What Does It Mean To You?

I figured I had better put this post up before it becomes irrelevant, although talking about what a word means to ones self can't really become irrelevant.  A couple of weeks ago, Felicia Day posted an update to her Youtube channel, Geek & Sundry, she rhetorically asked what "geek" meant to her.  There she listed off a few descriptive words like "Outsider, Dreamer, Creator, Rebel, Fighter" versus what she feels the word Geek has taken on in the larger media, such as "Cliche, Monetize, Brand, Exploit."

I liked a lot of what she had to say, but I kept in mind that she was saying what geek meant to her.  I didn't feel like she was saying that "This is what Geek means and this is how the world should see it.  Now!"  That point of view would go against the whole point of her video, that "it's a person who dares to love something that isn't conventional" and that "your judgement is not my problem."  That I like, and that's as a whole is what I took away from her two and-a-half minutes.

This brings me to my next point, although it's less of a point and more like a "bullet point."  A lot of people have their own definition of what a geek is and what constitutes that that person sitting by themselves over there is a geek.  Or how about a nerd?  Earlier this year, Portlandia made a mock PSA that was about the word and association of "Nerd."  This type of "thing" could be made for just about any group who feels that their moniker has either been used incorrectly or abused by any other group.  I'm not saying that such corrections are unwarranted, I guess, something, I don't know.  And what makes someone a geek and not a nerd or vice versa?  Likewise, what makes one person a gamer and someone accusing someone else that they aren't because of X, Y and R?

And now I've tread into very dangerous and accusatory ground.

I feel it all comes down to labeling.  One person's labels may not coincide with another person's and that person may already have negative connotations towards any one of labels you throw at them.  Hippie?  Metalhead?  Hipster?  Gamer? Golfer?  Secretary?  Tea Bagger?  Chances are you formed what you personally feel is a stereotypical image of what that person looks and possibly acts like. Is it the right or wrong view of that person?  Is your view politically correct?  Does your view of any of the above possibly conflict with someone else' view?

And you know what, I'm guilty of it too.  I've said, "Fucking hipster" to myself while driving and have been cut off by a person riding a fixed gear bike on the 33rd block of Hawthorne.  In a very similar light, I'm as guilty as the girl scoffing at the guy sitting on a bus playing a game on his PSP Vita and thinks "stupid nerd" when he doesn't move allowing her to sit in the last open seat on the bus.  This idea of visual perceptions of people reminds me that I want to talk a little bit more about this, but I will save that for it's own post.

But going back to what "geek" means to Felicia Day, myself or you the reader, it's a potentially touchy topic. I could say, let it mean whatever you want it to mean for you, then someone else could say that "you can't just assign any meaning you want to geek, that's not how language works!  You can't say that "bacon" now means "french fries covered in cheese curds and brown sauce" because that's it's own thing already."

So where does that leave us?  This discussion isn't going to be solved in a single article or blog post, or youtube video and I don't think it really needs to be "solved."  It just is.  And who am I to come to such ambiguous conclusions?

I'm a person who loves video games (RPG, FPS, Survival Horror, Puzzle, Racing, Action, Flight Simulators, Adventure, Platformers, Point-And-Click, Simulation), music {Metal [Gothic Doom, Progressive, Doom, Death, Battle, Epic Heathen, Melodic Death, Black, Symphonic Black, Blackened Death, Meloic Black, Power, Folk (Scandinavian, Russian, Celtic), Pirate, Viking], Rock, Hard Rock, Movie Soundtracks, Video Game Soundtracks, Broadway Musicals (not a fan of Cats or Rent), Classical, Baroque, Folk [Irish, Scottish, Russian], Klezmer, Parodies, Classic Rock, Indie Rock, Latin Pop, Punk, Alternative Rock, Grunge Rock}, reading [Science Fiction, Fantasy, Horror, Mystery, Fiction, Historical Fiction, Apocalyptic Fiction, Contemporary Fiction, Mythology (Celtic, Norse)], painting (Miniatures, Ceramic Figurines), watching movies [Horror, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Dystopian, Comedy. . .

Under what category would I be placed?

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
The Likes Of Us All

Gender and Video Games

Hey all, just thought I'd take a break from my Writer's Block to tell you about a great article I just read, by Sophie Prell at Penny Arcade,  regarding Transgender identity and Video Games.  The article brings up the idea that with video games, players can role-play as the opposite gender.  This allows them to build a virtual identity free from the scrutiny that they would have to endure in public.  It also is a great place to experiment. 

As I mentioned in my comment on the article, I play as women all the time in games.  In fighting games I almost always choose the woman (so often there's been only one).  This started with Chun Li from Street Fighter 2,  and may have been based entirely on how easy it was to do her lightning kick.  (I'm really disappointed in how hard it is to find a good lightening kick video on youtube,  but for our purposes, the move is performed by relentlessly smashing the 'kick' button).  After getting to know Chun Li she became my favorite character.  She's so leggy, and she jumps very high.  Since Street Fighter 2 I have gravitated toward light characters who are very agile, which is how fighting game makers usually design their female characters.

Let's see, any others?  Female Warrior in Golden Axe.  Paladin in Ultima IV.  Female Cat character in Final Fantasy XI.  Sprite in Secret of Mana (actually male, but I always thought female.)  Help me out here, I'm drawing a blank.  I know there are plenty more. 

I'm not too concerned about what this says about my own gender.  I just really appreciate that I can play around with it in video games.  I've never crossed the line to performing as female for others - ie: pretending I'm a woman on an MMO or something.  In fact, my FinalFantasy XI female character was named 'Imadood' - just so there was no mistaking.  That said, I think its important to point out that any assumptions we make about what gender a player is - those are just assumptions.  It's a video game, and we are free to express ourselves through the game- who we are in real life is really nobodies business. 

I do want to say that the subject of gender and video games on the internet is fraught.  Fraught, I say!   It's so hard to find a mellow and respectful atmosphere to have that discussion without a zillion people throwing around slurs, porno and generally thoughtless ignorance.  I would say that the experience of talking about gender and video games on the internet is like playing Contra or Raiden - shit is just flying everywhere! (click links for videos of those games in action to see what I'm talking about).  

Contra and Raiden are fun games, who doesn't love a good shoot'em up?  Well, some people don't.  And even those who love them - they're hardly my first choice, I can tell you that.  No, I prefer the calm environment of an RPG, where the pace is slow and steady, and I can save the game and come back to the action.  It's so hard to find this sort of pace on the internet, but I am glad to say that the Penny Arcade moderators have done a great job with this article.  I suggest you read it, and browse the comments a little.  

-D

“Video games showed me who I could be:” transgender gamers share their stories, joys, and fears-   by Sophie Prell

Just A Bit Of Randomness

One of my friends Shaggy is doing a month long blog about video games.  It's an A-Z type format with updates pretty much every day.  Keep in mind though, it's not just a simple "Here's a game that starts with the letter D: Donkey Kong," but it's about the game and Shaggy's personal experience and history with that game.  The blog is called Eclectic Musings and I think it's pretty cool, all biasness' aside.  I really enjoy Shaggy's perspective, seeing as how he's roughly a decade older than I am, but reading about someone's history with video games, primarily through arcades in the late 70s and early 80s.  For instance in his, "E is for Excitebike" post, I didn't know that Vs. Excitebike was a thing outside of Japan.  It's good reading and I recommend it.

This last weekend, Conklederp was in Arizona for the Western Regional Music Therapy Conference so I had the apartment to myself (along with Joey) for a couple of days.  Naturally, I stayed up until 5-6am then woke up six hours later.  One would think that I had spent most of my time playing video games (Skyrim, Morrowind, Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together, Mega Man), but then there were nights when I really "geeked" out.  My last two nights before Conklederp came home, I spent between 5-6 hours fixing the ID3 tags for video game soundtracks.

That's something that I'm pretty anal about.  If a song is incorrectly tagged, that shit's gunna be fixed faster than a stray cat in a dog pound.  Having to fix the ID3 tags isn't something that I have to do a lot of the time, but for instance, when I finally uploaded the soundtracks from the last two Humble Indie Bundles, there was a bit of work I had to do.  For instance:

I know the Year doesn't affect anything in iTunes or the Last.fm scrobbles, but I just need it to be there.  Second, the track order needs, NEEDS to be accurate.  There'll be times I want to listen to a soundtrack in it's entirety and I feel that the composer has the songs in a particular order, if it's chronological order or whatever, it needs to be accurate.  This wasn't the case with Cave Story +, but the album titles need to be accurate as well.  Yes, there can be some discrepancies when it comes to having OST, OSV, Original Soundtrack, Original Sound Version, Soundtrack, Sound Track, or just the title, but that's something I just try to make consistent.  Lastly, the genre needs to be correct.  I don't have many songs under the "Other" genre, but if it comes from a video game, I label it as "Video Game Soundtrack."  Even if it's Electronica Hardcore outside of a video game, it's still getting the soundtrack label.

Oh yes, I get annoyed if I don't have album artwork.  There needs to be a picture and not those generic eighth notes on a grey background for the album artwork.  If there was never an official soundtrack released and therefore no cover art, I will either use a picture of the composer, the box art from the game the music came from or a screen shot of the title screen.  Then after I finished fixing all that needed to be fixed, I spent the next two hours playing Morrowind.

So that's your bit of randomness for Monday April 8th, 2013.  Only one week until taxes are due.  I did mine and somehow I still owe the state of Oregon a few extra bucks.  Ah well, it's all for the good of the country.

And go and read and stay up-to-date with Shaggy's blog.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

An Endless Challenge

Emulator Hour: Final Fantasy (NES)

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/d/d8/FF1_USA_boxart.jpg/250px-FF1_USA_boxart.jpg

A lot of the fun of Final Fantasy comes from picking your character classes.  The designers were very clever in creating six classes, but only four characters to a party.  Thus it is impossible to try all of the classes in a single play through, and the possible combinations are enormous.  In addition, each class will receive an upgrade about 3/4 of the way through the game.  This upgrade will change the abilities of that character, to varying degrees of significance.  It is very helpful to be aware of these upgrades when choosing your initial class, so that you don't end up stuck in the mud after dumping 20 hours into a game.  This happened to me recently- a result of making a hasty and uninformed decision when designing my party.

Be warned, you only get to choose your character classes once -  at the beginning of the game.  Similar to the first phase of Settlers of Catan; your choices during this phase will have a strong impact on how your playing experience will roll out.  Also similar to Catan; you will likely be well into the game when hindsight kicks in and you realize which choices you would have made differently.  You may then be confronted with the urge to start over again from the beginning.  On my recent play through of Final Fantasy,  I decided to experiment and go with an unorthodox: Fighter, Black Belt, Red Mage, Red Mage line.  

My party set-up was fine for the first 9/10 of the game or so.  I have very strong physical attacks, which allowed me to blaze through most of the dungeons in the early part of the game.  In addition, being full of physical attackers means I don't have to think very strategically; I don't have to conserve spells, I only have to try and spread my attacks out among the groups of enemies.  (This is because Final Fantasy has the obnoxious programming quirk of allowing players to attack enemies who were destroyed earlier in the round, and thus result in an 'ineffective' wasted attack.)

I first began to wonder if I had made a mistake when designing my party when I began to find my Red Mages simply can't learn certain spells.  I had the idea that I would make one mage lean toward white magic and one mage lean toward black magic.  It worked out pretty well until I found that I didn't know what most of the spells do, and their 4-letter names were not very good descriptors.  In addition, a super-essential Level 5 spell - LIFE was not available to Red Mages.  This was a problem.  The Life spell is the only way in the game to bring a slain party member back while out in the field.  Without that spell, I have to beat a given dungeon and boss without letting anyone die.  This is extremely tough, but I got good at it by grinding out lots of levels and over-powering myself for each dungeon.

The wave of regret hit me much stronger in the later half of the game, when I upgraded my Red Mages to Red Wizards.   As it turns out, Red Wizards can learn the LIFE spell, but by that time, I had maxed out my spell slots for that level for both Wizards!  Fuck fuck, shit fuck fuck fuck.   

But, you can't go back, only forward.  My party hardily bashed its way through the water temple and the air temple, and now I've gotten to the final temple, but I just can't hang.  I'm at level 28, which should be plenty to beat the dungeon, but I always sap my supply of healing spells, and I start to lose party members.  I haven't even made it to the boss.  I'm sure if I boosted my levels up to 32 or so, I could make it through, but I'm just tired of it by now.

So, I probably won't beat Final  Fantasy this play through.  And I'm too disgusted to start over again.  And, really, I don't know what I would do differently.  I liked this party, and I would be interested to try it again, just remembering to consult a walk-through beforehand.  But I'm also tempted to try a new party combination, but I'm not sure what.  If you're still interested, I'm going to walk through each character class and describe their advantages/disadvantages and contributions to the whole.

http://shrines.rpgclassics.com/nes/ff1/ff1classes.gif

Fighter/Knight:
The Fighter is a Final Fantasy Icon.  I also think he looks a little bit like a rooster.  He's got the highest defense, hit points and can equip the strongest gear.  He is the strongest attacker for the first half of the game, but he is eclipsed by the Black Belt/Master in attack power, and finishes up second.  The hardiness and consistency of the Fighter makes him hard to leave out of any party.  However, he's also a bit of a money-sink, since he requires all the top-notch gear.  The upgrade to the Knight doesn't really do much, it adds white magic up to level 3, but by the time you get the upgrade, spells from those levels don't have much effect.


>>Read More

Emulator Hour: Mega Man 2 (NES/3DS)

First off, is it Mega Man 2 or Mega Man II?

The box art, regardless of region has the game titled as being "2."

If you can't tell what the game is based on the box art, you can consider yourself  medically normal.

But, when you start the game, the game is titled as "II," with the exception of Rockman and then the title screen has the number 2.  

Does he really need a helmet?

Wikipedia has the NES Mega Man 2 with the number and the Gameboy release (different story) of Mega Man II.  So, for all intensive purposes the NES Mega Man will be referred to as "2."

Now that that's out of the way, let's get down to business.

Mega Man 2, released in 1988 in Japan and 1989 in North America by Capcom is a fun game, but god damn is it pretty difficult.  I feel like I can say "pretty" as opposed to "fucking" seeing as how I just beat it a few hours ago for the first time since I started playing it nearly 24 years ago.  To all the possible haters, it was on normal difficulty, it was the port to the Nintendo eShop and not on the NES from an original cartridge.

The story is pretty simple in that Mega Man, created by Dr. Light "was built to be a domestic robot, but in order to put a stop to Dr. Wily's evil plans [world domination], he was reborn as Mega Man, a battle robot. "  What more do you need to know?

While going through the game, there were definitely areas and specific screens that I remembered very well.  As I did when I originally played the game back in the early 90's, I started off with beating Metal Man (and by "beat" I mean that it took me a number of tries to not only get through the level but beat Metal Man.

Admittingly, I looked up the suggested order to go up against the bosses.  I personally don't see this as cheating since one still has to have some skill in order to get through the level and the game is designed so that a boss is weak against a particular weapon.  Also, I knew this information when I was younger but had since forgotten it.  To note, here's the order I used:

1) Metal Man

2) Wood Man

3) Air Man

4) Crash Man

5) Flash Man

6) Quick Man

7) Bubble Man

8) Heat Man

In this order, each weapon from the boss is strong against the boss below it.  Yes, the Heat Cannon (named Atomic Fire) is strong against Wood Man and the Quick Man Boomerangs are pseudo-strong against Metal Man and the standard arm cannon works well enough on both Flash Man and Crash Man, but you've got to pick an order, and this was the one that I settled down on.  An actual list can be found here and actually lists what weapons the bosses are weak against, but keep in mind that you can still go through the levels and beat the bosses in any order you want, something that I still see as ingenious about the game.

One thing that I noticed while playing, was that Mega Man 2 is apparently very guilty of the annoying respawning of enemies that Dr. Potts talked about regarding TMNT.  I don't know how many times I would get knocked back by an enemy, run towards the shielded green cannon guy, only to have the same enemy respawn and now be faced with two green shielded cannon guys.  Another hazard that I fell victim to (pun not intended) was switching out my gun while on a ladder.  The danger of doing this, is that Mega Man falls/ teleports back onto the screen and when this happens when you're on a ladder, you are no longer holding onto the ladder, and fall through it to the screen below.

Now, the 3DS (and maybe the DSi as well, but I never had that system so I can't comment on it) does this thing when you close down a downloaded NES/Gameboy game.  It puts the game in stasis, as in, I could be playing Mega Man 2, pause the game then exit to the main 3DS screen while closing down the Mega Man 2 game.  When I return, I can pick up right where I left off.  For Mega Man 2, this allowed me to never need to copy down passwords.  I could play the game and reach the "Game Over" screen and simply select "Continue" or "Stage Select" and I never had to worry about copying the password and subsequently losing said password.  Once I reached Dr. Wily's compound, I realized that losing the passwords was probably the main reason why I was never able to complete the game.

And then there was this series of jumps that I could rarely manage to time correctly.

And the very few times I did manage to make those jumps, I wasn't able to deal with the Mecha Dragon.  Yes, that silvery dragon on the front of the German and UK covers, you do have to fight although it only took me about 4-5 times to figure out how to not die during the battle.

By the end of the game, I felt like I'd become pretty good at killing the boss robots, having to defeat them one-by-one from a central hub-teleportation point before fighting Dr. Wily and while it is a little tempting to go through the game on the "Difficult" difficulty setting, I'm sure I would have a hard enough time making it through the levels with enough life just to get to the bosses.

Oh yes, the music.  Holy damn the music.  First off, if 8-bit era, NES style music is not your thing, tough luck not liking this music; except my Father.  The music was primarily composed by Takeshi Tateishi along with Manami Matsumae and Yoshihiro Sakaguchi.  I find the music to be every bit as awesome when I first heard it as when I hear it any other time.  The music from Mega Man 2 seems to be a staple among video game music cover bands (The Advantage, NESkimos, Minibosses).  So yes, the music holds up.

Now when I was playing Mega Man 2, I never seemed to hunker down and just play the hell out of the game.  I would pick it up, play for maybe 15 - 20 minutes then put it down after getting frustrated and needed to walk away.  My stats for the game had me playing 15 different times with an average of 17 minutes of game time each time I would play.  In the end, it took me 4 hours 25 minutes.  A very respectable time I would say having spent $4.99, so roughly $1.10/hr, although I know that I will be wanting to go through the game again, not because Mega Man 2 has some of my favorite songs from the series, but because now I know I can beat the game.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
Charging Up The Digital Hill

You Know What? Flying Is Weird.

I was sitting outside yesterday morning, mainly because it wasn't raining and it wasn't cold.  It might be the start of the "Drinking Coffee Out on the Deck in the Morning Because the Cat Wants Us to Go Outside" time of year.  Yes, the cat will hang out by the sliding door and meow at us after we're awake wanting us to open the door so he can go outside and sit on the deck with us.  Although I don't think we really factor into his thinking aside from having to open the door for him.  So there we are, enjoying our coffee and I see a vulture circling on air currents and thermals.

That's when I start thinking about Pilotwings.  Until I had been playing Pilotwings Resort for the 3DS extensively, I felt like I could never get the hang of hang gliding (pun not intended or noticed until after I wrote that) regardless of the Pilotwings game.  In Pilotwings 64 I could never figure out the right balance of gliding between thermals, circling and watching the beautiful scenery.

So there I am, looking up at this circling vulture and after it circles a few times, it flies a different direction (aren't all directions different after a circle?) then rises while circling as it comes in contact with another thermal.  How do they know where the thermals are?  I get that it's some bird intuition-sense-it-through-their-feathers/brains/esp-something-or-other-that-I-don't-fully-understand, but it's still kind of amazing when I think about it.

That's probably one of the reasons why I will never go hang gliding.  If I were to be convinced to go, even on a tandem glide, which I'm pretty sure is required if you've never been before (like sky diving), I would be pseudo-panicking because I wouldn't be able to see where the thermals are and we would end up just circling our way back down to the ground.  Like, how do you know where they are in the real world if they don't look like this:

That's my fear anyway, maybe along with hang gliding old women dressed as clowns carrying sharpened rusty knives in their teeth.  But that's something else entirely.

You also cannot tell, but I had just taken an hour long break to put together an Ikea bookshelf.  I went looking for my collection of 3DS games [I wanted to take an in-game picture of a thermal in Pilotwings Resort, because that's one of the few 3DS games where you can take in-game pics) in a pile that was birthed after cleaning up the apartment, was unable to locate it and thought, "If all our video game stuff was centralized, it would be easy to find stuff" and "I should clean up that corner where our video game stuff is stacked/piled."  So when I first started, Conklederp asked if she could help and this popped into my head:

I didn't want this to happen, but I ended up needing Conklederp's help so she did, and it only took, at most, an hour, probably not even that long.  I've got carpentry and cabinet making running through my blood on both sides of my family, so I know how to build shit.

So I did all that and then I have now come back to finish.  Again, birds can fly and that makes them pretty awesome.  Ducks can swim and fly, which makes them awesomer.  Dippers, are just too fucking much and are probably in the process of taking over the world.  What's that, you haven't heard of Dippers?  That's part of their plot too and so far, it's worked.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
Smoke & Mirrors

Follow up: Sword and Sworcery EP

I recently completed this game, and decided to do a follow-up to my First Impressions.  I felt that the ending of this game was strongly affecting in a way that warranted further attention here.  

Sword and Sworcery EP is weird.  Weird and unique; truly this game is very much itself.  It doesn't really resemble anything else in my library or memory. Weird and beautiful: the sounds and graphics are finely crafted, original creations, custom to this game.  There's something so great about the impact of the sword swings during combat.  The sound has a real punch to it.

The themes are strange and perplexing.  The willingness to mix fantasy with random bits of modern imagery make it really hard to pin down.  However, playing through, from start to finish, this game has a sense of coherence.  This is actually aided somewhat by the habit of breaking of the fourth wall.  The characters speak directly to the player, and even the Scythian, the character controlled by the player, uses the royal 'we' whenever speaking.  It seemed clear to me that the Scythian did this to acknowledge the dual nature of the player and herself. The other characters will refer to the Scythian, but speak directly to you.  It feels as though they live in this game and acknowledge that there is a player outside the game.  

There is a theme of the inevitability of death, which is mentioned directly within the dialogue, and also through animated behavior.  This theme coupled with the breaking of the fourth wall, drew my attention to the fact that I was in no danger, however, I was taking part in putting the Scythian in danger.  And while the game never blamed me for it (as the player), I shared in a sense of dread and inevitability, as the Scythian carried out her 'woeful errand' with my assistance.  But more than that, I had an awareness that I was 'sharing' these feelings with the characters, who are merely pieces of fiction after all. 

As the game drew to a close, I felt my own connection to the characters drifting away.  I was left with a feeling of watching fish in a glass bowl.  The events of the story ultimately have a greater impact on the characters within, and I have  only second-hand involvement.  I will go on with my life, go to work, the grocery store, play another game.  But these events will have lasting effects on the characters within.  

I guess, in a sense, immersion is never really broken, but more put in its place.  The player is outside, and must remain there. We can only watch, and have a small influence on what happens within.  Which makes for a weird and beautiful experience.

So yeah, rad game.  I highly recommend it. Click the >Read More> link below for more info.

Daggerfailed - Attempts at The Elder Scrolls Chapter II: Daggerfall

I really wanted to play The Elder Scrolls Chapter II: Daggerfall, partly because it's the second game in a series that, in under a year of starting starting The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, I've fallen in love with, but also because the development company, Bethesda Softworks, offers the game free off of their own website.  I downloaded the game (149 MB compressed) and as was the case with The Elder Scrolls Chapter I: The Arena, I had to use DOSBox in order to run the install program and to play the game.

Now here's the part of the post that becomes instructional.  I had to learn a bit more DOS jargon to not only install, but to load up Daggerfall.  All of this "How To" was located in the "Daggerfall Legal and Installation" PDF that came included with the game (thank god).  The following screen is the set up in order to install Daggerfall:

The program then started up flawlessly and following the instructions I arrived at the screen, common when uploading a game from a CD:

I wanted to include this, mainly to show the age of the game, or at least an aspect of computer games when Daggerfall came out in 1996.  That a "Huge" installation is 450 MB.  It was at this point that I wasn't able to proceed with the "Huge" installation and I couldn't figure out why.  I knew my computer had more than 450 MB of free space.  After some online searching, I discovered a key "thing" that I had forgotten to input during the initial installation.  I only say "forgotten" because I didn't know about it and it wasn't included in the installation instructions in the PDF.  What I should have included was a "-freesize 1000" at the end in the first line.  SO, in order to successfully install Daggerfall, your DOSBox needs to look "something" like this:

Z:\> mount c: c/dagger -freesize 1000

Drive C is mounted as local directory c:/dagger\

Z:\>c:

C:\>mount d c:/dagger/dfcd -t cdrom -label Daggerfall

MSCDEX: Mounted subdirectory: limited support.

Drive D is mounted as CDRom c:/dagger/dfcd\

C:\>d:

D:\>Install

I said "something like this" because I have the Daggerfall folder located directly on/in my C:\ drive so that it would be easy for me to find and type out every time I wanted to play.  If the folder were located elsewhere, the command prompt might look "something" like this:

Z:\> mount c: c/Games/ElderScrolls/dagger -freesize 1000

Everything worked fine after that.  The game was installed and I was able to start up a character, although I died partway through the prologue and hadn't saved.  I then had to go to work.  A couple of days later I came back and started up DOSBox and began the loading process:

But then something odd happened.  Odd because I didn't expect it to happen and I hadn't seen it before:

Yup.  DOSBox is telling me that I have the wrong CD in my CD drive and Daggerfall can't be loaded up.  I even tried shutting down DOSBox and going through the start up sequence again and I received the same "Looks like you inserted the wrong CD.  Please insert your Daggerfall CD in your cdrom and try again."  The Internet tells me that this is happening because when I tried to start up Daggerfall, I didn't type it in exactly as I had when I installed it.  So, when I installed the game, if I had typed in "-label DaGgErFaLl" I would have to type it like that every time after that.  Apparently the "only" (??) fix is to re-install the game which I am on the verge of doing a third time.

I don't want this whole post to come across as saying that Bethesda has released a faulty product as there are plenty of people online who have not had any issues with the installation and running of this game, but there are also people, like me, who have had some problems and I just need to figure out what those problems are before I get a character half way through the game and have to re-install the whole thing.

Yes, I am going to give it a third try and with any luck, I will be posting my First Impressions for The Elder Scrolls Chapter II: Daggerfall in the coming weeks.  That is if I can pull myself away from the handful of games that I'm playing at the same time.  First world problems indeed.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

Farewell to the Faithfully Departed