Author: Zubon

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Промоакции для игроков не только в шутерах — воспользуйся промокодом Vavada от наших партнеров и получи бонусы, которые подарят азарт и атмосферу, сравнимую с игровыми победами.

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Incentives and Locations

Where Ingress was structured almost entirely around portals, Pokémon Go has incentives both to seek out those same locations and to head away from them. This is healthier on several levels.

Ingress’s portals are Pokémon Go’s gyms and PokéStops. Gyms are the PvP spots, and PvP seems much narrower in Pokémon Go. You can control gyms for your team, and there are moderate incentives for doing so. PokéStops provide items, notably the Poké Balls you need to collect Pokémon and the recovery items to heal after gym fights. Contrast with Ingress’s portals, where the same locations are your PvP control points and your source for items, with large incentives to control networks of them. (PokéStops dole out items every 5 minutes, like portals, but they do not “wear out” after 4 uses in 4 hours, so living or working at a PokéStop can let you refill pretty conveniently. “Never runs out” encourages camping a bit, but you only get your dose every 5 minutes, so that is pretty suboptimal unless there are also a few monster spawns.)

But you are playing Pokémon, so you probably want to catch some monsters. Where are they? Out in the world, go for a walk. If you sit on a spawn point, they do keep spawning so you can collect a fair number … of the same general type. Want something other than a 20th Rattata? Go for a walk. (I presume rare spawns are not easily farmable by hanging around the same spawn point, percentage chance? I’m not an expert here.) That is also a good way to level up, because you get a lump of experience points every time you capture a monster for the first time.

Eggs are the other reason to go for a walk. In classic Pokémon faction, you hatch eggs by putting them in an incubator and walking so many kilometers. You find eggs at PokéStops, up to a capped number. Want to hatch them and get more eggs? Go for a walk. Maybe you will find a new type of monster while you are out there.

I have friends who are now walking miles per day to look for Pokémon and check their gyms.

: Zubon

Portals and Pokéstops

Pokémon Go released last week. You probably already know this.

Pokémon Go comes from Niantic, makers of Ingress. All that data Ingress players collected was then used as the basis for a new game. People are laughing about how many churches have been tagged as Pokémon gyms. All those Ingress portals are now gyms and PokéStops, so the historical district of your town is probably full of Pokémon trainers collecting Poké Balls. The re-use of location data is efficient and sometimes surreal as some Ingress portals are misplaced, non-existent, tagged with Ingress RP, or otherwise inappropriate. Any stories you heard about Ingress players in a bad part of town or getting questions for lurking around the police station are now multiplied by the vastly more popular IP and the number of younger players.

Also multiply any positives, as one Pokémon app has done more in a weekend than a decade of obesity and exercise public service announcements.

: Zubon

Bug Zapper: Turbine Edition

As you may have heard, Turbine is transitioning out of the MMO market and into mobile. I am somewhat surprised that mobile F2P is still a growing market, but maybe that is where the social media gaming money went after Zynga did its thing. Mobile devices are certainly a huge and still growing market, and you have many casual players in that space. It feels like a lot of people are competing for a few whales.

It makes me downright mad to see a studio that used to show such passion and talent for MMOs to be groveling for the scraps of mobile gaming.
— Asheron’s Call, a game hovering on the edge of “not officially canceled” for a surprisingly long time (but certainly not under current development). Kill Ten Rats was effetively a LotRO fan blog for a while with all the active writers playing it. Ethic, chime in here if the dream lives on, but I’ve killed that goblin a hundred thousand times across a dozen games over more than a decade, and I can scarcely muster the energy to read about how it is being re-skinned as a different shade of orc in whatever the next WoW expansion is.

In the Western market, WoW is the juggernaut that carries on under inertia, able to print millions of dollars with any significant update but unable to further expand the market. EVE Online remains in a category by itself, seemingly quite sustainable within a comfortable range. Everyone else seems to be a hanger-on and/or niche market. I have nothing against niche games, and my dear love A Tale in the Desert is now up to its Seventh Telling under new management. Good for them. People love their games and create great communities, and they can keep going indefinitely so long as someone pays to keep the servers up. That is an advantage to players of smaller games: no big studio to decide that resources can be better invested elsewhere. You can even launch a new one of those like Project: Gorgon as a boutique game and get enough interest to make it worthwhile.

The title of this comes from the GU Comics running joke. MMO flies circle the bug zapper, and while LotRO lives to see another year, would you renew that contract in 2017? If Turbine is exiting the MMO space, wouldn’t you expect the MMOs to be sold to someone who wants that as their market segment?

But maybe your corner of the MMO space is vital. I imagine the Eastern market marches on? I cannot recall when I last logged into an MMO. I don’t know if I ever installed one on my new hard drive. My MMO era finished, and seeing Turbine do the same provides a sense of closure.

: Zubon

Cook, Serve, Delicious!

My thanks to Jeromai who recommended Cook, Serve, Delicious! I have spent only an hour in this game, but it was one of the most intense hours of gameplay I have had. 75% off during the Steam summer sale.

I tend to be suspicious of cooking sim games because I have hated the entire Papa’s (Pizzeria, Burgeria, Pancakeria…) series every time I have tried one. So far, CSD! knocks out the annoying things like precise placement of mustard in favor of intense time management. Intense! With just four prep slots and four dishes, I am facing off against an array of demands with lots of time pressure, along with the chores that add more time demands. The game days are bite-sized increments of gameplay, and you need to be on for those days. If you want to get a perfect score for the day and the bonus, at least; I imagine you can play more relaxedly and have a pretty solid restaurant.

Filleting fish is surprisingly satisfying.

I am looking at the screenshots on Steam and thinking that the later days must get a bit more dicey with many options. My recipes right now are basic with limited variation. Do you want sugar on your sopapillas or not? There is exactly one way to prep fish or chicken. One of the screenshots shows 13 different toppings for nachos. Which: realistic, fair, but that is a lot to customize per order, as opposed to the six possible toppings on starter salads.

I do not know how long the thrill of cooking will last, nor whether it will still be fun at the higher levels, but even an hour of intense, quality, enjoyable play makes this worthwhile at 75% off.

: Zubon

The Room

This is not about that movie.

The Room seems to be the best thing I picked up on the Steam summer sale, and you can still get it for $1.24. It is a not-terribly-long puzzle game, starting with a puzzle box and unfolding from there. Most of the puzzles are enjoyable, although sometimes a little too far into “A leads to B leads to C, push the button” or “what are they thinking?” but where things fall on that continuum will probably be idiosyncratic based on what you find intuitive. When in doubt, try looking through the lens.

Even when it is not at its best as a game, in that you are basically pushing buttons to watch a fancy mechanical box whirl, it is a cool fancy mechanical box. It also leads to some enjoyably phantasmagorical imagery as the story of the game develops.

As a bonus, the sequel launches on Steam July 5, so if you like this one, there will be another one this week (and 2 and 3 are already available on mobile).

: Zubon

Gems of War

The other match-3 game I have been playing a bit of lately is Gems of War, also off the Steam discovery queue. It is from the makers of Puzzle Quest, so the basic gameplay is solid and entertaining. This is their F2P game that includes just about every F2P grind and cash shop mechanic I have ever heard of, except for selling “energy.” Its monetization is impressive in its horribleness, particularly in the way it stacks upon itself and creates layers of hiding actual dollar amounts. Continue reading Gems of War

Colorblind

The Steam summer sale recommended I try Force of Elements, a match-3 F2P2W asynchronous PvP game in early release. Having enjoyed a bit of match-3 lately, I tried it out. In my second game, I found something really exciting: this game not only failed to take colorblind people into account, it went in the other direction and uses a “grayed out” mode as an attack to make it difficult to see what gems should match. That is one way of defining a problem into a feature.

Also note the “asynchronous PvP,” in that your opponents are computer-controlled versions of other players. This means using colorblindness as an attack only works against other humans, unless the computer imposes a different penalty upon itself in these cases.

: Zubon

Story via Mechanics

One thing I enjoy in the Pathfinder Adventures story mode is that the rules can be adapted to create good scenes, fluff out of the crunch. One of these is done inelegantly, with a paragraph of text that makes that one a mini-game, but consider:

  • “The Poison Pill” sets you against someone leaving deadly traps around town. The usual henchman mini-bosses are obstacles (poison traps) instead of monsters.
  • “Local Heroes” wants you to network around town and meet people. The henchman mini-bosses are replaced with allies you can recruit, with the goal of closing all the locations instead of defeating a villain. And the scenario reward is more allies.
  • Several scenarios have a special rule that makes the difficulty scale in a way that encourages you to find the villain as quickly as possible and to create the usually desired effect of rising difficulty over time. For example, “Undead Uprising” raises the difficulty to defeat Zombie Minion mini-bosses for each Zombie Minion defeated (and the boss summons more before the final confrontation). “Foul Misgivings” increases the difficulty of everything as Haunt mini-bosses haunt your characters, and the lowest difficulty adds a rising chance for a bonus boss fight as you meet Haunts (the higher difficulties just throw the bonus boss at you). “Them Ogres Ain’t Right” increases the final boss’s difficulty by 2 for each mini-boss defeated. A wildcard mechanic has the same effect of rising difficulty, which could get ugly stacking with the scenario mechanic.
  • Several locations have connections to specific allies who can be used for bonus effects, like the one who can banish the aforementioned Haunts.
  • “Angel in the Tower” requires you to have someone at the Shadow Clock location or else time starts slipping away.
  • “Battle at the Dam” has the most elegant implementation: “The Dam may not be temporarily closed.” For folks who have not played, if you encounted the boss but have not closed all the locations, you can “temporarily close” them to keep the boss from escaping; if you win the fight, the boss flees to any open location. If the Dam cannot be temporarily closed, you MUST fight the boss there, either early (and you spend the rest of the scenario tracking him down) or more likely as the climactic battle (because why risk fighting a mini-boss there when you cannot close it).

: Zubon

Conflict and Anger

Typically, the more direct the conflict, the less anger it tends to provoke. At the extreme, I don’t think too many people have flipped the table because someone captured one of their pieces in a chess game. … On the other hand, indirect conflict, which is perhaps, another way of saying passive-aggressive conflict, tends to produce stronger feelings. For example, spite-drafting a card in a drafting game, taking the last of a scarce resource in a resource management game, or blocking someone out of a needed action spot in a worker placement game are all the sort of thing that tend to irritate people in a way that blowing up their troops does not.

— Inverted Porcupine

That seems about right to me. No one objects to killing in a murder simulator. People get up in arms when you take the last wheat that their imaginary sheep needed. The harshest PvP MMO in history is A Tale in the Desert, where the explicit Conflict discipline was about playing friendly games of open competition, while Leadership and Worship gave you the chance to kill people in a permadeath game.

: Zubon

Recursion

Pathfinder Adventures is the electronic version of the card game version of Paizo’s version of D&D.

I feel like I should be able to work a couple more “version of”s in there, but it could be a stretch.

: Zubon