Tuesday 5 April 2005

Pic of the day: Speak softly and carry a ridiculously oversized hammer.

Games

Now that I don't feel acutely sick anymore, I spend more time playing games. (It's kinda hard to feel immersed in a game when you shiver with cold and have to run for the bathroom frequently.)

This week, I keep playing City of Heroes Europe. It is the same city, it just uses European servers and has two extra language options, German and French. There was casual mention long ago that Italian and Scandinavian releases would follow, but I doubt that will happen. In the meantime, World of Warcraft has become THE cult hit here. CoH EU has only 4 servers, and not even those are full. Europeans simply don't obsess over superheroes the way Americans do. But I mentioned that before. Even so, the number of players on the least used British server is slowly rising. Defiant, as it is called, is where I play now.

In retrospect, I must admit that part of my recent flurry stems from the message boards. Defiant has a high-profile supergroup, The Contingency, which among other things organized a high-level Hamidon trial (one of the hardest things you can do in the game, requiring a massive attack by high-level heroes). They also released a pretty funny video about what heroes do when not fighting, namely dancing and showing off their visual effects. I guess I briefly entertained the notion of joining that organization, but when I think it over I realize that I cannot devote that much time to a game. Still, it was kinda inspirational.

***

And of course, there is the test server. I still haven't tried the Arena, because I have less than zero interest in Player vs Player fighting, even when it is completely voluntary and the losing party suffers no lasting damage. No, when I'm testing Issue 4, it is only because of the new costume options. Today's picture shows one of the good old anime cliches: A somewhat underage girl with a ridiculously large hammer. In some manga and anime, especially the parodic types, girls would produce enormous hammers out of nowhere and whack boys that were out of line. Since young teenagers often are out of line by incident or accident, this could easily become a running gag. The hammer is an existing feature of CoH, it's called the Stone Melee power set. But in the hands of a small teenage girl, it gets a whole new meaning.

***

But when it is late at night, I don't play City of Heroes, because it is a game to keep me awake. Also it induces scary dreams. Instead I wind down with Sims 2. It is slow going, at least when you only play an hour or so a day. And it never fails to make me sleepy. The intense concentration probably is part of that.

I have finally managed to get my lovey-dovey couple through university and back to Pleasantville. For some reason, in Sims2 I always end up playing families. I think it is because the Sims now have finite life spans. OK, it is possible to work around that, but it is the core of the game. Children are conceived, born, they grow up, and history repeats itself. In this situation, there is a mental push to secure my favorite Sims' genes for the future by having children.

Strange how this doesn't happen in real life, even though the end of life is even more certain here. Perhaps it is just that I am unable to really grasp the flow of time in real life? It moves so slowly that I cannot really see what is coming, even though my intellect knows it.

And of course, there's the detail that real life isn't a game.