Weird Day
Today is a supremely weird day. I had two things on my to-do list when I got in, added two and immediately knocked them off within a few hours, then stared at the original two things wondering how to get a foothold on them. I wouldn’t call this grunt work, but I might coin “grunt creativity,” which I now define as a situation driven by a lack of creativity in developing tasks that require creativity. I guess cynics might try “putting lipstick on a pig” (is that safe to use again now?).
I pulled out Shadow of the Colossus last night and beat I believe Colossus #7 (the electric water snake, for fans). It was stressful but in the sort of joyous sort of way that only relied on me actually beating the thing rather than spending an hour drowning while gripping onto its back underwater.
Kristin and I have blown the dust off Champions of Norrath, which is kind of a Playstation 2 Neverwinter Nights of sorts. We can play this co-op, which is rare and fun. The game isn’t too hard, and we mainly just like picking things up and selling them. We’re both accomplishment-oriented people in games.
I actually rolled an essentially pure magic-user for this go-round, which is a first for me. I did this for the better future of Sigma. It’s becoming well known that I have never valued attack magic in games, especially the strict sort of system used in MUDs and hardcore RPGs.
Although the spell system in Norrath is pretty bad, I am beginning to get my head around how the game is played from that perspective. I see that you assume more risk (more vulnerabilities) and must be compensated by truckloads of features, constructs, and general awesomeness. I see now that an overlay on the conventional weapons system is beyond weak.
The role is indirect and involves cleverly bending rules. This is now fun to me, which is a growth moment. It’s like playing a whole different game.
But I stress again the Norrath system is awful. It lacks creativity. For the most part, they used an overlay on an archery system, which is better but still not enough. And no auto-aiming is pretty miserable when you’re pretty clearly on some sort of octagonal grid or something in the back end. But this is graphical nonsense and fortunately avoids coming into play within Sigma.
I have taken the reins on the giving and accepting items implementation, which has really piqued my interest as of late. I have trouble in Python knowing how to key my dictionaries, so I typically at the last minute change concepts to a list and forget the dictionary altogether.