If you live in Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, or Iowa, please spend all of tomorrow in your storm cellar.

This isn't a joke. NOAA thinks there's going to be a boat-load of tornadoes tomorrow.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 09:03 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
Post contains 36 words, total size 1 kb.

This was surprisingly good. A lot of things that could have been in it to ruin it, which they consciously left out.

It's based on a game from Sega, and when you see these young ladies:

I dunno about you, but my first thought was "eroge". But if that's the source, it's been scrubbed clean. There's pretty much no fan service.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 06:02 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment
Post contains 659 words, total size 4 kb.

I've made another post to Hot Air's Green Room.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 04:33 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 15 words, total size 1 kb.

It's pretty evident that I'll get nowhere in this game without the manuals. Of course, I don't have manuals. What I have is PDF files. So what to do?

Well, the obvious solution is to move them onto the Kindle Fire. Then I can access them while playing the game.

So I tried copying them into the "Docs" directory on the Fire. And then turned on the device, and there was nothing there but a message saying I should send documents to myname@kindle.com. (My actual name.) So I sent them there, all 23 megabytes or so. Took a LONG time.

And nothing showed up. I finally noticed a pair of buttons on top labelled "cloud" and "device". The default is "cloud". When I switched to "device" then they showed up.

Presumably eventually they'll show up in the cloud, too, but I don't really care.

By the way, they look great. But I have to use the Fire in portrait mode; otherwise the text is too bitty to read with my old eyes.

(If that hadn't worked, I could have used the Slate, of course. I may still end up doing that, because it has a larger screen.)

UPDATE: They did show up, but as potential downloads in the "Device" rather than in the cloud. Since they were duplicates, they didn't actually download. Instead, there were "x" marks on top of the icons, and clicking them deleted them.

Nonetheless, Amazon has made a tremendous mistake here, and eventually someone is going to notice and take advantage of it. If you know someone's Amazon account name (and while not exactly public knowledge it isn't really a secret either), then you can email graphical spam in the form of a PDF file to theirname@kindle.com and it will get downloaded onto their device automagically. I'm going to try sending a different PDF file to myself to see if it requires me to click to download it, or it comes automatically.

It doesn't really matter, though. How long before every Kindle owner's "doc" directory is loaded up with icons offering herbal drug-equivalents and get-rich-quick schemes and all the other stuff we all know and loath?

UPDATE: They have an app for it, but it isn't required. Ordinary email is all you need if you know the account name.

UPDATE: They download automatically. You don't have to approve.

This will end very badly. Good thing they can push firmware updates, because they're eventually going to have to. They've left a barn door wide open here, and it will get abused.

Actually, I don't yet know that for sure. It is barely possible that Amazon has connected my email address to my account name, and only accepted the document because it was mailed by me. One more experiment in the works.

UPDATE: I was wrong! They did think this through. Just now J did me a favor and tried sending me a PDF file. I got an email acknowledgement, but the file itself isn't on my Kindle.

So I tender my apologies to the folks at Amazon for doubting them.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Gaming at 08:49 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 517 words, total size 3 kb.

I got three minutes into this episode and had enough. Ieyasu wakes up on a sidewalk, sees a big video display, and watches a music video done by an idol. And she decides she wants to be just like that.

Nope, nope, nope. Not for me, thanks just the same.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 08:41 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 57 words, total size 1 kb.

It didn't last very long. I lost my hero in the first week, and gave up.

I don't quite understand what happened. I moved into a dwarven town, and the defending force was obviously too much for me, so I hit the "retreat" button. The popup said no one on either side lost anyone.

And then my hero and my whole stack were gone. There was some sort of popup about him being mugged, or something like that. So I killed the window.

The scenario is called "Arrogance", and I was trying to play it at the easiest possible setting. For all the good that did me.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Gaming at 08:02 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment
Post contains 112 words, total size 1 kb.

1 Hrrrm.  It's been ages since I've played any of the HOMM games, though I did spend a good bit of time on them when they first came out.  Don't know what happened there.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at April 12, 2012 08:06 PM (PiXy!)

2 When you "retreat", you do not get the hero back. Instead, the hero (along with artifacts) reappears in your tavern, to be hired again. All the troops are lost.

The purpose of the "retreat" command is to preserve a good hero in defeat, not to cancel out of a battle.

You can also "surrender" when fighting another player, in which case you must pay some ransom gold, but get to keep all troops.

Even in defeat, heroes are not killed, and they never lose their level and skills. They will eventually be available for hire again, but not necessarily on your side.


Basic advices:
Nearly everything in the game can be right-clicked for help or vital information.

The troops available for hire, whether in towns or in map buildings, are replenished at the beginning of each week.

Flaggable buildings on the map offer continuous benefits. Claiming them is essential to the game. These include mines (generate resources) or troop generators (which other than offering troop for hire, also boosts troop growth of the same type in your towns)

Much of the game is using your heroes to grab benefitial objects on the map. You'll need multiple heroes to do that. Later you'll also need to use idle heroes to ferry troops to your main hero.

Build town halls at the start of your game. They provide additional daily income.

There is no concept of maintenance or troop limits in the game.

The castle faction (humans) is for beginners. Inferno (demons) and fortress (swamp) are for advanced players.

Posted by: cuc at April 13, 2012 01:50 AM (ly+de)

3 Oh, I forgot:

When you start a game and hired one or two additional heroes, move their starting troops to your main hero. Only your main heroes need to fight battles and gain experience. You'll learn which objects on the map contain battles and which don't.

Posted by: cuc at April 13, 2012 02:04 AM (ly+de)

4 When assigning troops, use shift-click to split a stack.

During battle, you may want to turn on the hex grid and other displays. Click on the computer button at the bottom left for combat options.

No worry, HOMM is the easiest-to-learn big name strategy game ever.

Posted by: cuc at April 13, 2012 02:20 AM (Gze9f)

5 cuc covered a lot of good points. A couple additional thoughts:

- If you are defending a town, you can not retreat. (Unless that town is a Stronghold type and has a special Escape Tunnel improvement built.) So be very careful about defending towns if you don't have enough troops to hold it. It can be better to flee and let the enemy have it, rather than risking the loss of a well-developed hero.

- If you right-click an enemy hero or a stack of monsters, you get a summary of their strength. This can range from "A few" (1-3) to "A pack" (maybe 20?) to "Lots" (50-70) all the way up to "Zounds!" (500+). Check this information on everything you can see to decide who you can fight and who should be left for later. At the start of a map, there will usually be quite a few enemies who are much too powerful to attack. These are positioned to block expansion into new areas of the map or to keep especially useful things out of your hands until you are stronger.

- These early strong monsters may also prevent AI heroes from reaching you, giving you time to develop your forces. Sometimes it is a good thing to have a big stack of something nasty around.

- The random monsters around the map grow in numbers with each passing week. So a stack of Minotaurs (random example) that shows as "Several" in week one might have grown to "A pack" by week 4.

- Each of the random monster stacks around the map have an attitude factor. Some of them hate you and will always fight. Others will offer to join you in return for gold. Still others will agree to join you because they support your cause. There is no general way to tell which is which from the map, but there are some spells and hero abilities that can help reveal attitude and even persuade monsters to a more favorable result.

Oh, and that dwarf town: dwarves are s_l_o_w. Terribly, terrible slow. And your heroes' movement on the main map is determined by the slowest unit in their army. I tend to leave dwarves at home unless I have nothing else.

Elves are cool, though.

Posted by: haphazard1 at April 13, 2012 06:01 PM (9yBYR)

6 As for factions, I agree that the Castle town (humans with pikes, archers, swordsmen, etc.) is one of the easier factions to learn and play. Pretty good town improvements available at reasonable costs, a decent and balanced army at lower levels, and with excellent high-end units.

The Inferno (demons) is more of a mid-range faction. I would also include Rampart (dwarves and elves, magic forest town), Dungeon (subterranean critter town), and Necropolis (the undead) in the middle difficulty group.

The tougher factions, at least for my play style, are fortress (swamp town), tower (snow town of wizards, very magic oriented), and especially stronghold (orcs).

All town types can be powerful if you can develop them and learn to make good use of their creatures. But some are definitely easier to learn than others.

Posted by: haphazard1 at April 13, 2012 06:13 PM (9yBYR)

7 All this Heroes discussion motivated me to crawl into the depths of my closet and pull out the old media folders.  I have Heroes III and V, but not IV for some reason.  It will be interesting to see if I can get III installed and patched up to where it will play, or if your version has something special to it.

Posted by: David at April 13, 2012 06:32 PM (Kn54v)

8 Well, the HOMM3 which is being sold by GOG includes the Armageddon's Blade expansion pack and the Shadow of Death expansion pack. For whatever that's worth. (For me it was worth $5, which is what I paid.)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at April 13, 2012 07:45 PM (+rSRq)

9 The expansion packs add a new town type, the Elemental Conflux, which is built around elementals and other "neutral" creatures. If I am remembering correctly, it also adds multi-part artifacts (such as the namesake Armageddon's Blade) and improves support for more elaborate quests. There are also new campaigns and maps to play. A pretty good deal for $5, if you like the base HOMM3 gameplay.

Another option to consider if you enjoy HOMM3 is Heroes: Chronicles, which I just picked up from GOG myself during the sale. There are 8 "chapters" each of which seems to be an 8 map campaign centered around one of the 8 town types. The whole thing is linked together as one big storyline. There are a few new creatures, but otherwise it is a standalone version of the HOMM3 engine that plays the new campaigns. (No additional maps or choose your own game options, just the campaigns.)

I have played the first 3 maps so far and have enjoyed it, even if the first chapter is about my least favorite town type: Stronghold. :-( Beware the might of my orcish armies!

Posted by: haphazard1 at April 14, 2012 12:40 PM (9yBYR)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

HOMM2 runs on this machine. But it's a DOS game, and it runs in full screen mode. Problem there is that this is a 1920*1080 display (i.e. 16:9) and they're using a 4:3 display mode (probably 800*600), so all the graphics are massively distorted.

The first one almost certainly is the same. So it looks like I'm going to have to dive into the series with version 3.

UPDATE: 3 is not a DOS game, but it too runs full screen, in a 4:3 mode. Looks like I'm going to have to check into the HD patch.

UPDATE: OK, that works.

But the tutorial is less than totally helpful. I guess I need to read the manual to learn how you end a turn. I can't find any button to do it, and since I assume the game is expected to be more than one turn, there must be a magic keystroke that does it.

UPDATE: Aha! There is a button! (but I had to reach page 20 of the manual to find that out.)

UPDATE: OK, and I have completed the tutorial game, which of course is ridiculously simple. I didn't bother with the tutorial manual, so it probably took me a lot longer than it should have. But it was fun, and I did enjoy it.

I won't be ready to advance beyond "Simple" for quite a while, though. And I didn't take advantage of everything I had. For instance, at one point I learned a spell, "Magic Arrow", but I didn't end up using it in the final battle.

Still, not at all bad. But the patch is pretty much essential, if you're running it on a modern computer with a display that isn't 4:3. (Does anyone make 4:3 displays any longer? Not if they're LCDs, they don't. My iPaq's display is 480*640, but it isn't a PC, and every other display around here is wider per height.)

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Gaming at 06:17 PM | Comments (10) | Add Comment
Post contains 330 words, total size 2 kb.

1 You make me nostalgic for the days when manuals actually would *have* a 20th page. . .

Posted by: metaphysician at April 11, 2012 07:10 PM (3GCAl)

2 You make me nostalgic for the days when manuals actually would *have* a 20th page. . .

He makes me nostalgic for the days when manuals would actually be included in the box...

Posted by: Wonderduck at April 11, 2012 08:57 PM (PVVuW)

3 Generally speaking, your video card driver should have the option to "stretch", "retain ratio" or "center" when the resolution is lower than standard. Your monitor often has these options too.

The DOS games on GOG.com are all played through DOSBox, which means they can be windowed by alt-entering, or configured to run at double size (in case the details are too tiny on 1920x1080).

Posted by: cuc at April 11, 2012 10:31 PM (ly+de)

4

I'm using a high-power notebook computer. Strictly speaking, there is no "card".

I've heard about those settings in the past, and I've hunted carefully and found no such choices on this computer.

In any case, HOMM3 with the patch works fine, so I don't need any other solution.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at April 11, 2012 11:04 PM (+rSRq)

5

He makes me nostalgic for the days when manuals would actually be included in the box...

Not this time. The manuals are all PDF files. It was an electronic delivery. No box, no disks, nothing but bits coming down my pipe.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at April 11, 2012 11:05 PM (+rSRq)

6 The most likely place for the "don't stretch video" is in the bios.
Or if you were using an external LCD, it's menu might have such an option.

If you turn it on, of course, you'll get a tiny area in the center of the laptop's actual display, which is a different kind of just as bad.

Posted by: RickC at April 12, 2012 05:40 AM (Tn7Hp)

7 Why are you guys trying to solve a problem which has already been solved? Please stop.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at April 12, 2012 06:01 AM (+rSRq)

8 I threw extra money at the Wasteland 2 project on Kickstarter to get the "big box" edition with a printed manual.  I miss the days when you could weigh the quality of the game by, um, weighing the quality of the game.

You can still get 4:3 / 5:4 monitors if you hunt around (e.g. this Dell) but they tend to be expensive.  The iPad is 4:3, and the latest version is 2048x1536; I wish someone would make that panel into an external display.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at April 12, 2012 07:30 AM (PiXy!)

9 Magic Arrow is one of those spells that I find to only be useful in the very beginning of a map, when stacks are small and low-tier.

Lightning is better, but you have to get all the way to Chain lighting (Tier-4?  I can't remember) to get a go-to spell.

Posted by: BigD at April 12, 2012 07:57 AM (qLkdZ)

10 I find Magic Arrow least useful at the beginning of a map, because your heroes are also very weak at that stage. (Unless you have heroes carried over from a previous step of a campaign, which is a whole different ball of wax.) If you can develop a hero with a decent Power stat, or supplement it with a nice artifact, then you can do quite useful damage for very small mana cost with Magic Arrow.

Chain Lightning can be tremendous fun. Although you have to be careful with it.... Solmyr is one of my favorite heroes, because he starts with Chain Lightning as his special skill. It is completely unbalanced, and tremendously fun.

When my heroes are still weak and can't do much damage with direct spells, I usually stick to buffs/debuffs and try to get the most I can out of my troops. An occasional Haste or Slow on the right target can make a big difference tactically. Using Bless on a low-level unit that has highly variable damage is also one of my favorites ways to get value from heroes with minimal magic skills.

Posted by: haphazard1 at April 12, 2012 07:16 PM (9yBYR)

Hide Comments | Add Comment

Wasurenai is trickling them out slowly, but at least they're still working on them.

This ep is about astrology, and about the thirteen constellations of the zodiac, the thirteen constellations on the ecliptic. Bet you didn't know about that, did you? I sure didn't.

The thirteenth is Ophiuchus, which was reclassified as being one of the ecliptic constellations in 1928. By sheer chance (or contrivance) it turns out that Marika's birthday puts her in the sign of Ophiuchus.

As always it's a fun show, with lots of sight gags. I'm still enjoying it.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 10:50 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 99 words, total size 1 kb.

I'm quite a fan of Mai-Otome. Or at least, of some parts of it. Pretty much the last 8 episodes of the TV series, and all of the OVA. But there's another series with many of the same characters, which came first: Mai-HiME. I've long wondered about it, and so today I decided to try watching it.

Loads of spoilers about both series below the fold.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in General Anime at 08:56 AM | Comments (29) | Add Comment
Post contains 789 words, total size 4 kb.

You all are familiar, I assume, with the American fad to get tattoos in Chinese, usually resulting in gibberish or something really embarassing.

Seems that the new fad in China is to get tattoos in English.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste in Weird World at 06:19 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 41 words, total size 1 kb.