Of Teeth and Claws

Update your bookmarks!

2010-03-29T11:59:00.003-04:00

Short version
It's time to update your links and/or RSS feed!

My new site is located at: http://systemicbabble.com/ (blog, RSS)

Long version
After two and a half years, five hundred and fifty posts, thousands of comments, and nearly one million visits it is finally time for me to retire 'Of Teeth and Claws'.

As I alluded to last week this is hardly the end of my blogging; I've been going strong in some form or another since 2003 and simply cannot keep my digital mouth shut for more than a couple of weeks at a time. I am, however, looking to shake of the single topic rut that I keep getting myself into. Over the course of my blogging career I've ran an Ottawa Senators hockey blog, a Canadian political blog, a military history blog, and now a gaming blog. As much fun as these focused sites have been, I always feel that I need to keep myself on message when I'm writing, with infrequent deviations.

So it's time to fix that. I have set up a new blog here: Systemic Babble. (RSS, Twitter)

I have seeded the blog with 101 articles from Of Teeth and Claws, and will be pulling in some older posts from 'Bound by Gravity' and 'Never Forget' over the course of the next few months.

Concurrently, I will be writing new material. A lot of this will be video game related, but you will also see posts about a number of other topics that interest me, as well as updates from the Web Critters project whenever I have status to report.

Also, as of now, new comments on Of Teeth and Claws will be disabled. I feel I need to take this measure in order to unburden myself from dealing with the constant barrage of spam that the site receives, and I don't want people to think that I'm ignoring their contributions.

See you on the new site!

Can a College Class be a Game?

2010-03-25T18:04:00.013-04:00

While the bear’s away, the cats can come out and play?

Well, it’s in a little different vein than the usual game design articles here, but I felt the topic was pertinent enough to entertainment game design to post here. As I’ve mentioned a few times before, I’m particularly interested in the convergence of video gaming and video game culture with formal Education and educational psychology. It’s one of the frontiers of both Education and gaming, so it makes the news fairly frequently. That said, I was surprised to spot this recent article on Yahoo news:

Inspired by popular video games like World of Warcraft, an Indiana University professor is applying game design principles such as clear, well-defined goals and gradual, incremental rewards to his college classes. A hit with students, the approach has some employers showing interest, too.

Students at several of Indiana University's game design courses begin their class with zero "experience points," which corresponds to an F grade. Instead of completing presentations, they'll perform "quests;" sitting exams becomes "fighting monsters;" and handing in assignments becomes "crafting." Students even team up into "guilds" to tackle group projects.

As much as I’d like to say this is a great idea and recommend that other courses and programs adopt an approach like this.. well, there are some problems. Now I need to preface this.. It could be that this particular game design program in Indiana is already addressing all of these issues. I just don’t have any way of knowing from the two available articles. I believe that there are five significant problems and issues with the approach:

Buying In

The first major issue is buy-in. So far, every single person I’ve talked to about the article has basically said the same thing: “Interesting.. but kinda dorky”. Several people even felt insulted at the idea of ‘pretending’ that college work was like ‘questing’. As I described in a previous article here, two of the five requirements for something to be a ‘game’ are cognitive, wrapped up in the perception and mindset of the game ‘player’. Some activities just aren’t going to be games for some individuals, and getting a person to accept something as a game requires more than just giving non-game activities trendy game labels. But let’s suspend disbelief for a few moments, assume that we’re going beyond just renaming, and look at some real potential differences between a traditional college class and a ‘game’ class.

‘Maintenance’ vs. ‘Progression’

The concept of ‘experience points’ has been a part of nearly every fantasy role-playing game to date. Experience points are one tool that games use to create game ‘progression’, or a method for helping the player feel like they’ve accomplished something and assisting the player in goal-forming. It’s a popular game concept, as the commentary for the Yahoo article highlighted:

“This system works because traditional grading is actually flawed. In the traditional system, you start at 100% and have to MAINTAIN that. Maintenance of anything is harder, more stressful work than PROGRESSION, which is how this ‘gamer system’ works.”

Looking at the difference a little closer, however, it’s really only a difference in frame of reference. If you consider the total points available in a course, and compare that total to your current points, you have a progression system. But if you compare your current points to the maximum possible points available to date, you have a maintenance system. The key difference between these two viewpoints is actually the words ‘maximum possible’. As those familiar with MMORPG game design will tell you, one of the critical requirements for a successful MMORPG is ensuring that the players never feel like they’ve hit the end of progression, the end of the roller-coaster ride. The player should always feel like they have more that they can accomplish, because they minute they reach the end of the ride, they’re probably going to stop playing. So how do you cognitively change the course into a progression system? Remove the ‘maximum possible points’.. don’t let the student hit the end of the progression.

There are two reasonable ways to accomplish this. First, you can make most or all ‘quests’ available at any given point in the course so a student always has the opportunity to make progress. Unfortunately, this isn’t always feasible in some content areas and classes. Sometimes certain activities and assignments require information or resources that the students don’t have yet. It also doesn’t address the progression issue of when the student gets close to the end of the course: What happens when they’ve completed all of the ‘quests’ available for the entire course, and still don’t have as many ‘experience points’ as they would like? Alternately, you can provide a near-unlimited number of ‘quest’ opportunities. In a traditional grading system, this would be called ‘extra credit’.

Meaningful Learning

The previous section described methods for allowing students to experience game ‘progression’ in a classroom setting, and there are a number of potential benefits and problems involved in creating such a system. In gaming terminology giving the player lots of possible methods for making progress is typically referred to as giving the player ‘multiple routes’ for success. In Education, it’s called ‘differentiated instruction’. Giving the player multiple routes to success allows them to play to their strengths, both in terms of activities the student is most comfortable with as well as activities that fit the student's learning style best.

However just as the game designer can re-brand ‘assignments’ and ‘presentations’ as ‘questing’ and ‘crafting’, the player is equally free to rename the activities (quest) ‘grinding’. Anyone who’s played MMORPGs for any length of time can probably attest to how routinized and tedious ‘questing’ can become. While the player may learn valuable skills and techniques during their first few quests, quite quickly quests come down to nothing more than time and route optimization, a fairly mindless activity for most players. To parallel the curricular problem: It is easy to create another worksheet or assignment for a class, but much more difficult to make each activity an equally-worthwhile learning experience. From a survey I conducted on World of Warcraft learning, one of the trends I noted was that players typically reported that game rewards were less meaningful than the rewards from non-game activities, despite being more tangible and immediately useful. Incorporating progression into a course needs to add to the motivational experience, not just suck the meaning out of the activities, and this is no small challenge. Further, dramatically increasing the number of possible assignments and activities (as well as the timings of when they can be completed) would significantly increase both the lesson planning and grading necessary for the course.

Reward ‘Currency’ & Controllable Environments

Anyone who’s played fantasy role-playing games quickly becomes familiar with the concept of game reward ‘currency systems’. The fluidity of game reward currency compared to typical non-game rewards gives games significant motivational appeal: You might be hard-pressed to come up with any tangible benefit to struggling to learn Calculus, but you know exactly what you can do with the gold you’ll get from doing that quest. This is particularly important in enticing players to try a game for the first time. James Paul Gee, one of the foremost experts on video game learning, calls it the ‘Amplification of Input Principle’. Ideally, the game activity should allow the player to feel successful within the first few minutes of playing, and reward the player in an immediately-useful way. What I’m getting at here is that on their own ‘experience points’ are not a currency with much utility or fluidity. In the simplest classroom setting, all you can trade them for is your grade for the class. In most games, however, ‘experience points’ are typically traded for ‘levels’, which in turn give the player access to other forms of more-useful currencies like ‘skill points’.

As I mentioned in a previous article, one of the five basic requirements for an activity to be considered a ‘game’ is that the activity is ‘controllable’. Ideally, not only should the player have some level of control over the final outcome of the activity, they should also have some ability to influence the course of activity events. In this case, that means giving ‘experience points’ greater utility than just currency toward a course grade, or the addition of other complementary currency systems. For example, students might be able to trade experience points for class absences (or the extra assignments or activities that are typically associated with making up missed classes) or the ability to opt out of a test or assessment, or specific amounts of experience points might be required (or used) to ‘unlock’ certain kinds of activities or projects.

Game-play Motivations

Finally, once we’ve adequately established the course activities as a ‘game’, it’s important to examine what types of game players would be attracted to the particular game. Ideally, we want the game to appeal to all students. Players of MMORPGs will probably have heard of the ‘Bartle Test’. The test, designed by Richard Bartle, is designed to identify a MMORPG player’s ‘game-playing motivations’. According to the test, there are four primary game-playing motivations, designated the ‘Achiever’, the ‘Explorer’, the ‘Socializer’, and the ‘Killer’. Everyone has a little of each motivation in them, with a player’s two highest-scoring motivations most directly affecting the kinds of games and game activities that will interest that player. If you’ve never taken the Bartle Test, a free version of the test can be found on the GamerDNA site here.

A course experience point progression system definitely fits best with the ‘Achiever’. Achievers “enjoy setting goals, surpassing previous performances and hitting new milestones. They tend to have lots of high scores, badges, trophies and other concrete evidence of their successful endeavors”. An experience point progression system with multiple routes for success would also appeal to the ‘Explorer’. Explorers enjoy discovering the unique and novel aspects of the game environment and system. They want to examine every possible route to success and understand every nuance of the game environment. "It's not so much the wandering around and poking about, but that euphoric eureka moment the Explorer strives for.”

Unfortunately, nothing about a course experience point progression system directly appeals to the ‘Socializer’. Players with high Socializer scores “enjoy interacting with other people, forming bonds and finding cooperative solutions to the challenges within the (game) world”. Enticing the Socializer would require adding a social and community aspect to the course: not just group activities and assignments, but the ability to discuss the game environment and related activities and to share ideas and understanding. In short, the creation of a course learning community. A lot of college classes encourage ‘study groups’, but the social networks and systems employed by gaming culture are typically much more elaborate and extensive, including blogs, wikis, discussion boards, databases, and facebook and twitter groups. Further, unlike study groups led by graduate teaching faculty (GTFs), gaming learning communities are typically player controlled, giving players ownership over their learning environment.

Most problematic is the ‘Killer’. In general, direct competition between students in a class is frowned upon. Achievement in schools today is typically ‘mastery-based’: student learning is compared against a ‘benchmark’ goal, rather than against other students. Further, laws protect students’ grades and performance. The character-comparison sites and ranking systems common with online fantasy role-playing games would be illegal in a school setting. While carefully-controlled optional in-class competition could be one method for enticing the Killer, another reasonable approach would be to provide averaged student data throughout the course, allowing those interested in the competitive aspect of gaming to track their own accomplishments against the class average in a variety of ways.

In conclusion, I definitely think we’ll see more and more attempts at bringing gaming and gaming culture into our Educational experiences.. and hopefully these attempts will gradually incorporate more and more of the kinds of learning that have been found to be effective in successful video game design, rather than just attempt to give traditional classroom activities game labels.

Winds of change are blowing

2010-03-16T12:27:00.002-04:00

I've been enjoying my most latest mini-break from blogging, but it didn't take long for the writing itch to return. I'm a weak, weak man and I have far too many opinions to keep bottled up inside. I'll be getting back to full time blogging soon, but for now I'm mouthing off over on Twitter to try to familiarize myself with the application.

You can find me over there if you're interested it what I'm thinking: SystemicBabble. I promise I won't yammer on endlessly about the minutia of my life. (Slap me if I do.)

Personally I'm still somewhat surprised that I'm on Twitter at all - after all, up until a few days ago all I could do about the service was bad mouth it. Much to my chagrin an idea squirreled its way into my brain, and since then I've been unable to shake it. Twitter is the basis of this idea, and so learning it became a priority.

You see, one of the things I've been working on during my blogging hiatus is an old project that I continually neglect: The Web Critter Project. I've recently dusted the codebase off and will be putting a lot more effort into finishing what I started, with a twist.

The initial plan was to create an ALife simulation that used web pages as an environment. One incredibly difficult problem with this idea was that web pages are complex and often messy, and so using them introduces a layer of ugliness that kept me at arms length. (Not to mention newish technologies like AJAX that transform the web into a much more dynamic thing.)

Twitter, on the other hand, is a great little environment. Messages are at most 140 characters long, and do not have any implicit formatting. If I treat each Twitter account as a specific location within the simulation's environment and consider a user's last N tweets as the available resources, then suddenly the simulation starts to take shape.

I'll write more about this later, so watch this space if you're interested. Oh, and video games. I'll talk about them too.

Notice: Hiatus

2010-03-04T22:14:00.005-05:00

Just a heads up that I need somewhere between a few weeks and a month or two to recharge my blogging batteries.

Tired bear is tired

I've been feeling compelled to post every single day recently, which means that writing is starting to feel like a job. From past experience (I've been blogging since 2003) I know that if I keep pushing to meet arbitrary self-imposed quotas then I'll burn out hardcore, and need way more time off then if I take a break now.

Toskk has free reign to post here in my absence, so things might not be completely dark.

See you all on the other side.

Video games that change the world

2010-03-02T12:36:00.002-05:00

As time goes on video games are slowly shaking off their reputation of being nothing more pointless escapism. With many of the original video gamers well into their 30's and 40's, it makes sense that more and more of the decision makers in the world have, at some point in their lives, had a positive experience with gaming.

Today I have a series of three articles that articulate some of the non-traditional uses that have been found for games..... they're no longer just about having fun.

1. Tackling societal problems
CNN has a great interview up with Jane McGonigal, a games developer who focuses on "the way that massively multiplayer online gaming generates collective intelligence, and interested in the way that the collective intelligences thus generated can be utilized as a means of improving the world". (ref)

Here's a quote from the article:

The cooperative skills and hopefulness that people learn while pecking away at online games like World of Warcraft will help our society address real-world problems like climate change and nuclear arms proliferation, she says. To get people to use less oil and mentor entrepreneurs in Africa, she also is developing games that merge the digital and real worlds.

"My goal for the next decade is to try to make it as easy to save the world in real life as it is to save the world in online games," she said.

2. Winning hearts and minds in a warzone
The American military has created a video game that attempts to teach soldiers how to properly deal with the civilians that they interact with during wartime and peacekeeping operations. This is always a sticky problem, as different societies are often completely alien to foreign visitors - especially those bearing arms.

A new game may help soldiers in that problematic campaign–winning the hearts and minds of people in occupied countries. The game, developed by the University of Texas and backed by the U.S. Army, gives American soldiers deployed abroad some lessons in foreign customs and cultures. This is the opposite of a first-person shooter game; the Pentagon calls it a “first-person cultural trainer” game.

Air-dropped into foreign lands, soldiers often find themselves at a loss, knowing neither the local language nor the cultural conventions. The new 3D simulation game is intended for soldiers to learn the niceties in Iraq and Afghanistan, where a friendly relations with locals could make the difference between life and death.

3.Teaching science
Finally, Discover.com blogger Sean Carroll discusses his greatest hope for video games, which is well within their capacity to accomplish:

The kids these days, they love their gaming. So it makes sense to ask how that passion can be put to good use. Personally I’m fascinated by the prospects of using games to teach people science. Not just facts and features of the real world — although those are important — but the scientific method of hypothesis-testing and experiment.

Games already feature exactly those features, of course; everyone who figures out the "laws of nature" in the game world is secretly doing science. It wouldn’t be that hard to tweak things here and there so that the techniques they were practicing connected more directly with science in the non-virtual reality.

Burning Germany to the ground

2010-03-01T17:16:00.005-05:00

As I'd hoped, Bill has posted a battle report for the game of Axis & Allies (revised edition) that we played on Saturday. I played the Allies, while he controlled the Axis powers. Although it was a one-sided affair almost from the start, which is less interesting than a tight game, we still had a fun time with it overall.

Time runs out for Germany - click to enlarge

Players of the original Axis and Allies will definitely want to check out the later edition. Not only does it add a couple of new unit types (artillery and destroyers), but it also corrects a lot of the imbalances present in the 1981 edition, most importantly the terrible tech charts.

If I were to pick a few rules changes that make the biggest strategic difference they would be:

Changing the defense value of tanks from 2 to 3. This is particularly massive for Russia, as it allows them to maintain a stronger defense while simultaneously delivering powerful attacks to Germany's eastern front.
Adding the Sahara desert to Africa. This makes it far more difficult for the Germans to conquer the continent, starving them from what used to be a guaranteed source of IPCs.
Low cost submarines. At 6 IPCs, subs are a steal - and with their sneak attack they can cause havoc early and often.
Removing the combat value from transports, and making them ineligible as combat targets. A staple strategy in Axis & Allies naval combat used to be bringing extra transports to a battle to take early hits. Not only is this moot, but now transports are auto-destroyed when present in a sea space containing only enemy units.

I look forward to playing a game as the Axis sometime soon; after the beating that I delivered to Bill I'm curious to see if I can overcome the problems he ran into and threaten the world.

Board Game: Panzer General

2010-02-28T09:48:00.005-05:00

Bill and I had a rare games day yesterday which, as always, started with a ritual gorging on an orgy of food at Denny's, and then graduated into a game of the new Axis & Allies (which I'm hoping Bill will review on his site) before moving into a few rounds of Panzer General: Allied Assault, a game that I received for my birthday last month.

Click to enlarge

Panzer General is an interesting collaboration between Petroglyph Games and Ubisoft. The World War II strategy title was co-developed for the Xbox 360 (XBLA) and meatspace game market. I only have experience with the physical version of Panzer General, however the Gamers With Jobs discussed the XBLA version shortly after Christmas and seemed to enjoy it.

Gameplay overview
At first glance Panzer General is a dauntingly complex game. When you open the box you are greeted by a huge stack of cards, and an obscene number of cardboard chits. The rulebook only further serves to scare the crap out of new owners: while not as heavy as traditional hex-based wargames, there are so many steps involved in a single turn (combat alone is a 16 step process) that I was wondering what I had gotten myself into. Thankfully, after walking through a couple of turns step-by-step, we were able to set the rule book aside: the game is simple to internalize and becomes very natural in a hurry.

The game, like many modern strategy titles, does not come with a fixed board. Instead, cardboard tiles representing various terrain features (hills, towns, plains, etc) are assembled to create a playing area tailored to specific scenarios. The beginner scenarios are 5x6, however differing sizes and shapes are possible.

Gameplay is completely card-based. You receive an allotment of cards - both actions and units - to begin the game, and are able to replenish your hand at the start of every turn. Unit cards are played onto the map (face down at first, but then exposed when they contact the enemy) while action cards are played when specified (during combat, or as full actions during your turn).

Click to enlarge

The first thing that you will notice when playing Panzer General is how cramped the board feels compared to other war games. 5x6 is not a lot of room to maneuver, and so battle lines will be drawn in a hurry. Placement of units becomes crucial, because it is almost too easy to box your own units out of important battle, and render them useless. Thus, planning for the end game is necessary from your very first turn.

Combat is extremely intuitive, but also strategically deep. Both units get a chance to inflict damage on the other with the attacker usually going first. Combat is resolved by comparing the innate attack value of the attacking unit with bonuses for terrain, morale, and support against the defense value of the target combined with bonuses for terrain. Action cards can then be played to further modify the outcome, and finally a small random component is applied to the totals . The results are then tallied up, damage is applied, and if it is still alive the target gets a chance to counter-attack.

The key to most battles is support. Any units that is capable of attacking the target can lend its support value to the fight. Usually these consist of tanks or infantry in direct contact with the target as well as artillery at range. It is very important to establish strong support lines, and not over-extend yourself deep into enemy territory where you are exposed to more fire.

One other important game mechanic is 'prestige'. Prestige is the currency of Panzer General, and is gained by holding territory. You spend your prestige in order to play new units, activate action cards, and draw extra cards at the beginning of your turn. Prestige is collected at the end of each of your turns, and that allowance must last you through your opponents turn as well as your subsequent turn. Running out of prestige in often fatal - action cards can heavily influence battles, and being unable to play them when you get attacked (or are attacking) ensures defeat. (Likewise, running out of cards is not recommended.)

Final thoughts
All in all, Panzer General is a nice change of pace from traditional war games that involve manipulating plastic pieces on a battle field. Once you get your head into the proper mindset and start playing the game for what it is (instead of what you think it should be) its a lot of fun. If I had an Xbox I would certainly be picking up an electronic copy to see how it translates as an online experience.

Demo: Heavy Rain

2010-02-24T12:11:00.009-05:00

Heavy Rain, the latest offering from Quantic Dream, was released as a PS3 exclusive this week, and has been receiving largely positive reviews from the gaming press. A demo was made available a couple of weeks ago in the Playstation Store, however I only managed to get around to playing it last night, largely because I wanted my wife to experience the game as well and our schedules have been out of sync.

Despite it's enormous budget, Heavy Rain is not your average blockbuster title. Fast paced action, deep strategy, and number crunching are all eschewed in favor of creating interactive entertainment in which the player has some control over the outcome of the murder mystery/thriller that unfolds. The result, if the demo is any indication, is a strange beast that blurs the line between video game and cinema.

Scott Shelby - click to enlarge

Graphically, Heavy Rain is a masterpiece. The artists have taken an incredible amount of care in crafting a world that looks and feels utterly realistic. Character models are fantastic both in how they look and also in how they move. Most games still have a difficult time animating human motion, and while this title has a few glitches (for example, when Shelby uses his asthma puffer) it is far tighter than the competition.

Another nice touch is the way clothing reacts to the environment. Agent Jayden starts out his sequence dry, but quickly appears soaked as he is forced to survey a crime scene. If he falls down while investigating then his clothing is muddied, and falling in different ways convincingly dirties Jayden's pants and jacket. Likewise, the graphical results of losing a fight are incredible - Investigator Shelby looks like hell after his encounter like a thug if you perform poorly.

Norman Jayden - click to enlarge

Game play, on the other hand, is a mixed bag. At its core, Heavy Rain is nothing but a prolonged series of quick time events in which the player may choose to execute a series of gestures to interact with the environment, or in some cases is forced to do so.

If Scott Shelby starts having an asthma attack then you need to push your thumb stick to the right, and then roll to the bottom. If Norman Jayden wants to investigate a scrap of cloth on the ground you need to push down on your stick. If you want to speak to an NPC then you need to push the button corresponding to one of the thought actions that will spiral around a character. If you get in a fight then you will be forced to waltz through a God of War-style series of clicks and stick motions.

While I still dislike quick time events, Heavy Rain's do not annoy me nearly as much as those found in other games. When used as the main game play mechanic, QTEs are not nearly as disjointed and immersion-breaking as when they are wedged into a brawler, and after a while some of the common events even started to feel natural. It also helps that the QTE prompts are unobtrusive white overlays and are positioned near the object or place that a player is meant to interact with; this design choice allows the player to continue to focus on the main portion of the screen, and not constantly divert their attention away from the gorgeous graphics.

Summary
Both my wife and I were suitably impressed with Heavy Rain and we have agreed to rent it one weekend when we have nothing else planned. It should be a nice experience to snuggle up together on the couch and experience a good murder mystery first hand.

Demo parameters: Two scenes (30m of game play)
Release date: Now
Cost: $59.99

Update: The Brainy Gamer shares his thoughts on the full game. I usually agree with about fifty percent of his opinions/gaming tastes, so taking his negativity with a grain of salt is recommended.

What is a Game, Anyway?

2010-02-22T19:21:00.002-05:00

We talk about 'games' a lot.. but at the core what is a 'game' really? It turns out that defining 'games' is not an easy thing to do. People have been trying to define the term for (probably) as long as games have been in existence, and the emergence of 'video games' has greatly increased the interest in defining games in general.

Experts from many different disciplines have over the years attempted to define what it takes for something to be a 'game' and to describe the most basic requirements of a 'game', but invariably each definition is different. For example, some definitions try to isolate 'games' from 'puzzles', while others try to isolate 'games' from 'sports', other definitions try to isolate 'single-player' activities from 'multi-player' activities, and still others try to isolate 'cooperative' activities from 'competitive' activities.

Why should we care about a definition?! Well, I believe that how we define games has a significant impact on how we design games, and further that this definition has interesting implications for video games in general and MMOs in particular.

While I don't mean to dismiss or discount the definitions put forward by many notable game designers, or claim that my own list of requirements for an activity to be considered a game is the 'correct' one, I'm going to suggest that there are five basic requirements for an activity to be considered a 'game', and rely on a French Sociologist by the name of Roger Caillois for some of these requirements. His 1958 book, Man, Play, and Games (sometimes translated as Games and Men) is still considered one of the definitive works on games, despite being written long before video games even existed.

Just to preface these requirements.. many of these basic requirements have just as much of a cognitive component (they apply to the mindset of the 'player') as a physical component. I'll explain more in-depth for each requirement, but just keep in mind that some of the requirements to something being a 'game' might have to do with your own outlook on the activity.

Requirement #1: Governed by Rules - the activity has rules that are different from everyday life.

This is the one requirement that essentially everyone agrees on. All games have rules, and operating within and around these rules forms the core of the game experience. Game rules are so critical to the game experience that they can be the source of a lot of conflict and animosity. My own memories of elementary school recess are filled with days when the pick-up soccer, football, wall-ball, four-square, etc. game devolved into a heated argument (sometimes even a physical one) over the rules, and I'm sure I'm not alone in this.

Requirement #2 - Uncertain - the outcome of the activity is unforeseeable.

In any game, there is a fair amount of randomness and unpredictability. In a game of soccer, you don't know what the final score will be before starting the activity, or even if your team will score at all. In a game of Chess, you don't know who will Check Mate the opposing King or how it will happen, or even if it will happen at all (Chess can also end in a draw, either by insufficient material to accomplish a Check Mate or by triple repetition of position).

This requirement eliminates many activities that we would call 'puzzles'. Examples of puzzles includes activities like jigsaw puzzles, crosswords, and Sudoku. In each of these activities, you know up-front precisely how the activity will turn out.

Why is this important?! Well, without getting too much into what motivates a person to play a 'game' (a topic for a future article, hopefully), I'll just mention that what motivates a person to play a game is somewhat different than what motivates a person to do a puzzle. Take the player-vs-environment 'raiding' of many MMOs.. many of the most-vocal critics of PvE activities make the claim that raiding isn't a game at all, but a big puzzle, and whether you agree with that statement or not may help determine if you prefer player-vs-player activities over player-vs-environment ones. This requirement also has interesting implications for video game replay. As the player becomes more familiar with a particular video game (e.g. they've 'beaten' the game), the 'outcome' of that activity becomes more and more certain, and in the mind of the player that 'game' gradually shifts toward being a 'puzzle' instead.

Requirement #3 - Separate - the activity is circumscribed in time and place.

This requirement is about the when, the where, and the how long.. the constraints of the game environment itself. Many games have specific time or score limits, or objectives or circumstances which end the game, the point being that players need to know 'at the end' who wins, and when that 'end' is going to happen.

Why is this important?! This requirement has interesting implications for online and other long-term games, where an official 'end' is effectively nonexistent. At a basic level, this requirement is about giving the player 'benchmarks', moments where they can know that they were successful. MMOs often accomplish this through boss fights, achievements, online character tracking and comparison sites, etc.

Requirement #4 - Controllable - the outcome of the activity can be influenced.

As my favorite video game design commentator Daniel Floyd would say, game design is all about designing 'decisions'. Decisions, whether expressed as 'problems' or 'choices', give the player control over the outcome of the game. How much control a player has typically comes down to the mental, physical, or mechanical rules that govern that game. How well can you hit a baseball with a wooden bat? How well can you count cards or anticipate your opponent's next move? How long have you spent leveling up your character and acquiring better gear?

'Games of Chance' (i.e. gambling) are an interesting example of this requirement, and a good illustration of the cognitive component of games. I'm going to suggest that people who enjoy games of 'pure' (i.e. true random) chance treat these activities as games because they do believe they have some measure of control over the outcome: luck. For the rest of us, we'll either engage in games of chance that are not 'pure' (e.g. Blackjack or Poker) or we won't engage the activity at all because it's not a game to us.

Why is this important?! There are two aspects of this requirement that are especially pertinent to MMOs. First, video games often use a variety of methods for allowing players to influence the outcome of events, for example gear and levels, but one of the more difficult-to-manage methods for allowing players to influence the outcome of events is the 'skill factor'. Game players often want to see a direct correlation between their personal skill level and their level of control over the game events, and some games and activities emphasize or de-emphasize this 'skill factor'. Second, MMOs often require a fair amount of teamwork and working with a group of players. Players interested in personal control over the outcome of game events often dislike having to give up some of their control by being forced to rely on a group.

Requirement #5 - Goal-Directed - the activity has some desired outcome.

Whether it's to defeat the opponent, get the highest score possible, or conquer the world, all games have desired outcomes. For some games, the desired outcome is the same as the 'end' condition (e.g. Check Mate the opposing King), but in a lot of games there are many possible goals a player might work toward. For example, take a game like Baseball. While the overall goal is to score more runs than the opposing team, your personal goal might be to hit a home-run.. or to just get a single.. or to catch that pop fly coming your way.

Why is this important?! Video games in particular are often very good at giving the player lots of potential goals, and this goal-forming process is very important in attracting the player to the game and getting them to keep playing. Helping the player select and pursue goals is a critical aspect of good game design. A player who gets involved in a game without a goal in mind is very unlikely to enjoy the experience, or to stick with it for very long. That activity just isn't fun for that person.. it's not a game to them.

Why does any of this matter?! The really important point to all of this is that if the above requirements are accurate, we can directly alter an activity to become a game (or not become a game anymore) by adjusting a few parameters and helping the player cognitively accept the activity as a game. For example, take the activity of flipping a quarter (i.e. heads or tails). Clearly, this activity is not a game. Let's look at why not:

The activity is governed by rules, of sorts. We'll be flipping the quarter by hand, and when the coin comes to rest we must accept the results of the flip (we can't decide we don't like the results and turn the coin over, for example).
The activity is semi-uncertain. While we don't know the exact result of each flip, we do know that in a true random environment the coin will land heads 50% of the time and tails 50% of the time.
The activity is not circumscribed. We haven't yet established an 'end' point or win condition to the activity.
The activity is not usually considered controllable. Barring slipping in a fake two-headed coin, most people would say this activity is pretty close to true random.. after all it's used to 'fairly' decide on who goes first in a lot of games.
The player has no goal in mind for this activity. Most people would probably consider this activity to be mind-numbingly boring.

With that in mind, let's look at how we might adjust the activity to meet all of the five requirements:

To make the activity circumscribed, we need to give it an 'end' condition. As examples, this could be to only flip the quarter x times, or it could be to flip the quarter until you got heads y times in a row.
The player actually has more control over this activity than they might realize. For example, you could suggest that the player adjust the position of the coin on their hand before flipping it, or how high in the air or how fast they flip the coin, or how soon they catch the coin. While it's not a lot of control, the key to this activity is convincing the player that they do have some control over the outcome.
Let's say we want the goal of the activity to be to get the highest ratio of heads to tails. As mentioned above, the important issue here is not that the activity has a goal, but getting the player to want to achieve that goal. How would I get the player to take on this goal? I'd probably use some kind of reward for 'winning'. How does $50.00 for getting the most heads in 50 quarter flips sound? Ready.. set.. go!

Certainly video game design is a lot more complex than the above activity, but examining how effectively video games meet these basic 'game' requirements could be a valuable tool for increasing a game's replay value and enticing a broader spectrum of game players.

Post Mortem: Retro Game Challenge

2010-02-22T12:18:00.012-05:00

A few weeks ago when I was abruptly dragged away from home for a business trip I went looking for a game to play in my hotel room in the evenings. While I received some great feedback from readers, I actually ended up snagging a copy of Retro Game Challenge for the Nintendo DS for $5 at a local Electronics Boutique.

Retro Game Challenge's premise is a somewhat novel one: you have been kidnapped by a strange electronic avatar and time warped back to the 1980's where you must conquer a number of arbitrary gaming challenges in order to return to your present day life. This quirky premise is used brilliantly as the framework for presenting eight "original retro" games. Each game is brand new, but has been made in the style of a typical NES title, right down to the limited controls (D-pad with two buttons).

Initially only a single game is available, however as challenges are completed more and more games are unlocked. Every new game release is more refined and complex, mimicking the manner in which developers become comfortable with a generation of hardware and are able to squeeze better games out of a system late in its life cycle.

The games each come with (electronic) manuals reminiscent of those that you would find in the 80's: terribly overwrought stories, (intentionally) poor translations, and corny hints and tips. In addition, 15-20 page gaming magazines are occasionally released that contain information on upcoming releases, the current hot title, and previous games. Information in the magazines ranges from general analysis, to game play tips, to outright cheat codes. The campy letters from the editor are also amusing.

The games
It is impossible to discuss Retro Game Challenge without a cursory examination of each of the titles that is packed into it. Be warned that some of this information could be considered spoilers, so if you are interested in a pure play through you want to stop reading right now.

Cosmic Gate: As the first of the retro games, Cosmic Gate is one step up from being a Space Invaders clone. The game is broken into 64 waves of enemies which must be defeated into order to save the galaxy. Enemies arrive in simple patterns, line up across the screen, and then start descending. Occasionally a few baddies will break off and attack you directly. As an added twist, every level contains a flashing enemy; if you kill the flasher first then you open a warp gate.

Cheats used to clear the game: Warp to level 64 immediately.

Robot Ninja Haggle Man - A simple little game, RNHM is reminiscent of any number of early one-screen action titles. As Haggle Man you can run, jump, and throw ninja stars at your foes. Each level has a pile of labeled doors which you can enter, and doing so serves three purposes: enemies hit by opening/closing doors are hurt, you cannot be hurt while behind a door, and chaining doors alphabetically can be used to heal yourself or attack your enemies. The object of each level is to locate the boss (either by killing all the enemies on the level or revealing him from behind one of the doors). The game has sixteen levels of increasing difficulty, and by the end you will be burning through lives semi-regularly.

Cheats used to clear the game: Infinite continues.

Rally King - An offroad racing game, this title is one that I loathed. It should be noted that I hated this style of game as a kid, and so the odds of me holding anything but scorn for a modern version of a racer were approximately zero. Still, fans of this sort of game should enjoy the faithful recreation of an 80's racer, complete with fussy controls, and a tough slide-boost mechanic. Each race lasts two laps, and you must finish 6th or higher out of twenty cars in order to advance. As an added bonus you start in 20th, and every other car receives a head start.

Cheats used to clear the game: No enemy cars!

Star Prince -This is a nifty little top-down shmup in the style of Axelay. You control a ship through four levels and are constantly being attacked from flying enemies and ground-based defenses. Along the way you can find a variety of power-ups to collect or, if you shoot them enough, use as bombs. Each level has a mid-boss and an end boss, and the difficulty ramps up substantially as you penetrate deep into the game. Somewhat amusingly, halfway through completing challenges for this game you are given a rapid fire controller, which alleviates the pain of hammering buttons. Does anyone remember owning one of those little gems?

Cheats used to clear the game: Invulnerability. But only after I beat the game the first time, and then screamed in frustration as I had to complete it again (but harder) because "the enemies were just imitations"!

Robot Ninja Haggle Man 2 -An iteration on the first game in the series, RNHM2 adds in a system of power-ups as well as a lot of tougher enemies to fight. The levels also become a lot more vast, which makes the time limit that is imposed on you that much tougher to beat. This game is a faithful example of the early recipe that game companies used when creating most sequels: minimal changes to a winning formula. (Come to think of it, that's not all that different than today's standard.)

Cheats used to clear the game: Infinite continues.

Rally King SP - Hot on the heels of a "good" sequel comes Rally King SP, a sequel that is an almost exact clone of the first game, except that it's sponsored by a fictitious brand of ramen noodles. The only other noticeable change is that the tracks have a new color pallet, and between each level is an additional advertisement for the cup of noodles.

Cheats used to clear the game: No enemy cars!

Guadia Quest - Long delayed, Guadia Quest is the crown jewel of Retro Game challenge, in my opinion. The game is a Dragon Quest-esque roleplaying game that puts you in charge of a party of three generic adventurers on an epic quest.

Game play, predictably, degenerates to an awful lot of clicking 'A' to attack with each party member, but a helpful 'Auto' feature gets you around that if you're willing to wait. This title is by far the longest of the bunch, but if you see it through to the end properly you will be rewarded by an unexpected little twist.

Some encounters are also quite difficult, so prepare to die fairly frequently. Uncharacteristically, you are able to save whenever you want, and retro RPGers will love how much freedom that gives them to take chances.

Cheats used to clear the game: None

Robot Ninja Haggle Man 3 -RNHM3 takes all of the game play elements of its predecessors and throws them out the window. Instead, this title is a Castlevania knock off that does an excellent job of capturing everything that makes that style of game both great and terrible all at once. Combat and exploration are excellent, however excessive backtracking is required, and the screens can be annoying to constantly repeat. The game also can get very grindy if you don't use cheat codes, since it has all sorts of items that you can buy in order to upgrade Haggle Man.

Of special note is the story in RNHM3 - it is so perfectly 80's that the developers must have stolen it from somewhere. A perfect blend of high drama and absolute wackiness.

Cheats used to clear the game: Max gears, infinite lives, warped to bosses 2, 3, and 4.

Summary
Retro Game Challenge is definitely not a game for everyone, but if you're a child of the 1980's and owned a NES then this game has the power to take you back to the glory days of 8-bit gaming in a way that real retro titles simply do not. By creating new games instead of re-purposing classics, Retro Game Challenge ensures that it is not already old before you pop the cartridge into your DS.

In the end, all that it's missing is the necessity to blow out the game before playing it.

Spinks on immersion

2010-02-20T10:20:00.003-05:00

Sorry for the deluge of immersion articles this week - it is a topic that I personally find fascinating, and clearly it is a point of contention among gamers. In response to Toskk's brilliant article yesterday, Spinks nails one right out of the park:

If I’m immersed in a story, the absolute last thing I want to do is stop and min-max my character stats (or worse, be forced to go back to a previous save point, redo my gear/stats and play through some of the story I have already seen). If I’m immersed in a game, I don’t want to have to sit through seventeen cut scenes and have to care about which option would give me the best reward. If I’m immersed in exploring an area, I don’t want to have to fight through some scheduled event or be forced to grind out reputation just to be allowed to enter the next zone. And if I’m immersed in a solo resource management game, I don’t want to be forced to group.

Immersion (or we can call it flow) is not only the goal of many gamers, but it is also the problem. Having to switch between a gaming mindset and a storytelling mindset not only kills immersion but also will annoy people who liked one side of the game but not the other.
Figuring out how to neatly merge some of these styles is the big challenge for the next generation of game designers.

This context switching is the source of the problems that I have with both Dragon Age and Mirror's Edge. Whenever the game play changed radically I was torn out of the moment, and reminded extremely thuggishly that I was just playing a game.

Immersion and MMORPGs

2010-02-19T13:07:00.004-05:00

In light of the recent 'Many Faces of Immersion' post here, and thanks to a little nudge from Andrew, I decided to dust off and finish up an article on Immersion in MMORPGs that I originally worked on back while I was playing WoW. As the above post and related discussion highlighted, just defining the term 'Immersion' as it applies to video games and game design is a challenge. We all have something a little different in mind when we talk about 'Immersion'. Some people use it primarily to talk about video game graphics, while others take a much broader view of the term.

In my opinion - and the opinion is shared by a number of game designers and authors on the topic - 'Immersion' in video games refers to a specific occurrence: the experience of being 'caught up' in the video game environment. I'm sure it's happened to all of us. You look up at the clock after a gaming session, only to discover that far more time had gone by than you had really planned on, or you were so intent on playing the game that you entirely forgot about eating lunch, or you originally started an MMO to play casually with a few friends, only to discover two years later that you'd accumulated over 200 days played in addition to now spending most of your awake hours thinking about the game. *cough*

It should probably come as no surprise to anyone here that MMOs are typically highly-immersive. In fact, in a survey of players of MMOs, a full 60% of players admitted to having at least once played for 10 hours continuously.

One of the main reasons MMO gameplay is so immersive is that it typically takes advantage of all four commonly-discussed forms of immersion:

Spatial/Sensory Immersion
In discussions of Immersion and 3D games, this is usually the first aspect people think about: how 'real' or photo-realistic the game graphics are. Spatial/Sensory Immersion is the experience of being in a game environment that is “perceptually convincing”.

As the discussion on the 'Many Faces of Immersion' post covered Spatial/Sensory Immersion quite in-depth already, I'll just add one of the key goals behind Spatial/Sensory Immersion is to give the player the sense of being in a 'other' space: a space separate from our everyday reality, but with a clearly-defined set of rules, parameters, boundaries, etc. In short, the 'other' space behaves in predictable and learnable ways. Thus, Spatial/Sensory Immersion is really more about establishing context, consistency, and permanency for the 'other' space than about visually awing the player.

Tactical/Sensory-Motoric Immersion
If you’ve ever felt like shouting “I shall pwn you with my button pressing skillz!!”, or gotten so involved in hammering your attack sequence you forgot to look up in time to get out of a shadow fissure, you know the experience of Tactical/Sensory-Motoric Immersion (Note: if it’s the first one, you don’t have to admit it).

This form of Immersion is present in games requiring fast reactions, precise hand-eye coordination, and technical perfection, and it isn't limited to video games, either. In physical sports and activities, Tactical/Sensory-Motoric Immersion is the often described as the feeling of being in “the zone”, of playing beyond your everyday ability level without much conscious thought.

Tactical/Sensory-Motoric Immersion at work

Strategic/Cognitive Immersion
Typically associated with a “mental challenge”, this form of Immersion is most commonly talked about with games like Chess. The player gets immersed in the process of mentally calculating out all the different possible moves, responses, strategies, tactics, etc.

Interestingly, Strategic/Cognitive Immersion can be long-lasting, and has the potential to occupy the attention of the player even outside of the game itself. Take Chess, for example. For those interested in Chess, a lot of their time spent on the game takes place outside of the game itself, studying openings or famous games, or analyzing patterns like the one below:

White to move, Check Mate in four.

If you take a minute while reading this article or after finishing it to work out the above problem, you know the experience of Strategic/Cognitive Immersion.

Narrative/Emotional Immersion
I already described this one more in-depth in a recent post here, so I'll keep it brief. Narrative/Emotional Immersion can be exemplified as the experience of not wanting to put the book down, the desire to keep reading to find out what happens next, the emotions you feel when things happen to the characters you’re reading about.

Without delving too much into theories about humans as social/emotional creatures, I think all of us can recall times we've been emotionally affected while watching or reading a narrative unfold, and often these feelings can persist even after finishing the book, movie, or game.

Did I just make these terms up?
No, the four types of immersion defined above were coined by Ernest Adams, Staffan Björk, and other notable experts on video game design. I do believe there is, however, one type of Immersion that these experts have missed:

Character/Role Immersion
This form of Immersion is about the unique interaction between player and character, when your own goals, desires, and motivations get caught up in your goals, desires, and motivations for your character. I suspect that most MMO players can tell stories about all of the tedious, boring, or outright mind-numbing game activities they've engaged in to get their character that title, pet, or mount they want them to have. I felt that the experience of Character/Role Immersion was captured perfectly in the following comic:

Comic by Nyklia - World of Warcraft Comic Contest Honorable Mention - August 2006

So why is all of this important?!
As I mentioned at the beginning of the article, one way to define 'Immersion' is as the experience of being 'caught up' in the video game environment. Some of these forms of Immersion are present in other forms of media (e.g. Spatial/Sensory Immersion or Narrative/Emotional Immersion), while others are more unique to gameplay (e.g. Strategic/Cognitive Immersion or Tactical/Sensory-Motoric Immersion), but all of them are valuable tools for engaging the player and keeping them playing. Further, some of these forms of Immersion have the potential to stretch the definition of 'game environment' to include activities outside of the game itself. Visiting a game forum, blog, or theorycrafting site to help plan your in-game activities might be considered Strategic/Cognitive Immersion. Writing a character background story or chatting about your character's accomplishments might be Narrative/Emotional or even Character/Role Immersion.

In fact, we're talking about games right now.. what are we caught up in?

Mortal, at last

2010-02-18T22:08:00.004-05:00

The last MMO that I played for myself was Dungeons and Dragons Online back in early November. (I still try to play Wizard 101 weekly with my godson, but that's different.) Since then I've found myself unable to care very much about MMOs, and completely unable to play them. The sense of "been there, done that" is just too strong in all of the titles that people are raving about - frankly, the entire space just feels stale and lifeless.

It is no surprise that during my self-imposed hiatus I managed to completely miss the announcement that the Mortal Online open beta had finally gone live. I had signed up for a closed beta account half a year ago, but was never accepted.

Installing the game - click to enlarge

Mortal Online intrigues me in a way that no other game besides EVE Online does. It is a pure sandbox world that does not coddle players, and in fact seems intentionally obtuse in many cases. In a way the game is a throw back to the old way of making MMOs. In theory, thinking, planning, skillful play, and cooperation will be rewarded in a manner than very few games are willing to try these days. In theory.

It may be that Mass Effect (and then the sequel) keeps me from ever logging in to Mortal Online.... but it has to mean something that the game has actually interested me to the point where I was willing to download the beta, and install it on my system. No other MMO has gotten that far in recent months.

Facebook is getting hard to ignore

2010-02-17T00:21:00.002-05:00

As much as I look down on the "games" that all of my Facebook friends keep spamming me with - tripe like Farmville, Restaurant City, and Mafia Wars - it is getting awfully difficult to ignore the service as a viable gaming platform, especially with the recent big names that have flocked to the platform.

Consider these news items:

- First there was the announcement that EA purchased Playfish for $400 million.
- Next came Sid Meier's declaration that the next Civilization game would be on Facebook.
- And now Richard Garriott - Ultima veteran - has founded a new Facebook-centric company.

It's enough to make a doubter like myself think twice, and reexamine my innate biases.

While I don't think that Facebook game will supplant traditional AAA gaming, neither do I think that they are just a passing fad.

The truth is, Facebook games have more in common with the old BBS door games than they do with big budget titles. Asynchronous by their very nature, these titles could be a great way to fill a few minute a day provided that they start to develop more sophisticated game play. In fact, a game like the venerable Legend of the Red Dragon would be wonderfully suited for the Facebook generation. Likewise, some of the older browser-based strategy games that were popular a decade ago - Utopia, Monachy/Canon, and Dominion - would be good fits for this type of platform.

I will have to do some exploration of the Facebook gaming scene and see if I can dig up a few titles with meaningful game play; expect a follow-up report in a week or two.

The Many Faces of Immersion

2010-02-16T00:10:00.000-05:00

In the past couple of weeks both Evizaer and Wolfshead have featured articles on the topic of immersion in video games, however neither writer's definition of the phenomenon rang particularly true to me. As a term, "immersion" is bandied around by gaming pundits when discussing games to describe a mash-up of factors that range anywhere from a "realistic game world" to an "extremely engrossing gaming experience". The two aforementioned articles illustrate these usages wonderfully:

Immersion is a state when the player or spectator (in the case of plays and motion pictures) temporarily suspends their disbelief and willingly transports themselves into the realized world of the creator. The difference between films and virtual worlds is that the players are not mere bystanders — they are active participants with a purpose.

True immersion is really a holistic mindset or philosophy of art, design and user interface that when combined should influence all aspects of a virtual world rather than just a few features in isolation.

And:

But gamers want to take the concept of immersion farther. Now immersive games have to be games where the world is more real. This doesn’t mean that the world has to be more superficially like ours (though that’s what many developers seem to want it to mean)—it means a world that has a similar level of detail to our world, at least as far as the player would naturally examine the world. Players think immersion requires that the game include small details of the real world that have no mechanical reason to be in-game.

While these definitions sound reasonable on the surface, both rely heavily on aesthetics without delving into any of the other aspects of video game design that go into forming an immersive experience.

To further explore this issue, consider three separate games that are immersive for entirely different reasons.

Case one: Mirror's Edge
Mirror's Edge is a realistic-looking first person action game that puts you in the shoes of a "runner" (a near future courier who traverses city rooftops while avoiding the law). Graphically the game is stunning and contains all sorts of incidental details that bring the game world to life; birds roost on ledges and startle when you come near, planes cut lazily across the skyline, pedestrians go about their business oblivious to the player on the streets below, and so on.

Mirror's Edge - click to enlarge

While these details may help players ease into the virtual world, they are not the primary reason that Mirror's Edge is so engrossing.

The game grabs you by the throat and hauls you in by virtue of the sense of immediacy, panic, and danger that is created from the very first moments of the opening mission. As you dash across the rooftops you are being chased by officers - often unseen - who are shooting to kill, and since you have no weapons at your disposal your only option is to run as fast as you can. The cityscape unfolds before your eyes as you leap huge gaps, slide through tight spaces, and hurdle obstacles. As a player, my heart was pounding during the most intense sequences, and I caught my breath in sheer terror on many occasions when I missed a jump. This is immersion in its purest form: when I am running I feel like I am there, and I physically respond to the on screen stimuli as if I were the one falling to my death.

Mirror's Edge also provides an excellent example of how to break immersion. Dying in the game sets you back to the last check point that you passed, and they are never very far apart. During particularly challenging sequences you will die - a lot - and thus constantly reload to repeat a mechanical challenge. This destroys the fluidity of the game, and strips away all sense of immersion revealing the core of the experience to be somehow more hollow then it felt mere moments before.

Case two: Dragon Age
Bioware's fantasy epic, Dragon Age: Origins, is a role-playing game that is played primarily using an overhead camera. The graphics, while pretty, are not nearly as realistic as many modern titles and the world is extremely artificial and gamey. As much as the artists went out of their way to make Ferelden look lived in, the developers hem the player in at every turn and tightly control movement.

Dragon Age: Origins - click to enlarge

Despite the aforementioned constraints, Dragon Age is an incredibly immersive game. Instead of realistic freedom of movement and game play, character development and plot-based interactions are used to make the player feel like they are a part of the world.

From the very beginning a Dragon Age player is encouraged to meld with their on screen avatar; the very first task in the game is to customize a character's appearance and background. Every little tweak that is made will be rendered on screen, and for sixty-plus hours the player will get to watch their creation live out a grand adventure.

More important to the immersive experience than character customization is the dialog system that forms the core story-telling mechanism in the game. Dragon Age is full of conversations: from banal merchant greetings, to diplomatic brinksmanship, to intimate relationship building. Each of these interactions takes place using a dialog tree in which you listen to an NPC speak and then select from a menu of possible responses. Crucially, your chosen response is not voiced; instead Bioware has left it up to the player to speak their character's words in their own mind. This simple choice has enormous implications for immersive roleplaying - not only does the player have full control over their character's looks, but also their voice.

The types of choices that players are asked to make, and the rewards (or lack thereof) for making them, also aid immersion. Dragon Age's morality system is one of the most well-realized and realistic that I have had the pleasure of experiencing to date. By removing most of the rewards from the system the player is allowed to respond to a situation in a more realistic manner. In Dragon Age it becomes possible to mentally justify a course of action beyond "I need X more evil points for my next level, so I'd better kill that kitten".

Unfortunately, like Mirror's Edge, Dragon Age: Origins is not a completely immersive experience. The moment a player enters a battle the illusion dissipates, and the core game mechanics are revealed for what they are.

Case three: Sid Meier's Civilization
Released in 1991, Civilization is by no means a realistic looking game, and yet it is easily one of the most immersive games of all time. The graphics are designed with a function-first mentality, and while they looked good enough in their day they were certainly not cutting edge.

Sid Meier's Civilization - click to enlarge

Civilization is an empire building game than incorporates nearly all of the aspects of modern members of its genre: exploration, diplomacy, commerce, and warfare. A player becomes the leader of a fledgling nation, and struggles to game prominence on the world stage, and eventually achieve dominance.

Game play takes the form of managing the actions of all units and settlements on a turn by turn basis, which can be done with a keyboard or point and click with a mouse. The business of being a world leader is completely engrossing, and most players quickly slip into a trance-like state and they are drawn in the simply-drawn yet intricately complex world. Time literally melts away as a game of Civilization wears on, and hours can disappear at a time.

This total immersion is not unique to the original Civilization game, but is shared by all of the best members of the turn-based strategy genre. Key to keeping a player's focus are intuitive controls, a streamlined user interface, and constant feedback from the game world.

Putting it all together
All three titles discussed above contain extremely immersive sections of game play that have the ability to snare a player's attention, and make them feel a part of the game world. From the graphics and intensity in Mirror's Edge, to the strong personal connection to a character in Dragon Age, to the deep strategic mechanics of Civilization, each game demonstrates a different form of immersion.

It is this diversity of experiences that makes the term so difficult to pin down.

Video game immersion is not as simple as realistic graphics, it is the ability to draw players into the experience, and make them forget that they are playing a game. An immersive game does not feel like a game; it is just as natural as breathing.

If a player is forced to stop and think about what they should be doing, then the illusion will be shattered. When Mirror's Edge forces you to repeat a section a dozen times it is impossible to think that you're actually a runner leaping over rooftops. When Dragon Age turns from a brilliant exploration of morality and character into a tactical combat simulator then its magic spell is broken.

All of the graphical details and high fidelity renderings of people and places are moot if game mechanics obstruct the core package. Sometimes a game just needs to know how to get itself out of the player's way, and let them at the meat of the experience. Immersion is truly difficult to create, which is why it is so highly priced when it finally turns up in a surprise hit game.

Post Mortem: A Boy and his Blob

2010-02-15T17:37:00.006-05:00

A Boy and His Blob, by WayForward Technologies, is a modern re-imagining of a classic 1989 NES game. I have fond memories of renting the original game on multiple occasions during my hardcore 8-bit days, but never managed to beat it. Not even close.

While the original game was tough as nails, the Wii installment is much more forgiving and approachable; a fact that makes it a wonderful choice for gaming couples. My wife and I played through WayForward's masterpiece together over the course of a couple of months, and had a blast doing so.

For those who are not familiar with the title, A Boy and His Blob is a puzzle platformer that puts you in the shoes of a young lad who, somewhat mysteriously, is in possession of an endless supply of jellybeans. Accompanying our pint-sized hero is a white blob that can transform into a variety of useful forms when fed different flavors of jellybeans. For example, a white bean transforms Blobert into a ball the boy can throw, a black jelly bean allows him to take the form of a ladder, and a red jellybean transforms him into a hole in the ground.

The game is broken up into four maps, each of which contains ten levels (more or less). In addition to these forty storyline levels, each area you explore has three treasure chests hidden within it, and finding all three chests unlocks a challenge level for you to test your skills on.

Fetch, blob! Click to enlarge

As the player you are in control of the boy, who is, for all intents and purposes, a wuss. Boy can't run very fast, can barely jump, and dies if he touches an enemy; in fact the only thing the hapless squirt has going for him is his interstellar buddy and a sack full of jelly beans!

Solving the game's environmental puzzles consists of utilizing the beans that you have been given for a level (which is never the full set) to overcome all of the obstacles in your way and reach the golden jelly bean at the end. At first the levels are trivial, but the difficulty ramps up quickly, and by the end of the game you will be forced to solve some tricky maps that involve good thinking and excellent timing. Challenge levels, on the other hand, are almost always tough and the level of perfection that is demanded could be frustrating for players who don't like to fail often. The rewards for completing challenges are worth it though: most levels unlock concept art that was used when designing the game.

Mechanically, A Boy and His Blob has a fairly simple control scheme that is both intuitive and crisp. It should be noted that WayForward decided not to include any sort of waggle in the controls, which was appreciated. Like any puzzle platformer, jumping precision is a required skill and you should expect to die quite often during some of the tougher sequences. In the normal levels death is punished by moving you back to the nearest invisible checkpoint (which is never far off), whereas in the challenge areas dying sets you back to the start of the level.

This doesn't look good - click to enlarge

The artwork in this game is simple yet beautiful. The hand drawn characters and backgrounds convey a distinct style that helps wordlessly tell the story of the boy and his adventure. Each block of levels has a distinct theme that ties it together and adds variety to the journey.

What is most impressive is how WayForward managed to take a shapeless blob and imbue it with a strong personality. The blob is usually white and fairly sedate, but he starts darkening when forced to approach an enemy, and his movements become more agitated. Likewise, when separated from the boy, blob will often turn slightly red and hop around frantically, but when the pair are again reunited he settles back down. This totally irrelevant game mechanic is actually a powerful tool in making the player feel attached to blob. It is reinforced by an equally useless "hug" command, which allows the boy to hug blob. My wife was very fond of making sure the little guy got hugs whenever he helped get the boy across an obstacle.

A Boy and his Blob is probably not for everybody, but if you like a good puzzle platformer then I highly recommend picking up a copy and playing it through. It is a great little game to turn on and curl up on a couch with your significant other to play, and the cute interactions between the boy and his interstellar friend are almost guaranteed to bring a smile to your face.

Bonus content:
- Gamasutra recently ran an article on the way user feedback shaped the game
- Retronauts podcast #79 contained an interview with WayForward's Marc Gomez and Sean Velasco in which the NES and Wii games were discussed in detail.

Post Mortem: Mirror's Edge

2010-02-13T13:17:00.004-05:00

Released last February by DICE, Mirror's Edge is a first person game of speed, precision, and path-finding that takes place (primarily) on the rooftops of a future city. In the game you play as Faith, a 'runner' who find herself embroiled in a political murder mystery that hits a little too close to home. Using her wits and athletic ability, Faith sets out to resolve the mess that has been precipitated by unknown antagonists.

Faith - click to enlarge

The first thing that you will notice when you fire up Mirror's Edge is that the graphics are superb. DICE has gone the extra mile in creating a cityscape worthy of a vibrant future surveillance society; the environments that you traverse range from clean and polished business suites to gritty construction sites, each of which feels convincing.

The character models are top notch. Faith, when you do catch a glimpse of her, is exotically beautiful and her twin sister Kate likewise shines. Merc and Celeste are equally well rendered and even the faceless blues (police) are a pleasure to look at.

Mirror's Edge tells its story through a combination of traditional dialog-drive narrative and environmental cues. The immediate plot is conveyed to the player using direct character conversations; everything you learn about where you need to go and what you need to do is stated plainly by Merc or another character. In contrast, the majority of Faith's back story and the history of events that led the city to become a totalitarian regime are conveyed through the environment in a manner very similar to a Valve game. Posters, electronic billboards, and graffiti all weave together to create a sense of history and cohesion in the game world.

One of many dangerous jumps - click to enlarge

There are three major types of game play within Mirror's Edge: running, puzzle solving, and combat.

The majority of the game is spent running across rooftops, through buildings, and around obstacles. At the beginning of each segment you are given a destination, and you must try to negotiate the environment to reach your goal in a timely fashion. Mirror's Edge excels during these sequences. As you sprint through the city scape certain objects will be highlighted in red to signify that they are of special interest. (For example, a pipe you need to climb, a board that you should jump off, etc.) The entire experience feels very organic; after getting used to the controls the entire world seems to open up for you and you will find yourself madly dashing over, under, and through your surroundings, Faith's footfalls ringing in your ears.

The game gets intense when the blues - government police - show up. Faith is usually unarmed, and often the correct response to seeing an officer of the law is to run fast and hard. Careening over rooftops with bullets impacting all around you is an utter rush, and your survival instinct will be kicked into high gear. More than once I caught myself letting out a gasp in sync with Faith, so perfect was the game's simulation.

Of course, Mirror's Edge is more than just running.; some levels require you to solve an environmental puzzle to reach a specific location in order to advance the plot forward. Your ultimate destination is almost always obvious, however for the times when you do not know where to go you can press the ALT key to force Faith to look in the direction that you're aiming for. The puzzles in the game are fifty percent finding a path through your surroundings and fifty percent executing some precise acrobatic moves. Thankfully, if you're solving a puzzle you are never under attack, and it is rare that a puzzle room will kill you outright.

Taking down a blue - click to enlarge

The biggest knock that I have heard against Mirror's Edge is that the combat system is frustrating. Sometimes you are forced into a fight, and cannot run. Faith is unarmed, which is a problem since your assailants always carry at least a pistol, if not something more deadly. To take out a blue you need to combine your basic attacks (punch, flying kick, sliding kick) with well-timed disarm maneuvers. Once a cop is down you can take his weapon, however your ammo is limited and will rarely last you more than two additional kills. After dispatching the enemies it is usually in your best interest to discard your weapon and carry forward unarmed - Faith is far less quick and agile while encumbered.

There is no mistaking it - Mirror's Edge has some difficult sequences and you should expect to die frequently when learning the levels. Thankfully, DICE saw fit to place frequent hidden check points throughout each level, and so you will rarely have to repeat more than a minute of content when you inevitably get yourself killed.

In summary, Mirror's Edge is a stylish game that represents a thrilling departure from standard FPS fare. Running through the city scape at breakneck speed is intense, and feels unbelievably fluid and organic. While there are a few frustratingly tough sections in the game, they are not frequent enough to tarnish an otherwise fantastic experience. Best of all, the game routinely goes on sale at the digital download sites - I picked my copy up for $5 on Direct2Drive. If you enjoy FPS games then you owe it to yourself to try this unique title.

Demo: Dante's Inferno

2010-02-12T19:18:00.001-05:00

Dante's Inferno, released this week by Visceral Games, has been ruffling feathers among members of the gaming media for nearly a year. Between a promise of ultra-violent, ultra-explicit game play and a purposefully obnoxious sustained media blitz, the title has been a source of controversy from the first moment that I caught wind of it. A demo has been available on the PS3 for a couple of months and I finally managed to set aside a half hour to try it out last night.

Click to enlarge

It has been said that Dante's Inferno is a God of War clone, however since I have never played any titles in the series I cannot vouch for that fact. What I do know is that the game, at least as showed off by the demo, is an arena-based brawler. The player is shuttled from set piece to set piece and forced to battle a scripted batch of enemies in each location.

Combat consists of mashing one of three possible attack buttons (light, heavy, holy), jumping, blocking, and dodging. Attacks can be chained together into small combos, which run up a counter the more hits you successfully land. Periodically during certain fights you will be prompted to press a specific attack button, which initiates a "quick time event"; these usually lead to devastating killing blows, assuming that you mash the appropriate symbols in the allotted time.

As a game mechanic, quick time events feel both cheap and annoying. There is nothing more immersion breaking than to be suddenly prompted to halt your fluid attack sequence and press a specific button. Once you get the hang of these your attention is constantly split between actually watching your avatar fight and the empty space where an symbol might appear - ugh. What's even worse, some enemies can only be killed by successfully negotiating a quick time event and - at least in the demo - failing just forces you to try again (and again and again).

Click to enlarge

The first "epic" boss battle that Dante's Inferno throws at you is a fight against the Grim Reaper as your character tries to prevent himself from being tossed into the pits of hell. Ignoring the pair of lame quick time events that conclude the encounter, the entire fight is a boring sequence of blocking Grim's triple attack and then counter attacking. If it weren't for the fact that the Reaper teleports around the area periodically the fight would probably be simple to complete blindfolded. The second boss is not much better; while it is important to be mobile (and run away from its attacks since they break through your guard), spamming holy attacks from a distance makes quick work of your adversary.

But enough with the negativity. If Dante's Inferno does one thing right it is to set up a gothic world, and then pile on enough dark atmosphere to smother a kitten. This is not a bad thing: the world is gritty and nasty, and the enemies truly want to reap your soul. The graphics are great, the music is brooding, and the small bit of dialog that the demo contains is well scripted and voiced.

One of the more talked-about aspects of Dante's Inferno is the nudity. Within five minutes of firing up the demo you will have a naked breast taking up a quarter of your television. Seconds later there will be a pair, and throughout my demo play through I never went more than five minutes without a naked woman making an appearance. As far as things go, the breast-shots never feel overly vulgar, however they do seemed forced on occasion. Vulgarity, for those searching it out, is apparently a staple once you reach the Lust level.

Summary
If I sound down on Dante's Inferno's game play, it's because I am. After dabbling with the brilliant Bayonetta, another game with ties to God of War, I was expecting something fun and engaging. Instead what I got was a pedantic button-masher with less finesse than my favorite hair-witch has in her pinkie finger. Truth be told, whereas Bayonetta comes off as a skillful and elegant dance, by comparison Dante's Inferno is a brutish slog that tries to pretty itself up with gratuitous boob shots every once and a while.

Demo parameters: one and a half levels (30 minutes game play)
Release date: Now
Cost: $59.99

Getting to know you - other hobbies?

2010-02-10T18:55:00.004-05:00

If you are reading this blog then the chances are excellent that you have more than a passing interest in video games. That's well and good, and serves as common ground for a conversation, but sometimes it becomes a little too easy to see a blogger or guest as a one dimensional creature, driven by gaming and not much else. That conception, however, is far from the truth in most cases.

So, a question for you: Do you have a hobby that trumps video gaming? Is there an activity that you engage in that makes you set everything aside, including your games, when the time is right?

If not, feel free to chime in with the hobby that places second behind gaming. Don't be shy!

My addiction
It would be unfair to pose this question without fessing up myself. Personally, my main addiction in life is ultimate frisbee, and I will literally rearrange my entire schedule in order to make my weekly games and attend tournaments. I play all three seasons (summer, fall, winter indoors) multiple nights a week (right now twice).

I can't remember if I actually hung on to this disc - click to enlarge

Now, most people who have heard of ultimate think that it's a hippie sport, but these days that couldn't be farther from the truth. Ultimate is a game of constant sprinting, hard directional changes, precise throwing, and often times some acrobatic catches. A spaced out hippie would have a tough time competing in a modern game.

My first time on the field I nearly died - I couldn't believe the pace of the game, and thought my heart would explode. These days I can handle tournaments of six games spread over two days without too much hardship, although the second morning always comes as a shock.

During my three years playing World of Warcraft my raiding schedule was strictly dictated by the evenings that I played ultimate. If I had a game scheduled, I wouldn't sign up for a raid - it was simply no contest. The rush I get from laying out and catching a poorly thrown piece of plastic eclipses even my most memorable raid take-downs. Vashj has nothing on a hard-fought game that ends on universe point.

Since ditching WoW I haven't had to make any real sacrifices for ultimate: my wife is happy enough to let me run out my aggression, and I think she even enjoys the hours of guilt free T.V. that my scheduled absences afford her. Of course, when the children finally arrive, all bets are off.

Bashing the Testers

2010-02-08T12:07:00.005-05:00

It is somewhat fashionable amongst players of MMORPGs to lash out at a game's quality assurance team whenever a bug or exploit manages to make its way into the live code. I ran across a couple of particularly galling demonstrations of this attitude in the comments section of the Blessing of Kings blog. In response to an article about an elite raid guild being temporarily banned for using an exploit, a few ignorant individuals decided to spout off:

[S]ome measure of responsibility should fall on Blizzard as well, who needs to examine either 1)their internal testing methodology, or 2) their internal testing personnel.

When was the last "final boss" of a raid instance (thus, no beta on PTR) that wasn't bugged? Been a while, hasn't it...

And:

i fully blame blizzard on everything involved in this mess. instead of fully testing the encounter and making sure the pinnacle boss of the expansion would not have such a huge flaw. they spent time trying to band aid the train wreck that is wotlk pvp.

the thing is the bombs did seige dmg to the frozen throne which caused the platform pieces to be rebuilt. the unintended here is that something that shouldn't have taken dmg did and blizzard didn't catch it because they didn't test fully.

The exploit in question involved using a specific item to magically regenerate parts of a structure; certainly not expected behavior. Although I have already responded to these two comments on Blessing of Kings, I felt that the topic deserved a bit more attention here.

Let's face it, the vast majority of MMO players are neither software developers nor testers, and thus they have absolutely no insight into the challenges faced by these professionals. Yet despite this wide spread ignorance, there are forums literally filled to overflowing with vitriol aimed at the hard-working individuals that create our video games and provide us with a lifetime of entertainment.

MMOs cannot be exhaustively tested
MMOs are enormous beasts, far larger in scope than all but the most ambitious single player games. The feature set for a simple MMO fresh to market is huge, and in a game like World of Warcraft the list of moving parts is exponentially larger still. If this wasn't enough, massively multiplayer online roleplaying games exhibit many of the traits of a complex adaptive system (due to their unique evolutionary nature). On screen results are often a result of a complicated web of player interactions, and the results are often more emergent than mechanical.

The scope and nature of MMOs make them impossible to test comprehensively. Verifying that every skill of every class with every possible item combination and customization behave one hundred percent as expected for a single raid encounter would take months of labour. Exhaustively validating that all of those skills and items interact flawlessly with each other plus all of the unique encounter mechanics and set pieces would take far longer still.

With players constantly clambering for more content, major MMO developers are faced with a stark choice: test to a reasonable degree and hope that all bugs are found in a smoke test, or else delay new content for months while all possible scenarios are meticulously iterated by quality assurance. This is a lose-lose proposition, but financially-speaking the only choice that companies can logically make is the one that will placate the most angry players: release content that is known to be not completely tested and hope that all major bugs and exploits were found prior to the patch going live.

Unfortunately, like in every piece of complex business software ever written, bugs happen. The thing is, in the case of a top notch development studio like Blizzard, bugs happen far less often than with most gaming studios.

Instead of constantly bitching and moaning every time an exploit slips through QA, World of Warcraft players should be thanking their lucky stars that Blizzard devotes as much time, money, and energy to testing that they do. Those testers have often thankless jobs, and they deserve praise and admiration for a job well done, not scorn and insults.

Unwinding and updating

2010-02-06T15:29:00.002-05:00

I'm back from my business trip and am hopefully done with travel for a few weeks. I ended up rescheduling my flight to late Thursday night to avoid getting snowed into my hotel - if I'd waited until Friday as planned it was not going to be pretty.

Despite the great responses that I got to my plea for hotel-friendly games, I ended up tripping over a copy of Retro Game Challenge for $5, which is an amazing deal for a year old game; I had been looking for a copy of the title for quite some time.

Adding a new game to my list of in-progress titles was perhaps not the best idea in the world. As shown on my side bar, I'm already part of the way into Mirror's Edge, Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box, New Super Mario Brothers Wii, Demon's Souls, Shiren the Wanderer, and A Boy and his Blob. I've also committed to playing the original Mass Effect on this month's Gamers With Jobs' "pile" thread. Focus, it seems, it not my strong suit.

Blog updates
I've created a new "spouse gaming" tag and categorized a number of posts under it. Playing video games together is one of the few hobbies that my wife and I share and I mention our exploits on a fairly frequent basis. I've been thinking about tagging posts where I mention her for a while now, and finally just decided to go ahead and do it.

I also took a bit of time to spruce up my blog and podcast listings again to reflect my current reading/listening list. Here are the new additions:

Blog: The Grind - A blog focused on roleplaying games that is maintained by a a few members of the 1Up staff. The articles are often long and detailed, with a strong focus on up and coming titles.

Blog: Insult Swordfighting - With a name that refers to the ancient Secret of Monkey Island game, this blog is a treasure trove of great articles.

Blog: Killed in a Smiling Accident - A group blog that is equal parts snark and insight, I can't believe that I didn't subscribe to this one sooner.

Blog: Sexy Videogameland - Leigh Alexander's personal blog. I subscribed to this one based on the strength of Leigh's articles in other gaming publications.

Podcast: Some Other Castle - Ever since Idle Thumbs went dark I have been missing my weekly dose of humorous video game chatter. No longer! The gals at Some Other Castle are laugh-out-loud funny at least once every five minutes, and yet still manage to weave a lot of good information into their craziness. The best damned Internet Radio Podcast Show (IRPS) on the web.

Podcast: The Digital Cowboys - A topic-based show that eschews the traditional "what we've been playing" and "news" segments in order to focus on a single topic every week. They nearly always have a top notch guest along to discuss the issue of the day.

Emergent Roleplay

2010-02-05T13:25:00.002-05:00

At the bottom of a recent article about the lost art of roleplay in roleplaying games, Bill tossed out a great theory:

My last, and most controversial point I suspect, is that as games develop further into communities working towards common goals there is no need to roleplay. I don't have to roleplay a character fighting a war with thousands of allies against thousands of enemies in a battle to control resources and living space because I AM fighting a war with thousands of allies against thousands of enemies in a battle to control resources and living space. Eve is interesting in the same way a sport is interesting to participate in; you have competition, camaraderie, glorious victory, ignominious defeat, and at the end of the day everyone goes home to have a beer and go to bed.

I think the same could be said about progression raiding in World of Warcraft, and perhaps a lot of aspects of other games. Go stop by Bill's site and chime in on the discussion.

Illusion of control

2010-02-02T21:42:00.004-05:00

As I listened to last week's episode of The Digital Cowboys podcast (episode 140 to be exact), I came to the realization that the real triumph of Dragon Age was not that the game had a brilliant combat system, a deep dialog tree, a gorgeously realized world, or wonderful customization.

A typical choice - click to enlarge

No, while all of these individual features were excellent in their own right, it was the emergent illusion of control that transcended simple game mechanics and story that made Dragon Age: Origins the masterpiece that it is. Despite having an overarching plot that is as linear as any Final Fantasy game, most players who spent any time losing themselves in Dragon Age came away feeling like they had control over their character, their adventures, and ultimately the world that they embraced.

As best as I can tell, the illusion of control is instilled into Dragon Age primarily by the nature of the moral choices that players are forced to make at regular intervals as they play.

Most games that explicitly tie their morality systems to in-game rewards or powers. For example, you cannot obtain the best powers in Mass Effect, Infamous, or KoTOR without veering your dialog choices to one extreme or the other. Since gamers are astute at min-maxing, the morality system just becomes another game mechanic to understand and exploit; ethical thought need not apply.

In stark contrast, there are almost no moral choices in Dragon Age: Origins that grant you a substantial reward or impose a harsh penalty. At best you will gain an ally, and at worst you will lose one; neither case tips the balance of the game in a drastic fashion. By untangling morality from rewards, the player is liberated to actually think about their own character, and how they would react when presented with ambiguous situations. Extremes, while possible, are no longer the only valuable choices, and instead the mushy middle ground becomes fertile territory. This only makes sense: how many people are pure evil or angelic good? The majority of us are some shade of grey, and this game finally allows us to portray those characters accurately without feeling like we are cheating ourselves.

In summary, Dragon Age is a masterful role playing game that has truly set the bar high for its successors. While the level of freedom the game grants players is barely more remarkable than a linear JRPG, the illusion of control and the sense of freedom is absolutely perfect.

Overheard in a brewhouse

2010-02-01T20:27:00.002-05:00

One half of a conversation I overheard while waiting for dinner tonight; it was too noisy to hear the other half.

Waiter: So do you play much WoW?

Waiter: Oh yeah? What class?

Waiter: Paladin? Prot spec?

Waiter: Me? Oh, I play a priest. I started with a Warlock back in beta, but that eventually got old.

Waiter: What server are you on?

Waiter: Oh cool, I'm on [indistinguishable]. Hey, do you raid?

Waiter: That's too bad. I'm was in a top raiding guild. #15 in the US.

Waiter: Yeah, it takes a lot of time. But I had to cut back recently. I actually quit in December when I ran out of cash.

Waiter: Other games? Well, I a buddy of mine works for Games Workshop, and so we got to play the beta for Warhammer - that was pretty cool.

Waiter: Oh, okay. Can I get you guys anything else?

Warcraft is everywhere.... I can't escape!

Book: The Disappeared, Kristine Kathryn Rusch

2010-01-31T22:23:00.005-05:00

The Disappeared, by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, is the first book in her Retrieval Artist series; that said, it is actually the second book in the series that I have read, the first (Buried Deep) having been picked up on a whim at a used book store.

The Disappeared is a far future science fiction novel that is focused on character and ethics ahead of hard science or ideas. In fact, if you ignore the setting, at its heart this novel is one part mystery, one part crime drama, and one part moral quandary. Like many sci fi works, however, the setting serves as a backdrop for a thought experiment.

The future that Rusch portrays is one where humanity has burst onto the interstellar scene, made contact with a number of alien races, and commenced political and commercial relations with them. As a necessary part of this interspecies relationship, some give and take is politically required, and this discourse anchors all of the problems that the character's in Rusch's world face.

The main characters, Miles Flint and Nolle DeRicci, are detectives in the Armstrong Dome (on the moon) and throughout the novel are tasked with mitigating three separate alien-human disagreements that arise. The sticking point is justice: a key aspect of the galaxy that Rush has crafted is that the governments of the various starfaring species have agreements in place that allow them to extradite members of other races who have been found guilty of a crime in their own society. This may sound innocent on the surface, but extremely tough moral dilemmas arise when trying to rationalize the vastly different nature of criminal acts in alien societies, as well as the different forms of punishments that each metes out, with normal human sensibilities and ideals.

The novel unfolds primarily through the eyes of the main characters, but also occasionally jumps to different individuals in order to provide context. Rusch's prose is solid throughout, and she does an extremely good job of making the moral quandaries difficult to digest, and fantastically uncomfortable.

If you are looking for some space cop fiction that will make you think, then I heartily recommend The Disappeared.

Hotel Gaming

2010-01-30T09:21:00.002-05:00

Sorry for the silence the last few days. On Wednesday afternoon I was instructed to drop everything and catch a flight. A crisis had come up at a client site, and I was the right guy to fix it. A couple of long days later and I'm back home, but I need to fly out again on Monday and spend the entire next week away from home again.

One good thing about this business trip compared to others that I've done is that I am allowed to return to my hotel after a reasonable day of work - some trips (with different employers) have seen me work sixteen hour days on site, but this is a lot saner. The upside to this is that I have the evenings to myself, and can pretend - just for a little while - that things are normal.

I have a decent business laptop - it ran World of Warcraft well when I tried a year ago - and so I'm hoping to get some gaming in each night. Unfortunately, although I bring a mouse, I'm stuck with a laptop keyboard and a 17" monitor so I wouldn't want to play anything like a shooter.

If you know of a game that was released in the past couple of years that you think would be perfect for this sort of scenario, then please drop me a line in the comments; I'd love a few suggestions.

Story-Driven MMORPGs

2010-01-27T15:30:00.004-05:00

Well, better late than never. As Andrew mentioned back in September, I've been invited as a guest poster to write a series of articles on describing what a "next generation" MMORPG could look like. Game design commentary tends to focus on existing games.. strengths and weaknesses, pros and cons, etc., but we often don't talk much about what we'd like to see in games that don't yet exist. I see this as an opportunity to discuss game design without the real-world issues of game development, budgets, server processing requirements, etc. In short, it's a chance to dream.

For this first article, the theme I chose was "story-driven".. in the last few years, we've started seeing a lot more emphasis on game storytelling, and yet MMOs are probably the one game genre where storytelling is the most difficult to do.

Why is “Story-Driven” a characteristic of next-gen. MMORPGs?
Ironically, “Story-Driven” Fantasy Role-Playing Games aren’t “Next Generation” at all, but rather a core element of the paper & pencil Fantasy Role-Playing game genre that unfortunately did not transfer well into the early computer-based online Fantasy Role-Playing games (e.g. MUDs), and has remained largely absent even in modern MMORPGs. In an interview in 2006, Gary Gygax (the creator of Dungeons & Dragons) explained the fundamental goals of role-playing games: “The essence of a role-playing game is that it is a group, cooperative experience. There is no winning or losing, but rather the value is in the experience of imagining yourself as a character in whatever genre you’re involved in, whether it’s a fantasy game, the Wild West, secret agents or whatever else. You get to sort of vicariously experience those things.” In short, the function of a Fantasy Role-Playing game is to provide a framework through which a group of players can experience and interact with a story.

Why is “Story-Driven” so important?
Although modern video games have gotten quite good at visually establishing context without the reliance on storytelling that goes along with paper & pencil Fantasy Role-Playing games, there is still one very important reason to bring storytelling back into MMORPGs. Engaging the player through a story is commonly referred to as ‘Narrative Immersion’, and it’s one of the four major types of immersion found in games. According to Staffan Björk and Jussi Holopainen, authors of Patterns in Game Design, Narrative Immersion in games occurs when the player becomes “invested in a story, and is similar to what is experienced while reading a book or watching a movie”. It’s the feeling of not wanting to put the book down, the desire to keep reading to find out what happens next, the emotions you feel when things happen to the characters you’re reading about. In a good thriller, you want to find out what’s going to happen next. In a good drama, you want to see the characters grow and develop. In a good action movie, you can feel the intensity and adrenaline almost as tangibly as the people in the movie.

While narrative immersion is certainly not the only method for drawing a player into a game, it can be a valuable tool for giving the player a deeper emotional connection with the game, and a more meaningful game experience.

So what would a “Story-Driven” MMO look like?
I’m hoping to explore this idea a lot more in subsequent articles, but what follows are some brief examples of characteristic differences between a traditional MMORPG and a story-driven one.

Stories don’t require x tanks, y healers, and z DPS
One major game design feature typical of non-story-driven games that often dramatically limits the accessibility of the game to a wide audience is grouping requirements. All too often in non-story-driven games, encounters and events are designed with exacting group requirements in mind. Resourceful, desperate, or over-geared players can sometimes get around the exact group requirement, but they can’t get around the fact that the whole encounter, including the time investment and reward system, was not designed for their own group.

In a story-driven game, occasionally there will be times when the player or group finds they need certain skills. Maybe they encounter a door or chest that needs to be picked. Maybe they need someone who can read Elvish. Maybe they need three players to all press switches simultaneously. Most of the time, though, the story is created for and around the group, rather than the group being created for and around the story. Do you have three friends who all play Rogues? Create a story specifically for that group. Did 28 guild members show up for the evening? Create a story in which all 28 players can participate. MMORPG game design tends to get caught up in all the rules, mechanics, and benchmarks, but in reality it’s the story that keeps the players playing. As Gary Gygax once revealed: “The secret we should never let the gamemasters know is that they don't need any rules.”

Random is bad
Think back for a moment about a good novel you’ve read, and think about the kinds of events and situations the characters experienced. What I’m getting at here is that the things that happen to the characters in a novel happen for a reason. Maybe it’s to teach the characters something, maybe it’s to teach the reader something, but the author didn’t just roll the dice to see what happened in his story.. so why should that work for a fantasy role-playing game? From a game design standpoint, randomness produces uncertainty of outcome, and facilitates the player ‘playing to their strengths’. If you aren’t guaranteed a certain outcome, you’ll tend toward solutions with the best chance of success. So a degree of randomness in how the player resolves a presented event or scenario is a good thing, but the actual events, encounters, and scenarios a player faces in a story-driven game should never be the result of a true random roll.

“They move at the speed of plot”
For those not familiar with the phrase, it was popularized by Babylon 5 producer J. Michael Straczynsk. As the story goes, when questioned about how fast a particular spaceship traveled, he answered “How fast do the White Stars travel? They move at the speed of plot. What of it!?” While the answer no doubt infuriated science-fiction nerds everywhere, it also exemplified a critical characteristic of story-driven design. In a novel, an author will often skip over inconsequential or unimportant spans of time, allowing hours, days, weeks, or even months to pass with no more than a paragraph or two. If a character is supposed to make it to an event on time, they make it. If they’re supposed to arrive late, they’re late. This is at-odds with the mechanics often present in video game environments, wherein any given mode of transport always travels at some constant maximum velocity. Let’s say that the physical distance between the starting point and the ending point you direct the character to get to would take 20 minutes of holding down the run button. In a story-driven game, carefully examining and designing around this game time is critical. Is anything of consequence or importance supposed to happen during this span of time? If so, fill that span of time with events of consequence, and not just random events, either. If not, provide the player with a faster method of travel, preserving “the speed of plot”.

Bring the story to the player
While active ‘clicking’ and exploration has long been a staple of video and computer games, one hallmark of non-story-driven games is the necessity of going out and finding the story or quest giver yourself. From a narrative standpoint, this makes little sense. Some of the things that happen in life and in stories happen not because you went out looking for them to happen, but instead they practically landed in your lap. The goal here is to catch the player up in something unexpected, to make sure that at no point in the game the player is without a storyline. The same way that players tend to lose interest in a game one they’ve reached the ‘end’ of the game storyline, players also often lose interest when left for long periods of time to wander aimlessly without being part of a story.

So far, I’ve talked a lot about what a story-driven MMORPG might look like, but not much about how it could actually be done. Really, the answer is time and money. Making a more story-driven MMORPG would definitely increase the cost of game development. That aside, there are many game design methods that could be employed to make story-driven MMORPGs more feasible, and I’m hoping to explore some of those in future articles. I’m already working on a second article: “Don’t give every player the same story”.. more on that soon.

A tale of two demos

2010-01-26T12:28:00.004-05:00

I rely on free demos as one of my primary indicators when I am choosing whether or not to buy a video game, often eschewing reviews if the experience is entertaining enough and (in my opinion) representative of the type of game play that I can expect from the full title. While sometimes I take the time to write about a particularly horrid demo, usually when a demo does not inspire me I leave it alone.

While looking for a casual game to play on my PS3 this weekend, I ended up downloading and playing a couple of demos; specifically, Zen Pinball and Pixeljunk Eden. Both games had an equal chance at my money - I've always loved pinball games (Balls of Steel, anyone?) and I have a sometimes unseemly love affair with artsy abstract games. Interestingly, the two demos serve as excellent examples of what to do and not do when creating a sample of a game for a discerning audience.

Zen Pinball
The Zen Pinball demo restricts the player to a single table, but allows them full games (three balls) every time. All features of the table are active, and it is playable as many times as desired in perpetuity. Since pinball controls are intuitive the game doesn't make any effort to explain itself, although the options section does contain the controller mappings if required.

Zen Pinball - click to enlarge

Aside from the single table restriction, Zen Pinball also caps your score at 2.5 million points, prevents you from earning trophies, and has a nag screen after every game completes. To reinforce these restrictions, the game pauses and tells you what it has prevented every time you would have achieved a milestone. A message along the lines of: "I'm sorry, in the demo version you cannot exceed 2.5 million points, please buy the full game!" is displayed and then the game continues as if nothing untoward has happened.

These restrictions are absolutely perfect for a game like Zen Pinball; since the title is essentially a high score chase it makes sense to stop tracking a player's points after a certain number in order to encourage the sale of the full version, and using a small nag message is a great way to do it. The player can continue play for as long as she likes and get an excellent feel for the game, however her success will never be measurable after a set point. Likewise, preventing the acquisition of trophies (while announcing that one could have been earned) is a fantastic way to appeal to achievement junkies.

Pixeljunk Eden
Pixeljunk Eden is an artsy abstract platformer that puts the player in control of a little creature that can hop around, cling to plants, find treasures, destroy enemies, and so on. It has a lot of positive buzz on gaming sites, and I was interested to give it a try and see what all of the fuss was about.

Pixeljunk Eden - click to enlarge

Unfortunately my frustrations with the demo began almost immediately. After downloading the demo I fired it up, and was immediately told that I had to update the game. The update turned out to be nearly the size of the initial install. Ten minutes later that finished, and still eager to play I clicked start and was met with a Terms of Service agreement. Now, I'm a modern computer user and I'm used to these things, but the Pixeljunk Eden ToS is fourteen pages long and you have to click to get past each page before finally being allowed to accept the bloody thing. Bad idea: preventing your players from actually playing your demo.

Finally in the game, I chose to start a new game, and like most arsty titles was slowly introduced to the game's core concepts through an in game tutorial. Unfortunately, this tutorial did nothing to tell me why I existed in the world, and instead seemed content to let me muddle around.

As I hopped around, squashed enemies, and gathered pollen I slowly began to feel comfortable with the controls (despite not having a clue what I was doing) and was really starting to enjoy the ambiance of the entire experience when suddenly the game paused and a dialog appeared on my screen. "The demo only allows you to play for 6 minutes at a time, and gather three thingamajigs." I was then unceremoniously deposited back at the menu screen, my progress lost without warning.

Quit. Delete. Eff you. Pixeljunk Eden was erased from my PS3 almost immediately as my frustration boiled over. "How dare the game cut me off without warning and lose my progress," was my dominant thought, "how effing dare it".

Making a good demo
Creating a demo that will sell a game is trickier than it seems, but by examining my experiences with Zen Pinball and Pixeljunk Eden a list of "do's" and "don'ts" starts to emerge.

DO: Make the demo representative of typical game play.

DON'T: Force lengthy update processes or unnecessary administrative screens.

DO: Tease the player with a taste of what they lose if they stick with the demo.

DON'T: Cut the player off without warning. If the demo is time restricted, say that from the start.

DO: Allow the player to play an adequate amount and feel some measure of success while doing so.

DON'T: Leave the player wondering what she should be doing.

DO: Remind the player to buy the full version with regularity.

And finally, remember: if you're not going to produce a good demo, then do not produce any demo at all!

Of grief, genetics, and GTA

2010-01-25T17:45:00.007-05:00

So here I am on the other side of Dragon Age: Origins, and I'm already pining to play through the game again. I worry though. I've heard that DA:O loses a lot of its magic on subsequent playthroughs, and so I'm going to try to hold off until the summer games drought that will inevitably occur.

For now, I'll distract myself with some news and links:

Anyone who played MUDs back when they were the only virtual worlds available will probably remember The Mud Connector as being one of the first and best web resources for players in search of a new digital home. Bright Hub posted a great interview with Andrew Cowan, creator of the site, a couple of weeks ago that is well worth checking out.
The maker of the brilliant little Flash game "The Company of Myself" (which I raved about not so long ago) is working on a follow-up project entitled Grief. You can read about it on his site, and even play a small demo.
Suck at video games? It may be due to the structure of your brain:

New neurological research, published in—and made freely available by—the journal Cerebral Cortex has found a correlation between the size of a trio of structures in the human brain and their owner's ability to learn and play video games.
In a discussion about game reviews, The Brainy Gamer points out a troubling statistic about video game publications that receive exclusive pre-release review rights:

Should we be troubled by the fact that these handful of privileged sources have assigned [Mass Effect 2]e a collective average of 97? Does it matter that early exclusive reviews nearly always skew higher than those appearing later?

I'm sure Mass Effect 2 will be great, but 97%??? Really??
I need to get me some of whatever Melmoth is on. Yikes.
And finally, The Associated Press has a headslapper of a story about a video game-playing criminal:

Sheriff's deputies in central Florida found a suspected car thief playing the "Grand Theft Auto" video game, and they later charged him with just that.

Polk County deputies investigating the theft of a 1998 Dodge Durango arrested 30-year-old Michael Ray Ekes on Thursday. They found the SUV outside a Haines City home. Ekes was inside in the house, playing the popular video game.

Sigh.

That's all for now - I'll have something more substantial to talk about tomorrow.

Virtual Used Games

2010-01-24T14:23:00.003-05:00

Green Man Gaming, a UK-based company, is set to launch a service that allows gamers to trade in their "used" digitally downloaded games much in the same way that console gamers can hock their wares at their local gaming shop for in-store credit.

GameSpy has the scoop:

Gian Luzio, COO for Green Man Gaming says, "Previously the minute you had paid and downloaded your game it had no resale value. This is extremely expensive for the gamer and does not encourage the consumer to try new genres or franchises. Our leading edge technology gives downloaded games a value that gamers can trade-in at any time."

Green Man Gaming will ensure that the publishing community receives substantial remuneration from the digital pre-owned market. "We will pay significant royalties to the publisher each time the game is traded in perpetuity." commented Luzio.

Personally I cannot see Green Man Gaming succeeding, there are simply too many holes in their plan and too many problems with digital re-distribution.

First and foremost there is the question of DRM. With so many PC titles locked behind draconian DRM walls, it sounds like a massive headache for both consumers and game developers to create safe and reliable methods of game transfer. License keys, which are one of the key aspects of these copy protection schemes, would have to be permanently revoked from one consumer's system(s) before being transferred to a new owner. Since there is no common cross-company method of managing digital rights, this is both a complex and costly proposition. Key piracy, always a concern, would become even more dangerous - it wouldn't take long for an enterprising pirate to figure out a good way to steal honest buyers' keys and resell them.

Leaving aside the technical aspect of the argument against a virtual used games market, I have a difficult time imagining that game developers and publishers, who have long fought to maintain control over the distribution of their products, would be open to embracing Green Man Gaming's proposed new business model. Even if they are compensated for part of the value of used game sales (something that console game publishers do not have the luxury of), the earnings would pale in comparison to that of an original purchase. With the rise of services like Steam, Direct2Drive, and Impulse there is no reason for game publishers to hand over control of their property to yet another third party - especially since they can deeply discount their games on the existing services and see massive sales as a result, and a renewed buzz around their titles.

Finally, the entire concept of a "used" digital download is extremely sketchy. Unlike a physical game, a digitally downloaded piece of software is just data on your hard drive. It cannot get banged up, the manual won't get worn, and there is no case to break. When you buy a game from a service like Steam all you are doing is purchasing the rights to run the software on your machine(s); thus Green Man Gaming's service is reduced to a third party rights management transfer service.

So long as the digital download services continue to operate as they have been over the past year then there is no need to invent a virtual used games market; frugal gamers need only to wait for the inevitable Steam sale on a title to get a bargain. It is in no one's best interest (aside from Green Man Gaming's) to walk down this path, neither consumers nor game developers will be served by adding another middle man.

Dragon Age: Forging a Legend

2010-01-23T15:47:00.008-05:00

Warning: This article contains spoilers.

Areas spoiled: Landsmeet, Return to Redcliffe, Defense of Denerim, End game

Previous articles: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

It's over. After 61 hours, 26 minutes and 49 seconds Fiona finally reached the end of her journey, slaying the Archdemon and restoring some semblance of peace to Ferelden. From her humble beginnings as a sheltered member of the Circle of Magi, she outgrew the boundaries set out for her by society, and forged a path of bravery, compassion, and even love through the hordes of Darkspawn.

But I'm getting ahead of myself here, when I last wrote it was time to call the Landsmeet and see if Teyrn Loghain Mac Tir could finally be overthrown, and the armies of Ferelden brought to bear on the Blight.

The Landsmeet

- When I entered the Landsmeet I was immediately met by Ser Cauthrien, the knight who had so recently managed to solo my entire party without as much as breaking a sweat. She attacked, and apparently had forgotten to take her wheaties that morning because I mopped the floor with her (much to my surprise). What was the point of nerfing her for the second bout, I wonder?

- In the actual Landsmeet I had three votes in my favor - including Anora's brilliant speech - and three votes against. Apparently in the strange kingdom of Ferelden this tie vote counts as a clear win for the incumbent, and Teyrn Loghain declared victory and attacked.

- The resulting royal rumble in the hall was amusing, and I spent much of the time trying to keep Loghain locked down with Cone of Cold, while fending off the rest of the troops.

- When order was finally restored, a duel was demanded to resolve the claim for the throne. Although I assumed that my crowd control would be best for keeping Loghain at bay, I allowed Alistair to fight him since I did not want to weaken his claim to the throne.

- The duel turned out to be nasty, and Alistair had to chug potions like a pro to get through it in one piece. At the end a cut scene was triggered, and Alistair decapitated Loghain.

A tough choice - click to enlarge

- Of course, Alistair's killing blow was not all sunshine and rainbows; after he pulled the decapitation stunt Anora flat out refused to marry him.... and I was forced to pick who would take the throne. After a few moments of humming and hawing I chose Alistair - bloodlines in Ferelden seem to be very important, and his claim by blood trumped Anora's. (Interestingly, I could have chosen to have Fiona marry Alistair and take the throne which might have been an option had she not already fallen in love with Leliana.)

- Anora was displeased with my choice and refused to swear fealty to Alistair. I ended up locking her in a tower instead of killing her or exiling her. It would be best to keep an eye on the woman.

To Redcliffe

- After resolving matters in Denerim, we marched to Redcliffe to defend the town from the Darkspawn armies and confront the Archdemon.

- I have no idea how Redcliffe got overrun; the town was filled with Darkspan who died in a single hit.... even a barwench with a broom should have been able to reliably kill a herd of the beasts.

- Things were more desperate at Redcliffe Castle, and the smirk was quickly wiped from my face as I had to reload the game after getting crushed in the courtyard.

- The second time went much smoother, and with the invasion repelled, everyone gathered in the castle where it was revealed that the main bulk of the invading army was marching on Denerim. Whoops.

Pivotal Decisions

- After the meetings I was instructed to get some rest, but before I did that I ran around the castle chatting with my allies and getting their impression of coming events. Strangely, when I arrived in my room Morrigan was waiting to quiz me about my relationship with Leliana. Awkward.

- The last thing I had to do before retiring was speak with the Orlesian Grey Warden, Riordan. In the conversations he revealed one of the Warden's great secrets: to vanquish an Archdemon permanently a Grey Warden must strike the killing blow, and that Grey Warden will die upon doing so. My reaction when I heard that, as scribbled on some note paper: "Oh shit".

- I returned to my room to find Morrigan still there, and this time she broadsided me with a request that completely flabbergasted me coming so soon on the heels of Riordan's revelations: she knew of a way to avoid sacrificing a Grey Warden to kill the Archdemon. If I would convince Alistair to sleep with her that night and impregnate her, then when the Archdemon was slain its essence would take over the budding child within her. After that Morrigan would leave to raise the child/demon/thing on her own.

- I almost took Morrigan up on that offer. I was so close to clicking the affirmative answer, but in the end I told her I couldn't do it. She reacted badly, as you might expect, and I refused to beg her to stay. I don't think that begging would have worked anyways.

Morrigan and Fiona part ways - click to enlarge

- Losing Morrigan was an enormous blow to my party, which was built around having a pair of lock down crowd control mages. Not only that, she was my sole herbalist, and with no healers in my party, her departure made things a lot dicier.

The Defense of Denerim

- The next day the army marched to Denerim, but we were too late to intercept the invaders and by the time we arrived they had broken into the city.

Beating back the invaders - click to enlarge

- After dispersing the Darkspawn at the gates, I formed up a strike force to try to push my way through to Fort Drakon. I chose Fiona, Alistair, Leliana, and Oghren. Oghren is a poor substitute for Morrigan, by the way.

- The Denerim end game consists of three small areas to fight through before heading into Fort Drakon. Each battle is primarily filled with the "grunt" level Darkspawn that I encountered in Redcliffe, as well as a few elites. Also, in each area you can depoy one of the allies that you gathered through the main campaign: I had 50 each of elves, dwarves, and Redcliffe soldiers, as well as 12 mages to use. The Templars were strangely absent, despite claiming that they would support me.

- I deployed my troops as follows: Market - Redcliffe Soldiers. Elven Alienage - Elves. City Gate Defense - Dwarves. Palace District - Redcliffe soldiers. Fort Drakon courtyard - Elves. Archdemon - Elves. The Elves rock, what can I say.

- I tried deploying the mages once, but the computer AI for them is utterly brainless, and they happily tossed fireballs into melees that I was participating in, killing Alistair and Oghren off without fail. Morons.

- As all of this went on, a cut scene showing Riordan's death punctuated the fact that before long either Alistair or Fiona would have to die.... there was no longer an easy way out.

Fort Drakon

- As I cleared through Fort Drakon I couldn't help but notice that I was a kleptomaniac to the bitter end. I robbed the place blind, despite it technically belonging to Alistair now.

- The final battle was telegraphed by Sandal, the Dwarven enchanter, standing near a door. It's as if the developers wanted to give under-prepared adventurers one more chance to buy stuff. Personally, I was well stocked and so just sold all of the freshly-pillaged loot.

The final battle - click to enlarge

- Stepping out onto the rooftop behind Sandal triggered the game's final encounter: the battle with the Archdemon. My general tactics for any dragon in the game are simple: spread out, keep the mages and archers at range, and micromanage anyone who gets aggro.

- Disappointingly, the fight against the Archdemon turned out to be far easier than any other major boss battle in the entire game. Sure, I had to chain-quaff healing potions sometimes, but none of my characters were ever in danger of dying.

- At the half way point of the battle the Archdemon becomes unattackable and you have to fight off waves of Darkspawn. At this point a whole bunch of important NPCs show up, and I assume the difficulty at this stage is inversely proportional to how many off them that you managed to get on your side.

Killing blow - click to enlarge

- Soon enough the Archdemon fell, and the last big choice came up: would I allow Alistair to strike the killing blow, or would I do it myself?

- Frankly, Fiona's nature the entire game has been to let her partymates make decisions for themselves, and it has been very rare that she has tried to change who or what they are. With that in mind I told Alistair that the kill was his if he was sure that he wanted it, and, as it turns out, he did. The Archdemon's last breath was also Alistair's. And so it ended.

Epilogue

- In the end it turned out that Anora got her throne after all, and - at least according to the game - she made a good Queen.

- When Anora offered me a reward I choice to ask for the Circle of Magi's independence from the Templars. I was actually amazed to see this as an option, and since it was something that Fiona wanted from the very start it was the choice I made over top of all of the riches and fame.

- I was excited to see that Bhelen turned out to be good to his word and started to reform Ozrammar! Any action to abolish the ruthless caste system that used to bind the dwarves is a good step.

- At the end of it all I allowed all of my companions to disperse... well, with one exception. Fiona and Leliana decided that they deserved a break from all of the excitement and bloodshed, and struck out on their own to travel the world. I'm sure that it won't be too long before the lovers find themselves in the midst of excitement again, but for now a rest is in order.

A kiss - click to enlarge

Last words
I hope that you have enjoyed reading about the travels of Fiona, the Grey Warden, as much as I have had writing them out. Dragon Age was an amazing experience and I cannot wait for the Awakenings expansion to release. (For those wondering, I have no interest in either the Warden's Keep or Return to Ostagar DLC bundles.)

I think I'll avoid writing up a formal post mortem for this game - I've scattered my praise and criticism throughout this nine part series, and I don't think anything can be gained by correlating it all.

Of piles, sequels, and worries

2010-01-20T12:43:00.003-05:00

I meant to write a meaningful article today, I really did, but then my lunch hour exploded into a flurry of customer support, and all I'm left with in a few measly minutes in which to cobble together the disparate thoughts that are floating around in my skull. In no particular order:

I meant to finish a lot of games this month and even signed up for three commitments in Gamers With Jobs' monthly "Pile" thread. Sadly, I've made almost no progress. My wife's new work schedule has slowed our sessions of A Boy and His Blob to a crawl, my ongoing Dragon Age adventures have kept me from starting Mass Effect, and Demon's Souls has scratched my masochist itch to the point where I haven't picked up Shiren the Wanderer in weeks.
Is anyone else worried that Bioshock 2 is going to be a huge let down? Don't get me wrong, I'm a massive fan of the first game, but the more I think of it the more I realize that it was the unexpected atmosphere of Bioshock that made it so memorable for me. Just like Shrek 2 was so much less than the original Shrek due to the formula being known in advance, I worry that Bioshock 2 fail to win over my heart and mind for similar reasons. (The fact that Ken Levine isn't part of the team only adds to my discomfort.)
Speaking of sequels, since I won't have played Mass Effect before the second installment arrives, I'm going to take a pass on the pre-order bonuses, and instead wait for the inevitable Steam sale. I could probably use a small break from Bioware RPGs anyways.

That's it for now!

Demo: Fairytale Fights

2010-01-19T12:06:00.004-05:00

On a whim I downloaded and fired up the PS3 white room teaser demo for Fairytale Fights a couple of nights ago. The demo is extremely straight forward: you are placed on a white background and then assaulted for a few minutes by progressively difficult waves of enemies. The brawl lasts until you are killed or time runs out.

A cartoon murderess - click to enlarge

Fairytale Fights is a ridiculously violent cartoon brawler that allows you to take control of a storybook hero and butcher everything that stands in your way. The art style is extremely stylized and cutesy, but once the action starts it is also over-the-top violent. In short, it's perfect!

Mechanically, the game is a twin-stick beat 'em up. The left stick is used for movement, while the right stick allows you to launch all manner of attacks. The rest of the buttons perform useful functions like jump, pick up, dodge, and so on.

Combat is both simple and deep; it is easy to dive right into the action and start pounding the crap out of animated baddies, but if you have an appetite for more depth then you can incorporate the six pages worth of combos shown in the tutorial into your game. On top of the normal brawling are weapons that you can pick up and use, Double Dragon style, until they are knocked out of your hands.

Blood! Click to enlarge

The weapons are where the game really becomes a riot. As much fun as it is to pound someone bloody with your fists, I was literally howling with laughter when I picked up a sword and started hacking cartoon limbs off. I nearly fell out of my chair when I sliced an enemy cleanly in half, and then that bloody half hobbled around the screen for a few seconds before pitching over, dead. And of course who could resist an old school blunderbuss? Blowing a hole through the big bad wolf was almost a necessity! My absolute favorite thing to do in the Fairytale Fights demo, however, was to run through the pools of blood, and watch my little character slide through the mess - you really need to see it to believe it.

As a pick up and play demo, Fairytale Fights is a masterpiece of cartoon gore and hilarity. The action is fast paced, funny, and addictive and the experience has me seriously contemplating buying the game. The only hitch right now is that my wife isn't so sure that she wants to play co-op with me, and I'd rather play with her than on my own. We'll see how persuasive I can be.

Official site: link
Demo parameters: White room, time limited brawl
Release date: Now
Cost: $39.99

Dragon Age: Clothing optional edition

2010-01-18T12:13:00.010-05:00

Warning: This article contains spoilers. I would, however, appreciate if you did not spoil anything beyond the point of the game that I discuss.

Areas spoiled: Arl of Denerim's Estate, Denerim Alienage, Leliana's personal quest, various side quests

Previous articles: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

The end, I am told, is near. Fiona, now level 19 and fifty-seven hours into her quest, has secured the aid of all four Grey Warden allies and is prepared to challenge Teyrn Loghain Mac Tir for supremacy of Ferelden. My last few play sessions have been extremely plot heavy (a nice break from the combat-heavy Ozrammar) and I was forced to make many uncomfortable decisions. I'm sure they only get tougher from here.

My party composition (as it frequently is) was Fiona, Morrigan, Leliana, and Alistair for the duration. My thoughts on progress, as always:

Cleaning up some side quests

- One of the interesting things about not following a guide or using FAQs is that I'm never quite sure how things should be done, or in what order. Thus, I decided that before triggering the Landsmeet I had to clean up all of my open side quests in case the game cut off access to them.

- My first stop was the mountaintop above the village of Haven for a rematch with the High Dragon. Although I had to micromanage my potions and party positioning, I dispatched of the beast on my first attempt with very little trouble.

Alistair tanking the High Dragon - click to enlarge

- The dragon dropped a pile of loot, most of which was trash, as well as a dragon scale. The dragon scale (as well as some drake scales I acquired in Haven) were tradeable in Denerim at Wade's Emporium. When asked what I wanted made from the scale I chose heavy armor - Alistair appreciated the gesture.

- When I first visited Denerim I was experimenting with my party composition and didn't have Leliana with me for the back alleys. Remembering this, I cruised through the old areas and picked the locks on some chests.

- Aside from the chests in the alleys I also stumbled across Gax'kang the Unbound, who apparently is the culmination of a quest that I didn't realize I was on. The resulting fight took place in a cramped hovel, and was nasty. My mages kept stealing aggro from Alistair, and had to be manually microed into the back room to keep them alive. The fight lasted quite a while, but at the end everyone was alive and I received a really sweet sword (The Keening Blade) as a reward.

I heart Leliana

- From almost the beginning of the game Leliana has been my favorite computer-controlled ally, and I've spent a lot of time listening to her stories about places, people, and her past wherever I go. As a bard she has a lot of stories to tell, and I've devoured each of them. Leliana is also the only party member that I've managed to raise to 100 approval.

- I decided that I needed to complete Leliana's personal quest, which involves a quick trip to Denerim to deal with Marjolaine, her former employer, friend, and - perhaps - lover. The quest itself is not combat oriented, and simply involves backing up Leliana as she confronts the woman. The reward, Marjolaine's Recurve, was a nice touch to an otherwise very well done personal back story.

- Back at camp I immediately went to talk to Leliana, and convinced her that she's not as awful and manipulative as Marjolaine, and that she could be an effective bard (part minstrel, part assassin) without also being evil.

- The quest and conversations seemed to open up new romance dialog options, and given the relationship that Leliana hinted existed between her and Marjolaine in the past, I decided to see if she would fall for Fiona as well. Over the course of a few conversations a relationship was teased out, and then a kiss, and finally something more.

An Orlesian romance - click to enlarge

- The decision for the sexual cut scenes to take place around the party's camp fire is more than a little odd, and I can't help but think that Oghren, that dirty dwarf, got quite the show that night.

The morning after - click to enlarge

- I really do enjoy how characters react differently to you depending on their approval, and especially once a romance has been established. It breathes life into the game where it would otherwise be stagnant.

To Denerim with the Arl of Redcliffe

- Diversions out of the way, I traveled to Redcliffe Castle and told the Arl that I was ready to call the Landsmeet.

- The first major event to occur in Denerim is a confrontation with Teyrn Loghain in the castle. The dialog option presented stumped me for a few minutes. All I had to do was fill in the blank: "I am...." (a) Witness to your crimes at Ostagar, (b) Fiona, a Grey Warden, or (c) a friend of Alistair, your rightful king. It was not an easy choice, because each answer had such a different tone, and so many possible outcomes in my mind. After humming and hawing I chose (b), and then spent the remainder of the conversation biting my tongue, trying not to antagonize the man that I was ready to kill.

- Hot on the heels of the meeting with Teyrn Loghain you are visited by Erlina, the servant to Queen Anora who claims that her mistress is in trouble, and may be killed by Logain (her father). I couldn't figure out who to believe, and tried to postpone any decision until later.

The Arl of Denerim's Estate

- Despite not trusting Erlina's story (and the Queen by proxy), I agreed to sneak into the Arl of Denerim's Estate to speak with Anora.

- I couldn't help poking around the castle, and when I stumbled into a room where a guard was romancing a servant I set off the alarms. Whoops. Frustratingly, the woman who ran to sound the alarm was not attackable - I would have liked the option to stop her from doing so.

- After defending myself on the main floor I ventured into the dungeons. The first room along the way had a great scene with an Orlesian Grey Warden who had been captured.

- The major fight in the dungeons was with Arl Howe, and it took a bit of strategy to get by. Like I often do I immediately dropped a sleep bomb in the room, and scampered into the hallway. I then dispatched the soldiers while paralyzing the mages, all while having Alistair tank Howe. Once I killed the mages off things got easier, and thankfully I kept them crowd controlled most of the time, and thus unable to do anything too nasty. Howe died shortly after his last mage hit the ground.

- Further into the dungeon, as I was releasing prisoners, I came across Vaughn, the Arl of Denerim's son. He had the gall to insult elves, and so I left him locked up to rot. Bastard.

- After (finally) rescuing Queen Anora I was about to head outside when Ser Cauthrien and her compliment of twenty knights stopped me. I sleep-bombed the lot of them, retreated to Anora's room, and dropped an Earthquake and a Blizzard into the main room as I went to slow everyone down. Unfortunately Ser Cauthrien shrugged off the crowd control quickly, and proceeded to solo my entire party.

A prisoner in Fort Drakon

- Interestingly, being defeated by Ser Cauthrien did not give me a game over screen, but instead deposited Alistair and Fiona in Fort Drakon, Denerim's prison.

Alone in a cell with Alistair - click to enlarge

- When prompted, I chose to try to escape, and specifically to try to get a guard's attention.

- After hailing a guard I could either feign sickness, or try to seduce him. Deciding that Fiona's feminine wiles couldn't be wasted, I chose the latter. Creepily, the guard seemed more than happy to come do the nasty in front of Alistair, and when I asked him to get out of his armor he happily obliged.... well, sort of (see below).

Safe sex? Head protection of a different sort - click to enlarge

- After beating the crap out of the naked guardsman, Alistair and Fiona broke out of the cell, found their gear conveniently stashed in a crate, and put it all on with a single click.

- Exploring around I found soldier disguises, and, deciding that subtlety would be better than brute force, put them on. What followed was a simple little puzzle quest to get out of the Fort by deceiving a number of soldiers and commanders into thinking that we were new recruits, and getting sent on patrol.

Back at the ranch

- Escape completed, I arrived back at the Arl of Denerim's estate to find that my companions and Queen Anora had escaped successfully (despite being defeated.... strange).

- A discussion with the Arl revealed the next big decision: who should sit on the throne? The initial plan had been the reluctant Alistair, however Anora wanted to continue being Queen as well.

- After some (fairly simple) brinkmanship I had convinced Anora and Alistair to have a marriage of convenience and rule together. The theory is that Alistair's presence will hopefully mitigate the innate distrust that I feel for Anora. Time will tell how the compromise works out.

- Returning to Denerim, Alistair wanted to visit his half sister whom he had never met. The resulting reunion was equal parts heartbreaking and infuriating; Goldanna ended up being a bitter gold digger. I allowed Alistair to give her 15 sovereigns, but when that didn't whet her appetite we walked out.

The Denerim Alienage

- As the underclass sin Dragon Age, the city elves live in a slum within Denerim. When you arrive they are suffering from a plague.

- I gave gold to the first beggar I saw, and then a little while later he was back with a friend asking for more. I gave them less, and then shortly after an entire herd showed up looking for money. That lot got nothing. Just like in real life, donating to beggars on the street only encourages them to keep at it.... I know better. (In real life my rule is to donate to a charity that helps feed street people. Warm beds and clean clothes is better than giving them cash straight up in my opinion.)

- The orphange was extremely creepy, even more so due to the presence of the blind Ser Otto, who meets a grisly end.

Ser Otto's death - click to enlarge

- The true cause of the Alienage's problems turn out to be Tevinter slavers that Teyrn Loghain has sold the elven population of Denerim to. Interestingly, despite being slavers the Tevinters at least treat the elven members of their own society with respect.

- When I confronted Caladrius I almost bought the letter implicating Logain for 100g, however I decided against it and instead beat the hell out of him.

- The fight against Caladrius and his soldiers was amusing. For the most part I stood in the room behind him and cast Earthquakes and Blizzards on his troops until they were all dead. In turn, he sent Blizzards down on my head, forcing me to retreat into the hallway. When he was finally alone I rushed him and dispatched him with no hassle. I'd imagine not using long range warfare would have made the fight much more difficult.

- As always, when Caladrius begged for mercy I let him go free - but not before he gave me that letter to use against Teyrn Loghain.

Next steps
When I next play I will finally be calling the Landsmeet, and I'm sure life will get messy in a hurry. I have no idea how much of the game is left, however at fifty-seven hours in I have to assume that I'm getting close.

Hyped for Final Fantasy XIII

2010-01-16T23:23:00.005-05:00

Warning: Rabid fanboy mode engaged.

My wife and I downloaded the new international trailer for Final Fantasy XIII last night on our PS3 and were promptly blown away by it.

I've been a Final Fantasy fan boy since the very first game arrived in North America and it kicked my thirteen year-old ass hard. I remember dying many times in the Marsh Cave, but I didn't give up and eventually I got the hang of these new fangled RPG things, and powered through the entire game. I've beaten every main installment of the Final Fantasy franchise as they were ported out of Japan (and sometimes, via the magic of ROMs, before) with the exception of Final Fantasy XII (damned WoW) and Final Fantasy XI (which, as an MMO, doesn't count).

Anyhow, as I sat watching the XIII trailer my jaw was firmly planted on the floor. I am in awe of the art, adore the voice acting, love the music, and am intrigued by the battle system. I could care less that the game is extremely linear; unlike some people I do not find this to be a turn off at all. I've never played JRPGs to make choices, I play them to be told a story.

The best moment of the trailer had to be when the chocobo first appeared on the screen; both my wife and I simultaneously squealed with joy. We're such fanatics.... it's going to be a wonderful experience to pass the controller back and forth for an hour or two every couple of nights, and watch the story unfold together. March 9th cannot arrive soon enough.

Cryptic fishes for more suckers

2010-01-16T09:41:00.002-05:00

I would have loved to have titled this article "Boldly going where no other scam has gone before", however Cryptic's announcement that they are selling lifetime subscriptions for their upcoming Star Trek Online MMO prior to the game's actual release date is a case of disheartening déjà vu.

It was probably inevitable. After selling out their lifetime Champions Online subscriptions it only makes sense that Cryptic would try to find more people willing to gamble a hefty sum of cash on an unproven game. Of course, for those unwilling to fork over $240 (plus pre-order) there is always the $120 12-month plan which is equally risky.

By all accounts Star Trek Online is in much the same boat as Champions Online was prior to release: it needs a lot of work if it's going to be successful. Unfortunately, Cryptic seems hellbent on ramming yet another MMO out the door, and it will come as no surprise to anyone if it turns into the sort of massive flop that last year's botched Champions release was.

Even still, I have no doubt that MMO loving Trekkies will eagerly snap up the lifetime subscription offers, and they won't be alone: space junkies looking for a faster paced game (as opposed to EVE) as well as players with too much disposable income in their pockets and too little sense in their heads will quickly follow.

The Cryptic offer appeals to the same part of our animal brains that the insane Steam holiday sales did. Humans have a hard time justifying NOT spending money when confronted with a deal that appears to be too good to be true; it is doubly hard to resist when the deal expires on a known date.

Spending to save is a disease that plagues our society. But just like $5 for a one year old AAA PC game seems like an amazing steal (even if you'll never play it), so to does $240 for a lifetime of play in an MMO, and that is why normally sane people will pony up the cash. In both cases you are gambling that you will get your money's worth, and far too often that will turn out to be a losing proposition.

Of course, $5 is a lot less of a risk than $240 and that is the crux of why I praise Steam for breathing life into the PC gaming market with their sales while simultaneously accusing Cryptic of trying to scam fanboys. In the end it's your money, and you are free to spend it however you please. Encouraging Cryptic to continue selling lifetime subscriptions using pressure tactics, however, is a dangerous move for the MMO industry.

Beyond Good & Evil 2: Back on?

2010-01-15T08:36:00.005-05:00

Ah Beyond Good & Evil 2, how I pine for thee. First it was delayed, then it was put on hold indefinitely, and now it is back in production again? My heart can't take much more of this rollercoaster ride.

Pey'j, how I pine for your porcine goodness

Honestly, I'd sell a part of my soul to revisit Jade and the claustrophobic dystopian world that she lives in. I want to get back to sneaking around, taking pictures of atrocities as they unfold, and beating up the odd baddie when the situation warrants it. If I get to drive around in a hovercraft again, then all the better.

MMOs: Living games

2010-01-13T23:02:00.001-05:00

More than any other type of entertainment, massively multiplayer online games exhibit one of the most important characteristics of living creatures: they are constantly evolving in response to the changes in their environment.

Spurred on by an excellent article by Psychochild, Gordon recently wrote an post connecting MMOs to genetic programming in which he asserted that these large games needed to undergo gene-like mutation in order to "excite [players] and stimulate new growth".

Unfortunately, I feel that what Gordon is actually looking for is something different than genetic mutation, and in fact he misuses the term in his piece repeatedly. Specifically, the following quotation demonstrates his mistake:

We now see evolutions of minor features, like guild windows, instead of sweeping and grand gestures that drive the industry forward. Mutation, the anomalies which bring radical changes and ideas to the table, are necessary in order to challenge the status quo.

Evolution is not a discrete operation, it is a complex one that, in genetic programming, is made up of two operations: crossover and mutation. Crossover mimics reproduction in nature, and is a chance for two different organisms to share their genes in order to create a new organism. Mutation, on the other hand, is accomplished by randomly changing the values of genes and is used to introduce novelty into the system and prevent stagnation. Long term evolution is impossible without mutation, and difficult without crossover. Thus, the minor features that Gordon observes and the sweeping changes that he hopes will happen are both evolutionary - only the scale differs.

Fleshing out the evolution analogy

While I may take issue with Gordon's application of the ideas and terms that underpin genetic computing and evolutionary theory in general, I think that the idea that MMOs are complex creatures within an evolutionary landscape is a fascinating one.

Whereas most games are released to consumers and live or die based on their form at the time of shipping, massively multiplayer games have ongoing patches, release cycles, and expansions. The look and feel of an MMO on day one is radically different from its form five years later; a quick look at World of Warcraft provides a perfect illustration of this. In short, an MMO can be said to evolve.

So how exactly do the elements of an MMO map to genetic computing, and how tight a fit is this analogy?

Organism: Every MMO represents a single organism, which competes with all other organisms for limited resources within an environment. The success of each MMO is measured by how long it lasts and how much money it makes.

Environment: The landscape that these organisms live and compete in is not a physical place, but rather is defined by the play time of video game consumers. Clearly this environment is not bounded, and may grow or shrink depending on the popularity of MMOs in general, and the games industry as a whole.

Resources: The primary resource that organisms compete for in the environment is cash. Without a stable cash flow an MMO cannot survive, and will eventually be shut down. Secondarily, MMOs compete for play time which may not always translate directly to dollars, but is indirectly valuable in obtaining them.

Fitness: The fitness of an MMO can be measured directly by calculating some combination of monthly revenue and gross hours played across all users. Without making a profit, an MMO is less likely to add new features and evolve, and instead will focus all of its earnings on survival (server/staff maintenance).

Chromosomes: Organisms in this system are made up of chromosomes, each of which represents a system or feature within an MMO. Chromosomes may be simple (e.g. the minimap widget) or complex (e.g. the combat system), however complex chromosomes can be reduced to a series of simple chromosomes.

To bring it all together, under the evolutionary model organisms (MMOs) consisting of chromosomes (features) compete for resources (dollars) within an environment (video game players), and their success and longevity are determined based on their fitness (profits).

Evolution in motion

To illustrate these concepts and bring the discussion back to the original topic of mutation within massively multiplayer games, it may be instructive to consider an example of how an MMO introduces a new feature, and what evolutionary steps are taken along the way.

Mutation Example:

Step 1. A developer comes up with an idea for a change to the game (which could be an addition, removal, or modification), thinks it over in his head, and perhaps in extreme cases runs some simple numbers or writes a basic proof of concept to validate the idea. This is the mutation in its rawest form.

Step 2. The idea for the feature-mutation is shared with company stakeholders and (frequently) members of the game's community. The feedback from this initial review process serves to estimate the fitness of the feature-mutation (which is a luxury that nature does not have).

Step 3. If the fitness estimate is deemed to be net positive (or, at worst, neutral), then the feature-mutation is implemented within the MMO (i.e. the mutation "multiplies" within the "population"). If the idea is not supported, the feature-mutation dies out immediately.

Step 4. After the implementation has been completed, some initial in-house testing is performed. Data from these tests trigger another round of fitness testing, after which the feature-mutation could again live or die.

Step 5. The change is deployed onto test servers where real players can dabble with it. The feature-mutation is once again tested for fitness.

Step 6. The feature-mutation is rolled out to the live servers, where the entire player base can interact with it. At this point you could consider the mutation to have been adopted by the entire organism (MMO). Obviously, the fitness of the organism including this new feature-mutation is again tested as players react to the impact by playing and/or paying more or less depending on how they feel about the game with the new feature incorporated.

In this way the living game (MMO) is constantly evolving through a series of small mutations, each of which has to pass a series of fitness tests before finally being adopted by the organism as a whole. It is important to note that even after being adopted into the main organism, these feature-mutations will constantly have their fitness tested as their environment (the player base) changes, the organism adopts more and different mutations, and other organisms evolve to compete for the finite resource pool.

Summary
Of course, the analogy isn't perfect - in nature and genetic programming speciation can occur, and entire different competing species with the same original ancestors will compete for supremacy in the same environment. Within the scope of the MMO genre, however, organisms do not reproduce in quite this manner. The closest games come to speciation is when games blatantly clone existing titles (e.g. Alganon copying World of Warcraft), and then diverge from that base copy.

Even still, it is clear that MMOs evolve and adapt in a manner that is not all that far off from the fundamentals of genetic programming and evolutionary theory. Spurred on by the implicit competition for consumer dollars, these living games are constantly remaking themselves to appeal to an audience that can provide them with the resources they need to sustain their day to day operations and grow towards the future.

It's anyone's guess what the MMOs of tomorrow will look like, but chances are extremely strong that whatever form they arrive at will be the result of incremental changes (both big and small) over time.

Bonus points
Although it it beyond the scope of this article, I believe it is safe to say that the interactions between consumers and the large number of MMOs on the market serve to form the basis of a complex adaptive system. As such, the direction of the genre (for lack of a better term) is emergent as opposed to predetermined. This implies that no matter what the best and brightest game designers in the world today may think, they are not really in control of the shape of MMOs in the future. It's a fascinating thought.

A perfect analogy

2010-01-12T12:19:00.003-05:00

Sometimes a game manages to capture a mood or a state of mind perfectly. This little gem, which will take you less than a minute to complete, does just that: Life is Hard.

Life, in a nutshell.

[via Gamers With Jobs]

Does Bayonetta degrade women?

2010-01-11T20:26:00.005-05:00

When I wrote up my thoughts on the Bayonetta demo I stayed well away from debate that has been raging over whether or not the game's portrayal of women is degrading. The main character, as you are well aware, is an extremely sexual creature, and everything from her lithe movements to the random camera snaps that are artistically inserted into the midst of game play is crafted around making that as brazenly clear as possible.

Bayonetta - click to enlarge

Writing for GamePro, Leigh Alexander has written a piece explaining her thoughts on the matter. Here's an excerpt from the article, in which she tries to decide if Bayonetta is exploitative or empowering:

Bayonetta takes the video game sexy woman stereotype from object to subject, and it's tremendously empowering. The title character uses the mantle of her sexuality as a power source. Between Bayonetta and her equally fierce rival, Jeane, it's a women's world -- the boys just play in it. The Umbra Witches aren't to be messed with. With this unique theme, the game itself is an artistic representation of the concept that female sexuality is its own kind of weapon. This stylized love letter to femininity is signed and sealed with all of the game's tiny details, from the kiss-shaped aiming targets to the subtle grace of Bayonetta's butterfly-shaped shadow.

[...]

But what about her unrealistic body, her gratuitous sashaying, the lollipop-licking? The hypersexualization of Bayonetta is intentionally unrealistic -- just as unrealistic as the superhuman aplomb of the Devil May Cry boys. Dante, for example, is a pleasure to play because of his unrealism, and Bayonetta is too. Both reject subtlety in favor of unrestrained, sometimes theatrically-excessive style in their own ways.

That emphasis on style over character substance isn't every player's taste, but it's not inherently unfair to women in this case. Kamiya's thematic choice for Bayonetta is an undercurrent that unifies the entire game, thus giving her sexuality context -- and context is the most important consideration in judging whether an element is appropriate or not.

The entire article is well worth reading.

Dragon Age: Fart me a lullaby

2010-01-10T16:08:00.007-05:00

Warning: This article contains spoilers. I would, however, appreciate if you did not spoil anything beyond the point of the game that I discuss.

Areas spoiled: Orzammar, Carta Hideout, the Deep Roads

Previous articles: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

Forty nine and a half hours into Dragon Age, and I have finally finished up the four main quests that started way back in Lothering all those weeks ago. I have secured the help of the Humans, Elves, Dwarves, and mages and am finally ready push out that slimeball Teyrn Loghain Mac Tir, and then take the fight to the dark spawn.

Along the way Fiona has crept up to level 18 and, in tandem with Morrigan, can dish out a nasty amount of damage while locking down ninety percent of the combatants on the field. The downside is that it doesn't take a heck of a lot to kill her, and some of the tougher fights in the Deep Roads forced me to micromanage my mages to a new level in order to keep them alive.

Today's post title, by the way, is courtesy of Oghren.

Into Orzammar

- If I had thought that the Elves and the Humans were nasty customers, then the Dwarves opened my eyes to the absolute depths to which a civilized race can sink in the Dragon Age world. Their caste system is brutal and unfair, with entire swathes of their race being treated as non-people by simple accident of birth.

- I absolutely loved the Dwarven lass, Dagna, who wanted to study with the Circle of Magi. Adorable. Given my distaste for the caste system, I took it upon myself to recommend her at the Tower despite her father's rejection of her dream.

Fiona looking stoic - click to enlarge

- The Orzammar storyline centers around choosing between two rivals for the throne of the underground kingdom. Harrowmont is a well-liked traditionalist who has an honest reputation, while Bhelen is the son of the previous king who is rumored to have killed both his brother and father. After speaking to the commoners and nobles I wasn't sure who to side with, however a visit to Dust Town convinced me that getting Bhelen on the throne was the only chance to turn the draconian Dwarven system around. Even if Bhelen turns out to be a bastard, at least he represented change; Harrowmont, no matter how honest, believed that Orzammar's social system was right and just and that felt completely wrongheaded. Bhelen earned my grudging support.

- While performing the Dwarven quests I made sure to gobble up all of the codex entries that appeared so that I could deal with the Dwarves from a position of knowledge instead of ignorance. On a few occasions this extracurricular research seemed to pay off, as Dwarves responded positively to an Elf knowing about their culture.

Decapitating the Carta

- Although I wanted to destroy the Carta - a gang of thugs that terrorize the denizens of Dust Town - immediately upon finding out about them, the game only allowed me to take a crack at them after an initial excursion into the Deep Roads at Bhelen's request. This forced linearity grated a little bit in a game like Dragon Age.

- As per my normal pattern, I let Jarvia's thugs live when I shook them down for information on how to infiltrate the Carta. I didn't see them again, so I assume they decided to play it safe and not double-cross me.

- The corridors of the Carta hideout are narrow, and it is was under these conditions that I learned the power of casting Sleep with one mage, and following it up with Mass Paralysis. Since Sleep is instant cast and locks down most enemies in a hurry, which then allows the much more potent Mass Paralysis time to fire off.

- All in all the Carta, and Jarvia herself, were fairly trivial.

In search of Branka

- The final task required to put a Dwarven king on the throne is to locate the paragon Branka and win her support. Bhelen insinuates that if she is located but her support cannot be gained than killing her might be necessary. Upon hearing this I winced, but jotted a note down to do so if required.

Nearing the Anvil of the Void - click to enlarge

- After receiving the quest I was accosted by Oghren, who had been a prick to me earlier. I gave him a rough ride in the dialog tree, but there didn't seem to be a way to outright reject his help. I ended up benching Alistair for the entire Deep Roads expedition as a result.

- Along the way I decided to put together the demon in the "Asunder" quest, and since it didn't seem overly aggressive I allowed it to go free. I scored a quick 25 gold for this flippant decision, and I'm interested to see if it comes back to haunt me.

- The Corrupted Spider Queen was the first real challenge I faced in the Deep Roads. She killed me twice before I finally managed to put her down. It was particularly challenging to crowd control the four spiders she periodically summoned before they tore apart my mages. The fight reminded me of a World of Warcraft raid, but on a smaller scale.

- When I met Ruck, the Dwarf driven mad by eating dark spawn flesh, I agreed to lie to his mother and tell her that he died a long time ago. I pitied the poor man, but he was still living in his own way, and so I allowed him to continue doing so.

- Speaking of tough fights, getting mobbed by eight shrieks is nasty business. I barely survived an ambush, with only Leliana up by the end of it. She seems to have a horseshoe wedged somewhere... she was the only survivor in the Flemeth battle too.

The Broodmother in all her nasty glory - click to enlarge

- The fight with the Broodmother was intense. I died my first time through, and on my second attempt I survived with zero potions left. Ugh. The fight took a lot of micromanagement because I couldn't allow anyone to stand near the tentacles, but I also couldn't group party members up due to the constant AOE attacks from the Broodmother. The second wave of adds nearly did me in, and I had to blow a lot of CC just to have a chance. An extremely well done fight !

Dealing with a Paragon

- When I finally located Branka it was clear that she'd gone completely mad. I determined at that point that I'd have to kill her if the game allowed it, and I wouldn't even feel bad about it.

- I stumbled into a strategy against the Spirit Anvil that felt a bit like an exploit. I had my party wait around a corner out of line of sight, pulled a single spirit with Leliana's ranged attacks, killed it, and then clicked on the anvil when it lit up. Rinse and repeat. Doing this allowed me to avoid fighting multiple ghosts at once, which made the fight extremely easy. Did anyone else do it this way? If not, how tough did you find the battle?

- When I had to choose what to do with Caridin I found the decision excruciating. The Anvil of the Void was extremely powerful, but also malignant. In making my choice to destroy the Anvil I had a showdown with Morrigan, and I honestly expected it to end badly; I actually threatened her. In the end I only earned -1 approval which seemed weak considering the intensity of the conflict.

- The resulting fight against Branka was the hardest I've fought to date, and it took me four attempts to put her down. The biggest problem I had was that she could one-shot my mages, and so I had to be very aware of who she had aggro on, and if it was a mage I had to manually flee.

Crowning a King

- Caridin forged me a crown to give to the Dwarf of my choosing, and interestingly enough even that late into the adventure the game gave me the option of crowning Harrowmont.

- I stuck with Bhelen, and the idiot's first order was for Harrowmont to be executed. I tried to convince him otherwise, but to no avail. He then started threatening the children of assembly members who didn't vote for him. What an ass. Still, if Bhelen can change Dwarven culture to something less caste-driven then it won't have been a total waste.

- As a final act in Orzammar I convinced the leader of the Legion of the Dead to fight topside during the final battle against the blight.

As an aside, when I got back to camp to talk to my allies, I was presented with the following absolutely inane dialog with Zevran. I've never tried to hit on the guy even once... but even if I had, option three is still juvenile:

"Is this after I ravish you in celebration?" (click to enlarge)

To the ladies out there.... is this something you say often to guys you work with?

Anyhow - I'm looking forward to seeing where the story goes from here - I'm finally approaching the end game and I can't wait!

Demo: Bayonetta

2010-01-09T21:58:00.006-05:00

The Christmas release season has kept me away from playing many demos for the past month, but today I managed to snag thirty minutes to fire up the Bayonetta demo on my PS3.

Allow me to walk you through my thought process as the game unfolded before my eyes:

Oh this is pretty. Where are all the enemies? Oh, there's some, let me try attacking. Whoa. Oh wow! Holy sh.... she just did what? And.... whoa. Whoa! My god, was that hair? Holy crap, yes it.... Whoa!! Holy shit! Oh....my.... god.....

And this went on throughout my entire play session. After each encounter I barely got a chance to catch my breath before the thrill ride started back up.

Bayonetta strikes a pose - click to enlarge

Bayonetta is brawling action game by the creators of the Devil May Cry series that is immediately noticeable due to its over-sexed protagonist. In the title you play Bayonetta, a dark witch, as you battle against the forces of light to..... well, I don't know what really - kick some ass, I suppose. I'm not sure it matters.

The character design for Bayonetta is more than a little odd. It feels like the game's creators took everything that they thought was sexy about women, and then exaggerated those details as much as possible. She has voluptuous breasts, luxurious black hair, extreme curves, and legs that are three miles long. Oh - and a face that is terrifying similar to Sarah Palin.

About to kick some angelic ass - click to enlarge

Despite this unrealistic character design - or perhaps because of it - Bayonetta fits right in to the gorgeous world that has been laid out for destruction. The environments presented in the demo feel lush and vibrant, the perfect backdrop for an all out battle royale between the forces of good and evil. The enemies look great too, and as the special effects explode across the screen everything is drawn together perfectly.

Game play in Bayonetta is straightforward to dive into, but appears to be quite rich beneath the surface if you feel like investing some effort into the game. Your main abilities, like in most action titles, are jump, punch, kick, and evade. These can be chained together in a large variety of ways to create combo attacks that deal devastating damage. This provides a great deal of depth to the fighting mechanic, which in turn allows you to constantly work on improving your skills. It helps that many of the combos are an absolute blast to watch unfold; in one instance you morph your hair into a giant high heeled shoe, which then boots your foe across the screen.

A hair.... shoe? Click to enlarge

Now don't get me wrong, I'm not an action game connoisseur - in fact I generally avoid this type of title because I'm not very good - however Bayonetta goes out of its way to empower the player and make him feel awesome; it is extremely easy to perform all sorts of insane-looking combos. Wanton destruction is fun.

Another big aspect of the brawling system is the evade mechanic. At any time - whether you're standing still, moving, in the middle of a combo, etc. - you can press a button to evade any attack, and doing so allows you to take no damage. If you wait until the last possible moment to evade then you have a chance to enter "Witch Time" mode, which slows all enemies down for a few seconds, allowing you to get in a number of free shots. The risk-reward system of split-second dodging is intense, and adds another layer of depth to the combat experience.

Periodically while fighting the game will prompt you to click certain buttons to perform a "torture attack" on your foes. If you react quickly enough you will be rewarded by a special sequence in which you dispatch an enemy in a particularly nasty manner. I gather this is very similar to systems pioneered in the God of War series, although since I've never played one of those games I can't be sure. Either way, it was a good test of reaction time, and I couldn't help but to cackle manically whenever I pulled one off.

Fear the hair dragon! Click to enlarge

If I had any complaints about this game it would be that the entire story - at least that which is presented in the demo - is completely incoherent. I have no idea why Bayonetta was doing what she was doing, or why enemies were coming after her. Furthermore, the last level in the demo took a sharp left turn, and I ended up in a different area fighting someone completely random. Given that the level was labeled as verse five, I assume that it wasn't taken out of context, and that the full version of the game will flow is the same disjointed manner.

Despite not being an action game fan, I had a blast with the Bayonetta demo. The game is drop dead gorgeous, and if you can get by the absurdity of what's going on and just live from moment to moment then you will have a breathless amount of fun. The pace is frenetic, the colors are loud, and your heart will be racing.

I full intend on renting this game as soon as I've cleaned up my backlog a little bit more - it will make a nice break between all of the heavy RPGs I'll be playing this winter.

Demo parameters: one level (5 parts, 30 minutes game play)
Release date: Now
Cost: $59.99

Post Mortem: Professor Layton and the Curious Village

2010-01-07T12:49:00.006-05:00

Released in 2007, Professor Layton and the Curious Village is the first in a series of five Nintendo DS puzzle games, only two of which have been ported from their Japanese origins. While I knew the game was successful when it was released, it took my wife taking an interest in the title to spur me into picking up a copy.

Over the course of the past month my wife and I have made Professor Layton a part of our bedtime routine. Before going to sleep most nights we would snuggle up close, position the DS so that we could both read the screen, and solve a few of the game's puzzles together. When plot points came up I would read them aloud, and when it was time to work out solutions to the increasingly tricky puzzles we put out heads together and worked out the solution. It was a really nice trip, and a great shared gaming experience.

Visually, Professor Layton and the Curious Village reminds me of a Saturday morning cartoon from my childhood. The artwork is clean and colourful; simple without being boring. The citizens of St. Mystere, the village Professor Layton and his sidekick Luke are exploring, are all lovingly drawn and span a whole range of quirky looks and behaviours. Periodically during major plot points the static screens give way to short animations that are an absolute joy to watch.

Game play is relatively straight forward: using the stylus you navigate between the (roughly twenty) areas that make up St. Mystere and interact with the items and people that you find by tapping on them. As you explore you will be challenged by puzzles of varying difficulties that you must solve. Figuring out the solution to these puzzles awards you with (meaningless) points as well as collectibles and plot progression. Hint coins can also be located by tapping on predetermined locations within the environment, and can be used to provide assistance with puzzles.

The puzzles are the true heart of Professor Layton. There are 120 scattered throughout the game, many of which are optional; only eighty puzzles must be solved to finish the game, although avoiding them would be missing the point (in my opinion). There are a wide variety of challenges available to tickle your brain: word problems, logic puzzles, visual tests, illusions, math problems, and tactile puzzles are just some of the many types of brain teaser that you will run across.

Each puzzle is described in words on the top screen and pictorially represented on the bottom screen. Helpfully, many of the challenges allow you to use the bottom screen as a scratch pad, and my wife and I often found ourselves scribbling notes or equations to help us along our way. Each puzzle is worth a fixed number of points based on its difficulty and there is no time limit imposed on the player. Wrong answers are punished by decreasing the (meaningless) points awarded for the solution, and only rarely is storyline progress impeded. In the event that a player has a hard time coming up with the solution to a puzzle they can spend hint coins (found all over the world) to unlock up to three helpers.

After finishing Professor Layton I was left with two relatively minor complaints about the game. Firstly, it gets very tedious having to tap the stylus randomly all over every screen in order to find hidden puzzles and hint coins. While neither reward are required to finish the game, my wife and I felt compelled to do this whenever we entered an area and it was never any fun. Secondly, the major plot-based mysteries of the game are all revealed through dialog and cut scenes. The player is never asked to solve any aspect of the the game's central mystery, and instead the Professor magically intuits what has transpired. For a game that tests your mind, it would have been nice to play an active role in solving the mystery.

Despite these minor complaints both my wife and I had a great time playing Professor Layton and the Curious Village together. During our play sessions, I was pleasantly surprised at the number of times that one of us intuited a puzzle's solution while the other was completely baffled. The experience of solving puzzles together was a lot of fun, and proved the old adage that two brains are better than one.

Authors worth reading

2010-01-06T18:39:00.002-05:00

Professor Beej recently appealed to his readers for some new authors, and instead of burying a comment in the depths of his thread where only he would see it, I figured that I could post my recommendations here for all to see.

First, my personal bias: I used to be a huge fantasy reader, but got sick of how repetitive most of the plots got after a while, and outgrew the genre. Instead, I dove headlong into sci-fi, with an emphasis on books that focused either on cool ideas or deep character development; I generally shun most pure action rags for the same reason that I avoid the majority of action movies. I also have a love of dark fiction, which will probably shine through here.

Avoiding the authors already on Beej's list, here are some novelists worth keeping an eye out for:

Tad Williams - Although he's best known for his fantasy novels, Williams best work by far is his four part Otherland series. Set in the future, the books describe a world dominated by a VR-based communications network that takes immersion to a new and scary level. For bonus points, an MMO is in the works based on the Otherland.

Lyda Morehouse - Her AngeLINK series (starting with Archangel Protocol) is a strange blend of a high tech world filled with political intrigue, and twisted religion. Lyda's characters are extremely lovable, even when they're downright despicable.

Neil Gaiman - Originally a huge name in comic books (his Sandman series was epic), Neil Gaiman's fiction is most frequently set in something resembling modern times. Scratch the surface just a little bit, and a dark fairytale can usually be found. American Gods is a particular favorite of mine.

Stephen Donaldson - Another fantasy author that dabbles in sci-fi, Donaldson is known for extremely dark fiction. While I find his fantasy only passable, his "Gap" series (starting with The Real Story) is a gritty masterpiece set in the far future. If you like fluffy stories with happy endings, then this isn't for you - Donaldson is ruthless in creating a world where there are no heroes. The entire series is brutally compelling and enormously gut wrenching.

Robert Sawyer - In my opinion, Sawyer is the current king of science fiction. His books are founded on extremely sound scientific theories, and from those seeds he weaves speculative tales of the near future. If I had to pick a favorite novel I'd say that Calculating God would take the cake, although Flashforward is a close second (and, for that matter, was adapted as a television show).

Other quicks hits you might enjoy:

Max Berry - Jennifer Government: A corporate dystopia spiraling out of control.
Kim Stanley Robinson - The Years of Rice and Salt: Follow a set of entwined souls through history.
Jon Courtenay Grimwood - Stamping Butterflies: A pair of dreamers with different destinies, but which is real?

Dragon Age: 'Awakening' Announced

2010-01-05T12:50:00.008-05:00

Bioware will be releasing the first Dragon Age expansion, entitled "Awakening", on March 16th this year.

A darkspawn? (Click to enlarge)

The feature list so far looks promising:

A Stunning World Expanded: BioWare's deepest universe to date just got bigger with an all new area of the world to explore, Amaranthine

Unlock the secrets of the Darkspawn and their true motivations
Rebuild the Grey Warden order and establish their base of operations at Vigil's Keep

All-new Complex Moral Choices: Embark on an epic story that is completely defined and reactive to your play style

Shape your entire experience based on the choices you make and how your handle complex situations

New Ways to Customize your Hero: Experience additional spells, abilities, specializations, and items to further personalize and customize your hero and party

Import your character from Dragon Age: Origins or start anew as a Grey Warden from the neighboring land of Orlais
Encounter five all-new party members and an old favorite from Dragon Age: Origins

Even more Bone-Crushing, Visceral Combat: Battle against a new range of horrific and terrifying creatures

Put your skills to the test against an evolved, intelligent breed of Darkspawn and other menacing creatures including the Inferno Golem and Spectral Dragon!

The Spectral Dragon, perhaps? (Click to enlarge)

Although Bioware does not give any hints as to how many hours of game play will be packed into Awakening, the fact that you will have the opportunity to "start anew as a Grey Warden from the neighboring land of Orlais" suggests that this is a large campaign, not just something tacked on to the main story line. The price point also points to a substantially beefy journey; Game Stop is listing the cost of the Dragon Age expansion at $30 (or $40 for console players).

Despite not being finished with the initial campaign, I'm definitely excited for some more Dragon Age. I'll probably have a tough time deciding whether or not I want to stick with my existing (overpowered) mage character or if I'll start a new Grey Warden - I think for now I'll postpone that decision as long as possible.

Update: Shacknews has a trailer.

Exergaming (of a sort)

2010-01-04T19:10:00.006-05:00

As a computer programmer and a video gamer I am a demographic that has a high risk of living a sedentary life and falling into the obesity trap. In fact, I've been there before: up until six years ago I was clinically obese. It took my scale ticking above 220 pounds (I'm 5'9) for me to realize that something was seriously wrong, and to find the will power to turn my health around. A year and a half later I had wrestled my weight down to a much more reasonable 160 pounds, and have remained in that ballpark ever since through a combination of sensible diet and plenty of physical activity.

I like to work out for an hour every day, but during the long Canadian winter my options are limited. Last spring my wife and I invested in a stationary bike to help keep active, and I try to ride it four days every week (the other three days are consumed by two games of ultimate frisbee and one day lifting free weights).

My big problem keeping motivated is that biking indoors is dreadfully boring, and I need to keep my mind occupied if I have any hope of completing a session. During the fall it isn't that difficult; when the NHL, CFL, and NFL are all playing I can almost always tune in a game that I'm interested in watching. With the CFL playoffs complete and the NFL season winding down, pretty soon I'll only be left with my hockey, and there is almost no chance that I'll find an interesting game on television four nights per week.

Which brings me to this evening's experiment: my own attempt at exergaming. When I sat down on the bike tonight there was nothing on television, and so on a whim I popped the New Super Mario Bros. Wii into my console, grabbed a controller, and started pedaling. I had heard stories of people trying to game in this manner this with mixed success, but it seemed like a worthwhile thing to at least attempt.

Much to my delight I was able to maintain a good pace with my legs while platforming at close to my full potential. The minutes flew by, and before I knew it the hour was over and I'd downed a Koopa kid for good measure.

On a few occasions I found myself slowing my pedaling - almost always when I was in danger of dying on screen, or performing a particularly tricky jump. It took some mental discipline to speed back up, but in the end it didn't effect the distance I rode very significantly at all. There were a few times when I accidentally made Mario spin-jump by jerking the controller (damned waggle controls), but overall I didn't feel adversely affected by multitasking. I assume that playing a thinking game (like an RPG) would be more suited for being paired with physical activity, and so I may have to hunt a good title down.

I'm looking forward to a winter filled with exergaming on my bike; both my Wii and PS3 should get a lot more love. Now all I need to do is find a way to incorporate a video game when I weight lift.

Board Game: Pandemic

2010-01-03T15:24:00.007-05:00

Pandemic, published by Z-Man Games, is a co-operative board game for between two and five players (2-4 without the "On the Brink" expansion) that challenges you and your friends to stop the global outbreak of four deadly diseases. The game is simple to pick up, contains five different difficulty levels and three play variants, and is extremely tightly tuned.

Since receiving the game and its expansion for Christmas I have played three different sessions totaling perhaps eight hours. The total number of games played during that time frame stands somewhere around twelve - a testament to the speedy nature of the games, which generally last no more than forty-five minutes. (Each of these sessions was with different people; we probably could have fit more games in if everyone had a firm understanding of the rules when they sat down at the table.)

Basic game play
Thematically, Pandemic is wonderfully topical; the world that has been repeatedly whipped into a frenzy over global disease outbreaks every time the media catches wind of a new flu strain, and so what better to base a board game on?

At the start of each game each player is randomly assigned one of eleven roles (only five without the expansion), which could range from medic, to scientist, to something more esoteric like troubleshooter or generalist. Each role grants a player a different set of special powers and actions, and this random distribution helps make each play through of the game different.

Once players have their roles they receive a few player cards, and then the remaining deck has Epidemic cards roughly evenly distributed through it and is placed on the board as a draw pile. An infection deck is also shuffled, and then nine cities on the board are chosen from the top of the deck to be initially infected.

The board - click to enlarge

Once set-up is complete the game begins, with players taking turns in order. A player turn consists of performing four actions (move, treat a disease, research a cure, etc), drawing new player cards, and then infecting a number of cities equal to the current rate of infection by drawing from the infection deck.

The two game mechanics that the core game play is based on are Epidemics and Outbreaks.

And Epidemic is triggered when a player draws an epidemic card (see above) from the player deck. It must be immediately resolved. The global infection rate increases, a new city is infected, and then all of the currently discarded infection cards - which represent cities already infected - are shuffled back onto the top of the infection deck. By placing the spent infection cards back on the top of the pile the game simulates the intensification of disease in areas that have already been hard hit. From a player's point of view this is a huge "oh crap" moment.

An outbreak is triggered when a player draws the infection card of a city that already has three disease tokens on it, and thus cannot receive any additional tokens. When this occurs, all cities connected to the target city receive an infection token from the outbreaking disease. If one of the connected cities already has three disease tokens on it (and thus cannot receive another) then it also outbreaks, and so on. If players are not careful to treat disease hotspots, these chained outbreaks will spell their doom in a hurry.

A game of trade-offs
Pandemic is a delicately balanced game. Currently the only games that I have won have been those played on "Beginner" difficulty level, which includes only four Epidemic cards in the player deck. I have nearly won "Normal" difficulty (five Epidemic cards) almost every time that I've played it, but we've always lost in the end.

There is a single victory condition in the game: find cures for all four diseases. A cure is found by discarding five player cards that are the same colour as the disease you wish to cure. Curing a disease doesn't eradicate it however - to do that you need to have the cure AND wipe all instances of the disease from the map. Once this is accomplished the disease will never return, which buys players some breathing room. Eradicating diseases in not a required condition of victory, however.

Conversely, there are three ways to fail: running out of cards in the player card deck, allowing eight outbreaks to occur, and running out of extra disease tokens for any of the four diseases.

Cards on the table - click to enlarge

During the four player games that I played we almost always lost by exhausting the cards in the player card deck. This failure condition simulates taking too long to combat the global pandemic, and thus allowing the diseases to get out of control. During game play you always want to be treating disease hotspots to prevent outbreaks, however doing too much of this will result in you taking too many turns to find all four cures, and thus losing the game. On two occasions this happened to us when we could cure the disease on the next player's turn... the tuning is that tight.

When I played Pandemic with two players the most common failure condition was allowing too many outbreaks to occur. Since it is harder to have someone in every corner of the map with only two players, the danger of letting an area fester too long is amplified. We found that we had to be much more liberal with using our player cards for travel when playing the two player version of the game in order to keep the outbreaks at bay. (Player cards can be collected to cure diseases, but also allow fast travel between cities - this mechanic forms another of the game's trade-offs.)

All of this speaks to the wonderfully tight tuning that Z-Man games has brought to the table with Pandemic. As we played we felt that we were learning what strategies worked, and even when we lost (most of our games) we were chomping at the bit to reset the board and give it another try.

Addictive co-operative fun
It's a breath of fresh air to play a co-operative board game for a change. Too often board games are associated with players needing to win against all other players at the table, and that can be a turn off for some. Pandemic does away with all of that and encourages teamwork, collaboration, and camaraderie. Table talk is encouraged, and if everyone doesn't learn to work together then everyone will lose - there is simply not enough wiggle room in this game for someone to go it alone.

Unfortunately I've only been able to give a brief overview of the game here. If you are interested in learning more, then I highly encourage you to read the rules on line:

Pandemic - Core rule set
On the Brink - Expansion rules

Head, meet brick wall

2010-01-02T14:35:00.005-05:00

In their latest episode, one of the guys over at Drunken Gamers Radio uttered a phrase that made me nod my head in sad agreement:

These days, "hard" is not succeeding on your first try.

Many gamers, both newbies to the hobby and veterans who remember monochrome green screens, have an extremely low desire to be challenged by their video games. Typical explanations for this lack of difficulty tolerance range from very personal justifications ("I get home from work after a long day, and the last thing I want to do is lose to a game") to more esoteric industry-based excuses ("Games used to be difficult because they wanted the player to keep feeding money into a machine; that era is long gone, and good riddance.").

Whatever their reasoning, it seems obvious from conversing with people on this blog and in gaming forums that the majority of today's video game players neither want nor enjoy a hard challenge, especially one that requires multiple failures during a learning process before success is finally achieved. Although I cannot understand this mentality, that does not make it invalid or wrong - simply foreign and, at least for me, a little bit sad. I hate to see the gaming industry gravitating away from the types of games that force a player to learn, practice, and excel before granting succeess.

I bring this topic up because two of the games that I am playing right now have no business existing in a market place that is so challenge adverse. Both Demon's Souls (PS3) and Shiren the Wanderer (DS) are brutal and unforgiving games that severely punish poor play.

Shiren the Wanderer

Let me walk you through a typical hour in Shiren the Wanderer, which leans heavily on the roguelike model that has thrived among independent game developers for decades.

You start a play through with no money, no equipment, and at level one in the starting village. If you're smart you'll grab a free rice ball from the pub, and then head out into the wilderness to fight some monsters and try to advance. As you battle your foes you will slowly gain levels and acquire gear (none of which is identified, and may be cursed). If you're lucky you'll quickly find a weapon and a shield, but that is by no means a guarantee; how bold you can be with your tactics is heavily reliant on what you find.

Before long -assuming that you haven't played poorly - you should reach a new village where you can buy and sell a few items, and upgrade your weapon (if you found one). Then it's time to head back into the procedurally generated field, and press on to the next village. The second village is an important step - it contains a warehouse that allows you to stash fifteen or twenty items, and pick them up during a later visit. Subsequent towns and villages along the way may or may not have these warehouses.

At some point in your Shiren the Wanderer play through will find yourself overwhelmed, and how you react will determine if you continue on, or fall in battle. How you manage your scrolls, potions, staves, weapons, armor, and other items is crucial. The order in which you engage enemies, and the way in which you do so will determine whether you live or die. You cannot expect to simply stand and fight everything toe to toe - only death awaits the fool who tries that.

And death is inevitable, make no mistake about it. Shiren the Wanderer will kill you repeatedly, and every single death will send you back to the starting village, naked, broke, and level one. The only items that you can stake a claim to after a death are those that you had the foresight to leave at warehouses along the way - everything else is gone forever.

This harsh cycle of failure drove the man who owned the game before me (I bought a used copy) to give up after only reaching a maximum level of eight. He had died nearly one hundred times before selling the game - a staggering amount. I've died roughly twenty times since starting a few weeks ago, but managed to reach level twelve. I'm still painfully far from the end of the game, but I learn something with each new death, and internalize those mistakes.

Despite constantly losing every ounce of progress I've made, Shiren the Wanderer is a satisfying experience due to the challenge it presents. My character may not progress, but I do.

Demon's Souls

The first game that I bought for my PS3 was the surprise hit Demon's Souls. This awkwardly named Atlus title has, despite all odds, broken into the mainstream. The game does not attempt to hide the fact that it is tough as nails. It kills you frequently, and then spits on your corpse before daring you to try again.

A third person action RPG, Demon's Souls puts you in the role of an adventurer trying to save a lost kingdom. Combat is fast-paced, tactical, and downright nasty - enemies are not afraid to play dirty, and are relentless in their assaults. In case that wasn't enough, Demon's Souls punishes players with a zerg mentality by littering the levels with deadly traps and brutal ambushes.

The death mechanic in the game is not quite as punishing as Shiren's, but it still awfully evil. Upon death you are returned to the start of the level that you were on, and all of the souls that you have collected (which serve as a hybrid mixture of experience points and currency) are dropped where you perished. If you manage to return to the location of your death on your next attempt then you can recollect the souls, however if you die again they are lost permanently.

To put things in perspective, I played for two hours last night, and at the end of that session my character was exactly the same as when I started the game up (plus or minus a few healing herbs). Game-wise I had not progressed an inch, although personally my knowledge and skill at the game had grown by a measurable amount.

Embracing difficulty
As an avid video game player, I find that games like Shiren the Wanderer and Demon's Souls are the most satisfying experiences that I can have. While I like candy-coated fluffy experiences just as much as the next guy, my true passion is for games that challenge me to learn them inside out and to play like a pro. I want a game that respects me enough to kick me in the ass when I make a mistake, not gently hold my hand, and whisper sweet nothings in my ear. I hope that the success of Demon's Souls (but also hard titles like Dragon Age and Megaman 9) spurs game designers to make tough games more frequently than they have been.

Dragon Age: Forcing a Compromise

2009-12-31T15:42:00.001-05:00

Warning: This article contains spoilers. I would, however, appreciate if you did not spoil anything beyond the point of the game that I discuss.

Areas spoiled: Honnleath, Morrigan's personal quest, Brecelian Forest, Brecilian Ruins

Previous articles: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Ah Christmas: a time of family, friend, food, and video games. One of my big goals over my two week Christmas break was to make substantial progress in Dragon Age Origins, and so far I've done a worse job with that than I had wanted to. If anything, Fiona has received less play time over the past two weeks than she would have if it were a normal work week.

Whining aside, I did manage to bust through a fair number of side quests, as well as the entire Brecilian Forest/Dalish Elves story arc, which has to count for something.

My playtime is now up to 37.5 hours according to my save file, and the game is still retaining a fresh and fun feel to it. A lot of times I'll be chomping at the bit to finish an RPG by the forty hour mark, however with Dragon Age I have a sneaking suspicion that my hunger for this game will not be sated by a single completion.

My starting party for these adventures was Fiona, Morrigan, Leliana, and Alistair. Random thoughts follow.

Honnleath

- I decided that my first stop would be the village of Honnleath, home of Shale the DLC/pre-order golem companion character.

- Upon arriving at the outskirts of the village I was immediately assaultde by a wave of Darkspawn. Clearly something was awry, and I had barely beat off the first cluster before running headlong into another pack of the vermin. It was going to be one of those days.

- Shale was petrified in the town square, and the activation rod that I received from the merchant didn't work at all. There was, however, a building to explore and so in I went. Dozens of Darkspawn later I found some survivors holed up behind a magical barrier.

Shale - click to enlarge

- A little girl had gone missing, and in order to get the proper activation word from one of the survivors I had to save her. Go figure.

- The quest to save the little girl was actually pretty amusing. A lust demon disguised as a cat had the tyke enthralled, and the game allowed me to fast talk my way into a situation whereby I could kill the kitty-demon without harming the girl. It probably helps that I have all of my social skills maxed out.

- While doing the slide puzzle quest (ugh), the game bugged out on me and lost track of where the tiles actually were. The result was frustrating random clicking to arrive at the solution, since I could not see the results of my actions on the screen. I dislike slide puzzles at the best of times, and loathe buggy ones. Bad Bioware, bad!

- In the end I recruited Shale, and replaced the perennially-whiny Alistair with him. (After a few hours of dragging the golem around, I'm not so sure that it's an upgrade - I have an unfunny smart-ass in my party instead of a wussy baby. Gah.)

Morrigan's Personal Quest

- Somewhere along the way I found Flemeth's grimoire, and gave it to Morrigan as a gift. This triggered an optional side quest in which it is revealed that Morrigan's mother (Flemeth) unnaturally extends her life by possessing her daughters when her body is too old to continue.

- Since I have a thing for Morrigan (and her outrageous outfit), I decided that the only viable option open to me was to kill Flemeth, and so off I went to her hut in the marsh. When I confronted Flemeth she offered to give me her true grimoire as proof of her death, if in exchange I would lie to Morrigan. I decided that just wouldn't do, and attacked.

- Unfortunately a sloppy podcaster had spoiled what happened next for me - Flemeth shifted into dragon form and proceeded to beat the ever-loving crap out of my party. Ouch.

- After a humbling defeat I changed my party around a little: Fiona, Rascal the Mabari hound, Shale, and Leliana made up the second assault.

- My second attempt on Flemeth went much better, but it didn't take long for my lack of a dedicated healer to make itself felt. One by one my characters dropped, and it was only through some frantic clicking that I kept everyone alive long enough to injure Flemeth to the point where Leliana, as the only survivor, could deal the killing blow. Yikes.

Too close for comfort - click to enlarge

Dangerous Travel

- After the fight I had ZERO healing potions remaining, and no components to craft more. This left me in the precarious position of needing to travel somewhere to buy Elfroot.

- Another (minor) spoiler I'd heard was that the Dalish elves stocked Elfroot, and so off to the Brecilian Forest I went, hoping not to encounter any random battles.

- Of course, as fate would have it I ran straight into the teeth of an ambush designed to kill Leliana. My party was killed on my first attempt. I tried to power my way through, not realizing that mages were involved, and that proved fatal.

- On my second attempt I spotted the assassin leader on the ridge above me, and so tossed out two Mass Sleep spells to pacify everything in the area, and then proceeded to burn him down. This turned out to be an excellent tactic: reducing the leader to zero health triggered the end of the battle. Like I usually do, I spared hiss life, and then continued on to the forest.

Dalish Encampment

- Upon arriving at the Dalish encampment and being introduced to the main story line there my reaction was: Werewolves?!? Really?!? It seemed so cliché, and I was prepared to be disappointed by a one dimensional plot. Boy was I wrong.

- I accepted all of the side quests from the elves except for Cammen's whiny appeal for a wolf pelt to help him get a lady.

- Lanaya, the apprentice Keeper of the Dalish, struck me as extremely bipolar. Within a two minute timespan she went from friendly to hostile and then back again. My crime in her mind: accidentally clicking on a chest twice.

- I respected the Dalish chests and other lootables, and only picked the herbs in the camp. When I got to the vendor I went wild buying potions and crafting components.

Brecilian Forest

- Into the forest I went, and started slaying wolves, werewolves, and bears. Everything was going well until I stumbled across my first Wild Sylvan. I killed the tree-beast, but it startled the hell out of me.

- Along the way I found Danyla, the elven woman that I'd been asked to be on the look out for. Danyla had been turned into a werewolf and begged me for death, and also to conceal the nature of her fate from her husband. I obliged, and when I returned to Athras I lied about what had happened to his beloved. It was a very touching and heartfelt quest.

- The quest involving the Grand Oak Tree and the mad man was amusing. I allowed both to live, and instead traded for the acorn from the hermit in order to obtain the bark from the tree. Both NPCs were very well written and well voiced.

The Grand Oak Tree - click to enlarge

- I disrupted all of the grave sites I came across in order to obtain the Tevinter artifacts. The grave site on the hill above the old oak tree was particularly nasty, and I died a few times before finally pulling out a win.

Brecilian Ruins

- The ruins continued the type of action that I had come to expect from the forest, with some spiders thrown in for good measure. My ample crowd control more than made up for my lack of healing, and I powered through most trash mobs without needing to quaff a single potion.

- I should take a minute to gush over how much I love Leliana's rogue abilities. When exploring I usually control her so that I can detect any traps before blundering into them, and discover secret doors. It also makes it simple to loot as I go, since I can (finally) unlock every chest without needing to switch characters.

- When the dragon appeared I was initially scrambling to set my party up for a nasty battle, but the beast proved to be a push over. Sad.

- I released the Arcane Warrior from his prison, and learned the specialization. Fiona is now an Arcane Warrior, although she has none of the skills learned so far.

Using chain-CoC on a Revenant (cheesey but effective) - click to enlarge

- I also solved the elven ritual in the ruins. I made a mistake on my first attempt, which was easily corrected by using a (rare) reload. From my notes: (1) get the jug from the fountain an fill it, (2) put the jug on the alter, pray, and then take a sip, (3) empty the jug back into the fountain. Behind the doorway that opened I tried to be respectful and talk to the spirit there, but was attacked anyways. I'm not sure if there is a "right" way to deal with her, but I didn't try beyond my first attempt.

- When I finally ran into the werewolves again I chose to parlay with the Lady of the Forest. After speaking with her, I decided to bring Zathrian to speak with the werewolves and (hopefully) lift the curse.

- Zathrian proved to be stubborn, and when I tried to force him to be reasonable he decided to attack me. The resulting fight went well, with only Leliana dying in the middle of the melee. I had Morrigan lock down Zathrian with whatever CC she could muster (usually Cone of Cold), while Fiona tried to control everything else.

- In the end Zathrian lifted the curse on the werewolves, who frustratingly left without rewarding me or offering me their help. Perhaps when the final battle comes they will resurface - we'll see.

The Lady and her flock - click to enlarge

- When I returned to the Dalish encampment with news of what had occurred I decided to lie to Lanaya about Zathrian's involvement with the curse, and instead led her to believe that he acted heroically. Total horse manure, but as I said earlier, she's bipolar and unpredictable.

And that is that. My next destination will be Orzammar, which I have heard is the hardest of the four major quests.

MMOs of 2009

2009-12-31T09:23:00.003-05:00

Taking a page out of Evizaer's book, here is a quick run down of the MMOs that I played during this calendar year. The list is awfully long, however there are only a small handful of games that I paid money for - the rest simply failed to sell me during their free period. In roughly chronological order, here they are:

World of Warcraft: I came into 2009 riding high on WoW. Wrath of the Lich King had just been released, and although my guild tore through Naxxramas startlingly quickly, Ulduar held a lot of promise in our minds. By May I was disenchanted with the changes to the game, and quit.

Warhammer Online: While struggling with Warcraft, I took Mythic up on their offer of a 10-day WAR trial in March. While I had a generally decent time in tier one, I did not feel that the game was worth the (at the time) $50 up front investment (plus recurring subscription fee).

Guild Wars: Early in the year I tried out a free Guild Wars trial, and after a few nights of play decided to abandon it. The game's instancing was too much for me, and since I didn't have a static group to play with I always felt alone in the world. Perhaps I'd like it more now, but at the time it was not what I was looking for.

Free Realms: I participated in the closed beta of Free Realms, and transitioned smoothly into the full game when it launched. I had a tonne of fun, paid $5 for a subscription, and played the heck out of the game..... for two or three weeks until it all started feeling old hat.

EVE Online: A couple weeks after dropping WoW I started a 14-day trial of EVE, largely due to the fact that my best friend is an avid player. While I started out having a good time with the game, I quickly learned to loathe the "click-and-wait" nature of the game's mechanics. Although the long game in EVE is fascinating to contemplate, the minute-to-minute game play feels like a chore, and is the worst I've experienced in any MMO to date.

Aion: I picked up a key to the first closed beta weekend, and put a fair amount of time into the game. It was obvious from the start that this was simply a pretty WoW clone, with very little inspiration behind it.

Metaplace: While Metaplace was not an MMO, it was an attempt at creating a virtual world builder. I was worried about the game early on, and sadly my initial fears came true just recently. There was no real game here.... just some user designed SNES-era sites to see.

Ryzom: I jumped into Ryzom and quickly fell in love with the world and the game's unique skill system; I even ponied up $10 for a one month subscription. Unfortunately as I got deeper into the game I started needing a group to progress safely, and there was no population to support it.

Fallen Earth: When the Fallen Earth beta came out I jumped all over it - finally, an MMO that was not set in a high fantasy world- excellent! I loved the tutorial, but once I finished that and got out into the open world I lost all interest in the title. I found the game to be a pointless grind with awkward feeling (although innovative) combat and some downright irritating jump animations. I only have so much patience for picking up random bits of junk and pasting them together.

Spellborn: After hearing mention of the Chronicles of Spellborn a few times, I downloaded the game and invested a good twenty hours into it. I was having a blast. Sadly, I got sucked into DDO and had to choose between the two games..... Spellborn lost. I enjoyed the combat, thought the questing structure was good, and think that I might have to fire this up again in the new year.

Dungeons & Dragons Online: As previously mentioned, DDO roared into my consciousness late in the year, mostly due to the allure of permadeath play. I played for two months (and bought $50 of Turbine points) before hitting a wall in early December, and haven't logged on since. With the busy holidays out of the way I'll probably make my way back to Eberron soon enough.

Wizard 101: Wizard 101 has been the only constant all year. I started playing the game in early 2009 and have played once a week with my 10 year old godson since then. I let him control our activities (for the most part), and we've worked our way up to level 20. I love the micropayment model that KingsIsle offers, and really enjoy my time in this game.

Post-holiday flurry

2009-12-29T21:14:00.003-05:00

I've been unable to find a good chunk of time to blog over the past couple of days despite having both days off. What little "me time" I have managed to eke out has largely been spent playing a bit more Plants vs. Zombies and some casual web games.

For those of you not interested in minutia, feel free to stop reading here.... I intend to bullet-point blog my past couple of days because I'm not terribly certain how they evaporated so completely, and I'm in the mood for some pointless introspection.

- I returned home from my Christmas travels on Sunday afternoon, unpacked, and managed to pump out a blog post by early evening.

- At 8:30pm Sunday I left for an ultimate frisbee tournament, which lasted until 2:00am. We placed a somewhat dismal 6th (out of 8), however we didn't lose a game by more than three points which is ridiculously close for indoor ultimate. (In fact, we could have been fighting for first had we scored two more points in round robin pool play.) The tournament served as a harsh reminder why over-eating sucks.... having to run my ass off for hours was harder than it had to be.

- Monday morning was spent recovering from the previous night's exertions. Relatively pain-free awakening.... but my muscles let me know how much of an asshole they thought I was by the evening. My quads still ache something fierce just sitting here now.

- Monday afternoon started with brunch with my wife, followed by some grocery shopping with half of the damned city. Following that chore, we headed out to Future Shop and Best Buy, and ended up bringing home a new television to replace our aging 27" beast.

- Monday evening consisted of cleaning up the entertainment center, moving the old T.V. out of the way, and setting up the new PS3 and T.V. with the existing Wii.

- This morning started out with my daily dog walk at the off leash park. I had to scamper home by 10:00am in order to put in a couple of hours of Wizard101 with my godson. We plowed through a pile of Krokotopia quests, one small dungeon, and dinged level 20. Good times!

- After finishing with Wizard101, I queued up approximately ten PS3 demos for download (highlights: Dante's Inferno, Fat Princess, Zen Pinball, The Bigs, Bayonetta), and then took off to run some more errands. Blargh. When I got home I had an hour left before I had to pick up my wife, and so I squeezed in a bit of Dragon Age Origins. (I'll have a new write-up for that soon enough.)

- This evening was consumed by making dinner, and then ironing in front of the Canada-Slovakia IIHF hockey game. Once the score got up to 4-0 for Canada early in the second period I grew bored.... blow outs are no fun to watch.

That brings me to this post.... I suppose I'll click 'Publish', and then see about messing around with Plants vs. Zombies again for a half hour before bed. I have a date with my wife and Professor Layton at 10:00pm.

I'd like to say that regular blogging will return tomorrow, however Bill is coming over for a rare guy's day, and we plan on geeking out with some board games. At the very least we'll be playing Pandemic, Nexus Ops, and Memoir '44. Should be a blast.

Post Mortem: Plants vs. Zombies

2009-12-27T18:26:00.005-05:00

Released by Popcap Games in May, Plants vs. Zombies caught a lot of core gamers off balance this spring, and proceeded to suck them in with its bizarre concept and quirky charm. The title is essentially a tower defense game that pits you and your gardening skills against a seemingly endless horde of undead across fifty levels.

Plant selection screen - click to enlarge

The core concept is simple: at the start of each level you are shown the type of zombies that will be attacking you, and you must then select a limited number of plant types to defend yourself with. Plants are broken down into a number of different types: energy sources (which provide you with sunshine to plant more seeds), direct attackers (which pelt the incoming zombies), fortifications (which temporarily block zombies), special attackers, and one-time attacks/defenses. The sheer variety of available plants allows you to customize your garden however you would like, and prevents the game from becoming dull like most tower defense games inevitably do.

Actual game play starts off slowly, but rapidly builds to a frenetic click-a-thon, before (hopefully) subsiding to a measured pace by the end of each level as your well-placed defenses make mincemeat of the incoming horde. Quick, smart action is needed early on as you build up your battery of sunshine-generating plants that will power your entire operation, while fending off the first tentative zombie attacks. This delicate balance takes a bit of practice to achieve, but after you've played a few levels you will get a feel for how long you can put off planting attackers while the zombies are shambling towards you.

Defending the backyard - click to enlarge

The tempo of each level ramps up quickly, and before long you will be gathering sunshine and fortifying your yard rapidly in order to have sufficient defenses in place for the first (of up to four) huge waves of zombies. Waves are where the real danger in each level lies, and it often pays to save enough sunshine to use your area of effect one-time-use plants at the beginning of these dangerous assaults in order to thin the herd to a more manageable level. Assuming you go into each level with a plan in mind, you will eventually reach a point where all of your static defenses are in place, and you can concentrate on using your one-time attack plants to control hot spots and keep the zombies in check. With skill (and sometimes a dab of luck) the last zombie will fall dead before any of them can get to your house.

To add a layer of complexity to the game, periodically you will see money or gems drop on the play field that you can click on to collect. This money, as well as the bonus that you receive for completing each level, can be used to buy new plants, more plant slots, special defenses, and all manner of tools for the zen garden mini game. This currency mini-game is completely optional, but totally addictive - it's tough to resist picking up the money as it appears, and saving up for the next big purchase.

Defending at night - click to enlarge

As if this all wasn't enough, every few levels the game will throw a curve ball at you, and present you with a level that has you defending your garden playing a variety of different mini-games. These range from whack-a-mole game play to planting defenses without having control over the plants that you have to work with. Every ten levels the zombies switch their attacks, and you go from defending your front yard, to your back yard, and finally your roof. Each different area presents different challenges, and with the exception of the roof each must be defending in both the day and the night. (Mushrooms become available for use during the night, but the sun doesn't shine.)

If this still isn't enough to satisfy you, completing the main game mode unlocks the first of a huge pile of mini games, that allow you to earn more money to keep playing. There is an incredible amount of content packed into this gem of a game.

Plants vs. Zombies is an absolute blast to play, and everything from the playful graphics to the crazy plants and zombies showcases the wacky sense of humor that underpins this wonderful title. As I said in a previous blog article: I don't like zombies, don't enjoy tower defense games, and don't play Popcap Games..... but I love Plants vs. Zombies anyways!

Final note: Steam has Plants vs. Zombies on for $7.49 as a part of their Christmas sale, so if you haven't played it but want to give it a shot, now is a great time to buy.

Merry Christmas 2009

2009-12-25T20:31:00.005-05:00

Hope that everyone had a great Christmas this year, enjoyed the time with their family, and received some neat new toys. In my case my beautiful wife decided to resolve my console quandary for me:

Click to enlarge

Also note the awesome board game in the background. That was great fun tonight as well!

Post Mortem: Torchlight

2009-12-24T10:42:00.005-05:00

When it as released two months ago, Runic Games' Torchlight caught a lot of people off guard, and proceeded to blow them clear off of their feet. Although many bloggers have long since burned through one or two play throughs of the title, I only just finished my first two days ago. Torchlight, to me, was the perfect pick-and-and-play game, and I interwove sessions of the game between my Dragon Age Origins marathons. It is a great way to kill half an hour due to the low commitment required to play: simply fire up the game and kill stuff. What could be simpler?

Torchlight - which was put together in eleven months by a lot of the same people who produced the first two Diablo games - hearkens back to my high school and early university days. Despite the amazing success of the Diablo franchise there have been relatively few action RPG titles released in the intervening years (and those that have come out have been lackluster).

The Alchemist and his golem - click to enlarge

My Play through
Since individual opinions on a game like Torchlight may vary based on how the player chose to approach the title, I feel that it is important to lay my decisions out front. I played the game on the "Hard" setting and chose an Alchemist as my character. All but one of my skill points was sunk into the "Lore" (pet) tree, and so by the end of the game I was toting around six imps and two golems in addition to my Lynx.

The Good
Let's not beat around the bush here: Torchlight is an excellent hack and slash romp that can suck you in, and, if you're not careful, devour your soul. The core game play of this title is pure distilled fun; click on your enemies to unleash all manner of outlandish attacks and then collect mounds of loot. Within minutes of starting the game I could see that Runic Games had taken everything good about Diablo, ramped it up a notch, and then added a glossy layer of candy-coating over the entire package for good measure.

The graphics in this game are very well done. Like World of Warcraft, Torchlight has a cartoony art style that serves two purposes: it looks great and it runs smoothly on older systems. While some Diablo fans might want a grittier atmosphere, in my opinion the more light-hearted design does not detract from the overall experience.

Fleeing a horde - click to enlarge

Dungeon crawling forms the bulk of the game play, and it is implemented fantastically. Controls are simple, and for the most part all you will be doing is clicking to move, clicking to attack, and pressing a few hotkeys to quaff potions and use less common abilities. Simplicity is a boon here; no one wants their killing spree to be interrupted by complex clicks and arcane short cuts. Smash skull, loot corpse, repeat.

The Bad
Of course, like any game Torchlight is not all sunshine and roses. There were a few things that bothered me while playing that I just could not let go of, especially near the end of the game.

First and foremost is the sheer amount of gear that drops from the hordes of enemies that you dispatch. It won't take long for you to fill your bags up, and then you will need to offload stuff to your pet and send it back to down to liquidate the crap. In general this gear shuffling is necessary at least once per dungeon level, and often times more.

Spiders! Click to enlarge

The sheer quantity of gear would be less irritating if such a huge percentage of it was not pure unmitigated crap. For every two hundred items that you pick up off the floor, you might find a use for one. Everything else is vendor trash, and that can get a little cumbersome. Thankfully it doesn't take long to skim an item's stats and decide whether or not it's an upgrade.

My other gripe stems from my choice of character. Game play for a lore-heavy Alchemist becomes extremely degenerate and boring from level twenty onwards. The type of Alchemist that I built was extremely dependent on his pets to the point where he could barely kill a single trash mob on his own. Even after pumping up my dexterity and gun skill, my best tactic was to maintain my two pet buffs and spam Fear to keep mobs away from me at all times. Stopping to attack with my weapons was neither viable nor safe in the end game, and so I became a simple accessory for my imps and golems. I cannot speak for other classes, but I'm assuming that this sort of poor late game mechanics are isolated to relatively few builds.

In summary
Despite those two complaints my overall experience with Torchlight was extremely positive, and I am looking forward to giving the game another play through with a different class sometime soon. If anyone has recommendations for exciting and engaging builds, I'd love to hear them.

Uncanny sale

2009-12-23T08:54:00.002-05:00

Steam has unleashed their Christmas sale on an unsuspecting audience, and it's a doozy! The sheer number of games that are on sale should be enough to satisfy anyone; there are easily a hundred titles with their prices slashed (and often deeply). Unfortunately, the two games that I immediately looked into are both sitting at full price: neither Zuma's Revenge or Darkest of Days is on sale right now. I shall bide my time. I'm good at the waiting game.

Metaplace shutdown

2009-12-22T16:02:00.003-05:00

Unfortunately the question that I asked back in June was answered last night: Metaplace will not survive its beta phase and will be closing its doors permanently on January 1, 2010. When I first visited Raph Koster's venture back in June I was met by desolate worlds. Seeing only 47 users online at a single time was not uncommon, and as I continued to visit over the course of the next few months things did not appear to be picking up - in fact the population appeared diminished with each new visit.

Its a shame: I really like what Metaplace was trying to achieve - empowering people to build their own virtual worlds in order to hang out, show off, host event, and socialize is a great concept. Unfortunately, creating anything more complex than a simple decorated room was complicated (for a casual user like myself), and I gave up trying after not too long. Still - I loved the ability to embed worlds in a browser, and I used that technology extensively when I highlighted my favorite worlds over the course of a few months.

In the end the product's largest failing was that the technology felt too old. Metaplace graphics were reminiscent of those that you would find in the early SNES era, which is not good when the other big offering in the virtual world building space is full 3D. (And being web-based in no excuse in a world that contains things like Quake Live.) Additionally, the responsiveness of the Metaplace platform was often lacking, and I remember having to wait for the screen to fully render for up to thirty seconds at a time, and then visibly clunk along loading new tiles as I moved my avatar around the screen.

Hopefully Raph and the other Metaplace developers will bounce back from this, learn from their experiences, and wow us with their next project.

How do you buy games?

2009-12-21T14:22:00.005-05:00

From reading gaming blogs and listening to video game podcasts it is clear that people choose to spend their money in different ways when it comes to investing in their entertainment. Some folks feel compelled to buy every game as soon it comes out, trusting that the pre-release buzz is accurate, while others take a much more conservative approach, doing their homework before dropping any of their hard-earned cash.

Personally I find that I am a confused shopper: if a game is released in a franchise that I'm a fan of (e.g. Final Fantasy) then I can't get my credit card out of my pocket fast enough, however for any other game I am slow to invest, and often wait for a public consensus to form - or better yet a sale - before buying it.

Day One Purchases
I can count on one hand the number of games that I bought on the first day that they were released this calendar year: Dragon Age Origins and Torchlight. Interestingly enough, the two were picked up for completely different reasons.

Dragon Age Origins exemplifies a fanboy purchase: I am a big RPG fan (and have been since my NES days) and I enjoyed the Baldur's Gate series back when they were released. In a rare move, I actually preordered Dragon Age from the local Electronics Boutique, and picked it up the first day that it was available.

Torchlight, on the other hand, was bought for a reason that may seem odd to readers who do not also have their own blog: I wanted to be a part of the conversation. In the lead up to Torchlight's release the game was getting overwhelmingly positive press from a number of sources that I trusted, and for a change I wanted to be able to read and write about a game as it was being consumed by the community, instead of months afterward.

In both cases I put my money forward with no assurance that the game that I was buying was actually going to be enjoyable to me; I put my faith in the developers and the community that these products would be solid fun, and thankfully they delivered in spades. Decisions like this are never easy ones for me to make, however.

The Waiting Game
My default mode of operation when buying a game is to wait for a while before buying it. Since my money is valuable to me I do not want to get stuck with a game that promises to be fun, but utterly fails to deliver. This has happened enough times in the past that I'm always wary.

When a game comes out that I'm interested in I'll usually do a few things:

Play a demo, if one is available. If it is, I'll have enough information to make an informed decision - if not, I have some more work to do.
Devour and blog/podcast commentary on the game, filtering by commentator's that I've learned to trust.
Check Metacritic for the average score, and read a couple of high and low reviews to get a feel for the various opinions.
Check the Gamers With Jobs forum for some further opinion if I'm still on the fence.

While that may seem like a lot of work for a single decision, the last thing I want is to waste even more time and money on a bad game, or something that is not up my alley.

If my research does not convince me that the game is worth full price (and, in my opinion, precious few games are!) then I will jot its name down on a list, and start to watch for it to be discounted either online or in the stores.

Crimes of Opportunity
The rise of Internet video games retailers and the cutthroat competition between them has led to a third type of purchase decision: the fire sale purchase. Between Steam, Direct2Drive, and Impulse there are always a good half dozen or more games deeply discounted at any given time, and the sales are constantly being updated. The shopper in me just cannot resist seeing a game that I'm vaguely interested going on sale for $5, and as a result my backlog has grown to an unreasonable size in just a few short months. Sadly I can't seem to find any self control.... and maybe that's not such a bad thing since I'm refraining from most $60 purchases on day one.

Twenty tunes for 2009

2009-12-20T10:16:00.008-05:00

Taking a page out of Sunmurma's book, here is a list of twenty songs that I really enjoyed this year. Not all were released in '09, but my first experience with each of them came during this calendar year.

All of these artists are Canadian and all but one are on independent labels, so you haven't heard of any of these songs.... well, that should explain why. Much like independent video games, it would be a crying shame if you just assumed that music produced by unsigned artists was somehow inferior to the stuff churned out by the big boys. Canadian indie music is booming right now, and you'd be cheating yourself if you didn't click through and take a listen to at least a few of these tunes.

Clicking on any of the links will take you to a site where you can listen to the track as well as browse other tunes by the same artist.

#20: Said the Whale - Camilo (The Magician) - A powerpop track that's heavy on the guitar. The chorus to this song has an annoying habit of getting lodged in my brain, and taking hours to get out.

#19: Shout Out Out Out Out - Remind me in Dark Times - Described as "dance punk", Shout Out Out Out Out never fails to produce interesting tracks that reverberate with me on a primal level. This particular song slowly builds over the course of a minute, but becomes riveting as soon as the distorted vocals kick in.

#18: Beast - Mr. Hurricane - A powerful track that boldly blurs the line between rap, funk, and electronica, with some gospel-like elements thrown in for good measure. Undefinable perfection.

#17: K'naan - Dreamer - As a rule I'm not into hip hop, but Somolian-born rapper K'naan forces me to make an exception. I had a tough time picking just one of his songs from his list, because they're all so catchy, political, and reminiscent. His upbringing shines through his music, a bright beacon of hope for all of us.

#16: Coeur de Pirate - Commes des Enfants - You don't need to understand French to fall in love with Béatrice Martin's music - every song is heartbreakingly beautiful. This folksy tune often rolls through my head despite having lost most of my French more than a decade ago.

#15: The Eatons - Firestarter - Candy-coated alt rock... that's how I'd describe this song, and I mean that as a good thing. I dare you to listen and not bob your head throughout the song, the infectious drumming just makes it too hard to resist.

#14: Gonzales - Working Together - I have no idea what genre to pigeonhole Gonzales into, and this song does nothing to resolve my confusion. It's campy - but in a good way - and playful in the extreme. Everyone should have this much fun.

#13: Pony da Look - Flatlands - Creepy: that's the only way to describe the music of this all girl band. Close your eyes as you listen and I'm sure you'll be transported to the dark world described by this song.

#12: Metric - Sick Muse - Of all of the bands on this list, Metric is by far the biggest, and one of only two that I have ever heard on a main stream radio station. There's no denying how well suited this alt rock number is for Emily Haines' stellar vocals: it just rocks.

#11: Chad VanGaalen - Willow Tree - If you listen to this folksy little number while distracted you'll probably come away thinking it's a quaint little uplifting tune. If you listen to it again, this time paying close attention to the lyrics, you'll realize how morbid it actually is.

#10: Justin Rutledge - Greenwich Time - I don't like country music - in fact I despise the majority of it. This tune is a rare exception; the smooth vocals and unassuming guitar and drum beats slowly build into an compelling sing-along-at-the-top-of-your-lungs chorus. I can never help myself.

#9: Final Fantasy - The Butcher - Owen Pallett sings and plays violin. That doesn't sound too compelling, does it? Well, give this one a listen and I think you'll side with me in believing that the violin rocks.

#8: Dan Mangan - Robots - Winner of this year's CBC Radio 3 Bucky Awards for Best Song, Dan Mangan's music - and particularly Robots - is perfectly suited for his gravelly voice. Robots need love too, you know.

#7: illScarlett - Nothing Special - You're going to have to take my word for it that "Nothing Special" is an amazing song (assuming that you're not adverse to a bit of ska) because I can't find a free version of it online (likely because illScarlett signed with Sony for this album). Here's a link to the equally awesome "Take it for Granted" from the band's website.

#6: The Weakerthans - Tournament of Hearts - This band has been around for a long time, churning out record after stellar record. Catchy in the extreme, I love the take on alt rock that The Weakerthans bring to the table: a little more sugar, a little less grit. (Plus, what other band would write a song from the perspective of a cat?)

#5: Stars - The Night Starts Here - What I love most about the pop sounds of the Stars is that nearly every song is a duet. Torquil Campbell's smooth voice compliments the gorgeous vocals of Amy Millan, and the result is always something beautiful, intimate, and often tinged with a hint of melancholy.

#4: Holy Fuck -Lovely Allen - Give this one a minute to build, and then just sit back and bask in the sheer perfection of the complex beats and melodies that stitch together this acoustic masterpiece. Then consider that Holy Fuck shuns the use of computers, drum machines, or other such instruments when crafting their songs - they're just incredibly talented musicians.

#3: Creature - Alive - Depending on who you talk to, Creature either plays "dance punk" or "alt pop"; whichever label you prefer, this song is pretty much pure distilled awesomeness. The lyrics serve as punctuation for the groovy beats that will get your blood pumping.

#2: Tokyo Police Club - Tesselate - This was my summer song; I remember driving home many a night, adrenaline still buzzing after a game of ultimate frisbee, with the windows rolled down and Tesselate pouring into the warn evening air. This band deserves every bit of recognition that they gathered all year, which included an appearance on the Late Show with Letterman.

#1: Elliot Brood - Without Again - Alt country? Banjo rock? Death Country? Whatever these guys play its a mind-blowing combination of foot-stomping beats, plucky strings, skillful harmonica, and raspy vocals. I keep meaning to catch an Elliot Brood show when they roll through town, but so far have missed each one. Definitely my favorite artist right now.

Hope you've enjoyed listening to these tunes as much as I have had writing about them!

Dragon Age: And the Deathly Hallows?

2009-12-18T15:10:00.005-05:00

Warning: This article contains spoilers. I would, however, appreciate if you did not spoil anything beyond the point of the game that I discuss.

Areas spoiled: The Circle Tower

Previous articles: 1, 2, 3, 4

Play time over the past couple of weeks has been limited, however I was recently able to get Fiona through the entire Mage Tower story line. It helps that this particular segment of the plot was a heck of a lot shorter than the Redcliffe story arc. In total I spent five hours liberating the Circle, which brings my total time played up to twenty-seven hours.

Since I've complained about gearing for my mages in the past, it is worth pointing out that the Mage Tower gave me a lot of opportunity to re-outfit both my main character and Morrigan. I broke down and put helms on both of them, although I feel they look utterly ridiculous; you can't argue with the stats though. One thing I will not do is change Morrigan's robes away from the set that she came with; some lines are not meant to be crossed!

My starting party was Fiona, Morrigan, Leliana, and Alistair.

Random thoughts and observations, as always, follow.

On the Lower Floors

- Upon arriving at Lake Calenhad Docks and bullying my way onto the island and into the Circle Tower I encountered Gregoir, the Templar-Commander who I pissed off so badly when I helped Jowan during my origins story. My loathing for the man was quickly replaced with pity as I realized that he was a sniveling whiner, just like Alistair. Perhaps this cry baby attitude is fostered in the ranks of the Templars? Or maybe it's a side affect of lyrium addiction.

- Seeing that the Templars were beyond useless, I decided to take matters into my own hands and search for surviving mages myself. It wasn't long before I stumbled across Wynne and, without realizing what I was doing, accepted her offer of help. The game immediately forced me to bench another party member, and in disgust I chose Morrigan. I hadn't wanted a healer for my play through and have specifically avoided giving either of my mages restorative spells.

- The summoning puzzle(s) were simple and tedious. In doing them I got annoyed with having to open my codex over and over again to figure out what to do - I couldn't seem to locate a hotkey or setting to take me straight to the information.

- Somewhere along the way I fought a group of blood mages, and when I was presented the opportunity to spare the life of one of them, I did so. I still have a soft spot for all magic users. Despite pitching a royal fit the last time that I showed friendly inclinations towards a blood mage, Alistair remained silent this time. Maybe he's gotten used to me flaunting his wishes.

- The sense of heightened corruption with each new room in the Circle Tower was really well done. The changes were subtle at first, but by the end were gloriously grotesque.

Trying to convince Alistair to leave the Fade - click to enlarge

On the Fade

- The encounter with the sloth demon was downright creepy, and instead of an epic battle I was surprised to find myself enthralled and alone in a section of the Fade. Nice twist.

- It didn't take long to figure out how obscenely overpowered the mage I've built is - the ability to pop off Cone of Cold, Paralysis, Horror, Sleep, and Mass Paralysis all in rapid fire sequence (if necessary) is disgusting. Despite fighting solo for much of the Fade, I only every had to engage a single enemy at a time.... and it was usually immobilized. I'm surprised how well my crowd control build turned out.

- Swapping staves on the fly proved to be very useful. Demons in the fade are susceptible to either fire or ice attacks, and resistant to the opposite element.

- Cone of Cold followed by Stonefist is ridiculous. I can one-shot anything aside from a named elite or boss.

- I heard a few complaints about the Fade sequence on the last episode of The Combobulater, however I found the details that the host was annoyed with to be overstated. Particularly, Emeny had railed against the shape changing, claiming that it took a few seconds to swap forms. In truth it took at most one second to shift, which was more than acceptable. Personally I think the entire section was well done, and a lot of fun.

- The final battle against the Sloth demon in the center of the Fade was somewhat confusing. The demon died a number of times and then immediately resurrected in a one of two different forms. When I finally killed him I was beginning to wonder if I was doing something wrong because he kept respawning. The entire fight was trivialized by the two lyrium veins in the middle of the arena that allowed me to periodically refresh my mana.

Fighting an Ogre in the Fade - click to enlarge

On the Upper Floors

- Upon escaping the fade I went back to killing a mix of blood mages and demons room by room in the Tower. Aside from one encounter with a slavering corpse and an Arcane Horror I made it through without dying. That damned horror killed me a good three times though.

- The encounter with Templar Cullen was awkward. He's the guy who had hit on my character within five minutes of the game starting, and he gushed about his emotions to me from behind a demon's force field.

- Somewhere near the top of the tower it struck me that this entire plot arc was very reminiscent of a Harry potter novel. An order of mages infiltrated by practitioners of dark magic who decide to revolt? Hmmm.....

- The Harry Potter parallels were hammered home when I encountered Uldred. Not only does the man sound like Serverus Snape, but he looks a hell of a lot like Voldemort! The fact that he was torturing First Enchanter Irving didn't do anything to dispel the effect.

- Upon completing the main tower quest line I told Wynne to stay with the tower, and had Morrigan rejoin my party. My healer-less journey can now continue unimpeded!

- I never solved the 'Watchguard of the Reaching' side quest in the tower. Although I thought I knew the order to click the statues in the Grand Hall, I could never get it to work. Owain, who is mentioned in the codex entries that support the quest, is curiously missing after the Circle Tower is cleansed and so I'm wondering if hunting him down is a key to the puzzle. I could look the solution up in a FAQ, but I've resolved not to do anything like that.

Advanced corruption in the Circle Tower - click to enlarge

Next up: some side quests and then the Brecilian Forest. I'd also love to locate Jowan, who the Arl of Redcliffe had allegedly shipped off to the Circle Tower.

Final Fantasy XIV - Open Beta Sign-ups!

2009-12-17T06:57:00.000-05:00

I've been a Final Fantasy fanboy since Square released the very first version for the NES two decades ago. When I heard the news that they were accepting sign-ups for the open beta, I immediately rushed to the submission page to put my name in the hat.

From the podcasts: Cataclysm interview and Dickishness

2009-12-16T06:37:00.003-05:00

I'd like to point out a couple of recent podcasts that have topics that may be of interest to readers:

Active Time Babble, ep. IV
World of Warcraft fans will want to tune in for the interview with Greg Street (aka Ghostcrawler, Lead System Designer) and Cory Stockton (Lead Content Designer) of Blizzard. The 1Up crew discuss the Cataclysm expansion with the developers in a fair bit of detail, including the motivation behind many of the design decisions that were made. The interview can be found at the top of the podcast, and runs for twenty minutes or so. (The remainder of the show is spent discussing Dragon Age in a relatively spoiler free manner - I only had to fast forward once.)

Gamers With Jobs, ep. 166
The guys discuss "dickishness" in online discussions about video games, which is something that plagues many forums and blogs. Not only do they go through the various types of jerks that you will find online, but they also take a stab at explaining why people can react so viscerally to seemingly meaningless and frivolous topics. The main take-away: don't be a dick.

Scatterbrained

2009-12-15T11:59:00.003-05:00

My apologies for the lack of commentary over the past two weeks. My gaming time has been more limited than usual (due in part to the busy nature of the Christmas season), and what time I have had for gaming has been divided amongst so many titles that there is no coherence to my activities.

In lieu of posting something insightful, here are the games that I have played in the past two weeks (excluding that awful demo, an amazing flash game, and some wicked Mario action). This list is always available in the upper-right hand corner of the blog.

Dragon Age: Origins - I'm still chugging along, but I have a hard time playing DA:O unless I know that I'll have more than an hour to myself. I love to immerse myself in the experience, and that is impossible for me to do without a good chunk of free time. Expect another post on my journeys soon.

Torchlight - I'm rapidly approaching the end of Runic Games' fun little romp. I use this title as a pick-up-and-play game when I know that I don't have a lot of time available. It's been fun enough, but like Diablo I know that it won't suck me into endless replays.

Plants vs Zombies - I don't like tower defense games. I'm not a PopCap fan. I think that zombies are dumb. And yet despite all of these negative predispositions, I'm absolutely in love with this game. Go figure.

Professor Layton and the Curious Village - My wife wanted to try this game out, and so I picked up a copy from EB Games for next to nothing. Almost every night before going to sleep she cuddles up on my shoulder and we solve a few puzzles together - it's a really nice end to the day.

A Boy and His Blob - Another wife-game. We've been slowly working our way through this wonderful remake of a childhood memory for about a month now, and are in no rush to reach the end. The game succeeds on so many levels, and I'm dreading finishing with it.

Wizard101 - I'm still playing this MMO weekly with my godson, although last week's romp had to be called off due to an unexpected trip to the hospital. (He's okay.)

Roguelikes - I have an on-again, off-again love affair with roguelikes, and recently I've been feeling the urge to play one again. I've dabbled with Triangle Wizard and Slash'EM, and intend to try out Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup in about five minutes.

Noticeably absent from this list is:

Dungeons & Dragons Online - I want to play DDO, but like Dragon Age it is a game that I feel I cannot play unless I have a solid chunk of time set aside for it. Unfortunately for DDO, this means that it is in direct competition with DA:O and that is not a fight that an MMO will ever win. Thankfully DDO is free to play, and so I'm not throwing money away by not logging on - my Turbine points aren't going anywhere.

Mario Mayhem

2009-12-14T06:30:00.005-05:00

As I mentioned last week, on Saturday my wife and I trekked over to Bill's place to visit with him and his wife, and we brought along a sealed copy of New Super Mario Bros Wii for the evening's entertainment.

Click to enlarge

After their twins went to bed at 8pm we had a couple of hours to do battle. Here are some memorable highlights, in no particular order:

- My epic "win", which involved using one less continue than Bill's wife. Bill actually used the most continues, although my wife did an awful lot of hiding in bubbles to prevent herself from having to die on the tricky jumping sections.

- The initial mad rushes to steal as many power-ups from the item blocks as possible, which eventually gave way to trying to share the rewards as the levels got trickier.

- The first time someone discovered how to pick up another player. Even better, the first time someone figured out how to throw someone into a pit. (It was Bill, and he accidentally threw my wife to her doom, and was so mortified that he pleaded for forgiveness.)

- The first time I managed to throw Bill's wife into a pit. Muhahahaha!

- The chaotic nastiness that the fortresses and castles represent. Wow, they can be tough with four people jumping around.

- Bill's inability to tell Luigi and Mario appart when both had the ice flower power-up.

- Bill's wife and I trying to leap over a pit of lava at the same time. She managed to get a tiny bit higher than I did, and so headstomped me into the pit, but flew up into a Thwomp and died as a result. Hilarity ensued.

- The desperate cooperation after wiping on a fortress for the second time. Impassioned pleas for a player to play safe whenever the other three were dead or bubbled.

- Bill and his wife dying to the same Thwomp three or four times in a row.

- Cake at the half way mark. (Not a lie.)

- After spending the entire first boss battle in a bubble for safety, my wife exiting her bubble and using me as a springboard to grab the magic wand as it descended.

- Accidentally picking each other up whenever we had the pinwheel hat. Screaming at each other to knock it off.

- Bill's wife picking me up, and then jumping in a pool of lava to kill us both.

- Bill and I cooperating to kill the second boss by taking turns stomping him. We did this in response to wiping on the boss our previous attempt due to everyone trying to stomp him at the same time.

- Bill and his wife teaming up to kill me by advancing the screen on a sand level where I had to wait for a geyser.

- Laughing so hard it hurt. Repeatedly.

Click to enlarge

All in all, the New Super Mario Bros. Wii is an absolute riot when four friends play. Although I'm sure I'll have a great time single player, I cannot wait for the next time I get to play some "co-op". My next chance will be when I head to my parent's place for Christmas - my brothers and I have a match scheduled in between wild bouts of table tennis.

Demo: Painkiller - Resurrection

2009-12-11T12:34:00.006-05:00

In search of a game to serve as a counterpoint to my recent Dragon Age adventures, a few days ago I set my sights on a first person shooter that had been released on Steam last month.

Painkiller: Resurrection
Painkiller: Resurrection is a badly named mess of a first person shooter that makes you want to immediately turn off your PC just to make the pain stop. It's truly atrocious, and I wish I were exaggerating.

Click to enlarge

The hour that I sunk into Painkiller was one hour too many, and I should have taken the hint during the tortured monologue that forms the game's introduction that I was about to set foot in a low budget FPS. While the comic book style art during the introductory sequence is nice to look at, the voice actor ruins the effect; he sounds like he is reading his cue cards for the first time as he stumbles through his lines (or perhaps given the content he was forced to work with, maybe he just wanted the hurting to stop). The games protagonist is (allegedly) a cold blooded assassin who goes out of his way to tell the player how much he enjoys murdering people - well, except when it's by accident - who dies trying to save some unintended victims of one of his schemes, is sent to hell, and then has to kill a whole bunch of monsters to redeem his soul. Riveting stuff, I know.

Graphically, Painkiller: Resurrection is run of the mill - it neither excites nor disappoints. The first level is set in a demon-infested cathedral that, architecturally speaking, seems to be extremely non-functional as a place of worship. As a deathmatch arena, on the other hand, the cathedral makes perfect sense. Enemies within the demo consist of a couple types of demon which are reminiscent of the old Doom games. The music is done well, as are the weapon sound effects. On the other hand, the main character constantly blurts out one of three or four different phrases as he kills enemies. For example: "This is madness!" or, "Die!". It gets annoying and repetitive in a hurry.

Click to enlarge

I could forgive lackluster aesthetics if the game was fun to play, however it most certainly was not. Like most FPS games, your avatar has health and armor and can pick up a variety of weapons and ammunition from the environment or defeated enemies. The weapons I came across in the demo were the starting weapon (which can shoot an odd projectile that lodges in the scenery when fired, and then can be retracted later on to hit enemies in a straight line) and a shotgun/grenade launcher combination. Nothing too bad here yet.

What drove me absolutely insane was the complete lack of game balance. Enemies in the starting zone hit for roughly a quarter of your life if they land a melee or ranged attack. Unfortunately for you, most health boosts that you can find restore a single point of health (of your total 125) when you pick them up. Much rarer are health boosters that seem to restore half of your total hit points. This means that if you get hit, unless you're lucky enough to find a rare big health pack, you will be unable to recovering those lost hit points for a long time. This becomes a problem quickly.

Furthermore, the developers of Painkiller: Resurrection seem to have a fetish that involves spawning hordes of enemies behind a player immediately after they clear a section of a level. This is extremely obnoxious, and smacks of immature game design. While I fully support attacking the player when he least expects it, it is asinine to habitually spawn packs of demons behind a player five seconds after an area is cleared. Before long I was more worried about areas I'd just cleared than I was of the unknown areas in front of me, and that's not a fun feeling.

As a final note, the most ridiculous aspect of the game is the frequency with which enemies fly apart into hunks of unidentifiable bloody meat. I have not seen gibs done so childishly since the days of Quake 1, and even the over-the-top gibs in Rise of the Triad at least had some distinguishing features to them. Not so in Painkiller - gibs fly out in the exact same compass directions every time, and disappear into the ether as quickly as they arrived. It's just bizarre to watch.

Gibs is Rise of the Triad - click to enlarge

In closing, stay far far away from Painkiller: Resurrection; even the free demo is simply not worth your time or bandwidth. As an FPS game it manages to fail on almost every level, and the sense of immaturity that pervades the title will be unappealing for anyone who has graduated primary school.

Steam: link
Demo parameters: one level
Release date: Now
Cost: $29.99

Idle musing about a sequel

2009-12-10T07:47:00.000-05:00

So I have to wonder.... given all of the recent hoopla, will the developers of Tiger Woods PGA Tour 11 just go ahead and add in a Hot Coffee easter egg to their game?

The showdown

2009-12-08T07:01:00.002-05:00

This coming Saturday an epic battle will be taking place over at Bill's house. My wife and I are heading over for dinner and some gaming, and we'll be bringing a sealed copy of the New Super Mario Bros Wii with us. I picked the game up last night at a local Electronics Boutique, and it will remain in its packaging until we are ready to fire it up for some four person mayhem. No one can have any practice, you see.

We could play the game cooperatively, but even if we set out with that in mind there is no way that peace will last.

The battle lines are already drawn; in some respects the battle lines have been entrenched for close to a decade. The main combatants will be myself and Bill's wife, however the two of us will form frequent temporary truces to kill off Bill - just because we can - while my wife will be left more or less alone to wreak whatever havoc she feels like. It usually works that way no matter what video game the four of us play - Boom Blox was the most recent example, but Mario Kart Wii and a variety of Mario Party games exhibited many of the same tendencies. There's just something fun about beating the hell out of Bill... what can I say? (And besides, I'd rather not poison my own marriage by picking on my wife.)

I look forward to a few hours of laughing at our juvenile antics, cursing each other out, and playing a good old fashioned platformer.

2010 Gaming

2009-12-07T12:26:00.002-05:00

The 2009 releases are all but finished, with only a few stragglers left to trickle out the door in the run up to Christmas. It was a damned fine year for gaming, at least in my opinion, and happily the future looks bright as well.

Below is a list of the games slated to be released in 2010 that I'm looking at with an eye towards purchasing. A few of these would be day one buys, but the vast majority would wait until the price drops; gaming is so much more affordable if you have patience, especially with all of the digital distributors constantly running insane sales.

Role playing games
Mass Effect 2 (PC, January 26)
Final Fantasy XIII (Ps3, March 9) - This game almost ensures I buy the system
Golden Sun 3 (DS)
Dragon Quest IX (DS)

FPS games
Bioshock 2 (PC, February 9) - I'm worried a sequel will lack the magic of the original
Half-life 2: Episode 3 (PC) - Not announced, but can Valve really go another year without it?

MMOs
Final Fantasy XIV (PS3) - Only if no subscription required

Other games
Dante's Inferno (PS3, February 9) - Despite the offensive advertising, I'm intrigued
Super Mario Galaxy 2 (Wii)
Dawn of War II - Chaos Rising (PC)

And, of course, any interesting indie games that make their way to Steam and just beg to be played. It's going to be another great year.

Dragon Age: Up the mountain

2009-12-05T10:09:00.006-05:00

Warning: This article contains spoilers. I would, however, appreciate if you did not spoil anything beyond the point of the game that I discuss.

Areas spoiled: Denerim Market, Haven, The Hidden Temple

Previous articles: 1, 2, 3

Finally, a new look for Fiona. After leaving the Circle of Magi in the first hours of the game, I was finally able to acquire some new mage robes that suit Fiona's renegade nature far better than the conservative starter gear. This particular set was picked up from a vendor in Denerim and although I found it hideous at first it has had time to grow on me.

I have now played approximately twenty-four hours of Dragon Age Origins, and I'm still enjoying every minute of it. I'd probably be much farther along if I could consistently find blocks of one hour or more with which to play - I just can't justify firing the title up if I know I'll be online for any less than that.

On the Denerim Market

- On my way to Denerim I was ambushed by Zevran, the Antivan Crow assassin, who I beat down handily. After the battle I was greatly amused by his banter and allowed him to join my party despite the fact that he immediately tried to get in bed with me. (Not to mention Alistair's sullen pouting - I swear, Alistair is a spoiled child who hates not getting things his own way.)

- Upon entering Denerim I decided to switch up my party, and ran with Fiona, Alistair, Morrigan, and Rascal (my Mabari warhound). This meant benching Leliana who had been under-performing in my opinion, despite being useful as a lock pick.

- The Denerim market contains some great NPCs. From the delusional Chantry matron who keeps mixing up her scriptures with food references, to the eccentric smith Wade, to Master Ignacio and Sergeant Kylon, the entire zone is brimming with character.

- Speaking of Ignacio, I decided not to take him up on his offer of work. I've no interest in going out of my way to be an assassin.

- I was extremely irritated by the bizarre and repetitive card game that you play with Isabela to learn the Duelist class. I never did figure out how to win; it seemed like dumb luck with no chance to influence the outcome. Perhaps only warriors can win?

- The Blood Mage house in the center of Denerim was a shock to the system. I found myself having to beat strategic retreats on a frequent basis to avoid being slaughtered, and pulling technique seemed to become increasingly important as the instance wore on. The final boss was nasty, and whenever I let crowd control slip on him something bad happened - I barely got through that fight, and only Morrigan survived.

- The first time you get hit by a fireball in Dragon Age it'll scare the hell out of you. Especially if you don't see it coming because the mage is hiding in a room off to the side. Ouch.

- Tactically, I also had to learn to use "Hold Position" instead of "Free Move" when battling through the Blood Mage enclosure. This because very useful in all future battles.

On Haven

- After completing all of the Denerim Market quests I made my way to Haven to see about finding Brother Genitivi. I rearranged my party again before leaving because the lack of a rogue was driving me mental: Alistair was left at home in favor of Leliana, which left Rascal to tank.

- The atmosphere in the town of Haven is creepy - especially when the young boy recites his long rhyming chant. Very well done.

- Given the atmosphere, it didn't take long to pull back the curtains on the delusional cult that had set up shop in the town. (Not that the normal Chantry isn't delusional - but the citizens of Haven took it to a whole new level.) I killed the shopkeeper in self defense to discover the slain Redcliffe Knight, and then the entire town was on top of me. It was a bit odd that killing one man behind closed doors could illicit such an immediate response, but that's RPGs for you....

Three pretty ladies and a pooch - click to enlarge

On The Hidden Temple

- After clearing out the Chantry in Haven I finally was able to meet Brother Genetivi, who turned out to be a shifty fanatic who has stary eyes for the Urn of Sacred Ashes due to its significance to the Chantry. I didn't trust him from the start, and was as evasive as possible every time I had to speak with him.

- Annoyingly, the game decided to teleport me up the mountain to The Hidden Temple. I would have rather walked, thank you.

- The encounters within the Hidden Temple were fairly straight forward, with a good mix of magic users and melee soldiers sent in to harass you. Drakes and Ash Wraiths also occasionally appeared, but since both are significantly hindered by frost effects my two ice-focused mages made quick work of them.

- It is probably worth mentioning that I still have no healer in my party, and neither of my mages can use even the lowest level healing spell. This is intentional - I have no desire to min-max my characters away from the ideas that I had for them when I started the game. So far healing potions have kept me afloat, and I just CC as much as possible while DPSing everything down quickly.

- After killing Kolgrim at the back of the temple (his offer was a little too lunatic to be considered) I headed onto the mountain top and used the horn he dropped to summon the so-called reincarnation of Andraste. The dragon kicked my ass in roughly thirty seconds - I didn't stand a chance. The battle was so lopsided that I opted not to try again, and instead pressed forward into the gauntlet.

- The gauntlet presents the player with four "tests of faith", which I figured would not be particularly good for my heathen mage. Not so! The riddles were fairly simple, and I solved all but one. The battle against clone of my party was tough, as they can dish out a tonne of DPS and CC (as mentioned above) and it took me three tries to win. The bridge puzzle was a nice change of pace, and I solved it relatively quickly after mapping out all of the mechanics on paper. Finally, the walk through the fire was rather silly, as depicted below:

Matching panties for all! - Click to enlarge

- With the ashes secured (and my armor back on) I headed back to Redcliffe and revived Arl Eamon. I received a crappy staff as a reward, and was told to go do other quests while the Arl prepares to try to unite humankind.

- I tried to have Jowan set free, but he was sent away to the Circle of Magi. Since that is cruel and unusual punishment, my next stop will be the Circle tower where I hope to break the Chantry's hold on the mages and rescue Jowan. Sadly, I doubt the plot will allow for at least one of these outcomes.... but we'll see.