A sudden swift duology of posts.

Hello! It has been a while.

For starters, today the woof and I went out and, while discussing and debating the ubiquity of technology, I demanded that he read Neil Stephenson's "The Diamond Age" like right then. At the wheel. While driving. As we had no copy to hand, we pulled over at a nearby bookstore.

Where we... did not find a copy of The Diamond Age, so I just ordered one off Amazon.

We did find a great many other books for Reasonable Prices, which means we just chafed our wallet. Sigh. Still as I usually do, I document them here.

( By which I mean, here. )

So there's that.

Not A Review: Wizardry - Labyrinth of Lost Souls

I don't do game reviews anymore. I am firm on that. But I do still PLAY a hell of a lot of games, and people have asked me about this latest one I picked up.

Which is Wizardry: Labyrinth of Lost Souls for the PS3. The page for it is right here.

For starters, it's $15. Not a bad deal.
For seconds, if you're in the right demographic you probably already know if you want this game.

Do you like sisyphean dungeon crawls, where you push into a dark, dank dungeon and swear a lot and oh god what does THIS monster type do? Where you go a few feet in, annotate your graph-paper map, get a level and a few unidentified items to sell or hopefully equip, and then slink back out in a hurry? Do you love rolling your own characters? Do you, most importantly, own a PS3?

If you're nodding, you should own Wizardry LOLS. If you have fond memories of any of the past games, you should own Wizardry LOLS. If Etrian Odyssey, The Dark Spire, Class of Heroes, or Shin Megami Tensei Strange Journey were fun to you, you should own Wizardry LOLS.

This is actually a much GENTLER game than the utterly face-destroying games of the past. You can still get your ass handed to you in a baggie by a few low-level kobolds, but you can level quite briskly, you can get decent equipment in a hurry, and the game does automap if you buy the map paper or cast the right spells. That said, it is still briskly, brutally, casually cruel to a starting adventurer.

I have an item called "Ring of Death" which only evil characters can equip. I don't have any evil characters. It has some special ability that I -could- use. I AM TERRIFIED OF USING IT just to see what it does. It instills, like... Demon's Souls-esqe worry in me.

This is a fun dungeon crawler. I've played it a few hours, and... well, it's Wizardry, it's a dungeon crawl, it's a bit mean. Your characters can wither up into dust and blow away if you fuck up bringing them back to life, for crying out loud... but at least you can bring them back to life at all.

My only complaint is that there are a couple of clear hooks for DLC content from the store. Some of these look like they're "Buy this to make the game easier". This bothers me ideologically, but you know what I will do? I won't buy them. DILEMMA SOLVED. If you buy them, tell me what they do.

Hell, maybe buy them anyway. Gotta get the sequel funded for translation somehow.