The weird thing about me is that I've always been a little bit shy. I'm getting much better, but even now, I'm sometimes a bit shy when trying something new. If anything, I just nowadays find out much faster that this stuff isn't killing me and I'm worrying for no reason - the only hard part is getting around to try something social. I can do just fine, if I get started doing something.

In a last few years, I was a bit shy when I tried Second Life for the first time, but I was fine once I figured out how the application works. I was shy to try out Halo 3 multiplayer, until I figured out that wise people just don't even try the voice chat thingy. (No, I was not scared by the Halo 3 multiplayer. It was the brand new notion of voice chat that scared the bejezus out of me.)

But there has been times when I was completely paralysed by the idea of interacting with strangers in online games. It took me over a year to seek out other people in MUDs. I was kind of shy in Neverwinter Nights persistent worlds back in their heyday.

Long before I was adoring some awesome-looking houses in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and waxing teary-eyed over how frigging awesome the Deepscorn Hollow is (please don't laugh), I was already working on some high-quality player character housing in my favourite games. Specifically, Neverwinter Nights.

Would it have been awesome if you could just return to your character's home after a long and challenging adventure, and drop your loot in the chests or put them on the shelf, then head off to another exciting adventure without worrying about your character's encumbrance limits?

Oh yes, you can do it! You could do just about anything in NWN, except achieve any sort of persistence. Once the module starts, all you have is the ability to save/restore games and export your character; you can't restart the module with another character and expect everything in the module to be exactly as you left it with another character.  You needed external hacks to do that. And oh boy oh boy, did people ever hack in all sorts of weird persistence hacks using the scripting API and some more evil methods like latching another program on the server process (as far as I understood it). Since we're only doing this for single player, we can probably do some more gore-filled methods instead.

So, here's an article that's long overdue. I was going to post this to my crappy lil' Neverwinter Nights site when tons of people were still actively playing the game (they probably still are, I just haven't been checking on them), but I never got around to. I probably did in some form, but never posted the guide on the site and I'm not going to start looking.

Without further ado: a guide on how to create your own persistent houses in Neverwinter Nights.

I got my Xbox 360 in December 30, 2008, and it's now February 1, 2009 - when my Xbox Live Gold trial was supposed to run out (but didn't, because I obviously renewed it =).So, (puny) 460 gamer points later, it's a good time to ramble a little bit on how a self-professed Nintendo geek has so far survived in the Microsoft world.

The short answer, of course, is that while it has been a little bit bumpy ride, in the end, I'm very happy.

So, for the last few months, I've enjoyed Wii as a... um, new platform for playing GameCube games. Then, I got Super Smash Bros. Brawl, which was ultimately just improved Melee and the Serious Players could just stick to GC controller.

And this week's new highlights for me: Metroid Prime 3: Corruption and Tomb Raider: Anniversary. Both will need more rambling in due time, but here's some rambling on the topic of Controlling The Games. Of course, I was a little bit sceptical about how these much-raved-about Wii controls really work in real life, but my fears have subsided.

A while back, there was some Æncyclopædiæ drama over Chris-chan (aka Christian Weston Chandler). I'm not really commenting much on the issue, having had similar (but deinitely not as spectacular and not as severe) issues as this guy, but I'm just saying that I found the Sonichu audio books pretty... unique. And at parts hilarious. I sure hope this guy gets over the, ahem, issues, one way or other.

Anyway, I'm not posting about that - I just mentioned that because looking at the case reminded me that I still haven't completed Pokémon Sapphire. So, in the weekend, I played good few hours of the thing. Yay. So here is some aimless rambling about a Grown Man Playing Pokémon, a bit Analytically.

I'm not necessarily completely coherent today, so apologies if this article is too weird to handle.

Finally managed to sign up to Veoh. So, here, I finally uploaded a video from late 2004 or so: Me defeating Metroid Prime, in, uh, Metroid Prime, GameCube's finest game, for the first time. I should have uploaded this somewhere earlier, but I didn't want to burden archive.org and YouTube only wants 10-minute vids. Anyway, my play style here displays some unprecedented clumsiness, never before seen but sometimes repeated. (I think I was just getting tired that day - this was my third or fourth try that day...)

For me, the last week marked the end of GameCube gaming... well, GameCube gaming on a GameCube, at least.

Here's the complex, remarkable and weird tale on the last few days of SSBM on the Almighty Cube, and how I moved from the Cube to that fantastic new white box thing. Warning: Horrenduous flash photography also included. Another warning: Nothing works.

This post might need a little bit of explanation to go with it, first. I've sometimes had to post jaded observations on how some things are awful. This post is not intended as a flame; the point is that this is an observation.

And the observation is that I've grown tired defending the Ultima series. Now, don't get me wrong... I'm just admitting excess zealotism, and is a part of healing process.

Life of the Party is the tenth level of Looking Glass Studios' Thief II: The Metal Age.

The level is just about perfect in two respects. First of all, it's a great example of how Thief series gameplay works, and is an example of an outstandingly put-together level that has tons of goodness. The level has everything that makes Thief great: Humorous dialogues between guards and other NPCs, lots of nooks and crannies to explore, lots of stuff to steal, and interesting architecture...

Secondly, it's almost an iconic example of a genre. If you wanted to make a game about thieves in a mediaeval fantasy world, Life of the Party is just about the greatest example of how to do it. Thieves dancing through the rooftops!...

A discussion on Slashdot again reminded me of one of the most odd game copy protection things I've ever seen.

Ages ago, I got a game collection for Commodore 64 called 2 Hot 2 Handle, which had - I think - Shadow Warriors, Total Recall, Golden Axe and Ivan Ironman's Super Off Road. (Whoa, memory serves me well, if MobyGames is to be believed.)

Now, I think Shadow Warriors and IISOR worked fine, but Golden Axe and Total Recall had curious feature: the copy protection clankered the drive a lot, which could mean only one thing: A busted disk.

With a little help from my father, the thing was sent back, by mail, across the country, to the store it was bought from. Some time later, the thing came back with a note that said something like "The games are okay! If they don't work, turn the disk drive to its side." With a helpful diagram, too! (I think I'll scan it and put it here if I find it. =)

I think they just returned the exact same disks, because the game definitely did not work - but once I flipped the drive to horizontal position, yep, the thing worked just fine!

(As a side note, "Shadow Warriors" is not the same thing as Shadow Warriors, aka Ninja Gaiden. I bet a lot of people got disappointed. =)

Update, March 18, 2006: Yup, obviously, I could find the thing. Scan is above. Also of note that I was still confused about the whole Shadow Warriors thing: Both of the games were marketed as Shadow Warriors!...