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Painting Diary – Chronoscope – Sasha DuBois – part four

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Fancy Pants

This is the fourth diary entry in the ‘Painting Sasha DuBois’ series, parts one, two and three can be found by the simple click of a mouse.

First base coat of trousers and topWith some miniatures (for example, a zombie army you use for gaming) it’s entirely possible to make yourself get on and paint them.  The technique is different, you’re trying to paint them reasonably quickly, and it’s not likely anyone’s going to be inspecting them individually from 12 inches away, but they have to look good at distance as a unit on the playing surface.  So you can forgive yourself short-cuts and missed lines and broad brush strokes (as it were).  However, when I’m painting a miniature I like, and I really want to look good I have to be careful not to make myself progress, because I find that I lose the spark that makes me care about the detail.  If I push it too hard, it ends up looking rushed.  So I barely touched Sasha when I sat down a couple of nights ago (hence the short part three post) and although I’ve made more progress again it’s slow going.

I’d just spent a day painting a mini with blue and scab red and wanted to avoid that exact combination, but I knew I wanted to do Sasha’s coat in the red because it just looked so cool when washed / brushed.  So I went for green on the trousers and top as a nice contrast.  In the past I’ve made the mistake of starting with a base layer that’s too dark.  The issue there is that the wash makes little difference or you have to use a black wash to get any result, and then any amount of dry brushing is just too severe.  So, this time I went with a lighter green base coat with a plan to wash that with a dark green to give it some depth.  I was in two minds about starting with the trouser layer, there’s a tricky bit of work between her legs (no sniggering) where the coat shows through.  There’s a good argument to be made for doing the coat first, since it’s slightly easier to work on the legs and not hit the cloak.  However, if you put a green wash on the legs there’s a chance it’ll run onto the back of the coat, but when you wash the coat due to the layout of the model it’s very unlikely to run onto the legs.  So I went with legs first.

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Painting Diary – Chronoscope – Sasha DuBois – part three

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Best laid plans

First base coatI planned to work on the major clothing areas on the Sasha piece after finishing the eyes for the third part in the diary painting thing (part one here, part two here).  However, if you read my post on inspiration then you’ll know I ended up doing Sasha’s hair.  Hair is one of those funny things, although we talk about it being black or brown or blonde or red, it’s really not those colours and it’s very hard to just simply paint hair.  Harder than you might imagine, so when I find a colour combination that works I’m really quite happy.

While painting the deadly hammer wielding nun in the inspiration article I found that one of the brown paints in the new paint set is really good as a base hair colour, which I then wash with a brown wash and dry brush highlights onto.  It’s really effective.  So once I’d got it looking nice on the nun, I picked up Sasha and did her hair.  That’s it, that’s all I got painted on her in this session.  Sometimes that’s the way it goes, I’ll paint huge areas and get loads done (if I’m inspired) or each section will be a real chore forcing me to keep going (if inspiration is a little lacking that day).

Hair after wash and dry-brushSo, Sasha got her hair sorted, hopefully soon she’ll get some clothing as well.  Her clothes really are quite interesting with multiple layers and lots of scope so I’m quite excited about painting them, but I’m also concerned I’ll screw them out, so I’m probably going to try and get into a bit of a groove by working on other miniatures first / as well.  I find that I get better and re-learn things after a long time away and that a few weeks in my hand is a lot steadier.

Fingers crossed.

You can check out part four here.

Movie Memories: Clash of the Titans

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clashI’ve always been a fan of fantasy and to a lesser extent sci-fi.  There’s something about mythology, heroes, dragons, monsters, wizard and magic that I love.   In 1981 I saw Clash of the Titans at the pictures.  To the best of my knowledge and memory (which, if this series of posts is anything to go by, has been proven to be weak) this was the first film, or certainly one of the very first films, I went to see without immediate family.  So I guess I went with some friends.

I certainly remember feeling grown up, but my lasting movie memory was the opening few minutes.  There was a beach, and along it walked a naked woman.  I couldn’t believe my eyes.  I was in a cinema, and there was a naked woman on the screen!

Titans in the UK had an A rating, which when I started writing this post I thought meant it was suitable for 15’s and over only, but according to Wikipedia’s history of BBFC ratings meant it was ok for anyone over 5 to go in alone, with parental advice that it might contain scenes not suitable for anyone under 14.  So I would have been 10 in 1981 when it was relased.

Of course I loved the mythology and I was scared by the Medusa and relieved when her head was removed and disgusted to find it was in a bag, and then amazed by the mechanical owl.  But mostly, I remember the woman on the beach.

Painting Diary – Chronoscope – Sasha DuBois – part two

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The eyes have it

First thin layer of flesh tone paintThis is the second part in a series of articles covering the progress of a single miniature painting job (Sasha DuBois, Time Chaser).   In the first article I covered the basic preparation of the miniature.  In this article I show you how I can take a perfectly good miniature and ruin it from the outset with a hack skin and face job.  Rather than just include a long line of images near the end, I’ll scatter them throughout the paragraphs, each one has a title which should let you know which stage it’s at.  For full pictures and descriptions you can still check out the Picasa web album.

Once I’d prepared the figure I had a think about basic colour schemes and skin tone.  I’m really uncomfortable painting much other than ‘sun beaten caucasian’ skin, I’ve tried a range of colours in the past from the realistic to the fantastical and either my technique doesn’t suit them or I’m just not able to convert what I see in my head into colour choices and colour application on the final figure, so I went with my traditional skin colour choice.  For the rest of the figure I want something bold and colourful, this is a steampunkish / sci-fi figure and I really want it to be vibrant.

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Painting Diary – Chronoscope – Sasha DuBois – part one

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Introduction

Figure in blister packI wanted to paint something and I also wanted to write some reasonably lengthy and meaty blog posts, so I thought it made sense to combine the two things.  Welcome then to my first painting diary where I’ll cover the process I followed to paint Reaper Miniatures’ Sasha DuBois (part of their Chronoscope line).  The whole article is split up into several parts, and this is part one.

It’s worth saying what this series of articles is not.  They’re not a guide on how to paint, they’re not an example of the right way to paint, they’re not about how you should paint.  What it is, is purely a diary about how I painted this specific miniature.  At the moment, I’ve got no idea how the figure will turn out, I may ruin it, I may give up half way through, I may finish it and hate it, or complete it and be really proud of it.

Along with the blog posts I’ll be updating a Picasa web album with all the photo’s I take.  You can check out all the photo’s in the on-line gallery here.

I was going to track the progress of a space marine I got (for free!) when I bought some paint, because it would be something totally different for me.  I’ve never painted a space marine, I don’t usually paint sci-fi miniatures, it’s male, and it’s fully clothed.  However, I eventually decided at least for my first painting diary (on this platform) that I’d stick partially to form.  Hence the figure is female and is at least partially naked (bare midriff), however it is at least a sci-fi miniature.  So, here we go.

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Lord of the Rings Online – a review – part four

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Welcome to the fourth and last part of my short (yeh yeh) review of the Lord of the Rings Online (you can find parts one, two and three behind those links).  As Grete said while she proof read the third part for me, it’s not really a review, more of an introduction to the game.  Generally I agree, although I could argue it is a review, but not a critique.  Either way, it was a little longer than I expected when I decided to answer Ottaro’s original question.  Hope you found it useful.

4. Other Stuff

There’s the stuff that makes up a game (the content, the system, the graphics) but there’s also the non-stuff or maybe the quantum-stuff which is much harder to pin down which makes a game worthwhile and gives it longevity.  I’ll talk about those things here, I’ll give you a list of all the stuff I remembered I hadn’t spoken about, and I’ll finally (thank the Greek gods finally) wrap up.

4.1 Immersion

A game can’t be totally responsible for your eventual immersion.  People with hectic lives will find themselves being dragged out of the game, or distracted and not able to ‘lose themselves’ as easily as people in quiet households.  Some people find it easier to focus on a single thing and immerse themselves for many reasons than other people.  But a game must certainly take some responsibility for enabling that immersion.  If the game constantly drags you out of the action because of the control system, or if the information on screen is so anachronistic that it constantly reminds you you’re playing a game then it’s always going to be harder to feel fully involved. If the graphics on the other hand are impressive, representative and make you feel like the world could be real, then it’s going to be easier.

Add to this the other players and to a lesser extent the other non-player characters and how they behave.  If the players around you are constantly discussing their mortgage or car purchase in an easy to read channel, or the NPC’s act dumb all the time, then suspension of disbelief becomes harder and harder.

How then does LoTRO rate?  Well firstly you need to remember I’ve played exclusively on a roleplaying designated server, and that means people are pretty keen on keeping out-of-character chat to a complete minimum and limited to the /ooc channel only.  In that respect, it’s very good, people try hard to talk in-character in fellowships or in /say and there’s very little non-IC chat to remind you about the bills you should be paying.

Alongside the well behaved players, we have NPC’s in LoTRO that sometimes call to friends for help, sometimes run away to shoot at you from range and sometimes call you names during the fight, it’s not going to win AI awards but it certainly helps.

Finally, the beautifully rendered world sucks you in, and before you know it you’re staring into fires in Goblin Town feeling the warmth and wondering if that smell is roast pork or maybe, just maybe, somewhere, a Hobbit is being turned into dinner.
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Lord of the Rings Online – a review – part three

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Welcome to the third part of a short review of Lord of the Rings Online that I hope I can keep to four parts.  Parts one and two have come before this one (I like a traditional numbering scheme) and part four is on the way.

3. Technology

With any luck, this part will be short!  The content and system behind an on-line roleplaying game combine to make up much of the overall experience.  Certainly for many players those two things are enough to decide the fate of a game.  However, how the game is actually presented on the screen and how the different technology elements work can also make or break a game for quite a large section of the player base.  That’s what this part is going to talk about.

3.1 Interface

The interface is the window through which we look at the game and the system through which we control it.  Bad interface design has killed games in the past and will sadly kill games in the future.  I freely admit I struggled with the LoTRO interface at the outset.  I was very used to EverQuest after 7 years, and I wasn’t at all sure about changing.  Over time though I have gotten used to it and while there are features which annoy me there aren’t any show stoppers.  Discussing the interface in full detail would take hours and thousands of words, I’m not going to do that so I’ll just give you a general feel for it.

The interface is actually several elements,

  1. how do you control the game
  2. how does the game display information to you
  3. how does the game handle chat
  4. how can you configure those three things to suit you

3.1.1 Control

I’ll handle control first.  Basic movement in LoTRO is pretty standard, cursor keys or WASD for moving around, combinations of keys to look around rather than turn.  You can use left mouse button + mouse to turn and right mouse button + mouse to look.  Holding down both mouse buttons makes you move in the direction your character is facing.  You can mix and match all those combinations.  Anyone who’s played a FPS or a recent MMORPG will find using that control system easy, it’s pretty standard these days.  You can position the camera either floating behind the character (3rd person) or inside the character (so the game is 1st person).  I played EQ in 1st person but for some reason LoTRO works a lot better for me in 3rd person and I’m pretty used to it now.

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Movie Memories: Dead Poets Society

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When Dead Poets Society was released in 1989, I went to see it at a cinema in Newcastle Upon Tyne.  I’m pretty sure it was the Odeon, but there’s a small chance it was somewhere else, maybe the Tyneside Cinema across the road from the Odeon.  I really, really enjoyed the film.  I found it moving, inspirational and it really moved me.

But what I remember most about seeing it is that I cried.  The cinema was packed, so busy that it wasn’t possible to sit with the people I’d gone with.  We all ended up sitting on our own, amid the crowded rows of people.  You’ll note I’m being vague about how many of us there were, because once again, I’m not 100% sure who I was with.  I think it might have been David Sant, or a few of us.  I really wish my memory for people was as good as my memory of the movies themselves, but alas it’s not to be.

Anyway, we were forced to sit on our own as it were, surrounded by strangers.  Once the film got going it wasn’t a huge issue, after all it’s not like we’re going to be chatting to each other, although it made the adverts slightly less interesting.  However, by the time we got near the end which if you’ve seen it you’ll know is highly emotional, tears were streaming from my eyes, I’m man enough to admit it.  I was balling my eyes out.  I was flooding the row of seats.  Which is all the more embarrassing when you’re sitting next to people you don’t know sniffling, and yet also incredibly handy since you’re never going to see them again in your life (most likely).  I remember standing, when it had finished, and trying to get my eyes and face dry before making it back out into the light, so that no one would know I’d been crying only moments before.

That is my enduring memory of Dead Poets Society.

No matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the world — John Keating

Lord of the Rings Online – a review – part two

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This is the second part of what started out as a small review of Lord of the Rings Online and has turned into an epic monster.  You can check out the first part back here, and parts three and four are coming up after this one.  This bit (part 2) deals with the system aspects of the game, i.e. how things work.

2. System

It doesn’t really matter how much awesome content there is in a game, if the system behind it sucks like an open chest wound.  People will only put up with so much pain to get to the content they enjoy.  Systems have come a long way since the early online roleplaying games which extolled the virtues of lots of hard work for small increments in power.  These days developers realise the casual gamer market is just as key to the success of a game, and people with families can’t commit to six straight hours in front of a keyboard every night.  Systems have developed that allow casual gamers to get the most from games but still offer opportunity for complex character development and fine tuning.
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Lord of the Rings Online – a review – part one

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splashscreenOttaro was asking how much I liked Lord of the Rings Online (you can read his comment here), and rather than write a 400 word comment I thought I’d write up a more general review. Only it got out of hand so I’m breaking it up into individual posts.  This is part one which has an introduction and covers the game content.  Part two looks at the system behind the game, part three covers the technology of the game such as the graphics engine, the user interface and so on, and part four provides my overall impressions, a look at the social elements in the game and how immersive I find it.  I reserve the right to completely change all that once I actually write the articles and find I’ve waffled endlessly about something else.

Background

So that you can get an idea of where I’m coming from with this review, here’s some information about me.

I played EverQuest for something like seven years.  I played as a new player who knew nothing, as a player in a big casual guild who sometimes got groups with guild members but often grouped with random people, as someone who ended up in a raid guild one expansion behind the curve, as a ‘hard core’ grouper doing the hardest group content (at one point), as a casual raid-force leader, and all levels in-between.  At one point I cared about the ratio of hit points to AC as a warrior, I cared about the amount of avoidance and shielding I had.  I spent time looking at upgrades and trying to work out how to gain tiny incremental benefits.  I had three maximum level characters (when 80 was the maximum level) and one of them had every useful AA (my warrior) before the last expansion came out.  Eventually I just got tired.

I love fantasy and sci-fi, and I deeply love the world that Tolkien built and the characters he wrote about.  I love the Lord of the Rings story, world, characters and mythos and I have done so since I was 11 or 12.  However, I’m no serious scholar of Tolkien and Middle Earth, so if I think things aren’t in the lore but they are, don’t have me shot.

Before I stopped playing EverQuest (EQ) I’d tried a few other MMORPG’s, EverQuest II (EQII), World of Warcraft (WoW), Star Wars Galaxies (SWG), Guild Wars (GW), Dungeons and Dragons Online (DDO) and Lord of the Rings Online (LoTRO).  I had the LoTRO account for over a year, playing on and off before I finally stopped EQ and LoTRO was not the cause.  I fell back into LoTRO when I wanted a social on-line game and found that EQ was just too much.

I am very much a casual LoTRO player.  I spend some time solo,  most time with my wife and every now and then a little time with a few friends.  Sometimes we group, sometimes we just chat while we all do our own thing.  Before the release of Moria I had a maximum level character (50), but it had taken over 12 months to get there.  I’ve tried all the classes to some level or another and all the races.  I have never raided, and have spent very little time in the elite dungeons (top end content at various levels).  I don’t look hard for item upgrades, when I get gear as rewards I make a snap decision based on which seems best using a bit of guesswork.  I’ve read something like three articles on the web to give me a very basic insight into choosing weapons.  I have very little idea how my character stats compare to other peoples, in fact, I have very little idea what my character stats are at all.

I play on a roleplaying designated European server (the European instance of LoTRO is run by Codemasters, I guess it’s licensed to them by Turbine, this means that we don’t always get all the features, like my.lotro.com for example).  The roleplaying server keeps the number of trolls in the out of character chat down to a minimum.  Although I don’t roleplay in any real sense I do act in-character as much as possible in the /say channel (i.e. the channel which emulates characters talking to those nearby) and if you want lots of roleplaying it’s there for the taking.
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