff right off the bat. I didn't even have to punch the chickens. Getting the eggs was kinda fun. Then I spent five minutes trying to turn the quest in and failing. Maybe I was supposed to punch the NPC.

You get skills by walking around and talking to people. There are about a dozen dialogue topics, and if you talk to people a lot, you get better stuff. I'm supposed to keep track of which shopkeepers like talking about "skills" or "farmlands". If I wanted to spend weeks getting to know video game characters, I'd play Animal Crossing. That way I could at least choose what I say. The Pete/Pelly/Phyllis love triangle is more interesting anyhow.

12.11.2008 - Terrence Marks:

Quick game roundup

I'm playing through Final Fantasy IV. I'm near the end. I get to a treasure chest, get attacked by a red dragon, and my party dies. This has happened about four times in a row. I don't even really need the gloves in that chest. I'm putting the game down until I get smarter. I figure if I enjoy the game enough to do the same dumb thing four times in a row, it must be pretty good. I'm playing through the games in order (more or less) and amazed at how coherent the first four are, in terms of style and gameplay. I didn't notice that the first time around; I suppose going from FF1 to FFTactics to FF7 to FFUnlimited makes it a strange journey no matter what.

Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker is a gorgeous, amazing game. I was expecting Tetra to be more like Midna and was disappointed at the lack of screen time the pirates got; I suppose that just means that Twilight Princess was a better Zelda game. Nothing wrong with that. I tried playing this game back in 2004 originally, got horribly lost when I first started sailing around and put the game down for four years. Then I got a guide and picked it back up. I enjoyed the game, but I don't imagine anybody was waiting for my endorsement before buying it.

Battalion Wars - I liked the Advance Wars games, which this is marginally related to. This game has elements of both the real time strategy and first person shooter genre. By which I mean you have to do both at once. You're trying to coordinate five different troop types at once, and there's no AI to speak of. The vehicles have a MarioKart-on-ice floatiness to them. The sixth mission has you taking on a far superior force with no reinforcements or repair. I failed at it about four times in a row (doing different dumb things each time), didn't enjoy it, and haven't picked up the game again.

12.10.2008 - Terrence Marks:

Namir Deiter is nine years old! That's old enough to drink, in Internet years.

Our RSS feed just got a bit of an upgrade. You can now view the last 8 comics instead of just the titles. Why did I add this now? I didn't realize it was possible earlier. I'm not sure if I should have the RSS feed contain everything or just the last eight. I want to make reading the comic as convenient as possible - I'd probably read twice as many webcomics if getting up to speed on them didn't take so long. I intend to add my blog and the news to them in the near future

I've got a new e-mail address, terrence@yousayitfirst.com. The old one, terrence@sparepartscomics.com, has been defunct for about three weeks. I'm moving Spare Parts over to our regular server. We've got about four different web hosts, and if Network Eleven can't respond to a problem ticket in two weeks, I think we can get by with three. Anything you sent me (including namirdeiter.net comments) since November 25th, please re-send.

What happened? There was a catchall address. It filled up, putting me over quota. Since I'm over quota I can't make changes like, say, deleting that address, adding a quota to it, or deleting the mail. I find this highly disappointing.

I've added a start here link to You Say it First. When I wrote that arc about two years ago, that was what I meant it as - a quick primer to the characters and the situation. And now it's all conveniently in one place, as is the first arc.

11.18.2008 - Terrence Marks:

Now, You Say it First is a bit continuity-heavy at times. I'm trying for "rewards careful reading, but makes sense if you've only read the previous week". Since I think about the comic more than most of you, I'm not in any position to judge this. I ask because the other day I was catching up on a webcomic that I hadn't read in a month or two. I got confused. So, reader, do I have enough exposition, too much, or not enough?

11.17.2008 - Isabel Marks:

Fall has not been kind to us, between multiple deaths and multiple colds, it's been insanely difficult to keep up with the updating schedule. Honestly I'm still feeling quite sick and stressed (it's around 7:30 am where I am now- this is the middle of the night for me), but I'm trying to get things done since I'm up.

Please help spread the word about Namir Deiter and You Say it First being back to date. We're going to try and look into advertising (the recent events have left a big dent in us financially, so we're going to try a grass-roots advertising campaign first). We have linking buttons for both Namir Deiter and You Say it First at the links given and would appreciate if any of you used them. We'd be open to link's page link trades, please contact Terrence if you're interested!

Ok, now for the web comic updates... both Namir Deiter and You Say it First are up to date, in fact, if you didn't visit the site on Sunday, chances are you missed a week of comics that are now in the archive. Yeah, a whole week went up in one day... a lot of that going on lately. Click here to start from last Monday's comics. Fortunately, since it was an arc in itself, reading today's (Monday's) You Say it First won't spoil the pervious arc for you. We're both really sorry for the delays, we hope you enjoy reading them in the archives!

Now onto NamirDeiter.net news... quite a bit going on there. Comic commentary is back up to date, although Terrence may add a bit more later- we'll make an announcement about it if and when he does.

Wallpapers are finally updated, including one in the Spare Parts directory from the new bonus book in the NDU Library.

Speaking of which, there's a new bonus book in the free section of the NamirDeiter.net bonus Library. Alisa's Story is a 12 page telling of Alisa's life between the end of Headphone Story and her beginning in Spare Parts! Big huge thanks to John Chambers, this story's commissioner.

This brings us back to date, almost. NamirDeiter.net's main page bonus comics are still a few weeks behind. I'll be making as many comics as I can to bring them back to date- but I may need to take a sketch day every now and then till we're back to date.

Ok, I'm losing my concentration here... thank you all once again for your patience. I'm sure this post is full of mistakes that will hopefully be fixed later, till then, good night and good morning.

11.30.2008 - Terrence Marks:

The Internet almost always has what you're looking for. The problem is finding it. For the last week, I've felt like I should track down some good Paper Mario fanfiction. Then I realized that it'd take longer to find something good than it would to read it even if I knew where to look. I need recommendations, because otherwise I'll feel obliged to trawl through everything to find the good stuff. Or just sit home, not read it because I won't have the time to do it properly, and wonder if anybody shares my theory about Midna being Count Bleck's daughter.

Likewise with MMORPGs. Isabel has started playing Animal Crossing: City Folk. I'm looking for more games. There are about 200, depending on who's counting. It's hard to find good information on them. I mean, I can find out if a dancer can wield a longsword or if an axe does more damage than a sword in a specific game. Or that they totally nerfed mages. But if you haven't picked a game, it's really difficult to find good information about what a specific game is like. One review site, every game has between a 7 and 8.5 rating. About 30% of the reviews give it a 1 and say you're an idiot for playing it. 70% give the game a 10 and say they're not idiots. It's not helpful. I can't make an informed decision, so I can't make a decision. Even if I find one I like, I'll be wondering if I could've found one that's better.

I've found a few 'review' sites, but they're not helpful. "You can play as an elf" doesn't tell me what a game is like. "You can have three different kinds of spiky hair" doesn't tell me what a game is like. The reviews I've seen give you a four page writeup of the world's history and show you a screenshot with ten guys casting spells at each other and dozens of glowy numbers. I don't chose a game by how glowy the numbers are. Look at Final Battle Adventure Online. The numbers are hardly glowy at all.

"You have four attributes. Two of them are irrelevant, depending on what class you are. You put points into them when you level up." tells me a bit about the game. "If you put points in the wrong one, you're screwed unless you pay us $5 per point to reset it" tells me even more about the game.

I'm not really sure what I'm looking for, but here's what I've got so far.

Pay or Free? No preference. I can afford $15 a month. However, before I spend $50 or more on a game, I want to be sure I like it. I actually prefer a flat fee to a "free" game where you have to pay a la carte for basic functionality.

Death Penalty? No. Or not much. On Maple Story, it can take a huge amount of grinding to level. There's no way to tell how powerful a new monster is. If it kills you in one hit, which it might, you can lose days of work. Not fun. I understand that it's more realistic for actions to have drastic consequences. That's why I don't fight alligators in real life. If I accidentally pull four red slimes instead of just three, I don't want to spend another week treading water.

Sociability? Not really. I'm not really into guilds or such. I play odd, irregular hours. I'd rather not have a group of three people who expect me to be on from two to four-thirty every day. If I'm playing a game where I'm supposed to be part of a group, I want to be able to easily find a pickup group, and I prefer quiet, competent people to interesting ones. I realize this is more to do with the players than the game, but that's such as it is.

So I'm open to suggestions. Either a game or a good review site. Or Paper Mario fanfiction. Either way, really.

(Umm..my email is down right now, but you can reply here if you like).

11.16.2008 - Terrence Marks:

Now, as you know a decent chunk of the Los Angeles area was on fire today. One of the fires was about ten miles from where I work. Comics are in progress, but Isabel spent the day worrying about me. I'm not in any actual danger, but it's close enough to worry her. I have to work tomorrow so I'm not sure how tomorrow will be.