Mods vs. Rocking?

OK, so a really clever title it ain't. But something occurred to me the other day; I don't really play ANY vanilla games anymore.

Not that I play a whole lot of games anyways right now, not with a full-time job and two kids. But I still manage to get an hour or two in a day, and a bit more on the weekends, so I manage to keep my hand in on 4 games. Chances are you've never heard of 3 of them, so let me educate you a bit on them and what freely available mods have done for me.

Going in alphabetical order...Europa Universalis 3. This is a grand strategy game, mostly real-time but with programmable pausing for people like me that have the reflexes of quaalude-addicted sloths. The best thing about this game? The ability to pick ANY country represented in the game on ANY given date between 1453 and 1793. Want to play as Austria? Go ahead! France? Sure! Japan? You bet! Baluchistan? It's in there.

Now, this is cool...but mods make it better. Manga Mundi Gold is a totally free, completely fan-written mod, using the tools that the developers in the game created (this is a theme you'll be seeing a lot of). It GREATLY enhances the original game, adding in a workable and realistic Holy Roman Empire, events about the Protestant Reformation, the Sengoku Jidai, and lots more stuff. It's not perfect, but I can't even imagine playing the game without it now...nor without the excellent graphic mods that I've found as well. And therein lies the curse of the mod: once you've got one, you just can't go back. And if something goes wrong with your game or your system, it's no longer just a matter of plugging in a disk and going to town.

Similarly, Flight Simulator X has the same problem for me. Without the additional scenery and especially the excellent World of AI mods that add almost 200 real-world airline AI's to the game, the world feels empty and lifeless...even though, in it's base vanilla form, you'd never know it. It's the best-populated and best-detailed FlightSim to date...but a few hundred people from around the world, working on their own time, have made themselves irreplacable for the unfortunate ones who find out about them. And I haven't even started on multiplayer yet! When Penny Arcade invites a major commercial game designer to write on their website, and all he talks about is VATSIM, you know there's something really special going on.

Football Manager 2008 isn't affected in gameplay by any mods...but with a new skin, real-world logos for almost every club in the game, and, most importantly to me, stadium background pictures of the home grounds of almost every club, I can't image reinstalling anytime this millenium. Hundred and hundreds of megs of hard drive space devoted to a game that will be updated in a year, and likely made obsolete. I must be insane.

And last, but perhaps the most powerfully...Silent Hunter 4. This is a subsim, based in the Pacific Ocean in World War 2. Now, for this game, there is a HUGE community of modders out there, people who are famous for modifying skins just to get the number of rivets represented on the hull right! These guys are certifiably insane, and, while I use a couple of gameplay mods (namely improved campaign layers), the mod for me that is the most impressive is the radio. Here's how it works.

In the game you can click on the 'radio' button, and, in the vanilla version, generic background music will play, and occasionally, war bulletins will be played over the radio, keeping you up to date as to what is going on. But, and here's the fun bit...it's quite easy to make your own stations.

90% of the users of this game probably toss their own mp3s into the folder and forget about it. But thank goodness for obsessive-compulsives! Thanks to their efforts, with a bit of searching, you can download not just period music...you can download entire radio stations worth of broadcasts, from around the world, all of it cued to the proper dates in the world. It's amazingly immersive to be cruising around the SW Pacific, hearing the static slowly fading out, and fading in, the voices of KLX Los Angeles, reading the lastest bulletin by World News Today (brought to you by Admiral!), or perhaps some Burns and Kelley...maybe even a CBC frontline reporter, speaking over the rattle of heavy machine guns. I've got gigs and gigs of this stuff...and without it, the game would just be a boring exercise, rather than a historical involvement.

And all of this is because the developers had the good sense to leave the tools available in their game. This can be dangerous of course; the Sims 2 and Oblivion are famous for their 'X-rated' content (side note: more nudity in games, no matter how blurry, is ALWAYS good), and a good naked mod is always good for whipping up the outrage. But game developers can't think of everything; in FlightSim and EU3 particularly, the freely and readily available tools are perfect for filling the holes that the developers didn't think of, the holes that 90% of users wouldn't care about anyways...but for that extra 10% who do notice, makes the difference between a good game, and one that destroys your life.

Maybe I didn't really have that much to say about mods...but the realization last week that I don't play any games WITHOUT them sort of struck me as interesting.

Giant Robots. C'mon, you think we come like this STOCK?

Of basketballs, and travelling...

Most people outside of Canada just don't get how BIG this country is...and frankly, most people INSIDE Canada don't quite get how big it is. Or how small you can actually make it, if you're willing to spend the time and energy (usually in the forms of fossil fuels).

This isn't some touchy-feely thing about relationships and understanding...no, this is just about hard-ass miles on the road, the ice, slippery, badly maintained roads that connect my little slice of the world to the slightly larger slice called Saskatchewan. I have been on the road today, on that very same icy, slippery, badly maintained road, for over 7 hours, for the sole and only purpose of taking 7 boys to play a few games of basketball.

In almost any other place in the world (Australia might be the sole exception), this would be seen as absurd. Even in most other places in Canada, if you had 7 pee-wee aged boys to take play, and there were only going to be 4 other teams there...to be told you had to drive over 3 hours on bad roads would draw scorn and guffaws. But up here, it's a fact of life. It's just what's done. No fuss, no muss. And the kids themselves are used to it, thank god...think of you, in a van, with 7 young boys, for over 7 hours there and back. Sound like hell? It surprisingly wasn't.

Oh, and we came in 3rd. So, to paraphrase one of my kids, "Yeah, we did drive 4 hours to lose."

Giant Robots, feeling good despite it all.

Boys vs. Girls

Having one of each, it's sort of amusing to see the different interests each have developed, despite them having more or less the same sort of things available to them when they grew up. Obviously it's not 100% accurate, since the boy had a big sister to look up to, but the girl had none...but there's enough there that as a parent, it was pretty obvious to see.

The big thing, obvious even before they could really talk, was the personality. They seem to both be ridiculously stereotypical. The girl is eager to please, helpful, giving, and will adapt herself to whatever situation she finds herself in...ie. if Daddy's legs are in the way of where she wants to go, she'll climb right over them. The boy on the other hand, while still liking to help and to do the same things that Mommy and Daddy do, never took quite the same exquisite pleasure in it that his sister did. And he's not the kind to adapt to fit the world...he'll make the world fit him. Daddy's legs in the way...push them OUT of the way. The girl would climb the bookshelves; the boy would stack things beside it to get what he wanted.

It's continued as they got older. The girl...all about dolls, tea parties, sleepovers, and dressing up....admittedly, with a remarkably strong interest in trains. The boy on the other hand...dinosaurs. At the age when his sister's biggest thrill was collecting dishes to take to be cleaned, the boy stomps around the house, growling and snapping at the dog; "I'm a monster!"

Just two examples of how that little Y chromosome actually makes a difference in personality. Boys and girls ARE different, and we haven't gone far enough yet in treating them as such.

Giant Robots, completely asexual, but still fascinated by dinosaurs AND fashion

It's late, and I'm tired, but...

Actually, it's not late at all, but I'm certainly tired; up since 4:30 in the morning, which is early even by my standards, and facing the end of a long day.

A few co-workers have asked me if it's not stressful being around kids all day, and then going home to...more kids. The answer to that is HELL YES. I don't really consider myself to be a social person; though people who really should know better have said in the past that I've got good social skills, that's more as a result of concious effort, more than anything natural. I have to work hard to appear at ease with people. As a result, when I don't have to be around them...I honestly would rather not BE around them.

But with two small children, that's sort of not an option. Why did I turn into a morning person? Cause that's the optimal balance of time and energy for me; I can be up before the little monsters, and still feel energetic and enthused about the day. If I were to defer things to the evening, all too often a long day of being nice would overwhelm that. It's hard to feel upbeat about the day when someone has kindly offered to cut your eyes out for keeping their kid after school hours, just cause they threw a desk at you.

So the point is, yeah, it's stressful. If you've got kids, and take a job with kids, better make sure you REALLY like kids. Or, are prepared to be up at some very, very odd hours, just to regain your sanity.

Giant Robots, keeping the nightshift alive, even when on the dayside.

Simple things that make me happy.

...power failures. Who would have thought that I'd ever actually be happy when the power went out? Certainly not me, what with my highly technological bent (even Giant Robots that are powered wholly by mysterious, quasi-nuclear technology like to fool around with Earth computers). And yet, here I find myeslf, quite enjoying a few hours to curl up with a nice book...and without a dozen or two hormonal teenagers.

And I'm certainly not alone in this feeling...one might even assume that the old joke kids used to put around about PD days being excuses for teachers to have parties is entirely true. A look at Facebook for my co-workers yesterday would have confirmed this...it's a hard sell as to who was more excited about the unexpected day off yesterday, students or teachers.

On the other hand...this is getting a _little_ bit ridiculous, with the 3rd mechanical failure in less than 3 weeks. Let's hope this ridiculous winter is nearing an end...

Giant Robots, filled with backup electricity, and no diesel fuel pumps whatsoever.

So those years of hard work finally pay off...

...and in the mail comes my shiny new teaching liscence. The permanent kind. The two that I had previously to this both had expiry dates on them...but not this one. This one has a 'From' line, but no 'To' line.

Which is pretty scary, actually. After just 1 year in a classroom, I can now leave the country, run a highly successful drug-running operation, indulge in some white slavery, and maybe a little bit of child pornography, and, as long as I don't get caught, can come back anytime before my 65th birthday and at least theoretically be offered a job as a teacher. Doesn't matter if I'm current or not, of if I've been anywhere near a classroom in the previous 30 years...because I happened to pass some exams and survive in a classroom for 1 full school year, I'm a Teacher For Life.

Kinda weird. I can legally teach with fewer restrictions than I can drive.

Giant Robots have no plans to do ANY of the above, Mr. Hansen...