Category: General

On the one hand, I don’t get the use of “casual” as an insult. “Casual” could reasonably translate to “sane,” particularly in the MMO world. They spend only a few hours a week playing? Yes, that’s a good idea. Games designed for casual players are more accessible, have a comfortable learning curve, and can be enjoyed in relatively small increments.

On the other hand, I completely get why “hardcore” players do not want casuals in their (our) games. Some games require a heavy investment to really pay off, and there are levels of play you cannot reach without practice. If I am trying to play at those levels, I will not be happy about having teammates or opponents who are just there casually. There is a difference between shooting hoops in the driveway and playing basketball in a competitive league. Relatedly, hardcore players reasonably scorn games designed for casual players because they are often shallow, with a low skill ceiling.¹

“Mastery” is the concept I think I want here. Casual players are there to play, to have a bit of fun. Hardcore players are there to master the game, and that is where their fun is. Neither is a wrong way to approach playing games, although one might be ill-suited to particular game, and conflicts arise when you put both sorts of players on the same field, whether in direct competition or simple interaction from playing with the same toys.²

Many of the best games have both casual and hardcore appeal. They can be enjoyed with a minimal investment and enjoyed further with greater investment, without making the casual players feel like they are being excluded. But you know Sturgeon’s Revelation, and those relatively few games are “the best” because they capture that rare pinnacle.

: Zubon

(1) Casual players can reasonably scorn games designed for hardcore players because they are often unnecessarily complicated, with a huge investment required for limited reward beyond the cognitive dissonance that it must have been worth it.

(2) Good PvP matching systems help separate those two groups to make competitive games. Oddly, the market is one place where casuals and hardcores can interact to mutual benefit. Hardcore speculators love profiting off naive casuals, and naive casuals can immediately cash in for what they consider a decent price without even noticing that they could have gotten 12.4% more if they had researched market trends. Capitalism, ho!

Pretty but shallow. Lovely visuals and sound, but it gains nothing from being in a game format. The story is evocative but never completely gels. I am told that there are semi-random elements, which would be an advantage of the game format except nothing makes that apparent and how many people want to walk through the game again in the chance that the verbal part will vary randomly? Also a reason why the story may not gel; it must support multiple, conflicting stories at once.

Great atmosphere, marginally worth the time (~hour), certainly not worth the price. You would be happier watching someone else play through the game, which is the same effect except for holding down the W key.

: Zubon

I remember when The 7th Guest came out. It was cutting edge for its time, with amazing graphics that made the first real use of a CD-ROM. I acquired it in some pack or another on Steam and tried it recently.

Yep, it plays like the cutting edge of 1993. The puzzles are not as hard as you may have heard but as potentially incoherent. Historically notable but not something you should go back and play.

: Zubon

I have gradually been getting started on Dishonored (yes), and the achievements for the game are giving me ideas of how I might go about playing. Several amount to challenge modes like “play it as a pure stealth game,” “don’t kill anyone but your target,” and “don’t kill anyone” (I presume you can defeat the bosses without killing them yourself). But I have been finding myself somewhat paralyzed by wondering what closes doors and which achievements are mutually exclusive in ways you will not find out until half-way through.

Some are obviously mutually exclusive. “Don’t kill anyone” does not work with “kill lots of people quickly” or “kill people in a variety of ways.” Some are less so. It is not a priori obvious whether you can go through the whole game without (1) alerting or (2) killing anyone or (3) learning the magical powers. For example, maybe going undetected in some area requires killing a guard or possessing a rat or something. And then most games have non-obvious ways of failing challenges, so presumably keep lots of save files.

I am trying to plan ahead to economize, because it would be disappointing to learn that I could have passed a challenge if I had done one thing slightly differently 10 hours earlier. Dishonored is gratifyingly non-spoileriffic with respect to that, having big ticket challenge achievements (“play the whole game this way”) rather than highly specific things you would need to read in advance to know about (“acquire the herring before chopping down the mightiest tree in the forest but do not use the herring to chop down the tree”). This is also an virtue of Dishonored’s reportedly short (~20 hours) playtime, because playthroughs are not epic commitments. Dishonored has the downside that you can repeat missions but cannot retroactively un-fail challenges by not killing anyone on a second try.

Or maybe you can now? Probably not, but researching a bit has led me to many questions whose answers changed over time. For example, it seems that killing the assassins in the tutorial prologue used to count against “don’t kill anyone,” but now it doesn’t, and there are several other places where players found challenge-failing triggers the developers decided should not count against you. So researching turns up answers that may be outdated or inconsistent, and for best fun find a discussion between people who played different versions of the game where the rules changed, so we have experiences and maybe even videos verifying inconsistent answers.

I could alleviate some of this by not badge-hunting, but I like badge-hunting, and “challenge mode” is a special sort of badge-hunting that I think most of us can endorse. Now if only I could set the game to recognize which challenges I was trying for, indicate when they have failed for some reason, and give me the chance to rewind back through auto-save points to fix that. That would be a nice little feature.

: Zubon

Gone Home is an interactive story, not a game. I loathe visual novels but I enjoyed Gone Home a great deal. It is a small story, about which not much can be said without spoiling it, but the comments are open for spoiler-filled discussion.

Gone Home has a short play time, around two hours. There are no monsters nor puzzles nor combat, just exploration and discovering the story at your own pace. You arrive home from the airport to find the house deserted. Go inside and find out what happened.

Two things made the game for me. First, Sarah Grayson’s voice acting as Sam. She’s great, especially when [spoiler]. Second, I really enjoyed the contrast between what the game seems to be and what the story is. Negatives: the main story is not something you cannot find better in a book; the side stories are more sketched than written (also perhaps their strength); the locked doors that structure the narrative are an obvious artifice. But seriously, Sarah Grayson.

I got Gone Home on sale, and I might hesitate to recommend it even at the 75% off, $5 price point versus “worth playing if you get it in a Humble Bundle.” I found it worth the time.

: Zubon

Metacritic reviews are very polarized, with the negative anchored by folks who missed the “no puzzles or combat” thing and spent $20 for a 2-hour non-game.