But this is just too loving funny to pass up. Well, humorous, at any rate.

It’s a bit dated—Gingrich has climbed far enough in the polls that he’s no longer just the pseudo-intellectual member of the crowd, he’s the pseudo-intellectual frontrunner. (Momentarily; it’ll boil down to whether the GOP wants to try and get independent swing votes with Romney, or use Newt and keep the right-wing votes they’d otherwise lose by going Mitt.) And it’s a tad biased—I’d like to see Obama with a “make promises he doesn’t keep” ability to balance that out.

In other news, I’m pretty sure I’ve played a character with Herman Cain’s stats. Don’t worry, it was 2nd Ed, so it translated to nulls across the board instead of negatives.

For a brief moment in 2003-05, there was a flurry of game developers jumping on the bandwagon: 64-bit versions of UT2k4, Half-Life 2, Far Cry, and STALKER appeared, amongst a few others. Of them, Far Cry probably received the most attention, since it came first and had a shiny promo video, making good use of its already-stunning exotic island locales:

And that was about the end of that, save for a few johnny-come-lately outliers. Crysis needed a 64-bit version so the designers could build the game’s engine, so out came a 64-bit version of that. And Hellgate: London had a 64-bit version up for its brief pseudo-mumorpuger life, in order to support more memory on its servers. These two programs switched for technical reasons, not to be a part of the 64-bit gaming storm, which more or less died down when people stopped and realized the world wasn’t going to convert immediately just to please hardcore gamers if it meant they couldn’t use their six-year-old deskjet printer or scanner.

In actuality, 64-bit computing hasn’t been the powerhouse AMD claimed it would be. Looking at the Far Cry video, it’s pretty easy to see that the devs just added some shiny new effects, higher-res textures, and called it a day, probably banking on the fact that anyone capable of running 64-bit games had a high-capacity gaming rig to begin with. And as this three-year-old Tom’s Hardware survey shows, most of the 64-bit games weren’t even optimized for 64-bit OS’s: the games’ framerate performances were on-par or lower than their 32-bit versions, even for the much-vaunted Crysis.

In other words: there’s a reason the 64-bit gaming hype has fallen to the wayside. The tech just isn’t being utilized to its full potential; too many people were still using 32-bit operating systems and/or legacy hardware, and building a separate architecture—or pushing exclusivity to the smaller 64-bit gamer niche—wasn’t going to fly with marketing. So instead of native 64-bit games, these are all examples of 32-bit games patched—but not optimized—for 64-bit systems. (The exception being Crysis, which was a native 64-bit program optimized for 32-bit systems.)

On the plus side, the technological advance is needed, welcome, and will—eventually—pan out into major benefits. The biggest advantage of a 64-bit OS is that it can recognize more than 4GB of RAM, something 32-bit can’t; at this point in time, 4 gigs costs about $20-35, and many hardcore gamers are investing in 8GB (or more) because the price is so low. (A quick glance at the Steam Hardware Survey shows some 60% of its PC survees have 4GB of RAM or more, and over 80% for MAC gamers.)

32-bit gaming is reaching the end of its era; games are advancing fast and hard enough that old 2GB memory caps hard-locked into 32-bit OS’s are giving some issues. To get around that, Windows programs can be flagged as “Large Address Aware” in order to use the full limit of 32-bit RAM—the aforementioned 4 GB, or 3GB if you’re using an older version of WinXP. Most of the Large Address Aware programs require a lot of system resources—PhotoShop CS3, for example—or were games, like STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl, Company of Heroes, and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars.

Given that this is a problem we’ve known about since 2007, I’m still surprised that many AAA-titles and high-end software launch without being Large Address Aware today. Skyrim, for example, wasn’t, so it crawled along only using 2GB of system memory. (Guess which was one of the first major mods out there; an official BethSoft 4GB patch came later.) Before that, people tweaked the .ini files for Oblivion and the Fallouts to accept larger quantities of RAM—Oblivion launched only recognizing 1GB, if memory serves; then again, 2GB was pretty high-end back then.

In short, PC software is reaching the end of an era. The way things are going, clinging to 32-bit architecture is rapidly becoming obsolete, even with the Large Address Aware safety net. A high-end program, be it Adobe Creative Suite or BioShock Infinite, is going to run a hell of a lot smoother if it recognizes more RAM, moreso if it’s been optimized. Games like Skyrim are already pushing the limits of 32-bit technology. 64-bit compatible operating systems, drivers, and software are becoming commonplace enough that the full-on shift will probably/possibly/hopefully start in the next decade. And then—finally—we’ll be able to reap real rewards for 64-bit gaming: more RAM means shinier visuals, higher framerates, better performance.

1. Mirkwood! You want to know a brilliant idea? Start off your three-game Middle Earth RPG line in between The Hobbit and LOTR, in one of the most detailed areas of the world, where Bilbo was wandering around just five years prior. It’s a nice sandbox to play in, a good points-of-light old-school locale, with lots of potential for cool plots, without being in a high-traffic area where the noted NPCs will overshadow the players. And it hits all the basics, containing elves and dwarfs and orcs, ruins, mystery and adventure. For small-scale adventuring and the beginning of an epic RPG trilogy, it’s a good start.
   
2. Feels like Tolkien! The problem with the Middle Earth RPGs that came before is that they weren’t based around the actual themes Tolkien dealt with: long epic journeys, fellowship/the adventuring group as a unified whole, the fine sense of history and scale, lineage and the heroic adventures of prior heroes’ offspring, a high-fantasy realm with high-magic artifacts and creatures but with limited magic use. All of these are here as core game mechanics. Mission Accomplished.
3. No Wizards! Well, Radaghast is around as a deus ex machina NPC, but no playable wizards at any rate.
4. Corruption: Taint and Redemption! Speaking of major themes of Middle Earth translated to core mechanics. See anguish, take part in suffering, travel through tainted lands, and you gain corruption. How do you get rid of it? Make something beautiful ala Earthdawn: roll your Craft or Singing or whatnot to bolster your own spirits.
5. Dice Mechanics! When these were announced, the worry was that they’d be like Warhammer FRPG’s box of inane special bits. Instead, it’s quite simple. The One Ring uses a dice pool (ala Roll-and-Keep or Storyteller or Shadowrun) of d6′s, backed up by a Feat Die (ala the Wild Die of Star Wars d6 or Savage Worlds), in this case a d12. Rolling a 6 on the d6′s gives you a raise, e.g., makes your result that much better if you succeed; the dice pool results are summed, and go up against a base difficulty of 12-14. The d12 is closer to a d10, numbered 1 through 10 with two special sides: a Gandalf rune (auto-succeed) on the 12, and an Eye of Sauron (bad things happen) on the 1. Very slick, and you can use dice you already own. A full set is provided in the slipcase, I’d like to see separate sets for sale.
6. Encumbrance/Fatigue! One of the best systems in gaming for handling this, I kid you not. Running too much, wearing heavy armor, or otherwise exerting yourself in combat makes you Weary, which brings us to the other half of the dice mechanics: while Weary, results of 1, 2, and 3 on the d6′s aren’t counted. Ouch. But at least your high-end results, including the raises from rolling a 6 and the Gandalf rune on the d12, still count.
7. Beautiful maps! I’m partial to cartography, and this set’s strong selling point is the maps. There’s a nice player’s map of the Mirkwood region, along with a GM’s map, showcasing the major features, hex-grid distances, all color-coded to determine how long it takes to travel in one type of terrain or another.
8. The Art Loving Rules! It’s all very evocative of Tolkien’s Dark Ages Europe-esque world, in part because John Howe was tapped for this project. Though, it was Jon Hodgson’s work that made the book shine. All the art on this page is from the interior of the book: vast, mist-shrouded wilderness, like old-school landscapes, showing just how small and insignificantly finite our adventurers are in this ancient land.
9. Dynamic Character Creation! There’s only a half-dozen different faction-races—hobbits, dwarfs of the Misty Moutain, wood elves, Beornings, woodmen, and Bard’s riverfolk—but each has a variety of skill-sets to pick from and assign, various backgrounds, and occupation/callings, which results in a flexible system. Much more “who you are” than the D&D-esque “what you do,” which is nice, with plenty of freedom of choice. I’m hoping more will be added sooner than later, but the base ones cover a range of possibilities.
10. Synthesis of Form and Function! I know number two is similar, but I can’t get over this fact: it feels like The Hobbit. MERP always felt like Rolemaster wearing a Lord of the Rings mask, with its drudgery of charts, deadly criticals, and excessive list of skills. Decipher’s LOTR game was marred by typos, horrible handling of a cash-cow license, and a D&D-esque feeling of “descend into this dungeon, kill that, take its loot.” The One Ring is the first game that doesn’t feel like a variation on D&D, but gives an actual Middle Earth game vibe, in its handling of mechanics, narrative, and combat.

And a few things that aren’t so great, just so I’m not accused of favoritism. Every game I own has at least a few flaws, and this one is no exception.

1. Damn the Simulationist Nature! This is one of those games where skills like Singing and Cooking are actually important. I guess it’s nice that they have mechanical uses, and they do have a place in Tolkien’s books, but is this the kind of thing you really want to bother with in an RPG? Yes, rolling your Cooking makes sense—think of Samwise in the movies—but it reminds me of the ’80s, Rolemaster’s everything-and-its-cousin skill list and AD&D’s nonweapon proficiencies, which were the last places I saw Cooking listed as a skill. Ugh.
2. Lack of enemies! The only adversaries are those which appeared in the books, namely various kinds of orcs, trolls, wolves, spiders, and bats/vampires. That’s about it. Granted, plenty of variety in each type, so they’re perfect for scaling and changing it up, but there isn’t a whole lot of variety. I am glad they left the dragons and balrogs for more applicable supplements. But I foresee encounters becoming very repetitive.
3. Indexing is a bitch! Get used to switching back and forth between the Player’s book and the Loremaster’s book. I’m not exactly sure why they have this terminology, since important rules are spread out between them; other rules are mentioned once, and never referred to again. The worst parts are the rules that aren’t lumped with similar rules, and dumped someplace off the map—sometimes in another book. So it can be hard to find what you’re looking for if you didn’t memorize the books cover to cover.

Those are the only complaints I can drop on this, though, aside from a few niggling nitpicks that aren’t worth mentioning. Cubicle 7 has a GM—err, Loremaster Screen scheduled, along with Tales of the Wilderland, a seven-adventure loosely-linked adventure campaign. I think the game’s strength will be its scale of cumulative slipcase/box set games, allowing a group to run parallel adventures to the novels from the time of Smaug’s death to the fall of Sauron… provided the line has enough longevity and supplements.

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock all winter, you might know these as the two bills which can force content providers (such as social media sites Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube) to pull offending items within five days or force down the site as a whole. (Yep, WordPress and Blogger could come crashing down because some Russian guy has a blog for pirating comic books.)

So, instead, I ask everyone—both of you—to go read this. (Or, alternately, watch this.) Probably the most important piece of internet-control-based literature of late, which accurately looks at the issue of internet censorship. Some snippets:

Right now is as hard as copying will get. Your grandchildren will turn to you and say “Tell me again, Grandpa, about when it was hard to copy things in 2012, when you couldn’t get a drive the size of your fingernail that could hold every song ever recorded, every movie ever made, every word ever spoken, every picture ever taken, everything, and transfer it in such a short period of time you didn’t even notice it was doing it.”

That, right there. The problem with internet censorship bills are that they’re so very shortsighted. In the past decade, memory (RAM) has quadrupled in speed, storage (HDDs and SSDs) have exploded in size, USB 3.0 has transfer rates that would boggle a Windows 95 user, and these cost a fraction of the price their equivalents did. Ten years before that, my parents were using an MS-DOS machine with less RAM than my first video card. How far will technology improve in the next ten years? The next ten decades? And how will you manage to retain the iron-clad value of copyright and prevent any form of copying or sharing without going full-blown Big Brother to compensate in hardware advancements?

And, if you think of protocols and websites as features of the network, then saying “fix the Internet so that it doesn’t run BitTorrent”, or “fix the Internet so that thepiratebay.org no longer resolves,” sounds a lot like “change the sound of busy signals,” or “take that pizzeria on the corner off the phone network,” and not like an attack on the fundamental principles of internetworking.

The rule of thumb works for cars, for houses, and for every other substantial area of technological regulation. Not realizing that it fails for the Internet does not make you evil, and it does not make you an ignoramus. It just makes you part of that vast majority of the world, for whom ideas like Turing completeness and end-to-end are meaningless.

The other big problem. The internet is a universal abstract composed of billions and billions of lines of zeros and ones. You can’t pull out segments here and there like you can in a physical object without marginalizing the masses’ freedom. And at this point in human history, our technocratic culture is so ingrained that any changes will have aftershocks everyone will feel. Particularly if the protection bill in question would allow its overseer to effectively shut down social media like blogs, Facebook, and Youtube if they don’t pull down infringements in time.

Never mind that BitTorrent is commonly used by tech companies and developers to distribute and share large-size files efficiently; Facebook and Twitter both use Torrents to keep their serves updated. Valve and Blizzard sell their games online, legally, using Torrents. And the UK Government used Torrents to distribute tax information details across its offices. At this point the common view sees the system only as a kind of hacker-pirate emporium, so the useful, versatile system will continually be on the chopping block.

In fact, the Motion Picture Association of America, a SOPA proponent, circulated a memo citing research that SOPA might work because it uses the same measures as are used in Syria, China, and Uzbekistan. It argued that because these measures are effective in those countries, they would work in America, too!

And the big reason why SOPA/PIPA is being fought tooth and nail by everyone from conservative lawmakers to left-wing bloganistas: to prevent another round of VHS/Betamax home-taping and mix-disc CD burning, we need to turn to the tried and tested Great Firewall of China method. Because this is the only way to preserve the sanctity of Top 40 hits, reality TV, and Ashton Kutcher movies.

Why might other sectors come to nurse grudges against computers in the way the entertainment business already has? The world we live in today is made of computers. We don’t have cars anymore; we have computers we ride in. We don’t have airplanes anymore; we have flying Solaris boxes attached to bucketfuls of industrial control systems. A 3D printer is not a device, it’s a peripheral, and it only works connected to a computer. A radio is no longer a crystal: it’s a general-purpose computer, running software. The grievances that arise from unauthorized copies of Snooki’s Confessions of a Guidette are trivial when compared to the calls-to-action that our computer-embroidered reality will soon create.

People tend to think of computers as the magical idiot boxes from which they can browse the web and check email. Not trying to typecast, but I’ve met numerous people who fit the “stupid techie stories” mold and confuse FireFox for an operating system. Even tech-savvy people have problems explaining, say, the difference between Windows and a Linux distro to a layman. In reality, unless you’re too poor to upgrade and use hand-me-downs, chances are many of your household devices have microchips in them. Your car probably has one, if it was made since the mid ’80s. Most modern heavy-lifting utilities you buy at Best Buy have them, such as washing machines, dryers, dishwashers, and refrigerators. The obvious examples include Smartphones, some dumbphones, iPods, your video game consoles. And even less obvious devices—your grandad’s hearing aid, your radio, your digital camera.

Consider the precedent of allowing a bill to pass which allows private organizations to monitor your computer use and data, and blacklist access to certain areas—worse, access to certain devices because somebody mishandled them—and the wheels of doubt start turning. For all we know, these could be the quiet and beneficent overlords watching carefully in the background to arrest only the black hats and make the world a safer place. On the other hand, these are the guys who tried to ban home taping in the ’80s, and arrested old ladies for pirating scads of rap and indicting twelve-year-olds and the deceased. And don’t forget, who claimed in 2007 that ripping your own CDs to your own computer is illegal. That’s right. You’re only renting the right to play those discs, not owning the actual content or the rights to use them how you wish.

I’m reminded of this old video; Web 2.0—and whatever will replace it—has already fundamentally altered our connectivity, our level of technical intertextuality, and has opened a can-of-worms discussion about freedom of information and copyright. The average computer user is young, tech-savvy, and connected to dozens of social media sites. Their average blog, Tumblr, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube page, Google+, Flickr, … forum profile… all of these interact with copyright in some way, be it an avatar, images, a photo-collage, playing Yakety Sax in the background of that video of their Pomeranians on ice. Considering we’re descendants from the generation who home-taped their favorite songs or TV shows, these developments should come as no surprise.

As the video says, we need to rethink copyright, authorship, identity, governance, privacy… the internet is only going to strain copyright governance further, and these tough issues and concepts have been called into question. Our old definitions no longer function in this world of a high-tech, fast-moving, free flow of information. And the future is anyone’s guess.

No, what I really hate about modern fantasy novels is their low quality of writing. Fantasy fans may vehemently disagree with me here, fantasy is one of the most denigrated genres within the genre-fiction ghetto. And in some cases, there’s a reason for that. Every now and then I’ll get a recommendation for a new fantasy novel, another five-star bestseller, and half the time the result is disappointment—due to the author’s inept prose, trite dialogue, flat characters, stock plot, flaccid developments, overuse of description, the author’s disturbing rape/torture fantasies, etc.

(I donno, maybe my tastes are too specific and I’m too hard to please. Lord knows I’ve had enough writing workshops, which are death on trying to read anything without a mental red pen in hand.)

So, when I see a capable, objective, coherent review that negatively criticizes a bestselling fantasy novel, I take note. (In part because far too much criticism comes from fictionalized fan-base infighting.) This would be Liz Bourke’s review for Michael Sullivan’s Theft of Swords; Sullivan was a big hit self-publishing his own work, and Theft collects his first two self-pub’d novels under the banner of an actual publishing house. By contrast, of the 45 Amazon reviews, only five are three-star or less.

At this point, whatever opinion I’d have had otherwise, the fanboy commentators have told me everything I need to know. What happens when someone has an opinion different from your own? Why, there must be something wrong with them. Let’s insult the reviewer, some kind of female historian intellectual who failed to objectively review even though she used objective data. (My personal favorite: taking quotes “out of context” makes any author look bad—of course, that’s exactly why I do it on my book review blog… not.) Two things strike me:

1. Objectively – I do not think this word means what you think it means.
2. To paraphrase Yahtzee: the objective for a critic is to critique, not put people’s balls in their mouth for a living.

This, as a whole, is my problem with the fantasy genre today. The review includes a number of “bad writing” examples which exceed anything I can pull out—”His father is a chivalrous knight of archaic dimensions. (p. 174)” is killer.

But more than that, my problem is with the fans; not just the stupidity in the comments section, but the fact that this is a bestseller. People continue to buy, defend, and propagate bad high/epic/fantasy works. It feels like the specific elements, the aesthetics and world-building and story arc, are promoted at the cost of quality and originality—in other words, popularity isn’t based on the novel’s merits but by its degree of catering to the genre’s tropes. That can’t be good for the genre.

To subvert this old article, which I more or less agree with: familiarity is what’s wanted, but only that which is familiar within the fantasy genre. And people wonder why fantasy is often so denigrated.

I have fond memories of building my first two computers, and my dad’s, which are almost sepia-toned nostalgia at this point. While I got most of the parts from a local specialty store—which offered great service and cut-rate prices—I remember going into now-defunct places like CompUSA and Circuit City to pick up odds and ends. The stores were nearby, and there’s only so much difference in PCI adapters or 56k modems or 80mm case fans. Now, unless you’re buying some piece of crap off the Best Buy showroom floor, the go-to places for computer hardware are online: NewEgg and Tiger Direct.

Less fond are my memories of building computers for friends. Well, Keving’s was kind of fun, because he bought pizza, and we got to mock him for trying to use the case’s feet pegs to hold the motherboard on. My ex-roommate’s computer was an object lesson in futility; we outlined a solid list of components, and he decided to cut costs at the last minute. (When he said “a $500-700 computer,” he’d meant apparently meant $525 and not a penny more.) Hilarious hijinks ensued. When I’d suggested a case, I’d double-checked to make sure the motherboard would fit. When he downgraded both case and motherboard, one was too big and the other was too small. (Guess which was which!) Also, to quoth Rich as he wildly waved the case’s side around, making a sound much like an aluminum foil rainstorm, “I’ve wrapped meat in stronger material than this!”

The lessons learned included “Always fill out an RMA and mail things back within days, not weeks,” and “Never buy an open-box motherboard on the off chance some dipshit failed to overclock it correctly and burned everything out, no matter how much cheaper it is to buy an open-box AssRock.” And unlike Keving, he didn’t even pick up some pizzas.

So file this post under “man, times have changed”/”kids these days.”

Processors!

Traditionally, I’m an AMD fanboy. My first gaming computer had an Athalon CPU, because it blew the Pentium III out of the water performance-wise and cost $110 instead of $199. My long-haul gaming rig had one of the first AMD 64 CPUs, which was an early FX chip—the line made for gaming enthusiasts as a Pentium 4 EE killer—at that. When I built desktops for my dad, a friend, and my roommate… yep, all solid multi-core AMD 64′s.

So it should be pretty damning when I went with Intel over AMD. Intel’s had a solid winning streak for a while now, with their Core i3/i5/i7 chips offering solid performance, particularly at the high end, for not a whole lot of money. AMD’s Phenom IIs were (more or less) comparable in both price and performance, keeping the balance of power if not AMD’s original performance advantage. But somewhere it all went wrong.

AMD’s next-gen chipset, Bulldozer, looked to be hot stuff: an eight-core, 3.6 Ghz processor with multi-threading that broke the Guinness world record for overclocking (an astounding 8.4 Ghz!). But its actual performance is disappointing and unpredictable. Unless you’re overclocking or doing high-end video or software rendering, performance will fall behind the higher-end Phenom IIs. Intel’s capable processors from last year, the i5-2500k and i7-2600k, continue to offer the best price:performance ratio, especially since they overclock like pros.

AMD has a strong road-map for the architecture, hoping to improve performance by 10-15% with each successive yearly release. If that’s true, their next release, Piledriver, might actually surpass the Phenom II and Intel’s i5 and i7 CPUs…. processors from last year which sell for a good chunk of change less than Bulldozer. Bulldozer has a lot of potential in its multi-threading, as proven by its solid performance for video work and rendering, but Piledriver has a lot of catching up to do to make the architecture competitive for gamers.

Hard Drives!

When I bought my two Terrabyte external hard drive a year ago, it cost a measly $85. Internal drives were dirt cheap: a one Terrabyte SATA HDD cost around $50 for example, and I’m talking about 7200 RPM drives from Western Digital. When I picked up 160 GB internal hard drive now, it cost around $80.

There’s a lot of complaints about price-fixing and gouging, but there’s a a more realistic reason. The 2011 monsoon season wracked Thailand, including its industrial parks, which would be where most hard drive manufacturers and component suppliers have work sites. And with the second-largest producer of hard drives out of commission, prices spiked. In under a month, prices for hard drives doubled to tripled, and they’ve yet to climb back down. Unless your need is critical, give it some time before picking up another one so that the price can stabilize closer to reasonable.

It’s also worth mentioning the advantages of SSDs (solid-state drives), which are much faster and efficient, if expensive. The lack the mechanical moving parts of a hard drive, thus don’t need to spin anything up to write or read, and store info in microchips like USB flashdrives… only much, much faster. Some newer ASUS z68 motherboards, particularly with the Intel Core Smart Response Technology, can use SSDs as a cache for information stored on HDDs for a performance enhancer.

RAM!

Maybe it’s because I bought so much RAM during the price-fixing years, when 2 GB of DDR1 cost just shy of $200, but memory prices today are more than dirt cheap. They’re just giving memory away. A solid set of 8 GB RAM from someone like G.Skill or Corsair costs around $50, which feels ludicrously low; at this point, there’s absolutely no reason why you shouldn’t pick up more if you have the slots free.

But only if you’re running a 64-bit OS: 32-bit operating systems can only recognize 4 GB at most, and for earlier versions of Windows XP, only 3 GB. It’s also worth noting that I’m talking price for DDR3, which is incompatible with older machines (and visa versa; if you haven’t upgraded, most likely you’ll have to pay an arm and a leg for DDR1, or somewhat less for DDR2).

Lastly, as an example of why not to buy parts from big-box retailers… I made the mistake of glancing into Best Buy, where 4 GB of their shitty PNY memory costs $54. Compared to what I got off NewEgg, half as much for slightly more. They did have mad deals on case fans and canned air, however.

Graphics Processors!

Call it a video card or GPU, it’s the thing that lets your computer interact with your monitor (unless you have onboard video) and powers your gaming experience. Much like with CPUs, things have stuck with two major supplies, in this case nVidia and ATI.

AMD bought out ATI a few years back, and redesigned their line of Radeon cards to offer more performance bang for the buck. The HD 4850 and 4870 were solid cards offering performance equal to nVidia’s contemporary 8800 and 9800, only for a lot less money. This was followed up with their 5850 and 5870 cards, high-end performance killers.

Sadly, ATI hasn’t been able to capitalize on those gains; while they’re still seen as the more cost-effective choice for low-end and midrange PCs, especially with two cards installed using CrossFire, nVidia remains the reigning champ in terms of high-end performance and popularity. ATI cards continue to have weird bugs and glitches, which doesn’t help things. While it mostly boils down to specific price-points and personal brand feelings, it’s hard to argue against nVidia’s market dominance.

A quick glance at the Steam hardware survey shows that around 60% of PC users go for nVidia cards. Though, interestingly enough, the aforementioned ATI 48XX and 58XX series are all in the top twelve. While my 4850 is a great choice, if it died tomorrow I’d probably jump ship back to nVidia and get a new GeForce GTX.

BIOS!

Here’s one for you.

If you’ve ever done a lot with computers, either in terms of upgrading new hardware, installing/upgrading an OS, or doing basic maintenance, you’ve probably seen the BIOS screen more than a few times in your life. It hasn’t changed much since the days of DOS: basic ASCII graphics, simple keyboard controls, overwhelming blue screen with all the input needed to change the boot device or configure power management.

As a matter of fact, there it is!

That’s all a thing of the past, now. The last decade saw the development of the UEFI, or Unified Extensible Firmware Interface; after its antecedent, EFI, appeared on Macs and a few oddball Windows machines, UEFI is set to become a common feature of PCs replacing BIOS on the motherboard itself.

The new UEFI technology is an OS-firmware interface, which boils down in non-tech talk to mean “an interface to manage PC boot and runtime services.” You know, the same things BIOS always handles. What’s changed, though, is a lot.

ASUS shows us our beautiful new technological future... and it is glorious.

First off, it’s a graphical interface, so it looks like something we should be using in an age of 64-bit computing. Amongst other things, it has realtime information such as temperature, processor and fan speeds, memory size, and voltages—if you’re doing repairs/upgrades, things you might like to see in the first ten seconds of booting. Aesthetics aside, it also handles mouse support, probably its most useful feature. There’s also quick and easy boot device priority sections—click and drag around your boot devices—along with automated performance tweaks. And that doesn’t even delve into the advanced menu, which handles everything from automated overclocking to automated BIOS flashing (firmware updates).

Minor changes, compared to advances in memory, storage, or processors, but helpful and welcome ones at that… it’s simplistic, easy to use, and looks like something designed in this century. Probably its biggest advancement is increasing the limitations of hard drive partition sizes to the futuristic-sounding 8 Zebibytes; BIOS had a limit of 2.2 Terrabytes for a Master Boot Record partition, which means your future machine with a 3 Terrabyte hard drive can only be recognized with a UEFI.

Poasting will continue when technical difficulties conclude.

The One Ring, released this last October, is the latest attempt to make Middle Earth into a viable roleplaying game. You could ask whether or not we need another Middle Earth RPG, since we have I.C.E.’s MERP and Decipher’s Lord of the Rings, but unless you’re a huge fan of either of those you’ve probably already answered the question with a “yes.” MERP was a copy of Rolemaster with Middle Earth setting details slapped on; Decipher wasn’t terribly knowledgeable about roleplaying games, and their product line shows: the books were passably solid but not exemplary, and support for the line bottomed out sometime shortly after the Two Towers sourcebook was released. (It was also focused more on the movies than the books, which may or may not be a bad thing.)

Whether or not we need another high-fantasy elfs and goblins RPG is another question, Epic Pooh and China Mieville and all; I still like Tolkien’s (and pre-Tolkien) novels to the subsequent fantasy genre, and make an exception in my general dislike of traditional fantasy for a couple of reasons. (The big one being that Tolkien wrote a myth, the end-all of Northern European mythic cycles to be precise, while everyone since writes in the genre known as fantasy. Then again, I also love The Iliad and Norse fables and the like.) YMMV.

In any case, The One Ring, Cubicle 7′s newest RPG. (It goes well with Starblazer and Doctor Who; they should have some “Imported from Britain” sticker on there for their outsourcing of European nerddom to America.) It’s written by Italian Francesco Nepitello, who knows his Middle Earth better than most. And while it’s another of those dreaded indie storygame RPGs, the influence of traditional games is immense: I can see running it either as a high-end tactical trad game (with some homebrewing to the combat) just as well as a storygame.

So far I’m liking what I’m seeing. Unlike previous Middle Earth attempts, the game adheres strictly to Tolkien’s style and world, meaning there’s no playable wizards for one. It also tries to make game mechanics out of some of Tolkien’s themes. Travel, for one; the included maps are used to determine just how long it took to get from one adventure to another. Lineage for another; after a player’s hero is “retired,” they can continue their story using that hero’s offspring, which is pretty cool. And while there are no magic-users, artifacts do exist, much as Bilbo and the dwarfs stumbled into a cache of magic swords.

The setting is Mirkwood, the wild expanse of forest and lawless orc-infested land depicted in The Hobbit. Take your old-school D&D wilderlands/points-of-light setting and turn it to eleven; safeholds are few and far between, the going is treacherous, and various enemies lurk in every corner. Plenty of room to explore and adventure in, and the books are littered with interesting story-seeds and plot hook ideas.

The dice are an interesting feature and selling point; you get a number of d6s and a d12, which you roll in a dice pool of sixers (equal to skill rating) with the d12 as your wild/action die. Rolling a six on the d6s gives you the equivalent of a Raise, making the result that much better. The d12 is actually a d10 with two special sides: a Gandalf rune, acting as an auto-success, and an Eye of Sauron, which isn’t quite an instant failure, instead making the result interestingly bad.

So, you end up rolling a bunch of d6s (up to six) plus the d12 against a base difficulty of 14, which can be a stretch on 3d6. Skills are divided under three attributes; you can add the related attribute’s total to the dice-roll total by spending a Heart point—something like a cross between Willpower and FATE points—if you don’t think you rolled high enough. (Otherwise, attributes don’t do that much.)

Combat is very streamlined, and though it’s not as tactical as it could be, it’s meaty in its own right. It revolves around the abstract of choosing a combat stance, which modifies physical aggressiveness and placement. So, not tactical in the maps-and-minis way, but a fine balance of choosing your balance of offense/defense. It’s also worth noting the game’s amazing encumbrance system: exhaust yourself, carry too much heavy weapons/armor, and suddenly you’ll find yourself Weary. When Weary, rolling any 1′s, 2′s, and 3′s on the d6s aren’t counted in your total. Dayum.

If you'd rather not suffer from eyestrain, you can download the sheet from the Cube 7 website.

Character creation is simple, yet flexible. You choose from one of six races—hobbits, dwarfs of the Misty Mountains, wood elves, wildermen, Beornings, and Bard’s riverfolk—and then pick your background (which provides skills and abilities), some more skills, some favored skills (and favored attributes, which raise the bonus provided when you spend that Heart point to boost favored skills), and lastly, pick from one of five callings—slayer, treasure hunter, scholar, wanderer, or warden. Which also provide you with benefits and new options.

It may sound limiting as a class system, but trust me, it’s not; there’s a lot you can build from all the options, and it gives a great feel of “who you are” rather than the D&D-style class feel of “what you can do.” That said, I’m hoping for a companion or something that adds in more races, backgrounds, and callings.

The One Ring comes in a slipcase for $59.99 (cheaper on Amazon!), containing two softcover rulebooks totalling 336 pages, two 22″ x 17″ mini-poster maps, and a tray of dice—six special d6s and a special d12. It’s a tad on the expensive side, softcovers and all, but it looks loving beautiful, and I’d say it’s totally worth the price I paid… which was negligible thanks to my Amazon gift certs and the fact they only charge $37 for it.) If you’re a Middle Earth fan, and don’t mind looking outside the D&D box… give it a shot. It’s the most Tolkienesque Middle Earth RPG so far.

So, it’s been a dog’s age since we’ve seen a DDM release, with Wizards canceling the line in 2010. Pathfinder Battles should see a release in January, unless there’s yet another delay, but I’m on the fence here: I don’t need more basics like wolves and goblins, I stocked up on those back in 2006, and I always liked the soft plastic DDM figs better than the hard plastic and shittily dull computerized paintjobs of Wizkids. But I have a dearth of big figures, missing all the trolls and ogres in the later packs, and the black dragon doesn’t have those asinine handlebars like in 3.5, so I’ll probably pick up as many larger figures as possible.

Besides, who else but WizKids is making prepainted plastic figs these days? Reaper’s about the only other contender for 1″ tactical RPG figures.

Anyways, Tenandys was cleaning house and thrust a box of random crap at me for cut-rate prices. In this case, a veritable crate of Mage Knight figures. With the assumption I could rebase these, repaint them, and use them for RPGs. I already have several dozen Dreamblade figures I’d bought, meaning to cut them down for D&D use, so this isn’t as random as it could be.

There’s a lot going for repainting and rebasing these old figures: there’s a number of awesome sculpts, there’s plenty of basics that DDM took forever to supply, and most of all, they’re cheap. Cheaper than a case of DDM at this point (at the end of 2011, most go in the hundreds of dollars), and a case of Pathfinder Battles goes for $250-275. Reaper’s prepainted plastics cost $5-8 each, which might give you one huge dinosaur or a handful of kobolds. Plus, it’s something to do, and if you like painting that’s a natural add-on.

If you’re not in the loop, rebasing useless old figs has turned into its own cottage industry in the past few years.

So, needing a time sink, I thought I’d do a set of how-to guides on them while I’m at it.

Tools You’ll Need

• An Exacto knife. Any type will do, but the best is one with a removable blade that you can attach a chisel blade, to debase Mage Knight figs, and then a cutting edge for Dreamblade or whatever. Also, slipping a razor blade under the feet and pressing from there works, and people have done this all the time, but if you’re not careful that’s just an accident waiting to happen.
• A towel. To put between the figure and your hand so you don’t cut yourself, and when you inevitably cut yourself anyways, something to mop up all the blood. Go for the kind of nice, thick, wide hand towel you use in the bathroom or kitchen; you want something bigger than a washcloth in both size and thickness (trust me) but something more manageable than a beach towel.
• Old Obsolete Miniatures Games Figures. Mage Knight are a prime contender, since they were mass manufactured, but there’s also Dreamblade, World of Warcraft miniatures, and if you want to get ambitious in searching for use, HeroClix. You can get a lot of a hundred or so figs for ~$40-70 on eBay, or can run around hunting for boosters of these if’n you want. Or you might have some on hand, or know someone who wants to get rid of them. Who knows.
• Bases. Something to stick all these figures on once they’ve been popped off their crappy bases. You’ll need a bunch of 1″ (25mm) bases for Medium figures, and 2″ (50mm) ones for Large figs. Some people use washers, others opt for round or square wooden bases. A few crazy people take cheap and worthless DDM/Star Wars Minis and cut them off their bases, but those minis are only going to go up in price. Gale Force 9 sells magnetic ones, if that interests you. Normal plastic ones can be found in the Games Workshop bitz bins at sites like The War Store and Spikey Bits in lots of 20 for ~$3. Or you can get 30 for $5 at Wargames Factory.
• A Chair and A Table of Decent Height, to sit in and do this work on respectively. Should be a no-brainer. I’d also say to lay down some newspaper to catch all the little plastic bits that might break off/get cut off, especially if it’s at a table you eat at frequently.
• Band-Aids for when you cut yourself. Not fucking around, if you haven’t worked with miniatures before—as in, anything more complicated than “take them out of the box”—take it slow and careful. Even if you’re used to assembling Warhammer figures, don’t forget, here you’re prying things off their bases, not assembling them; the knife’s natural inclination is to keep going after it’s cut through or otherwise found an open space, and that direction most likely will involve fingers—the things holding the miniature unless you’re paranoid and used a vise grip.
• Other Supplies depending on how far you want to take this. If you want to paint them, pick up a few basic brushes—say, a 0 and a 1 for most of your work, a 2 for doing broad drybrushing and washes, and a .5 or smaller for doing eyes. And some paint pots, namely the basic ROYGBIV rainbow, a shit-ton of more earth tones and flesh colors, and at the least some silver, if not more metallics. (Actually, a learn-to-paint starter kit will have most of this, plus instructions.) Sealant, and  primer if you’re hardcore about painting for scratch. And you can get a variety of flocking from your local Train Store.

Next time I’ll actually get into the grit of the project, and move on through choosing, acquiring, debasing, mounting, and the basics of painting.

The way d20 experience works structures encounters so weird as to be silly: for a first-level party, it breaks down to fighting a dozen orcs two at a time, give or take. Hardly a threat when the PCs can outnumber and surround their foes. (The “maximum” challenge, APL+3, is what, eight orcs at second level? That would ruin the players.) By the time the PCs can survive fighting a mob of orcs—say, third or fifth level—the orcs are so underpowered as to make the fight laughable.

I remember a “fight” in Legacy of Fire with nine third-level rogues against four 6th-level characters; the rogues could only hit if they rolled a crit. And during the last batch of RPG Superstars that I paid attention to, the contestants all got flak because they populated their 5th-level dungeons with pairs and trios of CR 2-3s, fights that would make the most unprepared, unoptimized characters shine. That’s neither challenging nor making proper use of d20′s tactical abilities.

And it’s a very inflexible arrangement, too: you can’t try to modify within the system, but would need to totally revamp it to make changes. Throwing a dozen orcs against the PCs will either slaughter them or have them to level up too quickly, depending on their level, causing the RAW leveling to break down. (I said this tied in to yesterday’s post.) Granted, it’s a common occurance to modify what exactly a challenge for your APL is—the Paizo staff will point out that they change encounters to challenge PCs in their home games—but at that point, it’s clear that encounter balancing and tracking needs a makeover.

The irony was back in 2nd Ed, a fight with twenty orcs was a staple fight, but it was boring as hell and only gave you a few dozen XP. 3.x opened the floodgates on tactical options—flanking, aid another, combat maneuvers—which makes for more satisfying tactical combat. But the system is built for a party to fight fewer opponents than before, otherwise the PCs level too quickly. I long for those epic battles, to utilize the d20 tactics and D&D’s wargame heritage, and have ended up having one in the last two Adventure Paths I’ve run. (In both cases, the PCs had a large complement of NPC support; even without that, they’d have trumped the expanded encounter, another reminder of how out of whack CRs are with mobs of lower-level enemies.)

Challenge Ratings were supposed to be an accurate gauge to balance encounters, but in the end, gauging challenges relies most heavily on the GM knowing how much their group can take: how well they work together, their level of optimization, their reserves of scrolls and potions and get-out-of-death-free cards. There’s a lot of factors which CR/APL/ECL doesn’t take into account: larger parties can take and deal more punishment, richer parties are harder to hit and deal more damage, higher-level parties are less susceptible to poison and disease.