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Retro Games: Nox

I’m using the term retro pretty loosely to include just about any game over 5 years old. Nox is an action RPG developed by Westwood Studios and released by EA in 2000 for Windows. It plays like most Diablo clones and was fun playing through as the Warrior class (Conjurer and Wizard also available with very minor plot changes), but there were flaws that kept it from becoming anything more than average.

In terms of user interface, the biggest departure from Diablo though is the use of the right-mouse button to move forward rather than just clicking on the ground. The level of environmental interaction is actually quite good and I’d say ahead of it’s time. Tables and chairs are separate from each other, you can kick rocks as you run or knock down walls to discover hidden areas. The problem is you can run into and get hung up on those little objects. If you get caught between a chair and table you can keep running into either one to eventually push it out of the way or you can swing your mouse behind your character to backtrack and find a better path.

Diablo II came out the same year and it seems they tried to copy a bit from Blizzard’s masterpiece without actually thinking it through. All weapons and armor have durability like Diablo II, but the rate of wear and the cost of repair is ridiculous. On top of that there is no handy way to get back to town to repair or replenish health potions; they should have copied town portals too. The best part about RPGs is the loot. Problem was all my best gear was constantly broken (or disappearing because I forgot to remove it before its durability ran out) and I was just using whatever I could pick up.

Nox won’t be getting a repeat play through with the other classes, but it does give some insight into how things have changed in the aftermath of Diablo II. If you’re an action RPG fan then it might be worth playing (let me know if you want a copy). Considering its age I’ll give it a solid 7.

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Post Shared Google Reader items in WordPress

You might be wondering what these “Shared” posts are. Most of my web surfing consists of reading my RSS subscriptions in Google Reader, all 146 of them. On a given day I might find one or two things that I think other people would want to read. Google Reader lets you share items with your “friends”, but there’s no way to have a discussion about the content.

A while back I was trying to figure out a way to share those “shared” items with a wider audience. I stuck a link in the sidebar to my shared item page, but I doubt anybody uses it. What I really wanted to do was have WordPress automatically create posts with a link to the content I mark in Google Reader. The WP-o-matic plugin does exactly what I want.

Setting up the plugin involves creating a CRON job on the server and setting up a feed to check periodically. You can customize the content of the post that gets created; I opted for a little blurb and a link to the content. I wanted to modify the title that gets created which isn’t an available option so I modified the plugin to do that for me. I also set it to save posts as drafts so I can assign a category and tags and maybe some of my thoughts before Google Reader gets a hold of it and caches it forever.

So these shared posts are really the cream of the crop of my subscriptions and I’d love to have people share things they find. I like the fact that whenever shared items show up in Google Reader from my friends they are of high quality and worth the read even though it might be outside my immediate area of interest.

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Diablo III announced

Kurtis beat me to the punch, but here’s my take.

Some games you quickly play through and get tired of. The Diablo series has not been one of those games. Diablo was one of the first RPGs I played on the PC. Diablo II saw many, many, many hours spent playing with friends on Battle.net, probably more than Starcraft and Warcraft combined.

Blizzard just announced Diablo III, go watch the gameplay video and start drooling.

http://www.blizzard.com/diablo3/

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Notes in Google Reader

Just realized you don’t have to subscribe to a feed in Google Reader to share something you find on the Internet. Under “Your Stuff” they added “Notes” a while back. On that page there’s a bookmark you can drag to the bookmark toolbar, click it, add a note and share the note in your Shared items. Highlight text on the page and it will prepopulate the description field with it. If you can’t see my shared items, send me a chat invitation in Gmail; pretty sure that’s the only way to become “friends” in Google Reader. Added a test note of a chart from Ross Perot’s perotcharts.com.

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Inline text box spell checking in Firefox

Firefox 2 added spell checking in text areas, but I just found a little tweak that extends spell checking to inline text boxes. Big help for keeping blog titles and such spelled correctly. Here’s how:

  1. Type about:config in the address bar, hit enter
  2. Filter on spellcheckDefault
  3. Double click the entry and change the value to 2

Also if you haven’t upgraded to Firefox 3 go grab it right now. Lots of memory leaks have been fixed and overall things are much more responsive.