Curmudgeon Gamer

Review: Defender of the Crown (GBA)

2008-05-15T11:27:00.003-04:00

For $3, I couldn't pass up a used copy of Defender of the Crown for the GBA. The classic game I'd loved as a youngster, now in handheld form? Brilliant.

I'm happy to say that the nostalgia comes through nearly unspoiled. The graphics remind me of the Amiga version whose screenshots I'd envied back when I played the Commodore 64 version until the disk drive wore slam out. The music is more modern, and I think I actually prefer the SID version.

As for gameplay, it's exactly the same. You play a little RISK-like strategery, claiming land and building an army. Occasionally you raid castles, try to rescue a damsel, or joust at a tournament. (Ok, there is something new in the tournament. I don't recall ever bashing my opponent in a one-on-one mace battle.) Ultimately, you want to take over the entire country and claim the crown.

The random setbacks (losing a territory, money, or sabotaged catapults) feel a little too frequent for my tastes. And the swordfighting I found to be frustratingly hard. In the original there were only two opponents, now there are ... four? Forget it, I'll stay a bachelor until I'm king. Also, how the heck does jousting work? It seems completely random to me.

I've seen some reviews complain that this game could have used some extras. Ok, sure, paying full price I can understand the disappointment. On the other hand, it makes a perfect cheap game that is way easier to pull out and play than my Commodore 128 system.

(Or, you could just play the official versions online. For essentially free.)

Mirror's Edge Teardown

2008-05-15T10:49:00.004-04:00

Mirror's Edge, a new title from Electronic Arts, looks really amazing to me. I think its new take on the parkour action genre has the potential to make Ubisoft's upcoming Prince of Persia game look stale. (Caveat: We've not seen the new PoP, so we can come back and compare once Ubisoft's game is shown.) When I look at the games I've really enjoyed in the past couple of years, they're mostly third-person action games like Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, Tomb Raider: Anniversary, Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, and the God of War series. I hope Mirror's Edge will be a fresh title to add to that list.

Anyway, the official trailer is a lot of fun to watch, and even more fun is this teardown of the trailer by GameTrailers.

Via Rock, Paper, Shotgun.

The words I wish I got to define

2008-05-15T03:37:00.003-04:00

So, a little while ago I posted a query on Curmudgeon Gamer, namely What is Ludology? This was an honest question, but asked with ulterior motives (more on that later). And the answers I got were perfectly reasonable.

But then I had to get all fancy-pants and search the Web. As always, big mistake. Not accidental porn big, but big.

At this point, I will digress by explaining those ulterior motives.

When I was young and naive, I came across a brilliantly excitingly named branch of mathematics called "Game Theory". Naturally I said to myself, "holy crap! Pretty darn smart of me to become a mathematician -- now I'll get to play games for a living!"

In case you aren't aware, "Game Theory" is a bait-and-switch ruse right up there with "Greenland". Somehow they managed to take the field of strategic game-playing and restrict it only to games no one would ever want to play. (Apparently there was some analysis of actual games in there at the beginning, but that was swiftly excised, lest anyone actually enjoy themselves.) Even worse, it turns out Game Theory is actually useful in economics, so there are hundreds of books on super-boring "Game Theory" that are actually not about games at all, just taunting me.

Now, as time went on, my interest in games has actually increased, and I desperately want to make a living from analyzing and studying (and playing) games. Real games, that are fun. But I had learned that "Game Theory" was not that.

So while explicitly I was asking "What is ludology?", implicitly I was pleading "Ludology is the immensely fun and cool analysis and study (and play) of games, right? And someone will pay me to be a ludologist?" I mean, how could it not be? "Ludo" is from the Latin for game (ludus), and "-ology" means "study of", so ludology must mean study of games, which is what I desperately want an official legitimate-type word for, right? (Put your hands down, eager beavers -- we'll get to it!)

Now let's return to that horrible "search the Web" idea.

It turns out "ludology" is in fact a pretty widely used term in the field of "game studies", which is a catchall term which presumably includes analysis of the play of games, but also refers to things like game sociology, game criticism & history, game computer science, and pretty much anything that some academic wants to publish that refers to a game. (How game studies should relate to the design of actual games is a topic of some debate.)

But of course ludology doesn't mean what I want it to mean. Oh no. Ludology is both a field and an ideological position, in opposition to the field/ideological position of narratology. Narratology is meant to encompass the study of essentially anything with a story, abstracted from its medium (so movies and books and soap operas and arguably videogames all use narratives, and can all be understood under the narratology umbrella). Ludology pushes back, saying that games are fundamentally _not_ just narratives. Just like narratives occur in different media, so do games (board games, card games, tv game shows, videogames, etc.) and instead of just lumping them in with the narratives, the ludologists say, the play and rule elements of games set them apart and they should have their own umbrella field that discusses the nature of games (abstracted from the medium) the same way narratology treats narratives. And that field is ludology. (The perspectives with horrible -ology names doesn't necessarily stop there: here's an article promoting a "paradigmological" approach.)

While the five word definition of "ludology" is still "analysis and study of games", the meaning behind that is very different from what _I_ was talking about. It asserts a political standpoint (games aren't narratives), and because of that standpoint it is necessarily chiefly concerned with the ontology of games, which is a fancy way to say trying to answer the question "what is a game?" Furthermore, the conflict between ludology and narratology as disciplines pulls them both further away from usefully relating to actual games, which of course require both gameplay and story.)

I understand that any "-ology" needs to make some effort addressing what they're all about, but that's Chapter One of the Intro to -ology book. (Remember reading the "What is Life?" section of your biology book?) The rest is the interesting stuff. You don't take archaeology and spend the whole time learning about "what is old stuff? what makes this the old stuff we study and that the old stuff we don't study?"

Oh, and am I the only one who's annoyed by taking a random word and putting "-ology" at the end of it? "Narratology" is obviously made up, and the natural counterpart "gameology" is equally stupid (no offense intended). But who thought digging up a Latin word to put before the (Greek) -ology would make it more acceptable?

Thankfully, their failing is my last shot. Someone stole Game Theory, Ludology seemed like a good idea but someone stole that too. However, "pediology" would be more consistently Greek -- although people might think it has to do with studying children and/or feet ("paidia", I am told, means "a childish game or amusement"). Equally confusing would be "scholeology", but perhaps even more appropriate: according to footnote 7 on page 5 of this paper (PDF link), the Latin ludus might have been used as a conscious parallel to the Greek schole, which referred both to leisure time and to school.

So, I coined it, I get to define it: I'm a scholeologist, which means that I analyze and study forms of games and game rule systems, both in terms of objective strategies and results and in terms of entertainment value and human-game interaction. I don't study the role of games in society or the society of gamers (what I would call game anthropology), although we might have useful things to say to each other; and I don't study games solely as vehicles for learning and cognition, although that's exactly what I'll tell the funding bodies when I apply for grants, if they'll buy it.

There might be ludologists who would say what I do is ludology (certainly it's not narratology -- I plan to never use the word "Aristotelian" again, and they seem to like it), and maybe I'll come around, but for the moment it sounds too political and "the nature of game-ness" for me. If the hypothesis "the positive effects of rubber-banding such as in Mario Kart for casual players can be achieved with less negative impressions from competitive players if more information is hidden from the players" isn't ludology, then I'm happy to make it scholeology. (I don't know if it's a true hypothesis or not -- possible future paper? :) )

Just in case there aren't enough links in this post, and/or you got here because of a conjunction of search terms, you might want a summary bibliography of books from various sides of game studies. For that, check out this excerpt from yet another book.

NYT Crosswords vs CrossworDS

2008-05-14T06:31:00.005-04:00

It's possible to take it for granted these days that, if it's a casual kind of game made for the DS and it's not published by Nintendo, then it's a sucky piece of trashware produced solely to cash in on the system's huge user base. And conversely, that Nintendo has produced a similar game that is much better.

That had been the case with Nintendogs (as opposed to Catz, Dogz, Horsez, and the horrifying "Babyz"), with the severely underrated Clubhouse Games, with the two Brain Age games... heck, the Sudoku applet in Brain Age is so clearly better than every other version of the puzzle on the DS that it brings one to a kind of despair. Why is Nintendo's Sudoku minigame so well-made when others' full Sudoku applications are so crappy? Putting these things together is not brain surgery. It's enough to make one wonder if Nintendo doesn't have a patent on non-stupid number grid entry on portable gaming computers (USPTO # 951827364).*

It would be easy to assume that Nintendo's version would be better than Majesco's. It is not, by a long shot.

From looking at the games, initial impressions would seem to indicate the usual first-party upstaging. Crossword DS has a brilliant interface nearly as good as Brain Age Sudoku, and with better character recognition despite having 16 more glyphs to distinguish. It's not obvious at first that Majesco's game HAS character recognition. Furthermore, that game's color schemes range an odious gamut from ugly to unreadable, while Nintendo notices that a crossword game that's not black boxes on white squares is a slight against the memory of Arthur Wynne.

Majesco's game commits a few other grave offenses, although they're only obvious compared to Nintendo's interface. NYT Crosswords shows only Across or Down clues at a time; Crosswords DS shows them both at once. NYT uses a thin-stemmed, seedy newsprint typeface for clues and what looks like hateful Comic Sans for entered letters; Crosswords DS uses sharp, thick-lined sans-serif characters for both. NYT uses annoying button assignments that make it far too easy to accidentally receive an irrevocable hint, and only offers one type of hint at that; Crosswords DS uses the book orientation popularized by Brain Age, ignores button presses in favor of a visual interface, and will give stuck players the option of seeing a single letter, a whole word, or even providing alternate, easier clues, ala GAMES Magazine's World's Most Ornery Crosswords. And while both programs offer more than a thousand puzzles, Crosswords DS also provides Word Search puzzles and Anagrams.

And yet, of the two, despite Nintendo's typical meticulous attention to usability, their product is far inferior where it counts. Ultimately, in a collection of crosswords, the quality of the puzzles is
paramount. The New York Times is just about the most respected source of puzzles out there, and Majesco's inclusion of several years of their output shows that, while they may not be the best at putting together an interface, they care about the puzzles themselves. And once gotten used to, the interface isn't really so bad.

The handwriting recognition particularly turns out to be pretty good when used, even if the drawing area is restricted to a small input box. The ugliness of the interface can be remedied by entering a code. This essential code is "up up down down B B Y Y," and instead of being hidden away on GameFAQs, it should be printed in large, boldface type on the front of the very box, just beneath the title. Thankfully, once entered it's saved to the game file, allowing players to forget the low-contrast sins of the original color scheme.

While NYT Crosswords features years of top-notch puzzles, ranging in difficulty from a relaxing pastime to uncommonly challenging, Crosswords DS's puzzles... well, to be honest, I don't really know how hard they become. You see, in the same way that Brain Age Sudoku starts out with only a selection of low and medium-difficulty puzzles available and a bunch more that must be unlocked, Crosswords DS also forces players to begin with easier puzzles before letting him tackle harder ones.

This wouldn't be so bad, except that the easy puzzles are grievously simple! We're talking 4x4 grids here, progressing up to 11x11 for the harder ones available at first. You should know that these puzzles are included in the game's puzzle count, so when the back of the box says over 1,000 puzzles, a good percentage of them is this slight fare. Even the New York Times Monday puzzles, the easiest of the lot in Majesco's title, are full-sized grids.

Furthermore, while the NYT clues are filled with the wit and cunning for which the Times crosswords are famous, Nintendo's clues honestly read like something better suited for elementary school students. Fill-in-the-blank clues are over-common, as well as slipshod "partial word" clues along the lines of "the farmer in the d _ _ _". While it's possible, should the player persevere through the featherweight stuff to get to the harder puzzles, that the package redeems itself, it is unlikely to match the New York Times' Will Shortz-edited output.

Yet even one of the subgames in Nintendo's package fall prey to this kind of shoddyness. The very first Anagrams puzzle accepts, and in fact requires, "lase," which is a real if obscure word defined by Answers.com in regards to lasers, yet rejects "ale." The Word Searches seem to be okay, although they are hampered by the fact that they're word searches, the decaffeinated coffee of word puzzles.

Were this a perfect world, or at least one less encumbered by exclusive licensing, we would have a game that combined Nintendo's wonderful interface with Majesco's formidable puzzle assortment. It's possible that the problems with Nintendo's game has to do with them trying to play to both kid and adult audiences, which would explain the near-beer clues and word search inclusion. I usually dispute claims that Nintendo's efforts to keep most of their games friendly to children ruins them for adults. For insecure adults, maybe. But in this case it certainly has.

* Don't look that number up; it's a joke.

Videogames -- still not evil

2008-05-13T09:51:00.003-04:00

Just a little link to direct your panicked parent friends to: in what must be a surprise to everyone, a big 'spensive study found no evidence that violent video games make kids violent. Who'da thunk it?

Chains of Olympus for PS2 for Xmas '08

2008-05-08T09:24:00.003-04:00

This isn't an announcement, but a prediction. Provided the porting of Daxter from the PSP to the PS2 is true (see here, originally seen here), then Sony has to be seriously considering porting God of War: Chains of Olympus to the PS2 as well. Keep in mind that both Daxter and God of War on the PSP share some engine code, so a port of the former would accelerate a port of the latter.

According to NPD's figures, Chains of Olympus sold well over 300,000 copies in its first month on the market. A PS2 version would easily sell a million and would complement a $99 PS2 model quite well.

Given that I completed the PSP game twice (something I almost never do for long-form action games), I'd probably end up picking up the PS2 port. So make that a million copies, plus one.

In an ideal world, Sony would also get someone to port the game to the PS3 and sell it for $15 on PSN. But this is Sony we're talking about, so it will never happen.

Giving It Away (or: Why the State of North Carolina now owns a lot more videogames)

2008-05-05T20:27:00.004-04:00

My alma mater, NCSU, has a videogame collection. What they have covers newer systems and mostly popular games. So when they sent out requests for more games recently, I responded.

Last week I gave nearly every Atari 2600 and Atari 7800 game that I own to them. In total 120 games, many with boxes and manuals, which I've listed below for the curious.

There are some items there that are probably worth a few dollars. I don't keep up with the scene any more, so I don't know how much a Limited Edition Okie Dokie cartridge goes for nowadays. (Mine looked like this, but with #49 on it.) Nor how much a special edition of Qb (#93) fetches on eBay, complete in wood box with source listing and the original broken version circuit boards. When I was collecting, it was a big deal to get games like Track & Field, KLAX (2600, boxed), and Road Runner. I suspect demand is lower today, but at least NCSU has them without the fuss.

I only regret that I sold my two Swordquest Waterworld cartridges (both found in the wild, one with instructions and comic) and Motorodeo and way back when. I even had a Shuttle Oribter -- I wish I could have given that to NCSU too, but it was long ago liquidated.

In the coming years, I plan to donate the rest of my collection -- NES, Genesis, SNES, Jaguar, Lynx, PlayStation, Dreamcast, PlayStation 2. Those later systems will be more difficult, surprisingly. Whereas I spent a lot of time collecting Atari games with which I had little emotional connection, it's quite another thing to think of donating my original copy of Tomb Raider for the PS1 or my copy of Metal Gear Solid 3 for the PlayStation 2. [Note: Originally the word "selling" was used above. I meant "donating", as the text now reflects. The items I've given to NCSU were donated, and I declined offers of money to "defray costs" of transporting the items to Raleigh in person.]

I'm not sure on a timeframe, but my dwindling free time makes having this library in my home less desirable. And, I can visit it any time I want. There is even talk of some public events, to which I would be an invited guest. Neat.

Oh, and I did keep one Atari 2600 cartridge. Which one? The Stellalist Beta Cartridge. It's special twice over: my dear friend, Ruffin, gave it to me and it has code on it that I wrote. As far as I know it's not available anymore.

If you're interested in what I just gave away, just click here to see the inventory sheet.

Video game canons and flesh colored band-aids

2008-05-01T11:46:00.001-04:00

I was obviously asleep when the announcement was made that this stab at a video game canon was announced last year:

Mr. Lowood and the four members of his committee — the game designers Warren Spector and Steve Meretzky; Matteo Bittanti, an academic researcher; and Christopher Grant, a game journalist — announced their list of the 10 most important video games of all time:

Okay, I can pick at the list. Anybody can pick out a list. Did they screw up? Sure. Where's KABOOM!? (kidding on that one -- for now)

What concerns me is that these guys are, well, just that. All white guys. Sure, it's a pretty good crosssection of dark haired white guys. There's a short one. One that's not ashamed of his poor vision. Two -- no, on second glance, three -- major facial hair decisions. Still, as humans go, it's a pretty diversity challenged group on its face, har har.

What else unites the Superfriends of Ludological Canonization? That they all decided not to make their rationalizations for picking these ten easily Googleable [by me].

In any event, even if white guys too largely made the games and white guys too largely play/ed the games, is that really a good reason that white guys should pick the games? I imagine these guys would likely find my dimestore critique here uncontroverstial, but then why not branch out before announcing your list at the Game Developers' Conference and posing for the NY Freakin' Register of the US Times?

Insert smilie.

GTA4 lockups: what did reviewers play?

2008-04-29T21:21:00.002-04:00

I let my 60Gb PS3 install GTA4 tonight while I fixed dinner. When I checked on it later, it had run through the intro and locked up after giving control over to the player. (I wasn't there, so I didn't see it happen.) Apparently lockups are happening with some regularity to a lot of players and not just on PS3.

The whole situation reminds me of how Champions of Norrath on the PS2 locked up for a fair number of consumers, but no reviewers mentioned it. Seemed odd to me at the time and I did some asking around to find out why.

Turns out reviewers didn't review the same kind of disc sold in stores. One reviewer told me he reviewed Champs o' Norrath on two single-layer DVDs as opposed to the dual-layer DVDs sold to us commoners.

Makes me wonder if the same thing happened here. The reviews are pretty much all pegging the 10 on the review-o-meter, but I haven't heard about the reviews talking about lockups like folks are seeing on normal systems. If I had the time, I'd start asking around -- someone should.

Meanwhile, I hard reset my PS3 and played about 15 minutes up to the first save point. So far so good. Now if I only had time to play more, but real life has me elsewhere. Ah well.

Ludicrous Ludology

2008-04-27T09:02:00.004-04:00

From Ruffin below:

This pseudo-academic tripe gives every ludologist a bad name.

Without disagreeing with Ruffin on this point (see End of the World predictions in comments to that post), I fear that most people who've heard the word think that ludology is by definition "pseudo-academic tripe".

I solicit your considered opinions: should there be ludology (or, if you think that's too high-falutin' a term, "game studies" or "game analysis" or "game commentary and criticism")? If it isn't tripe, what is it? What makes good ludology? Is it essentially the same as movie criticism for games? Or is it mathematical "game theory" applied to real games?

I'm sure there's commentary about this throughout the web (ludology.org as well as gamasutra spring to mind), but they're a bunch of yahoos. What do the curmudgeons think?

Hidden message in Metal Gear Online! (not really)

2008-04-27T00:13:00.003-04:00

This help screen for entering your avatar's name in Metal Gear Online is surely a cryptic hint to the mysteries of Metal Gear Solid 4.
Or it could just be weird programming or some dirty words I never learned. Still, made me laugh.

Review: Impossible Mission (NDS)

2008-04-25T13:18:00.004-04:00

I just finished a game I never finished almost a quarter century ago: Impossible Mission. My original experience was with a pirated copy (yes, pirated) on the Commodore 64. I just finished it on the Nintendo DS. Frankly, it's a little depressing.

Here's the gist of the game: collect pieces of punchcard keys from rooms guarded by lethal robots and then make it to a special room to stop a nuclear weapon launch. You can run, jump, search for keys, and use the computer terminals to reset lifts and disable the robots temporarily.

First, the very fact that this game is still being sold -- practically unchanged -- is alarming. I understand nostalgia, it's my personal excuse for playing this game, but how can this game be on store shelves in this day and age? My guess is that it's just simple enough to appeal to the casual Nintendo DS player. After all, the game involves only a few platform-mechanics in several barely-randomized rooms and some 30-odd puzzle pieces to find.

Second, the game is easier for everyone now because you can save at practically any moment and then reload later. Messed up a jump and lost 10 minutes off the countdown? No problem. Reload that save and it's like it never happened. You can (and I did) save-crawl the game to completion.

Additionally, the only novelty aside from the save game option, is a set of improved graphics. Purely cosmetic. The game even offers the option of playing with the original 8-bit graphics, which are strikingly neon-looking. I guess I've become accustomed to "realistic" graphics after all this time.

Finally, after all these years, I'm disappointed in the end-sequence. I thought there might be something significant to facing the madman, but here it's just a cut scene. SPOILER: He presses the button to launch the missile and you press another one to stop it. What drama! END SPOILER.

For $10, Impossible Mission for the Nintendo DS isn't bad. I'll settle for the comfort of striking this title off my list of uncompleted games.

Echochrome and the hobbled PSP

2008-04-23T20:35:00.004-04:00

I'm getting echochrome tomorrow. Reading the Sony blog about it, I continue to be amazed at garbage like this:

And for the PSP version, you can share the levels you create with other people in your area via wireless Ad Hoc. Cool, right?!?

Sorry, Sony, but Game 3.0 -- your word, not mine -- was really supposed to be about sharing your work YouTube-like. No one gives a flying flip about sharing data via ad hod wireless. No one.

Instead of insulting our intelligence, how about spend more time implementing a serious network service for the PSP? It's just embarrassing, three years after you launch a fine piece of hardware like the PSP, to still be stumbling on something so simple as this.

Gamasutra, don't BS me with RPGs, please

2008-04-21T17:27:00.004-04:00

From Gamasutra:

In classic role playing game (RPG) design, there are commonly three primary character archetypes: tank, DPS ("Damage Per Second"), and healer. These archetypes have their roots in old-school pen and paper RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons, and were carried forward into early single player RPGs like Ultima and then into MMOs.

I sure love when somebody looks at the state of things now, mentions a few precursors, and then writes some revisionist history, 1984 style. We have always been at war with Eurasia, as Matt likes to say.

What absolute bunk. What archetype is the ninja-jester-lumberjack from Ultima, again? And thieves in D&D and AD&D didn't exactly work like rogues and druid cat form in WoW today. There was no sustained "DPS". These alternative classes, even races, performed alternative tasks. Can we find a secret door? Call the elf. Lost underground? Hello, dwarf. Need to pick a lock? Call the thief. But when it was melee time, did the thief stick around? Heck no; s/he RAN. There were similar issues -- protect the magic-user squishie, bring in the cleric to heal the ranger, etc -- but these don't feel like they do in WoW. To heal in D&D, you had to back out of battle and head someplace safe. In WoW, in contrast, the healer is constantly dropping spells. And what's the difference between an elf and a Tauren druid? Hrm, one stomps and the other can make itself invisible when it's drinking to restore mana. Oh yea, and one's a cow. What completely different playstyles!!!

Let me put it more succinctly. There was no "threat" in D&D. Threat is, in a nutshell, the formula that makes monsters in WoW keep attacking whatever has caused them the most damage. If your tank keeps wailing, your warlock can keep railing. You have to be careful not to out-damage a monster if you're not a tank, else the monster makes a beeline for you. Keep your damage below the tanks' (again, oversimplification, but it's close), and it's as if you don't exist. Dungeon Masters tended to be a little less, well, formulaic.

Let me add to my succinctness... There were no quests in D&D. Oh sure, you had something random driving the plot, but tell me which one has a better, more memorable plot, Blackrock Depths or Ravenloft (and here I mean I6 in particular)? Why is that, exactly?

The difference between D&D and WoW is that the first is wide open. WoW doesn't copy archetypes; it's D&D on rails. WoW dumbs down role-playing to the point that it's more checkboxes than imagination (see my last post on plot again).

Ultima Online is much closer to D&D than WoW. There's no real class structure at all, which is what I was getting at by referencing the ever-popular "ninja-jester-lumberjack" crack from Worst Ninja's UO log. Obviously this gamasutra author, Mr. Hopson, is more interested in furthering WoW-specific commentary than treating each game on its on terms.

In any event, there was never any "difficult to design" hybrid issue for D&D. The players made hybrids out of every class to a degree. It's called role playing. That someone could now re-imagine D&D as such a close cousin of WoW should frighten those that like the "RP" in MMORPG. What a bunch of bunk.

(The "economic model" approach to party dynamics was about as impressive as the early statement I lambast, above. I'd be more interested in hearing how party dynamics and character creation follows the food pyramid. It'd be original, at least. OH, wow, everything works like money?!! Are you kidding me? This pseudo-academic tripe gives every ludologist a bad name.)

EVE Online expansion based on a novel, an Elite idea.

2008-04-19T20:43:00.002-04:00

This from an interview on the WarCry Network about EVE Online's expansion:

The title of the next expansion - revealed here for the first time - will be 'The Empyrean Age,' the same as the EVE novel by Tony Gonzalez also slated for the summer. The reason is simple, this is the first EVE Online expansion where the story of the game and its universe will play a key role, a lot of it based off the novel.

That sound familiar? How about The Dark Wheel, released with Braben & Bell's Elite years ago. I'm not sure if I've ever read all of mine (though you can read it all right here), but it was in there to try and create a little plot to go with the randomly created planet names.

I've always wondered about plot in MMORPGs. In WoW, there's really no requirement to understand the plot of your quests nor does Blizzard create the quests so that you have to learn it, which bugs me. "Why am I killing X of Y and giving you N Zs from their loot, again?" In UO, you were, for the most part, supposed to create your own. I hope EVE pulls it off, even if you don't bother to read the latest scifi space trading [almost] pack-in novel.

Words You Are Not Allowed To Use In Your Game

2008-04-18T10:35:00.003-04:00

Including all cognates, and especially if it's a fantasy of science fiction game. No exceptions except as given.

Corruption

Tainted

Chaos (RPGs may use "chaotic" to refer to alignment only)

Darkness

Genetic

Evolution

Memory

Absolution

In the title, all pretentious musical terminology, for example:
Rondo

And last, but most especially:
Sephiroth

Karoshi 1 & 2

2008-04-14T22:28:00.003-04:00

I don't laugh out loud at games very often, but I laughed pretty heartily at several of the levels in this pair of games, Karoshi and Karoshi 2.0.

Hints: the mouse can be used on some levels (look for your mouse pointer to become visible) and you will have to think outside the normal rules of games in several cases. Way outside.

I got through the first one no problem. Some of the stuff in 2.0 is just wicked, so here are some hints.

Pinball Hall of Fame: The Williams Collection (Wii version)

2008-04-08T00:58:00.004-04:00

Having been disappointed by the previous entry in the series, the Gottlieb Pinball Hall of Fame, mostly because the included games didn't click with me, this one was bound to be a winner. Williams pinballs just seemed deeper than Gottleib pinball tables from similar years. Overall, the new package is extremely good, possibly the best collection of virtual pinball tables on the market. The package falls short of perfection in a couple of areas, but that doesn't tarnish much of the sheer awesomeness to be found on this disk unless you're an enthusiast.

Just to get the issues about tables that are "exclusive" to one system or another out of the way, these are the games in the Wii version: Black Knight, Firepower, Funhouse, Gorgar, Pin*Bot, Space Shuttle, Taxi, Whirlwind, Jive Time and Sorcerer.

They are all unlocked at first, but only some are available in "free play." A new file begins with 20 tokens, and more are earned for earning replays and specials, making matches after games, and completing "challenges," special tasks available on each board. Playing a non-free table costs one token per game, per player. Unlocking a table for freeplay costs 100. It sounds restrictive, but enough good tables are free to start with, and enough tokens are granted for completing challenges (many of which are harder to avoid earning), that even terrible players should have plenty of tokens. Further, completing all the basic challenges on a table awards one freeplay unlock on the table of the player's chosing, as well as making available a special set of harder, "wizard" challenges.

The games, as mentioned, are much more interesting to us from a gameplay standpoint, as opposed to just historical interest, than the Gottlieb collection. In particular, four of the tables, Pin*Bot, Taxi, Whirlwind and Funhouse, came at the lead-end of the 90s pinball boom. Whirlwind and Funhouse were both designed by the designer of classic games Addams Family Pinball and Twilight Zone (and they show -- Pat Lawlor many certain trademark ideas from these tables in lots of his other games). Funhouse in particular is a gem, showing off a lot of the panache with which Bally/Williams pinball would use to win over players a couple of years later. Whirlwind's infamous spinning sandpaper disks are just as maddening, but not moreso, as on a real table, and that's an accomplishment. Many of the other games are also entertaining in their way, mostly except for Jive Time, which doesn't hold up well for players who grew up playing 90s pinball.

Best of all, the play itself seems to be scrupulously accurate. The game somehow avoids falling prey to the problem that nearly all video pinball suffers from, namely, that some shots are pretty much impossible to make because pinball relies on timing more strict than the game's framerate, meaning that some shots cannot be made when the ball comes down a flipper inlane because its velocity isn't synced right with the frame rate to enable those shots to be made. Well that might not be totally accurate, but that's how I conceptualize the problem; the result is that , in many other games, some shots that should be easy are maddeningly difficult when they shouldn't be. The emulation in this package is exceptionally good about this, meaning I was able to hit both the center ramp in Whirlwind and the Extra Ball target from the left inlane, two shots that are separated on the board by just a wall. That kind of fidelity to player timing would be above the call of duty in any other game, but in a package of pinball tables, it's downright essential.

That's the good, and what a lot of it there is. But there's still some bad to get out there. Let's get it over with.

Wii controls. Overall the flipper controls, using the triggers on the Nunchuck and the Wii Remote, are very good. By letting the player control one button with each hand, the game feels that much closer to real pinball. Motion controls, on the other hand, are a bit iffier. Players used to moving their hands as they play Wii games will have to be careful not to accidentally nudge the table as they play! I have yet to accidentally tilt the machine, but neither have I successfully been able to use a nudge in a way that feels analogous to shoving a real table. It's a great idea, but the technology isn't there yet.

Ball jumping. Twice I've managed, somehow, to cause the ball to skip through the playfield wall that leads to the flipper, sending it directly down into the drain. It's true that one of the times the ball had enough horizontal momentum that it skipped right up the outlane and back out onto the playfield (!), but it was still disconcerting. It may have done with one of those accidental nudges I mentioned, but unless there was an earthquake I fail to see how the ball could completely jump a wall like that in real life.

Incomplete respect paid to the tables. Yeah, hard to believe I'm leveling this charge.
And for the most part, the play is great. But for before the game starts, and after it finishes, the software doesn't care at all. Some of these games have somewhat entertaining attract modes, match displays and high score entry routines, but for some bizarre reason the developers figured they'd use their own super-lame UI elements for all these things. This is most shameful in Funhouse, which does play the High Score music and even plays the game's victory lightshow in time with it behind the ugly initial entry window, but leaves out such details as Rudy's congratulations to the player, and kills the Game Over music and lightshow dead in favor of the game's painfully generic rock soundtrack the moment play ends. The failure to use the games' own match routines and displays, in favor of a stupid little stop-the-number minigame, is particularly galling. Yeah, there's an aspect of Get Off My Lawn-ism in my complaints here, but for a package that seemingly prides itself on fidelity, and takes its name from the ever-lovin', blue-eyed Pinball Hall of Fame, to neglect something like this is kind of shameful.

But most players, I suspect, won't care about those things. The fact remains that this may be the best pinball compilation ever made. It's amazing, but in nearly all cases, tables made specifically for video pinball turn out to be so much worse than those based off of real tables. This collection is just about the best you can get without spending a month's pay getting a physical machine... or resorting to less-than-legal means.

Collecting sickness gone mad (or: Demo discs!)

2008-04-02T08:55:00.004-04:00

Well, I've finally done it. I've officially started collecting demo discs.

I've always had a few demo discs around. For example, that's the only way I could play Intelligent Qube for years. (Cue people asking me for an Intelligent Qube ISO...) And my wife nearly killed me when I played the Parappa the Rapper demo for ages. I also picked up the Official PlayStation Magazine demo of Tomb Raider: Legend within the past couple of years.

But now they've gone beyond utility into that bizarre realm of "neat artifacts I'd like to buy just to own". Oh boy. This is like label variations of Atari 2600 games all over again.

Here's the best source of data I've found on them. I even made a spreadsheet of the PS2 demos so I could keep track of mine. I have 13 ... out of over 400 listed on this page. At least I'll have something to keep me busy. I also have 3 PS1 demo discs and a handful of PSP demo UMDs.

Incidentally, there is competition out there for these. On a lark, I bid $18 on a lot of 41 demo discs the other day on eBay. The final bid was $38 or so. Yow.

Anyway, if you've got some you'd like to ditch, give me a holler.

Down the memory hole

2008-03-26T16:25:00.002-04:00

So there are reportedly leaked maps of GTA4's Liberty City. Neat.

I guess it should have been obvious to me, but I'd just assumed they'd build detail into the "existing" Liberty City that we all knew from GTA3 and GTA:LCS. So much for all that.

I know Liberty City about as well as any fictional world I've played, and I am a little disappointed that I won't have that leg-up when GTA4 hits next month. It would have been neat to have some of that memory helping me get out of tight spots on the run...

I'm guessing that this is essentially what happened to Liberty City from the original GTA when GTA3 came out...

Review: God of War: Chains of Olympus (PSP)

2008-03-11T20:41:00.004-04:00

In about the last year I've played God of War and its sequel God of War 2 to completion. The former is better with plot and the latter with combat, but both are well above average in both departments. With blood and nudity and a mythological soap opera, the God of War series strikes me as the modern male escapist fantasy equivalent of Burroughs's A Princess of Mars.

Last week the PSP received its own God of War game and I'm pleased to say that it recreates everything I loved about the PS2 games, including a decent story. Frankly, with external developer Ready at Dawn creating this prequel, I was concerned the plot would be second-rate. However, its proficiency at storytelling lags the original slightly while outdoing the sequel. This time we follow the adventures of Kratos, the superhuman servant of Ares, just prior to the events in the first God of War.

While Chains of Olympus succeeds at many things, I was most impressed by the pacing:

The opening level presents the game's biggest boss (but not the toughest one).
The third is full of puzzles.
The fourth provides you with the truly enjoyable hit-reflection ability.
The sixth takes you to a whole new setting, with several new enemies.
The seventh introduces a new and immensely rewarding weapon.
The eighth is a series of strenuous battles, a plot twist, a final battle, and a clever little conclusion that leads directly into the story of the original God of War.

I don't care how much people complain about the length of the game (which I completed in just over six hours), it's really packaged quite well. As for the length -- I don't want to spend more than six hours playing any handheld game, even over the course of several days.

Interestingly, my favorite moment in the game didn't involve combat or a puzzle. As you may know, heavy doors and objects are lifted in God of War by pounding the circle button repeatedly. Near the end of Chains of Olympus, Kratos has to commit a difficult act of personal sacrifice which is acted out through circle-button mashing. It's a simple variation on a common mechanic, yet I thought it was effective in conveying the emotional weight of the moment.

All around, I enjoyed God of War: Chains of Olympus a great deal -- both for its gameplay and its furthering the story of Kratos -- and I recommend it.

Patapon

2008-03-11T07:32:00.001-04:00

Patapon is an exquisite little offering that can be snapped up for as little as twelve pounds fifty. It would be a crime not to.

The PSP always gets a rough time of things, mainly because it isn't quite the license to print money that the DS is. But how many great games have come out on the DS lately? Think about it. Not that many. I can only think of Apollo Justice and the new Advance Wars, and whilst I love the both of them they're basically sequels. Patapon feels like a fresh, vibrant excursion in a land of opportunity and bleeds a kind of effervescent vivacity all over the large, dead pixel prone screen of my chunky, fat PSP. This joy is contagious, and soon works its way into my eyes and brain, eroding away my cynicism and rendering my joyless nature inert and redundant. When Patapon is spinning happily away in the UMD drive, the PSP becomes the drab young girl in glasses who gets a makeover by the captain of the football team and everybody wants to sleep with by the end of the movie. It's like falling in love with your high school sweetheart, and then finding out she's also a millionaire.

It's got everything a crusty old relic (read: me) needs to enjoy a game. An intuitive and non-standard control system, flash art direction, army building and rhythm based gameplay. Also, it's practically doomed to an existence of never being truly appreciated in its time and becoming a cult classic. Those are the very best kind of games, because the few of us that play them can sit around and reflect on just how better we are than your average muppet.

Downsides? It's quite short and farming rare items can be pretty bothersome. Although, if you're one of the gazillions of WoW players, you'd think I was needlessly complaining.

Super Smash Bros. Bawl

2008-03-10T07:45:00.005-04:00

I went down to the local ConHugeCo GameStopPlaceStoreThing yesterday and picked up my copy of Super Smash Bros. Brawl, the latest alternative the game industry has presented us for boring, painful life. All the way back, my mind was swirling with the possibilities: how would the workings of fate conspire this time to dash my hopes? Would the disc turn out to be broken neatly in two halves when I open the case? Would there be a wacky mix-up, and the game inside would be Sonic Riders? Would my car get sideswiped on the way back, leaving my organs strewn across the pavement, and as consciousness surrenders to death, would my copy of Smash Bros. Brawl lay sprawled mere inches from my rapidly stiffening arms? Would the game suck? Turns out none of this happened. Instead, the damn thing just doesn't work!

But it's just my Wii the game fails to work in. It works in my cousin's son's perfectly well, and at his place I was at least able to play the game for a couple of hours (under the disapproving glare of one of the visiting obnoxious local kids with which our street is cursed, they roam the road in packs). But whenever I tried to play it in my own Wii, the system would continually pop up one of those hateful "Disc is unreadable" errors, which Wiis present whether the disc's data is entirely opaque to the drive, or if even one byte of data is unreadable, drawing the whimsical ire of the Lockout Fairies.

Nintendo, at least, knows of the problem, and has a mechanism in place to handle repairs, and to their credit they provide free shipping and repair for affected systems. What they say is that, since the game is on a dual layer DVD, some systems whose lenses have gotten a bit dirty will fail to recognize the disc. This seems a little suspicious to me, since never before has a game disk failed to read in my Wii. In fact, it strikes me as more likely the result of a manufacturing flaw, whether one that directly makes dual layer discs unreadable, or maybe one that allows grime to get on the lens in the first place. Anyway, either way, the game still don't work.

And they considered the possibility that I might somehow enjoy the game on my cousin's son's Wii while mine is being fixed, because they want me to send my copy of Smash Bros. Brawl along with the system too.

Time for a break

2008-03-07T15:14:00.004-05:00

I'm due for a much needed holiday next week. I just grabbed a copy of God of War for the PSP and I have to say that it looks a lot better than I remember. I'll have to dig out my demo and see if there are noticeable improvements.

I also downloaded the PSP version of flOw, the relaxing game that previously had been a Flash game and later a downloadable PS3 game. Despite all the kvetching by the press about graphical slowdowns, this is really a very clean port. I recommend it for PSP owners, especially if you haven't played the PS3 version.

Meanwhile, I've not been blogging because my writing agreement with Next-Gen was extended from a monthly NPD column to include a weekly column. So, since late January I've been pouring my weekend free time into that work. For the curious:

Anyway, I've got next week's column in the bag and I'm hoping for a day or two of just pure gaming while I'm on holiday. Between my real job, time with family, caring for sick kids, being sick myself, and writing on the side I've had practically no time for games, much less writing about playing games.

Two steps forward, two steps back

2008-03-03T12:42:00.002-05:00

I'm as big a fan of Moore's Law as the next guy, but I'm not sure why it needs to apply to the latest engine rebuild in Ultima Online.

Here's an Ultima Online: Kingdom Reborn client Ultima preview from Ten Ton Hammer via the Wayback machine set to Jan 28, 2007:

Like the legacy client, 'Kingdom Reborn' is targetted [sic] toward a very low system spec. [UO producer Aaron] Cohen joked that the new client 'would not melt your videocard at all,' estimating that any computer bought within the last five or six years would run the new client, no problem.

No, it doesn't do a thing to my videocard, but it grabs over three-quarters gig of my memory all by itself. That's not cool, and I've had it crash once already in less than three hours of play. The claim a five or six year-old computer would run KR "no problem" is absolutely bogus. My poor, poor spinning hard drive.

I hate to continue the downer thread I started and amended slightly over in the Game Journal, but seriously, the biggest shock to me playing last night was just how daggum similar the Kingdom Reborn client experience was to playing my Second Age client from 1999 (Exhibit A). I don't see that the UO team has found any distinct advantage of using 3D. The game is as it's always been. The problem's not the video, but the bloat of the code's inefficient foundation, I suppose.

Honestly, I'm happy to see Ultima Online's still alive. It's a great monument to the birth of the commercially viable MMORPG. I'll readily stipulate the user interface improvements are a huge change and somehow worthy of all the time that was required to recreate every freakin' tile of art for the new client, but for the life of me, I just can't yet see it. Third Dawn, UO's first shot at a 3D client, was a starker, more noticeable change than this. Love it or hate it, at least there was a discernible difference, noticeable within seconds of launch, that accompanied the sluggish performance. Then, you could at least put your finger on what you were waiting on Moore to speed up.

And as I pointed out in my Game Journal entry, what is the appeal for old-timers to return if they haven't purchased expansions since, say, the Second Age? I download gigs on gigs of new client, receive the same -- make that more sluggish -- play experience as 1999, and can't even see one new land or one new dungeon from when I played nearly a decade back unless I shell out the equivalent three months' virtual rent (ie, $30). Without the now long-delayed Stygian Abyss expansion, Kingdom Reborn is nothing more than an extended beta test accessible to those still willing to give UO a shot for old times' sake. I've finally begun to believe Lord British's leaving did shoot the game in the creative feet.

Ultima Online: Kingdom Reborn feels like we're treading water, and I'm surprised that's enough to keep the game afloat.

EDIT: I found a quote from RPG Vault attributed to J.P. "Grimm" Harrod whose titles at UO range from "2004 to present as Character Artist, Senior Artist, Art Lead, Lead Character Artist, Associate Art Director, and now, Associate CG Supervisor". That's a pretty good list. In any event, the quote makes me hope there's a future for UO:KR. Here tis, slightly truncated.

I was hired on during the development of Samurai Empire... This was one of the first expansions, so we found ourselves having to reverse engineer a pipeline in order to get new assets in - and with no tools and no blueprint to follow.
...
The second thing was the development for Kingdom Reborn. As far as art goes, this was the renaissance for UO. We had an established pipeline and evolving tools, we had migrated to the latest versions of 3D Studio Max, and we finally had the opportunity to break the limitations of the 2D client that we had been confined to (nine year-old limitations, mind you).

Obviously KR is more about opening up the client for modification than any sort of graphics improvement. Heck, KR even has a 2D compatibility preference, where you get to use ports of the old art in the new client. There's a reason the memory management is so poor; it's the innards have been rewritten like mad, opening it up to the XML, lua, etc toolbox that not so coincidentally matches World of Warcraft's.

KR now becomes an impressive, extremely long-term gamble that people will continue to appreciate what remains for all practical purposes a two-dimensional game, but at the same time will, for the first time, intentionally open the game up for the same sort of freely given, end user labor that's made World of Warcraft so popular. Take a look at the items at thottbot.com, for heaven's sake. This stuff, from prices at auction to stats, I think, are all the results of having good, standardized hooks for people to write add-ons into seemingly every facet of the game. Where is UO's thottbot equivalent, presenting easily searchable, extremely detailed information culled from the game and players on every item that's been in the game? Where is the "Auctioneer" mod that makes creating wealth in WoW a breeze? Without KR, such mods would never happen. Now, the technologies are there.

But will the players stay?