Digital Dress-Up Dolls

I admit I loved playing with paper dolls as a kid. I loved dressing them and making new dresses from paper (although my creations definitely left something to be desired). I’ve not thought about them for a long time, though, ever since my dolls went the way of everything made of paper and ripped. But today I stumbled over a nice website dedicated to all those little Flash games out there which are basically digital paper dolls. I spent a very funny afternoon making several different types of those dolls. Some of them I will show here, so it’s going to be a picture heavy post this time.

The Dandy Maker was my original link to the site, shared by a Steampunk group on Facebook. I only made two Dandies there so far and only took a snapshot of one, so here he is:

 Same time period (roughly), but opposite gender is the Victorian Butterfly. I made three of them, one very regular, one more Steampunk-ish, and one rather dressed for bed than for society.

The doll I made most use of so far was X-Girl, which allows you to create a female comic character. I made nine of them already and I’m not going to share them all here.

Another doll I had a lot of fun with was Princess of Doom. I made two princesses so far, unfortunately, you can’t put them more into the centre of the picture, perhaps I should cut them out and post them again.

There are lots of other dress-up dolls on that site, including most interesting time periods, a lot of TV-series, movies, books, and games, and a lot of fantasy stuff. Give it a go, if you enjoy playing around with such dolls.

Waiting for ... Gaming

This is a post about something I find pretty annoying. About Free-to-Play games (Free-to-Pay games, as I call them) and their most annoying component: waiting.

You see, I really like to buy games and get the full game - to play, to keep. I hate several things about today’s DRMs, but that’s for another post. I like buying games and playing them as I see fit - when I want, where I want, as long as I want, as often as I want. There are games in my casual collection (like the second Dark Parables game, “The Exiled Prince”), which I have played completely four, five, or more times. What I like most about those games? They have a definite end.

I’ve never been one for stories of any kind that never really end. I’m not into soap operas for this reason. Therefore, I don’t really like all those online games, anyway. Not the MMORPGs (even though I like RPGs), not the online action games, and not the Free-to-Play games that have sprung up, either.

After I started playing on iPad, I also played several Free-to-Play games, since they were free and, well, it was new technology, what can I say? I stopped playing those games again soon, because they couldn’t hold my interest.

A little while ago, BFG started offering Free-to-Play games, too. The first ones were casino games and I never had any real interest in those. Gambling definitely isn’t my thing (I prefer spending money on games, books, and DVDs), so I just ignored them. Next were a couple of other games, mostly Hidden Object Games. One of them, “Midnight Castle,” became a favourite at the Challengers forum, though, and a few days ago, I downloaded it against my better judgement.

So, what is my problem with the game? Well, they’re playing the waiting game, very much like all Free-to-Play games do. Let me explain the basic idea behind Free-to-Play first, then I’ll also tell you about the waiting game.

Free-to-Play is the idea that you can play the basic version of a game for free. Yes, for free, for no money, without paying. Now, us grown-ups, we know there’s no such thing as a free lunch, much less a free game without a hook (at least a free game made by a professional developer and published by a professional portal). The hook with Free-to-Play is micro-transactions. Micro-transactions are small transactions within the game, done with real money. No in-game currency you can earn by doing stuff (that exists, too, in those games), but real money you pay for something to make the game easier or speed it up. You can play a Free-to-Play game completely for free - if you have a lot of patience. If you’re prepared to do a lot of grinding for your Free-to-Play RPGs. If you’re prepared to wait a lot. At first, those transactions seem to be pretty easy and not at all expensive. You pay a few dollars, sometimes only a couple of cents, and get something that will speed up building or make your character get more experience and so on.

However, let’s do a little calculation here. “Candy Crush” is a Facebook game where you can either bother your friends for more lives or buy a new life when you run out of them for 99 cents. The game belongs to the genre of the Match 3 games. Not a dying breed at all, there’s loads of them for all platforms, no matter whether it’s the computer or the mobile devices … I’m sure there’s even some around for consoles. If you’re not a member at BFG or Gamehouse, you can buy a full game there for $9.99 (for members, which get fined the price for one game every month for a coupon to use, it’s $6.99). A full game, one you can play without micro-transaction and as long and as often as you like. Those portals (and others I didn’t mention here) have loads of Match 3 games. Some include sweets, others let you match other stuff. And with buying 10 lives less, you’re almost there to buy one game without the micro-transaction hook. But people don’t do that, because they can a) bother their friends at FB until they get some stuff and b) always shell out a few cents for a new life, once all their friends unfriended them.

So, let’s get to the waiting game. If you play a Free-to-Play game for free, if you decide not to use micro-transactions, you have to wait a lot. Buildings in some games take hours of real time to be ready. Plants in some games take hours to grow. “Midnight Castle” has a cool-down time on the search scenes. You need to search each of those often, because they only yield one object on one go and you need a lot of those objects they give you. After playing a scene (knowing you will need more stuff from that one), you either have to wait for the scene to unlock again (can take 30 minutes or more) or you have to shell out on diamonds which unlock it again immediately. How you get diamonds? Well, either by luck in a search scene or for a quest - or for money, real money. Same goes for the in-game currency of gold coins. You earn some in the scenes, but you need a lot of them for crafting and unlocking new scenes and stuff like that. You either work hard for them or you shell out some real money. For me, who will not buy stuff for the game, that means a lot of waiting for the scenes to cool down, so I can get more stuff and earn more gold the hard way.

I’m not saying you should never play a Free-to-Play game, I just want you to remember there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Think about it.

SimCity

Yes, I am one of the thousands and thousands of European customers who bought the game and had to wait a couple of days before they could finally play it. Because, surprise, a lot of people wanted to go online (as if the new SimCity gives you a choice … LOL) and start building their cities once the game was out.

On the whole, I avoid buying games that force you to stay online to play (if they’re not MMORPGs, but I don’t play any of those regularly). It’s one of the reasons (together with the high price and my less-than-ecstatic memories of the previous games) why I haven’t bought and played Diablo 3 so far. I haven’t played StarCraft 2, either, even though I love the first. I do own a couple, though, such as Assassin’s Creed 2, Prince of Persia: Forgotten Sands, and Settlers 7. All of those, however, I bought during sales at Steam, so I didn’t hand over full price for any of them.

Why do you have to be online just to play a game all by yourself? That is my main problem with all those online-only games. I can fully understand only allowing Multiplayer over the internet and company-owned servers. I don’t think it’s ideal, but I can understand it.

However, when it comes to single-player gaming, where is the reason? I only want to play by myself, build a city or two (or loot a few crypts, or fight a few aliens). I’m not a natural Multiplayer gamer. Take a game like Forgotten Sands or Assassin’s Creed 2. Neither of them have a real Multiplayer mode. Neither of them can be played in any other way than all alone. You can compete, sure, who finishes first, but you can’t play together. The first Multiplayer mode for Assassin’s Creed came with Brotherhood (which is Assassin’s Creed 2.3333). Until then, it was only you, the free game world, and all the people who wanted you dead or whom you were supposed to kill. Same goes for Prince of Persia. As fun as jumping, climbing, fighting, and puzzling through the palace is, you do it alone.

And from Thursday to Sunday, EA proved me right. Most people who wanted to play SimCity did indeed want to play all by themselves, like me. Which is why there is an online petition to make the single-player mode of SimCity playable offline. And even that was impossible, because the servers couldn’t handle the amount of players. Over the weekend, EA more than doubled the servers which, admittedly, is very helpful. What company officials seem to forget, though, is that not everyone has broadband internet. A lot of people all over the world can’t be online 24/7. I can, theoretically, as I have a good connection, but even my internet is not completely secure. So I pay a lot of money and then more money (for the internet connection) and I still don’t have a guarantee I can play the game? Sounds like something is wrong there.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t blame EA for underestimating the number of people going online to play. I blame them for creating a situation, in which not getting on a server meant not being able to play. If I buy a game with an online Multiplayer mode and I can’t go online on the first day, I can’t play online. If I buy a game with a single-player mode, not being online should not keep me from playing. There are other technical problems that might happen, such as a game not working with certain computer configurations or operating systems. That’s annoying, too, and requires quick patching, but it’s not something as foreseeable and avoidable as having too few servers to handle all players.

SimCity is a legend, naturally a new version is going to attract a lot of players. Even with the very high price, a lot of people are going to buy it. And if everyone buying a copy (digital or boxed) has to be online to play, it’s going to create loads of traffic on the servers.

So, EA, please patch the game with an offline single-player mode. Let me have my private regions to myself. (That does sound a bit strange, sorry.)

Ok, now a few first impressions of the game, away from the annoying technical online question that has overshadowed the game itself.

Once you are online and have successfully created a region and successfully picked an area for a future city, the good old ‘SimCity fever’ is back. Maps are awfully small, but apart from that, the game is fun. You create connections to the outside world, you build roads, map out zones (residential, commercial, industrial) and watch houses being built, small U-haul cars arriving, and people moving in. And once they have moved in, companies and industrial areas come to life. You have to take care of electricity, water, sewage, of schools, police stations, fire departs, hospitals. You have to make your inhabitants happy, manage to attract various levels of wealth, from the poor workers over the middle-class citizens to the rich. You need to keep your eye on the budget, you need to decide on specializations (mining, high-tech, tourism, gambling, trade). You have to listen to your citizens, who will have tasks for you to perform, too. Sooner or later, you will start a new city in your region, specialize it differently, work with new tasks. Cities can help each other out, providing there are free capacities.

Balancing the budget can be a bit difficult, but that’s the point, isn’t it? There is always the question do I go for ecology or money? Do I do things the easy way (which usually means pollution) or do I go the hard way? Do I boost the worth of the lots, so I get higher incomes (which means higher tax income for me)? Do I keep the city mostly in the hand of the lower incomes, so it will provide basic services for other cities in the area (that works, actually)? Do I want high density at any price or do I want a nice, low density environment?

One thing I’m definitely missing in this game is a real manual. Sure, there is a digital one online, but having something to sheave through while I’m playing full-screen would be nice. I remember the good and often funny manuals for earlier games (let’s exclude the dreadful SimCity Societies). They were one reason why I played the games for so long, because the provided me with new things to try out.

Yet I can see the game will provide a lot of long-time amusement for me, too. The core of the series is still there. The fever that makes you play ‘just another five minutes’ that turn into five hours. The way you can just watch all the bustle in the city (and now all the better, as you can zoom in and see a lot of things happening in real time). The way constant demands of the cities keep you working and figuring things out.

Thanks for the new SimCity, EA and Maxis. Thanks for a game that will keep me up late and provide me with a good reason to play. After all, my citizens need me.

Fun with Conspiracies

Reading about conspiracies is something I get a lot out of – a lot of fun. I do not believe in most conspiracy theories I’ve read (I could, just, believe in the whole “Area 51”-shebang, though), but I find reading them very entertaining. They tell you so much about mankind and how the human mind works.

I have always loved literature that’s somewhere on the fringe, among fiction as well as non-fiction. I just loved “The X-Files” from the very first episode I saw. I’ve read the books by von Däniken as a teen (and seen his documentaries which were then shown on some TV stations here in Germany). I’ve also read other books about prehistoric astronauts, alien abduction and other topics like that (yes, one could say I was pretty much at home with the fourth Indiana Jones movie). I knew about Rennes-le-Château and ‘Le Serpent Rouge’ even before I read anything by Dan Brown (though mostly through the third “Gabriel Knight” game … “Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned”). I’ve known about Oak Island long before I read “Riptide” for the first time. I’m pretty well acquainted with the “Mothman Prophecies” and other cases of the “Men in Black” and alien abduction. In fact, I’ve belonged to a forum dealing with all of those stories for quite some time (until they kicked me out for reasons I still don’t understand – I didn’t do anything wrong at all).

But conspiracy theories are different. I’ve fought my way through the three volumes of “Illuminatus!” (and it was hard, believe me, that fractured writing has almost got me to admit defeat). I’ve read Robert Anton Wilson’s “Everything under Control. Conspiracies, Cults and Cover-ups” various time and always enjoyed myself tremendously. I’m currently reading another book on that topic, a German one titled “Elvis lebt! Lexikon der unterdrückten Wahrheiten” (Elvis lives! Lexicon of suppressed truths). But, very much like the author of the latter book, I do not believe those theories (or suppressed truths). I find them amusing and I like reading about them so I can put parts of it in my own stories. By looking at what people believe in, you can generally learn more about the people than about the thing they’re believing in.

Take, for instance, the best-known conspiracy theory of all: Area 51. What does the theory that the American government deals with aliens in there tell us about the people in the US who were the first (but are no longer the only ones) who believed in it? First of all, as the military always denied there is an Area 51, although there is a military instalment in that area, the theory tells us the people in the US do not trust the military (and haven’t since the end of the 1950s, when the first rumours broke out). It also tells us that those people believe (or at least find it possible) that mankind is not alone in the universe. Otherwise, where would those aliens come from? They also believed the military was capable of shooting down an alien spacecraft at a time at which they could not launch one themselves (do I really have to say it? Right … Sputnik … there, I said it).

(Well, that works in the comic four-parter “Area 52”, because the aliens are so far advanced in their technology that, simply do not expect to be attacked by simple missiles. But in that comic, there’s a secret base in Antarctica which serves as Area 51’s attic. Everything the specialists there are through with is shipped to the enormous warehouses of Area 52 where a few military people have to take care of it. Nice comic, though, and doesn’t take itself too serious, so if you stumble over it somewhere, give it a try, it’s both gruesome and funny.)

So, is there a secret base in that area, dealing with aliens? Well, “Roswell Conspiracies” says so, but that’s an animated series, so it can hardly hold up to a serious test. (The series also states werewolves only live for eight years and vampires really are big, dangerous alien snake creatures that use technology to appear human.) It seems from far more realistic evidence that Area 51 (let’s stay with that term, because everyone knows where to put it) really is a research center and possibly used to test new prototypes of fighter planes. The place is ideal for it – dry dessert climate, so no missed flights due to bad weather, and a lot of uninhabited space all around, so not too many people will see the fighters. Today, it is also a semi-official airport for emergency landings in this area (since 2008, ICAO-code KXTA).

But enough about Area 51. There are loads of other conspiracies out there, if you can believe the internet (and we all can, can’t we?). There’s a conspiracy about Elvis, about Vitamin C, about the Illuminates and about one-hundred-and-twenty-thousand other things (number is an estimate). If only a few of them are true, mankind is in deep, deep trouble, indeed.

Conspiracies are true – from a certain point of view, as Obi-Wan Kenobi would have pointed out (and there’s even a Jedi Knight Conspiracy out there). Apart from that, they’re also fun – from every point of view, at least for me.