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Nov. 4th, 2009 06:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickElection yesterday, spent the day working the polls which is to say that I played rather a lot of Thief Gold. With only five people voting in person, and four of them poll workers, it was not a real busy day for election stuff. I'm done with the previous mission, which was *supposed* to be about stealing from the Hammerites but turned into Surprise, Assassins! instead. The lockpicks are fun, if time-consuming.
Mission 1: Steal the Jeweled Scepter of Phallic Symbolism
Mission 2: Break Cutty Out of Jail / Find Felix's Map
Mission 3: Steal the Horn of Horniness
Mission 4: Surprise, Assassins!
Mission 5: eVase-ive Thief Theft
The missions are getting harder, which is understandable. As you get better at running the dude, early missions will replay as too easy. They can't expect you to be very good at the game strategy and controls from the get-go. I mean, yeah, it only takes a couple of tries to figure out that going toe-to-toe with dudes in armor is a very bad idea, but you don't have facility with the tools right away unless you do a lot more videogaming than I do. With several levels worth of practice, you get better at sneaking around and avoiding guards and shooting things with arrows and stuff. So, things should get harder as you progress. Building this learning curve the right amount of hard is probably something that game designers work on. (The only person I know who works on video game building plays an awful lot of video games in his non-work time. He's not exactly a n00b.)
Surprise, Assassins! was kind of annoying in that I'm absolutely no good at tailing people. It took me rather more replays than I want to cop to in order to follow the assassins back to their lair. The map was, again, a bare suggestion of the floorplan. The reading materials left lying around were interesting and fleshed out the plot and game world. That was nice. This was the first mission that I heard a female voice in. (Yes, I do notice that sort of thing.) Graphics are aged and I'm not running on high detail, so everyone is kind of polygonal -- I couldn't see a chick if I ran into her unless she was built like Dolly Parton-- but the voice was distinctly female.
On the whole, I liked Suprise, Assassins! It took place in a dude's house. There were people to pickpocket. There were shadows in which to skulk. There were locks to pick and rooms to case and conversations to overhear. Notably, No Zombies. Additional point of note: only two lizards, easily avoided. Thumbs up for lack of suckage, a few points off for not having interesting sewers. Surprise, Assassins! also required an amount of loot from me, which forced a certain amount of world exploration beyond just the mission objective. That was kind of interesting for one go-round but I think I'm going to keep seeing it and that does not seem like quite so much fun. It is realistic, though -- Garrett's gotta make the rent, buy groceries, etc. He's got expenses.
The next mission, eVase-ive Thief Theft (you sneak into the Thieve's Guild and steal a sapphire vase) is bewilderingly complex. The guild is located underneath (?) a casino that is underneath (?) a restaurant. Seems like a lot of digging for a non-mechanized society. Maybe they used slave labor. Anyway, the casino isn't so bad. It's a reasonable size. The Guild, however, is multi-layered and sprawling. It's like six times as big as the casino above it. It has tunnels. It has numbered *things* (vaults, maybe?) and levers that move stuff and spiders that eat you and assorted people not-wearing-armor and other people wearing armor and lots of fireplaces (underground? where does the smoke go?) and raised brick walkways and really, how big is this damn guild? It *feels* huge. It's also crawling with people. And, again, the map is relatively useless and Garrett doesn't know where the vase is. (Not exactly true. He knows that the guild has two dudes in charge. One dude has the key, the other dude has the locked-up vase. The dudes are not very BFF at the moment and Garrett is hoping that he can make off with the vase and have them go for each other's throats. So, yeah, he has a vague idea of where the vase might be, but "Dude #2's quarters" is not helpful when you don't know where either Dude #1 or Dude #2 hangs his hat.)
Mission 1: Steal the Jeweled Scepter of Phallic Symbolism
Mission 2: Break Cutty Out of Jail / Find Felix's Map
Mission 3: Steal the Horn of Horniness
Mission 4: Surprise, Assassins!
Mission 5: eVase-ive Thief Theft
The missions are getting harder, which is understandable. As you get better at running the dude, early missions will replay as too easy. They can't expect you to be very good at the game strategy and controls from the get-go. I mean, yeah, it only takes a couple of tries to figure out that going toe-to-toe with dudes in armor is a very bad idea, but you don't have facility with the tools right away unless you do a lot more videogaming than I do. With several levels worth of practice, you get better at sneaking around and avoiding guards and shooting things with arrows and stuff. So, things should get harder as you progress. Building this learning curve the right amount of hard is probably something that game designers work on. (The only person I know who works on video game building plays an awful lot of video games in his non-work time. He's not exactly a n00b.)
Surprise, Assassins! was kind of annoying in that I'm absolutely no good at tailing people. It took me rather more replays than I want to cop to in order to follow the assassins back to their lair. The map was, again, a bare suggestion of the floorplan. The reading materials left lying around were interesting and fleshed out the plot and game world. That was nice. This was the first mission that I heard a female voice in. (Yes, I do notice that sort of thing.) Graphics are aged and I'm not running on high detail, so everyone is kind of polygonal -- I couldn't see a chick if I ran into her unless she was built like Dolly Parton-- but the voice was distinctly female.
On the whole, I liked Suprise, Assassins! It took place in a dude's house. There were people to pickpocket. There were shadows in which to skulk. There were locks to pick and rooms to case and conversations to overhear. Notably, No Zombies. Additional point of note: only two lizards, easily avoided. Thumbs up for lack of suckage, a few points off for not having interesting sewers. Surprise, Assassins! also required an amount of loot from me, which forced a certain amount of world exploration beyond just the mission objective. That was kind of interesting for one go-round but I think I'm going to keep seeing it and that does not seem like quite so much fun. It is realistic, though -- Garrett's gotta make the rent, buy groceries, etc. He's got expenses.
The next mission, eVase-ive Thief Theft (you sneak into the Thieve's Guild and steal a sapphire vase) is bewilderingly complex. The guild is located underneath (?) a casino that is underneath (?) a restaurant. Seems like a lot of digging for a non-mechanized society. Maybe they used slave labor. Anyway, the casino isn't so bad. It's a reasonable size. The Guild, however, is multi-layered and sprawling. It's like six times as big as the casino above it. It has tunnels. It has numbered *things* (vaults, maybe?) and levers that move stuff and spiders that eat you and assorted people not-wearing-armor and other people wearing armor and lots of fireplaces (underground? where does the smoke go?) and raised brick walkways and really, how big is this damn guild? It *feels* huge. It's also crawling with people. And, again, the map is relatively useless and Garrett doesn't know where the vase is. (Not exactly true. He knows that the guild has two dudes in charge. One dude has the key, the other dude has the locked-up vase. The dudes are not very BFF at the moment and Garrett is hoping that he can make off with the vase and have them go for each other's throats. So, yeah, he has a vague idea of where the vase might be, but "Dude #2's quarters" is not helpful when you don't know where either Dude #1 or Dude #2 hangs his hat.)
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Date: 2009-11-04 03:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-11-05 12:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-11-04 07:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-11-04 08:11 pm (UTC)There's a couple of situations like that in Centre County up in Bald Eagle Valley. I'm pretty sure that the Union Twp/Union Boro polling stations are across the street from each other, for instance. Although neither of them are as small as the *two* Curtin Twp precincts. Why there are two precincts for a township with maybe sixty voters between them is a mystery lost in the depths of the Kennedy Administration, I'm sure.
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Date: 2009-11-05 12:54 am (UTC)We have about twenty registered voters (they don't purge the list often enough) and about thirteen people who regularly vote in the borough, half of whom vote by mail via absentee ballots. We are the "hot swappable spares" for the county's election equipment because we have so few ballots that we can count them by hand if necessary. (We don't mind our status as the hot-swappable spares... and, yes, they have come and taken our stuff for another precinct's use when needed.)
The other election supplies are paper ballots -- we get usually fifty printed ballots -- and the kit that they send out to everyone, with the postings and tape and pens and all that jazz. The borough owns its own voting booths, three of them (required by law) which are made of wood (framing and shelves) and red velvet (real velvet) curtains. The red velvet curtains came from a sale somewhere, I believe from a local high school that redid the auditorium curtains. The booths are folded up and stored in a spare room at the polling place between elections.
The polling place is the Lodge, which was my grandparent's house when I was small. It's bigger than a normal house. It has a pool table where we spread out all the stuff and pack up all the envelopes when we're done with the voting. The owners of the Lodge (VHDAI) get a check from the county for serving as the polling place. It's not a huge check, but it's a check.
The reason that the borough has its own precinct is that it is its own government. Before the establishment of the borough, it was mostly part of Brush Creek Township, 54.3 square miles containing (2000 census data) 730 citizens for a density of 13.4 people per square mile. (The other, a very small part of the borough as a whole, was in Wells Township, another hotbed of civilization containing a whopping 529 persons as of the 2000 census.) I am not certain that there is provision for multiple localities to vote at one place. The county seems perfectly happy to let us continue to be our own precinct and we're OK doing it this way, too.