Creative Balance and DRM in Video Games
There's an interesting interview in The Escapist with Cliff Bleszinski (who worked on the Unreal games and the Gears of War games). As Ars Technica notes, one of the strange things about the interview is that Bleszinski seems to be saying that the less gaming he does, the better he becomes at his job.

I'm at the point now where I want to make sure I have a good work/life balance. I'll play Call of Duty 4, but I might not necessarily get all the achievements; I might not get to the next level as far as leveling up in the online experience. I might not beat Army of Two. I'll give it a good five or six hours and be like, "OK, I get the experience. Now I want to check out the latest movie." Or I want to be outside taking my dog out or just experiencing life in general and meeting new people.

One thing I've learned throughout my life ... being tasked with creating new characters and new IP is, you have to have that pool in your head of experience in life to draw from. ...

I love this medium; I think it's the most compelling medium to ever exist in the history of entertainment. To be a good creative, you need to be a well-rounded person. You need to have life experience. You need to have your heart broken. You need to experience loss. You need to raise puppies and have a family eventually and know what it's like to put the top down and drive 120 mph on a beautiful day with the leaves kicking up behind you, with the music playing. Because if you don't know what that's like, how are you going to have a real-life frame of reference to compare it to when you try to bring that level of excitement into your games? I think it's definitely good to live life and be a well-rounded designer.

Interesting stuff. Of course there's nothing particularly new about this. When you limit your creative influences, your creativity is sure to become limited as well. The fact that most game designers get into the industry because they love gaming is a good thing, but when they continue to eat, breath, and sleep gaming, a few things happen.

As Bleszinski mentions, creativity tends to suffer in such situations, and thus the industry ends up doing the same old thing over and over again. As a casual gamer, this part isn't as noticeable to me... however, I do tend to notice that games have gotten harder to pick up and more difficult to complete (not all games, of course). I don't mind a challenge, but I think there are some games out there that really attempt to push the boundries of difficulty, and this is done because hardcore gamers demand this sort of thing, especially if the game is a simple rehash of old concepts. But casual gamers get burnt out on this type of thing pretty quickly. Many of these games are very rich and detailed... so much so that I simply don't have the time to parse all the details and get to a point where I'm actually doing well.

None of which is to suggest that game designers shouldn't play games. In the computer industry, using one's own product is known as eating your own dog food, and it's an important part of software development. Of course, similar to with games, this can also lead to incredibly powerful and flexible software that is overly complicated for a casual user (i.e. linux).

This made me wonder about DRM. Pretty much any gamer who legitimately purchases their games hates DRM. It can be incredibly frustrating; even the simple systems that only require the CD to be in the drive to play the game can get annoying. I look at some of the draconian systems being put in place on high profile games today, and I wonder how anyone could possibly think it's a good idea to implement something like this. I guarantee that the people who are pushing for these systems are not eating their own dog food.

Interestingly, there is one small but successful gaming company that doesn't use any form of DRM at all. The company is called Stardock, and I think part of the reason they don't use DRM is because the founder and head of Stardock, Brad Wardell, is a gamer himself. He's often written about his dislike for copy protection, so it shouldn't be that surprising that he knows his dogfood. He also has a keen business mind in that he doesn't believe in inconveniencing his best customers and treating them like criminals. Go figure. That's why I'll gladly shell out money for the latest Stardock game, even if it kicks my ass.



Incompetent Boobery of a Solar Empire
A few months ago, I picked up Sins of a Solar Empire, and promptly ran several galactic empires right into the grave. I learned a lot during those first few failures, and I finally managed to win a game. It turns out that all I needed to do was set the difficulty to "Easy." Yet, even after that victory, I wasn't able to keep the streak going. After mismanaging another two empires into extinction, I gave up on the game. It was taking an awful lot of time and effort for me to kill these empires, and continually losing doesn't exactly do wonders for motivation.

The game definitely has a high learning curve. At least, for a casual gamer like me, it does. In one of my posts, I wondered what a more active gamer like Shamus would do with the game. And it appears that he's finally picked up the game and given it a try:

I decided to just run through the tutorials. The most important thing that I learned was that under no circumstances should I ever be allowed to run a galactic empire. It’s harder than it sounds, and the consequences for failure are rather dire. During the tutorial I was taught a few short lessons about some buttons. Apparently there are buttons, and they need to be pressed sometimes. There were some other details in there about economies and spaceships, but they eluded me once the tutorial had run its course. I’m still pretty sure about the button thing, though.

... I built a small collection of spaceships, which were sent to an adjacent planet where they were murdered by space pirates. I built a trade center which sat idle, since I didn’t have anyone with which to trade. I built a series of scout ships and sent them to auto-explore, after which I never heard from them again. I built a capital ship and subsequently misplaced it. I pushed some other buttons related to the running of my main planet, none of which seemed to have any real effect except to deplete my coffers. Then I found some ships I didn’t remember building, flying around my world. They didn’t respond to my commands, and it wasn’t until just before they began bombing the place that I realized why.

A half hour into the game I was running an inept empire whose only accomplishments were staggering financial and military losses. I felt like I was playing Soviets in Space.

He's much better at expressing the futility of a first time player than I was (the comic he created that accompanies his post is utterly hilarious), and I'm somewhat reassured by the fact that even a more experienced gamer had similar problems (reading the Sins forums was disheartening - most everyone there seemed to immediately grasp everything necessary for the game and they all sat about debating minutiae). While his post is very humerous and snarky, he does end up recognizing the game's learning curve:

This is not too say the game is too hard or complex. It’s just different, and you can’t really build on what you’ve learned in other games to help you along here. The tutorial teaches you how to use the interface, but figuring out what you should be doing is your job. At the start of the game there are dozens of possible actions to take, without any real hint as to which ones are a good idea or why. I imagine I’m going to lead a couple more doomed empires into history before I get a handle on the thing.

This is very true, and Shamus is good enough that I'm sure he'll have the game figured out in a few games. Is the game too hard? It was hard enough that I wasn't having much fun towards the end. That doesn't make it a bad game, it was just too much work for me... though I have to admit, reading Shamus' post made me want to fire it up and slaughter my people.

The last game I played was one of the specific scenarios. It was a small map, with only a handful of planets, and three players. Furthermore, the map was shaped in such a way that you really can't take advantage of choke points (which usually helps in other games, even the ones where I lost). Anyway, the last time I played it, I got lit up by the two enemies. But I was careful to save a bunch of times, so I loaded one of my older saved games where I was still in good shape and gave it a shot. I threw caution to the wind and sent two of my capital vessels and a fleet of support ships to attack one of my enemies. This actually turned out to be a mildly successful tactic... for a while. Eventually, the other enemy caught on and attacked my home planet. I was able to fend them off, but my population was decimated and my economy went into the tank. I had to retreat from my attack for a bit to rebuild my forces too. Eventually, I was able to resume my attack, but my enemy seemed suspiciously fortified. It turns out that my two weenie enemies had joined together and had a ceasfire and trade relationship going. I was basically screwed. I could spend another hour watching my empire die a slow, torturous death, or come here and finish this blog post. Guess what I did. I don't know, maybe I could turn it around. It seems that I need to read up on how to do some of that diplomacy stuff.



Summoner Geeks
Via Haibane.info, I stumbled across this:


It's pretty funny and I got a little curious about the history of this thing. Apparently a sketch comedy troupe in Wisconsin called the Dead Alewives put together an album featuring a parody of Dungeons & Dragons. The audio skit is pretty funny by itself, and it's been making the rounds on radio and the internet ever since the mid 1990s. In 2000, a bunch of developers at a video game company, Volition (they made Descent, Red Faction, and of course, Summoner), made an animated version, and distrubuted it along with their games (it's in some promotional material and if you win the game, you see it there as well). So it went from an improvisational comedy group, to a CD they made, to the radio, to the internet, got mashed up with visuals from other video games, and has now finally made its way to me (about 12 years later).



Crayon Physics Deluxe
Interesting trailer for a game called Crayon Physics Deluxe. It's like a more complicated version of line rider or something.


This is apparently a sequel to Crayon Physics. [via clusterflock]



Wii Game Corner
Some quick reviews for games I've played recently:

• Super Mario Galaxy: As usual, Bowser has kidnapped Princess Peach and Mario's looking to rescue her. This is probably the best reviewed game for the Wii. Metacritic has it at a 97 and there's not a single review below 90. While this is perhaps a bit too high, I do agree that it's a fantastic game. There are some imperfections. The default camera anges are sometimes a bit off, but that's a general platform game problem, so it's hard to fault the game too much for that. Similarly, the controls are sometimes a bit awkward, but for the most part, it works fine. There are some Do it again, stupid or twitch levels, but I expected this and there aren't that many levels that get too frustrating. Otherwise, the game is great. It's the best looking Wii game I've played, and the music is pretty good too (it evokes the older Mario games while doing its own thing). Aside from the camera and sometimes awkward controls, the gameplay is generally fun and easy to pick up. The level design is great (the general concept of the spheroid, 3D levels with neat gravity tricks is well done), and the game is broken up into little bit-sized chunks (something that appeals to people like myself who don't want to have to play for hours at a time to get anywhere). Bottom line, it's a lot of fun. I haven't finished the game yet, but I'm looking forward to playing more, and I can see why people are heaping praise on the game.
• No More Heroes: This game follows the exploits of Travis Touchdown, an amateur hitman who uses a beam katana (basically a lightsaber) to dispatch his enemies. His goal is to become the #1 ranked assassin in the world... and to do so, he must take out the top 10 assassins. To do this, he must pay the United Assassins Association to set up matches against each assassin, and to pay for these matches, Travis must take on various odd jobs. There are a few positive aspects of this game, but for the most point, it's a mess. The gameplay is interesting, but much too simplistic. You basically need to just keep pressing the A button. A lot. The game tries to add other attack modes (wrestling moves, charging up an attack, etc...), but none of those are really necessary. For the most part, the game just pits you against a bunch of enemies at a time, and you press A a lot. Now, the one good thing about this control scheme is that when you get to a certain point, the game prompts you to do a "kill move" and displays a direction on the screen for you to slash your wiimote, at whichpoint you see a slow-motion animation of your kill move. This is actually a pretty cool interaction and it works well... The game doesn't seem to care how accurate you are with your killing slash though (several times I know I went in the wrong direction, but it registered anyway). The boss fights are relatively fun (at least, when compared to wading through wave after wave of henchmen). Each boss has certain unique powers and you need to figure out how to counter them. The game is broken up into bite-sized chunks, which, as I've already mentioned, is something I like. Unfortunately, that's where the good things about this game end.
  
  
  This screenshot probably makes the game look better than it is...
  The game wants very badly to be something like the Grand Theft Auto games, but with assassins instead of petty criminals. The game is framed in an open-ended cityscape that you can drive around in. There are stores and places to find work, etc... Sound familiar? Yeah, it is, except that the cityscape is tremendously boring. The "open-ended" cityscape turns out to be a little closed off. There's very little you can do here. In GTA, you can steal other cars, get into trouble, cause general meyham, or simply drive around and find jumps. In this game, you can... drive your indestructible motorcycle (which handles like a boat) to your next job (or to a store). And that's pretty much it. Oh, and you live in a hotel (just like GTA!), but in a delightfully irreverant twist, the "save" function happens when you go to the toilet! How clever! It even has authentic flushing sounds to signal a successful save. The fighting in the game is very repetitive and monotonous. The only thing that sorta saves it from that trap are the boss fights, which are decent (but not great). The "odd jobs" portion of the game is inexplicably awful. You need to run around the city and tackle missions like "collecting coconuts" and "lawn mowing" (yes, seriously, there is a mission called "lawn mowing"). In and of themselves, these mini-games aren't that awful, it's just that they're so very out of place in this type of game.
  
  The game's visuals are a bizarre mish-mash of styles. It's attempting a low-fi comic book style, which would be fine, except that the graphics are clunky and the animations sometimes choppy. When you dispatch one of the enemy hoards, the slow motion animation is decent, but every enemie basically squirts blood like a hose (think Kill Bill or Evil Dead II) and when the screen clogs up with lots of enemies, you really can't see anything (Luckily, all you need to do to get through this is keep pressing A.) Other visual aspects of the game (such as the menues or the assassin ranking screen) seem to be trying to harken back to old-school video games (very pixelated) and are strangely divergent with the other visual styles of the game. The voice acting in the game is pretty good, actually, but the music... perhaps it wouldn't be so bad if there were more than 2 songs in the whole game. It doesn't take long to get annoyed by the music.
  
  While not garnering the universally positive reviews that Mario Galaxy did, No More Heroes still seems to have done quite well for itself. It's the 10th ranked game on Metacritic, and it's got a score of 84 (which is pretty good). If you can't tell from the above, I think this is wildly inflated. There are some good things about the game, but overall it's a mess.
• Miscellaneous Sports Games: I've played Madden 08, NBA Live 08, and Major League Baseball 2K8. I haven't played any of these a lot, but of the three, Madden was the best. It has some pretty neat Wiimote controls (touch pass versus a more bullet-like pass, depending on how you throw, etc...) and is generally pretty fun. I loath the game of basketball, and so I probably have an unfair bias against NBA Live 08... however, I did enjoy the slam dunk competition. Finally, we come to 2K games' just released baseball game, which has a neat pitching controller scheme, but otherwise is pretty glitchy. At one point, after throwing a pitch, the pitcher animation froze for about 10 seconds before resuming and throwing the ball at me (the batter). I've always had bad luck with 2K sports games, and they don't seem very trustworthy as a company in general, so this didn't surprise me much.

One thing I'm noticing about a lot of 3rd party games for the Wii is that they're trimmed down from the versions released on other systems. For instance, Madden 08 is missing lots of features that are on other systems. I haven't played the game enough to know whether what's missing is really that important or not, but it does make purchasing a game for the Wii a little nerve-wracking. Am I really getting the same game? The different controller scheme also makes you wonder if they just tacked on Wii controls, or if the game actually has a well-thought-out scheme. I'm really hoping the announced Star Wars game isn't just a toned down version of the real game (early news doesn't look so promising on that front, though it does look like they're trying to add a Wii only gameplay mode). This sort of trouble, when combined with Blue Ray's victory in the HD format war, makes the Playstation 3 a viable purchase for me. Much as a I hate Sony, I might have to do it... though I think I'll wait for the price to come down (or maybe I can get one of those crazy deals where I get 15 discs along with it) before I seriously consider it.



Sins of a Solar Empire: Victory!
I won a Sins of a Solar Empire game last night. It turns out, all I had to do was play on "Easy." Heh. Actually, I think the thing that really did it was the Pirates.


Pirates are a faction in the game that periodically launch raids on one of the players. By default, they pick a random player to attack, but you can put a bounty on your opponents (or, in larger games, you can secretly attack your allies, if that's necessary), and if you bid more than your opponents, they'll go bother your opponents. When you're playing against AI, it's easy to win the bidding war, and I think that's primarily why I won this game. Honestly, the Pirates thing got a little annoying after a while. It happens every 10-12 minutes or so, and it's really annoying to have to deal with a pirate attack. Later in the game, when I didn't need the pirates, making sure I won the bidding wars was just a pain in the arse. I don't know if the duration between attacks is configurable, but if it were a longer period, the game would go a little smoother.


Another thing I noticed that I forgot to mention in my last post was that position is everything. There are choke points in the phase lanes, and if you can block off your enemy at one of those choke points, you can fortify your position and build your empire behind it. In at least one of my previous games, I was in an awful position and had a lot of trouble fortifying my empire. In the below screenshot, I was able to narrow it down to two phase lanes, one of which was blocked by the Pirates (actually, by the time I had taken that screenshot, I had expanded into my enemy's empire, so while I still had only one planet exposed, there were three phase lanes going into it). Since I was winning the Pirate bidding wars, I didn't have to worry much about the planet facing the Pirates, so I really only had one planet to worry about. I fortified it with mutiple capital ships and a couple hanger defenses, and all was well. Of course, if someone managed to get past those defenses, I would be screwed, as the rest of my empire was relatively free for the taking.


And finally, I found playing with The Advent to be much better than playing with the TEC. Perhaps because I had a better idea of how to use their ships (having been annihilated by them a few times in the past, and thus knowing how to populate my fleet). I still haven't played with or against the Vasari Empire yet, but I did find their backstory, as described by Brad Wardell (owner of Stardock, and I'm pretty sure he's also the author of the AI which keeps kicking my ass), interesting. Basically, The Vasari were tremendously powerful, but are now the equivalent of "Battlestar Galactica, a ragtag, fugitive fleet fleeing something horrific." Interesting. I should try them out sometime. I've honestly only played a couple of the many available scenarios, so I'ev still got lots of stuff to go through with this game.



Sins of a Solar Empire: Lessons Learned, Sorta
So I've been playing more of Sins of a Solar Empire this week, and while I'm still having fun, I don't seem to be doing very well. I haven't had a ton of time to play the game, but I actually haven't won a game yet. It being a real time game, I had trouble remembering to take screenshots as I played, but the below thoughts are what I remembered and what I've learned from my first few failed attempts.

• In my previous post on the subject, I talked about this game having a bit of a steeper learning curve than the other Stardock games, and I think that's about right. I got annihilated in my first attempt at the game, and have learned several strategies that improved my survival... but I still haven't won a game (I've played about 4 games).
• The first thing I learned was that I had to expand my empire as much as possible to take advantage of resource mining and trading (to increase funding). Having a solid resource and economic base improves things vastly, and in my first game I spent too much time in my own planet's system. In later games I recognized the virtues of sending a scout ship on auto-explore around the solar system, discovering all the planets and large asteroids (which are big enough to put a colony on.) And then I had to make sure that I expanded my empire, creating colonies on nearby planets and asteroids (and mining resources and setting up trade). The screenshot below shows the largest empire I managed to build, which consists of about 5 planetary bodies (2 planets and 3 large asteroids). Not only that, but I also seem to be in a relatively isolated position of the solar system... alas, things turned bad shortly after I took this screenshot. The bottom right colony was attacked with a large fleet of enemy vessels. I had to shift my military power from other colonies to fend off the attack, which I managed to do, but not without leaving my other colonies vulnerable.
  
  
  
• Combat has proven to be relatively tricky (for me, at least). After the first game I did some reading around and found out that you start the game with the ability to create a "free" capital ship, which helps enormously in expanding your empire (most "unclaimed" planets still have low-level enemies that you must defeat, and they're generally no match for an invasion fleet with a capital ship). Now, which capital ship to make is still a bit of a mystery. In the game I'm chronicling, I opted to use KOL Battleships and Marza Dreadnoughts, as they seem to have the most powerful weapons. Since I was under attack, that's really what I was looking for. However, I kept having trouble fending off attacks, and my enemies seemed to have no problem taking out my capital ships. I later found out that the ships that caused me the most problems came from one of my enemies called the Advent, and their capital ship type called the "Progenitor Mothership." The below screenshot shows me actually destroying one of these motherships. At this point, the number of ships on the screen has been drastically reduced. Towards the beginning of the battle, it resembled the first scene in Star Wars Episode III - all these ships firing at each other. The Sins interface allows you to zoom in and out with ease, and it was neat to be able to zoom in close enough to see the bullets flying, but then also be able to zoom out a bit and get a more global outlook.
  
  
  
• Capital ships aside, I've also realized I drastically underestimated the necessary size and makeup of a good fleet. I'd have a capital ship and maybe 5 frigates, but from reading around the Sins forums, it seems like what I really need is at least 1 capital ship, 10-15 frigates, and maybe some long range ships that launch support fighters/bombers (and honestly, I'm probably still lowballing that). Part of the reason I keep losing is that I run out of frigates and so all I have is a capital ship where the enemy can concentrate all it's firepower. And honestly, in the screenshot below, I'm destroying another mothership, but you can plainly tell from the stuff on the left of the screen that the bad guys badly outnumber me (they're green, and most of my stuff are immobile logistics structures, not fighters). (Oh, and I took a bunch of screenshots in a row, trying to capture that explosion, so I had to block out a portion of the screeshot that showed the file structure where my screenshot was saved - sorry).
  
  
  
• So I like the game and I'm learning (sorta), but I keep losing, and that's not especially fun. One of the things the game seems to be getting dinged on in the press is the lack of a gameplay mode that features a sort of progression or story. Personally, I don't mind the lack of a story, but other real-time games like Warcraft and Command & Conquer always started you off with easy scenarios and walked you through them so that you could get a handle on all the details. Now, the game does come with 5 short tutorials that go through a bunch of issues and they do indeed help you learn the controls, but they're a little lacking. They don't cover an actual scenario, they just sorta show you how to use the interface. The truth is that I'm still figuring out the basic strategy of the game, which is getting a little annoying. Maybe it's just that I'm a casual gamer and haven't ever been really good at real time games (again, I've played them, but I don't think I ever finished one). In any case, a better way of learning the ins-and-outs of the strategy portion of the game would be a help. As it is now, I might have to resort to reading the manual (and you know how I feel about manuals!) I'm still having fun, and I still want to try out some strategies. I don't mind being challenged by a game, but on the other hand, it would be nice to win a game every once in a while... I think my general temperment isn't aggressive enough with these types of games. I tend to like to build up huge, powerful fleets if I'm going to be militaristic, but in games like GalCiv, I usually ended up winning a cultural victory or a technology victory. This game seems to require a more aggressive military strategy. I guess I shouldn't just be sitting around waiting for people to attack me...
  
  
  

That's all for now. I'll continue playing this game because it is genuinely pretty cool... but I just haven't gotten the hang of it. I guess that game's not made for casual gamers who don't have a lot of time on their hands... I wonder how a more experienced gamer like Shamus would do with this game (and I know he likes Stardock and was looking forward to Sins, so I'm guessing we'll find out at some point in the near future - I think maybe he's waiting for Impulse (Stardock's new digital distribution software) to come out first...)

Update: Seems I'm not the only one who's having trouble getting started. Some interesting suggestions are given there. Of course, some of them would bother me. For instance, playing the game on slow might give me some more time to read the tooltips and develop a better strategy, but as it is now, I get frustrated having to wait for my resources to fill up so that I can do this or build that... Also found this Tips for New Tyrants guide which looks promising...



Sins of a Solar Empire: First Impressions
Sins of a Solar Empire came out this week. While I am a casual gamer and thus don't typically buy new games right when they come out, there are a few reasons I picked this one up. First, it's from Stardock, developers of the Galactic Civilization games (which I'm a big fan of). Stardock is also one of those neat companies that doesn't treat its customers like criminals and makes it easy to download and play the games (no annoying DRM or CD copy protection come with the game). Given my feelings on DRM, it's nice to find decent games to support, and Stardock's user-friendly approach has earned them a free pass in my book. So I'll buy anything even remotely interesting that they put out. Anyway, I bought the game and installed it this morning, so here are some initial thoughts and first impressions on the game:

• The one annoyance with purchasing the game online was that I actually went for a TotalGaming.net subscription and then I had a little trouble finding the game in Stardock Central (which is their distribution software). Still not sure what happened there, but when I logged into the TotalGaming.net website, I could spend my tokens there, and then the game showed up in Stardock Central and I was on my way. Anyway, it looks like Stardock has been working on a replacement for Stardock Central called Impulse, and it looks neat. It's supposed to be released within a few weeks, so perhaps I should have waited. Anyway, this is was only a minor speedbump on my way to downloading and installing the game (which took about 20 minutes total - not bad considering the size of the game).
• Sins mixes some elements from Turn-Based 4X Strategy games like GalCiv II with Real-Time Strategy games like Starcraft and Command & Conquer. While I've played both types of strategy games (real-time and turn-based), I'm not really an expert, but it seems like an interesting concept and I look forward to exploring the gameplay a little more than I have.
• Again, I'm a casual gamer, so it will probably take me a little longer get up to speed with the game's mechanics. It does seem to have a steeper learning curve than the GalCiv games. Still, after playing for a little while, I think I've got a handle on the basics of gameplay and all the various stats and controls. The HUD is packed with lots of info, though I haven't played enough to say whether or not it's completely successful (but it's not a disaster either, so that's a definite plus). One of the things Stardock games are cool about is automating the tedius aspects of the game (for example, in GalCiv, you can designate "Governers" who automatically act to update the improvements of a planet... that way, you don't have to manually do so). I haven't played enough to find many of these features, and given that this game is now a RTS, I've already found myself surprised by events on other planets and frantically switching back and forth between them. But I'm still trying to figure out the lay of the land (er, lay of the starsystem? Whatever.)
• The look and feel of the game is relatively consistent with GalCiv II, and it looks great. Naturally, there are lots of differences, and the game overall has better graphics (as you'd expect), but you can tell it's coming from a similar lineage. Everything I've read about the game says it's been developed by a gaming company called Ironclad and distributed by Stardock, but a lot of the features bear a resemblance to Stardock's games, so I'm not sure what the deal is with that. But hey, it looks good.
  
  
  
• The game seems to be doing really well, despite having just come out and there being almost no "reviews" in the common publications. As they note: "After years of being told that PC gamers are really just console gamers but with different game controllers (mouse and keyboard) and that in-depth strategy was dying, we now have some conclusive evidence that no, that serious strategy games are alive and kicking. ... People are buying this game sight unseen despite relatively little coverage, PC gamers so much want a real time strategy game that has 4X depth that they are going out, en masse to find out more about this game and buying it. "

Again, I haven't gotten too far in the game, and am still trying to get my bearings, but it's been a lot of fun and I'm really enjoying it. Hopefully, I'll be able to put together a game example like I did for GalCiv II.



Metroid Prime 3: Corruption
I got a Nintendo Wiii a while ago, and once I tired of the typical Wii Sports games, I looked around for a new game. I settled on Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. It had just come out at the time, I had fond memories of the original (though I'm not sure I ever finished it), and it had great "reviews" at all the gaming sites (even user reviews hovered around 8-10 out of 10). Of course, I'm much more of a casual gamer, so what I'm looking for is typically a bit different than the hardcore gaming crowd. While I can see why the game got good reviews, I really did not enjoy this game. It's got some positive points, but there are lots of negatives that just dragged the whole experience down for me.

Again, I'm a casual gamer, and during the past few months, I haven't had a lot of time to play video games. I think this context is a big part of why I didn't enjoy this game, but I'll get into that later in this post. Another thing to keep in mind: This is my first Metroid game since the original, and though I have a pretty good opinion of that game, I don't really remember much about it either. Here are some thoughts on various aspects of the game:

• Combat: The game is basically a first-person shooter, so combat is pretty straightforward. The controller scheme for the Wii is well done and easy to adjust to. Basically, you use the nunchck to move your character around, and the Wiimote controller controls where you look (and where you shoot). Pressing A shoots, which is a little strange at first, because B is the trigger on the Wiimote, but it works well enough. Sometimes I thought there was a lack of precision in the targeting method, but it seemed to work reasonably well. Sometimes it got annoying to constantly have the Wiimote pointed directly at the screen - if your hand strays, your viewpoint does too, and that can be disorienting. Lots of trademark Metroid weapons make an appearance along with a new hyper mode. Activating hyper mode requires you to empty one of your energy tanks (each energy tank is made up of 100 life points, and you continually gain energy tanks as the game progresses), but you also get a temporary weapons boost. Personally, I found hyper mode annoying and stupid (more on this in a bit).
• Bosses: One of the primary draws of adventure games like this are bosses, the enemy that shows up at the end of a level. Usually, battling a boss requires a lengthy effort and you need to use a wide array of weapons to defeat them. Often, there's a series of fun "mini-games" that you play in order to defeat a boss. In Metroid 3, this is certainly the case. The bosses are powerful and indeed take all of your firepower to defeat. Unfortunately, the bosses end up being more annoying than anything else. First of all, it's awfully difficult to figure out which weapon you should be using and in what situation. If it wasn't for this walkthrough, I would have given up on the game a long time ago. For example, here's how you defeat a boss named Korakk:

  Riding Korakk is a Pirate Hussar. Get rid of him first, quickly and easily, with the Hyper Beam. After that, downing the Korakk is a fairly easy but also dangerous process. Keep it targeted and be patient as it hops around. When its mouth glows, it's getting ready to shoot its tongue out (it won't really do it unless you're in front of it where it can see you). As soon as the tongue comes out, fire a shot at it to retract it and daze the Korakk.
  
  Once that happens, immediately roll into a ball and go under the Korakk's glowing belly. Set a few bombs so that they explode and hit the belly. Then zoom out and go back to normal.
  
  Repeat this at least one more time. When the second set of bombs hit, position yourself just behind the Korakk as it will finally collapse and expose its rear end. Target it and yank it with the Grapple Arm. The Korakk will then reel on its hind legs and expose its belly. Circle over to the front of it, go into Hypermode and plug the belly with a few Hyper Beam shots.

  How are you supposed to know these things if you've never played the game before? I don't know, maybe I'm just dense, or maybe it has something to do with previous installments of the series that I haven't played. Heck, even once you do know what to do, the process of actually doing it is usually a frustrating exercise in button pressing. In some ways, the bosses are kinda neat, but really, they just ended up frustrating me. By the time I got to Mogenar, a particularly difficult boss (and apparently I'm not on my own, as a quick search confirms that a lot of people found this boss frustrating), I was at the end of my rope, and after three or four attempts (each taking a long time, a half-hour at least), I gave up. I'm not going to play the game anymore. I think the biggest problem is that Mogenar requires you to go into hyper mode too often, and I apparently didn't have enough energy tanks for the battle. The thought of backtracking to a previous level and then making my way back to Mogenar is enough to keep me away for good.
• Other Game Play: The most frustrating thing about this game is the lack of save points. This became especially annoying when my schedule got really busy, as I didn't have much time to play, and the way the game is set up, you have to play for at least 1 hour (frequently 1.5-2 hours) before reaching the next save point. The game doesn't make you start from the very beginning of the level when you die, but it does if you turn the game off, so there's some annoying repetition involved here. The other thing that bothered me about the game is that it seems like it's trying to create an open ended world (a la the GTA series), yet there is a very specific linear progression that you must go through. What this essentially boils down to is a lot of backtracking, realizing that you forgot something, redoing the same level, and then backtracking again to get back to where you were. I had a hard time figuring out the proper sequence of events at some points, and the game doesn't seem to allow multiple solutions to a problem (which is what usually happens when you have a more open-ended world). I don't mind an open-ended world and I generally like freedom within a game's world. Exploration can be a lot of fun, but this game was trying to get that while also railroading you along a specific path. In the end, the level design was just annoying and repetitious, and I quickly got bored with it.
• Puzzles: The game mixes battle scenes with little puzzles, and these I actually kinda enjoyed. Where the bosses were difficult to figure out and frustrating, I didn't seem to have as much trouble with the puzzles. However, there really weren't that many puzzles and the game was dominated more by battles than puzzles.
• Visuals and Audio: This is actually another strong point of the game. The visuals are well done and compelling. The music and voice acting is pretty good as well. The character and level design is a little uneven, but overall it's well done. Samus looks great, and her various equipment is also well designed. This is probably the prettiest game I've played on the Wii (though I should mention that I haven't played that many games:P)
• Story: Ultimately, I found the story to be rather dull and uninspired. Perhaps I'm just missing something from the previous installments of the game, but the story follows the bounty hunter Samus Aran, who seems to be on a mission to battle Space Pirates and rid the universe of something called Phazon. I'm a little confused by this, because at some point Samus gets infected by Phazon, and the Galactic Federation decides that instead of ridding her of the Phazon, they're just going to give her something called a Phazon Enhancement Device (P.E.D.) That seems smart, right? Got infected by something evil? Great, let's enhance it! This leads to annoying periodic phazon episodes that drain your life throughout the game. There are also several other bounty hunters which are supposedly on my team, but which don't seem to serve any purpose other than to betray me (presumably because of the wonderful P.E.D.) I don't know, this whole universe seems much more confusing to me, and it's nothing like what I remembered in the original Metroid. I'm assuming that my lack of experience with the other Metroid Prime games is causing the problem here, but still, the story seemed silly.
• Usability: I've already mentioned several issues. The biggest problem, again, is the lack of save points and the confusion as to how to proceed at various points in the game (both because of the level design and because of the confusing bosses). The controller scheme seems to work well enough, and I think it's about as good as it will get for a FPS on the Wii. There are some more advanced button combinations that need to happen at various points of the game, but nothing too difficult to use (a big issue for me was that I had trouble finding 2 hour timeslots to play, so I had to reacquaint myself with the controls every time I played).

I'm not very impressed with this game. If I were to give it a rating, it would be somwhere in the 4/10 range, and I'm really surprised that more people aren't mentioning any flaws in this game. I wouldn't recommend this to casual gamers, or those who don't have a lot of time to devote to gaming. Hardcore gamers or those in love with the Metroid franchise might fare better (a lot better, if reviews are to be believed). Then again, I'm not the only one unimpressed. This person does an interesting job summarizing one of the common complaints of the game:

I mean, honestly... If I wanted to receive orders from someone, I would have purchased Halo or Half-Life. If I wanted to be sent on a linear mission to perform some menial task, I would have bought Zelda. If I wanted to be placed alongside a team of other mercenaries, only to witness each one die on their own or fight them after they turn against me, I would have bought Metal Gear. If I wanted to play mini-games, I'd play Final Fantasy. And if I wanted to spend my time accumulating achievement points, I would have bought a 360 by now.

I didn't buy Halo or any of these other games, I bought Metroid. In the Metroid I know, you start out alone. You have no map, no friends, and no sunlight. You have a gimped weapon, no bombs, and no guide to get you acclimated to the environment. The satisfaction in playing Metroid doesn't come from finishing the game. It comes from exploring it and surviving it, and occasionally finding an item to help you along.

It's a dark game with eerie music. It's a simple, paranoia-inducing game where if something moves, or is even facing you, you shoot it (because it sure as hell isn't going to say "Hi Samus!" and give you a briefing). It's a non-linear game where the replayability comes not from finishing quests in less time, but from attempting to explore further with fewer items.

Again, I have no idea what to say about what makes a Metroid game a Metroid game, as I've only played the original and don't remember much, but what this person is talking about sounds a lot more fun than what Metroid Prime 3 actually was.

As a casual gamer, this game comes nowhere near my standard for the adventure genre, which is God of War. I had my issues with that game as well (*cough* Hades level *cough*), but overall, I was really impressed with a lot of aspects of the game. On a completely abstract level, I actually looked forward to playing GoW, whereas, I almost dreaded playing Metroid (again, consider my context - I don't want to spend a required 2 hours playing the game when my time is at a premium).

Anyway, I traded a friend Metroid for The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. I like this a lot more than Metroid, but there are still issues. Just when I was getting used to the controller scheme, they up and changed my character into a wolf. The wolf level is mildy boring too, though it's still much better than Metroid. I don't anticipate Zelda frustrating me as much as Metroid, but I guess you never know. I'm much more into the Zelda universe though, so I have a little incentive to keep up with the game. As for the Wii in general, the next game I'll actually get excited about is the announced Star Wars game. Now that is something I'll be willing to dedicate a lot of time towards! Otherwise, I might just invest in a little sports game or something (Rockstar's Ping Pong maybe? Seems like a good fit for the Wii, though I gotta wonder how different it is from Wii tennis).



Video Games & Decisions
I've written a couple of times about Steven Johnson's book Everything Bad is Good For You. He intentionally takes a controversial point of view, that pop culture (which is usually referred to as an example of the downfall of culture or something) is actually making us smarter. While I don't agree with everything he has to say, I think he makes a lot of good points. His chapter on video games is particularly interesting, because it's such a new medium, and because it's rare that someone acknowledges anything good about video games, aside from the occasional reference to improving hand-eye coordination. Johnson mentions several things (like probing and telescoping), but the really interesting thing about video games are the decisions we make while playing.

When you think about it, that's what video games are all about. They are constantly forcing you to make decisions, to choose one thing over another, to prioritize. Johnson writes:

All the intellectual benefits of gaming derive from this fundamental virtue: weighing evidence, analyzing situations, consulting your long-term goals, and then deciding. No other pop cultureform directly engages the brain's decision-making apparatus in the same way. From the outside, the primary activity of a gamer looks like a fury of clicking and shooting, which is why so much of the conventional wisdom about games focuses on hand-eye coordination. But if you peer inside the gamer's mind, the primary activity turns out to be another creature altogether: making decisions, some of them snap judgements, some long-term strategies.

Shamus wrote a perfect example of this last week. He wrote about his typical strategy when playing deathmatch-style games like Unreal Tournament. His strategy involves lots of decisions and the fast-paced action of the games requires him to make these decisions within mere seconds. He wrote out the process of his decision as a humorous exchange between Sherlock Holmes and Watson:

"You see Watson, the lift on the far side of the room is moving back down to its default position, yet the door at the top is closed. Note also the spread of burn marks on the floor: All in a straight line, evenly spaced. Finally, one cannot miss that there are two medkits in the corner."

"Yes, it was evidently quite a battle. Very confusing, Holmes!"

"Not so! The descending lift and closed upper door suggest that someone came in through the upper door and jumped down onto the lift, instead of riding the lift up to the door. If he'd been going the other way, the upper door would still be open! This means our quarry cannot be on the upper level. Furthermore, given the other clues in this room we can determine not only what happened here, but we can also discover who was killed and who did the killing!"

"Impossible! The body of the victim is destroyed, and the killer is gone, how can you know who was here?"

"Note the pattern of burn marks, Watson. A even line such as this is only possible with a full volley of rockets, aimed downward. Only our foe xXRoquetManXx is reckless enough to use such a technique, which means he was most likely the victor. We know the victim couldn't have been Ownz0r, because we just got done ambushing him in the boiler room. Er, again. This means that our third adversary, Sn1pa, must have been the unfortunate victim here. So, here is what happened... xXRoquetManXx entered from the upper level and spied the other player below. Having already queued up the needed rockets, he aimed down and obliterated the unwary Sn1pa with the barrage, producing the burn pattern we observe. He then leapt down, touching off the lift as he landed. And finally, we can deduce that when he fled the scene he was unscathed, or else he would have helped himself to the nearby medpacks."

"Amazing Holmes! But bugger all, it would be even more helpful if we knew where he went! There are three doors down here on the lower level. Which way did he go?"

"Even simpler to deduce! He certainly didn't head for the boiler room, since that's the way we just came in, if you remember, and we did not encounter him. It's unlikely that he headed for the exhaust room, since that leads to some health and a rocket launcher, and we have already determined that he has both."

"I get it now, he's headed for the toxic waste pit through the third door. Brilliant! Let's get after him!"

"Easy Watson. No sense in going that way. He's had a good head start, and we'll just end up ten steps behind him. He'll be gathering up all the weapons and armor ahead of us, becoming stronger while we waste time fruitlessly trying to catch up with him. The toxic waste pit leads 'round into the boiler room eventually. So, if we double back now we should get there a few seconds before him. We have just enough time to reach the upper catwalk. He has us out-gunned with his rocket launcher I'm afraid, but we can insta-kill him with the Shock Rifle if we can take him by surprise. Let's go!"

Shamus electrified xXRoquetManXx with the Shock Rifle.

xXRoquetManXx says: dammit shams how r u ALWAYS BEHIND ME??????

Obviously, he doesn't make decisions explicitely like this - most of this happens without really thinking about it. It has to, because you don't have time to think much in these types of games. I haven't played one of these types of games since Return to Castle Wolfenstein - the mp_beach level was great fun, and I think a lot of people had a sorta sixth sense about the typical strategies used to complete the level. Sure, there were lots of people who were just good at button-pressing and aiming, but there was a lot of strategy involved too. I actually haven't played Unreal Tournament since the UT99 game (as I'd heard that 2003 and 2004 editions weren't that great), but it sounds like UT 3 is going to be pretty good. I may have to check it out.



Groping and Probing
So a few recent installments of Shamus' new comic, Chainmail Bikini, has created a bit of controversy. The comics in question are actually a series of 3 (the fact that there are 3 is a key part of the controversy, but we'll get to that in a moment). Here they are:

• #6 Touch Attack
• #7 Relationship Shy
• #8 Live Action Ramgar Pummeling

The controversy stems from the fact that there is a malicious groping in comic #6. Perhaps due to an ill-advised punchline ("improved stamina"), the discussion turned from one of groping and larping and into one of rape. And we all know how funny discussions of rape can get.

To be honest, I didn't find this particular arc in the comics very funny. However, I didn't find it very offensive either (though I can see why some might think so). Also, while I didn't find it especially funny, I do think it makes an interesting statement about gaming in general.

I don't tend to read web-comics the same way I read blogs. I tend to let several installments build up, and then read them all. So I didn't read this particular story arc until I knew about the controversy, and I must admit to a little bit of observer bias. Knowing there was a controversy colored my reading of the comic, and two things immediately struck me.

First is that while there is an element of one guy antagonizing his buddy, there is also an element of probing. By probing, I'm referring to exploration of the limits of a game and its possibilities. Steven Johnson's book Everything Bad is Good for You has a chapter on Video Games which covers this concept really well, and I recently wrote about it:

Probing is essentially exploration of the game and its possibilities. Much of this is simply the unconscious exploration of the controls and the interface, figuring out how the game works and how you're supposed to interact with it. However, probing also takes the more conscious form of figuring out the limitations of the game. For instance, in a racing game, it's usually interesting to see if you can turn your car around backwards, pick up a lot of speed, then crash head-on into a car going the "correct" way.

Now again, in comic #6, one character is clearly attempting to antagonize his friend for choosing to role play a woman. However, I find it interesting that he chose to do so in such a way that is consistent with his character (who is a Chaotic Neutral barbarian) and followed the rules of the game (rolling die, etc...). According to the notes that accompany this arc, this sort of thing tends to happen when a campaign is not going well. If the players aren't having fun, they're going to make fun, and in if you're in a role playing game, they're going to do so by making their characters do something a little extreme. They don't do this because they are really extreme people, but because they want to see what happens. In short, they want to knock the game off it's boring rails. In this case, one player's character player groped another player's character. And from the aftermath in comics #7 and #8, you can see that things certainly got interesting. However, you also see that there were indeed consequences for the groping (one player physically assaults the other), and the comments that accompany each comic clearly attest that this is, in fact, a bad thing. To me, it's clear that the character in the comic is engaging in probing, but the comic also makes it clear that in a game that is as open-ended as D&D, it's possible to take things so far, which is why you saw a "real-world" reprisal (scare quotes due to the fact that this is a fictional comic, after all).

The second thing that struck me also had to do with the consequences. The situation immediately reminded me of this post from my friend Roy's feminist blog. He found this german poster which has a picture accompanied by this text:

Warning! Women defend themselves! If you leer at, catcall, or touch a woman, take into account that you might be loudly ridiculed, have a glass of beer poured over you, or be slapped in the face. Therefore, we strongly advise you to refrain from such harrassment!

This is exactly what happend in comics #6 - #8. Well, not exactly. The comics actually take the consequences even further, while further abstracting the situation. Let me elaborate. The poster that Roy is pointing to is talking about real life situations. If you grope some woman at a bar, expect to be slapped in the face (or worse). What happened in the comics? An imaginary character who was role playing his own imaginary character groped another imaginary character that was being role played by yet another imaginary character. No one actually exists in this scenario, and yet there are indeed consequences for the groping. In fact, the consequences were the entire point of this character arc. So when I read comics #6-#8, I immediately saw them as a demonstration of Roy's poster. (Ironically, you could even read into this more, saying that the consequences have actually broken free of the imaginary world of Chainmail Bikini and taken root in the real world - in the form of a long comment thread and multiple blog postings like this one).

Now, if one were so inclined, I can see why this arc would be grating. Personally, it doesn't bother me, but I've never been groped (er, against my will) and I can certainly understand how that could be off-putting (I suppose an argument could be made that there are some other gender issues as well). And as an astute commenter at Shamus' site points out, a lot of why this comic doesn't work as humor is due to the structure of the story:

A lot of why this doesn't work well as humour, and why it's ended up annoying people, is to do with the structure of the comic. I think Shamus really struggled with fitting a potentially amusing gag into the three-panel format, and ultimately didn't manage it successfully.

Here's what I mean. Comic 6 Panel 1 has the line "I'm exploring gender roles within the context of a roleplaying environment". The barbarian's player throws these words back in comic 7 panel 2. It's the punchline of a five-panel gag split over two comics. Structurally, this is a mess. It leads to a lame second gag to fill the rest of comic 7, but more importantly it means some sort of not-quite-a-punchline has to be contrived for the end of comic 6. That's where "improved stamina" comes from. Whatever is said in subsequent comics, it is really hard to read comic 6 in isolation without inferring that the barbarian's player intends to have his character vigorously sexually assault the female character. Because this is the last line of the comic, the additional implication is that we are meant to find this funny in itself. No wonder some people got offended.

Now, imagine doing the same thing over a slightly longer single comic of four or five panels. You would cut the "improved stamina" line for a start - it would serve no purpose any more. Instead, the comic ends on "I prefer to think of it as exploring gender roles within the context of a roleplaying environment". The first advantage of this is that it's a lot funnier. The punchline is where it's supposed to be, not buried half-way through the next comic. The second advantage is that the potential for offending readers is greatly reduced. It no longer reads as though we're meant to find rape or sexual assault funny: the humour is in the elf's player having his pretentiousness deflated in a basically harmless, if tasteless, way.

Shamus himself has noted that this explanation is not only accurate, but a good explanation as to why people are offended by what he essentially saw as a harmless joke. This makes sense to me. He wrote a strip that touched on a controversial subject in a humorous way, but then he was forced to cut it up and insert artificial punchlines, one of which implied more than he thought. From his point of view, the comic is basically the same as before, but just split up a little. All the sudden people start talking about rape and unsubscribing to the comic. I can see why he'd be a bit perplexed by even a reasonable objection to the comic.

I've never been a particularly great writer. When I was in high school, I always excelled at math and science, but never did especially well at english or writing. By college, I was much more comfortable with writing, and part of the reason for that was that I realized that writing isn't precise. Language is inherently vague and open to interpretation, and though there are some people who can wield language astoundingly well, most of us will open ourselves up to criticism simply by the act of experessing ourselves. One of my favorite quotes summarizes this well:

"To write or to speak is almost inevitably to lie a little. It is an attempt to clothe an intangible in a tangible form; to compress an immeasurable into a mold. And in the act of compression, how the Truth is mangled and torn!"
- Anne Murrow Lindbergh

Unfortunately, this simple miscommunication seems to have gotten lost in a thread of almost 200 comments. Some people have quit reading the comic altogether because of some perceived malice or ignorance on Shamus' part, others have taken to turning this into a divisive debate about rape. I don't want to start a holy war here, but when it comes to controversial stuff like this, I tend to give the creators the benefit of the doubt.

I think this whole controversy has brought up some interesting ideas, even if most have reduced it to a debate about rape. For instance, probing in games often takes the form of doing something extreme. My seemingly innocuous example above was turning your racecar around and driving the wrong direction to see what happens when you ram into another car. In real life, such an action would be catastrophic and could result in multiple deaths. Now, does doing something like that speak ill of me (the player)? How does wanton vehicular homicide compare to imaginary groping?

In my limited D&D gaming career, I played a Chaotic Evil thief who stole from his own party (i.e. one of my friends). Why did I do that? In real life, I'd never do such a thing. Why would I be interested in doing it in a role playing game? At a later point, I certainly suffered the consequences for my actions, and I think that's the rub. Playing games is all about setting up a paradigm, and sometimes half the fun is attempting to pull it down and find the holes in the paradigm, just to see what happens. I think that's a big part of why open-ended games like Grand Theft Auto are so popular. It's not the act of stealing a car or murdering a stranger that's fun, it's the act of attempting to derail the game. (Again, I touched on this in a post on game manuals.) In a recent discussion on what people like about Role Playing Games (also at Shamus' site), one of the most prominent answers was that good RPGs "...must give the player lots of freedom to make their own choices." One of the things I really hated about God of War (an otherwise awsome game) was that the character I was playing was a real prick. At one point, he goes out of his way to kill an innocent bystander (something about kicking him down into the hydra maybe? I don't remember specifically.) and that really annoyed me. What happened didn't bother me so much as the fact that I didn't have a choice in the matter. I don't really have an answer here, but I like games that give me a lot of freedom, because once I get bored by the forced or scripted aspects of the game, I can probe for weaknesses in the paradigm, and maybe even exploit them.

Update: I just noticed that Roy has tackled this subject on his blog. He seems quite disheartened by Shamus' post, though Roy wrote his post before the comment I quoted above was posted... My perception was that Shamus just couldn't understand why people were objecting... but once someone actually pointed out, in detail, why the humor doesn't work, he seemed to be more understanding (not only of why people were complaining, but of what people were suggesting by their complaints). But that's just me. I don't want to put words in Shamus' mouth, but as I already mentioned, I tend to give creators the benefit of the doubt.



Wii and Foosball
When playing the Wii, especially Wii Sports, one can't help but wonder how stupid we look playing this game. Here we are, standing in front of a TV, flailing about in an attempt to play some silly game. I'm sure people watching someone play on a Wii think it's really lame. It takes about five minutes of actually playing it to get past that, but getting someone to try that first five minutes might be a little difficult.

The other thing I've noticed is that Wii Sports is really only fun when you're playing with a bunch of other people. I can play the single player games for about a half hour before getting sick of it, but when other people are around, time simply flies. Hours later, you start to wonder why your arm is so sore. When you think about it, this isn't that unusual. Most games are social affairs and would be no fun by yourself. It wasn't until video games came along that single player games became so common. I think a big part of that had to do with the inherent limitations of video game hardware. A lot of early games had capabilities for multi-player, but the really fun multi-player experiences didn't happen until you got to the 1990s, and even then, it wasn't as big a portion of the industry as single-player games. Things have been getting steadily more social as time and hardware (and networking) has gotten better, and I think the Wii taps into something that a lot of the latest games and systems don't. Again, this isn't that unusual. Games are meant to be social, and in some cases the mechanics of the game are irrelevant when compared to the social value. For example, Steve Yegge explains one of the main pastimes at Google:

Anyway, until then, the main pastime, other than researching how the Romans managed to eat several meals at one sitting, is Foosball. This is a game I've been introduced to since I came to Kirkland. I've seen it before, and always thought it looked kind of lame, but that just shows you what I know. Foosball is a way of life around here. Which makes it... not lame, see?

I can't quite figure out whether it's popular because it's the only thing to do other than stuff your face (except on Mondays when you can poll the massage calendar hoping someone will cancel) or if it's actually fun in its own right.

There's something similar going on with the Wii. When you're watching other people play, it seems kinda lame... but then you start playing with your friends and all of the sudden, it's 3 am and you feel like your arm is going to fall off. Wii becomes not lame because everyone has so much fun playing, even if they do look like idiots while doing so.

Now all they need is Wii Foosball and we'll be all set.



Wii, guess what I get to do?
So I've been working a lot lately, which means no exercise. How to correct this? That's right, I bought a Nintendo Wii using the feeble excuse that it will at least provide some measure of activity other than sitting at a desk and typing. Plus, you know, it's fun. In any case, I'm not writing much tonight, so I'll just point to a few things, including the latest "hubristic" round of the Movie Screenshot Game, in which I posted 5 screenshots and requested that the winner has to get them all right. As it turns out, that was perhaps a little too hard, so I've posted some hints in the comments. If no one gets them tomorrow, I'll post even more obvious hints, and if no one still has it by Friday, I'll have stumped the internet. Or, uh, the 10 people who read my blog.

For those who are baffled by the title of this post, it's one of the little clips they often play on the Preston and Steve Show, a local morning talkshow that's freely available online as a podcast (the whole show is posted every day, with almost no commercials). When I can home tonight and saw the Wii waiting on my doorstep (I ordered online), that was the first thing that went through my head... then I realized I could make a Wiipun.

In other news, Author is also watching Nadesico and wants to "engage into a stegagography themed game" in which people who get rare discs mark them in some way and post them in a central location, so that other people who get the same disc will know, and can mark it again, etc... until they find out how many copies of a disc Netflix has in stock. Interesting idea, though I should admit that I never got disc 4. It said "Very Long Wait" and then one day, it said "Now" so I put it at the top of my queue, but a couple of days later, I checked again, and it was back to "Very Long Wait." Crap. I proceeded to remove it from my queue and downloaded the episodes, which I still haven't watched (this weekend, I promise!) I'm half tempted to put disc 4 back in the queue, just to play Author's game. Author, if it helps, I do have disc 6 here, if that counts for anything. My assumption is that they have less than 10 (maybe only a couple or even just one) of disc 4. Since they don't have any of disc 5, I wouldn't put it past them...

And finally, for anyone who listens to the excellent Filmspotting podcast, it looks like we've reached the end of an era. One of the hosts, Sam Van Hallgren announced on last week's show that he will be retiring from after just a few more shows. At first I was shocked, but then the more I thought about it, I realized I should have seen this coming. The show has had several guest hosts throughout it's 2.5 year run, and it always seemed to be Sam that was absent. Sam will certainly be missed, and I can totally understand his reasons. When he started Filmspotting (or Cinecast, as it was called back then), he was single and working a part time job. Since starting, he's gotten married, bought a house in Milwaukee, and gotten a full time job. Like some bloggers I read, I have no idea how these people manage to produce the quality and quantity of material that they do, and so it's hard to begrudge Sam leaving the show. Again, though, he will be missed. One of the great things about the show was that Adam and Sam have great chemistry and differing tastes. They've already found a replacement for Sam (one of their friends, nicknamed Matty Ballgame), and he's guest hosted before. I'm sure he'll do a good job, but the show will never be the same. Of course, that's what happens - life goes on. Hey, maybe we'll go back to the 2 shows per week format! Really, though, I have to credit Cinecast/Filmspotting for really galvanizing and inspiring my recent (by which I mean the last 2 years) movie craze. I've always loved movies, but listening to Cinecast/Filmspotting has really emphasised my appreciation, and despite Sam's departure, I'm sure it will continue to do so.

That's all for now. Back to the Wii for me.



2K Games = Quality!
So the net is raging about the new video game BioShock, which apparently features an ill-advised DRM scheme. Shamus has posted several updates on the subject, and of course I agree with him and most of the fans that the DRM scheme is absurd, unusable, and ultimately pointless (echoing my general thoughts on DRM), but my experience with 2K Games has nothing to do with DRM.

I have a weakness for sports video games, particularly Hockey games. In 2003, I bought a copy of EA Sports' NHL 2004, which I loved (despite some flaws). I played/simmed 20 seasons in Dynasty mode, and won 20 Stanley Cups (fun!) Unfortunately, I lost the game when I moved into my current house. I looked at the game review sites for the new 2005 hockey games and the then-upstart 2K Games was making some bold moves and getting great reviews. They had just signed a contract to brand their sports games with ESPN and to compete with the EA Sports Goliath, they were pricing their games for just $19.99 (versus EA's $49.99). The games were getting 90+ scores on all the standard sites (while EA was getting average to bad reviews), so I figured why not? Big mistake.

My favorite part of the newer hockey games is the Dynasty mode where you can play a sort of meta game where you take the role of general manager and control a team through many years, as opposed to just one season. It allows you to build your team up with young talent and watch them grow into superstars, etc... NHL 2K5 had a similar mode, called Franchise. The problem? I played 20 games in the first season of my franchise, and then the game simply wouldn't let me save my progress. It just crashed every time I tried, no matter what I did. Did I mention that this was a console game, incapable of being patched? On a side note, it would have been nice if the reviews for this game mentioned this sort of thing, but video game reviews have largely become useless. Of course my review, which takes the form of a comparison between NHL 2004 and NHL 2K5, prominently calls out the 2K game's bugs.

Anyway, it gets better. My friend Dave bought a copy of NHL 2K7 last year... and it still has the same bug! It's been 3 years, and they still haven't fixed the bug.

So I'm not surprised that the same company has embraced a useless DRM scheme (provided by Sony, no less - how on earth could anyone trust a Sony DRM product?) Don't worry, they'll probably get around to fixing the issue in 5 or 6 years (I wonder if they fixed the aforementioned crashing bug in NHL 2K8?).



Manuals, or the lack thereof...
When I first started playing video games and using computer applications, I remember having to read the instruction manuals to figure out what was happening on screen. I don't know if this was because I was young and couldn't figure this stuff out, or because some of the controls were obtuse and difficult. It was perhaps a combination of both, but I think the latter was more prevalent, especially when applications and games became more complex and powerful. I remember sitting down at a computer running DOS and loading up Wordperfect. The interface that appears is rather simplistic, and the developers apparently wanted to avoid the "clutter" of on-screen menus, so they used keyboard combinations. According to Wikipedia, Wordperfect used "almost every possible combination of function keys with Ctrl, Alt, and Shift modifiers." I vaguely remember needing to use those stupid keyboard templates (little pieces of laminated paper that fit snugly around the keyboard keys, helping you remember what key or combo does what.)

Video Games used to have great manuals too. I distinctly remember several great manuals from the Atari 2600 era. For example, the manual for Pitfall II was a wonderful document done in the style of Pitfall Harry's diary. The game itself had little in the way of exposition, so you had to read the manual to figure out that you were trying to rescue your niece Rhonda and her cat, Quickclaw, who became trapped in a catacomb while searching for the fabled Raj diamond. Another example for the Commodore 64 was Temple of Apshai. The game had awful graphics, but each room you entered had a number, and you had to consult your manual to get a description of the room.

By the time of the NES, the importance of manuals had waned from Apshai levels, but they were still somewhat necessary at times, and gaming companies still went to a lot of trouble to produce helpful documents. The one that stands out in my mind was the manual for Dragon Warrior III, which was huge (at least 50 pages) and also contained a nice fold-out chart of most of the monsters and wapons in the game (with really great artwork). PC games were also getting more complex, and as Roy noted recently, companies like Sierra put together really nice instruction manuals for complex games like the King's Quest series.

In the early 1990s, my family got its first Windows PC, and several things changed. With the Word for Windows software, you didn't need any of those silly keyboard templates. Everything you needed to do was in a menu somewhere, and you could just point and click instead of having to memorize strange keyboard combos. Naturally, computer purists love the keyboard, and with good reason. If you really want to be efficient, the keyboard is the way to go, which is why Linux users are so fond of the command line and simple looking but powerful applications like Emacs. But for your average user, the GUI was very important, and made things a lot easier to figure out. Word had a user manual, and it was several hundred pages long, but I don't think I ever cracked it open, except maybe in curiosity (not because I needed to).

The trends of improving interfaces and less useful manuals proceeded throughout the next decade and today, well, I can't think of the last time I had to consult a physical manual for anything. Steven Den Beste has been playing around with flash for a while, but he says he never looks at the manual. "Manuals are for wimps." In his post, Roy wonders where all the manuals have gone. He speculates that manufacturing costs are a primary culprit, and I have no doubt that they are, but there are probably a couple of other reasons as well. For one, interfaces have become much more intuitive and easy to use. This is in part due to familiarity with computers and the emergence of consistent standards for things like dialog boxes (of course, when you eschew those standards, you get what Jacob Nielson describes as a catastrophic failure). If you can easily figure it out through the interface, what use are the manuals? With respect to gaming, the in-game tutorials have largely taken the place of instruction manuals. Another thing that has perhaps affected official instruction manuals are the unofficial walkthroughs and game guides. Visit a local bookstore and you'll find entire bookcases devoted to vide game guides and walkthrough. As nice as the manual for Pitfall II was, you really didn't need much more than 10 pages to explain how to play that game, but several hundred pages barely does justice to some of the more complex video games in today's market. Perhaps the reason gaming companies don't give you instruction manuals with the game is not just that printing the manual is costly, but that they can sell you a more detailed and useful one.

Steven Johnson's book Everything Bad is Good for You has a chapter on Video Games that is very illuminating (in fact, the whole book is highly recommended - even if you don't totally agree with his premise, he still makes a compelling argument). He talks about the official guides and why they're so popular:

The dirty little secret of gaming is how much time you spend not having fun. You may be frustrated; you may be confused or disoriented; you may be stuck. When you put the game down and move back into the real world, you may find yourself mentally working through the problem you've been wrestling with, as though you were worrying a loose tooth. If this is mindless escapism, it's a strangely masochistic version.

He gives an example of a man who spends six months working as a smith (mindless work) in Ultima online so that he can attain a certain ability, and he also talks about how people spend tons of money on guides for getting past various roadblocks. Why would someone do this? Johnson spends a fair amount of time going into the neurological underpinnings of this, most notably what he calls the "reward circuitry of the brain." In games, rewards are everywhere. More life, more magic spells, new equipment, etc... And how do we get these rewards? Johnson thinks there are two main modes of intellectual labor that go into video gaming, and he calls them probing and telescoping.

Probing is essentially exploration of the game and its possibilities. Much of this is simply the unconscious exploration of the controls and the interface, figuring out how the game works and how you're supposed to interact with it. However, probing also takes the more conscious form of figuring out the limitations of the game. For instance, in a racing game, it's usually interesting to see if you can turn your car around backwards, pick up a lot of speed, then crash head-on into a car going the "correct" way. Or, in Rollercoaster Tycoon, you can creatively place balloon stands next to a roller coaster to see what happens (the result is hilarious). Probing the limits of game physics and finding ways to exploit them are half the fun (or challenge) of video games these days, which is perhaps another reason why manuals are becoming less frequent.

Telescoping has more to do with the games objectives. Once you've figured out how to play the game through probing, you seek to exploit your knowledge to achieve the game's objectives, which are often nested in a hierarchical fashion. For instance, to save the princess, you must first enter the castle, but you need a key to get into the castle and the key is guarded by a dragon, etc... Indeed, the structure is sometimes even more complicated, and you essentially build this hierarchy of goals in your head as the game progresses. This is called telescoping.

So why is this important? Johnson has the answer (page 41 in my edition):

... far more than books or movies or music, games force you to make decisions. Novels may activate our imagination, and music may conjure up powerful emotions, but games force you to decide, to choose, to prioritize. All the intellectual benefits of gaming derive from this fundamental virtue, because learning how to think is ultimately about learning to make the right decisions: weighing evidence, analyzing situations, consulting your long term goals, and then deciding. No other pop culture form directly engages the brain's decision-making apparatus in the same way. From the outside, the primary activity of a gamer looks like a fury of clicking and shooting, which is why much of the conventional wisdom about games focuses on hand-eye coordination. But if you peer inside the gamer's mind, the primary activity turns out to be another creature altogether: making decisions, some of them snap judgements, some long-term strategies.

Probing and telescoping are essential to learning in any sense, and the way Johnson describes them in the book reminds me of a number of critical thinking methods. Probing, developing a hypothesis, reprobing, and then rethinking the hypothesis is essentially the same thing as the scientific method or the hermenutic circle. As such, it should be interesting to see if video games ever really catch on as learning tools. There have been a lot of attempts at this sort of thing, but they're often stifled by the reputation of video games being a "colossal waste of time" (in recent years, the benefits of gaming are being acknowledged more and more, though not usually as dramatically as Johnson does in his book).

Another interesting use for video games might be evaluation. A while ago, Bill Simmons made an offhand reference to EA Sports' Madden games in the context of hiring football coaches (this shows up at #29 on his list):

The Maurice Carthon fiasco raises the annual question, "When teams are hiring offensive and defensive coordinators, why wouldn't they have them call plays in video games to get a feel for their play calling?" Seriously, what would be more valuable, hearing them B.S. about the philosophies for an hour, or seeing them call plays in a simulated game at the all-Madden level? Same goes for head coaches: How could you get a feel for a coach until you've played poker and blackjack with him?

When I think about how such a thing would actually go down, I'm not so sure, because the football world created by Madden, as complex and comprehensive as it is, still isn't exactly the same as the real football world. However, I think the concept is still sound. Theoretically, you could see how a prospective coach would actually react to a new, and yet similar, football paradigm and how they'd find weaknesses and exploit them. The actual plays they call aren't that important; what you'd be trying to figure out is whether or not the coach was making intelligent decisions or not.

So where are manuals headed? I suspect that they'll become less and less prevalent as time goes on and interfaces become more and more intuitive (though there is still a long ways to go before I'd say that computer interfaces are truly intuitive, I think they're much more intuitive now than they were ten years ago). We'll see more interactive demos and in-game tutorials, and perhaps even games used as teaching tools. I could probably write a whole separate post about how this applies to Linux, which actually does require you to look at manuals sometimes (though at least they have a relatively consistent way of treating manuals; even when the documentation is bad, you can usually find it). Manuals and passive teaching devices will become less important. And to be honest, I don't think we'll miss them. They're annoying.



Link Dump: Flashy Edition
As per usual these days, time is short, so just some quick links to various flash oddities and games.

• Desktop Tower Defense: This addictive, low-intensity game has been out there for a while, but what was new to me was the context of it's creation. Jeff Atwood dives into the history of Tower Defense style games, and makes a surprising observation:

  You'd be surprised how much money you can make by creating a flash game and giving it away for free on the internet. The Tower Defense game mode is a business opportunity for an enterprising programmer. According to a recent interview, Paul Preese, the author of Desktop Tower Defense, is making around $8,000 per month.

  I suppose it can't last, but wow. Making almost $100,000 a year by making such a simple flash game and giving it away for free? That's just amazing, even if it does only last for a year or two. In any case, a good entrepreneur would reinvest that money into new games and enhancements, or any other number of potentially lucrative endeavors.
• Shuffle: Another simple, low-intensity game that is no less fun for the effort. Good stuff.
• Starcraft: Flash Action: When did this happen? I haven't played much of this (for fear of falling into black hole of such games), but it seems like, well, a web implementation of Starcraft. Interesting.
• The Zoomquilt (and Part II): Not really a game, but a mesmerizing pseudo fractal piece of art that you can continually zoom in on (or zoom out from).

That's all for now.



Commodore 64 Links and Thoughts
Just finishing off the Commodore 64 retrospective with some links and thoughts...

• Vice Emulator: This is the relatively craptacular emulator I used to revisit the games of my youth. Once I figured it out, it wasn't that bad, but the biggest issue with C64 emulators is that they all lack reasonable documentation (or the documentation is difficult to find). The biggest problem I had was with the Keyboard settings. You see, the C64's keyboard had a different layout than today's keyboards, so the mappings aren't always intuitive. Also, the "Keyboard Settings" dialog needs some work (for one thing, someone needs to teach the interface designers how radio buttons are supposed to work). Oh, and by default, Vice assumes a German keyboard layout. That was a good one. Still, it worked well enough for my purposes.
• C64.com: Fantastic site where I downloaded the majority of the games I played, but which also has lots of good C64 articles, including some long excerpts from The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Commodore.
• YouTube has a bunch of cheesy old C64 commercials. My favorite has a funny little jingle that goes something like "Are you keeping up with the Commodore, cause the Commodore is keeping up with you!" Ho man, that's not creepy at all. And this one on Google Video is, well... it's just sad.
• Interestingly enough, I work in the old Commodore headquarters building. Go figure.

Well, that about does it for the Commodore 64. It was a system of firsts for me: my first real computer, my first programming experiences (BASIC!), and lots of firsts in terms of game styles too. And so I do have a bit of a soft spot for the C64. Next up in the video game retrospective will be the good ol NES. I won't be starting that one right away, but I have a feeling that it will end up being a longer series of posts (too many great games for the NES). Until then...



C64 Games: Honorable Mention
Continuing the retrospective: There were a lot of games made for the Commodore 64/128, and to be honest, my experience with the C64 is probably less extensive than with other gaming systems. Nevertheless, there were several games I used to play quite often on the C64, which basically amounted to the interim system between the Atari 2600 and NES. Many games have not aged very well, but there is still some sentimental value to these, and some are still genuinely fun to play. The C64 was significantly more powerful than the Atari 2600, so the games were often much larger in scope and began to have more to accomplish than arbitrary point scores (though, honestly, many games were basically run-and-gun, compete for the high score type games)

• Test Drive/Test Drive 2: A series of games that has pretty much endured the last 20 years and will probably continue to thrive, the first two games were on the C64, and they were great fun. At the time, at least. These games have not aged well. The concept is pr