Category: General

General

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[AoW] My God, it’s full of Quirks…

We haven’t yet talked about Age of Wushu (the US version of “Age of Wulin” which has been available in China for some time now). It has recently launched over here, to very little fanfare, and it’s somewhat of a pity because it’s an interesting one.

After spending a good amount of time with it, I could say Age of Wushu straddles -not comfortably– the line between themed park and sandbox. You fire it up and things seem familiar. Things are where they should be and more or less do what you’d expect them to. The kicker with AoW is that you recognize these things as themed elements but only just enough. Underneath these familiar and clear waters you can definitely see the really sharp coral edges of the sandbox, threatening to scrape you at every turn.

Some more brief thoughts, for good and bad:

Continue reading [AoW] My God, it’s full of Quirks…

Designing the Designer’s Edition

This is a good story at Penny Arcade Report, so I’m just linking you off to it.

“The final box will be 24” × 20” × 5.75” and will weigh 24 pounds. It will have five huge maps and more than 1,000 counters, many of them 3-D constructible Ogres and buildings. It will probably never be equaled in sheer size and awesomeness,” Jackson said.

: Zubon

PK

And now gamer-linguist nerd crossover content that may not be for everyone. You are warned.

A discussion of the word for “nerd” in Chinese included a note about Chinese usage of the term “PK,” which is comparable to English “pwn” or “versus.” (I hope that usage converges, otherwise you need strong context to tell whether the word implies simply opposition or also the result of that opposition.) Excerpt:

5. As so often happens when words cross from one language to another language, it does not mean exactly the same thing in Chinese (“to thoroughly dominate; to beat” [in one-on-one or multiple competition]) that it means in English (“player killer”).

I note that the English usage is also ambiguous. In our MMO context, I am most familiar with “PK” as an abbreviation for any sort of PvP player, but my usage arises from starting MMOs with Asheron’s Call, where characters had a PK flag that indicated whether they were participating in PvP. Victor Mair suggests that Counter-Strike players use “PK” where I would use “TK” (“team killer”) or perhaps “griefer,” someone who intentionally shoots people on his/her own team rather than the enemy. Feel free to contribute from your own idiolect in the comments.

The researchers Victor Mair mentions in his post (Matt Smith and Brendan O’Kane) have graciously forwarded me their notes with permission to use them for posting. They track the term back to MUDs. This is your chance to be on the cutting edge of Chinese gamer linguistics and potentially contribute to research in its advancement. Are you excited? I’m excited.. Continue reading PK

Almost Getting It

Current internet culture is strongly supportive of sending almost any string of text as long as you place it on an image. The standard Facebook unit seems to be the e-card, which puts your words by a faux-Edwardian image and, BAM, they are now worth sharing and liking. By long-standing internet tradition, the highest form of this art involves images of cats.

See here referenced a project to elevate the dialogue by placing poems on cat pictures, because people seem more likely to read and enjoy words when accompanied by cats. This keen grasp of the medium then immediately fails:

VIII. If you want to share a copy of this image, please ask first.

While a perfectly reasonable approach to intellectual property, you cannot productively harness lolcats to pull your wagon while locking them in crates. At best, you can hope for a happy medium between “too few requests to make it worthwhile” and “too many requests to read and respond.” I have this mental image of Facebook using this model and sending George Takei 250,000 messages a day, “John Smith wants to share your image, do you approve?”

: Zubon

Checklists

The endless, procedurally generated gameplay of A Valley Without Wind can sink into “what’s the point?” If you like Metroidvania a lot more than I do, having an endless stream with minor variations might be bliss, the way I could happily play Settlers of Catan every day. For me, it is one among many and not the best.

I started by jumping right in and exploring. Continue reading Checklists

Differing Visions

This New Yorker article is a pleasant contrast between SimCity and Dwarf Fortress, using a classic version of SimCity rather than the recent debacle. (Fun note: “SimCity debacle” gets 36,000 hits on Google and 126,000 if you remove the quotes.) Representative quote about Dwarf Fortress:

(For a while, the melting point for the fat layer of the dwarves’ skin was set too low, resulting in instant death for any creature that got damp and then entered a warm room—baroque and violent bugs like this are very much in the spirit of the game).

I was once interested in trying Dwarf Fortress but the learning curve was more than I was willing to invest to overcome.

: Zubon

Meaningless Progression

But isn’t it always? More specifically, from yesterday’s comments:

But what if your progress was in accomplishing something in the world, discovering story, or exploration? Essentially, if you left a legacy behind, an impact on the world that everyone could see, then it wouldn’t matter so much if you died.
— Machination

That is how A Valley Without Wind works. The character dies, but the town is still bigger, the lieutenants are still defeated, etc. (Also, RL functions somewhat similarly.)

But A Valley Without Wind is also a procedurally generated endless Metroidvania. Once you save one continent, there is a next one. And a next one. And it is not as though the NPCs are fully conscious beings, so the only person there to care is you as you run on the treadmill.

But isn’t it always?

: Zubon

Meaningless Permadeath

A Valley Without Wind has permadeath. A character dies once and s/he is gone. And then you get a new character with all the same inventory, upgrades, etc. So…

: Zubon

I’m told that there was some progress lost in the launch version of the game. Now you just respawn as a new character and head back to the mission.

Pouring a forty

As you might know by now, LucasArts has been shut down.

I’m not gonna go into the specifics. You can read those in the link above or elsewhere around the net. I’m also not gonna chastise Disney about what they do or don’t with their stuff just to score brownie points with my inner sense of nostalgia.

I just think it’s very hard to be a gamer with some amount of years behind you and not have come in contact with any of LucasArts’ productions. Whether you enjoyed them or not, they were always part of the landscape over the years. Always there.

Myself, I’m pouring a forty because of TIE Fighter, which I abused for many years, as well as the delightfully off the wall Zak McKraken and the Alien Mindbenders(*) and the several Monkey Islands. Those are mine. If you have your own bottle to add to the pouring, feel free. Comments are all yours.

I wish all those devs affected negatively by these news my sympathies and wishes for an immediate recovery. And if there were any old guns still hanging around…. o7.

(*) Yes, I’m showing my age.