Author: Zubon

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Casual Bites

Long-time readers know that I am an immoderate person. I binge, I commit fully. I mentioned that I was reading Worm; I went through 1,680,000 words in 17 days. So I don’t drink and I am careful about getting invested in things. I am coming down from that Worm binge and am once again (still?) wanting games I could play casually even if I likely won’t. The metaphor still holds: sometimes you won’t commit to watching a 90 minute movie but you will watch 5 TV episodes in a row.

One thing I liked about the MMO genre was the ability to make small units of progress. Hop in, get a few easy objectives in 15-30 minutes, go on to whatever else you’re doing. Beyond coasting, it combines the casual game spirit of low investment play with the long term perspective that these little units add up. There are plenty of single-player games that are similar, which are mostly what I am seeking in my Steam library as I have given up on MMOs.

There are lots of games that I want to play but do not feel up to committing the time necessary to give them a fair shot. I have some 4Xs but it is not quite satisfying to pop into one of those for a few turns. I have Banished installed but my only visit to its tutorial reminded me of The Witcher 2, not in difficulty but in that its interface turned me off so much that by the time I can get over that feeling I also forget what I was supposed to have learned. Before I completed the first tutorial it seemed that building a basic settlement involved going 2 or 3 levels deep in each of several menus for each of several steps, requiring roughly a paragraph of explanation each. Banished has a rather good (if harsh) reputation, but I don’t know if I’m up to that kind of commitment just to learn the interface.

My current need is gaming in bite-sized increments with intuitive gameplay. Being me, I am likely to leap into and consume something in mass volume, but I need that intuitive gameplay to get me past the commitment conundrum of needing to invest in learning a game before I am able to enjoy it. I want the game to meet me at least half way in terms of interface, when many of our gamer games seem to pride themselves on requiring large time investments to learn their mechanics.

: Zubon

Testing

I am gradually playing through Tiny Tina’s Assault on Dragon Keep in Borderlands 2, and I have come to wonder if the game was playtested solo and/or with the Mechromancer. I assume it must have been, so either the design team did not listen to those testers or they decided these were good design decisions. Part of the point of the DLC’s story is that Tiny Tina is a lousy GM with little concept of balance, fairness, or sanity, but that is not something you really want to inflict on your players.

For example, there are a fair number of enemies with one-shot (or nearly so) attacks. Borderlands 2 comes with one-shot protection, kind of like how City of Heroes prevented you from dying due to falling damage: you would be left at minimal hit points but not dead. This DLC keeps that rule, but has some of those heavy attacks be DoTs, have elemental effects with DoTs, or come as a multi-hit beam rather than a technical one-shot. It is a weird state of affairs when you build a mechanic into a game to prevent a problem, then design around that mechanic to make sure that problem still happens. This is mostly a problem for solo players, because in a multi-player game anyone can revive.

There are also several points at which Tina arbitrarily smites you because that’s how she wants the story to go. She usually gets talked out of it, but there are occasional scripted deaths where it is just a free trip to the rez point. (Not sure if some are whole-group and some just the mission owner/closest person, since I’m playing solo; if the latter, this works much better in group play.) As I have mentioned, this sort of thing is a major momentum breaker for the Mechromancer. When your class’s core mechanic is building up a buff over time, nothing ruins the play session quite like arbitrarily resetting that buff.

I’m amused by the metagamey story and the occasional rainbows and unicorns when Tina forgets she is telling a dark and brooding story. The gameplay mechanics of the DLC are shaky.

: Zubon

AlphaGo

While I have been reading instead of playing, the most exciting news in computer gaming has been Go. Chess-playing computer programs have gradually moved from “plays a standard game pretty well” to “almost competitive with a good human” to “consistently beats world champions,” reaching the end of that progression about a decade ago. Go, contrarily, has long been held out as a game at which computers will have trouble making gains because the search space is huge for a 19×19 board, moves have long-term consequences that make evaluating individual moves difficult, and play has generally been seen as more intuitive and so less open to computational brute force.

A year ago, the best Go program was competitive against a good amateur player. In the last six months, Google Deepmind’s AlphaGo has leaped to “best in the world,” beating the European champion 5-0 and now beating the world champion 3-0 with two games to go.

frame from a manga. two young men face a computer. one says, "but they say it'll be another hundred years before a computer can beat a human at go." the one at the keyboard replies, "I don't need a hundred years." There are three things I would like to note here. First, the speed of that jump is ridiculous. Go has long been one of those “at least a decade away” computing problems, like the ones that have been forecast as “20-30 years away” for the last 20-30 years and are still 20-30 years away today. AlphaGo is the first computer program to beat a professional player without a handicap, and then it went on to beat the world champion. That is going from “can’t beat a professional player” to “beats the top professional player” in one step. This is not the gradual progress we saw with computers and chess over decades, this is an escalation in power levels that would make anime blush.

Second, this is not simply a matter of Google having massive computing power to throw at the problem. The chess world champions play on supercomputers and evaluation trillions of positions per second. The world champion version of AlphaGo uses a distributed computing network, but they also have a single-computer version that beats the distributed version about a quarter of the time. We will see if the human world champion gets one win in the series, but this suggests that a much less powerful version of AlphaGo would still be a top player.

What I find most interesting is that humans seem to be fairly bad at evaluating how AlphaGo is doing. AlphaGo optimizes for probability of winning, not its current score or a projected score at the end. So the human analysts are commenting on how the computer seems to be making mistakes, that it is not capturing territory, and oh look gg the computer has somehow gotten itself into an unassailable position. One of the reasons computers have been bad at Go is that a single move now can have subtle implications 50 moves later; AlphaGo has made the jump to where its subtle moves look like mistakes to observers until it wins. It is probably not the case that the computer was playing a close game and pulled ahead in the late game. It seems more likely that the computer was steadily pulling ahead but in a way that is not obvious until the late game. Here is Eliezer Yudkowsky exploring this point at length. Bonus thought: human commentators were probably assuming that AlphaGo would lose, so odd-looking moves were probably mistakes rather than subtle brilliance; in light of consistent wins, I am curious if the human commentators will now look more closely at its moves for hidden strengths, rather than starting with the frame “this is another lousy computer Go program.”

: Zubon

Bonus thought 2: when I see Eliezer referencing “Path to Victory” in that post, I cannot help but see him referencing Worm, which he has read and commented on before.

Pathfinder Magical Girls

I have not been gaming for the past couple of weeks because I have been binge-reading Worm, which is both good and lengthy.

To tide you over, Pathfinder (the spiritual successor to D&D, don’t really know what official D&D is doing with 5th edition) will soon have, well:

The magical child archetype covers the “magical girl” trope, with a transformation sequence ability (faster switch between identities, but with flashy lights and music), summoner spells, and an otherworldly buddy.

I’m not sure if Pathfinder’s warlock is like D&D’s, but I think a warlock pact with Kyuubey would multiclass nicely to make a magical girl.

: Zubon

Dr. Langeskov, The Tiger, and The Terribly Cursed Emerald

Free, short, amusing. The game has 10-20 minutes of content and does not pad it, so it would take me longer to talk about the game than it would for you to play it. You’ll know whether it is for you within the first two rooms; the concept doesn’t really change, although it escalates. The Steam description alone gives you a sense. I would say I am avoiding spoilers, but this game is especially difficult to spoil. Due to a mix of role-playing and trolling, the discussion, guides, and even the official content is a mix of helpful and completely misleading. It is unclear whether people asking about subquests that do not exist are confused or playing along. It is unclear whether people who say the game itself does not exist are confused or playing along.

Spoilers are fair game in the comments.

Instead, I am going to talk abut how achievements can hurt enjoyment of your game, since I am usually very positive about them. This game has rather unfortunate achievements, a few standard “do the thing”s but mostly “do all the things”s. The descriptions of how to get the achievements are missing or misleading (“in-character”), and the “all the things” are of undisclosed number in hidden spots. It is a scavenger hunt without telling you what to hunt for. And every room has a closed door, so if you miss one thing, start the game over.

The game tries to fight the trend I noted about scavenger hunts, blocking achievement completion if you alt tab, bring up the Steam overlay, etc. so you cannot follow a guide. Actually, that might be a bug, and I don’t know if it’s worse for that to be intentional or not. If intentional, it is somewhat clever, except that most of us have smartphones now and can just bring up the guide on another device, so it is just an inconvenience. The inconvenience is compounded in that this apparently bugged out achievements completely for most of the time that the game has been live, making them unachievable. Players also report needing to uninstall and reinstall to clear whatever flag is set by alt-tabbing. The game is a quick download, so this is an annoying speed bump rather than a barrier. The line of aggravated and confused players starts over there, compounded by the confusion noted by trolling both in-game and out. The forums are surprisingly rollicking for a free 15-minute game.

So I’m saying: play the game and uninstall. Don’t go for the achievements.

Bonus points to the game for having Steam trading cards. Because it is a free game, you can never be awarded trading cards. A+ trolling. You can, however, craft cards with gems, so people have backdoored their way into a badge that is not achievable through in-game means. Well done, players.

: Zubon

Retrospective

I got a month’s worth of play out of GemCraft: Chasing Shadows, which is about as strong an endorsement as you can give a $2.49 game. I dare say you’d get your money’s worth at full price, if you are the sort that likes tower defense enough to play through 100+ levels of it. Looking at my Steam friends list, I am a far far outlier in terms of how much this was worth to me.

graphic shows xp total increasing from 12,056 to 3,644,724,749 Having played previous versions of GemCraft as a flash game, the big takeaway for me was the magnitude of the breakthrough reminding me that reaching a higher level is more significant than optimizing lower levels. I would like to thank the GC:CS players in the reading audience who did not pat me on the head condescendingly when I was proud of getting past wave 100, when that is still the early game. The image to the right expresses the change in magnitude, and that 3 billion xp came from a map where I went AFK and just let it run for a while.

Getting ahead of the xp curve was valuable, but the hour I spent carefully maximizing a level in the middle of the map would have been much better spent zipping across the map to get to the point where I had all the skills and difficulty dials. Getting one million xp is helpful, but it took an hour to do it around level 200; once you get your full suite of options, you leap to level 2000 and can earn more than a million xp in a second. Water finds its level, and you profit more by finding your level than by trying to perfect each level along the way. Granted, being really good at one level is usually how you reach the next one, and we gamers have a long history of optimizing the fun out of our games, so I am open to counter-arguments here.

There are only 3 achievements left that are not “defeat level X with a self-imposed handicap” achievements, so I may take a victory lap through those levels and see if I can pick up the 2 non-level-specific achievements along the way. The last achievement challenge is Iron Wizard mode, re-doing the game without being able to out-level the difficulty curve (although also with no reason to perfect levels beyond “just finish”). I don’t know if that sounds like fun or drudgery. I do not think I will be joining the players at the “extreme end game,” even though I am reaching that level 3000 range where it opens up. At that point, you’re just seeing how much you can abuse the math behind the game, which sounds fun but I’ve served my time.

: Zubon