The Clan of the Cave Bague

Well, the barbeque is on for the third night in a row. Cajun chicken, this time (with a couple of snags on the side). The weather’s been lovely for the last couple of days, despite what the weathermen keep trying to tell me.

What I need to do, though, is find somewhere that’ll sell me a solid plate – griddles are fine and well, but you just can’t do onions on em and using a sideburner and pan is just wrong.

I had a very geeky conversation with the strangest of people last night. I had gone to pick up my oldest lad from Scouts and was standing speaking to him, one of the Scout leaders, and the Scout leader’s daughter. The Scout leader is a tiny wee wifie in her late fifties (I think – it’s difficult to tell).

Anyway, the daughter had been referring to $oldestLad and his friend as “Slave 1″ and “Slave 2″. Scout Leader wifie piped in with “Boba Fett’s ship was called Slave-1″. I was kinda taken aback and said “oooo good pop-culture reference. But technically it was Jango Fett’s ship first.” To which she replied, “Well, yeah but he’s allowed to give it to his son.” To which I replied “But it’s not technically his son because he’s a clone.”

Scout Leader wifie replied “Not necessarily – he was completely unaltered so he could be his son.”

Out-geeked by a scout leader. I feel shame.

deKay thinks he’s being clever by running a spectrum emulator under wine on Mac OSX. Except he’s not being clever at all, because my dashboard widget STILL wins.

My lovely lady wife has Mac Envy. It’s a terrible thing to see. She was wrestling with MS Office this morning and was practically turning purple. So, I’ve been commanded to “Get Her A Mac”. Thing is, we’ve been stuck with the PeeCee for over a year now and she’d kinda got used to the whole “fighting against the operating system” thing. Until, that is, she saw my shiny MacBook.

So there we go – mission for 2008 is “Get Debbie an iMac.”

Oh yes I have – thanks to this site, I’ve just spent an hour or so making the most awesome everlasting wallet out of duck tape (or duct tape, for our American readers).

So once again, my firm belief that the whole universe is held together by duct tape is confirmed.

Not only that, but it’ll last forever – if a bit gets worn, well, just tape it up again!

This post has been a long time in the making. Cast your mind back to 2006 – we were an entirely Apple household, with no sign of a nasty PC. Then came the house-moving, the shipping to the other side of the world, the whole Australia fiasco, and then all the coming back.

So on our return, with pretty limited resources, we had to switch to cheap and nasty PeeCees. Well, that time is over. Two days ago I became the proud recipient of a lovely glossy shiny little MacBook.

So – initial thoughts. It’s a little 13″ puppy, with 2.1GHz Core 2 duo processor (I’m still not entirely comfortable with the idea of having an Intel chip in a Mac, but hey-ho), and 4Gb RAM. And it’s lovely. I’m still exploring my way around OSX Leopard – the last release I used was Panther – but so far it’s been elegant, simple and with many shiny aspects.

I can’t believe how quickly I’ve fallen back into the mac way of doing things. More time working with applications than arguing with the O/S can only be a good thing.

So, my mammie bought us this hyacinth in a pot. It’s very very pretty but smells like dead things. It was sitting on the kitchen window sill and every time anyone walked past it they made a comment about the unnatural reek emanating from it. Because of all the bad vibes being directed at the poor thing it began to wither. So I took it upon myself to save it from a life of verbal abuse and take it into work with me. What I didn’t know is that it’s also cursed.

So there I was, ambling along the path with my laptop bag over my shoulder, my lunch bag in one hand and the cursed pot plant in the other hand, with my lovely wife wandering along behind carrying my baritone.

The plant obviously objected to being removed from its area of influence because two seconds later I stepped on what can only be described as the only patch of ice in the whole of West Lothian, and down I went. The yoghurt in my lunch bag exploded, covering my lunch in banana flavoured goo, my laptop bag fell to the ground with a sickening crunch, and I sustained 2d4 hit points of damage.

The Hyacinth (purple) scattered to the four winds but, despite its best efforts was unable to drag me into its self-destructive attention seeking.

I was really annoyed – until, that is, my wife sent me a link to Virtual Florist. The meaning attached to a Purple Hyacinth is “I am sorry, Please forgive me”. Or just generally “Sorrow”.

I’ll think about it.

This is probably the best game I’ve played on the DS to date, but it would have worked just as well on the GBA. In fact, given that I’ve been happily playing this game in rogue/hack/nethack/angband/zangband form for near enough twenty years, I’m pretty sure it would work just as well on any platform you care to mention.

Simply put, Mystery Dungeon is a roguelike. This means it’s a completely turn based (and by that, I mean everything is turn based, not just the combat) dungeon crawler where the dungeons are randomly generated. It also features the permanent death (with a few exceptions) system that appears in all other roguelikes. The exceptions are that you have the facility to store items in various warehouses throughout the dungeons so those items are available for future incarnations of yourself. You can also request a rescue from someone on your friends list, so they can go on an adventure to recover your stuff and then send you a revive scroll. Other than that, though – if your HP falls to zero, it’s back to level one with no items. And that’s the way it should be.

This type of playstyle leads to the careful planning that other roguelikes involve, such as levelling up a weapon over many sessions but not carrying it with you (keeping it in the warehouse), but instead keeping it for a future uberrun. It also encourages some defensive planning – last night I wandered into a room where there was an enemy on every tile. I didn’t have any sleep or AoE scrolls, and so died very quickly. I’ll make sure I have a scroll in future.

Reading reviews of this game don’t give you an idea of what it’s like – the reviews I’ve read are conclusive proof that the reviewers just don’t get the genre (IGN 6.5/10, GameSpot 6/10) and their repeated moans about the “lack of save function” reveals that they think the point is to get to the end of the story, not to master the dungeon. It’s telling that the reader reviews for both those sites are 8/10 and 8.5/10 respectively.

One reviewer in particular came out with the following:

ChunSoft certainly has managed to get the randomization thing down, but that just makes the entire dungeon experience hit-or-miss. Random does not equal good. Far too often the dungeon’s exit would appear in the same room we started (or even in the very next space), thus negating any need to explore that floor.

This is, I think, all the evidence needed that the reviewer is either 12 years old, has never played anything except Final Fantasy, or has completely missed the point of Mystery Dungeon.

Anyway, as roguelikes go, it sacrifices the complexity of Zangband for the action of Nethack. It’s awesomely good. So far, my character has reached level 8 before the aforemention roomful of monsters. Another humiliating death was caused on Pegasus Ridge – don’t let the spirit of the evil bloke get into a Rice Changer. It turns the Rice Changer into a Rice Boss who, in turn, turns you into a Rice Cake and kills you. Not pretty.

Yet another embarrassing death, or “Why it’s important to research your class”. Ok, so a new character, level two, rummaging around in the first level of the dungeon. Suddenley I’m hungry. Oh dear, think I, I’ve been too busy playing with the magic system and learning spells that I’ve neglected to eat. Oh! I have no food! That’s strange, I’d better nip back to the surface and buy some. DEAD.

Hmmm what happened there? Oh – that’s right – I decided to try out a Vampire. Which is why I didn’t have any food. Oh, it’s daytime!

Thump the Warrior, at level 17, has just been killed.

By an insect swarm.

I’m going to cry now.