The Last Candle

OK. Big news for Morrowind fans. Have a seat for this one. Ready?

There is a multiplayer co-op mod in development. And it already works.

Works to a certain degree, that is. I haven’t tried it, but other accounts from the Shack and the forums note that running around with a companion is working pretty well. There are mechanisms for trading items and chatting. Co-op combat is progressing nicely.

If you’re a fan of Morrowind, your head has already gone googly-like from the possibilities for fun. For everyone else, here’s the dish. Morrowind is probably one of the greatest computer RPG’s ever created. The world in Morrowind is fantastically huge: 30 or so towns with hundreds of other hidden dungeons, crypts, caverns; 60 or so enemies; hundreds of weapons and armor pieces, as well as potions, spells, and various common items; thousands of non-playable characters to chat with; hundreds of quests; a dozen guilds; and literally thousands of other components. With the help of the excellent mod community, which has propelled the original game to near-perfection, Morrowind is as just about as perfect for an immersive, addictive computer role-playering experience.

But it’s only single player. If there’s one thing that’s better than a good single player experience, it’s playing on the same team with a pal. Ever since Morrowind was announced several years ago, fans were salivating at the possibility of co-op, a very probablu prospect now with our very network-attached computer culture. When the game was given single-player only, the disappointment of a million game geeks was almost palpable. (But not total: we all knew that the single-player was still going to rock.)

But now, Morrowind Online is going to bring multiplayer to one of the greater single-player adventures of all time.

And it gets better! Here’s the thing: Morrowind does not include one whit of network code. Zero. The mod is being created using for Morrowind called ScriptExtender, a utility that gives great wings to the scripting possibilities in the Morrowind world. ScriptExtender runs Morrowind scripts, which can be absolutely any part of the world, moving or static, in accessible virtual memory. External applications can access the virtual memory and make changes to the scripts, consequently making immediate changes to what’s happening in Morrowind. This includes inserting non-playable characters into the current game world and updating their behavior, position, and inventory in real-time. The same can be done with any item, beastie, or component of the world. (At least, I think so; I haven’t looked into ScriptExtender in too much detail. NPCs and monsters, at the very least, exhibit the aforementioned malleability.)

Therefore, thanks to ScriptExtender, all the information necessary to bring co-op to Morrowind is made available; the Online folks are bringing the tools to manipulate the data between players. They’ve already written an external utility to exchange scripts over a network, allowing exchange of NPC, monster, and location data between stations. The same application interfaces between ScriptExtender to exchange local data with a wide station while simultaneously changing its own script data to correspond with the networked station, syncing up the world behavior between the two machines.

And then you have Morrowind Online.

VERY exciting. I guess it’s about time to buy Tribunal and Bloodmoon so Morrowind online can be experienced in its fullest. The expansion packs allow in mods that allow you to drive giant hot air balloons with gunnery too — something that is sorely lacked in the Morrowind world.

One out of the many flaps in the poly-blogosphere lately was the commotion over Brit Hume, FOX News anchor and thus an automatic target of the Left, using a quote of FDR’s regarding Social Security. Honestly, I don’t know much about Social Security, and I don’t think this trouble is a good place to start, so I’ve mostly only paid attention to the rumblings across the ‘sphere. Essentially, the gist of the matter is that the left says that Hume purposefully manipulated a quote to his own agenda. The right says the quote was edited acceptably.

So far (and I don’t think there’s going to be another winner in this category), I have to give the “Quickest Race to Any Finish Line” award to Oliver Willis for his calls for Hume to resign appended with the ominous title AMERICAN TRUTH UNDER SIEGE. My GOD! Release the Copy Authenticity Squad! We must save the American Truth!

Um? So maybe a guy misquotes or, at the worst, distorts a quote to his own use. I don’t know which it is — there have been valid discussions from the opposing side of the blogosphere that argue that Hume was in the clear. And it could be that Brit was perfectly food with his choice of editing. OK. Whichever.

But “AMERICAN TRUTH UNDER SIEGE”? Drama, yes; accuracy, no. Not that I agree with Willis, but I don’t recall him putting up a banner saying “THE ILLICT WAR ON TERROR: DAY 355.” Moonbatisms aside, there at least we have an issue with serious national interest. Instead, when a FOX News anchor says something controversial, look out: the all-encompassing, etheral American Truth is under attack.

Bill from INDC Journal takes a look into the very probable future.

Reminds me of the calls for Rumsfeld to resign just days after the Abu Ghraib fluster broke out: too much, too early, too little information.

Keep digging, though: maybe there’s a Rathergate under that soil.

The reviews are coming out for Devil May Cry 3, and it’s lookin’ reallll-y good. The original game is my favorite action title — solid, super-super-stylized action with the most sassy, smart-ass protangonist ever — but the sequel was incredibly lackluster.

But! Reviews are heavily pointing to the 3^rd offering (why does the third game in a series seem to be more special than, say, going from the 1^st to the 2^nd game? I blame Super Mario Bros. 3) reclaiming the same fantastic shoot-em-up action that the original offered so finely. Good. Except a couple of passages from the IGN review make me fear for my controllers’ integrity a bit:

Hardcore gamers that think they’re the best on the block had better take notice: Devil May Cry 3: Dante’s Awakening is going to kick your ass… a lot.
[…]
Remember how tough the Hard Mode was from the moment Dante’s adventure first began? [YES. A vein in my head starts to bulge just thinking about it.] Well that’s been changed too — now the Japanese Hard mode has been transformed into the American Normal setting. [Oh.] So if you thought you were good before, you have to be even better now. Are you scared yet? Because if not you should be.

The Japanese are the ones who can beat a Resident Evil game using only the knife, a weapon that does almost NO damage to anything, and not losing any health. And now we get THEIR hard mode.

I sense broken plastic in my future.

busy BUSY blah blah blah Job Fair blah blah TCP/UDP blah blah

And Counter-Strike Source, too. Nothing like a good game of shooting bots with sub-machine guns and automatic shotguns to relieve the tensions. Of course, after the bots smear your own team into the ground by a ratio of 5:1, the frustation comes back. But at least there’re guns. And flashbanging your own team for a good laugh.

Since my iPod’s battery lasts about, oh, an hour these days, I turn to streaming stations whenever I’m at a computer to conserve the precious juice for those trips between classes. (It’s amazing just how loud and numerous people on cell phones are on campus. It’s not uncommon to see three, maybe four people in a row chatting nearby at once. ARGH.) In the library, where attempts to acculmulate wits and concentration are top priority, Sky.FM’s classical and new age streams are the prime picks. But for all other opportunities: METAL EXPRESS RADIO! Bringing out the best in all metal. (And some of the not-so-best. King Diamond, for instance…)

I hear a lot of music on these stations that I want to grab for myself later. Depending on the stream and the media player, the artist and song title is supplied, but otherwise I have to listen to the lyrics, Google in a particular phrase, and attempt to find the artist and title that way. The percentage of success is pretty high; I can come away from a half-hour of listening with a couple dozen new tunes to check out later.

Today, however, there came a song on that was strangely oddly familiar, but also really, really good. It was perfect power metal: soaring melody, nunace and range in the vocals, strength in the instrumentals, and progressive elements for variety. A beautiful thing, indeed; finding the title and artist became a frenzied hunt. Missing out on good music is a dire, dire thing.

Going by the vocals alone, I thought it sounded like Kai Hansen (of Gamma Ray fame!) was on pipes. Later, I realized that it was none other than the lead of one of my favorite groups ever: Roy Khan of Kamelot, master singer behind my top album pick of all time, Epica. Good! So it was either Kamelot or Conception, Khan’s old group. But, owning almost all of Kamelot’s library and at least listening to everything else, this was something new. Conception, then? Write down the lyrics — “Sometimes I wonder where the wind has gone” — and head off to Google. Nothing. Try a different line: empty, again. Scour Dark Lyrics’s entire archive of Conception for the right lines. Negative. Try Google again…

One hit — and then it all made sense: I was listening to a track from The Black Halo, Kamelot’s newest album, successor to Epica and unreleased outside of Japan. Totally by accident and to my extremely large delight, my ears were being sung one of the tunes from the album I had been waiting for with heavy lust since Epica’s release two years ago.

And it was awesome. PREORDERED.

Via the Shack, Machinae Supremacy! Swedish metal with power, black, punk, and video game influences. No, really: “Machinae Supremacy is a swedish new frontier band with a love for games and game music and that’s reflected in their music,” says the About page. Many of Machinae’s songs feature 8-bit era and earlier bleeps and squeals, tuned perfectly as harmonies to the riffin’ melodies. Great stuff for anyone who likes metal with a little black/thrash, a bit of punk, and a tiny touch of electronica.

But here’s the kicker: The downloads page has a good two dozen or so full songs available for immediate listening. (Bold print; just so you know this is serious business.) Standouts so far are Attack Music, Legion of Stoopid, and Winterstorm, but as I’m slowly going through the rest of the catalogue, I haven’t hit a song that I didn’t provoke me to break out the \m/.

(And I see that the tune Legion of Stoopid is a commentary on the evils of the Bushitler adminstration from the election 2004 time. Whatever. The music is still heavy metal sweet.)