I read this a while back, and I'm behind on saying anything about it . So sue me. Basically, I need to take a break from Greg Bear. That's not a complaint, by the way. This book was actually way better than Vitals and I think Greg Bear is a good writer. If anything, Eon and Eternity were so good that my expectations were too high when I went on to read more of his books (those were not the first books of his that I read, but they were the best ones).
Hull Zero Three is a sort of mystery story set aboard a giant ship floating in space. The narrator experiences arriving at the ship's destination planet, where he is one of the colonists that was preserved for the long voyage—and then he wakes up from his dream and he is on some sort of nightmare ship filled with killer monsters and he has no idea what is going on. Greg Bear has a tendency, which I first noticed with "Prufax" and that is conspicuously absent in his best stories, of delivering exposition in a way that is vague and that does give the reader details, but not in a way that creates a gripping story ("Prufax" is the longest and by far the worst story in The Wind From a Burning Woman and, if I remember correctly, it also received some awards and was critically acclaimed). Hull Zero Three does suffer from that problem a bit, but ultimately recovers. I stumbled across Eon and now I've come to the conclusion that Greg Bear is a prolific writer that puts out material worthy of publication, but that does, under the right circumstances, write truly great books. I wasn't disappointed, but I wasn't particularly impressed either, and I have decided that I need a break.
Tuesday, September 18, 2012
Patriarch Set
I don't have a screenshot this time, because for some reason, the method I used to get screenshots in the past stopped working. When I tried to use "print screen" all I got was a black space. It's too bad, as this character was wearing the full Trang-Oul's set, so he looked very different from most characters. The rest was pretty standard. Baal in the Worldstone chamber, collapsing from my awesome might. Oh, and my character also had an Act II mercenary and a Fire Golem. That's about it.
This was my first poison necro. I later started what I intend to be a more melee-based necromancer with Poison Dagger and enough gear for a strong physical damage attack. That necromancer, Nergal, will have a similar skill distribution, but I'm justifying the repeat as being different enough as an archetype: a melee necro. Set's archetype is poison necro. Well, that's the plan anyway. Nergal isn't very far into the game yet. Set isn't necessarily the typical poison necro, but I really wanted to use the Trang-Oul's set and a poison necro seemed like the best choice.
Poison is a common immunity for monsters. Like most of my characters, Set played exclusively on the /players8 setting, so monsters, and especially ones immune to poison, would not go down easily. I employed a number of methods for dealing with this. Set's switch weapon is a Grief phaseblade. A few swings with that procs a high level Venom, which massively increases the damage of Poison Dagger. Even monsters with tons of health will melt under the power of that much poison, assuming they aren't immune or extremely resistant. The phaseblade can also be used to attack, preferably with Amplify Damage or Decrepify. It doesn't give the damage output of a fully dedicated melee character, but it works. The Trang-Oul's set gives fire skills, with Fire Wall in particular being a strong skill. Most importantly, I invested several points in Lower Resist, ultimately maxing it at Level 90 (and then when I hit level 91, I had to figure out what skill to put a point into) for a level 31 Lower Resist with +skills. Lower Resist made most poison immunities easy prey for Poison Nova or Poison Dagger and left almost all of the rest vulnerable to fire damage. Poison/fire dual immunities that I could not break were very annoying, but not insurmountable. Let's just say that this character has made me hate the Frozen Tundra.
I think this is one of the more powerful options for a necromancer and gameplay was generally more rapid than with my summoner. The Worldstone Keep was still rather tedious and would have been insanely difficult without Revives. I even died once, which almost never happens now that I know the game so well and twink my characters for domination. The Black Souls in the Worldstone Keep are just that dangerous. I also had close calls with the Ancients (mainly they kept killing my merc and I got annoyed and restarted them). Those were the hardest parts of the game for Set. Baal's minions dropped while fighting Revives and Baal himself at several Poison Daggers punctuated by being slowed into harmlessness by Decrepify. This would have been less difficult and tedious if I hadn't insisted on fighting everything on /players8, but oh well. Also, I got PlugY's Diablo Clone to spawn twice as this character trekked through Hell, and apparently the combination of massive poison damage, Lifetap, and Grief made it possible (albeit not exactly easy) to solo that boss, which was cool.
For those keeping track, which is me, I now have five /players8 Hell Baal clears. In order, there was Shamash, Master, Oberon, Stephen, and now there's Set. That's two paladins, a druid, and two necromancers. I have lots of other characters, some in each difficulty. Because I already have two each of paladins and necromancers, I want to wait on completing any more of those until I get one each of the other classes finished. Of course, that implies that I'll actually keep playing Diablo II long enough to do that. Is that realistic? I have no idea. I don't have an obligation to keep finishing these characters. It's just something that I've casually decided to do, and so far I haven't stopped. I've taken long breaks, focused on other games, and I've even started mods (Median is pretty cool and seems better than regular old Diablo II, and Eastern Sun strikes me as generally being an improvement on the original game). Well, if I do finish any more characters, I'll try to get an amazon, assassin, barbarian, and sorceress all to beat Baal in Hell before I proceed with necromancers or paladins. I already have two characters that have beaten Nightmare and are at some point in the game in Hell difficulty: Artemis, a bow-wielding Amazon, and Isis, a tri-element sorceress.
This was my first poison necro. I later started what I intend to be a more melee-based necromancer with Poison Dagger and enough gear for a strong physical damage attack. That necromancer, Nergal, will have a similar skill distribution, but I'm justifying the repeat as being different enough as an archetype: a melee necro. Set's archetype is poison necro. Well, that's the plan anyway. Nergal isn't very far into the game yet. Set isn't necessarily the typical poison necro, but I really wanted to use the Trang-Oul's set and a poison necro seemed like the best choice.
Poison is a common immunity for monsters. Like most of my characters, Set played exclusively on the /players8 setting, so monsters, and especially ones immune to poison, would not go down easily. I employed a number of methods for dealing with this. Set's switch weapon is a Grief phaseblade. A few swings with that procs a high level Venom, which massively increases the damage of Poison Dagger. Even monsters with tons of health will melt under the power of that much poison, assuming they aren't immune or extremely resistant. The phaseblade can also be used to attack, preferably with Amplify Damage or Decrepify. It doesn't give the damage output of a fully dedicated melee character, but it works. The Trang-Oul's set gives fire skills, with Fire Wall in particular being a strong skill. Most importantly, I invested several points in Lower Resist, ultimately maxing it at Level 90 (and then when I hit level 91, I had to figure out what skill to put a point into) for a level 31 Lower Resist with +skills. Lower Resist made most poison immunities easy prey for Poison Nova or Poison Dagger and left almost all of the rest vulnerable to fire damage. Poison/fire dual immunities that I could not break were very annoying, but not insurmountable. Let's just say that this character has made me hate the Frozen Tundra.
I think this is one of the more powerful options for a necromancer and gameplay was generally more rapid than with my summoner. The Worldstone Keep was still rather tedious and would have been insanely difficult without Revives. I even died once, which almost never happens now that I know the game so well and twink my characters for domination. The Black Souls in the Worldstone Keep are just that dangerous. I also had close calls with the Ancients (mainly they kept killing my merc and I got annoyed and restarted them). Those were the hardest parts of the game for Set. Baal's minions dropped while fighting Revives and Baal himself at several Poison Daggers punctuated by being slowed into harmlessness by Decrepify. This would have been less difficult and tedious if I hadn't insisted on fighting everything on /players8, but oh well. Also, I got PlugY's Diablo Clone to spawn twice as this character trekked through Hell, and apparently the combination of massive poison damage, Lifetap, and Grief made it possible (albeit not exactly easy) to solo that boss, which was cool.
For those keeping track, which is me, I now have five /players8 Hell Baal clears. In order, there was Shamash, Master, Oberon, Stephen, and now there's Set. That's two paladins, a druid, and two necromancers. I have lots of other characters, some in each difficulty. Because I already have two each of paladins and necromancers, I want to wait on completing any more of those until I get one each of the other classes finished. Of course, that implies that I'll actually keep playing Diablo II long enough to do that. Is that realistic? I have no idea. I don't have an obligation to keep finishing these characters. It's just something that I've casually decided to do, and so far I haven't stopped. I've taken long breaks, focused on other games, and I've even started mods (Median is pretty cool and seems better than regular old Diablo II, and Eastern Sun strikes me as generally being an improvement on the original game). Well, if I do finish any more characters, I'll try to get an amazon, assassin, barbarian, and sorceress all to beat Baal in Hell before I proceed with necromancers or paladins. I already have two characters that have beaten Nightmare and are at some point in the game in Hell difficulty: Artemis, a bow-wielding Amazon, and Isis, a tri-element sorceress.
Sunday, September 9, 2012
Cowboy Bebop
I spent most of my evenings over the part few days watching Cowboy Bebop. All of it. Well, not the movie, but I did see that less than a decade ago and can mostly remember it. But the show itself, well, I hadn't seen all of the episodes (probably most of them) and it had been so long that I couldn't remember them that well. So I decided to just watch them all, in order. This might have been partially motivated by my having recently watched the entirety of Exosquad (through a rather convoluted cognitive pathway: Exosquad is inspired by Mobile Suit Gundam, but come on, I'm not going to track down and watch Mobile Suit Gundam right now, but hey, there are other anime things out there that I could watch instead and I've maintained for a while that Cowboy Bebop is my favorite anime, but I haven't seen it all, but I could remedy that by doing so). Anyway, there are only 26 episodes (27 counting the patchwork one they did as closure for the temporary cancellation), so it's not a lot to sit through really (Exosquad is way longer).
Going back to something after about a decade, I wasn't quite sure what to expect. I might have found it to be more flawed than I remembered, or I might have found it to be better than I remembered, or I might have found it to be about the same as I remembered. It ended up being the second of those three: I definitely appreciate the show more now, for whatever reason, than I did back then. A few things stood out enough that I even decided to write this blog post...
The music was even more spectacular than I remembered, which is actually saying quite a lot considering that the show was always lauded for its music and that so much of the focus of the show (the titles of the episodes, the music box motif, etc.) is musical. It's really, really good. The show itself wouldn't be ruined if it didn't have great music, but it certainly wouldn't be as powerful.
The setting is really quite creative and detailed. For a relatively brief show that is focused primarily on bounty hunters trying to track and capture fugitives, a lot of work went into the appearance of the architecture, especially the "gates." I noticed that, when the action was taking place outdoors, it was always so easy to tell (even if there had been no clues in the dialogue) when the characters were on Earth, because Earth, science fiction technology aside, always looked like Earth, and none of the other worlds really did. I even started to recognize some of the other worlds. If the story had been a longer one, with all those details, it would have been natural to become familiar with the key features of all the space colonies depicted in the show (Ganymede looks like this, Europa looks like that, Mars looks like this, Callisto looks like that, and so on). There's even a joke that only works because of this: Jet sets the ship to go to Mars so that they can seek their next target, but Faye resets their course to take the ship to Earth. When Jet steps outside and it doesn't look like Mars, he asks Spike where they are, to which Spike sarcastically says that he isn't sure, but he thinks it's Earth.
Faye Valentine is the most compelling character in Cowboy Bebop. And I almost can't believe I'm saying that. I couldn't believe it when I was watching it. I didn't remember thinking much of her when I saw episodes of the show a decade ago, and even as she made her first appearance, I thought she was a thoroughly unlikable character. She is reckless, selfish, arrogant, and usually oblivious. At first, it almost seems like she's just there to serve as a token female and third person to round out the cast or as a device to cause additional trouble for the other characters to struggle against, only actually solving problems herself if it's through blind luck. But she's easily the most dynamic character in the series (Spike is extremely static as a character, Ed matures a bit but is still rather static, and Jet does develop somewhat as the story progresses, but not nearly as much). The way the audience perceives her character shifts dramatically when she, on a whim, tells the dog a story about how she was awakened from being cryogenically preserved and could not remember her past. From that point onward, new details start to let the audience make some sense of Faye as a character. She doesn't just lie about herself because she's a jerk (she is, but that's not the reason) or a psychopath: she lies to protect herself because she doesn't even really know who she is. She gambles away her money because her oldest accessible memories are of being unfrozen and immediately (through the actions of con artists) stuck with a massive debt that she cannot possibly pay. She is depressed at having lost her past and scared at the prospect of living in a future she cannot understand, so she retaliates by taking an aggressive, manipulative, and slightly hedonistic approach to life. The saddest moment of the entire story isn't when anyone dies: it's when Faye, having refused to have anything to do with a mysterious videotape that might be related to her past out of a fear that it's some debtor's trick to attack her, and refusing to reimburse Jet for the money he had to pay to view the contents of the videotape, leaves the others to watch it and then hides so that she can watch it too (she is a jerk, after all), only to see a message from herself as a child cheering her on and pondering what kind of person she might become, and not being able to remember any of it. In the end, when Spike is going to go to his probable demise against Vicious and the Red Dragon Syndicate, it doesn't even seem tragic. The whole series builds up to it. The thing that forces drama into an otherwise seemingly preordained situation is the reaction of Faye and, to a lesser extent, Jet. Spike isn't afraid to die, but Faye is afraid that she'll lose her best friend (not that she'd ever admit it).
Going back to something after about a decade, I wasn't quite sure what to expect. I might have found it to be more flawed than I remembered, or I might have found it to be better than I remembered, or I might have found it to be about the same as I remembered. It ended up being the second of those three: I definitely appreciate the show more now, for whatever reason, than I did back then. A few things stood out enough that I even decided to write this blog post...
The music was even more spectacular than I remembered, which is actually saying quite a lot considering that the show was always lauded for its music and that so much of the focus of the show (the titles of the episodes, the music box motif, etc.) is musical. It's really, really good. The show itself wouldn't be ruined if it didn't have great music, but it certainly wouldn't be as powerful.
The setting is really quite creative and detailed. For a relatively brief show that is focused primarily on bounty hunters trying to track and capture fugitives, a lot of work went into the appearance of the architecture, especially the "gates." I noticed that, when the action was taking place outdoors, it was always so easy to tell (even if there had been no clues in the dialogue) when the characters were on Earth, because Earth, science fiction technology aside, always looked like Earth, and none of the other worlds really did. I even started to recognize some of the other worlds. If the story had been a longer one, with all those details, it would have been natural to become familiar with the key features of all the space colonies depicted in the show (Ganymede looks like this, Europa looks like that, Mars looks like this, Callisto looks like that, and so on). There's even a joke that only works because of this: Jet sets the ship to go to Mars so that they can seek their next target, but Faye resets their course to take the ship to Earth. When Jet steps outside and it doesn't look like Mars, he asks Spike where they are, to which Spike sarcastically says that he isn't sure, but he thinks it's Earth.
Faye Valentine is the most compelling character in Cowboy Bebop. And I almost can't believe I'm saying that. I couldn't believe it when I was watching it. I didn't remember thinking much of her when I saw episodes of the show a decade ago, and even as she made her first appearance, I thought she was a thoroughly unlikable character. She is reckless, selfish, arrogant, and usually oblivious. At first, it almost seems like she's just there to serve as a token female and third person to round out the cast or as a device to cause additional trouble for the other characters to struggle against, only actually solving problems herself if it's through blind luck. But she's easily the most dynamic character in the series (Spike is extremely static as a character, Ed matures a bit but is still rather static, and Jet does develop somewhat as the story progresses, but not nearly as much). The way the audience perceives her character shifts dramatically when she, on a whim, tells the dog a story about how she was awakened from being cryogenically preserved and could not remember her past. From that point onward, new details start to let the audience make some sense of Faye as a character. She doesn't just lie about herself because she's a jerk (she is, but that's not the reason) or a psychopath: she lies to protect herself because she doesn't even really know who she is. She gambles away her money because her oldest accessible memories are of being unfrozen and immediately (through the actions of con artists) stuck with a massive debt that she cannot possibly pay. She is depressed at having lost her past and scared at the prospect of living in a future she cannot understand, so she retaliates by taking an aggressive, manipulative, and slightly hedonistic approach to life. The saddest moment of the entire story isn't when anyone dies: it's when Faye, having refused to have anything to do with a mysterious videotape that might be related to her past out of a fear that it's some debtor's trick to attack her, and refusing to reimburse Jet for the money he had to pay to view the contents of the videotape, leaves the others to watch it and then hides so that she can watch it too (she is a jerk, after all), only to see a message from herself as a child cheering her on and pondering what kind of person she might become, and not being able to remember any of it. In the end, when Spike is going to go to his probable demise against Vicious and the Red Dragon Syndicate, it doesn't even seem tragic. The whole series builds up to it. The thing that forces drama into an otherwise seemingly preordained situation is the reaction of Faye and, to a lesser extent, Jet. Spike isn't afraid to die, but Faye is afraid that she'll lose her best friend (not that she'd ever admit it).
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