In Japan, personal computer games is also an euphemism for games with explicit content. That was not at all the reason why I had a stack about as high as this one, though. They were strategy games, various simulators, and sword & sorcery roleplaying games. And expansion packs for The Sims, The Sims 2 and The Sims 3.

As I have told before, after my two moves there are no longer a couple hundred computer games in my home, but only a handful. However, the Sims franchise – pretty much my only games now besides City of Heroes – comes with a new expansion pack twice a year, as reliable as the seasons. I generally don’t buy them until the bugs are ironed out, as this disturbingly lifelike life simulator either has poor quality control (EA tries to save a penny where they can) or is just too complex to test.

This week, I had installed The Sims 3 again on the quad-core machine and found that with Windows 7 and a Solid State Drive instead of the main hard disk, it ran amazingly smoothly.  So I decided to throw at it one of the largest user-made worlds out there, Los Aniegos.  (Yes, that is a pun on Los Angeles, and the overall structure of the neighborhood is inspired by that area. Of course it is 10 000 times smaller or so.) This neighborhood needs the Ambitions expansion which I already had, but also the World Adventures and Late Night expansions, which I saw no reason to buy before. Also, they have now come down in price. Way down.

(A new expansion pack is out recently, called Generations. I assume my recent renewed interest for The Sims 3 may be in part due to the collective telepathic influence of hundreds of thousands of gamers being excited about the game again for a few weeks. A great disturbance in the force…)

(I am not buying it now, then. Waiting for the bugs to be found first, but also for the price to come down, and for some really good content to be made by users for it.)

(Disappointed to see that the Norwegian name is Generasjoner, which is a literal translation, or barely even that. The name should have been slekters gang, according to the voice in my head. Next time mail me before instead of making a boring translation. The voices in my head are always happy to share their wisdom with the world for free. That’s just the kind of people we are, the voices and I.)

***

After checking the Gamestop in Kristiansand (the city where I work) I also checked a couple online retailers. However, considering the price, the freight and the delivery time,  I ended up buying both of the earlier expansions directly from Electronic Arts, using their new “Origin” direct download service.

“Origin” is the continuation of the EA Download Manager, which has been around for a while.  It serves two functions:  To buy and download games without CDs and boxes, and to update existing games with patches. The name is somewhat ironic: Electronic Arts bought and closed down a famous software house called Origin, best known for its cult hit Ultima series.  It is uncertain whether they originally meant to close it down – they were not really competitors – or whether the clash of business cultures simply made it impossible for the Origin developers to continue doing their work. EA is famous for being extremely suit-controlled.

While the “Origin” download service is a cold comfort for the demise of one of the most creative software houses ever, it is actually quite good at what it does. I would have appreciated being able to choose what disk to install to, but on the plus side, it is very idiot-friendly. You just pick the games or expansions you want, click through a lot of legalese (telling you that you have no rights and Electronic Arts can do whatever they want without you complaining – standard contracts in other words), and the program downloads and installs on its own. When you come back from making dinner, it is ready to press Play. It seems great for the type of humans who “just want to have fun”.

You do not need to be online to play the game, only to install or uninstall it. There is even an unsolicited description of how to uninstall “Origin”, should you ever wish to.  That was a pleasant surprise:  The competing service “Steam” from Valve (yes, probably an attempt at humor, that name) would log on (“phone home” as we say) if I tried to play Civilization 5.  With “Origin”, you can play anywhere, at any time. Or at least that is what they say. You need to be online when you install and activate the games though. And you can only install each game on 5 computers. Simultaneously.

That is pretty generous unless you have a large family, I’d say. And if you decide to  get a new and better computer, you can simply uninstall (while online) from one of the old computers, and “Origin” will phone home to tell that you have a license to spare, which you can then use to install the game again on the new computer.

The problem arises if your computer – or at least hard disk – dies without telling you in advance. This is not uncommon.  By the time I gave up on my C: disk on the quad-core, it was probably too late to uninstall things from it.  And most hard disk deaths are more sudden than that. One morning you wake up and your computer does not.  So over the course of a decade or so, the 5 licenses are likely to dwindle to two or even one. At that point you will probably start backing up your whole disk, which gets around the problem if you buy the exact same type back.

Or, perhaps after 10 years you are not going to play The Sims 3 anymore. I mean, how many are currently playing The Sims: House Party, which came out in spring 2001? Such people may exist, but are probably not used for business decisions.

This seems like a good time to point out that the accelerating change of change acceleration is accelerating, or in other words, the way things change faster than before is changing faster than before. By 2021, if there is even a human world left as we know it (and I very much expect there will be), entertainment is going to be quite different from now. It seems unlikely that there will be sold desktop computers, or even laptop computers, at the time. Hard disks and heavy-duty processors will probably be online, and most interaction with computers will come from handheld pads or tablets with 3D projection. Sims 3 is unlikely to ever be optimized for that.

My test sim has completed a “Deep Thought” ice sculpture. This entry hardly qualifies as “deep thoughts” though. Still, it may interest some younger readers.

After I put in a SSD as my boot “hard disk” and upgraded from Windows XP to Windows 7, all my old programs were gone. I have installed the few I am still using.  From a couple days ago, this also includes The Sims 3.

The game worked horribly badly on Windows XP and Vista. The frequent crashes on the Windows XP machine may have to do with the widescreen driver, which I believe was not made for XP in the first instance. But in addition, both of the machines were hit by sound issues, including one where the sound began to loop and there was no way to exit from the program in a dignified manner until the sound stopped looping, which was random and could take hours when I was unlucky. Force closing the program could cause Vista to display a black screen until I logged off.

As expected, the program runs much better under Windows 7. I am slightly surprised that they could not be bothered to keep the game backwards compatible with the only Windows versions that existed when the game was new. -I have the Ambitions expansion pack, but even if you have none, the game will occasionally update itself. Most notably it will implement small bits from the expansion packs even if you don’t buy the whole thing. So for instance I have the new photo memories feature and life phase length adjustment launched with Generations, and the zodiac system for romantic compatibility from Late Night, and my sculptor tries to make objects from the World Adventures expansion – except they end up as blinking red cubes instead…

Anyway, the game seems to be rock stable now under Windows 7. I have run it for several hours one evening. Unfortunately my favorite modification, the Awesomemod, is not yet compatible with the latest version, but this is unrelated to the operating system. It just so happens that the game has been upgraded for the recent release of the Generations expansion, and as usual this broke some of the modifications that worked before. I have no doubt that Pescado will make the Awesomemod work as well as it did before, probably better.

The Sims 3 is a pretty big program, and more so with expansion packs. As you play, the number of people and objects and data about them will continue to rise. So the game is one that benefits from having a SSD for your swap file, unless you have a lot of RAM in your machine. Of course, RAM is even much faster, but it may not be feasible – for instance my 32 bits computer cannot handle more than 3.25 GB RAM. In any case, when running the game now with the Ambitions expansion, on my Quad-core with 32-bit Win7,  there is no pause anywhere at any time: Everything appears instantly wherever I go on the map.  I am not sure whether this will continue if I play the game for a very long time, but I probably won’t do that. I have a lot of other interests now, trying to maintain my body and soul more than I did. So this will have to do for now.

Screenshot from incarnate trial in City of Heroes/Villains, with new League overview on the left side of the screen.

Well, City of Heroes and Villains, I suppose, as these new “trials” are open for heroes and villains alike.  I am happy to say that the Hero half of the game remains the more popular, though. Despite a number of competitors in recent years, the old CoX (as the double hero/villain game is often called) remains the king of the hill, and a major reason for this is ever new content included in the subscription fee.

City of Heroes, when new, was among the very first to use instances – basically pocket universes where a quest takes place independently of the rest of the world. Nobody except your team can come into that warehouse while you bust the drug shipment, effectively eliminating the problem of “kill stealing” that has plagued online games since the dawn of the genre.  Today, instanced dungeons are taken for granted even in the sword & sorcery MMORPGs, but that was not usually the case.

Raids, on the other hand, have been around for a long time, and most other online RPGs have been more successful with them.  Despite the unique rewards, the Hamidon raids in CoX only appealed to the hardcore players, which were rather a minority in this game. Part of it was that CoX is graphically intensive, with all the special effects you would expect from superpowers. But it is also hard to organize a large crowd. Until now, the largest fighting unit was a team of 8 players (plus pets, if any).

With issue 20, Paragon Studios introduce leagues:  Basically teams of teams. You can have up to 48 players in a league, by filling up 6 teams of 8 players each. Teams retain the functions they have had before, but in addition you now get a league channel for discussing strategy, and a league display that shows the health and archetype of every member in the league, priceless for healers and useful for all. (Admittedly healers play a much lesser role in City than in traditional RPGs, but it is still nice to have them around, not least during extreme challenges such as these.)

The new trials are endgame content, and only available for those who have bought Going Rogue. (The expansion pack for City of Heroes, not the book by Sarah Palin, unfortunately. It would have been highly amusing if they had meant the latter.) Since this is only the second expansion pack in 7 years, the first being City of Villains, most players who stay around for a bit eventually buy it. There is a lot of content in the game after 7 years, and it is now possible to experience any and all of it through “flashbacks” even after you have reached the maximum level, so there is no pressure. It will probably take a year or two to get through it all, more if you have a job or a family or a religion or something.

Once you’re ready to take the next step, though, you need Going Rogue and a level 50 character.  (The highest level in the game.) There is a tab on the standard interface marked LFG, and here you can sign up for either the Behavioral Adjustment Facility or Lamda Sector, or just take the first one that comes up, regardless of which. The latter is a good option for the fresh level 50 who has not yet unlocked his Alpha slot, as either of the two will contribute to that.

(Or her Alpha slot, as more than a third of the players of CoX are “grl in RL”, as the saying goes. Not very helpful for the desperate dater, as most of them came to the game by playing together with their husband or boyfriend.)

Anyway, what’s with this unlocking of slots? Well, you see, the level cap is still 50. Instead of gaining more levels, the more ambitious heroes are gaining Incarnate abilities, which allows for even more specialization than the game already has. For instance, already in Issue 19 you could unlock the Alpha slot, which lets you select a boost for all your powers. It could be more damage, or more accuracy, or more defense, or speed, or endurance. But you can’t have them all at the same time. There are some combinations, but not of the main benefits, and the more you specialize in one benefit, the less there is for others.

Issue 20 offers a whopping 4 new incarnate slots.  One is a “proc”, a chance of adding extra effects to any of your attacks. One is an area damage that hurts your enemies, another is an area effect that strengthens your friends for a short time, and one is a controllable pet.  Like the Alpha slot, there are numerous different effects to choose from, but you can only have one at a time in each slot. There are also different strengths, from common to very rare. And all of these are built from components that you get mainly through these two trials. (You can convert shards that you find during other content, but it is a slow process indeed.)

In addition to giving you components for building the various abilities, you also have to unlock them, and the only way to do this for the fabulous four is to do these trials repeatedly. To the best of my knowledge, there is no way around it. Each of the two trials unlocks two of the powers, gradually by means of a special incarnate xp. So you have to do them both, several times each, if you want to be one of the top dogs.

Needless to say, some people are less than in love with the notion of mandatory “grinding”, as RPG players call it when you do the same thing over and over. I suppose if you are a housewife, you get enough of that in Real Life! Some jobs too, I guess. So why pay for doing it in a game?

Well, in this case, because it is fun.  If you use the game’s queue system, you will be thrown together with completely random heroes and villains in a fight to forestall an invasion of Earth. The only thing they have in common is that they are level 50. They will have very different powers, so you have to change your tactics for every time you do it.  While I won’t say it is infinitely replayable, it is definitely replayable.

Once you have opened one or more of the incarnate slots, you can do any content in the game (except the player-made Mission Architect content, I believe) and gain a modest amount of  “Incarnate shards”, which can be converted to “Incarnate threads” and used to build content for the new power slots. So it is not like you actually need to do these trials hundreds of times if you don’t want to. You may, however, either because you like them or because you want to want to be the best there is at what you do. If so, knock yourself out. Actually, most likely your opponents will do that for you. These are not called trials for nothing! But even if you lose, you still get various good stuff from them. So I expect them to remain popular for quite a while. They certainly are now.

The vaguely humanoid yellow light source standing over the unconscious Nazis is Sun’s Bright Hand, my “Incarnate” in City of Heroes.

I still play City of Heroes regularly, but I don’t write much about it anymore. This is basically because I am a bit ashamed of playing computer games at my age and my current aspiration. It is a bit like people who watch porn don’t usually blog about it, and people who pick their nose don’t usually blog about it, and people who don’t wash their hands after going to the loo don’t blog about it… OK, that may be stretching it, since they are probably not aware of being abnormal and shameful. But then, neither was I.

In any case, City of Heroes is probably still the “goodest” of the big online games. By that I don’t mean the best, although that could quite possibly also be true. I mean the one with most goodness as opposed to evil. Last year the game added the possibility for heroes to gradually turn into vigilantes and then into villains, but at the same time a corresponding option was given to villains, and this seems to have become more popular than the opposite. I especially notice many masterminds having come to the side of justice lately.

Technically, the game has added a new level of high-resolution graphics for those who have expensive video cards in their computers.  I don’t use this, so cannot really comment on it. The new Praetorian zones are quite shiny, and there is a project for shinying up older zones over the next year. It is not a priority for me, of course.  The graphics have been pretty realistic from the start, apart from the characters of course.

The gameplay has improved steadily, especially after NCSoft bought the game from Cryptic Studios.  A unique feature is “Mission Architect”, which lets players create their own missions (quests) and story arcs (series of quests) and share them with everyone. This unleashed a torrent of creativity. Unfortunately, some of this creativity went into designing missions that gave more reward for less work than ordinary gameplay, much more in the beginning. For this reason, Mission Architect has been repeatedly nerfed (made weaker), and now gives approximately 75% of the experience points and influence (the currency of the game) compared to ordinary gameplay. But for those who have seen it all in the game, there are hundreds if not thousands of new stories to play through. There are also missions that are either easier or harder than usual.

One seemingly small change to the game is that you can now select the color of all ordinary powers. This may not sound like much, but many superhero fans made their own heroes in childhood and have very specific ideas of how they look.  For instance you can now create the equivalent of the Green Lantern corps.  (You are of course not allowed to actually reproduce copyrighted characters. What I mean is that you can have your own superhero group based on a particular color, with matching uniforms and powers.)

The game took a new direction with the release of the Going Rogue expansion pack. This was the one that made it possible to change moral alignment, but it did much more. It introduced a third game world, but it also unlocked the Incarnate system, which is where the game is headed now.

In the original lore of the game, there were only two incarnates: Statesman and the villain Recluse.  Having been infused with the power formerly used by the “gods” of Olympos, their powers were greater than other superhumans. But that is now about to change, as the same power is very slowly becoming available to other heroes as well.  (The regular reader of my blog will probably understand my interest in this “divinization” from a symbolic point of view.)

While unlocking the Incarnate potential does require the Going Rogue expansion pack, that is only the beginning of the beginning.  There is a series of quests one must go through in order to actually unlock the first Incarnate slot and begin earning Incarnate shards.  This is a kind of salvage which is earned by completing level 50 missions and occasionally just randomly given from defeating level 50+ villains.  (50 is the highest level in this game, and there is no plan to change this.) New incarnate abilities are added to the game with each new “issue”, an upgrade of the game with new features approximately three times a year. At the current speed, it will take numerous years to introduce all the Incarnate abilities, and the time between each new issue can be used to complete the requirements for actually using that new ability.

In other words, the demi-divinization of heroes is a process that takes several years of real time.  Surpassing their previous boundaries is a slow process, almost unnoticeable, and you cannot become a master of everything, certainly not at once. You have to decide how you want to develop: Will you shore up your weaknesses, or make your strengths even stronger?

While this is the major current of the game, there are also smaller events. For instance, from around midwinter and out January there is a Winter Event, and from around Valentine’s Day onward there is Spring Fling. This weekend is one of the few Double XP weekends in the year, when casual gamers come online in droves to get double experience points and influence.  At random intervals, but usually several times a day, there are also zone events that only appear in one part of the city and only lasts for about half an hour:  Rikti (alien) invasion, Zombie invasion, or Supernatural invasions. When these happen, heroes band together with whoever the find to fend off the attack. Being defeated during such an invasion does not lead to experience debt.

So there is basically always something going on in City of Heroes.  But then again, there is always something going on in real life as well, so there is only so much I can experience of this game.  Your real life may vary, in which case you may want to give it a try.  There are free trial accounts to be had at their website.

I honestly have no idea how long I will be playing it myself.  So many things in my life just gradually fall away over the years, and I suppose if I live long enough, this is going to fall by the wayside too. But as of January 2011, I still play CoH every week. Coming from me, that is a kind of recommendation.

There is nothing rogue about my Azure Wingman. He’s a bit darker than intended, but only in coloring.

The massive online multiplayer game City of Heroes, known as one of the most family-friendly in the pack, was after some years followed by its shadow, City of Villains. While some play one of them exclusively, others have characters on both sides of the divide. There was, as is good and proper, a great gap fastened between them, so that those on one side could not go over to the other, nor could those on the other side come over. There were a few combat zones where heroes and villains could fight each other, but this proved not to be popular. Most players far preferred to fight against computer-generated opponents rather than real humans.

Soon a couple cooperative zones were established where heroes and villains could fight against a common threat or just chill under a truce, but this was also rather limited. And the two worlds were still separate in essential ways, so that for instance enhancements crafted by heroes could not be sold on the black market in the Rogue Isles of the villains.

Lately, and I feel compelled to say unfortunately, a third expansion has been made. This week it went live, officially on Tuesday (though some could play it on Monday). This second paid expansion (there are 18 free ones) is called “Going Rogue”, but has nothing to do with Mama Grizzly as you Americans may think. Rather it contains an alternate Earth in which history took a different course, where the world’s greatest hero became a tyrant, and superheroes rule over the common people with an iron fist… for their own good, of course.

In this place, called Praetoria, you can create a new character based on either a hero or villain archetype. But their origin does not define them. It is up to the player, through his (or surprisingly often her) choices to define the alignment of the character. You may wholeheartedly join the ruling group, or work for the Resistance seeking to overthrow them, or work for both of them at a proportion of your own choosing.

By the security level of 20 (out of 50 possible) your goose is cooked in Praetoria, and you have to make it to either City of Heroes or City of Villains. But someone who started from a villain archetype may be “redeemed” to become a hero, and someone starting from a hero archetype may “fall from grace” (yes, the publisher uses this religious terminology).

Even after you arrive in Paragon City or the Rogue Isles, however, your future is not set in stone. The same applies to those who have been around before, and never visited Praetoria at all. They will find temptations in the form of “tips” from enemies they fight. These tips lead to missions where you may gradually change your alignment – or affirm it. There are rewards for staying with your original decision, and you may become slightly more powerful as a hero or villain. On the other hand, the opposite lets you cross over to the other side. In effect, villains can now become heroes, and heroes can become villains.

As a regular of the game, I was invited into the early Closed Beta testing. This is not my first time doing beta for them, but this time it did not last long. I found the moral ambiguity not interesting.

The expansion is not ALL about moral grayzoning, but almost. The upgrade to the graphics engine was included in the previous free expansion (and presumably the one before that again, when power coloring was introduced). There are a few new zones and enemy groups in the level 1-20 range, and the first hint at the new endgame content comes in the form of the first of ten “incarnate levels”. I will have to come back to those, if ever. I understand them not to be simply more levels (as in level 51) but rather a somewhat different way of improving your level 50 character, but I haven’t tried.

More to my liking, there are a few new powers. Actually the most popular of them, dual pistols, has been available since the previous free expansion, but available only to those who pre-ordered Going Rogue. Which I think most did. I did not, though I have bought it after release. With a month’s subscription fee included, two new character slots, and the new powers and auras, it is not a bad deal if you have money you don’t need yourself or want to give to the poor.

I naturally skipped Demon Summoning. There is enough of that in real life, but let that lie for now. There is also a new power of electricity manipulation, which I have not tried (there were already several electricity powers in the game before). I have however tested Kinetic Melee. The hero in the picture above has this. Basically he uses the aura around his hands to fight. It is somewhat similar to the concept of using Ki in martial arts. You can throw enemies around without actually touching them, but still at a short distance, about the length of a blade mostly.

The azure auras on Wingman’s hands and the gleam in his eyes are not parts of his power, as one might think, but are also new. Before, you could only get auras after doing a series of missions (quests) at level 30 or above. So that is a welcome addition. The hand auras fit quite well with his powers, and I colored them in the same color so they would blend seamlessly. I am quite happy with the result.

But the main attraction of the expansion, I am not impressed with. Sure, it is nice that masterminds and brutes can become heroes. But the whole “shades of gray” thing was not really ever on my wishlist. And it still isn’t my reason for buying the expansion. It is not a “run and buy” recommendation in the least. More like a curiosity.