Old soldiers never die . . .

<SoSD> Majick is for wankers.

<SoSD> Cold steel, baby.

    So much silence
    Deafens our ears
    So much emptiness
    Hinders our movements

Old soldiers never die . . .
Without my making a conscious decision, this page has gone back to being what I originally intended: A collection of information and opinions and so forth, about my favorite game, updated more or less whenever I had something to add, with the primary function of news being to note changes made to the content of the site - if any.

Well I'm going to do that instead of what I've been doing. So this marks the end of the Minefield's lifetime as a new page, at least for now, and you'll see stuff updated and added - and perhaps more importantly repaired after a total of four host moves now - over time and when the time is right.

I had a lot of fun doing this as a news page and it makes me a little sad to stop, but I really stopped several months ago and so this is a formality. Four years ago I felt very strongly about Subspace and had a lot of opinions about it as well as other things. I also really wanted to contribute to the way it was run. Over the course of those four years I did manage to contribute and more than a few people cared what I thought. I've been at peace with the game for a long time now. Good people are running it. I don't feel the need to complain about the state it's in, and I certainly don't need to defend it or its community. I am violently proud of this game and of the people who make it what it is.

So I've kind of had this albatross here, this thing I once not only liked doing but needed to do, which was cathartic for me. And here I've been feeling I was supposed to update it, and yet all of that stuff I used to put into it, which people came to expect - no longer resides in me. I'm afraid I don't have a hell of a lot to say today that would interest the people I once interested. And I'm hoping there also aren't quite so many people today who need that vindication of a clarifying rant, an exposed conspiracy, or whatever it was people came here for.

What I know is still important is the game's history - the archiving of its documents, the preservation of information about who has been a part of all this. I maintain that Subspace is the first true entry in the last significant new artform of the past century, an artform which will probably be with us forever. More importantly to me, I care about it and don't want to see any piece of it vanish due to everyone involved being so busy.

I've been busy avoiding a false requirement to do something I no longer want to do, and I'm glad to say tonight that that is over. It doesn't mean that I or this page will be gone. I frankly wouldn't do it unless I believed very strongly that this has been the primary factor in my becoming less and less active. So maybe tomorrow I'll wake up and say, "Gosh, I'm glad to be done with all that, and it was good while it lasted but it's time to move on." I make no promises, but I expect instead to come back here tomorrow and do what I actually want with the page instead of thinking about doing what I am supposed to and then putting it off.

My most heartfelt thanks to everyone who has stuck with the page over the years. It means a great deal to me, and I promise that at a bare minimum I will keep its archives up for anyone who wishes to thumb through them.

I have a parting, but not really parting, gift for the really die hard types to whom I feel closest, a final news item. Old news, though. The very oldest, actually. . . .


Hey, look what I found. 

From: Rod Humble (rodvik@ix.netcom.com)
Subject: Virgin Games wants you. 
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action, comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.adventure, comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.rpg, comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.strategic
Date: 1996/02/27 


Virgin games needs a few good testers to help with their future
internet games. Minimum requirements are as follows.


Windows 95
486 75+
An internet connection. 


If you are interested please send a short mail to:


rod_humble@vie.com


please include the following details.


Machine speed & video card.
Internet provider.


Cheers,
Rod


----------------------------------------------------------


From: Jeff Petersen (jeffp@itsnet.com)
Subject: Beta testers 
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.action
Date: 1996/03/08 


We are currently looking for people to help us test a simple internet based game. If you are interested, please e-mail rod_humble@vie.com and he will e-mail you information on how you can participate. Thanks!


Jeff Petersen


Jeff Petersen
Artificial Software
jeffp@itsnet.com


----------------------------------------------------------


From: R. McPherson (rjmcpher@rigel.oac.uci.edu)
Subject: Re: Virgin Games wants you. 
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.rpg
Date: 1996/03/13 


On Tue, 12 Mar 1996, Lee MacEwen wrote:


>The ever-so-wise rodvik@ix.netcom.com(Rod Humble) once said:
>Virgin games needs a few good testers to help with their future
>internet games. Minimum requirements are as follows.
>rod_humble@vie.com 
> > Has anyone responded to this? I'm curious if it's real or
> > not. The


I responded. It is real. It is an asteroids network game called
"SNIPER". It is sort of like network TANK except in an asteroids
spaceship. It plays fine. New users log in and get killed by
veterans who are relentlessly furthering their kill ratios.

Halloween 2001

<saltygirl> the coolest part is looting indian villages
<saltygirl> you get to smash their inferior culture
<saltygirl> and take all their gold!

---

and those who deny this world
is the soul of the unbroken one
lie
this is indeed Paradise
(come i shall show you where the stars give birth and sleep)
and all around you is the warm bluegreen breath of heavens
do not fear
around you is the vast blueblack space of stars
do not fear
this is the great ocean
on which the endless waves crash down
God is not dead
there is no death i say
(come i shall show you where dreams go to when they die)

hurry now; the sun is descending
the shadows wait to play

Halloween 2001

I cannot hang words on the silence
I didn't know there was a Dawn of the Dead tonight. It hadn't even occurred to me to check. It's frankly been a long time since I checked. 

Rude Awakening maybe doesn't know what it means that he ran that game tonight. All I can really say is I'm beside myself.
I'm sorry for doing another token update. I'll probably do one next month too, just to have a nice round four years and finally melt into the mountains. Check back though sometime just in case. 

Meanwhile, all I really want to say, is to thank Rude Awakening again for what he did, and also to Mine GO BOOM and anyone else who helped him with it. 

The song quote above is from Current 93. "This Shining Shining World" from the majestic and wonderful Of Ruine or Some Blazing Starre: The Broken Heart of Man. It just sort of seemed appropriate to post the whole passage instead of being clever and cute and only quoting a limited and cryptic bit of it, so I thought I'd break with tradition and actually give the source. Also because it's an album I think everyone should hear.

It's beginning to and back again

<Lews> your job, as the game master, is to fuck the players at every turn

<Lews> only when everyone is fucked over do you win

I meant to ask you how to plow that field
I meant to bring your water from the well
And be the one beside you when you fell
Could you tell?

It's beginning to and back again
Another month has gone by without comment from me. I'm not sure what to say except that I've always approached this game from a creative standpoint and have been holding out for some sort of inspiration. That inspiration has not been forthcoming.

In the last week something's been buzzing around in my head. May amount to something; might not. I'll let you hepcats know. Give a holler if you'd like to help.

Most of the fun in this game was dealing with other people who had fresh ideas and who liked bouncing them off of each other. Sometime last year we seem to have settled into something and it became increasingly difficult to encourage and harness that attitude. It seems we're kind of set in our ways now, but perhaps I'm wrong; I've been outside the loop for a while now. I'd like to be told I'm wrong.

Anyway . . .

<Roseo|Work> The controller looks like someone left a pile of jellybeans in the sun too long

O the dragons are gonna fly tonight

They're circling low and inside tonight 

It's another round in the losing fight 

Out along the great divide tonight

Anyway
They fixed Anarchy Online, sort of. I wrote the preamble to a review some time ago for Gamehacker and never got around to writing the actual review since the preamble mysteriously vanished in the same way that this page mysteriously vanished.

Since I no longer wanted to write the review, I sort of forgot to keep playing the game. It was no fun. Especially it starts out no fun, with new players imprisoned in a non-massive, usually non-multiplayer area I came to refer to as the Newbie Hutch.

Along came my friend Dariakus, purchasing the game on the strength of my lack of enthusiasm for it, and soon it seems like everyone around me is playing the thing. So that's what happened to me. The same bug that gobbled up Rod Humble two years ago finally got around to me. Of course there are major differences between EverQuest and Anarchy Online. The first and - sue me - most important is - finally - the graphics. It's become a little irritating to read comparisons between ugly graphical MUDs and beautifully written text MUDs. Especially offensive to me is the assertion that the imagery communicated by that text is not graphic or vivid, cannot be measured against the content of a graphical mud, and is either superior or inferior because of its form rather than its content.

To my mind, Anarchy Online proves this isn't true. Finally we have a graphical MUD that is more vivid and prettier than its text counterparts, not because it is graphical but because of the stylishness of its design and the professional quality of its execution. A curious thing happens: Players share common points of reference, experience immersion in and respect for the world around them, and the conversations and actions between them become a text MUD of sorts within the graphical context - actual roleplaying, and by this I mean not making stuff up but interacting honestly with what is around them as though those things were real. As a result, mundane details and made-up storeis are replaced with convincing discussion of the world and debate over its events and politics.

It's like Subspace, with cities instead of web pages.

Segue to the all important issue of Cosmic Rift, the last of its kind.

It was with some enthusiasm I learned today that the new zone, whose name has now escaped me, had gone up at some point in the recent past. It sounded somewhat promising based on the description. Sounded as though some interesting things would happen in that zone. So I tried it out.

Shortly after entering the zone I experienced a crushing fatigue such as I can't compare to any recent gaming experience. I remember some years ago I was made to sit at a table full of graduate students in music theory. Watching and then playing in this zone was something like that. I can't criticize the game because I didn't give it even the beginnings of a chance. Other people seemed to enjoy it. I was first struck by the complete lack of terrain (read: "wall in space") in the zone. Apparently the Cosmic Rift team is shooting for gritty realism or something. I'll try and force myself to play it later. Right now things look pretty bleak to me.

Two pithy additional comments about Anarchy Online. It pretty much works right finally, though it literally requires 256 megs of RAM to run properly. (Fortunately, the stuff is dirt cheap right now.) And 95% of the screenshots I've seen from it are terrible, including all the ones on the box. They make a gorgeous game look like another EverQuest or Asheron's Call, and it's not one.

Another months with one update. Let's see if I can double that in this next month.

My thanks to anyone who still checks here.

Where was I?

<Phyrian> You're on jury duty?
<Phyrian> Hmm
<Phyrian> Do they still have laws in California?  

 Met Jesus up on a hill
He confessed I was dressed to kill
Saw fear eternal in his eyes
He's seen what happens when the soul dies

Where was I?
I have this crazy theory. Maybe it's not me who's lazy and boring; it's you, and you just can't see it that way through the tunnelvision of your preconceived reality.

Long story short, my wife recently finished graduate school and I feel like I just got out of prison. Not a normal prison either, but the kind they build on asteroids in the future. Too bad there aren't any movies for us to go see. Remember back when people would get together and make movies, and they would show those movies to other people at a common gathering place, and that second group of people would react with laughter or fright or joy or sadness? Those were the days, weren't they.

I have things to say about stuff other than Subspace, and a little bit to say about Subspace but mainly stuff to do in Subspace. We'll discuss that later. My apologies for not having addressed the missing-ness of this page for a full month now, and many many thank-yous to the Mackieman for taking me in and setting me up here.

By the way, I did update in June; I just forgot to upload one time and the other time I found my account was gone. :P So there's a little bit more in the June archive if anyone's aching to know what I thought during June.

I'm out of time. See y'all in September. ;)

How do I know what I mean until I see what I say?

<repvblic> every teenager should be issued a copy of seasons in the abyss

Can't wait any longer

To see what you see

When I look at the world

How do I know what I mean until I see what I say?
C.M. Forester said that, not me. It's odd how verbose I can be when not updating my own damned webpage. I've been all over the Cosmic Rift boards lately. There's a lot going on with that game and a lot that needs to be addressed, including a few disappointments.

I'm going to keep this update small because I am neurotic about the midnight thing. Hopefully will have something a little more in depth up tomorrow sometime, but there's something important I want to mention here, which is that they are answering the complaints about ship sizes with a new set of smaller ships which apparently go online tomorrow for public testing.

Related to this, Jeff has made the message window and the player listing transparent and easily hidden, so that almost the entire screen can now be dedicated to gameplay.

There should be an open test zone up sometime tomorrow where you can try these out. I urge everyone who gave up on CR because of these problems to give it another try with the new ships.

For now I'll stay off the subject of me objecting to this. :P

Now where was I . . .

<saltygirl> these are awesome pretzels
<saltygirl> when i build my 2000ft airship and roam the world in search of treasure
<saltygirl> these are the pretzels i will eat

It's a strange day

No colours or shapes

No sound in my head

I forget who I am

When I'm with you

Now where was I . . .

Apologies once again for the sporadic updating. I've been rather up to my ears lately with my lovely allyring wife completing two masters degrees this month and a deadline of sorts looming for myself as well. Meanwhile I am now calling up Verizon to complain about their DSL non-service on an almost daily basis - no exaggeration.

Verizon really blows

I am going to vent now. You have been warned. Skip this if you don't want to read me venting.

When Verizon materialized out of the merger (cannibalism?) of GTE and Pacific Bell, it seemed for a while that the disgusting incompetence and unprofessionalism for which I've known GTE might be a thing of the past. For instance, the people who answered the phone would actually admit to the possibility of problems existing at their end. Sometimes they would know how to communicate in an efficient way with the people who do actual work for the company. (Answering phones is only work if you have a grasp of the subject matter your customers have called to discuss.) The technicians who came by the house to figure out what was wrong with their lousy system were no longer as likely to complain to me about how incompetent the previous technicians had been.

I'm reminded of the new Sbarro that took something like a year to move into the strip mall at the other end of town. Its impending arrival was posted where it was to be constructed, and they took forever. When finally completed, the big room between Software Etc. and Sharper Image - a room which had formerly a B. Dalton Booksellers - was tricked out like it was God's gift to high class dining. Marble tabletops and floor, stupidly high ceiling, fancy tall chairs and tables set up by those windows whose proper term I refuse to look up. An insane amount of money had been spent to make this place look high class and expensive - a chain pizza & pasta place I used to stop at on drives from Philadelphia to Fairfax and back; a restaurant which shared buffet infrastructure with Bob's Big Boy. Perhaps if you can imagine a Denny's dressed up to look like the UNATCO headquarters in Deus Ex, you can imagine the absurdity of this.

Well of course, in their excitement at creating a Classy Joint the proprietors forgot that not only to objects in the world break, but people go to restaurants to eat food. If you were to walk in there this weekend, you would find somewhere around two dozen fancy pants marble tabletops from which the glass covers have been taken, leaving the torn cork and adhesive which had held them on. If you decide you'd like to sit at once of these tables, you will eat either 1) pizza or 2) pizza which has been folded in half, because you will likely be the only customer they have during that hour. In their excitement and the pretentious act of strutting around thrusting out their youth and all that capital, they somehow ran out of money and can no longer actually provide a service to anyone. This is why no one replaces broken soap containers in bathrooms or fixes their store signs, why no one ever washes the rug at a bookstore unless the actual person who thought up the name of that bookstore lives within walking distance of it. It is why the other day when I spoke with one of the monkeys at our alarm service I was told, in all seriousness, that when Verizon unexpectedly cuts off our phone service for an indefinite amount of time, how will the people who monitor alarms know? because the alarm system has no way of contacting them to tell them the phone line has been cut.

And it is why, after what must by now total thirty or forty separate incidents and calls to Verizon's customer non-service, to this day no one there has thought to leave a note on the account to anyone else there, about anything, even the simple fact that we've now been told thirty or forty times to try rebooting the computer. Or that if they're going to sever our phone connection again in order to not fix the problem, it would be nice for them to warn us first so that we can let the alarm service know we won't be needing them to not do anything about it, should their system happen to do what it's supposed to do on the rare occasion that a human being with a functioning brain is present at the monitoring station to notice.

StarCraft

That's my other excuse. StarCraft. For a while there I was being dragged into numerous giant matches of this game on an more or less nightly basis. Fortunately it by now has broken down into a confusing ruin of bruised egos, hurt feelings, people refusing to play if other people are playing, undignified whining about other people's tactics, etc, etc, etc. The moral of the story is don't play fucking StarCraft. It's a great goddam game, but if you play it with your friends - ever see Storm of the Century? It'll be like that. You'll find out the hard way you have bad taste in friends and that our culture as a whole seems to be held together by a weak framework of nervousness, fronting, and bullshit.

StarCraft

Which brings me to the idea I had a while back which I am thinking of investigating more seriously in the coming weeks. In short, it would be a new series of scenario games based on a closed membership. This would allow us to have as many people contributing to the games as intend to play them. It would remove the potential for confusion and rudeness because players who won't follow directions or observe rules can simply be thrown out permanently, thus avoiding the chaos and time wasting that frankly makes scenario games not worth doing under normal circumstances.

Most importantly perhaps, maintaining an ongoing requirement that players understand the rules of the game they are playing means we can base games upon rules which would otherwise be unenforceable. By that same token, in theory such games could be unlimited by server capacity and scheduling problems - hell, we could hold linked games simultaneously in Subspace and Cosmic Rift if we wanted to. We wouldn't even need moderator status in a given zone or game to hold the events there.

I'd like to start this off with a small group if we do it at all, and expand that group by means of people actually becoming interested on their own rather than having to be sold the idea that something is a special event, and otherwise having to be talked into attending.

If anyone out there is interested by the possibility of playing scenarios in a way Subspace hasn't seen before - a community effort for the simple purpose of having fun and bettering the game culture generally, rather than another chaotic incarnation of another stale game type intended to promote a specific zone - let's discuss it. Maybe we'll wind up doing nothing more than playing All the King's Men on a Heretic II server, but it seems worth a shot to me. Hopefully by the end of June I'll have my recent annoyances behind me and be able to put in real time and energy if there are others who'd like to see something like this start up.

Hmm . . .

<saltygirl> but why is it silly to carry a hatchet?
<saltygirl> uncle buck had one!
<saltygirl> but his was bigger than mine
<saltygirl> mine's a small feminine attack hatchet
<saltygirl> the split your skull in two type

We're pilots watching the stars

Who do we think we are?

Hmm . . .
I'm kind of pissed, cuz tho it's my own fault I never got around to updating this month, I thought my most recent update was at least worth getting some feedback over. Only today did I realize I never posted the damned thing for a number of reasons.

Long story short, being married to someone who is finishing a masters degree takes up a hell of a lot more time than one might think. Now that that chapter's pretty much done with and my ongoing connection woes seem to be on hiatus for the moment, maybe I'll be able to consistently play something other than Super Nintendo roms. I'll probably spend the time playing Quake as usual, but you never know.

The update I never posted will go in the archives, but I do have this to say. I'm thinking of doing some new events now that the Summer is underway and I have quite a bit more free time at my disposal, and it's occurred to me that if we were to make it more of a floating, rotating sort of club than an event per se, we could eliminate 90% of the chaos and achieve greater more drama with fewer people. Check the archive if this interests you. I'd repeat it here but I think that's my only other update this month and I'd rather not have the same stuff in every update of the archive.

On that note, I'm going to fuck around some with the SCF main arena. I've been simmering a new Turf variant on the back burner for a while and might jump into that head first. Anyone interested in helping with ideas, give a shout.

Oh, for anyone who ever wondered what happened to Bridge Builder, the page is back up. I heard tell the guy was threatened with a lawsuit over the name. Amazing to me that more people want the new name to be Bridge Constructor than Suicide Train. At any rate the game's available again here.

I've started playing Anarchy Online. God I hate fighting mobs. Running around in a park full of people shooting all the animals or whatever. How gay is that. But I intend to endure it because the game's pretty as hell, I haven't invested any time in a MMORPG since my prehistoric MUD days, and most importantly the core of the game is a factional PvP conflict, though you wouldn't know it from playing the game itself. I'm hopefully it'll evolve into something more interesting than EverQuest with nanotech or Tribes with lagged dice-roll-based combat.

If anyone was keeping track, the new Plaid album is superb. Plaid being 2/3 of the former Black Dog, from the same record label as the Aphex Twin, Autechre, Squarepusher, and Boards of Canada. After their previous two albums as Plaid I had mostly given up on them as being damned good but no fun - constantly either too intellectual or too goofy. The new album, Double Figure, strikes a good balance and manages to be a great deal of fun in the process. Funky but not stupid funky; full of melodies; decidedly not experimental, which is a Good Thing. I tire of brainy bubble music written with spreadsheet software. Pirate yourself a copy of Squance or Zamami or Sincetta and see what you think.

I probably won't upload this update either, seeing as GameHacker appears to be broken at the moment.

Oh yeah, the Game Boy Advance sucks. In case anyone was curious.

How do I know what I mean until I see what I say?

<repvblic> every teenager should be issued a copy of seasons in the abyss

---


Can't wait any longer
To see what you see
When I look at the world

N e w s  o f  t h e  D a y

26 April 2001

How do I know what I mean until I see what I say?
C.M. Forester said that, not me. It's odd how verbose I can be when not updating my own damned webpage. I've been all over the Cosmic Rift boards lately. There's a lot going on with that game and a lot that needs to be addressed, including a few disappointments.

I'm going to keep this update small because I am neurotic about the midnight thing. Hopefully will have something a little more in depth up tomorrow sometime, but there's something important I want to mention here, which is that they are answering the complaints about ship sizes with a new set of smaller ships which apparently go online tomorrow for public testing.

Related to this, Jeff has made the message window and the player listing transparent and easily hidden, so that almost the entire screen can now be dedicated to gameplay.

There should be an open test zone up sometime tomorrow where you can try these out. I urge everyone who gave up on CR because of these problems to give it another try with the new ships.

For now I'll stay off the subject of me objecting to this. :P

One hour in four

<saltygirl> we bombed iraq in time for this weeks snl
<saltygirl> sweet

---


Excuse me, a doormat is good honest work....
Only the bored and wicked rich don't know that....

N e w s  o f  t h e  D a y

20 April 2001

One hour in four
Tritone churchbells and bloody chickensex if I've not spent 18 of the past 72 hours playing Cosmic Rift. Yow! I've been ranting away on the forums a lot so I'm going to keep my remarks here less detailed than they've been elsewhere, if only because I have other things on my mind. I do have a few things to say however.

Most glaring among the negative reactions to this game I've been seeing in the last few days is the unbelievably obvious contradiction in the claim that both 1) Cosmic Rift is nothing but a ripoff of Subspace, and 2) its developers have fucked it all up. To those out there claiming both: Duh? Did you want it to be more like Subspace so you could complain better about the similarities? To those among you making only one of these claims, observe those making the other: Magically, you and they are having entirely different experiences while performing the same acts within the same game.

I urge you to drop some of that old baggage and observe the game as it actually plays: achingly slow, far too dangerous in close combat, not a whole lot of variation among the ships or weapons. I hazard a guess that, after at least eight months of development, these things are not accidents. Are they any fun? Maybe not - but curiously it's the Subspace players who find the game awkward who aren't having any fun. Often it seems they are the same people who can't enjoy more than a few zones within Subspace. Maybe you've seen the face of God but to me it just looked like a computer game. You can get used to a new computer game. Imagine for a moment that this is in fact what you are doing.

We're carrying a lot of baggage on this trip and it's not fitting in the overhead compartments this time.

That aching slowness goes with the dangerous combat. Keep your speed always at a maximum, never be without something to bounce off of. Stay away from your enemy. Those days of coming in close and flirting with death and getting another chance are over. In this game the rule seems to be that you must make the kill or you immediately put yourself at a horrible disadvantage, struggling against your own inertia while your opponent - if he's smart he hasn't yet fired a shot - comes at you with the momentum he's been saving up, bounces off the surface he was choosing while you were eyeing his jugular, and comes at you with an attack you often simply cannot avoid. The outcome was decided when you misjudged what he had to work with and you mistakenly fired your first shot.

The pacing seemed less slow once I came to notice these things. I realized that those slow turns and hesitant moments were part of the fight, and in accepting that I noticed something else: The best War Zone and Turf Zone games and the sneakiest Chaos Zone tunnel hunts often are made up from long periods of suspenseful quiet punctuated by explosions of violence. Cosmic Rift seems to follow this principle on a micro level, so that the dogfighting can even become relaxing. So often though the kill is sudden, unexpected, and even shocking. In failure I am surprised at my inability to act; in victory I am amazed at my brutality. The highs and lows are high contrast, uncommonly satisfying. The pacing is as alien here in one direction as the lightning fast intricacies of Quake rocket fights might be in the other - the pacing in this game is a conscious act of defiance.

The other things on my mind went away. What I want to do now is play the game. But my DSL is broken again, and so I think I need to take a walk.

One hour in four

<saltygirl> we bombed iraq in time for this weeks snl
<saltygirl> sweet

Excuse me, a doormat is good honest work....

Only the bored and wicked rich don't know that....

One hour in four
Tritone churchbells and bloody chickensex if I've not spent 18 of the past 72 hours playing Cosmic Rift. Yow! I've been ranting away on the forums a lot so I'm going to keep my remarks here less detailed than they've been elsewhere, if only because I have other things on my mind. I do have a few things to say however.

Most glaring among the negative reactions to this game I've been seeing in the last few days is the unbelievably obvious contradiction in the claim that both 1) Cosmic Rift is nothing but a ripoff of Subspace, and 2) its developers have fucked it all up. To those out there claiming both: Duh? Did you want it to be more like Subspace so you could complain better about the similarities? To those among you making only one of these claims, observe those making the other: Magically, you and they are having entirely different experiences while performing the same acts within the same game.

I urge you to drop some of that old baggage and observe the game as it actually plays: achingly slow, far too dangerous in close combat, not a whole lot of variation among the ships or weapons. I hazard a guess that, after at least eight months of development, these things are not accidents. Are they any fun? Maybe not - but curiously it's the Subspace players who find the game awkward who aren't having any fun. Often it seems they are the same people who can't enjoy more than a few zones within Subspace. Maybe you've seen the face of God but to me it just looked like a computer game. You can get used to a new computer game. Imagine for a moment that this is in fact what you are doing.

We're carrying a lot of baggage on this trip and it's not fitting in the overhead compartments this time.

That aching slowness goes with the dangerous combat. Keep your speed always at a maximum, never be without something to bounce off of. Stay away from your enemy. Those days of coming in close and flirting with death and getting another chance are over. In this game the rule seems to be that you must make the kill or you immediately put yourself at a horrible disadvantage, struggling against your own inertia while your opponent - if he's smart he hasn't yet fired a shot - comes at you with the momentum he's been saving up, bounces off the surface he was choosing while you were eyeing his jugular, and comes at you with an attack you often simply cannot avoid. The outcome was decided when you misjudged what he had to work with and you mistakenly fired your first shot.

The pacing seemed less slow once I came to notice these things. I realized that those slow turns and hesitant moments were part of the fight, and in accepting that I noticed something else: The best War Zone and Turf Zone games and the sneakiest Chaos Zone tunnel hunts often are made up from long periods of suspenseful quiet punctuated by explosions of violence. Cosmic Rift seems to follow this principle on a micro level, so that the dogfighting can even become relaxing. So often though the kill is sudden, unexpected, and even shocking. In failure I am surprised at my inability to act; in victory I am amazed at my brutality. The highs and lows are high contrast, uncommonly satisfying. The pacing is as alien here in one direction as the lightning fast intricacies of Quake rocket fights might be in the other - the pacing in this game is a conscious act of defiance.

The other things on my mind went away. What I want to do now is play the game. But my DSL is broken again, and so I think I need to take a walk.

A funny thing happened on the way to the soapbox

<[null]> Ted Turner is going to kick Steve Case's ass
<[null]> too bad they don't have a way to make that a PPV event

Now some of us are weak, and some endure

And some people live their lives with a violence that's pure and clean

But I saw a man cry once, down on his knees

In the corner of a darkened cell, and his pain meant nothing to me

But I was younger then, and young men never die

When i walked out in the sun, I was strong, clear minded,

 and blind

N e w s  o f  t h e  D a y
9 April 2001


A funny thing happened on the way to the soapbox
It's clear that I don't enjoy doing this anymore, and I missed both my recent opportunities to Retire™ - the most recent being my 4th Subspace birthday, which I completely forgot about - so it appears as though we're stuck with each other until this coming December 1st. Mark it on your calendars.

So here I was, all ready to tear down 90% of the history of multiplayer gaming, when - you know at the end of The Grinch Who Stole Back Christmas, when the Little Whos Down In Whoville are having their evil pagan ritual commemorating their faceless Who-god, and our friend the Grinch has endeavored to teach them what exactly the fuck Christmas is for, when a portal to Hell opens up and the Ghost of Holiday Giftgiving jumps out, possessing our hero long enough to break his spirit and turn him into One Of Them?

It was like that, only BETTER. Inspired as I was by the unprecedented horribleness that is Tribes 2, I was making a list of bad games, and good games gone bad, and checking it twice, when something divine touched me, and before you could say "hey e let's bring back Turf / Jackpot Zone again" I was enjoying match upon match of the marvelous Quake III Team Arena, strutting my bad stuff at the top of the frag list not because I have any skill, but solely because - just like those Good Old Days - I was a Team Player. An army of one, if you will!

It took this long for that high to wear off, and now I'm afraid I've forgotten what in the hell I needed so desperately to say. But I will say this. After some tweaking and fiddling I finally got Tribes 2 to run well, and it's still pretty damned dismal. Not horrible, in all honesty, as much as I might wish to call it horrible. Just dismal. Claustrophobic and chaotic and visually the polar opposite of eye popping. It is missing all the vast, epic grandness of the original game as well as the cloak & dagger layout of its interiors. Things I experienced the day Tribes 1 hit store shelves - receiving objectives and waypoints from other players, painting targets for mortar fire, actual fear of flying vehicles - still haven't encountered them yet. It's not there. The teams don't communicate, people don't respect the vehicles, and the command interface is even less useful than the original. Far less useful, in fact. I couldn't believe this when I read it in the context of a positive review, but it's the case. Tribes 2 has just about the most miserable team interface a person could hope to come up with. There are many other aspects to this dead horse but I don't think I am going to kick it. Suffice it to say this long awaited sequel to the one game that really challenged Subspace in the greatness category during Subspace's heyday - nut uh. It aint there.

Other games have come close over time, most impressively Allegiance. That game in many ways topped the original Tribes, and offered unique experiences that rivaled what Subspace had accomplished. I'll revisit that game here sometime soon. For now all I can say is it continues to amaze me that developers dozens of team members strong, fueled by millions upon millions of dollars, still can't beat our game's basic oldschool charm - and not even because it is oldschool. Subspace's real strength has never been in how much less flashy it is, but in how honestly more advanced it is, than these new games.

I am actually very angry that I forgot my dumb 4th birthday, because I had intended to put up my first new map in maybe half a year, for whatever that gesture was worth, and I guess I've blown that. It'll go up soon just the same, within the next week or so, as I more or less retire the present SCF map originally made for The Dark Zone. Anyway stay tuned if that sort of thing interests you.

But for this night the sky is for their eyes.

<Golbez> someone look at http://www.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/meast/03/26/saudi.pokemon/index.html
<Golbez> and tell me
<Golbez> what the FUCK is going on in that picture

    But for this night the sky is for their eyes.

Smug compsci bitches make me hot

Why is it every prick at a software store who thinks he knows everything has EXACTLY the same voice?

Ah no, Black and White's not out, that's tomorrow!

Um. Read a webpage or two sometime ya moron.

Oh well, at least I was rescued from impulse buying what is probably just yet another Populous clone.

Subspace

It's funny, I haven't been playing much for a long time, as anyone who still checks this page has probably figured out, because it feels like I left Subspace on the old computer. I really need to see a shrink about this shit. I think part of it is that I wound up reinstalling ICQ which means every time I open the piece of shit I have to look at banner ads.

I have this to say about banner ads and then I'll be quiet about them for a while.

You own every dime of the revenue which has resulted from your viewing or clicking on ad banners. Someday soon take that revenue by force.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, we are coming up on my 4th Subspace birthday. I'm half-tempted to Retire® when that day rolls around next Wednesday, but I think I'll give this miserable hobby a fifth year, just for spite's sake. That, and if my departure resulted in a Council position for Rude Awakening people would probably send bombs to my house. :P

I'm changing the map in SCF to my official Monster in a Box™ - a monstrosity which I began in June of 1998, now in its 28th draft. May the Good Lord bless you all with fear of the unknown, for the unknown is the very living heart of badness and suffering.

Anyway, it'll go up in a few days, so the few dozen fans of Pleiades had better come and pay their last respects, or at least their last-for-a-while respects.

Platinum halo (I refused to spell his name correctly, sorry man) has started up a new Slayfest series. It began this last Sunday, but I think he forgot to tell anyone, and that no one told no one and so on and so on. Maybe this weekend the word will get out a little better and the game will amount to something more interesting. Not that the last one sucked or anything; there just weren't many people.

Oh yeah, something about SSCX being cut off from the rest of the world. Oh yes, I remember. GOOD RIDDANCE! Long live the Xalic Axis and to blazes with the rest of y'all.

Hey, this turned out pretty well. At the rate I'm going I should have something nice to say in time for the one year anniversary of Hyperspace's official release date. ;)

For Mackie

<SoSD> Here we are, fighing super mutants and deathclaws, and she's throwing knives.
<SoSD> Bloody ignorant whore.

    beneath the stain of time

    the feeling disappears

    you are someone else

    i am still right here

For Mackie
It would appear as though some time in the past three months I stopped really giving a shit.

Gee, I wonder how THAT happened.

Apologies to Mackieman and Absocold; all others pay cash.

See the rest of you assholes tomorrow.

We saw it all in colour--now we're waiting for the cloud.

<Tankboy> ron jeremy looks like super mario

    We saw it all in colour--now we're waiting for the cloud.

The short of it

After a few hours of the hot spankin new Tribes 2, it's occurred to me that I have a lot of bile to spit on the gaming industry. I'm out of time for an update today, and frankly I have yet to sort out my thoughts, but suffice it for now to say that in the past two weeks, between Tribes 2 and Fallout Tactics, I've been more disappointed than I have in total since I got back into gaming in 1991. And it's dawned on me: What do we really have to show, in terms of multiplayer, for the five years between Subspace's earliest twinklings and this that we have today?

If you ask me, we have three and a half great Quake games and a giant selection of disappointments, ranging from downright horribleness to merely shocking mediocrity and finally to those mind boggling cases where sombody really nailed it right on the head, only to turn around and destroy their own wonderful creations.

I'll go into this in detail tomorrow. For now I must meditate.

Crazy shit

<Luse> my bridge building strategy is elite
<Luse> it's called
<Luse> fill the water with steel
<Luse> - nt -
<Sqoon> mine is even eliter. It's called "Mr Train, fucking gun it. Or else."

Nobody else here baby

No one else here to blame

No one to point the finger

It's just you and me in the rain

Crazy shit 
The quote-o-the-day seen above is a reference to the Cafe's insidious new pet game, Bridge Builder. I hate this game. And yet I'm afraid I must recommend it. You build bridges. They collapse. You try again. You're friends mock you. For some reason it still qualifies as a game. The feared and hated Eblanaites have put up a page full of successful bridge designs in an attempt to obliterate my self esteem. You can view these here. Or you can just put rocks in your pockets and walk into the sea.


Unbelievable 
Giants: Citizen Kabuto. Man oh man, what a game. I might put up some screenshots of this bad boy later on, because the ones I've seen online and in print just don't do justice to the game's beauty and scope, and certainly not to the hair raising oldskool Lucasesque action. Hmm...actually here is a good one. Also check this sucker out. Mmm. And the game plays like it looks. I hadn't been too interested for a long time because descriptions made it sound quirky, Shiny-esque, a genre bender - nut uh. It's an ass kicking, exciting, fun as hell FPS through and through. And it's god a nice fat five-mission demo that kept me busy several nights running. Can't recommend this game enough. GameSpot has the demo.

Yuck 

Didn't realize so much damn time had gone by. I'll do better! I promise! I haven't been doing my game reading anyway. Actually, I did read about the sickeningly condescending Dogma 2001 but spent so much time last night venting that I've nothing to say about it now. Maybe tomorrow.


You yeah 
Yall missed my krad radio show. Shows. Pacific time Noon Tuesday and 4:00am Wednesday, at kcsb.org - an hour and two hours respectively. Ambient music, noise, occasional bleepy beaty goodness, that sort of thing. Not much talking. You've been warned. ;) And don't call me or I'll hang up on you!

January 2001

<cov\nap> goddamned aaa members "I'm by exit b3" they are *25* MILES FROM B3.
<kenta> lol
<cov\nap> GET A GODDAMNED MAP AND CALL ME BACK YOU IGNORANT JACKASS.
<einexile> hey if i ever break down can i ask for you?
<cov\nap> no
<cov\nap> you are in the domain of the auto club of southern california
<cov\nap> may god have mercy on your soul

Throw your mind away, fall into the sea.

There's nothing solid here. Dissolve your body today.

N e w s  o f  t h e  D a y
28 January 2001


Wow
It turns out Allegiance is doing alright.

For some reason I stopped playing the only other massive multiplayer action game (duck) around the end of the Summer. I think it was Fallout that did the deed. Recently I'd been thinking of returning, but repeated checks of MSN Gaming Zone showed there to be precious few people actually playing the game. For some reason, what used to be a fairly accurate reflection of the game's popularity is now worthless, as matches lasting two and three hours - often maxing out above 80 players - continue to happen on an almost daily basis.

Slight problem: I can't really remember how to play the damned thing. Guess that's in the nature of a good game, eh. There is other interesting stuff on the massiveness horizon, although I often wonder if there are many people left in Subspace who'd care. It's worth mentioning. Despite unfortunate statements by its developers implying an heavy emphasis on instant gratification, I have hope for Planetside. However, Verant recently issues a partial list of team members, and my theory that members of the original Subspace team may be involved has so far proven wrong. Nevertheless I look forward to a battle played out between so many people and over such apparently tremendous territory for an action game.

By contrast, we have Star Ware Galaxies. I'd been looking forward to this until I learned the other day that, unless I've made a terrible mistake, any fat fuck is going to be able to become a Jedi. To wit: "Our system," claims the FAQ, "is designed to allow the casual player, as well as the hardcore player, the opportunity to become a Jedi." Thank you assholes for ruining Star Wars. I was so hoping to become one of the most feared warriors in the galaxy on two hours a night. I am shallow and boring and cannot appreciate the experience of being frightened of other players in a game. The internet exists to make me feel like a badass for $10 a month.

Let's hope Sierra has a dagger up their sleeve in a big way. I'm guessing that if they do it might just have something to do with this.

I like writing about this sort of nonsense. I think I'll keep it up. You know I love Subspace and everything, but if I've got to wait another six months before I can open a door with a switch a la any other game circa 1994 and on, I think the frustration is going to kill me. Maybe that's why I've started playing Subspace more often in recent months: I've given up on trying to make it something it's not.

Good Lord, the infamous and horrific Mackieman has p1mpx0rd the infamous and horrific Cafe Eblana. Just do me a big favor and stay the hell out, k? ;P

By the way, it was in fact Mackie who talked me into getting off my fat ass and returning some of my idbound attention to this page, so thanks and shouts out to him for that, with a grudging runner-up award directed at conspiracy theory.

Sorry for not posting relevant links for Planetside and Allegiance. I'll try and use actual sources in the future rather than rely on vague memories formed at 3:00am during angry webflipping sessions. Speaking of which, did you know about this?



<SoSD> I like Windows 2000 too. If only it liked all the other things I like.

Close your eyes, touch your mouth in the mirror --

that's the wound that is made where the past meets the future.

N e w s  o f  t h e  D a y
27 January 2001


Hmm . . .
I guess I don't have a whole hell of a lot of time.

The DSL is broken again, for probably the 20th time since I first got it a year and a half ago. Verizon is a good company to deal with but I do not envy their task of doing support and maintenance of what appears to be innately an amazingly unstable and unreliable system.

The sound of a 56k modem makes me want to claw my eyes out. I'd remove it and install the old 33.6 if I could find it.

By law I have to watch Saturday Night Live now, or I'll miss the anomalous good writing and talented cast which occurs only once every twelve years.

What game was this page about again? :P



<repvblic> every teenager should be issued a copy of seasons in the abyss

You're packing a suitcase for a place none of us has been

A place that has to be believed to be seen

N e w s  o f  t h e  D a y
26 January 2001


Heeerrrrre's Johnny!
Bush won, the Millennium started twelve months and twenty-six days ago, and fuck you if you disagree.

God help me, I'm going to update this page today.

Developing...

Okay so

To make a long story short, the new design was basically finished, but in its present state, because I never really know what the hell it is I want, it was basically amounting to increase my confusion and clutter when its only purpose was to decrease those things.

I've never actually moved explicitly from one computer to another, and when I did so recently I experienced a creeping but intense feeling of disorientation. It was as though I had moved away from Subspace, in the same way that one moves away from one's favorite cafe. It might be only five more blocks to walk there, but strangely you find yourself never going. Here I was with Subspace and ICQ installed on this thing for over a week, and I for some reason couldn't get used to the idea of opening them. Subspace and ICQ were part of the other computer. Maybe if I'd had the sense to spring for that extra monitor this would not have been so much of a problem. Instead I again found myself lying on the expert couch of einexile the psychologist.

There's also the minor consideration that I'm hopelessly addicted to Quake III Team Arena. Jesus what an amazing game. Combine some of the best deathmatch ever with the more considered pacing of Tribes, a smooth interface and none of the pretentious intellectual bullshit that drags down most team games - throw in something like fifteen of the best CTF maps ever made; I had to check the credits to see if some new amazing talent had joined up, but no - it's all just good ol' Willits, Xian, and Jaquays, at the tip top of their form for some of the most fun and varied level designs I've ever seen. Amazing. All that and the music, for once, is honestly good - reasonably sohpisticated stuff and compatible with the gameplay. Game of the year easy.

So anyway it will happen eventually, this redesign, but not any time soon - and not until I am personally capable of maintaining and modifying it without needing to open up a book on web authoring. Until that's the situation I'd rather work with something I'm comfortable with.


As for Subspace
Part of the reason I haven't been updating much is I have very little to say about this game and I know very little about other games. Since this isn't going to change and no one seems much to care, I think I'll just plan on that being the case from now on.


And speaking of Subspace
Read over at Subspace HQ that thje immortal OneIFreak, best known for being the only member of the Mapmakers Guild who makes maps, has produced yet another of his gorgeous Subspace shipsets. And with this new set he has honestly outdone himself. The best thing about Onei's replacement sets is they actually look like they belong in Subspace. There are four different sets to choose from, all including the rolling files. Go have a look.


I think maybe I am gay
So I'm in the car on the freeway and this Smiths song comes on which I've never heard before, and I haven't heard the song before and The Smiths are okay with me, so I turn it up some, and Jesus, I almost have to pull over onto the shoulder for fear of losing control of the car, this song is so fucking beautiful. There Is a Light That Never Goes Out. Fine, laugh at me. You won't be laughing when you're spending the rest of eternity eye-deep in boiling shit for turning your whitebread punk nose up at the Moz.

(no headline)

26 January 2001 - In December of this last year, I allowed the Minefield to slip into a temporary state of disrepair while a new design was in the works. During this time, I resorted to an almost plaintext format, so important was it to me that I leave the old behind even while the new wasn't quite ready. It was a mistake to do so, and I've restored the month's updates more or less to the standard format for my archives. Any references to the formatting refers to the aforementioned plaintext setup, and any quotations have been added since thate fateful month, for consistency's sake.

(no headline)
Answer me this much. Is there anyone out there who managed to play Doom properly -- on Ultra Violence the first time through without cheating - who managed to finish the fucking game? I never made it past E2M4, in large part because at the time I was forced to use the keyboard only, because of a mouse bug I still don't quite understand. So I'm playing it again and I know what's going to happen but I'm terrified. I cannot play the game. I say to myself, well, I'll just blast through it and not take it so seriously. Nope. Doesn't work.

Anyway, it was Doom's birthday about a week ago, so I've set out anew on a quest to actually find out what E3 and E4 look like. Think maybe I need thicker skin. Quake II even scared me, and that game is downright silly sometimes.

Apologies for the hiatus. I'm somewhat at a loss for words, lately. At some point between my growing frustration with Subspace's limitations and my growing enjoyment of it thanks in large part to Extreme Games, somewhere along the line my tendency to form opinions about it has been left by the wayside. I simply don't have any to share lately. It's wonderful to have EG in its present state, because in many ways it's more of what Subspace was originally meant to be than is perhaps any other zone in the game right now -- but, at the same time, a series of annoying limitations seems right now to prevent the game from ever becoming more interesting.

Then again, who cares? There's certainly no pressure today on game developers to offer much more than the usual set of tired old teamplay variants. The only games in the foreseeable future that seem to offer anything truly exciting are MMORPGs -- Star Wars Galaxies and BigWorld, both a good year or two off, and each already disappointing in its own way. And don't even talk to me about PlanetSide. After recent "reassurances" from its developers that players will enjoy an orgy of instant-gratification-style combat without meaningful consequences, I could not be less interested.

The problem is clearly my own. The question is, what do I do about it? Bide my time in EG and dream, that's what. And try to think of something more to say about it.

Meanwhile, thanks to (on one hand) Rude Awakening, Questioning Silence, and the other new staff in the Sheep Cloning Facility; and (on the other hand) my newfound ability to leave things the hell alone and not broke what isn't fixed, the zone is slowly becoming an interesting Zone type zone. Medium sized map I am dying to change but won't, nifty flag game that seems to be proving itself over the long run, childish point and bounty system...hell if I know why, but it seems to be working out well. Come in and have a gander sometime.

Here I go again . . .

Here I go again . . .
It's crazy the amount of time you can take up tracking down information on ICQ. If you start off with help of any quality at all, the leads multiply exponentially and before you know it a whole evening has passed - and you wind up somehow knowing a lot less about the subject than you did when you first set off on your journey.

Of course, that's what happens with any sort of research, which is why some people research their projects endlessly and never end up starting work on them. What the internet offers that traditional research can't is countless opportunities to drift off into long conversations which have nothing to do with the topic.

Fortunately for me, I'm interested in those conversations as well.

Unfortunately for everyone who reads this page, the fact that I don't have the sense to delay them until their proper time means I once again near midnight having bit off more than I can chew. Give me credit, however, that at least these days I am taking those bites.

You'll see some of that soon enough.

Many years ago, a distraught and forgotten Georges Méliès discarded some ninety of his films - nearly all of them - into the Thames. These were among the first films to employ the use of special effects. Most prominent of his works, thankfully surviving, is 1902's A Trip to the Moon. You may recall the comical image of an angry moon with a rocket embedded in its eye, common in any quick-cut retrospective presentation on film history such as one might see on the Oscars.

Years later, the major studios, faced with the threat of "talkies" - the first sound pictures - in their panic, despair, and smugness, similarly discarded hundreds, or maybe thousands, of silent films. Today they do not exist.

The negatives for today's motion pictures made today are customarily locked in a vault one full mile below the earth, in the Arizona desert. It took perhaps eighty years for this to become standard procedure.

I hate that our games have not yet reached such a standard. Yes, it's been what - at a very liberal estimate, fifteen years? Twenty-five by arcade standards. But oh, the arcade and even console crowds have got their acts together, often against the kicking and screaming of wooden-headed publishers determined to make a few dollars *someday* off of ancient, ancient intellectual property and source code.

You and I, we aren't even close. And don't let the smooth gloss veneer of the FPS and RTS communities fool you: Neither are they.

We're going to regret this soon. And the arcade / console weenies will be thumbing their noses for the duration of our horrified revelation.

We're going to discuss the long lost maps of prehistoric Subspace, soon. And if you have a heart it will feel pain by the time I am done.

A funny thing happened on the way to oblivion . . .

A funny thing happened on the way to oblivion . . .
I was informed late last night of something I had not known since I started running Subspace zones three years ago, thanks very much. I owe a debt of gratitude to the wise newbie who clued me in to the fact, silly me, that I am required to have a rule against ball-killing in my zone. Not only that, but not withstanding my gross negligence - failing to post notices for a rule I didn't know I had - I am expected to punish my players for breaking a rule they didn't know about. Not only is ignorance of the law no excuse - it appears now that the absence of a law won't fly either.

Then I remembered that the individual scolding me plays in my zone because he is banned everywhere else. Not for any good reason, just for being his loveable self. A little secret: That's a damned good reason sometimes. Well, you get what you pay for, don't you. Perhaps I ought to start enforcing some of the other rules that are common out there in the chaotic fringe-worlds. Rules against lameness, for instance. Or cursing.

The Pointman interview will have to wait an extra day, as I didn't get a chance to approve some final changes with him. Instead I bring you a blast from the past, in the form of a long awaited reprint of The Romulans' Lamers Guide. This dates back to March 5th of 1997, exactly a month before yours truly joined the fray. All possible thanks to my old mapmaking mentor and evil homey for approving this at the last minute. :)