Gaurav Vaidya

SAY Media and Typepad

So I hear Typepad's parent company is merging with an advertising firm, and many people are nervous about what that means for Typepad, the web host this blog/site is hosted on.

Does that mean another move? Man, I hope not. I've just got settled in, still like the interface and features, and love not having to maintain a server myself to keep my website up. I hoped that TypePad actually charging for hosting meant that they'd be incentivized to keep their nose to the grindstone with new features, good uptime and decent customer support. The feature spread is so-so, and I haven't had to use their customer support yet, but on the whole I've been fairly satisfied with it so far. But if they decide to start focusing on advertising instead, where does that leave a low traffic website like this one? Brinstar, Dick and Cyn share similar worries.

Just the threat of having to migrate everything away (which is easy for me, as I haven't had time to accumulate much on this blog yet) and to create, design and prepare a new blog (the much, much harder job, as far as I'm concerned) is an unwelcome addition to my list of worries. And part of the reason I tried out Typepad at all is because of the Perl/open source connection via Movable Type: if that goes, would Typepad still be a place I'd like to associate with?

Well, best not to jump the gun, I guess. Open source probably has benefits for the company that they'd be even more eager to work with if they're focusing efforts elsewhere. Typepad is a semi-captive platform for content creation; if they're making enough money off us in aggregate, the might want to work at keeping us low-traffic bloggers around in hope of better expectations.

Probably a good idea to keep an eye out for alternate blog hosts, though. Just in case.

It's raining games

Stressed as I am with my graduate applications (now coming to the apex of the get-in-touch-with-Profs phase; next up: GRE, applications, and interviews), I'm really appreciating games which let me get a little fillip of gaming without either drawing me in too deeply (I'm looking at you, Football Manager) nor keeping me unentertained with sharp learning curves. If you're stuck in this sort of situation, here's some suggestions:

• Civilization IV via the Civilization Play by E-mail League: a fantastic group of people who play out entire games of Civilization by e-mailing each turn back and forth between the players. It's tons of fun, and only takes ten or fifteen minutes a day to play out all your turns and e-mail them out to other players. The community is really fantastic as well.

• Myth-Weavers: A fantastic Play-By-Post community for all kinds of role-playing games, particularly Dungeons and Dragons. It takes quite a bit of effort to get started, but - once you have - you'll be off in an imaginary world for fifteen to thirty minutes a day.

• I started writing this blog post mainly to talk about two new additions to this list. The first is EA's FIFA 2011, who's demo has given me a ton of fun. With each half reduced to five minutes, that's ten minutes of play per game. Three games after work can be had in just half an hour. What I'm really looking forward to (after the game releases in a week or two) is multiplayer: doing this with other human beings promises to be even more fun, and will - with any luck - take about the same amount of time. Sort of like Starcraft II Lite, I hope.

• My last discovery in this area is a really cutie: Altitude is a cross-platform multiplayer 2D game where you fly little airplanes around a map, weaving in and out of cover and shooting up your opponents. Shooting down other planes nets you experience points, which open up different engine configurations, plane types and other tidbits. If shoot-'em-up's not for you, there's plenty of other game types available, from carry-the-flag type missions to carry-the-bomb type missions. Exactly the sort of game that you can lose yourself in for a relaxing ten-to-twenty minutes before walking away, refreshed, happy, and ready for work.

Football Manager scares me

So I've just been playing Football Manager 2010, and let me tell you right now, it scares the living daylights out of me.

First the basics: it's a business simulator which sets you up as the manager of a football club. No, scratch that: it sets you up as a football manager. You can elect to start the game clubless if you like, relying on your reputation to work your way up the leagues. You manage your team hands-on, but can delegate responsibilities onto assistant coaches (or even take holidays in-game!). Your in-game character hosts interviews, has personal relations (successful or otherwise) with his players, and can be anything from a sympathetic mentor to a demanding taskmaster. That's a huge attraction to me right there: creating this virtual football manager persona is fun, like creating a character in a role-playing game, and of course it's always fun to manage to somebody else's career for a bit.

Managing a football team in this game consists primarily of buying and managing the best players to create an effective and successful football team. To do this, you'll also need to hire coaches and scouts to pick new players and train existing ones. As you go in to a match, you'll need to pick which players to play and in which formation, both of which you can tweak while the match is in progress. Although you don't control individual players, you still a number of tools to control their behavior: leading up to the game, you can tweak players' training, encourage or discourage particular types of play, and praise or complain about them publicly. Once in a game, you can substitute them off if they're failing, shout at or encourage them at half-time, or move them around in the formation to take the pressure of them if needed. You can also give the entire team overall instructions: when to be aggressive and when defensive, and give them a number of preset instructions, such as working the flank, moving the ball forward quickly, and others.

This game is filled with data, but in a way that's completely unintimidating. Row upon row of numbers march down many pages, and my glaze over at their approach, but inevitably there's a quick summary somewhere nearby to give you the meat. Most football acronyms have rollover text to explain what they mean (alas, there's no help available in explaining the explanations, which are written in perfect footballese). Plenty of pretty pictures - logos, faces, graphs - dot every surface. Seriously, I could learn a ton about making useful, easy-to-use interfaces from these guys.

Apart from checking all my boxes, I'm astonished at how quickly I was sucked into a game based around football. I am fantastically ignorant of any and all sports, apart from a passing acquaintance with cricket and a "hello-there" familiarity with the basics of football, so, yeah. That was odd, unexpected, and exciting. I started my first game and stopped, several hours later, in the wee hours of the morning; the first time I've done that since my first Civilization IV game. To my mind, games like this inspire fear as much as awe: these games destroy days. Gamer, beware.