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Another Try with Visual Novels

I gave “Game of Thrones – A Telltale Games Series” another shot and watched the first episode. I leave it at “watched” rather than “played” because I do not feel like my interactions were especially meaningful, and the gameplay remains a visual novel with quicktime events. Extra points lost for having sections with player control of movement where the only option is to walk forward. I am not sure how much the choices a player makes matter (by reviews: not much), but it seems true to the source material in that all options lead to death. Embracing “I am playing a role a tragedy” enhanced the experience. (There are several takes on “Guardians of the Galaxy as The Avengers playing an RPG,” and one of my favorite has Thor as Drax. After being told that calling up the Big Bad at level 2 will get them all killed, he revels in what a glorious tragedy it shall be.)

futurama screencap. robot devil says you cant just have your characters announce how they feel! that makes me feel angryI found the writing poor. There were several rounds of direct characterization, with characters remarking on how wise, brave, etc. the other characters are. There are at least two times in the first episode when you are put in control so you can click on pictures or objects to have the POV character say a series of, “Alice, she is so strong. Bob, I hope is still as playful as when I left,” etc. If the whole thing lasts about 12 hours, watching the game takes about as long as watching a season of Game of Thrones. The show sounds more entertaining.

I went on to try Doki Doki Literature Club, which has a lot of buzz. It is another visual novel. The fact that I can’t tell you the buzz about Doki Doki Literature Club without giving you a spoiler is itself a spoiler … as are the content warnings and “horror” tags. Checking a couple of reviews, it looks like I made it about a quarter of the way to the twist. Maybe I could try again, but the whole thing clocks in at 4-5 hours of visual novel. Maybe the full text is posted somewhere, and I could read an actual novel instead?

Folks have advocated Tales from the Borderlands as the best Telltale Games game, and Fate/Stay Night remains that one visual novel piece of gaming literature on the “someday” list. So I have some more to try sometime, but I am about at the point of accepting that this format is not for me. Walking simulators are borderline.

: Zubon

[TT] Munchkin Shakespeare

Munchkin Shakespeare is Munchkin with lots of Shakespeare references. If you like either or both of those two things, this is for you.

When I think of Steve Jackson Games, I think of Ogre, GURPS, and Illuminati. I think of hardcore gamer games with niche appeal. And then they published Munchkin, which apparently pays for everything else they do. If you are not familiar with Munchkin: it is a casual, humorous card game, distilling fantasy RPGs down to “kick open the door, kill the monster, loot the room, stab your friends in the back.” It is light, but it is entertaining. There are now several dozen versions, some of which have more than a dozen expansions. They cross all genres and frequently cross over with other games. This is SJGames’s equivalent of Monopoly (except that Monopoly is kind of horrible).

Munchkin Shakespeare had a successful Kickstarter, so much so that they made a deluxe edition. The deluxe Munchkin games come with decorate bits that add fluff but no crunch, primarily a board. People seem willing to pay more for bigger boxes and a board than for decks of cards you could store in a sandwich baggie. The board is genuinely useful for tracking levels. (If you ever want a safe Kickstarter campaign, Steve Jackson Games is good for that. Unlike folks making their first game, they have been doing this for almost 40 years. They deliver what they say they will, on time, even stretch goals extend the project. These are professionals.)

Our friends liked Munchkin Shakespeare over the (few) other sets they have seen. It has the usual mechanics, refined and clarified over the course of a decade. The humor is good, with lots of bonuses for literature majors. It is entirely appropriate to pause the game for a soliloquy. You might fight Two Bees, or the more dangerous Not Two Bees. You might wield the Slings and Arrows of outrageous fortune. And those are just the first Hamlet jokes that come to mind. Many of the jokes are obvious or explained, others are left as Genius Bonuses.

It’s fun.

: Zubon

AlphaGo Zero

Last year, I mentioned that DeepMind (Google) put together a computer that mastered Go, the game that was going to be one of the last games where humans could consistently beat computers because it had too many possible moves and was computationally intractable. Note the past tense. AlphaGo did not just beat the best human player(s) in the world, it did so in ways that were so beyond the human commentators that they thought it was making mistakes the whole time. But AlphaGo did lose one game, so DeepMind made a better version that stopped losing at all.

Two bonus notes:

  • This is not a supercomputer. The early versions were distributed networks, but the better versions are single machines.
  • The pace of progress is fast. 2015: an early version of AlphaGo gets the first computer win against a professional human player. 2016: the famous version of AlphaGo beats the human world champion. 2017: the latest version of AlphaGo beats that 2016 version 100:0.

AlphaGo Zero is that latest version. It is not yet perfect, as there was a generation between what I was describing as the 2016 and 2017 versions, which can win against AlphaGo Zero 11% of the time. So AlphaGo Zero is better, but “vastly better than the previous best computer” is only so much of an improvement when that in-between version was literally better than any human. There is only so much better one can get at Go. You can only win so hard.

The really impressive thing about AlphaGo Zero is that no one taught it. The previous versions were taught by watching master players. AlphaGo Zero was given the rules of Go, left to play 5 million games against itself over the course of 3 days, and was then better than the best human in the world, beating the version that beat the human world champion. It took another 18 days (+30 million games?) to reach the level of the previous best that DeepMind had made with human guidance, then 19 more days to exceed all the old versions. I presume it is even better now, if they left the computer running. That was earlier this month, so short time frames kind of matter here.

Let’s say that again: tutoring previous generations of AlphaGo by showing it the best human games and players in history made it worse. AlphaGo Zero started from first principles on its own. It took 3 days to surpass every human and 40 days to surpass every previous computer. That is one computer with four TPUs. That is an amazing demonstration of the speed and power of machine learning. Here is AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky on the same topic.

: Zubon

Commitment

Next thing to try this weekend: Endless Legend. Yes, another game from 2014. I have a deep Steam library to get through. This is not actually a discussion of Endless Legends in particular; I played a few hours, it was entertaining but did not knock my socks off.

No, this is about the struggle to get into a new 4X game at all. 4X games are commitments. One full game is going to take hours. Just the tutorial was about 30 minutes. And like with an MMO, you cannot say you really know the game after that first game. You need to invest a lot of hours to get a feel for its mechanics. While you would think you at least know whether it is fun for you in that time, you might be expecting it to be like previous games, missing a major mechanic, and otherwise be too clueless on your first playthrough. “Oh, that was a horrible experience because I went with Strategy X for my first 50 turns, which was optimal in Game Y but lousy here.”

I was looking for bite-sized gaming last year largely to avoid this, and I guess I still am. I don’t want to invest 23 hours in a television season or more than 100 in a series only to find it craps out at the end. I am unlikely to start The Wheel of Time when most seem to say that you want to skim/skip several thousand pages in the late Jordan years. And how much do I want to invest 20+ hours to see if I like a game? I have a friend who encourages me to join them for Twilight Imperium, where even if I accept that it will be a great experience, I will be investing 3+ hours to learn an 8-hour game that I might play twice.

Movies are looking pretty good in terms of benefit-cost. Games that do not feel the need to pad themselves to 40 hours are looking pretty good.

And the funny thing is that I love commitment. I want to dive in and invest deeply. I have thousands of MMO hours under my belt. Maybe that is it: after a combination of burnout and disappointment with the entire MMO genre, I am hesitant to commit and get burned anew. I am still recovering from a divorce.

I would pick up Civilization VI, because I feel already invested in that series, but I am waiting for a good sale. I have plenty of years-old games that I am still sifting through, and a few good ones will see me through to the Christmas sales.

: Zubon

Shovelware

This morning I fell down a rabbit hole and became aware of sites that sell shovelware bundles of Steam games. For example, Go Go Bundle will sell you about a dozen lousy games for about a dollar. These seem to be mostly low quality and poorly translated. At some point, Steam lowered the minimum bar to clear to put a game on Steam.

I am not sure why someone would want these. Better flash games are available free. I can only guess there are a few ways to game the system, which might also point towards why you would want to buy 50-packs of these Steam keys at a discount. Yeah, 50 copies of the same shovelware. My first guess was card farming, since one game’s worth of Steam cards sells (sold?) for about a dollar, so a pack of a dozen games could net you about $10 if that is still true. Or farming Steam levels, so you get 50 accounts and farm cards to send yourself? Neither seems worth the effort or electricity, although never underestimate the ingenuity of people with access to automation and someone else’s electricity.

screenshot of game achievements, all labeled "another second in the game." Total achievements - 5000 Or achievement farming? If I will put in some effort to earn an achievement, I can totally see someone dropping a few dollars to add more achievements to their Steam profile. And then I saw Bitcoin Clicker in one of the packs. Bitcoin Clicker is an idle game with 5000 achievements. You are awarded an achievement every second you are in the game. Need to bulk up your Steam achievements count? Just $0.99, or the same price for a pack of bundle of similar quality games. With Steam trading cards! This might have been stepped on by the time you read this post. (Bonus: the developer listed it as an MMO with full audio in 27 languages. And it is apparently a very minor reskin of an example game.) Total achievements: 7166. NEW_ACHIEVEMENT_NAME_1_21 NEW_ACHIEVEMENT_DESC_1_21All of this has led me to the Achievement Spam Steam curator that tracks games like this. I feel dirty just scrolling through the list. Apparently the idea is to steal some content, slap on achievements, and see how many copies you can sell for a dollar.

I hesitate to give exposure to crap, but holy crap.

: Zubon

Telltale Games

I am trying to play “Game of Thrones – A Telltale Games Series,” but it is a visual novel with quicktime events. If there are two things I have never enjoyed in gaming: visual novels and quicktime events. I am led to believe that all the popular Telltale Games games are basically this same thing, plus or minus some quality, thematics, and how much your choices affect the game.

Is this wrong? They seem to be doing pretty well for themselves and getting popular IP. What do you like about these games?

: Zubon

Australia

I feel like there should be a longer silence for mourning, but Ravious was also the guy who mixed a game review into his announcement that he had terminal cancer. Keeping the blog going seems like a better tribute than letting it die, too. On a related note, I still miss Jeff Freeman.

My most recent game has been Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel, continuing my trend of bringing you the latest news on games from several years ago. This one comes from a development studio that does not even exist anymore. I am not yet to the halfway point of the game, but I wanted to talk about it because of convergent events. So far: if you liked Borderlands 1 or 2, you will probably like this. It is not going to be the strongest game in the series, and I may list a few likes and dislikes after I am done playing, but the basic gameplay is the same with a few minor variations. The bandits you have killed a thousand times have a totally new name and skin, bonus points for calling the psychos on the moon “lunatics.” If you wanted more of the same with a little variation, here you go.

What I am especially enjoying so far is the Australian-ness of it. The Pre-Sequel was made by 2K Australia. They are not hiding it. The NPCs have a range of Australian accents. They use Australian slang. I do not get all of the cultural references, and several that I do get, I recognize that I do not fully appreciate them. As an American gamer, having games not made for me (or Japan) is a nice bit of jarring. “Oh right, other cultures exist, including other English-speaking cultures.” I like seeing games that assume their home cultures in ways that likely inhibit their global appeal, like using myths from eastern Europe without trying to translate them into Greek gods or faux-Tolkien. I see more of that in indie games, so a very Australian AAA game is to be cherished.

The convergence I mentioned is the Humble Bundle. There are two game bundles going on right now. One is the Humble Down Under Bundle of games from Australian developers. The other is the Humble Endless RPG Lands Bundle, which includes all three Borderlands games, in case you were curious but never picked them up. $1 to try the first one, $10 for them all (and some other RPGs like the Guild of Dungeoneering). You too can experience yesteryear’s top games.

: Zubon

ETA: I can’t seem to get into the Pre-Sequel. Maybe it’s me, maybe it’s the annoying compulsory vehicle section, but I’m uninstalling and won’t have more to say.