So, what have I been up to lately, besides not updating the blog? Those of you who follow me on
Twitter have seen that I've been listening to music, working overtime, and reading. I've been in a state of "too busy to blog", as opposed to "plenty of time, nothing to write about" - I'm usually in one state or another. In the last few months, I've read about two-thirds of the Discworld books, and I recommend them. After reading them, I tried to find out which of the books people liked most and couldn't (though I get the feeling that I like The Amazing Maurice more than most other people do). So here's my list, from favorite to least favorite:
Mort
Night Watch
The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents
Guards! Guards!
Men at Arms
Interesting Times
Wyrd Sisters
Going Postal
The Truth
Pyramids
Hogfather
Lords and Ladies
Carpe Jugulum
Jingo
Monstrous Regiment
Reaper Man
Making Money
Feet of Clay
The Fifth Elephant
Thief of Time
Thud!
Maskerade
The Last Continent
Faust Eric
What say you?
Hey folks... so as I'm sure you've noticed, comics have been kind of not happening too regularly over the last few months. Things in my personal life, getting used to new medications that still leave me a little sleepy some days, and a persistent cough that's keeping me up at night have left me feeling creatively drained. To make things more complicated (and I'm sure is in relation to the previous listed issues), I'm having a lot of problems writing the current ND arc. The best way I can sum things up is this: the story is like a huge rock tied to my waist. I can walk around and it go as far as my leash allows me, but I'm still stuck to it and I need to deal with it before I can move forward. This has kind of caused all my creativity to be blocked, which is hurting You Say it First and .net's comics as well. Everything I've been writing has been pretty much unusable at this point. So... I think I need a small break- not a "I'm going to make comics up later" break, but an actual break, with sketches. ND.net comics, however, will be made up. I've post-dated sketches into the comics's archives (.net will come this weekend) and there will be sketches up next week- so at the least there will be something. I'm going to aim for just one more week of sketches, from there I'm just going to admit defeat on the problem topic and do some drastic retooling- if after all this time I can't write this story arc, then it just doesn't want to happen. I'm really sorry for not posting about this sooner, every day for the last two weeks I would hope that would be the day I came out of this funk and scripts would spill out of me, it's happened before... it's just not happening now. I try to be stubborn but I think I need to admit defeat and see if a little relaxing will help things form in my head clearly. I'm really sorry everyone... I've let you all down, thank you so much for putting up with me and my delays. For those who left, even know this won't reach you, I am sorry you gave up on the series, I hope you'll try it again. For those worried that I'm going to never pick up the comic again (and have doubted in the past)... and I say this with all the sincerity in the world... Dude, I've been doing web comics for almost ten years- do you really think I'm going to stop any time soon? It's not going to stop happening.
In happier news... .net wallpapers are now up, I owe the biggest thank you to all you .net people- hopefully I can get something nice done for you all during my week(s) off!
Asda Story is the final game in the MMO review series I'm kinda doing. I spent a lot more time on this game than any others. I put it down a few months ago (much like I wrote most of this review months ago, but put it down until now). When I did play, there were new features added every few weeks, which was pretty cool.
It's a 3D game, free to play but with paid content. The art style is anime-influenced, and the target demographic seems to be teenage boys. It had some translation issues, such as referring to all NPCs as "he". These aren't figures in dark cloaks and armor where it could go either way; the predominant theme of the female NPCs is "anime cheesecake". One translates "west of the river" as "east of the river". When you trade items, you're told "It is possible to trade charged items by 24 level". This means, I'm told, "You must be at least level 24 to trade items bought with cash money".
Similarly, the game has a "title" system. Titles were a random mix of nouns, verbs, adverbs, and adjectives. "Stealthily", "Sworn Clan", "Confident", "Come Back Home", and "Bad Habit".
The good points:
I love the skill system. There's a ladder system. You need to put a total of 5 points into the first row of skills to unlock the second row. You need to put a total of 10 points into the first and second rows to unlock the third, and so on. There are three such ladders, which means there's a bit of strategizing to this. Each ladder has a good mix of attacks, buffs, and support skills. But you don't choose to be a fire mage or a healer or an ice mage. You choose to be a mage, then put points in where you want them, and you need to decide if you want to upgrade your fireball attack or put your points into a minor buff on the healing side to help unlock something really good, for instance.
The bad points:
The camera can be manually moved. But when you turn, the camera doesn't. If you have it pointing North, it'll point North until you move it. The problem is that every single dungeon is a maze of twisty paths that requires the camera to be moved every few seconds.
There are quests - plenty of them. I like having quests. It gives me something to do other than wander out into a field and kill stuff because it's there. The early ones have decent stories (too many RPGs just throw four pages of backstory at you because they think more words will make you care more). The later ones just tell you to kill a couple dozen of something. But quests make you feel like you're doing something worthwhile, that you're working towards a goal. Then about level thirty, the quests stop and it's all about squad-based instanced dungeons. Everything is balanced for an optimized party of six - and because of the skill system, it's hard to tell what your mage is good at. If you have five people, or don't have the right group, it'll be tough going. If you have four people, you die. I was spending more time trying to find a party than I was actually playing. That's when I quit.
- We were a bit shy of our donation goal, for the first time in a good long while. We'll be updating five days a week for July. Honestly, I'm glad that Isabel gets days off for a little while. This week, it'll be Sunday through Thursday. The rest of the month, it'll be Monday through Friday. Anyhow, no comic tonight, but please be sure to check out
ComixTalk's cover for this month.
Firstly, the amazing folks over at Studio Tavicat have a webcomic,
@Tavicat. You may know them as the extremely talented folks behind the Reality Check and Ranklechick comic books, or the Shutterbox manga. This comic is up to their usual high standards. We both like it, so you probably will too.
Secondly,
UnlikeMinerva.comcommentary is back up. I wound up missing a few weeks, due to various things, so I got more written and set the clock back.
Thirdly,
Isabel and
I both have Twitter accounts. We talk about a lot of stuff, but if we've got some small news about the comics (like them running a bit late), it'll probably be there first.
Isabel and I are back playing Maple Story after taking a year or so off. One of the things they've added is the Maple Trading Service (MTS), where you can buy and sell in-game items for cash money. I'm still trying to decide if this is a good thing or not.
That's bad. I'm the target audience for that kind of thing. I have a job, which means I can spare five dollars more easily than I can spare five hours. The game's demographics skew young, and I don't imagine people like me are in the majority.
Why do I like it? The MTS is searchable. The in-game markets are not*. Since they take a 10% cut of anything sold in MTS, that's not surprising. Since the in-game markets aren't searchable, they tend towards higher-value items - it's not worth your time to try to find anything else. There's a lot of stuff in the MTS that wouldn't be worth buying or selling otherwise. It used to be that if I really needed an item, I'd have to spend half an hour combing the markets for it, and the moderately common items wouldn't be worth anybody's trouble to sell. Now, if I'm catching up on old quests I can just go in and buy them for a quarter or so.
The problem is that there is now an exchange rate between cash and game currency ($1 gets you between 3,000,000 and 5,000,000). That really rare item I found and sold for 2 million? Used to be totally awesome. Now it's about 50 cents worth, which isn't nearly as exciting.
This also means there are two prices for everything. It's a moderately inefficient market, and it's very tempting to spend a few hours coming up with price lists to try and make money via arbitrage (buying items cash-cheap items, selling them for game money, which I use to buy cash-expensive items, to sell for cash). The problem is that, again, I'd probably be making well under minimum wage. I don't really need another job, especially at that price.
So, will I use it? Yeah. I admit I bought some very nice equipment for our characters; most of it is going to be a part of our end-game gear, and worth a few dollars. It's too useful to ignore. But I don't like it.
*: Or, rather, it you can buy the search-the-market items for about 70 cents per search. The cheap stuff goes for 21 cents in MTS, so you can see how that goes.
Isabel is back to work. As you know, we're a few days behind. She's working hard to get caught up.