Wizards of the Coast is now selling DRM-free (but watermarked) copies of the the 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons books. This is good. (Here's a direct link to the store, just in cases the previous link requires a login.)

They claim two stores are carrying it, RPGNow and DriveThruRPG. This is kinda sad. Those two stores are actually the exact same company; products end up on both sites by default. But whatever.

More ridiculous is the pricing, but it's what I've come to expect. The books are $24.95 each, or you get get the bundle for $74.85 for a bonus of no savings. They claim this is discounted off a $34.95 price. Which is silly, since this is the only place the PDFs are being sold, so it's not a discount. What they're comparing it to is the physical books. The books which have higher quality images, hardbound covers, and don't require a computer to read. And only a fool would pay $34.95 for each book. I supported my local gaming store and preordered the box set, getting a 10% discount. If I was more mercenary, Amazon would have sold them to me for $23.07 or gotten all three in a nice slipcase for $66.12 (a further savings of a few bucks).

How is it that a book can be printed onto paper, bound into a hardcover, shipped to a warehouse, then shipped to Amazon, then shipped to me all for cheaper than sending me a measely 100MB of PDF? The resulting book doesn't require a computer to use. The PDFs do offer the ability to search, but is that benefit so mind blowingly valuable that I should accept a markup of one thousand or more percent?

Yes, it is easier to make illegal copies of the PDF. But someone wanting such a thing could have had it weeks ago. And the watermarking should keep it to a minimum. In trying to compensate for lost sales, they've losing sales to people who would love to buy a copy. At $10 a book I'd have already purchased them. But I guess it's better to not sell me anything than risk losing sales.

(He doesn't specifically say he's taking about 4e, and many of his points apply to more than 4e. But it mocks much of the 4e response so accurately that I'm sure it was on his mind. As to my own 4e thoughts, they're coming. It's proving to be complex and I'm spending a lot of time sorting out my thoughts.)

(2007-07-09: As valleyviolet points out, I had a duplicate "out." Fixed.)

A big part of 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons was supposed to the electronic, online component: D&D Insider. So far, it's a decidedly mediocre.

Wizards of the Coast killed off the successful and popular Dragon and Dungeon magazines to replace them with online versions. Moving online isn't inherently bad. I pay for two great online magazines (Pyramid for gaming and Salon). I'm potentially prepared to pay for Dragon and Dungeon. But here is the first problem: D&D Insider is a bundle; you take it or leave it as a whole. You get Dragon, Dungeon, an online character creator, an online rules reference, and the ability to play online. If you only want parts of it, too bad, you're getting it all. Maybe you're a player who only plays locally. You'll never use the online play. You shouldn't read Dungeon to avoid spoilers. But you pay for them anyway. Assuming WotC's idealized state, where every player is paying, a DM gets no value from Dungeon since it's highly likely that at least one of his players read it. This bundling is bad for customers.

The fix? Sell the services ala carte.

The second problem is how Dragon and Dungeon are produced: as PDFs only. There is no HTML. Look to the magazines I actually pay for; neither one makes PDFs mandatory. Think of the varous websites you visit for the articles; how many only provide PDFs? None, or maybe a small percentage. This is because PDFs are a pain in the ass. PDFs are great for printing, but miserable for reading online.

The fix? Provide articles as HTML. HTML and PDF would be great, but if I only get one format I want HTML.

The final problem, is the software tools, especially the character creator and tracker. This is trivial software. I am confident that I could have a useful beta with basic functionality with a man-month of work. Part of the problem is that WotC has no useful in house software development experience. Software houses with decades of experience still suck at managing the process; for WotC to leap in with something so important was dumb. Furthermore, I'm guessing they're trying to solve every single edge case before shipping. They should have shipped basic functionality when 4e shipped, then added to it over time. It would have made people happier and provided lots of useful test data.

The fix? This one is hard. Probably radically cut back the feature list, including doing radical things like only supporting the Heroic tier. Ship that as soon as is feasible and declare it a public, free beta.

After much pointless discussion, Wizards of the Coast has given enough details of the 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons Game System License to come to preliminary judgements.

The good news: it's more open than nothing. Compared to say, Shadowrun or GURPS, it's more open.

The bad news: it's nowhere near as good at the 3rd and 3.5 edition Open Game License.

The OGL had the key elements of a truly open license. It was non-revokable. WotC had no control over what you produced. It was basically an open source or free culture license for gaming. If you feel people have an ethical right to build upon their culture and share the results, the OGL did the job.

Aroud the OGL a vibrant community sprang up. Sure, there were people who just reprinted cheap Player's Handbooks. But truly original derivative works sprang up. Mutants & Masterminds and Spycraft spring to mind.

Despite all this competition, WotC apparently did just fine, at least fine enough to issue a huge number of source books.

Now there was a second license, the System Trademark License. The STL was far more restrictive. It was revokable. It gave WotC veto power over your product. You were barred from producing certain content. All that in exchange for the right to use the d20 logo. Not so good, but you were always free to forgo the logo and stick with the OGL.

WotC has trashed that openness. The GSL is essentially the STL. It's revokable, whenever WotC wants. (And tellingly, the STL is being revoked right now.) WotC gets veto power and you are barred form certain content.

This is WotC's right, and it's certainly more generous than most RPG publishers. But it flies in the face of their open claims from a few years ago. And it means anyone building on WotC's product is building on quicksand. What is, is. I've got a shelf full of closed games, this will just be one more.

(I should mention that my new RPG love, Spirit of the Century, is available under the OGL. It's a great game, and I recommend buying a copy, but you can check out the rules, minus all of the world details and color text online: Spirit of the Century (OGL SRD).)

Another year, another Gen Con! Planning on attending Gen Con Indy 2008? The official online event listings can be a bit slow, they don't support a terribly powerful set of search options, and the only option for browsing the listings is to download a spreadsheet. I've created a website that searchable and browsable Gen Con Indy 2008 event listings. I hope it's useful.

If you want to discuss this, the Gen Con forum is the best place.

The most recent Design & Development post on Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition talks about quests. They start off on agreeably enough; 4e will provide XP rewards for finishing quests. However, the second half of the article starts trending into the stupid. They open the stupid with:

One of the suggestions [in 4e] ... is to give players a visual, tactile representation of a quest as soon as they begin it. At the start of the adventure ... you can hand the players an index card spelling out the details of the quest -- including the agreed-upon reward.

Straight out of computer RPGs, most likely from World of Warcraft.

Fine, it's just one way to record notes about what's going on. It can be helpful if, say, there is a long lag between games. But it's not such an essential idea that I'd call it out in a design article. Quest entries in computer RPGs exist because a player can easily end up with a dozen simultaneously, because so many quests are cookie cutter and easy to forget, and because many quests have arbitrary requirements (kill 12 Foozles) that it's nice to have the computer track your progress. But in a tabletop game, players are usually facing only a small number of quests at the same time. And if your game is compelling, they'll usually remember the big picture because they're emotionally involved.

Still, if you've got a group who wants to focus on the direct adventuring and wants to minimize the time spent on plot, perhaps it's a good idea.

Continuing on:

In the middle of the adventure, when the characters find a key ... you can hand them a card, telling them that finding the matching lock is a quest.

Right. Because your players are so stupid they'll forget what a key is a for. And how is that a quest? Sure, if they find a locked door they'll be sure to try the key, but what's their incentive to go actively seeking the door? If the outer quest requires that the door in question be opened, they'll do it anyway, so the subquest is unnecessary in every possible way.

Finally, they build up to what I believe is the stupidest thing they've written in a Design & Development article:

That's a really interesting ramification of the quest system: It's okay to give the players quests they don't complete, quests that conflict with each other, or quests that conflict with the characters' alignments and values.

Amazing! In no RPG has it ever been possible for the PCs to have goals that they can't accomplish, or that conflict with other goals or their values! With such dizzying design skills, perhaps they can tackle other seemingly impossible tasks. Perhaps the ability for party members to disagree on courses of action! Oh, and what about the possibility of having someone who gives the PCs a quest to betray them! I know, it's crazy talk, I might as well wish for a pony.

At least this mostly just sounds stupid, unlike their plans for endless core books which is evil.

I'm really optimistic about 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons. I'm hearing lots of stuff that I like. We obviously don't have enough information to really judge the game yet, but it's promising. It's been so promising that I've been giving it the benefit of the doubt. I'm trusting that D&D Insider really won't be mandatory. I'm trusting that the radical changes will be good. However, a minor release of information in the D&D Podcast, episode 16 worries the heck out of me. You can listen yourself (it's at about the 1:57 mark, or 1:38 of chapter 2 if your MP3 player supports chapters) or here is a transcription:

So, one of the things that I thought a lot about when I was first putting together the outline for this book, which has grown considerably since then, but, it's really important mindset that I want to try to train people into right away which is that this is not the core Monster Manual. We're going to do some number of Monster Manuals over the life of the edition and those are the core monsters for the game. Just like we're going some number of Player's Handbooks that are going to be the core Player's Handbook rules for the game. So, there are some monsters that I very intentionally left out of this book so that when they appear in Monster Manual II, that will help communicate, "Hey, look, this is a core Monster Manual." You don't have frost giants if you don't have Monster Manual N. So I just said something that's out.

So, they are intentionally withholding traditional, core D&D monsters so they can sell you books containing them later. The "core" set of rules will continue to grow over the years, meaning that the minimal set of books you'll have to buy will grow. I find this loathsome and can't find any defensible case for this being good for customers.

One of the strengths of a role-playing game is that you can buy a small core set of books and have all of the core of the game. Sure, there are lots of cool supplements you might want, but all of the elements that make D&D D&D are there in the three core books. As a result, role-playing gaming is a very cost effective hobby; for $60 for a GM and an optional $20 per player, you got the full core D&D experience. Now the core experience becomes a moving target. Some core elements are withheld until additional books are released. When they are released, it will cost you more. The shared "core" experience between different groups of gamers won't be as common.

Here's the meme-du-jour. For the following list of games (culled from Hobby Games: The 100 Best), mark if you own a copy and if you have played the game.

(O means "I own a copy." I limited myself only to games I believe I could find in my apartment with a half hour or so search. P means "I have played the game". I limited myself to games I've played at least one complete game of, or one multi-hour session for role-playing games.)

(In the original meme, the name of each game was prepended with the name of the author of the matching article in the book. That was really dumb, as it just confused things, since the author was not the game designer. So I just deleted them. The original also calls for using bold and italics to indicate ownership and having played. That was hard to read, so I did up a handy table. Feel free to pinch it; I make no copyright claim to the table. I originally saw courtesy of Aaron.)

(I'm guessing "Descent" is "Descent: Journeys in the Dark". BoardGameGeek doesn't offer any better options, nor am I aware of any RPGs called Descent.)

(2007-08-29 edit: Added a title.)

Planning on attending Gen Con Indy 2007? The official online event listings can be a bit slow, they don't support a terribly powerful set of search options, and the only option for browsing the listings is to download a spreadsheet. I've created a website that searchable and browsable Gen Con Indy 2007 event listings. I hope it's useful.

(2007-05-05 addition) There is a thread for discussing this at the official Gen Con site if you're interested.

Missed deadlines, overloaded websites, and general frustration are par for the course when getting hotel rooms and event tickets for Gen Con. This year continued the traditional during hotel registration.

February 9th, 2:24 PM: Gen Con announces via email that hotel registration will open "at 9am (PST) on Monday, February 12, 2007." Skywalk access and proximity to the convention center are important to me, so I ensure I'll be free at 11:00 AM (CST). (I frequently end up having to house the Live Role-Playing Chess supplies one or more nights during the convention. The supplies fill a cart and weighs about 200 pounds. Having rolled it along surface streets in the rain before, I've eager to avoid it.)

February 11th, approximately 10:30 PM: Having purchased a four-day badge, I check the hotel registration page to confirm when it opens. The web site says (this is from memory) "12:00:00 AM (EST) on Monday." This is, of course, midnight, not noon. Maybe it's a typo, but just in case I wait for 11:00 PM (CST).

11:00 PM: Sure enough, hotel registration is open. I quickly book a room. I get exactly what I want; a room with a king bed in the Westin. An email confirmation promptly arrives.

February 12th, approximately 11:00 AM: I get around to checking my email. There is notice that my reservation has been canceled. There is no explanation about what happened. There is no information on the official Gen Con site. After being repeatedly redirected I finally reach someone who can give me details: registration was erroneously opened early. The 200 or so people who registered when it was erroneously opened have had their reservations canceled. The cancellations are taking a long time, so registration has been pushed back to 2:00 PM EST.

12:39 PM: 21 minutes before registration opens I receive Gen Con's email telling me about the cancellations and new registration time. (According to the email headers the message was sent at 11:50. It took 49 minutes for their server to send the message to my server. It's entirely possible many people didn't get the message until after registration opened.)

1:00 PM: Thanks to the adjusted registration time, I've can only squeeze in a half hour to get a room. The site is overloaded instantly. I spend the first fifteen minutes waiting for the page to load. When I submit the first form, I'm told I have to start over because of fifteen minutes of inactivity. I try over and over without success. I run out of time and have to return to work.

3:30 PM: I get another chance to try and register a hotel room. The site is still hammered. Of the original fourteen hotels, only five are left. The Westin and Marriott are filled. Fortunately there is a room with a king bed available at the Hyatt; not my ideal room, but good enough. However, when I get to the last page and try to finalize the reservation I'm told that the dates are no longer available.

3:45 PM: My previous reservation failing to go through, I start over from the beginning again. We're down to three hotels. I run into bugs on the registration page where it complains that I haven't filled in a field that doesn't exist. I eventually sort it out after many slow page loads and finally get a room at the Omni Severin. It's a nice hotel, but I've lugged the LRPC kit from the Omni before, and it sucks. Compared to the room I had eight hours earlier it's a decided drop.

8:09 PM: Out of curiosity I check the site again. There is one hotel with space available. It's eight miles away. For all intents and purposes all of the hotel space sold out in less than seven hours.

8:30 PM: I get home and find a message from the convention center staff on my answering machine telling me about the cancellation. I appreciate that they did so.

What went wrong

No one double checked the start time. Someone from Gen Con probably should have checked that they and the convention center were in agreement.

Use of "12:00 AM" instead of "midnight." Too many people get confused about the difference between 12:00 AM and 12:00 PM. It's easier to just have software say midnight or noon to keep things obvious. It's an easy mistake to make; I made it myself for years until I implemented software to do te 12:00 AM to midnight conversion, that really drove it home.

Canceling the rooms. By canceling the rooms they created new problems. People who thought they had housing sorted out, then didn't check their email until the next evening would discover they went from having a great room to essentially having nothing. The time necessary to cancel all of the rooms meant that the official registration time had to be pushed back, causing problems for anyone who specifically arranged free time in the middle of the work day to register.

The delay in sending email notifications. My room was canceled at 10:26 AM, but email notification about what was happening didn't get sent until 11:49 AM. The notification took about an hour to go out because they emailed their entire list, probably tens of thousands of messages. Notifying the 200 people who had reserved rooms early could have been nearly instantaneous.

Too slow web site. Maybe they need to throw more hardware at the problem. Maybe they need more bandwidth. Maybe they need better software. It doesn't matter. Gen Con is one of the biggest conventions they host. If Indianapolis a reputation of being able to host large conventions, they need to prove that they have the ability to do it.

Not enough rooms in the block. Sites like Expedia are offering rooms at some of the hotels. Gen Con can clearly consume all available space. Clearly those rooms should have been included in the block. If that's not enough rooms then there is a bigger problem and Indianapolis clearly fails at being able to handle Gen Con.

Lack of a priority system. Even fixing all of the above, there is too much contention for the nearest hotels. When staggering back to your hotel tired, drunk, or both at 2 in the morning, proximity is important. Some people would like a lottery system, but I'm not fond of it. A lottery system would just encourage scalping, rewarding people who get lucky. The more honest system would be to let capitalism work. One option is to increase prices for the nearby hotels. Another option would be an auction system. Gen Con partially implemented this system with the "Very Important Gamer" passes, but it's bundled with stuff I expect your average gamer is uninterested in and overpriced. (Tellingly, at Gen Con Indy 2006 they said it would only be available through the end of Gen Con Indy 2006. More than half of the 150 or so tickets are still available for sale.)

Ultimately hotel registration is run by the convention center. They have no incentive to improve the situation. Gen Con needs to lean hard on the convention center to fix this for next year. This debacle makes Gen Con look sloppy and incompetent.

There isn't much Gen Con can do in the meanwhile to fix this year. One thing I certainly hope they do is to provide exceptional bus service to and from the further away hotels. The bus service will need to address real gaming hours, which means busses as early as, say, 7 AM so gamers can make 8 AM games with ease, and that run as late as 2 or 3 AM. To be useful they need to be frequent, perhaps running every fifteen minutes. A frequent, extended hours bus service would take much of the sting out of having to stay miles away.

(Edit 2007-02-12: replaced original two sentence bitching and insulting subject ("Dear Gen Con: FUCK YOU", if you're curious) with the above.)

(Edit 2007-02-13: Fixed capitalization typo. Expand 12:00 AM notes; used to happen to me. Add slow web site, not enough rooms, and lack of priority system to problems. Add note about needing exceptional bus service.)

(Via Workbench.)

Lots of good thought and games has come out of The Forge. Simultaneously, it contains some of the most self-obsessed wankery about RPGs ever. This series of posts by Ron Edwards is a stunning example of how insane he and his creation can be. Argument by sloppy metaphor: did you know bad gaming is like sexually abusing a child, or wearing a bad prosthetic? Neither did any other sane human beings. Did you know your years of playing White Wolf games in high school damaged your ability to understand, enjoy, and create stories? Well, Ron says so, and he's got anecdotal evidence, so it must be true. Oh, and you might have been playing White Wolf, but the "play is not fun." I have no idea why you and I were playing it so much, since we apparently weren't having fun.

Thankfully Ron is here. He is better than us rabble and can shine the light of truth for us. Of course, to understand his truth, please read these three long articles, and all posts by some other guy scattered across dozens of threads.

Perhaps this is the nature of indie work in all media; the need to be elitist and exclusionary, to look down on the poor masses. It's just a shame that it's so hard to find the gems they're uncovering under all the layers of wankery.

Added bonus bitterness: Let's check out the definition of "Creative Agenda" at The Forge's Provisional Glossary. "Three distinct Creative Agendas are currently recognized: Step On Up (Gamist), The Right to Dream (Simulationist), and Story Now (Narrativist)." Fascinating. The three recognized creative agendas are the three that The Forge creater Ron Edwards decided he liked.

Now check out "Underbelly." "A Technique of preparation and play using a canonical setting and storyline, known to all participants, in which the events of play create a "hidden" storyline to enrich and reinforce the primary one, which is treated as a creative constraint. Term coined by Ron Edwards; also sometimes called 'inverse metaplot.'" Maybe it's called an "inverse metaplot" or "underbelly" by Forgites, but here in rational person world, it's simply "metaplot."

(Inspired by several posts at Shooting Dice.)

Update 2006-10-30: Deleted some junk accidentally left at the end of the post.

Update 2007-01-12: Fixed wrong word: haven't to having.

Every year there are a number of companies at Gen Con selling new RPGs. Of these companies, there are always a few who completely fail to successfully pitch their games. Some free tips:

If your game is "D&D, but better," you lose. Save yourself the cost of the booth and just give up. "But better" includes better rules, or tweaks to the setting ("We don't have elves." "Our elves are evil and nasty." "Elves are immortal." Really, what's with the elf fixation?)

Assuming your game is something more than D&D-but-better, be prepared to tell me, in two sentences why it's better.

If your better thing is a new game mechanic, it needs to be really innovative. It should be so innovative that at least a few people stare at you with disbelief when you describe it. If you've got numbers associated with innate attributes, learned skills, and perhaps a dash of advantages/disadvantages; you are nowhere near innovative. You need Forge level crazy*. You need to seriously propose using Jenga for conflict resolution. That sort of crazy.

(* If you're designing RPGs these days, you should at least be familiar with the Forge. It's arrogant and exclusive, but there is no other community of that scale thinking about innovative RPG design.)

So your rules aren't up to snuff? No worry, rules aren't really what sells most games anyway. The thing that sells your setting is "what the players do." Note that I do not mean setting. An interesting setting is easy. I own piles of RPGs with fascinating settings, but I have no idea what to actually do with them. So I never run them and I don't recommend them. Zero (a game about being an rogue member of a hive-mind) is intriguing, but I have no idea what sort of game I'd run. What sort of challenges should I put before a group of Little Fears characters (modern children facing their nightmares become real)? Beats me. When you give me your two sentence spiel, several fascinating potential plot lines should immediately leap to my mind. I should have no problem imagining what sort of sessions my gaming group would have. If this is the situation, you're golden, you've got me hooked.

Mind you, think about your two sentence summary. If, given that summary, your average gamer will say, "Oh, you mean like that other role-playing game?" you lose. If your summary begins "You play heroes in a medieval fantasy world" or "You play vampires hiding in the modern world", you better immediately follow it up with something that emphasizes how much you are not D&D or Vampire respectively.

So you've got your two sentence hook and it's actually unique an interesting. Unfortunately, no hook works for everyone. Some people will hear about Little Fears and immediately know what they'll do with it. Others, like me, won't. (Heck, I own the game and I still have no idea what I'll do with it.) If you're pitching your game, the prospective customer's reply isn't "That's cool!", but they don't immediately leave, follow up with multiple examples of possible plot lines. If you're lucky it will get their brain going and cause the that's-cool moment to happen.

I come to Gen Con to learn about interesting role-playing games. I want to be drawn into something new and exciting. Give me something to be excited about. Don't bore me with descriptions of yet another attribute-and-skill based system. Don't bore me with your world's long and irrelevant back story. I want to do cool things. Tell me what cool things I'm going to be doing if I buy your game.

The MegaPenny Project is designed to help visualize large numbers by showing them in pennies. As a handy side effect, it can give you a sense of scale on D&D treasure hordes. 50,000 gold coins would be a huge haul by any stretch of the imagination. If those coins were the size of penny, they would just fill a backpack.

Okay, what if you want enough coins for a dragon to lay on top of a small pile? You'll need 100,000,000 coins!

(Via Treasure Tables.)

Ultimately if you don't understand why Dungeons & Dragons is popular, I find it hard to take you seriously when you tell me how you're going to make role-playing better. (Free hints: If you think it's all marketing and first mover status, you lose. If you think it's because fans of D&D are somehow stupid or inferior to you, you lose.)

[1] badwrongfun: Playing "the wrong way", but having fun anyway. You might be playing the wrong way by going against the expectations of the game ("You can't run a hack-and-slash game using Vampire; you're missing the entire point!") or the expectations of gamers who have decided they are more evolved beings ("It's not possible to properly role-play in Dungeons & Dragons."). Primarily used humorously to show that the speaker doesn't care that it's "wrong" since it's fun, or that the speaker feels a slight bit of guilt for enjoying something they feel they shouldn't.

(Edit 2007-11-04: "message thread and an explanation" changed to "message thread as an explanation".)

Once upon a time Gen Con was run by a very uptight TSR who was afraid of anything that might make gamers look bad. This lead to long lists of forbidden events, including things as innocent as LARPing. Times really have changed under Peter Adkison. The most recent email newsletter from Gen Con highlighted the following event:

Hentai Dubbing: Do you think you have what it takes to be a hentai voice actor? If you do, it's time to put your tentacles where your mouth is and come on down to Dick & Buster's Hentai Dubbing Extravaganza!!

I hope to shake hands with the man responsible for the phrase, "put your tentacles where your mouth is

For those interested in learning just enough Japanese to enjoy hentai in its native language, the con also helpfully has Hentai dake jya nai: Japanese Words in Adult Anime.

(This is a draft that will eventually join my video game reviews. As it's a draft I may update it repeatedly without notice.)

I've found some absolute gems in the $5 bargin bin at Menards. Indeed, thanks to Menards I actually own a copy of the universally mocked Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing.

Several days ago I scored a copy of Enter the Matrix. I remember the reviews being pretty bad, but surely it's got $5 of entertainment in it.

So far, not so good. The camera jumps around unpredictably. When in close combat you'll sometimes end up facing away from an enemy, unable to turn the camera around or successfully do any attacks to your rear. First person mode is too slow for real gun combat. Third person mode is okay, but the main character shots scatter embarrassingly randomly about the screen. Filling the air with bullets might be okay if you didn't spend so much time short on ammo. The character animation is massively awkward. When running without weapons the characters look like a stereotypical geek running in gym class, his arms flailing about. When climbing up clain link your character slides across the surface like its buttered.

The controls are weirdly twitchy. At the default setting when you move into first person mode the motion is too twitchy to aim effectively. If you lower the mouse sensitivity it becomes too slow in third person mode.

The twitchyness continues inside the menu system. Clicks tend to turn into double clicks, meaning you answer questions before seeing them. You can use the keyboard to click effectively, but you can't select items in the menu because a quick tap of the keyboard jumps several menu selections.

You have lots of options, like the ability to climb up things, but it's randomly disabled to force you into the designed level path. This leaves you bouncing against relatively short walls looking stupid while the game refuses to let your character grab on and pull themselves up.

Finally, I reach the climactic battle at the end of the first level, I'm doing pretty well then- CRASH!

The level design is dull. A post office. An airport. Yawn. The levels were also designed without any consideration for practicality. Apparently to get between some terminals in the airport is to cut through the bathrooms.