Tuesday, April 17, 2012

Game Informer Interview

I've received a lot of traffic over the last few days from people who read the interview with me in GameInformer. Welcome! Not to sound pretentious or anything, but I really didn't realize there were that many CRPG fans out there who didn't already know about me. I just wish all the extra visitors hadn't come at a time when I've had such limited opportunity to play and blog.

The interviewer, Phil Kollar, apparently decided that my profile was his crowning achievement as a game journalist, because he left the magazine mere moments after I submitted my final answers to his questions. Best of luck, Phil. Anyway, he asked a lot of questions that didn't appear in the final interview, and I wrote longer answers to some of the questions that did. I'm not sore about it or anything--that's what editing is all about--but I thought I'd offer the full text here as a quick one-off while I try to invest enough hours in Sentinel Worlds to generate another posting.


A lot of people love games or even love a specific genre of games, but that doesn't always correlate with a willingness to dive into the medium's history. What made you choose to begin this huge undertaking?

My first CRPG was Questron, which was pretty early in the history of the genre, so I don’t really see playing older games as primarily a historical undertaking. Games like Ultima IV and Might & Magic remain quite current to my mind.

I have a bit of an obsession about making lists. My wife and I have an ongoing project to eat at every restaurant on Route 1 between Boston and the New Hampshire border. I’ve made a list of all the cities in the United States with populations above 100,000, and I’m slowly working through them. I have a list of all major artists in jazz history, and I’m working through their catalogs. Making a list of all CRPGs and playing through them in order is very consistent with my personality. In a way, I guess it’s like a quest list in a CRPG, which is probably why the genre appeals to me.

It was only a chance comment on Reddit that made me start a blog.

Is there any reason that you've always been more interested in RPGs than any other genre of video game?

Great question, and I don’t have a clear answer. Part of it is the balance they strike: they’re a little more mature and cerebral than action games, but they require less patience than strategy games. But they also include more stuff than other genres. Take a look at my GIMLET scale: it has categories for things like NPC interaction, economy, equipment, character development, and so on. I don’t think any other genres have this variety of gameplay elements. One minute you’re tactically planning huge battles, and the next minute you’re managing your finances so you can buy a house. I’ve played games in other genres, like Doom and Star Wars: Battlefront and Half-Life, but there’s always a moment in those games in which I wish I could break the boundaries of the game. I want to be a single character in Battlefront. I want to actually have conversations with some of the NPCs in Half-Life. And it’s inevitably those moments that I quit those games and open up Morrowind.

Part of what I respect about your journey is that you always do your best to actually finish each game. Of the 80-some that you've played at this point, how many have you completed? How much time do you estimate that you've devoted to the task?

I’m a data guy, so I don’t have to estimate these things. Of the “winnable” CRPGs that I’ve played, my win rate is 47%. I try to keep it around half. As for time—I didn’t really want to know, but you asked. According to my spreadsheets, I’ve invested 1,017 hours since I started the project 25 months ago. That breaks down to about 10 hours a week. The variance is huge, though. Some weeks I don’t do anything, and others I do almost nothing but play games.

How do you decide when a game has just become too frustrating, boring, or time-consuming to be worth finishing?

I actually don’t have a very good system for this. This accounts for a lot of the gaps on my blog. I’m a professional in my 40s, so gaming is something I do when I probably should be doing something else. When a game is boring, frustrating, or too long, I find myself doing my actual job a lot more. Inevitably, I notice that I haven’t posted anything on my blog for a week and figure it’s time to move on. When a game is truly addicting, I never worry about finding time to play.

What has been the biggest surprise of your experiment so far? Any games you'd never played or heard of that you ended up falling in love with or games you fondly remembered that didn't hold up?

There have certainly been some wonderful surprises so far. I barely remembered the early Might & Magic games, and I was thrilled to rediscover them. Wasteland and Starflight are two games I never played back in the day. Everyone else knew how good they were, but I only discovered it recently.

Probably the best surprise has been a little-known 1988 roguelike called Omega, which has stores, joinable factions, and a very complex plotline. I had some corruption issues with the earliest edition, but it’s on my list to try again in the coming year.

Most of the games I remembered enjoying, I still enjoyed. Ultima IV and Ultima V still hold up, even if they are a bit shorter than I remembered from my youth. Pool of Radiance was an absolute joy. The only games to truly disappoint have been The Bard’s Tale series. I think most gamers of the 1980s remember these fondly, but I found them boring, repetitive, and devoid of any truly interesting elements. You couldn’t pay me to play them again.
 
What do you think separates computer RPGs from console RPGs? And with developers like BioWare and Bethesda now focusing just as much on consoles, do you think that distinction is disappearing?

This is one of those questions that every serious CRPG player ought to have an opinion about, but I just don’t. I scandalized my readers by purchasing Skyrim for the Xbox, but it just felt like a game that would be more fun to play from the couch on my big-screen TV. All I can say is that I’ve never been much impressed with games released only for consoles, and I’ve resisted attempts to add them to my list.

Are there any elements of the CRPGs of the '80s and '90s that you find lacking in modern RPGs? Anything you wish would come back?

I get this question a lot. Many people seem to think I particularly like old games because that’s what I happen to be playing now, but that’s just a byproduct of going in chronological order. I don’t have any particular fetish for old games. I don’t see any raw purity in the minimalism of Wizardry or the ASCII graphics of NetHack, and I generally like the ways developers have made use of improved disk space, memory, and graphics and sound technology as the years progressed.

However, there are two modern trends that I’m not in love with, and that I think make modern gaming worse. The first is the obsession with total spoken dialogue. When you have a voice actor speak every line, it limits your dialogue options, and no NPC ever calls your character by his or her actual name. Baldur’s Gate and Morrowind had some spoken dialogue but left a lot of it to reading, and there was absolutely nothing wrong with this.

The second trend is expansion packs. I’d rather developers just released new games using the same engines. Why do the protagonists in Tribunal, Bloodmoon, Knights of the Nine, The Shivering Isles, and Awakenings have to be the same as the PC in the main game? It means that you’re playing hours and hours of extra content with an overpowered character, and it breaks the story.

In general, though, I find that modern CRPGs contain most of the elements of older games, plus more besides, so I’ve been happy with the genre’s overall evolution.

How many total CRPGs do you have on your master list at the moment?

Just shy of 1,000, but the list is really only complete up to about 2003. Now, a lot of them aren’t really CRPGs, and I’ll discover that when I get to them. A lot more, particularly starting in 1991, are obscure Japanese titles that I might not be able to find or understand. Still, we’re probably looking at at least 800. I haven’t even played 10% of them.

At the start of this year, you put your blog on hiatus for about a month before returning. Why did you feel the need to step away for a while, and what made you decide to come back?

The whole episode was stupid and embarrassing. I’m self-employed, so I really need to balance playing games (and doing other nonproductive things) with the work that my clients actually pay me for. Towards the end of the year, I was way overloaded on contracts, and instead of working on them, I spent most of the last two weeks of December playing Skyrim.

Round about mid-January, I was in a belated New-Year’s-resolutions kind-of mood. I was sitting in my office chair, looking at my overwhelming “to do” list, looking at a pile of unread professional journals, looking at the piano that I hadn’t touched in eight months, and I just thought “I can’t do this anymore. Spending another hour playing a game—any game—would be so irresponsible that it beggars belief.” So I composed a hasty goodbye to my readers and embarked on my new life of productivity and personal development.

What I soon found was that I needed a certain amount of downtime no matter what, and instead of playing CRPGs, I just ended up goofing around with other things. I did eventually catch up on my work (to some extent), but my psyche wasn’t going to just let me blithely abandon a pastime that has been part of my life since I was 11. Also, I really missed the blog. So I came back after less time than some of my previous unannounced breaks, and everything continued as before. I haven’t been enormously productive, but that’s a good thing: when my readers start seeing one posting per day, they know there’s a crash coming soon.



88 comments:

  1. There's certainly nothing stupid or embarrassing about trying to improve on areas of your life that you feel are lacking.

    I agree with your assessment of expansion packs, I'd have much rather played a shorter game set in, say, Hammerfell, using the Oblivion engine than the Knights of the Nine expansion. I thought the older Redguard and Battlespire games were good for this, even if Battlespire wasn't as good as it should have been.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I have to take the stand behind expansion packs, eventhough I prefer they'd be making complete games at first try.

      Main reason being that I enjoy the continuity in RPGs and way through Pool of Radiance to Pools of Darkness wouldn't been same if characters would've changed in every game.

      Second is that if I invest time on grinding and leveling up I'd expect that game could at least treat you as force to reckoned with and be capable of casting the Mechanus Cannon at unsuspecting opponent if I feel like it.

      Ultimas resetting Avatar at beginning of every game might've been explained in-universe, but it didn't give a feeling of being hero who had saved the world few times in row already. Plot-based powerups feel pointless if you gain same things regardless what you've done and plot-based powerdowns are outright evil (Thank you, Outcast).

      This might be the reason why RTSs never struck on me big time, despite playing quite a lot Dune 2 and first C&C - you had to start from beginning on every stage and set funds regardless how well you did. Would've been better if you could've brought reinforcements from survivors from successful missions like in Myth.

      Delete
    2. The most interesting case of expansion packs/sequels so far must have been Fallout: New Vegas. Obsidian captured the Oblivion engine and imbibed it with the spirit of the original Fallout games. The development costs must have been very low, and the profit very high. Customers got exactly what they wanted and everyone was happy, it was not just a shorter game somewhere else, but about as big as Fallout 3, and much more consistent with the original games.

      Delete
  2. That was an interesting interview. Now I don't have to look to the local drugstore to find a copy of Game Informer. Thanks! I never buy gaming magazines, though I want to. They all seem to be priced as if the pages are lined with gold.

    Everyone should experience Starflight, at least once. ;)

    ReplyDelete
  3. I personally was led here via game informer. I was looking for info on older RPG's since I played Arena and Daggerfall last summer, I do admit to stopping my search when my D&D group took off and I started running my MUD server. I never looking for "CRPG" per say. I have enjoyed reading some of your reviews and like your "GIMLET" system.

    As an aspiring developer I hope to use your blog as a point of reference if I ever get the gumption to delve into an RPG.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Fortunately, much of his advice / GIMLET summaries will inform your MUD game development; specifically I'd be on the lookout for how he defines and recognizes a well-balanced game economy. Getting that right is essential for MUDs.

      Delete
    2. I'm not sure I've ever seen an economy done very well in a single-person game, let alone a MUD. It's tough to strike the right balance.

      Delete
  4. Thanks for posting this Chet. It's a great interview and I've been very keen to find it since readers started talking about it.

    Now that I've seen it, I won't consider myself as having made it until a magazine interviews me about my blog. You've raised the bar yet again! ;)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I'm sure it won't be long. Your blog is as good as mine in quality and better in consistency.

      Delete
  5. one last interview question:

    Have you had a look at Grimrock yet? Dying to know your opinion on that one.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. This comment has been removed by the author.

      Delete
    2. I too am wondering what our dear friend the Addict is thinking of Grimrock. That game ROCKS although it is hard as a teenage boy watching his first R rated film.

      Delete
    3. We don't need the Addict's opinion on Grimrock. The blog devolved into the Skyrim Addict aroung the time of his "retirement".

      Delete
    4. What, all 3 posts out of 350? Give it a break dude.

      I would love to hear how the Addict thinks Grimrock compares to Dungeon Master.

      Delete
    5. Due to the utterly bizarre scoring system Addict uses, Grimrock would get a low score for the same reasons Dungeon Master did (no shops, no NPCs, only one environment, designed to be played with mouse).

      It's better to just shrug and move to the next post whenever he talks about DM or any of its clones.

      Delete
    6. The scoring system is not bizarre, it reflects his tastes. It's good to know what the writer likes, and this blog is pretty transparent about it, and not trying to appear objective. It certainly makes for more interesting reading, I pretty much hadn't read anything about Dungeon Master that wasn't 100% praise.

      I probably would enjoy DM more than the Addict. This I could tell from reading the posts, and I think that's a sign of good writing. You don't read reviews just for the scores, do you?

      --Eino

      Delete
    7. I, for one, love Dungeon Master. CRPG Addict did enjoy playing it, and I especially enjoyed reading his blog entries on it.

      Delete
    8. "The scoring system is not bizarre, it reflects his tastes."

      I don't think it does even that. I don't think it does anything. As evidence of this, there have been times in the past where he verbally disagrees with his own score, wondering out loud how something scored so high or low (and later he added an "X-factor" to compensate for the failures of his own scoring system to reflect even his own tastes, which is so bizarre it still boggles my mind).

      Composite scores are always terrible indicators of the quality of the whole, any whole. Nothing is equal to the sum of its parts.

      Delete
    9. If you can do better, then I look forward to seeing what you have to offer. In the meantime, I wonder why someone so dissatisfied with this blog is even here. Why not spend time doing things you actually find sensible and enjoyable?

      Delete
    10. Roger Ebert is always agonizing about his movie rating system, too. No quantitative score is ever perfect. I'm going to keep using it because I like it as a framework to summarize the games, and I usually agree with where the ratings end up (at least roughly), but I hope it's clear to everyone that my blog is more about the text than the numbers.

      As for Grimrock, the first anonymous writer, however he said it, had a reasonably good point, especially where I can barely find time to play older games right now. I appreciate the defense, though.

      Delete
  6. Thank you for posting this. I was scouring the internet for a copy. Not finding it, I was dreading being that guy who reads a single article of a magazine off the shelf. First, I'd have to find somewhere that still sells magazines.

    Maybe Phil was inspired to start his own gaming journey. Actually, doing a bit of digging, it looks like he took a promotion from another company.

    Thanks again. It was an interesting read.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I have been searching for any indication that this interview happened, and I can't find anything but this blog-post either. There aren't even any comments mentioning it besides on this blog-post.

      Where do I find this interview, Chet?

      Delete
    2. There are actually a couple reader comments mentioning this, that aren't on this post. One of them is on his game listings post (near the top of the sidebar). You have to find the physical magazine to read the interview, unless you can get ahold of a digital copy somehow.

      Delete
    3. Oh, this is a second interview, not the one that was posted earlier. Cool. I thought this was an expansion on it.

      Delete
    4. I'm afraid I don't follow you, Canageek. What interview was posted earlier?

      Delete
    5. Giauz, I don't think it's available to anyone but Game Informer subscribers, either physically or digitally.

      Amy, I think Canageek is referring to my Toronto Thumbs interview:

      http://www.torontothumbs.com/2011/09/26/interview-the-crpg-addict/

      Delete
    6. Well, that's a bummer. Anything super-special-awesome! that us magazineless missed?

      Delete
  7. Nice interview, it was an interesting read. Who knows? Maybe we'll get lucky and some game developers will take note of your thoughts regarding voice acting and the like.

    ReplyDelete
  8. I'm one of the visitors from Game Informer, hi! I've really enjoyed reading your blog - I really like how thorough you are about it. I think I'm actually enjoying reading about the process, and your analysis of the systems, more than the games themselves.

    I also love making lists, and have recently embarked on a quest to collect and play as many old systems and games as I can (most of which I never played at the time), which I'm also enjoying almost as much for the process as for the experiences themselves.

    Also, you inspired me to convert my lists into spreadsheets, for which I thank you. ;)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks, Cura. I'm glad to have you as a reader.

      Delete
  9. "Not to sound pretentious or anything, but I really didn't realize there were that many CRPG fans out there who didn't already know about me."

    ...Really now? You thought the, what, thousand unique hits you get on your blog daily represented the entirety of CRPG fans in the world?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. What is causing people like you to take an antagonistic stance toward our friend and his blog? It's not like he's coming to your house and talking to you, or forcing you to read what he writes. This is the problem with becoming popular- the trolls come out of the woodwork. Sigh.

      Delete
    2. Well, on the bright side, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and the CRPGAddict has inspired several people to start their own game-related blogs, myself included.

      Delete
    3. When people say something stupid, they should be called out on it. Hugbox mentality leads nowhere. There are tens of millions of CRPG fans in the world by the most conservative estimate.

      Delete
    4. I said that tongue-in-cheek. I'll use a little smiley face next time.

      Delete
  10. Wow, Game Informer. I used to get that magazine, long before I realized that the internet was, well, a thing. Congratulations on being interviewed! Looks like you're starting to hit the "big time" as they say. Soon you will have no time for us mere mortals. You will be sitting atop a throne made from a thousand failed CRPGs, sipping wine from the glass of infinite riches as us lowly readers can only plead for another ounce of RPG related bloggery. I salute you.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. If only that was the case, but I suspect such fame and power will only come after sustained production.

      Delete
    2. I've yet to realize any fame and power. Maybe in a few years. ;)

      Delete
  11. I have to agree, it is nice interview, and I am again surprise how sensitively you open your soul to us, not only in this interview...

    But I really love the passage about the making lists. Are you sure that you are not my distant relative? ;-) I have also list of games which forms my game plan (not only CRPG), and I can speak about another lists in my life, but want to mention only one:

    I have a lists of your articles to know which I didn't read yet! :-)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I, too, am continuously surprised and impressed at how open you are. It feels like this is a means of personal and artistic expression for you (as it should be) and I hope that this never gets lost. Cheers.

      Delete
  12. Anyone have a link to the full interview?

    ReplyDelete
  13. Legend of Grimrock sounds like an intriguing combination of old and new based on this review: http://www.pcgamer.com/review/legend-of-grimrock-review/

    Anyone here that has played it?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I have played it a few times. Essentially it's a really, really excellent engine demo. Because its tile based and static, they've done neat things with textures and lighting. It's very accessible, but veteran CRPG players wont find much challenge, its too exploitable.

      Basically its super fun for what it is, but I can't wait for fanmade expansions and addons with NPCs, an economy, and less exploitable combat.

      Delete
  14. yo

    happened to find your site a lil while ago while researching all the games i missed when i was a kid.

    come home a few days ago to find my gameinformer and your site/review in it. wierd timing ^^ grats, lookin forward to your reviews of the older games ill prob skip

    ReplyDelete
  15. You have really made it when someone decides to interview you, how many bloggers can claim that?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yeah, he might even get a movie titled 'Chet and Richard,' and maybe Tom Hanks can play Richard Garriot spiraling into millionaire LARPing-maddness. I smell a cash-grab.

      Delete
  16. I see stardom ahead for Chet. He gets more national recognition by the minute. Perhaps a game reviewer. Who knows. But darn.....I really love his writing and insight.

    ReplyDelete
  17. I came across this blog just after the January goodbye posting. I started reading from the beginning and have now caught up. I was elated to see that the project is back on, as I had a very entertaining time reading through and discovering games I never knew about, some that I had but never played. I wouldn't have put int he effort to play them, but reading through the write-ups it almost gave the same experience with regards to wanting to know how the games play and if they had interesting plots. Much enjoyment from this blog, and I am sad now that I don't have such an archive of reading material having now caught up. However, I am much looking forward to new postings.

    ReplyDelete
  18. I should write up a Metafilter post on Chet someone; I found him through Crontendo (One of the few links that still works!) which I found via Metafilter.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I'm pretty sure I was on Metafilter at one point. Got a big boost in traffic that day.

      Delete
  19. I found this blog because then viridiangames, (Viridian is a city in Pokémon), aka. Anthony Salter, but now known as gamedevdad, made a post about this blog. I started reading from the beginning and after a lot of reading having caught up in time I decided that it was worth rereading from the beginning once more. I even started my own blog, mostly about Civilization and how bad the AI is, but nobody is reading it, but that's just because I have yet to finish my first "game" whilst busy with other projects from time to time.

    ReplyDelete
  20. Type in CRPG blog in Google. Chet's blog is the FIRST entry. That's how popular this thing is. I wonder how many hits he gets a week. I envision commercial ads streaming down both sides. Say it ain't so....... _that happens to all who dabble in success

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. His is the first three results in fact.

      Delete
    2. You have to make money somehow, if you already have a source of income you're unlikely to do better on the web, but for many people any source of income is better than none. Since there's so many pirates online stealing everything we shouldn't frown upon ads, without ads companies like Google wouldn't exist (I think most of their revenue is from ads). Imagine a world without Google or Youtube (also Google). Although with that said I do have a quibble with sites like girlswithmuscle.com and deviantart.com who recently added a little bit too much ads, but now they've scaled back the ads again so that I can enjoy the content. Ads make the web and they're usually not that intrusive, be glad if you have other sources of income instead of knocking those who don't, by which I'm of course not talking about this blog but in general. That dude I mentioned in my previous post for instance got unemployed a while back.

      Delete
    3. I get third on Google, but either way, not terribly surprising. "CRPG" isn't that common a term; most players and developers just refer to them as "RPGs."

      The ad thing will never happen. In fact, I'm probably going to get rid of the ones I have. I've made like $100 in the last 8 months--certainly not worth the hassle or pollution on the site.

      Delete
  21. I found it by searching for "Let's Play RPG games" in Google one boring afternoon at work, though I forget at what point the blog was at when I found it. Pretty early in, definitely well into last year.

    ReplyDelete
  22. I found out through Google searching 'RPGs' on my mom's Blackberry. I may have also made my first (anonymous) comment on that phone. This has become my number one site.

    ReplyDelete
  23. really enjoyed the game informer article. happy that you put the real interview here.

    ReplyDelete
  24. Off genre a little, but it looks like the 2 guys from Andromeda are back.

    http://guysfromandromeda.com/

    ReplyDelete
  25. Love this blog. What's the next review???????????

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Check out Chet's 'master game list' and 'all game rankings so far'. I agree, awesome blog!

      Delete
  26. Since you have what? two? sci-fi CRPGs to finish up, I think a little motivation is in order. Enjoy :)

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSUH8GnAJdg

    ReplyDelete
  27. I think the reason this blog is so popular, besides the subject matter is that Chet's blog entries are entertaining and a joy to read. He is also very polite and respectful of the readers who post on here. Long may he blog!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I agree its very refreshing. Hell he is even polite to his trolls.

      Delete
    2. I also find the level of English and writing he uses is a cut above most of what you find on the internet, which helps a great deal.

      Delete
  28. I had been following for a little while prior, but I have to admit when I read the Game Informer article, I thought that was incredibly cool exposure for you - and well-deserved as well. Enjoy the new-found traffic - and the next games on your list to tackle as well! :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks. I just wish it had coincided with a flurry of postings on my part, and not a three-week gimlet-fueled (in more ways than one) absence.

      Delete
  29. This is absolutely apropos of nothing, but the love for the first Bard's Tale is still everywhere. If no one here yet has checked out the article http://www.jasondenzel.com/2011/bards-tale/ give it a look see.

    I too still have super-great memories of the first Bard's Tale. Loved it. Still wanna try it again one day, not sure how well I would do. Probably ragequit in the first half hour.

    ReplyDelete
  30. This comment though should be apropos to the top, if I am still using the term 'apropos' correctly. I thought the GI interview was in fact awesome, and I think Chet is awesome. And, I think I can without fear of contradiction, that if Chet ever does quit his blog for real, I will have to kill myself painfully. I am sure you all who read his blog would follow me into death.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Good lord, man. They're just GAMES. And a lot of them suck.

      Delete
  31. You must be all tied up with real life again! Looking forward to the next post. I'll check back in another two weeks :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I'm thinking we need to clone the Addict, so that at all times one version of him is working and one is playing. It would be really intresting to see if Alpha and Beta Chet give the same ratings of various games after playing through them and having different things occur. We might need more then two though.

      Delete
    2. Have you heard about that Vietnamese guy who never sleeps? He gets lots of work done when everyone else is sleeping.

      Delete
    3. If "real life" means "destroyed my computer," then yes. Sorry for the delays. I'll be posting again soon. Innate, if you can find that Vietnamese guy's secret, do tell.

      Delete
    4. Thai Ngoc, he caught some weird form of fever in 1973, and ever since he's been unable to sleep. I wish that same condition could happen to me, I would get so much done. I could play games all night long and still be able to catch up with work without being tired the day after.

      Delete
  32. william, the first Bard's Tale I think is a decent game if you don't mind (and even better if you enjoy!) somewhat-repetitive hack-and-slash.

    As someone with fond memories of Bard's Tale myself, I had fun during my own playthrough last year but got bogged down about halfway through BT2 when the combat became too broken and frustrating.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I have never had any real desire to play any of the other Bard's. And after reading our friend the Addict's thoughts of the two games, I don't think I ever will try the other two. Nut I will ever bask in the warm glow of my memories of BT1.

      Delete
  33. Sucks to hear about your laptop: I hope you enjoyed your visit to my country though.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I was in Vancouver. It rained a lot.

      Delete
    2. Hehe, that sounds like Vancouver during spring. I'm considering moving there actually. Personally, I like my fish cooked, but hey, each to their own, and yes, it does have great fish.

      Delete
    3. Damn! I'm in Vancouver. I would have bought you a drink had I known.

      Delete
    4. I see that 20 (20,1,0-good/bad/meh) people have voted that it was a good thing that the gimlet disaster happened, or perhaps they're voting about the writing ability of the post, how good it was written. Iduno, maybe I've misunderstood the whole thing, I usually vote good/bad/meh on the merits of the game, but maybe it's the blog post itself I should be voting on. #imanoob

      Delete
    5. Ha! my home town!

      Delete
    6. I was technically in Surrey. Not quite as much to do there.

      I should get rid of those good/bad/meh boxes. I only ever had them because I was playing around with Blogger's options. But they're rather useless as a feedback mechanism (especially since you can vote multiple times) and for some reason Blogger keeps clearing them for older postings.

      Delete
  34. I vote based on how much I enjoy reading the blog post. For the CRPG Addict blog of course I am always voting good.

    Too bad you've apparently left Vancouver, today is a beautiful day, the kind of day that makes me glad to live in Vancouver. But the previous few weeks have been typical Vancouver spring weather, some rain, mostly cloudy days.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I had a nice day the last day. Took Chuckanut Drive back down in Washington, which was lovely. I've done the Seattle-Vancouver route eight times, but always on the highway before. Someone should have told me how beautiful the coast was.

      Delete
  35. Well, I finally caught up. I started reading this right after the Game Informer interview, and finally arrived here. I've been loving the writing so far. Very funny, and informative. Keep it up!

    ReplyDelete

I welcome all comments about the material in this blog, and I generally do not censor them. However, please follow these rules:

1. Do not link to any commercial entities, including Kickstarter campaigns, unless they're directly relevant to the material in the associated blog posting. (For instance, that GOG is selling the particular game I'm playing is relevant; that Steam is having a sale this week on other games is not.) This also includes user names that link to advertising.

2. Please avoid profanity and vulgar language. I don't want my blog flagged by too many filters. I will delete comments containing profanity on a case-by-case basis.

3. NO ANONYMOUS COMMENTS. It makes it impossible to tell who's who in a thread. If you don't want to log in to Google to comment, either a) choose the "Name/URL" option, pick a name for yourself, and just leave the URL blank, or b) sign your anonymous comment with a preferred user name in the text of the comment itself.

4. I appreciate if you use ROT13 for explicit spoilers for the current game and upcoming games. Please at least mention "ROT13" in the comment so we don't get a lot of replies saying "what is that gibberish?"

5. Comments on my blog are not a place for slurs against any race, sex, sexual orientation, nationality, religion, or mental or physical disability. I will delete these on a case-by-case basis depending on my interpretation of what constitutes a "slur."

Blogger has a way of "eating" comments, so I highly recommend that you copy your words to the clipboard before submitting, just in case.

I read all comments, no matter how old the entry. So do many of my subscribers. Reader comments on "old" games continue to supplement our understanding of them. As such, all comment threads on this blog are live and active unless I specifically turn them off. There is no such thing as "necro-posting" on this blog, and thus no need to use that term.

I will delete any comments that simply point out typos. If you want to use the commenting system to alert me to them, great, I appreciate it, but there's no reason to leave such comments preserved for posterity.

I'm sorry for any difficulty commenting. I turn moderation on and off and "word verification" on and off frequently depending on the volume of spam I'm receiving. I only use either when spam gets out of control, so I appreciate your patience with both moderation tools.