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.

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.

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]

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.

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.

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 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.