At first, it doesn’t seem at all like Halo, much the same way that eating a Reeses peanut butter cup in the shape of the bat signal doesn’t remind you of Batman.
Later, you realize that Halo doesn’t signify all that much anyways, at least not anymore. But that doesn’t stop Halo Wars from being a shapeless, uninspired mess.
In what has been a fairly surprising experience, I’ve recently spent some time going back through the Warcraft games, with the most emphasis on Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne and World of Warcraft. It’s been surprising because my memories of these two games are different - Warcraft III, which dropped while I was in college and which I put an enormous amount of time into, remains a cherished favorite. On the other hand, World of Warcraft was a game that never really sucked me in, even though I appreciated its myriad achievements.
WOW is just as I remembered it: unsatisfying, boring, yet addictive. When I first played WOW I got a troll priest up to level 42 or so, far enough to get a taste for the game but without reaching the endgame which is vastly different from the rest of the game. This time I played until level 9, and decided that was the end for me. Again.
Warcraft III is another matter. When I first played it it seemed like the pinnacle of RTS design, but now I find its lack of strategic and tactical options frustrating. I didn’t delve into the multiplayer (not for lack of trying, but I couldn’t get past DOTA, a mod with a learning curve just as brutal) but the singleplayer is an unending exercise in making as many guys as possible and forcing them down your enemy’s throat. It’s not CIV 4 - in fact, it seems more akin to Spore. That’s a rough comparison indeed.
What’s the point here? I’m not sure. But it’s useful to go back and play games to see how they’ve changed, and perhaps more importantly how you’ve changed.
The magic of delaying a game that needs it: Prototype looks great, way better than it did before. http://www.gametrailers.com/player/47312.html
I’m not a big fan of Zombies. Vampires I like. Werewolves? Fucking awesome. I can even get into mummies every once in awhile. And I liked that one Unicorns album about being a ghost (you know, the only they ever made). But zombies never did anything for me. Maybe it’s that they have always been an excuse for the horror genre to play with allegory and social commentary, both of which are fine things on their own but maybe not as cool as Vampires fighting Werewolves with giants swords, glowing whips and shurikens made of silver.
Along with refined sugar and the inevitable news story about 50 year-old pedophiles putting rufies in Haloween candy, zombies infecting other mediums is a natural by-product of the holiday (holinight? Halliwnight?). And so it is with games.
I don’t get all the brouhaha over zombies in games. Tom Chick likes the new Spiderman game mostly because it simulates a zombie breakout in an open world and does a good job of it. And far be it for me to take umbrage when one of my favorite game writers puts digital ink to page. Me, I couldn’t care less. Sure I liked Dead Rising. But shooting slow-moving undead husks? Just doesn’t do that much for me. Frankly, it sounds like a lot of games I’ve already played.
I guess it’s a bit better than the name I came up with.
I have no idea what the KOTOR MMO will look like, but if I had to guess I would say that it will be an online massively-multiplayer roguelike, with ASCII graphics and optional tilesets, with hardcore permadeath and one gigantic server.
I was talking to a friend who hadn’t played DF yet, and this is the story I told to demonstrate the differences between Dwarf Fortress and, well, every other game that exists.
A common problem in Dwarf Fortress is pet overpopulation. Dwarves, it seems, are not keen to follow Bob Barker’s advice. I had a fortress that was going quite well, my dwarves happily churning out food, drink, and tradable goods all while hollowing out a masterwork of a sunken lair, including a ludicrously tall pit extending from the first level of the fortress down hundreds of feet where I could throw all my unwanted kobold junk; the only rub was that the game was chugging along at only a few frames per second. After a few moments of investigation I pinpointed the problem: literally hundreds of dogs and cats prowling about my fortress. Luckily, pets aren’t eating their dwarven masters’ food stores in the current version.
How do you solve a pet overpopulation problem? Like most problems in Dwarf Fortress, there are a number of possible solutions. The easiest, and most expedient for my fortress, was to throw all the dogs down the large pit I had constructed. My dwarves obliged with little resistance, of course. At least one hundred dogs and puppies met their grisly deaths at the bottom of that pit.
Chucking a bunch of unwanted pets into a nearly never-ending pit, while certainly cruel, is also pretty fun. And it’s something few games let you do. (Other options for pet removal include butchering, drowning, and flooding with magma). But the interesting part of Dwarf Fortress is that it remembers what happens, or rather your dwarves remember the events that transpire around them.
A good dwarven year later (maybe two), one of my dwarves became a master crafter. After going a bit loony and becoming obssessed with the idea of making a scepter out of rock, he constructed the scepter and engraved something very interesting on it: a picture of a dog. The dog was falling.
After telling him this, my friend let out what I can only describe as a squeal of surprise. For someone less knowledgeable about the boundaries of gaming, this sort of story may not come as a big surprise. But what other games do things like this? DF is ably done but I suspect it’s no technical marvel - if John Carmack wanted to figure out a way to program NPCs who make contextual, representative art I’m sure he could. It’s not the technical prowess, but rather the strength of imagination that sets DF apart.
Hinterland is out.
My initial impressions are positive, but I’ve only put about 45 minutes into the game so they are definitely initial. I like some of the more esoteric design decisions, like how you control only one character even though you are doing city-building, adventuring in a party, and lots of other things that usually allow you to control more than one person. It makes it feel very much like Diablo or (even more so) Depths of Peril.
You start out in your skeleton of a town which only has one building: your house. As time progresses visitors come to your town and you can offer to build them a house, which costs gold. Once they have a house in your town they can either stay in their building and help you that way (farmers make food, innkeeps bring in gold from visitors, etc.) or you can bring them out adventuring with you. The thing is, an adventuring character isn’t making you money/food/whatever, so there’s an interesting balancing act going on. There’s also a fame concept, where by the more creatures you kill / the more resources you acquire the more fame you gather and the more visitors are likely to want to set up shop. There’s also a King who sometimes makes demands, Raiders who attack your town, and some other stuff to juggle.
The graphics are one step above ugly – something more stylized might have been a better choice, but they get the job done and the game runs really well on my crappy laptop. The animations are pretty bad. Overall it’s a cool mix of sandbox and adventure – when you start the game it randomly loads up all the areas and monsters, and you can choose the length and difficulty of game that you want. Obviously I can’t make any sort of final statement about how good the game is, but it’s definitely interesting and something different (and at $19.99 the price is pretty reasonable).
As I play through Spore, I can’t help but think about all the things I wish they had done. It’s a great game, and I want more. I want the decisions you make in the editor to matter more in the game. I want more of the “interaction of verbs” that Will Wright mentioned in that first GDC talk. I want a more robust and evolved take on combat and movement in the creature phase. I want more interesting, or just more varied, creature behaviors. I just want more.
