Category: General

I picked up Spec Ops: The Line on a sale while people were celebrating it as one of the best games of the year, particularly for its message about escapist violence and moral ambiguity. I have the problem that I have never played a military shooter game, so the deconstruction is wasted on me. The characters start doing things that are morally problematic and I immediately recognize it as such, from the first fight in the helicopters where no one seems to care that those are potentially occupied buildings you are shooting around/through. Bioshock’s “would you kindly” is not quite the same if you are not inured to obeying quest givers just because they are quest givers. Funny Games and Natural Born Killers do not fully work if you are not familiar with what they are critiquing.

On a different level, not having played a military shooter game, there is gameplay for me to get used to that the game takes as a given. All those bars and dials and buttons and mechanics we are so used to in MMOs can be bafflingly complex for a first-time player. Starting my first game, I’m not 100% sure where I should be looking for those, while this game obviously assumes some familiarity. Maybe I need to play it on newbie difficulty so I can figure out the buttons while people are shooting at me. Conversely, I have the opposite problem in games where I already know all the genre conventions: the introduction is ridiculously tedious as it walks new players through everything while I just want to know the three things that differ in this game, and they might not even cover that because the few differences are “advanced features” that will be explained well after the tutorial. It is hard to find a good middle ground between “you don’t need to tell me everything” and “hey, the game never explained that!” particularly with wide diversity in player knowledge. (Advantage: WoW for being the first MMO for the vast majority of its players.)

: Zubon

I’m almost caught up on Double Fine PC games! I would totally play a game called “Middle Manager of Justice” if I had an i-whatever, although Ben Kuchera recommends against.

It’s Halloween, monsters took your sibling because s/he was dressed as a candy corn, and it’s up to you to save him/her as well as all that luscious candy. Collect candy, costumes, battle stamps, and trading cards. Also stop an otherworldly invasion.

When you battle the monsters, you take on the form of whatever costume you are wearing such as a robot, unicorn, or Statue of Liberty. Combat is set up with that JRPG feel but with quicktime events. They feel more forgivable as a means of attack than as the random crap they usually are, but they are still not fun. Per RPG standard, monsters level as quickly as you do, so almost all the fights in the game are the same fight apart from a couple of boss fights. It has long animations and not much strategy, so combat mostly feels like padding.

The interesting part is exploring the areas, talking to characters, and seeing what stuff there is. The puzzles are minimal, basically find the right spot (which will be pointed out) and use the right skill (which will be hinted). Exploration works similarly, with only a few optional items not explicitly pointed out by your characters.

Like Stacking, there is no voice acting. Lots of word bubbles. If your child is old enough to read, s/he is old enough to play; very family friendly, few buttons, low difficulty. The Steam version comes with the DLC, which is effectively Act IV. Total playtime of about nine hours for 100% completion.

: Zubon

Looking through our list of MMO links, A Tale in the Desert is the only one I see that does not advertise “killing things” as one of its primary gameplay features. Then again, I have Civilization on my desktop, in which genocide is a path to victory.

: Zubon

We all know that MMO mobs have poor eyesight and hearing, or perhaps they simply don’t care when you kill their friends ten meters away. I realized the second part of the aggro radius question: a lack of object permanence.

Like small children, mobs lack the brain structure to know that something out of sight still exists. And they’re extremely nearsighted. If you can outrun them for five seconds, you are out of sight and out of mind.

Platformers frequently have enemies with perfect vision and absolutely no object permanence awareness. If they can see you, they will follow you endless and inerrantly. If you duck behind a waist-high block, they will go back to their standard patrol patterns. I also used to wonder about enemies who would shoot at your character with inerrant precision, only to have their shots blocked by walls or giant pipes. How did they even know you were there to shoot at you? Obviously they can see through objects, perhaps only able to see living creatures. And being able to see nothing except naked Marios and goombas is what fuels their rage to spit fireballs.

: Zubon

Shipping is a feature. A really important feature. Your product must have it.
— Joel Spolsky, “The Duct Tape Programmer“

via

The book Waiter Rant recommends against varying too much from the menu when ordering. When you order like Sally Albright, you are getting the cook’s first shot at preparing it that way rather than something s/he has made 1000 times. And s/he is also making six other orders and does not have extra time to think about it.

I took a train to a conference last week. The relevant train runs once per day. When your connecting train is late, there is no Plan B beyond waiting for tomorrow. In New England, where Amtrak is profitable and traffic is high, there is a Plan B other than waiting for tomorrow. Airplanes seem to have problems with lateness and cancellation at about the same rate as trains, but there are flights leaving every minute and sixteen alternate routes and four other airlines with reciprocal agreements. The problems that can happen happen so often that the backup plan is already ready.

Most games have just the one release date. Many companies launch games badly. Even if they are doing it well, the scale and number of problems are unknowns that are difficult to plan for. While some big publishers have horrible reputations in terms of game development, they add value by having released hundreds of games and knowing what they are doing there. MMOs get special note: there are only a few big releases per year, and only a few have ever launched really well.

Within games, you rarely see just one of something where that one is really good. If a game does something well, it probably does a lot of that; if it does not do a lot of that, it probably does not do it well. Learning by doing is important. You are not going to create the perfect boss encounter on your first try, whereas Shadow of the Colossus is all boss fights. As much as I loved City of Heroes, for years it had just the one raid, and neither developers nor players ever settled into being really happy with it.

: Zubon

I should note that this is about the intended level of quality. Many companies mass produce crap, but they do it on purpose and very efficiently.

On this lazy, rainy Sunday morning it’s nice to snuggle in with a good read. Have you checked out The Orrator? Long time MMO blogger, Steve “Slurms” Lichtsinn who has written and talked over at Multiplaying for some time has really found a genius node. I am really impressed because he really keeps on hitting really good faux-Tyrian articles that touch on current Guild Wars 2 memes and issues. I really like that he intersperses the articles with relevant ads. Definitely check it out.

If you are looking to get as creative as Slurms, there are now 5 ways to win 7 signed Collector’s Editions. I’ll just replug Syp’s contest since he is dutifully keeping tabs on the other MMO blog contests that pop up, and Guild Wars 2 Guru has 3 of them to give away too.

Also Borat kegbrawl. Is Happy Sunday, yes?

–Ravious

Following up on Sunday’s post, our old friends at Frogdice wanted to mention that they also have a fantasy-themed match-3 game called Tower of Elements. It is a tower defense game, a genre of which I am a fan.

I have played the demo but am not tempting myself with a new tower defense game just before a conference. I’m not sure how well it clicks in the first ten levels. It’s match-3 gameplay. I’d look at how that varies in the late game, but after you beat the tutorial you don’t get the option of seeing anything except the credits, so I can’t see what I’m missing by not buying. You need to match tiles in the right row to attack the enemy, which is rather particular for small monsters like rats. It seemed to go well with the strategy of “spam matches at the bottom of the tower, and other matches up top will just happen.” Vertical matches were more useful for covering ground, but I imagine the later levels have enemies who need many hits and who might care about what element you use to attack.

Tile drops happen instantly, and I never realized how satisfying it was to have the next row of tiles fall into place until I did not have it. You know that moment when you get a big chain and tiles just keep falling into place? Thunk, next, thunk, next, thunk. Of course, you might really hate that if you were waiting on the chain to get your next fireball going. Instead, you get huge waves of those fireballs when you do set off a big chain, which is satisfying in a different way. Either the demo is rigged or it is really easy to get chains with five tile colors.

“Click on the gold in the next few seconds or you lose your treasure” is a game mechanic pet peeve of mine, but the items you could buy with gold seemed unimportant when you could spam walls of fireballs. I never used an item outside the tutorial, but they are one of the mechanics to deal with “there’s a rat on the bottom row and I don’t have 3 to match down there.”

The art and sound are not carrying much of the weight. It is not adding much or causing a distraction. It is not appealing to nostalgia with pixelated art, which I appreciate considering how many small publishers are doing that lately.

Frogdice also wanted to offer a 50% off code: CFXR000QV

: ZUbon

link

A variation on the Bejeweled “match 3” formula, you are gradually escaping from a dungeon. It plays a bit like Warriors End, although you are plowing through monsters rather than fighting one opponent. You also collect crafting materials to upgrade. Graphics and music fit the 8-bit standard so popular as “retro” at the moment.

This could be amusing on a mobile platform, but it does not offer a lot if you sit down to play for a block of time. Like Bejeweled, once you understand how the system and its few specials work, you have mastered the game. There is not much Raph Koster fun here, but it is a small variation on a comfortingly (or stultifyingly) familiar formula. Running the dungeon would pass a bus ride nicely, but it will not satisfy an itch for deeper play.

I found myself disappointed by the treadmill nature of the upgrades. You know this formula from MMOs: enemy hit points rise at least as quickly as your weapon damage, so your numbers increase but you do not become more powerful. Many flash games with similar upgrade systems make the improvements still feel meaningful by sending you through the weak enemies before getting to the big ones; that can feel boringly repetitious, but you really do notice when your Super Upgraded Sword clears ten enemies in less than a second and you zip through, rather than starting somewhere level-appropriate so every monster still takes the same amount of time despite your thousands of gold pieces spent at the blacksmith.

On sale at Steam for a couple of days as I post this. A full playthrough has a few hours of content; going for all the achievements will take longer, especially since there are two for low level runs. With the game’s upgrade and score systems, I’m pretty sure you can get those two by upgrading slowly, carefully keeping your score low, then sprinting for 10,000,000 all at once (and start over completely if you get a good but not perfect score that ends the “low level” part).

: Zubon

1. The business cannot expect customer loyalty. Get as much out of him/her as you can while you can.
2. The customer sees the business trying to exploit him/her as much as possible as quickly as possible. The customer feels no loyalty.
3. Go to 1.

Charities can operate much the same way: past donors are likely future donors, but someone who is “thinking about donating” will probably still be thinking about it a year from now. Keep returning to that well.

As a blood donor, I am troubled.

: Zubon