Friends

Originally published at Nick Bertozzi. You can comment here or there.

These are going to seem out of order, because I'll be listing things that have happened to people who also don't blog properly.

Harris bought a house. It's pretty sweet, I guess. If nothing else, he lives closer to Minneapolis than he ever has. That, combined with the unseasonable warmth of late has made his yard an excellent choice for a dude of few funds these past weeks. That, and the fact that the run-up to him getting a house meant I had barely seen him for several months prior. Newlywed. Pssh.

Noah, likewise, has made a homecoming of sorts, now residing closer to what can properly be called The Heart of Uptown than anyone has in memory. Monique has apparently forbidden the amount of porch-loitering that would normally accompany so fine a location and so fine a porch, at least inasmuch as she has forbidden the requisite porch couch. She claims deference to to the pleasant gentlemen smoking outside the halfway house(s) across the street, but I suspect she just doesn't like scumbags lurking about her living space at all hours. We don't fault Kristina for that kind of footfall, so I suppose we'll just be happy to have them back within the Hipster's Quadrangle and call it a win for the home team.

I'm starting a new job a week from today. It requires a commute to St. Paul, somewhere near the intersection of Godforsaken and Whatthehell. The shift is from 12:30 to 9pm four days a week and every Saturday from 9am to 3pm. All of those ending times seem like auspicious hours for me to be driving back through Minneapolis. Just the same, I think I should get back to trying to download some books on tape if I'm going to have that much car time in my future.

The job itself seems like it should provide fodder for new journal entries. My first three weeks will be taken up by a training class. I can't imagine how it's going to take that long to learn the job, but it should provide me an opportunity to catalog the various douchebags, hoodrats and weirdsters that inevitable compose a corporate call center.

I've really been trying to update more, but it turns out that almost all my stories are about the middle-aged woman and the two-year-old with whom I spend most of my time. One of them already has a blog, and I'm not going to start telling cute baby stories in this once proud archive of Things Jim Has Tippped Over.

It's formatted pretty terribly on the site, to be honest, but you can get a sense of how the novel differs from the original letters that are online, and the new material. This first section is mostly about my brother Adrian. Anyway, I hope you like it!

Originally published at Nick Bertozzi. You can comment here or there.

Originally published at Nick Bertozzi. You can comment here or there.

And it's great. I've been having a really good time playing it. It isn't without it's flaws, but the overall experience is good enough that I've been all too happy to overlook the frustrating bugs. The onion AV Club gave it an A though, which I'm not sure I agree with entirely. I wrote a big comment on that AV Club review. And here it is!

The bugs in this game are frustrating.

The two big ones are:

- Quests that don't register their completion can leave you running around an area in frustration after fighting, say, the hordes of bad guys in the Redcliffe castle mission, wondering what small thing you haven't yet done. Only looking on the internet led me to the conclusion that something had gone wrong on their end. Reloaded a save game, fought the battle again, and CLICK - cut scene. Also, it didn't help that while I was trying to figure out what was going on, the aggravating fight scene music kept playing! It's great and cinematic when actually fighting, but while running around in empty areas trying to figure out what to do, it sure adds to the frustration!

- cut scenes sometimes screw up, and you'll go through a cut scene, make one of the games (actually pretty interesting) moral choices, and then suddenly be watching the cut scene again. I chose a different choice the second time, and was then moved forward in the game as though I'd only chosen the first. Later, other characters alternated between acting as though I'd chosen A or B. It sort of took the wind out of that choice. This happened to me in the Redcliffe section, as well.

That said, The game has some very good things in its favour, too:

- the moral choices themselves feel more satisfying. I really like the game's system of having the choices affect the world itself, rather than some arbitrary slider of how good or evil you are. You make a choice, and your companions approve or disapprove, sure, but also you'll find that your future options in the game world have changed, too. It really adds to a sense of immersion.

- The combat's good. Not too simple, but not ridiculously complex either, and the tactics reward the learning curve that comes with understanding how they're interpreted by the game. After playing with the tactic programming for a while, I found my party members acting just how I needed, which was useful for adapting to harder fights and made the combat feel genuinely tactical rather than like a mashfest.

- Some of the characterization is great - Morrigan and Shale are both fun and interesting, and I like the way they fit into the game world, and the major events of the game, rather than just having discreet stories of their own. Some of the characterization is sort of lame, too though. (The voice acting also runs from very very good to characters who seem to change voice actors mid-dialogue, again, in the Redcliffe quest, which led me to have most of my doubts about the game. Maybe the people in charge of the Redcliffe quest

- The skill trees feel well balanced, and it's fun to play as a warrior or mage or rogue (except for some rogue dex issues that they've acknowledged and which are being fixed in an upcoming patch) and for the most part the specializations really give a different feel to your class when you get to that stage. And a couple of the specializations are tied to the game world in a fun way. In a lot of these games, specializations just add a couple generic skills. Extra damage, and such. In this, they add skills that tie into the story sometimes. "Blood magic" being a big one, and that sort of detail really adds to the feel that you're a part of the game.

- The game gets its title from a system where you can choose your "origin" - each of which is a different way to start the game. The origins are a couple hours, before merging with the main storyline, but which will affect the game further down the line, too. Every character has to go to the dawrven city to seek aid, for instance, but that visit has a very different tone if you are a dwarf noble who was falsely accused of killing her brother the heir to the throne and then exiled.

I would give it a B, or a B- (with it moving to an A after a bug patch or two for sure.) A lot of care and love went into the game, and despite the couple frustrating bugs above, I've put in a couple dozen hours since it's release and haven't lost interest yet!

Penny Arcade had a pretty funny comic about how they do downloadable content. There are characters you come across IN-GAME, who describe the DLC for you, and the dialogue options say "downloadable content" right on them, which takes you out of the game a bit. ( I have, of course, downloaded them )

Have you played it? What do you think?

Originally published at Nick Bertozzi. You can comment here or there.

Originally published at Nick Bertozzi. You can comment here or there.

Hey Folks, STRANGE TALES #3 is on store shelves today. It features two pages by yours truly and colored by the very talented Chris Sinderson. Read a short preview here. I’d like to alert you that all of my original WATCHER intro and outro pages from the series are now for sale here. ‘Pon these pages are the likes of The Watcher, She-Hulk, Nick Fury, The Leader, Kraven the Hunter, Drs. Octopus and Doom, Spider-Man, and Wolverine.

Originally published at Nick Bertozzi. You can comment here or there.

Were you to have told me thirty years ago that I’d get the chance to draw Dr. Doom, much less in a chow line, I would have said, “No. I do not see that happening. No I certainly don’t.” Well, 10-year old NUB, prepare to see such a drawing ‘tween the covers of Marvel Comics’s STRANGE TALES #3, due on shelves tomorrow.

Originally published at Nick Bertozzi. You can comment here or there.

They weren't all successfully released, though. 

And anyway, who gets fruitflies in late October / early November?  We'd had none all summer!