youdiditwrong

Halo Wars

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 20:24:00 -0400

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.

Recalibrating Warcraft

Fri, 27 Mar 2009 18:05:27 -0400

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...

Fri, 27 Mar 2009 17:46:16 -0400

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

Halloween Fallout

Fri, 24 Oct 2008 16:14:47 -0400

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.

Star Wars: The Old Republic

Wed, 22 Oct 2008 15:51:36 -0400

I guess it’s a bit better than the name I came up with.

Massively Knights Multiplayer of the Online New Game Republic: KMotONGR: The wakening

Wed, 08 Oct 2008 13:46:02 -0400

It’s happening.

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.

What makes Dwarf Fortress different?

Fri, 03 Oct 2008 14:29:00 -0400

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 impressions

Wed, 01 Oct 2008 10:24:57 -0400

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).

The Department of Missed Opportunities

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 16:20:59 -0400

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.

New Dwarf Fortress is out

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 10:25:36 -0400

YES

Awesomecast

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 11:28:27 -0400

Gamersiwthjobs is one of the best gaming podcasts out there, and this week’s episode has a terrific discussion about, as they call it, the cross-pollination of pen-and-paper roleplaying and videogames. It’s well worth listening to, especially the part about the limits of MMORPGs and online gaming.

The most boring announcement ever

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 09:19:52 -0400

www.dragonage.bioware.com

Look, I’m going to be honest. Dragon Age sounds great. The pedigree is awesome. I love Bioware games. But jesus christ you have to do better than this. A video on SpikeTV? At 1:00 AM? Fucking 1:00 AM IN THE MORNING? I’m asleep then! Just put the damn video on your splash-page and be done with it.

Seriously… I mean, I fucking F5ed all day for this shit?

Also - Dragon Age: Origins? That’s your title? Is this game about a sweaty neard convention? Can one of the perks be +1 to deodorant?

Starcraft II looks really boring

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 17:05:00 -0400

From Blizzard’s FAQ on the SC2 website:

How will StarCraft II be different from StarCraft?

StarCraft II will run on a vibrant new 3D-graphics engine that will be capable of rendering beautiful landscapes as well as massive individual units and army sizes.

We’re also introducing a number of distinct new units to the Protoss, Terran, and Zerg, and even some of the familiar units that return in StarCraft II will have new tricks up their sleeves, which will give the game its own unique flavor.

In addition, Battle.net will be overhauled with some new and exciting features to enhance online play and competition, while the campaign will also offer some unique aspects for players who enjoy single-player content. We’ll have more details on all these aspects in the months to come.

I am so excited about these new 3D graphic things! And new units! Wee!

So basically SC2 is a glorified expansion pack. How fresh. I guess this post makes up for me defending Diablo III.

Is Blizzard too conservative?

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 17:25:00 -0400

In an otherwise laudatory post, Fallout 3 producer Ashely Cheng bemoans Blizzard’s decision to “stay on the conservative side of game design” with Diablo 3 and Starcraft 2. I think this is a pretty interesting assertion that deserves some exploration. Is Blizzard too conservative?

My immediate reaction is yes, Blizzard is too conservative. This was the first thing I thought when Starcraft 2 was unveiled, and I think most people would agree that whether SC2 is fun or not, Dawn of War 2 will likely be a far more innovative (and dare I say, interesting) product.

Blizzard is in a unique position: they are almost universally praised for their excellent games and their headquarters happens to be stationed directly above one of the largest money pits in the contiguous 48. Once propelled into action (and who knows what dark forces can move a behemoth such as Blizzard to begin production on another addictive goody), they make some of the best, most polished, and most fun games around. And everyone knows it.

To get that kind of reputation, however, you have to make great games. And when you make a great game, no one wants it to change. And thus, the paradox: you’re Blizzard; you have the resources to make your wildest dreams true, and yet you’re yoked to your franchises. Wild and brilliant design innovations are lurking in nearly every brain working at Blizzard, Inc., but those brains are chained to the past. After all, the past is where the moneyhats come from.

But I’m going to take the other side when it comes to Diablo III; the game looks like much more of the same on the surface, but I think there’s a lot of new and interesting things going on under the hood. Shacknews’s Nick Breckon has a great feature up about what we know so far about the game, and some of the information that’s been revealed is remarkably forward-looking.

One of the most interesting things is this:

A new “Adventure” system will power randomly generated scripted events. An example provided was an area the player would come across, such as an old abandoned house, that may have a story behind it and enemies to dispatch.

This strikes me as a huge, huge undertaking, but procedural quest generation are pretty clearly where the RPG genre will be moving soon, and it’s pretty awesome that Blizzard is taking the lead here. This is the kind of thing that Toady is currently doing in Dwarf Fortress and even in its current simple form it’s quite compelling.

Neither Diablo III nor Starcraft 2 are close to being released, so perhaps Ashely Cheng is right and Blizzard is being too conservative. My take on it, though, is that while Cheng is undeniably correct about SC2, Diablo III may end up containing some very innovative elements.

Is Ninja Gaiden 2 Tomb Raider (with more blood)?

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 16:04:00 -0400

I’ve been playing Ninja Gaiden 2, which is a very good game ( so far, at least ), and it’s occured to me that it’s really engaging not only my action gamer side of the brain but also my explorer side. The exploration is kind of a meta-game - NG2’s geography is almost entirely linear, and while there are lots of nice vistas there is rarely any discovery in terms of landscape - and this meta-game emerges as an exploration of behavior.

And there’s ninjas, so we’re talking extremely violent behavior.

Exploration of adversary behavior is something that’s been present in games, and particularly the adventure and fighting genres, for a long time. It started with sidescrollers like Mega Man and the original Ninja Gaiden, where enemies followed dependable and often limited patterns, with bosses exhibiting behavior that was somewhat more complex. So in this way, NG2 is a throwback.

What differentiates the game from its earlier brethren, and this was present in the XBox game as well, although not quite to this degree, is that nearly every enemey has some sort of interesting behavioral quirk to discover. It’s this aspect of the game more than any other that makes me interested in the series. And, tangentially, makes it the most interesting modern action game out there for me.

Also, ninja dogs that throw knives at you. That’s funny.

It occurs to me that this kind of interesting adversary behavior is something that is lacking in a lot of other genres - especially RPGs. Japanese ones tend to do this a little bit better, but one thing that whole genre could get better at, and as a consequence become more interesting, is investing more in interesting artificial intelligence for baddies.

A nugget of Dragon Age info

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 17:28:00 -0400

Remember Dragon Age, Bioware’s gritty PC-exclusive take on fantasy roleplaying? It’s okay if you don’t, because we haven’t heard anything about it for quite awhile, but there’s a tiny bit about it in a Sonic RPG interview up at Gamasutra:

Did you adapt the BioWare dialogue tool? I saw it demonstrated at Austin GDC.

MD: We’re actually not using the one that was used for Mass Effect, because the Mass Effect one is really designed to do cinematic conversations. This is moving away, because it’s not really practical for us to do cinematic conversations, so we’re using a version of the dialogue tool that was developed for Dragon Age, where it’s able to deal with more traditional style of storytelling.

Now, Dragon Age has since layered on something like what Mass Effect has, in order to tell a much more cinematic story, but we don’t need that here, so we’ve got a traditional BioWare-style conversation system without the additional trappings of a complicated cinematic system.

It’s not at all surprising that Dragon Age is using Mass Effect’s awesome conversation interface, because it ruled. If I worked at Bioware that thing would be on everything from the vending machines to the elevators. But it’s nice to know that things are still progressing.

Soren Johnson vs. Jeff Green

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 09:54:56 -0400

Here is a great Soren Johnson interview on 1up, where he talks about Spore, the PC Market, and other things.

In some ways I’m still very unclear about the “game” part of Spore. Obviously there’s a game in there, but how constrained will it be? Will the constraints necessary for the game thematically detract from the freedom of the editor, or will they work well together?

Is Spore hot coffee waiting to spill?

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 16:53:00 -0400

People are already creating amazing things with the Spore creature creator (I realise this isn’t the best example of something amazing, but damn it I loved that game), stuff that probably even the most forward-thinking smartey-pants at Maxis never dreamed of.

People are also, of course, making penis monsters and walking, yelping goatsecx dolls. And, trust me, creations that are far more vile.

Is this going to be an issue? The creator is so wide open that, to anyone in the know at least, it won’t seem like a big deal - it would be like taking Autodesk to task for a creation in 3DS Max - but will the world at large, and I mean the press here, mostly, see it that way?

Basically what I’m saying is, when a nutty political blog starts posting pictures of the Spore creature that’s a black man hanging from a tree, are people going to be outraged?

Sporations

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 08:37:00 -0400

So the Spore Creature Creator is out, and everyone is playing Dr. Frankenstein. Here are some of my favorites so far:

First of all, one of mine - the Sharkomonster. That .png at the bottom, by the way, is all you need to load up Mr. Sharkomonster into your own Creature Creator:

One thing that becomes immediately apparent when messing around with Spore is that making cute monsters (ala Monsters Inc.) is pretty easy, especially with the googly eyes. The stark, biological realism of the Spore shown at GDC in 2005 seems to be mostly gone.

I took a bike ride this weekend. It had stormed the previous night, and one section of the bike path...

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 14:10:47 -0400

I took a bike ride this weekend. It had stormed the previous night, and one section of the bike path was covered in mud at least an inch high. When I saw it, I briefly panicked; I’m not very skilled as a rider, and I wasn’t sure if I should push through the thick muddy path, which might lead to a sliding bike and getting very muddy as I fell into the brown muck, or if I should get off my bike and walk it through(riding on the nearby grass was not an option, as it was probably worse than the path). I decided to bike through, and after a few seconds recognized that I had made a poor decision: my tires picked up large globules of mud and embedded them into the treads, my bike began to swerve as it lost traction, and I was getting very muddy. I changed my mind and walked my bike off the path. My shoes nearly came off my feet as I pulled myself over the muddy trail.

Both I and my bike were covered in mud. It was caked all over the bike – in the brakes, the spokes, the chain – it sprayed all about me as I rode on further, staining my jeans and backpack in brown inkblot.

I’ve never been much of an outdoors person, but I found the experience immensely satisfying. Sometimes it’s fun to get dirty: a lesson many kids learn when they’re four, but apparently I forgot. And not only that, but the interaction of my bike in the mud and water, the way it caked onto the frame, the spray of it as the moving parts of my bike repeatedly careened against the buildup, it all made me think of how far games still have to go in terms of simulating something that even faintly approximates the complex interactions of physical objects in the real world.

This was an exciting revelation. The truth is that games don’t model things all that realistically right now, especially when it comes to physical bodies of different composition meeting up in space. Think about it: there’s no processor or supercomputer on Earth that could reliably model the elaborate back and forth of interactions that occurred on my bike ride. But these kinds of things will be modeled, maybe not now, maybe not in the next ten years, but it will happen. That’s exciting, especially because of what it means for gaming.

Perfect facsimiles of the real world aren’t necessary to have fun or to make a good game – it’s been proven over and over that complexity does not necessarily equate to better games. But what it does do is open up possibilities, much in the way that the steadily growing trend of games based entirely around physics have changed the ways we think of games and gameplay. The future is bright. I’m excited.