Tuesday 20 December 2011

The Internet is like Minecraft: You have to give yourself a project

An ulterior motive for making this blog is that I've been seeking a creative outlet, now that I'm again away from most gamers and chances to game communally. So I'm opening discussion on possible projects I could try:



Continue my Let's Play of Super Robot Wars J: I was doing my screenshot LP of this game when the forum I'd chosen to host it on was frozen and replaced with a new version, which didn't seem to have the same place for Lets Play type things. It brought the project to a halt and I wasn't sure whether to proceed (also I got Skyrim and suddenly doing things became hard). But I am curious whether the tiny audience I had for that would be interested in its continuation, even if were in a more closed off format like this blog.

More Skyrim: I've just finished a rambling playthrough of Skyrim, with my unoriginal Heavy Armor Nord with a big hammer wombling around completing quests at random, until finally relenting and finishing the main quest. And once I'd done that, I realised that as anticlimactic as it was, I wouldn't be able to really top it, Iskar Wullfson being something of a gloryhound who mainly did quests because he got off on random guards commenting on his past exploits. So I left him on the mountaintop after the end, and went looking for other things to do (which eventually led me to making this blog).
My point is that Skyrim has shown me enough that I'm interested in more, but at the same time I realise that I've done a lot of the content and thus somewhat diminished the novelty of the game. So I'm torn between trying a new playstyle straight away (magic or stealth, basically), or leaving the game to lie fallow for a while to get the novelty back when I do start again. If I did do a new character for your benefit, I could write up his or her adventures as a sort of In-character Diary sort of thing (mainly so I can relay it without video or taking thousands of screenshots).

Fallout New Vegas: I did like Fallout 3. Even the main story can kinda hold up if you have the right mindset (though for anyone but a goody-good it can be shot full of holes very easily). But New Vegas blows it out of the water. I've been considering doing my second playthrough for a while now, mainly to try out the hardcore mode now that my first character has done most of the content and I don't have the 'must see everything' pressure I had last time. I'd been considering either a melee character or a 'challenge' type who doesn't use armor on principle, and as above, turning their adventures into a sort of travellogue or mini-fanfic or something.

Alpha Protocol: A spy action game, relatively recent, about your James Bond knockoff getting involved in a Tom Clancy plot and having to shoot, stealth, and shag his way to the other side. I have a Pseudo-psycopathic take on the whole thing in mind, so we can see where that goes.

Super Robot Wars R: Another SRW title for the Game Boy Advance, this one rather primitive compared to SRWJ, but it has an important difference: While the menus and unit names have been translated, the plot has not, and thus can only be inferred from events and from my vague knowledge of mecha tropes and how to ask Google for details. Depending on how you view that, it can either be an excuse to skip the massive dialogue sections and get to the meat of the game...or to replace the plot with my own or one that you prefer.

The Miscallaneous Pile: Thanks to the presence of Steam, Humble Bundles, and over-generous friends, I have a lot of miscallaneous games that I could conceivably make something fun out of, but don't have a solid idea for yet.
Sword of the Stars: A 4X space game designed to focus on space battles, ship construction, and tech optimisation, and with gameplay quick enough that multiplayer games are viable in a few hours. We could try that, with the commanders of our own hodge-podge faction struggling against my writing skills to get anything done.
Free-to-Play Superhero MMOs: Champions Online, City of Heroes and DC Universe Online all come to mind, but what exactly would we be doing? Who would be our avatar going into this strange world of jerkass heroes, neverending super-battles and people who've paid real world money for hot pink underoos?
Baldurs Gate, Icewind Dale, Planescape Torment and Neverwinter Nights: All games in a similar vein, with you controlling a main character and/or a group of misfits trying to quest yourselves through various D&D universes and out the other side. The issue here is I'm not sure where to go with all of this, how meta I should go and whether to be straight or humorous.
Other Super Robot Wars titles: While a limited number of the SRW/SRT series have been translated, officially or unofficially, many exist and quite a few are emulatable. My grasp of the Japanese Language is poor-to-non-existant, but again, I know a fair amount of trivia about most series and can find more allowing me to either reconstruct the plot...or adlib it to conform to my whims or the whims of the audience. In fact, I can do this to an extent with one of the translated ones, if you'd prefer to watch me write myself into knots.
Fable: I picked up a disk of the original Fable game at Gaelcon's charity bric-a-brac stand, and haven't touched it since (again, mainly due to Skyrim). I have no real experience with the series except what others have said about it, so it'd be a blind run.
Jade Empire: I know many vocal people hate Bioware for their post Mass Effect 2/TOR 'selling out', but I don't share that pain of betrayal. I am quite annoyed my Steam copy of KotOR refuses to load 90% of the time and thus my sith lord in the making is now eternally stuff in front of the Tusken Instakill Lasers, but thats a different issue. If I can get Jade Empire to run on this future space laptop, should I see where this chinese-shaped rabbithole takes me?
Christmas Purchases: After the 25th I will have access to Saints Row 3, Morrowind, and Oblivion, so perhaps if people would rather I hold off until after the seasonal festivities, I could try them in a similar In-character diary vein to the first few ideas.

Also: A general call for old-style topics for me to rant on. I've kinda been tempted to redo my old LJ posts about Money in Tabletop Games, or another 'Rules Every RPG Needs' post, but maybe there are some other topics people would like me to wiegh in on?

Comments below, lets see where this goes.

7 comments:

  1. Continue SRWJ: I'm kinda 'eh' about this one. As I found out the hard way hosting Terminal's take on Zoids Legacy, Blogger and Picasa don't play as nice as they ought, both being Google products and all. If you must, consider setting up an imgur account for image hosting purposes.

    SRWR: Dibs co-pilot.

    Super MMOs: Anything you need to know about City of Heroes, ask me or hit up Paragon Wiki (the cohtitan one, not the Wikia one). Though taking on DCUO might be fine too for those of us who buy their computers on budgets downwind of $1000 USD.

    Other SRTs/SRWs:
    - SRW3 will rape you. Avoid it.
    -Alpha Gaiden is still fresh in everyone's minds courtesy of Tobias Grant's LP. Avoid it.
    -OG1 and OG2 are fairly easy marks, though you'll get catcalls about "this turned out X in OGs/OG Gaiden."
    -Endless Frontier and EF EXCEED, you and I have spoken at length about already; I'll do one or both in your stead.
    -If you're willing to step into fan works, consider Fantasy Maiden Wars - it's a Touhou take on SRW in four parts (the first being English-patched and focusing on Embodiment of Scarlet Devil events), each having the approximate learning curve of old-timey Super Famicom SRWs (though thankfully without the difficulty bloat of your counters being computer-determined).

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  2. Continue LP: I'd be up for it.

    Jade Empire is pretty fun. Decent variety of martial arts and weapons with some sort of a plot. Wouldn't make a bad LP.

    Alpha Protocol: I love this game and I can see a lot of replay value in it. You can play the rookie mode which gives somewhat different dialogue and which unlocks the veteran mode (broken in your favour). Definite good choice for an LP of varying degrees of seriousness.

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  3. Haken:
    I have a paid photobucket account. Its what I was using up until now. Hosting shouldn't be an issue.
    I already beat SRW3. I only got the normal ending, but I still consider it a victory.
    And I can play any SRW, not just the translated ones. In fact, if I'm going to be dicking around with the plot for nefarious purposes, an untranslated game might be a good excuse. Depends on how wierd you're willing to let me be.

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  4. Maybe give SRW L a run? It's one of my favorites, and being a DS game it's fairly easy to emulate. I'm afraid I haven't been following the J playthrough extensively, but if you were particularly far you might as well finish it.

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  5. Jade Empire might be interesting, since that was kinda back when Bioware wasn't fail.

    As for the SRW J LP, I wouldn't mind it continuing, personally.

    If we go with a non-translated SRW, I'd suggest the dark horse.

    Yes, I am talking about K. I'd be interested to see your interpretation of the classic saga of "Mist and the Tale of the Plagiarized Music, or; How much better Everything on Mist's planet is compared to Earth."

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  6. Suddenly I want to play Sword of the Stars with you.
    Superhere RPGs and DnD based RPGs... no sell, but thank you.
    LP Fallout seems interesting.

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