Castle of Calthaer

Bit by Bit: Thea – The Awakening

In which I tell the tale of my journey through the world of Thea: The Awakening

It’s been a while since I’ve posted, and a large reason for that is the fact that I’ve devoured Thea: The Awakening. That, and the fact that I’ve been really busy at work – someone’s out on maternity leave, and the rest of us are picking up the work. When I’m really tired like that, I tend to grab on to a compelling game and play it to death, which is what I did with Thea.

It’s a little overwhelming at first: there are a ton of options for upgrades, you have a huge world, and the challenges revolve around a card game that takes a little while to figure out. It begins to pick up steam quickly, though – you get a few resources, a few crafting recipes, and you get better at the strategy required for the card game. The reviews all stress that it’s not a “4x” game (Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate), largely because you can’t Expand – your first settlement will be your only settlement. It does have the trademark effect of 4x gameplay, though – you are always saying to yourself “Just one more turn”, and then end up playing for hours.

I started out with a great placement: some wicker was right on top of my base. This resource is key in making the first essential piece of equipment, which is baskets to improve the gathering skill of your townspeople. Gathering is a core task in Thea: you have to send out expeditions to grab more and better materials as the game progresses, or you’re going to be overwhelmed by the wandering enemies.

A world map from Thea: The Awakening — The five-skull raider’s fort that blocked me from the good stuff to the east and south.

In what felt like a very short amount of time, I had a “five-skull” (the highest level of basic challenges) Raider’s Lair plopped right along a narrow isthmus leading to most of the good resources – like ancient wood. I couldn’t quite get past it yet, so I had to spend some time training up my townsfolk. While all challenges in Thea are resolved with a card game, the challenges take on different forms. If not combat, then they’re Social, Hex (magical), Strength, and so forth, representing different approaches to solving a problem. I believe I defeated the raiders with Social – I walked up to them and had my townsfolk convince them that they’d be better served picking up and going elsewhere.

The different types of challenge require different skills – and there are a dizzying array of them. Skills like Speech are obviously for a Social challenge, but then you have ones without an obvious use: Folklore, or Sixth Sense. Even though I played the game for hours on end, I am not sure I’d be able to identify which skills do which – they all perform different actions within the card game. Some skills are useful in several types of challenges; others are good only for one.

The card game from Thea: The Awakening — Thea’s card game. In general, your townsfolk are each a different card. You and the AI take turns placing them from left to right, then an automated sequence resolves actions in the same order.

In the end, you’ll have to have your townsfolk specialize in only one or two skills. Eventually, you’ll unlock enough crafting recipes and ingredients to equip them with great gear – and they’ll start taking on significant challenges, like giants (who are not just white-skull challenges, but orange and red skull). Towards the end, I still felt like I was struggling to collect enough resources, but then I waltzed into a series of quests which must have triggered the end game once completed. The game told me I could keep playing, but it had given me a score and I figured it was as good a time to stop as any.

Not sure if I’ll go through another round of this – it’s a long and slow-moving game. But I’m glad I played it through once. Fans of turn-based strategy would do well to pick this one up – it might move a little slow, but it’s a satisfying ride.

Why I no longer play MMOs

In which I recount in brief my history with MMOs, and explain what happened to cause me to abandon them.

Calthaer, a Wood Elf Bard who never got much past level 30, about to board a ship in the original EverQuest, circa 1999. Yes – I’ve kept this screenshot on a hard drive since then!

My first exposure to MMOs began shortly after I arrived at college. I met Mike in one of my introductory classes; we became friends and bonded over computer games. He lived in the area; I was four or five hours from home. We played Warcraft II against each other via the modem – high-speed internet was just being installed throughout America, and in my freshman year few dorms or homes had it.

Mike eventually dropped out of college, but we kept in touch. During one of my visits, he introduced me to this game he was playing: Ultima Online. I watched him play – the idea that thousands of players were all playing together was compelling. It was new, and it was awesome – like nothing I’d seen before. Oh, sure, I’d played BBS games before – but you rarely encountered another player in real-time when you were all running around on a PC in someone’s basement.

Something kept me from jumping on it, though – it might have been the fact that it looked a lot like Ultima VIII, which I had recently played, and which impressed me not at all (not an uncommon sentiment – thanks a lot, EA). It wasn’t until Mike introduced me to his next MMO that I really jumped in with both feet.

He gave me a disk for a “beta test” – the first I’d heard of such a thing – and he gave me his login. It was an MMO, like Ultima Online, but it was in full 3D, like a first-person shooter. I had loved Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and others in the genre, so I had to jump on it, despite the monthly fee. EverQuest was my first MMO, and I was there right at launch.

In general, I loved it. I made friends, joined a guild called “The Silver Circle.” Neither the WoW nor the EQ2 guilds of that name are the same, from what I can tell – whatever primitive guild page or forum we had in those early days of the internet is now long gone, and the only record of a guildmate whose handle I can recall is Starrhawk, listed in this old EverQuest post here.

Eventually, I tired of the grinding. I had always loved exploring and seeing new things; the game barred you from most of that by placing difficult enemies everywhere. On top of that, it was crowded, and resembled an amusement park with long lines to “camp” the best equipment. I moved on to Asheron’s Call, and Earth & Beyond, but by 2002 I realized that I wasn’t having as much fun with these games. The novelty had worn off, they were sucking up a lot of time, and I was missing out on Real Life.

I actually logged in to the “classic” EQ simulator, Project 1999, a few years back, to re-experience the old days. I played it a lot; my wife was getting ticked at how much it occupied my attention. I started to realize, too, that the reason I was playing it was because I was feeling kind of depressed and wanted to “turn back the clock” and relive the late 1990s for a spell.

It made me wonder whether college itself hadn’t made me somewhat depressed – living in a dreary, cloudy city in New England, away from all my high school friends, coming from a private Christian school and living side-by-side for the first time in my life with thousands of hedonists. Maybe I spent so many hours in front of the computer screen because I wasn’t feeling all that great, and MMOs were an easy retreat – a way to forget the things that troubled me.

Today, I view my brief outing with MMOs as a sign that I wasn’t mentally healthy. I’m happy simply reading the occasional article from people that do play them, like Wilhelm Arcturus and Aywren Sojourner, and don’t think I’ll ever go back to playing MMOs again. I’d far rather set up some limited adventures – like a Minecraft server, or playing through the original Baldur’s Gate – with people I know, or want to get to know better. Even better, these days I like to sit around a table and play with folks in real life. Maybe it’s not that way with everyone – I am sure those who still play MMOs enjoy such games responsibly. I simply found it tough to limit my gaming time to prevent it from crowding out the rest of the enjoyable things in life when I was playing them…so for the last 15+ years, I’ve tried to avoid them.

Great Games: Terraria

In which I describe my most-played video game of the past decade, and what makes it fun.

Terraria - Calthaer's Castle — A view from my Terrarian castle.

At the beginning of 2011, an indie computer game began its meteoric rise to fame. The game featured a fully destructible environment: every hill could be leveled, every tree felled, every rock capable of being mined and picked up. You could use the materials you gathered to create a range of equipment, from pickaxes to swords. Enemies spawned during the day and night sequences, and your task was to build yourself shelter while you tried to move up the “tech tree” and gather better resources and equipment.

Minecraft, which had been kicking around for about two years, was the name of this game. Mojang’s exploration game was already popular when Andrew Spinks released Terraria in May of 2011. The comparisons between the two began immediately, with some calling Terraria a Minecraft “clone” – and others declaring that Terraria was a better game, whereas Minecraft was a sandbox.

Having never played Minecraft, I picked up Terraria shortly after its release in 2011 – and was instantly hooked. It had the look of the great platformers of old, but included the addictive resource-gathering and crafting that Minecraft had introduced. It also streamlined that experience – no longer did you need to carefully arrange resources in a grid to conjure your tools, as Terraria let you simply select them if you possessed the proper quantities in your inventory.

Terraria also introduced a progression in the content and world difficulty that Minecraft lacked at the time. Boss monsters punctuated your experience with the world, with each one unlocking more possible content with its defeat. This culminated in a fight with the games ultimate boss, which at release was arguably the Eater of Worlds, who was subsequently outclassed by an ever-increasing series of difficult bosses introduced in the game’s subsequent patches.

I’ve never actually “beaten” Terraria and gotten to the end bosses they’ve added since launch – I have too much fun building castles, creating efficient transportation systems, and even fishing. Over the years, they’ve added dozens of little goals, from crafting rare building materials and furniture to collecting powerful artifacts. Every time I return to the game, it seems I find that they’ve added something new and interesting to discover, prompting me to start a world all over again to experience it fresh.

The long list of goals combined with the classic platforming gameplay is what makes Terraria a great game well worth playing. I’ve enjoyed it for more hours than I care to admit – the combination of combat, crafting, and exploration is something I find calming and compelling. I love the fact that the game creates a new random world with every start – a random world with caves, treasure, and foes spread out at just the right intervals to keep you engaged. You also have the real ability to make your own mark on that world – to shape it according to your own wishes.

Terraria is now a classic, and can routinely be found for between $5 and $10 on Steam or GOG. If you have a computer that acts as a server, grab the dedicated server software (link is at the bottom of the page), configure your Windows firewall and router, and invite your friends to play. Writing about why I love the game has made me want to do just that, in fact…might have to do that sometime.

Getting The Nintendo Entertainment System

In which I describe my long-anticipated purchase of the greatest of classic game consoles.

The NES Challenge Set — My original NES, still in the box, and still with the Electronics Boutique price tag on it.

I’ve explained previously that the interactive screen has always been especially alluring for me. As a kid, the power of interactive entertainment was so magnetic for me that I’d play with single-minded focus, ignoring the rest of the world completely. My parents saw this and decided to put some limits on my gaming time, one of those limits being that we had no Nintendo Entertainment System in the house.

The original Game Boy was actually my first video game system, which I got with some Christmas money around 1990. Prior to that we had the VIC-20, and a bit later an Apple ][ clone (a LASER 128 we got from a now-closed Sears store). The Nintendo, however, was like a drug for me. We’d go to peoples’ houses that had it, and I’d get hyper-focused as I played it – so my parents decided not to get it.

Incidentally, if we had one of these at home I probably wouldn’t have felt like I needed to play the thing any time we visited someone who had it – but I guess that thought didn’t occur to my parents…they probably figured that I would play the thing day and night if we got it. They might have been right – maybe I would have snuck downstairs when everyone else was asleep and turned on the TV to play Nintendo, at least at first. I doubt it would have lasted. The Game Boy was something my parents could feasibly take and hide in a drawer if I got too obsessed, so that was the first “console” I got.

Eventually, once the Game Boy proved not to be detrimental to my grades, I was allowed to get the Nintendo Entertainment System I’d always wanted. By this point it was around 1992, and the NES was on its way out. The Super Nintendo was already in stores, and there were few games for the NES available at the local Electronics Boutique. I bought it with Castlevania III and Wizards & Warriors III, passing by the Contra Force game that was also on the shelf.

Up until this point, I’d only played games at friends’ houses – particularly at my good friend Jeremy’s house down the street. There were lots of games that had looked interesting, but that I had experienced only through advertisements (particularly in comic books, where many NES ads appeared back in the day). I was entering my teenage years at this point, and finally had a system to play these games on. I picked up StarTropics and the sequel at Toys R Us on clearance, along with the original Mega Man and Mega Man 6 – all still new and in stores. It’s tough to recall, but I might have gotten a few others at a local video rental store that was getting rid of their old games.

As I entered high school and had a summer job, everything got easier: Funcoland was in town, and they had loads of old Nintendo games for sale. Several were in boxes, and I had a small paycheck to burn. I recall getting Crystalis, The Legend of Zelda, and a few dozen other games from a store on my way home from school. While my friends were playing Sega Genesis, I still wanted to play those games that I’d always dreamed about and missed back when I was five to ten years younger.

I took my NES with me to college; friends would come over and play. For the past few years it’s been sitting in the box; it’s about time for it to make a comeback, though. We’re cleaning out my grandmother’s house (she’s still alive, but is in a nursing home, and in her 90s…her house itself is probably a post for another time), and I got an old CRT television and VCR that was sitting in the basement. I’m planning on hooking up the old NES and playing some games for old times sake.

Although my parents could have probably relaxed a bit about the Nintendo, I can’t say I feel like I was deprived. If anything, I think the delayed gratification enhanced my experience later. Even playing these games today, I can still summon that child-like anticipation I had, the thrill I felt when I took that system home and finally enjoyed the games I had for years looked forward to playing.

Gaming Through the Backlog

In which I recount my earliest days of computing, and what I am doing with the games I’ve gathered since that digital dawn.

My first computer was a VIC-20. My parents bought it used from a lady back in the mid-1980s…I recall the seller bringing it to our house, and eagerly looking out the window for her arrival. It came with only three games: Raid on Ft. Knox, Adventureland, and Pirates’ Cove. We eventually headed over to the local Toys R Us and snapped up about 10 more titles, all for a few dollars each. At that point, the games were on clearance – no one cared about “the wonder computer of the 1980s” by ’85 or ’86.

I’ve been buying games ever since then. Computer games, video games – it doesn’t matter; I’ve enjoyed them both, even during the days when there was more of a divide between the two. There has always been something magical to me about the idea that you don’t have to just watch things happening on the screen passively – you can influence the images, interact with them. The old VIC-20 eventually stopped working, and I sold the games, but that’s the only one – I’ve kept the Laser 128 (an Apple ][ clone) and its games, the Game Boy, the NES, the PS2…and most games that I bought for those systems.

A few years ago, I started to track my games on Backloggery.com. I realized that there were some games that I had always meant to get back to, to finish…and that I just hadn’t done it. I wanted a way to see where I stood with these. Given the decades of collecting, it was a bit of a job to enter all of them in. Eventually, however, I had gotten most things into the system, and I was finally able to see how many games I had finished – and how many I hadn’t.

My “uncompleted” ranking stood somewhere in the high 60% range. It was an eye-opener, and it accomplished what I had hoped it would do. For years I had snapped up game after game – loads of them, fairly indiscriminately, figuring that I wanted to play it and that I would get around to it eventually. I had over 800 games in my collection, 500 or so that I hadn’t completed – and lots that I hadn’t even played.

The worst offenders in my backlog were the lengthy JRPGs. Back in the 1990s I had read about these in magazines, and always wanted to play them, but I never had a SNES or a PlayStation to do so with. When I finally got a PS2 in 2002, I bought lots of games I had wanted to try: Final Fantasy games, Grandia, Xenosaga, all of that. Several of these were still in the shrink-wrap – I had never even booted them up.

It took me a few years to get there, but over the base 2+ years I’ve begun to sell some of these off. The rarest and most expensive ones were easy – $50-$100 for a game I haven’t played, and probably won’t get to play? Sure. It’s harder to justify letting a game go for $5; given eBay fees, it hardly seems worth it. Still, I’ve cut my collection by quite a bit.

With the new year, plenty of bloggers (like Bhagpuss) have discussed large numbers of games that they want to cover. I’m trying to avoid setting goals like those – if anything, I’m purposing to take a critical eye towards the rest of my collection and figure out what I can sell. I’m also hoping that this blog might give me a way to chronicle my experiences with some games – maybe if I write about it, I’ll feel more ready to part with it.

The Beginning

In which I introduce the blog and wax poetic about the internet of yore.

Better is the end of a thing than its beginning, and the patient in spirit is better than the proud in spirit. -Ecclesiastes 7:8

Heinrich Licht's gravestone — An auspicious beginning

I’ve wanted to start blogging for quite some time, and now I finally have. It’s all the rage today to build audiences, market yourself, optimize your blog for traffic, and otherwise turn blogging into a second career. I have no intentions of doing this.

The early internet I remember was a place of untrammeled expression, where it was not only possible but likely that one might stumble upon the personal and public musings of anyone and everyone. New and different points of view were there to be discovered, albeit in low resolution and with rudimentary HTML. Someone looking for information on 19th century quilting, for example, would invariably wend their way to the site of a member of the digerati (the only people to travel the World Wide Web at the time) who happenened to be an enthusiastic quilter, publicly musing about their personal hobby.

These days have gone, and while we cannot perhaps turn back time, I am opting to forge this site in the fashion of that bygone era. I plan on discussing my personal interests – varied though they may be – and allow others to read them (or not) as they see fit. In the interest of organization, however, I do plan on adding helpful tags to separate these into particular feeds, so that individuals can subscribe only to those topics which interest them…at least, I’ll do so as soon as I figure out how.

All that being said – welcome! The future awaits us; let’s hope it is as bright and beautiful as one can be, here in the Shadowlands. I’ll slowly peck away at this blogging thing until I master it.