I know I’ve been spamming this blog with game videos a lot lately, and I know that this particular videos is already a bit old, but hot-damn it’s good. I really like the juxtaposition between the young, almost angelic girl, and the warped, crow shaman. There’s a few things that blow my mind; namely the way the crow is suddenly sitting on the playground, like it’s preying on children. And then the way the girl smashes it apart with her light attack, dispersing the shaman in a torrent of crows. Loves it!
Author: Dennis
Unreal Engine: The Samaritan
Below is the recently released Unreal Engine demo film called The Samaritan. It shows a dark, gritty, Shadowrun-esque future where police brutality looks to be relatively common place. Check it out and try not to salivate on yourself.
Shadowrun: Corrosion Lifestyles
Trying to stay true to Shadowrun Third Edition as much as possible, one of the things we’d like to implement in Shadowrun: Corrosion are lifestyles, allowing you to purchase and maintaining a lifestyle that benefits your character in different ways. There’s a wide spectrum of lifestyles, much like in Shadowrun and they offer an escalating amount of benefits.
Below is a small write up of each lifestyle and the basic setup of what benefits they bring.
Cost: this is the initial purchasing cost of the lifestyle.
Upkeep: this is the daily upkeep cost of the lifestyle.
Social: it’s the penalty or benefits you get to social skill checks (Etiquette, Negotiations, Intimidation, etc.)
Ambush: when attacked in PvP it offers a penalty or bonus in avoiding the first, surprise/ambush round of the fight.
DocWagon: when you fall unconscious due to physical damage you are returned to Dixie’s who patches you up. She takes 10% of your money and your reputation goes down and you’re at 9 boxes of physical. This bonus changes things slightly.
Regeneration: regenerating lost physical health is dependent on your body rating, and can take a long, long time to heal. Regenerating lost stun health is usually quite a bit faster, but is dependent on your body or willpower, whichever is higher. This is a bonus that increases your body/willpower in terms of healing by a particular percentage.
Assets: these are money and influence generating things that a crew can purchase/conquer. Each asset has a legal owner, who gets extra benefits on top of the crew benefits. Because a character needs a solid identity to withstand government scrutiny, the higher the level of the asset, the higher the required lifestyle of the owner.
Street Lifestyle
You will live on the streets — or in the sewers, steam tunnels, condemned buildings, or whatever temporary flop you can get. Food is whatever you are able to find, bathing will be a thing of the past, and your only security is what you create for yourself. This lifestyle is the bottom of the ladder, inhabited by down-and-outers of all stripes. But life won’t be all bad; it will be free!
Cost: 0
Upkeep: 0
Social: +3 (penalty)
Ambush: +3 (penalty)
DocWagon: -10% nuyen, -1 reputation
Regeneration: +0% body/willpower
Assets: character can’t own assets.
Squatter Lifestyle
Life stinks for the squatter, and most of the time so will you. You will eat low-grade nutrisoy and yeast, perhaps adding some flavors with an eyedropper. Your home will be a squatted building, perhaps fixed up a bit, possibly even converted into barracks or divided into closet-sized rooms and you’ll probably share that with other squatters. Or maybe you can just rent a coffin-sized sleep tank by the night. You’ll have the use of a public dataterm, when you can find one that actually works, to call or e-mail anyone, and you might be able to pick up a pirate trid station on the trid unit you found in a dumpster. The only thing worse than the squatter lifestyle is living on the streets.
Cost: 5,000
Upkeep: 500
Social: +2 (penalty)
Ambush: +2 (penalty)
DocWagon: -8% nuyen, -1 reputation
Regeneration: +2% body/willpower
Assets: character can’t own assets.
Low Lifestyle
With this lifestyle, you’ll have an apartment and nobody is likely to bother you much as long as you keep the door locked and bolted. You can count on regular meals; the nutrisoy may not taste great, but at least it’s hot. Power and water will be available during assigned rationing periods. Security depends on how regular your payments to the local street gangs are. When you travel, you’ll ride the tube. You’ll be one among the factory workers, petty crooks and other people stuck in a rut, just starting out or down on their luck.
Cost: 20,000
Upkeep: 2,000
Social: +1 (penalty)
Ambush: +1 (penalty)
DocWagon: -6% nuyen, -1 reputation
Regeneration: +4% body/willpower
Assets: character can own a level one asset.
Middle Lifestyle
The Middle lifestyle offers a nice house or condo with lots of comforts. If you choose this lifestyle you’ll sometimes eat nutrisoy as well as higher-priced natural food, but at least the autocook has a full suite of flavour faucets. You will also have a commuter car or first-class tube pass. You will have a basic vidphone, and subscribe to a few cable channels and a local news screamsheet. This is the lifestyle of ordinary successful wage-earners or criminals.
Cost: 50,000
Upkeep: 5,000
Social: 0
Ambush: 0
DocWagon: -4% nuyen, 0 reputation
Regeneration: +6% body/willpower
Assets: character can own up to a level two asset.
High Lifestyle
A High lifestyle offers a roomy house or condo, good food and the technology that makes life easy. You may not have the same perks as the really big boys, but neither do you have as many people gunning for you. Your home is in a secure zone or protected by good, solid bribes to the local police contractor and gang boss. You will have a housekeeping service or enough tech to take care of most chores, and a luxury commuter car is at your beck and call. This is the life for the well-to-do on either side of the law: mid-level managers, senior Yakuza and the like.
Cost: 100,000
Upkeep: 10,000
Social: +1 (bonus)
Ambush: +2 (bonus)
DocWagon: -2% nuyen, 0 reputation
Regeneration: +8% body/willpower
Assets: character can own up to a level three asset.
Luxury Lifestyle
This lifestyle offers the best of everything: ritzy digs, lots of high-tech toys, the best food and drink, you name it. You will have a household staff, maid service or gadgets to do the chores. You will be likely (and expected) to have a powerful car and a big house, a snazzy condo or the penthouse suite in a top hotel. Home security is top-of-the-line, with well-trained guards, astral security and instant response times. Your holophone is SOTA with all the features, multistation trideo, all satellite and cable channels, and subscriptions to several major newspapers and journals. You’ll be on the VIP list at several exclusive restaurants and clubs, both real and virtual. This is the life for the high-stakes winners in the world of Shadowrun: high-level executives, government big shots, Yakuza bigwigs and the few shadowrunners who pull off the big scores (and live to spend their pay).
Cost: 1,000,000
Upkeep: 100,000
Social: +3 (bonus)
Ambush: no ambush possible.
DocWagon: 0% nuyen, 0 reputation
Regeneration: +10% body/willpower
Assets: character can own up to a level four asset.
Any other bonuses we can tie to lifestyles?
Funk
It’s becoming harder and harder to deny to myself that I’ve been in a bit of a funk lately. For the last few weeks now I’ve felt lethargic, lacking in energy and motivation, which hasn’t done me any favours in terms of work, training or Corrosion. Also, I’ve been foolish with the amount of sleep that I’ve been getting, but when I do get enough sleep, I never really feel rested when I wake up. As everyone knows, I’m a big proponent of snow. It started when the snow went away. I’m not sure if there’s a correlation, but there you go.
As a result, I’ve been struggling through my work days, doing things with little motivation, which makes everything take about ten times longer. Work also threw me a curve ball a couple of weeks ago. (Around the same time the snow went away, incidentally. Hmmm.) Right at the start of our bi-monthly release cycle we had a server migration; three or four different servers were going to be rolled up into one, big, power-server. Unfortunately, as my boss is wont to do, he didn’t think it’d be the big train wreck that it turned out to be and assigned me to take care of many of the problems that resulted from the migration. The Law of Escalation Misery also caused all kinds of unexpected related things to snowball into oblivion, so I’ve spent about three or four weeks out of the eight week development cycle trying to take care of these problems, going back to network- and system-admin work that I’ve been trying so hard to put behind me.
Corrosion has suffered because of a general lack of oomph. I’ve been doing little things, here and there, bug fixes, small changes and additions (like the chat system, for instance) but nothing significant and nothing that I’m particularly proud of. Hopefully that will change again because there’s still a ton of things to do, like expanding the magic system, implementing lifestyles (started on that), crews, Matrix, Astral, new missions, finishing The Arena, etc.
I’m also starting to miss Eva more and more. Even though we keep up pretty good contact over e-mail, ping and we Skype once every week or two, I still feel a gap in my social life with her gone. The same goes for Sam; we’ve had ups and downs in our friendship, but before she left things were finally looking up and we were hanging out a lot. Moulsari’s got less time for me because of her blossoming social life, which is something I’m very proud of her for — that and much more — but it leaves me in the cold a little bit, unless it is to be her punching bag when things aren’t going her way, an ungrateful and dissatisfying job, to say the least, but one someone has to fulfill.
Waah waah waah. I guess life throws you a curve ball every once in a while and it’s all about how you respond to it. Well, it’s looking more and more like spring is coming soon, and even though I don’t have my favourite terras friend in the country, life can’t be all bad. :)
iPhone Apps
This is a list of currently installed iPhone applications:
Facebook; The standard Facebook application. I use it quite a bit.
Echofon; this is my Twitter client. I haven’t really used any other twitter clients so I couldn’t say whether it’s good or not. I use it a little bit, mostly when I’m in public transport trying to pass the time, otherwise I’ll use the webclient.
PingChat!; I use this quite a bit to talk to friends who also have an iPhone. I’m not entirely sure why I have it and why I don’t just use WhatsApp instead, since that also covers BB’s and other phones. I guess it’s more habitual than anything else.
MMAFighting; This is a news application that shows the news feed from www.mmafighting.com/mma.fanhouse.com. I prefer The UnderGround’s application over this one, but this one carries more diverse news, like Japanese MMA news.
The UnderGround; This is the main source of MMA news that I read. I snagged it when it was still free and enjoy it quite a bit. I never use anything but the news section of it.
eBuddy; I have to admit that I hardly ever use this. It’s a chat client that combines gTalk, FB chat, AIM, ICQ, YIM and MSN in one client. I hardly switch it on, but when I do I’m pretty happy with it. It remains running in the background when you switch it off, and it also supports the landscape view on the iPhone which is a must for a chat client.
WhatsApp; free SMS’s, just like PingChat!. Since I use these two ping-clients, I don’t send SMS’ anymore and I could probably scale back my calling plan. I’m really happy that it supports BB’s as well, though Eva has an annoying habit of waking me up in the early morning by sending me msgs. :)
Daily Mugshot; This is the client for www.dailymugshot.com but I hardly use it any more and my account is pretty dormant. I don’t think any of my friends really use DMS any more lately, even the real die-hards like Jim kind of stopped taking their daily mugshot.
Speed Test; An application I downloaded once just to see what the speed of my internet connection was on my mobile phone. I don’t really use it.
T-Mobile Belstatus; This was a really cool application to keep track of your minutes and SMS bundle, but now that I use PingChat!/WhatsApp, I hardly look at the status any more since I don’t ever go over my monthly limits any more.
NetwerkRadar; This is a support application launched by T-Mobile where you can do a quick and (very) simple diagnostic on your connectivity and report any problems you might have. Never use it.
Buienrader.nl; If I would give more about whether it’s raining or not, I’d probably use this application more often than I do, which is almost never. I know some people that are addicted to Buienradar, so I’m guessing they might be addicted to this application, too. :)
NS Reisplanner; I’m…not entirely sure I’ve ever used this application. I’m nominating it to get deleted after I’m done with this post.
GVB; This is a terrible application with no practical use. It’s supposed to be an application with all the local public transportation times within Amsterdam, where you can plan trips, lookup departure times, etc. As it stands, it’s getting deleted as soon as I’m done here.
ABN-AMRO Saldo; This wonderful application gives the balance as well as the debits and credits on your bank accounts, which I love. You can schedule or perform payments with it yet, which is a bit of a shame, but I think that’s going to happen some time soon.
SitOrSquat; This application was thought up by a friend of mine, Danika, while she was on a trip to the Netherlands to visit Moulsari. She had been toying with the idea of making a website where you could rate public bathrooms and expanded that idea to include an iPhone application where you could find the nearest public bathroom and leave or read reviews of it. She got quite a bit of national attention with this application in the United States, and has since gone into developing many different iPhone applications and making quite a career out of it, too. I never use it, and downloaded it out of solidarity. :)
Skype; While I don’t think this is going to put telecom companies out of business any time soon, I do think this stuff is the future. With 4G being introduced, I don’t think it’s going to be long before we’re all just making Internet calls to one another. The sound quality is so much better, too!
Pathé; This is a pretty cool application that will allow you to look up the film times for the largest cinema-chain in the Netherlands. I think that you can also make reservations nowadays, but I haven’t tried it yet. It offers descriptions as well as trailers for films.
IMDb; IMDb has been the “go to” website for film buffs for the last ten years or so. This is their application, basically an extension of their website, with film, cast and crew information, including trailers, photos, reviews, etc.
Uitzending Gemist; An online cache of television programs for the three Dutch public televisions channels. Never used it but it might come in handy when I’m abroad and want to snag the last episode of Tegenlicht and don’t have access to a computer. Or something. :)
Shazam; When I first heard about this application, I was intrigued. When I first used it, I was a big fan. Basically, you can use it to record a couple of seconds of recorded music — not live, and you can’t sing it or hum it — and it’ll consult a big online database where it has digital fingerprints of a zillion songs and try and figure out which one it is. It’s like magic. :)
Units; This allows you to quickly convert any measurement into different units. Very handy, though I don’t get to use it very often.
Aji Reader; for a long time I wanted to have a PDF reader so I could carry some of my dorky RPG books around. There were plenty of PDF readers that would read online PDFs (in fact, I think the iPhone has a built-in PDF reader) but nothing that would allow you to download one to your phone and read it from there. I don’t use it much any more, and it’s a little cumbersome on such a small screen, but it’s served me well so far.
Backgrounds; An online collection of backgrounds for the iPhone. Don’t use it often.
Peggle, This is a really great game, very addictive and cute. It’s kind of like rolling Tetris, Bejeweled and Arkanoid all up into one.
geoDefense; Another really simple game and again very addictive. I don’t play this any more so perhaps it’s time to delete it.
SmartGo; Another game, this time it’s Go against the computer. Really difficult.
WoW Armory; The World of Warcraft official Armory application, which allows you access to all kinds of statistics about your character, guild, etc.
Dungeon Hunter; This game is freaking amazing and really showed me the power of the iPhone. It’s basically a simplified version of Diablo, but beautifully done with a rather fun storyline. The only thing I can say in opposition to this is that it’s a bit too short. It took me a few days of casual gaming to finish it.
WoW Authenticator; Another World of Warcraft related application, this time the authenticator, which helps you keep your account secure against spammers and scammers.
Bejeweled 2; Bejeweled, another Popcap game, like Peggle, which is simple, colourful and addictive.
Duke 3D; Somebody was awesome enough to port Duke Nukem 3D to the iPhone and it’s a flawless port! Like with all 3d shooters on the iPhone the controls suck a bit, but the game is completely identical otherwise. I still remembered many of the secret areas, which is a testament not to my memory but to how much time I wasted playing this game.
Cut the Rope; At one point in time this was the best sold game on the App Store. It’s another simple, casual game that requires you to find the Om Nom, a small dragon that was delivered to you in the mail and eats candy. Very cute and very addictive.
Streets of Rage; This is a port of the immensely popular and atmospheric Sega Megadrive/Genesis beat-em-up game Streets of Rage. I love this game and I love the mood of it. I’ve finished it a couple of times now and will probably revisit this game for a while to come. :)
C64; A Commodore 64 emulator with a bunch of games, including one of my favourites; Bruce Lee! Unfortunately, it disallows programming in basic, which would’ve been sweet, but it does have its own app store with games you can download for a small price.
Necronomicon; Some stupid, Lovecraft-based game that doesn’t make any sense to me. I thought I had deleted this app?
Worms; Another great port of a great game. Worms with guns, bazooka’s and exploding sheep trying to murder each other in a 2-dimensional landscape. I don’t know what’s wrong with that! One point of criticism is that iPhone screen is a bit too small, so you spend a lot of time scrolling the screen around, unfortunately.
iSicBo; Sic Bo (a.k.a. Hi-lo) on the iPhone. Basic gambling game.
Entanglement; This is a simple game of connect the lines. It’s simple, fun and you can make it as challenging as you want it to be.
As you can see, I’m a bit of a nerd and I like my computer games. I think the iPhone is an excellent device to port some of the golden oldies to since the screen resolution isn’t very high but the graphics engine can handle quite a bit. I can’t wait to give the port for Warblade a try. :)