Category: General

I heard good things about Puzzle Quest, so I picked up Puzzle Kingdoms on Steam during their summer blowout. It was not worth the $1, and I wish I had spent the time playing some random flash game.

Unless things change dramatically later on, it is just the one mini-game with some minor variations, like Bejeweled with some add-ons. You can go play Bejeweled right now. You and the computer are playing against each other on the same board with alternating turns, so it is a matter of playing denial while hoping something interesting falls into place. Of course, it falls into place in time for your opponent’s turn, so there is waiting and luck. The computer is tactically infallible but strategically hopeless, so it is a matter of getting an unsatisfying victory over an inept opponent, watching that opponent exploit something you cannot see (but it sees every possible combination), or hardly seeing what happens as it gets four or five combinations somehow falling from off-screen. The computer’s prescience is unlikely to be enough to save it, although it is a wonder to see it get two kills in one turn from blocks that were not on-screen when it started.

The gameplay is passable, although I found Warriors End a better version of the same thing. If you want that kind of thing, you get nothing else, so go to. The story is just bad: our hero is apparently conquering peaceful countries for their own good, but it’s okay because the dark lord is making them unhappy with magic boxes. You must destroy the magic box, even if that involves killing a path through a country that does not want your help. Nation-building through Bejeweled-based regime change.

There are also “RPG elements,” for when you feel like grinding a bit. Because sometimes mindlessly playing the same little thing and getting imaginary rewards is relaxing. It’s what we do here.

: Zubon

Oh, and Torchlight is $5 on Steam right now, in case you missed it during the last holiday sales.

Can you nail the Studio Ghibli visual feel in a game any more? No.

Eric Heimburg has a good post about why it may be cognitively impossible for some people to obey Rule 1 of raiding (“Don’t stand in the fire”). For more fun on this, I recommend the University of Illinois Visual Cognition Lab, particularly under “Gradual changes to scenes,” where they will tell you what is going to happen but you will still miss it.

: Zubon

The game that has been sucking up nearly all my train time, break time, and my wife’s TV time, is the Carcassonne App.  This little baby is one of the most polished apps I have seen.  The developers really considered the limitations of playing the award-winning board game on a miniature screen, and came through big time.  The AI is pretty good, there is a solitaire game, and even online play against random players.  Real quick I have a gripe and a suggestion for the game itself: (gripe) the AI, not just evil, is way too heavy on piggy-backing when both my wife and I felt it would have been much better to start a new city or road, and (suggestion) it can be really hard to find distinct owned farms on the small screen where a colored toggle would be nice to show temporarily who owns the farms.  Other than that both my wife and I have logged in well over 50 games each.  It is definitely my App Game of the Year so far.

That being said, the developers, TheCodingMonkeys (TCM) stumbled big time.  They stumbled in a way that opened my eyes to the current 0-day DLC phenomenon.  For you see, with the nearly dozen or so expansions for Carcassonne and promises by TCM that expansions will be forthcoming to buy in-game, there was none.  Fans don’t know which expansion will be first, or which ones are even planned.  All we know is the iPad version of Carcassonne comes first.  In terms of community management, they have created the worst foul.  They are not managing expectations on whether they are merely providing a product or a service as well.

Continue reading Carcassonne App – Product or Service?

This weekend was a lot of fun.  Like most of the MMO blogger ilk, I flitted around between a variety of MMOs.  I started playing Lord of the Rings Online again in order to level up my Warden.  I tried, and miserably failed, to solo the new Guild Wars 1 mini-mission Temple of the Intolerable, which is the third in the line of mini-missions to assassinate Mursaat.  The difficulty is spot on, and once I can snag a friend (with PvE-skills and a hero), I hear it’s not too bad if we’re careful.  Finally, I decided to check out Dragonica, which I will discuss. 

Continue reading Future Frame of Play

It’s Magic without the CCG elements. That’s kind of like D&D without the RPG elements, which Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro is also doing. That removes some problems but also much of the core game.

By “without the CCG elements,” I mean that there is no deck-building. You can pick one of several pre-made decks. There is some minor deck-building when you unlock new cards for each deck, but you cannot remove existing cards you do not like. On the upside, that removes the standard CCG structure of encouraging you to spend ridiculous sums on getting the perfect deck. On the downside, that removes the entire strategic element of the game, leaving only the tactical side of playing what feels like someone else’s deck. And the decks, while effective against each other, are stocked with trash that you would not use in a normal Magic game.

Playing through the campaign (against a series of computer-controlled decks), it is hard to shake the feeling that winning comes from who gets better decks/draws or from the weakness of the AI, rather than player skill. I have lost games watching enemy creatures fly in while I could do nothing to stop them, and I have won games where the computer never seemed to be able to do much. Then again, it might just be that the basic green deck is a blunt instrument requiring almost no thought: land, creatures, very few instants or special abilities. You only need to win once to advance, so one lucky draw and you’re set (limiting mulligans on the opening hand is somewhat silly when you can costlessly reset the duel).

Playing online might differ. I am always hesitant to test some random online community. It would be playing against others facing similar deck constraints, so again that mix of deck, luck, and minor tactics. For the tactical, there is a series of “win this turn” puzzles, each of which involves a few minutes of reading cards and seeing where the path to victory lies.

I picked this up because I was mostly enjoying Elements, saw the ad (free expansion with pre-order), checked some reviews of the console version, and thought it might be worth $10 to try the market leader. It was a low risk purchase compared to real Magic cards or a night at the cinema. Entertaining in an early binge, but likely lacking in staying power due to the low deck flexibility. I will let you know if that assessment changes.

: Zubon

“…you can donate one or all of your vital organs to the Aperture Science Self Esteem Fund for Girls? It’s true!”

Portal received a couple of updates this year, but I had not checked what. The ending now differs slightly (story, not gameplay). There is also a new achievement, “Transmission Received,” which is a sort of mini-game in which you take radios scattered throughout the levels to unmarked points for coded messages. You can tell that you are close because the radio starts getting static; when the light turns green, you’re there. Veteran players will notice far more radios than before in the game.

The radio in the starting chamber is one of them. Just carry it with you until you hear static. That will get you started. Do you know Morse code?

: Zubon

To adapt a line from Scott Adams, what matters is how many people love your game, not how many people hate your game.

If you make the best MMO ever, the most popular MMO ever, there will still be approximately 300 million Americans and 6.5 billion other people who will not be playing your game. That is your best case scenario. Even amongst gamers, most will not play it, and you will be ridiculously successful if you can get most MMORPG players to download the trial. Even if you are the WoW-killer, your game is still a niche in a niche.

This is a freeing insight. It does not matter how many people hate your game. Their dislike has no more effect on your success than the indifferent billions. Your game is not going to be all things to all people or even most things to 0.2% of people. You can focus on the base and make the game for them, rather than trying to reduce the scorn of people who are never going to be on your side anyway.

It does not matter how many people hate Darkfall. They quite happily fill a niche that has some very passionate support. It does not matter how many people hate Twilight. Stephenie Meyer is making her millions from the people who love it. It does not matter how many people hate xkcd or Rob Liefeld or Justin Bieber or the New York Yankees (although you can monetize some of that anti-fandom).

For the success of your game, vaguely positive is the same as indifferent is the same as opposed is about the same as vocal hatred. They are all non-subscribers. The people who matter are the ones who will play your game, who will pay to support it, who will recruit their friends and set up fan sites and build support tools and run in-game events. Unless you actually do suck, you get ahead by increasing your positives, not decreasing your negatives.

: Zubon

One night last week, I was in very poor spirits while playing Elements because of losing two games in a row after a 2/15 chance failed to come up in 30 tries. (Even worse than that 1.4% chance, really, because it was two 15-set trials of sampling without replacement with a 4/30 chance. The odds were around 4/15 by the end of each.) The night before I hit the computer’s perfect counter-deck to mine three times in a row, and I’m still vaguely bitter about that game where a 1/3 chance happened 8/13 times. The next night a 6/30 chance did not appear in two 15-turn games. In games that are completely random like craps or roulette, you just roll with streaks, but it is frustrating in a deck-building game like Elements or Dominion where managing probability is the whole point. Every plan breaks at a certain degree of perverse unlikelihood.

The next day I was reading Battle Royale, which is a different sort of game. If you do not know the premise of the novel/movie/manga, imagine Lord of the Flies, but the students are put on the island intentionally, armed, and told to fight it out until there is only one survivor. They are armed at random, based on which pack they pick up as they leave the briefing. Knives seem common, in varying lengths, but I just met the guys who lucked into a machine pistol and a sawed-off shotgun. And then there is Noriko, who got a boomerang.

The universe holds more perversity than you can survive. You think you have planned for every possibility, and then a meteor hits your house. All of life is an example of gambler’s ruin. You cannot live forever because, given an infinite amount of time, not only will everything go wrong that can go wrong, but also it will all go wrong at the same time. And, just in case you can survive that a few times, since we are talking about forever, it will happen an infinite number of times.

Which puts that card game issue in perspective.

: Zubon