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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 5316959" data-attributes="member: 27780"><a href="http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xuqgvk_dragon-issue-200-making-the-most-of-a-module_videogames#.UKaNv46Rn8s" target="_blank">Making the most of a module</a>Guess we're not completely devoid of filler, even here. Advice that you need to tailor existing modules to your players, and read them through properly so you're prepared, knowing what things are in there, how they relate to each other, and what tactics they will employ against the players? Issues 190, 157, and lots of other tangentially related articles say hi. This isn't a new topic at all. And with the use of modules as integral parts of people's campaigns fading somewhat, it does feel somewhat old skool in general, trying to lure people back into using and reusing the old stuff. This does not spark my interest at all, and feels like a bit of a letdown compared to the onslaught of special features we started off with. Oh well. We had to put up with things like V&V charisma in issue 100. We can breeze casually over this as well. Waiter! Serve up the next course! Eye of the monitor: Last issue we saw Sandy give us his position on sex and gore in video games. This time, it's piracy's turn on the soapbox. Unsurprisingly, as someone who makes their living from the computer game business, he's against it. And to discourage us from it, he tells the story of the demise of the Atari ST, one of the most pirated systems of all time. With games so easy to crack, people had no hesitation in doing so, and eventually companies lost interest in making games when they could get more profit elsewhere. This reminds us of several things. 1: People will usually pay for things if you make doing so more convenient than stealing them, and those who don't probably wouldn't have become customers anyway. 2: What is and isn't considered acceptable behaviour is far more dependent upon social pressure from the people around you than what some rules and regulations say. (This probably contributes a lot to the general lawlessness of the early internet, as a lot of the time, it's hard to think of people you only meet on the net as real people. ) 3: The asymmetry of production costs to reproduction costs is one of the great dilemmas of the information age, that we still have yet to come to a satisfying conclusion upon. The markups on things like computer games, CD's, movies, etc, compared to the cost of making the physical object are quite horrendous. Compare this to food, where they're often selling things for less than double the cost of production and getting to market, and some things, such as bread, are even loss leaders, and you can see another strong reason to consider the markups for easily copied luxuries somewhat unfair. And this is only going to get worse as more things become pure data, while the costs for gigabytes of storage space drop exponentially. This is hitting the music industry hardest, (probably because they were one of the slowest to react to the new distribution media <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" /> ) but everything that can be turned into pure data has to deal with it. And when we really get the hang of 3D printers, even that distinction will get pretty blurry. Raw materials will always have a market, but capitalism will have real problems when most finished products can be copied in your own home for negligible costs. I seriously hope we can get there without vested interests suppressing advancement for their own profit, and find a way of organising society so the average person can live free of soul destroying drudgery yet still have something constructive to contribute to society. Normally I would have cut a soapbox piece like this off long ago, but hey, it is a special issue. If ever there was a time to indulge a bit of transhumanist utopianism, this is it. Lands of Lore: The Throne of Chaos see Westwood strike out on their own with a rather good fantasy adventure. The usual class suspects, albeit without the cleric, must foil an evil witch via violence, magic, and puzzle-solving. Sandy isn't too keen on the amount of searching required, and you can do some sequence-breaking if you're cunning, but overall it's quite satisfying work. Dangerous Dave is almost shockingly primitive for the era, and so gets poor marks. Get with the programming, man. You can't make a profit if the graphics don't grab casual shop browsers. Monster Bashes 1-3 get a very short batch review. More so-so platformers, with sometimes fiddly controls. This is one genre consoles do a good deal better than PC's. Soul Blazer seems to be somewhere between Zelda and Gauntlet in it's proportion of roleplaying to action. You play an angel saving the souls of people from monsters. As you do, the world outside the dungeons gradually fills up, which is a pretty neat way to go about it. It's not without it's flaws, but they seem forgivable this time. Make sure you save regularly and do a bit of grinding to level up.</blockquote>

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