Cube Building Updates
Cube Drafting is a fun way to get more use out of Magic cards. I went over the basics in an earlier post. I want to talk about my considerations when designing the Cube and then provide my thought process on some of the card swaps I made.
Creating
My first step was going through Em’s huge collection. I (mostly) restricted myself to cards with the modern frame. This keeps me in the last 8-ish years of cards but includes my favorite older sets, like Ravnica and Kamigawa.
My first focus was to narrow down the sorts of cards I wanted. I had a few basic parameters:
- Nothing super-bomb level. Powerful cards are fine, but nothing that is a one-card win. One example of a bad card would be Predator Dragon, as a giant flying haste creature can often end the game immediately.
- Conditional removal instead of cheap removal. Things that read “destroy target creature” are frowned upon.
- Lots of “enters the battlefield” cards. I love 2-for-1s or 1.5-for-1s. This also helps enable other strategies like self-bounce and big, stabilizing plays.
- Enchantments where possible. Enchantments are notoriously vulnerable to 1-for-2s so I wanted to find all the good enchantments, especially in White.
- Tribal where possible. Nothing Lorwyn-level but I wanted each color to have its own tribes.
- Proliferate! I love proliferate and I have ways of boosting it with Graft and other +1/+1 and -1/-1 counter-based cards.
- Gold where possible. I’ve loved the sets that encourage multicolor and Hybrid is one of my favorite things.
- Removal in all colors. Certainly, colors should have their niches (red: damage, white: tapping, etc) but I want everyone to have fun keeping things under control.
I was able to pull out about 500 cards. My friend Alex helped me trim it down to 360, which is the right size for 3 packs for 8 people or 4 packs for 6 people. While Cubes can hypothetically be any size, keeping the pool to a limited size will help me keep it fit and well-designed.
Playtesting
From there, we played the Cube a few times. My first round of notes:
- White, especially control, was widely agreed to be the strongest. There are a lot of tapping effects, especially when including blue.
- Black came together with recursion, solid aggro and removal cards. Despite the removal being strong, I felt control was a bit weak for Black. Black+Red seemed well paired.
- Blue was a good second color but lacking on its own. Its tap and control effects seemed very strong but not enough to stand on its own. I also felt that proliferate wasn’t quite strong enough yet. Adding some tribal here will help.
- Red had some good removal but didn’t have enough tools to succeed with all-in aggro. Goblins wasn’t panning out so I wanted to find a new niche for Red. I also felt like Red and Green wasn’t as strong a combo as I wanted.
- Green had good mana generation but little to do with it. There weren’t enough elves to make elves work and not enough tokens to make tokens work. I needed to give Green a turbo shot of power, especially when working with its allies, White and Red.
- Gold was under drafted and I think I misunderstood the role of Gold cards in draft. I’ll need to focus on finding the best slots to give to multicolor cards, possibly by swapping in hybrid cards.
Developing
I have all the changes listed in a public google doc. It even contains my individual rationale on each swap. My summary:
White
- Mediocre creatures were swapped for Flankers, including a flanking lord. This is only a mini-theme, but I feel like mini-themes might be a big part of what makes a Cube fun.
- Several self-bouncing cards, themed around protecting your guys, were added. I like this as anti-removal and as a way to recycle all the “enters the battlefield” effects.
- White Crovax. Black Crovax is also in, and both of them are bombs assuming you can work around their drawbacks.
Blue
- A bit of Wizard synergy. One is a counter. The other is Azami, Lady of Scrolls. Solid on her own, she can be amazing if you can stick one or two other Wizards.
- More cloning. Cackling Counterpart provides a cool combat trick and Phyrexian Ingester is a new twist.
- Merfolk Sovereign. The two best Merfolk cards are a bit out of my budget, but Sovereign will reward players who collect a number of the already-existing Merfolk base.
- More control. Meloku will be strong and Mark of Eviction will be very interactive. I added a few medium-power counter spells, careful to avoid outright denial.
- A bit more Proliferate synergy. Tezzeret’s Gambit, specifically, seemed like a no-brainer as well as Aether Figment as a win condition for Proliferate.
Black
- Infect, Wither, -1/-1 counters, etc. I like this as another niche for Black: it may not always kill in one hit. As discussed, I’m not fond of super strong removal, so being able to cripple creatures and kill them later sounds perfect. Also, these effects greatly benefits from proliferate.
- Viscera Dragger and Vigor Mortis boost number of straight recursion cards, while Postmortem Lunge and Screams from Within provide other ways to interacting with the graveyard.
- Consuming Vapors may end up being above the curve. I really love that the other player has some time to react to the second sacrifice, but near-guaranteed 2-for-1 removal does concern me.
- Falkenrath Noble is hopefully the beginning of several Innistrad-block Morbid-style cards. When I can find more slots for death-triggered abilities, I will.
Red
- Several elemental cards were added. I wasn’t able to get the Elemental lord, but I will eventually. There are a surprising number of Elemental cards out there.
- More mid- and late-game burnout cards. Magmatic Core especially feels like a great finisher for super aggressive Red-based decks. Hopefully Devastating Summons will end at least one game.
- Coal Stoker joins Priest of Ubarask as a bonus-cast enabler. This feels super red to me.
- Fury Charm serves as a strict upgrade to Shatter. I’m hoping its occasionally main-deckable, especially if I can toss a few Suspends into the Cube.
- Conquering Manticore was swapped in to replace Predator Dragon. I don’t like the instant-win feel of Predator Dragon. Manticore is probably equally strong but gives the opponent more time to react. In a format with a lot of enchantment-based removal I feel its essential to give people time to react to bombs.
Green
- Feral Hydra, Protean Hydra, Briarhorn, Masked Admirers, and Ant Queen give Green a LOT more to do with mana. Just this package has dramatically improved Green by giving it new outs to situations where the ground game gets mucked up with creatures.
- Ant Queen also serves as another entry into adding to tokens, which is typically GW, along with Gaea’s Anthem, Bestial Menace, and Hunting Triad.
- Hunting Triad, Plaguemaw Beast, and Twinblade Slasher help Green’s contributions to other colors.
- Moldervine Cloak gives Green many opportunities to trade profitably or stay big when things get tricky.
- Prey Upon and Lignify give Green some more very Green-feeling removal.
Artifacts
- More equipment is the story here. Each new equipment has a lot of angles. Gorgon Flail makes any blocker scary, Obsidian Battle-Axe helps the scattered Warrior cards be scary, and Blight Sickle helps token and recursion strategies wear down fatties.
- Precursor Golem. So sweet.
Gold/Multicolor
- Red/Green got Rumbling Slum, Deadshot Minotaur, and Burning-Tree Shaman, which are all fun cards.
- I added in nearly every sweet Cascade card, as I love the feeling of getting a small guaranteed effect with a large random effect.
- A few more hybrid cards. I’d like to include more. I’m starting to understand that Gold can be very restrictive in limited. I’m thinking of Gold cards as a prize for having that color combo. In general, I expect to expand the hybrid options.
Matchmaking in Online Competitive Games
With Modern Warfare 3 out, I’m back into the crazy world of non-ranked matchmaking. My match can involve a group of players with ten times my in-game experience. Frustrating at first, playing against these skilled players eventually feels satisfying when I start to catch up. I don’t think I’ve ever come in first place, but I have fun. Beyond that, it’s hard to justify the lack of skill-based matchmaking. I thought it might make sense to make a breakdown:
ELO-style Matching
In games like Starcraft 2 or WoW’s Arena, you have a rating that goes up and down depending on your wins and losses. Beat a high rank opponent, gain a lot of points. Beat a lower ranked opponent, gain few points. Similar things when you lose. I’ve played several games with this system, and most matches are tough but winnable. It can be a excellent in one on one matches, but it can be a bit more frustrating to lose rating points because of an underperforming teammate.
Join-A-Server Matches
In most old school FPS games, you look at a list of player-run servers and pick one to join. You could even save favorite servers and revisit them frequently. Back in the day, I used to join the same Quake 3 server running a mod I liked. I got to know the people there and had a good idea of where my skill was in relation to everyone else. Apart from that, this is a complete random assortment with all the pitfalls therein.
Level-Based Matching
In unranked League of Legends matches or in several fighting games like Street Fighter 4, your account gains levels primarily just increases. The more you play, the higher your level and the harder your matches will be. If you play enough, you can eventually level yourself out of having a competitive chance.
Mode-Based Selection
The only selection involved in games like Modern Warfare comes from picking the game mode. Hardcore modes will attract mostly high skilled players, whereas large team games invite newer players. This does keep some of the more exotic modes from being reasonable for players.
Conclusion – Benefits of Non-Ranked Matching
The downside of skill-based matching is that it requires a large pool of players constantly starting new games. If there are only 400 players playing a game and a match takes 10 players and lasts 20 minutes, it will take time to match enough players even ignoring skill parameters. Adding in skill ranking and trying to match within certain constrains would add more delays. For an action-packed game like MW3, maybe skipping matchmaking is actually the best idea.
Enjoying Magic: The Gathering on the Cheap
I enjoy playing Magic and reading about new sets, but I definitely don’t enjoy keeping boxes of cards around. Buying lots of packs and trying to trade for cards also does not appeal to me. While I enjoy drafting, it is pretty expensive if you don’t intend to keep the cards. So, whenever I can, I look for other ways to enjoy the game. Fortunately, there are plenty!
Cube Drafting
My new favorite thing is Cube Drafting. Here is the brief explanation:
- Pick 360 cards in roughly even colors/cost.
- Shuffle all the cards together and split them into 15 card “packs”.
- Divide the packs up among the players and draft!
I went through my friend Em’s huge collection and picked out about 500 cards as a first pass. My friend Alex helped me trim it down to 360. We played that Cube the other day and everyone had a pile of fun. It’s all the fun of drafting, but since they’re all your chosen cards, they’re usually more powerful. This does a few things to the draft process:
- Late picks (picks 8 to 15) are exciting. Plenty of good cards to go around means some sweet cards go late.
- Diversity within builds. I put a Knight theme into white, and two players had Knight-centric decks, but they were quite different. Rather than the stress of drafting barely enough playables, you instead have many choices on which directions to go with your strategy.
- The Cube fits your personal tastes. I packed the Cube with “enters the battlefield” effects and some crazy Enchantments.
- Lower pressure encourages new players. I had a few friends that wouldn’t want to play a competitive store draft, but loved playing the Cube.
- Breathes new life into old cards. Em was surprised by all of his old cards coming back. I think he really enjoyed seeing all of his collection being used.
If you were especially creative, you could build specialty Cubes. What would an all-Red Cube look like? An all spell Cube? There are many crazy ways to go, since you have full control over the contents of the draft.
If you’d like to check out the Cube, you can see the listing here. Also, check out my notes for future developments of this cube.
Duel Decks
I’ve written about Duel Decks before, but Wizards has expanded their strategy since then. Nowadays, they release a variety of pre made themed decks. In addition to the “Garruk vs Lilliana” style decks, they also release pre constructed decks for some other formats:
- Planechase: Planechase is a cool format where there is a central “Plane” deck that modifies the game for everyone. Every turn, the Plane can change, which shifts the gameplay. There are some other twists along the way, too. You can buy Planechase decks that go with this format and tie into the Planes in some way.
- Archenemy: This fun 3v1 format uses another specialty side-deck, but the decks that come bundled are also really fun! I had an amazing first turn as the Archenemy that everyone still talks about. Like with Planechase, you can use the Archenemy side-deck with normal cards, too.
- Commander: More on this one later.
The idea here is that you can buy and play with pre made decks. I’ve found that it can be fun to learn these decks and their match ups, even if they aren’t high end cards.
Duels of the Planeswalkers
The 2012 version of this PC/PS3/360 game enhances everything I said about the previous version. More decks, better quality decks, and support for Archenemy. All for $10, which is cheap as MtG can be! There are some things I’ve especially enjoyed in this new version:
- As mentioned, the decks are higher quality/power overall, which makes the games more tense. It also makes unlocking cards more exciting, since the unlocked cards are exciting.
- Archenemy makes this game a killer couch-coop game. The Archenemy deck makes for a memorable villain and rallying for a win is super satisfying. Playing Magic cooperatively also helps teach new players, which makes the game fun for everyone.
- They support the game with new decks and cards. This version has one expansion and one deck pack, both of which have been reasonably priced ($5 for 3 decks+features, $3 for 2 decks). Like fighting games, more decks means exponentially more match-ups, which keeps the fun going for a long time.
EDH/Commander/Social
EDH (Elder Dragon Highlander), AKA Commander is a special format within Magic. The basic rules:
- Pick a Commander. It must be a legendary creature. That creature sits outside your deck. You may play him at any time. If he dies, he leaves the game again but may be replayed for his cost, plus 2.
- Build a 100 card Highlander deck using only the colors of the commander. In Highlander, “there can be only one” of any non-basic land card. This emphasizes searching out obscure cards.
- 40 life, multiplayer format.
- You can buy pre made Commander decks, and it seems like Wizards is committing to supporting Highlander into the future.
I don’t own any EDH decks myself, but wherever people are playing Magic, you can usually meet up with people that will lend you a deck. Many players are enthusiastic to show you their creations and share them with you.
If you have any feedback, let me know!
A few more iPhone games
My iPhone gaming has slowed down over time, but I’ve still checked out a few new games in the last four or five months.
Bumpy Road – Control a cute car by moving the terrain around it. I like the graphics more than the gameplay and didn’t end up playing this game for too long. A novel take on platform jumping, but one that seemed unnatural to me.
Extreme Road Trip – A simple game about flipping your car as it drives to the right. The precision involved in getting a perfect landing (instead of a decent one) is well rewarded with speed boosts that increase the action further. Quick, addictive, and fun.
Groove Coaster – A one button version of Guitar Hero-style gameplay. Cool graphical style and nice music. Single tapping eventually felt boring to me and I was sometimes frustrated by parts that make the timing hard to understand.
Hard Lines – Tron/Snake with a lot of modes and a sense of humor. This super-precision-based gameplay felt poorly suited for touch controls. Maybe with more practice I would enjoy it, but I guess I didn’t want to play Snake that badly.
Sprinkle – Really cool water simulation tech helps make this a fun fire-fighting game. Watching the water slosh around felt new and surprising. Why don’t we see games with cool simulation on more powerful systems, like PC and consoles?
Feed Me Oil - Another game with cool liquid tech. Here, you’re building Incredible Machine-style devices to transport goopy oil into the mouths of monsters. I enjoyed this one less than Sprinkle, mostly because of the many puzzles that required hard-to-manage fans and spinning gusts of air. With a better focus on easier-to-understand pieces, I’d like it more.
Sword and Sworcery – Adventure game with sick music and visuals. I think it’d be a better fit on iPad, as the touch targets are a bit small on iPhone, but I’m still enjoying it anyhow.
Ramp Champ – Skee Ball with some video game twists. Free and supported by In-App Purchases that unlock new tables to play. I played it for a solid hour or two and enjoyed it for that time.
Strategery – Similar to a stripped-down Risk. Fun and quick with an attractive interface. Once you make it up to the highest level, though, games are more about who arbitrarily survives the first few rounds and less about strategy.
1-bit Ninja – One-button platform game. At the time, I didn’t know this was a “thing” on iOS. It turns out that this is a thing I don’t like. Cute visuals, not a fan otherwise.
Super Stickman Golf – Exactly what I’d ask for with an iOS golf game. Worms-style aiming, power ups, good courses, fun (local) multiplayer, and free. I also like the sharp visuals, from the UI to the in-game graphics. High marks for this one!
Scribblenauts Remix – A mini version of the creative Nintendo DS game. The most fun part is imagining anything and having the game realize it. Pregnant pirate ship? Done. Want to see whether a crocodile or a crocodile hunter wins? Done. So many funny ideas.
Async Corp. – A twist on Bejeweled with Japanese-style graphics. Hard to recommend either way: it’s a puzzle game, so you’ll either get hooked or you won’t. I didn’t. The attempts at humor fell flat for me.
More of the Good and the Bad on Xbox
AC Brotherhood
Good – Best storytelling of any of the games so far, most varied mission design, brotherhood powers are so badass, still very fun to stab people.
Bad – Online way more chaotic than strategic, modern day characters as unlikeable as ever, overall gameplay starting to get tedious, brotherhood powers trivialize so many things.
Far Cry 2
Good – Great African rural setting, open world feels large and varied, malaria effects are a good attempt at adding random elements.
Bad – Insane amounts of travel time, nonexistent characterization and storytelling, uninteresting scenario design typical to open-world games.
Darksiders
Good – Zelda-style gameplay without the slow first several hours, brings the Warhammer aesthetic to life with a new world, competent and consistent gameplay.
Bad – No good puzzles, combat doesn’t have much new or fresh, no character development, demons vs angels isn’t as badass as it should be.
Mass Effect 2
Good – Better combat, better acting, better characters, better graphics, first 90% of the game is pitch perfect.
Bad – Storytelling fails when trying to get to the highest stakes, last boss is weird and lacks personal drama, the survival of your crew is way too easy to guarantee, seeing all the side missions guarantees the most drama-free ending.
Splinter Cell Conviction
Good – Stripped down main character, stealth aspects aren’t the typical pass/fail frustration for much of the genre, innovative “Mark and Execute” gameplay that makes you feel like an assassin stalking your targets.
Bad – Foes eventually get so strong that all the cool stuff goes out the window, hard to follow the storyline.
Fable 3
Good – Large world full of humor and variety, fun RPG action, unusually well implemented online features.
Bad – Storyline feels forced and unrelated to the exploration, final act has really weird pacing that enters point-of-no-return with no warning, never challenging except when really cheap and frustrating.
Alan Wake
Good – Great cutscenes, cool new light-based fighting elements, awesome trees.
Bad – Combat drags on really badly as story progresses, ending is way too meta and lacking in drama.
Portal 2
Good – More Portal! Both single player and co-op have great variety and humor, excellent expansion of the setting, perfect ending.
Bad – Nothing in particular, but lacks the shocks of the original.
LA Noire
Good – Unbelievably good facial animation that actually serves as the basis of the gameplay, well-executed setting, satisfying plot that starts with a slow burn, some of the story turns are well integrated into game mechanics, decent combat and action.
Bad – The fundamental system for judging truth/doubt/lie with witnesses is only barely good enough due to unclear separation of doubt and lie.
Mortal Kombat
Good – Surprisingly excellent story mode full of great cutscenes and big surprises for fans of the series, basic gameplay is as good as MK’s ever been, impressively disgusting fatalities.
Bad – Fighting games are still full of weird gameplay that make it poorly suited for casual players.
Shadows of the Damned
Good – Hot start with funny dialog and cool characters, gameplay is basically RE4 which isn’t bad.
Bad – Side modes are all bad, love interest character is awful, story evaporates halfway in, gameplay feels like a bad slog once dialog runs out.
Vanquish
Good – Huge explosions, sliding around is fun, takes place in real time, decent shooting.
Bad – Especially short, obvious plot twists, boss battles look great but aren’t fun.
Alice: Madness Returns
Good – Cool setting with fun cutscenes inside and outside Alice’s mind, solid combat, crazy looking worlds, great setup for unraveling Alice’s crazy memories.
Bad – Plot and gameplay both give out about halfway in, ending could have been more insane.
Bulletstorm
Good – Skillshot system properly awards doing insane feats, crazy guns, some really ludicrous lines.
Bad – Yet another FPS.
Deux Ex: Human Revolution
Good – Solid stealth action merged with useful RPG elements, can approach areas in many different ways, good rewards for playing well, cool dialog system, great setting, nice variety between open city zones and tighter mission areas.
Bad – Trial and error gameplay endemic to stealth-based games, hacking mini game is too random to be truly great, really lame boss fights that penalize stealth-based characters, especially bad final boss, really bad endings.
Enslaved
Good – Mostly just the rad ending, great voice acting.
Bad – Completely by-the-numbers Prince of Persia gameplay ripoff, all the enemies are personality-free robots, chemistry between the cast is mixed quality, no cool powers to learn or weapons to find, throwaway RPG elements, hoverboard sequences are punishing.
5by5
Podcasts are a great way to gain understanding directly from people who work in the industry. My favorite podcasts are from 5by5. My breakdown of the shows:
Back to Work – Merlin is crazy if you haven’t heard/read him before, but I definitely love every minute of it. Certainly a good place to hear the affirmation that it doesn’t count until you ship. The show is also super meta, which is definitely delightful to me as I love seeing how things work and seeing how things can be deconstructed.
Talk Show – as much as I like Gruber, I don’t really enjoy this show. Gruber comes off disinterested and grumpy compared to his more intellectual and thorough blog. I wonder if most nerds are really like that.
Build and Analyze – Marco has a lot to say and definitely carries that young tech entrepreneur feeling. The show gives a strong idea of his mindset, especially on more recent episodes where he talks about building a small content management system for his blog.
The Pipeline - Interviews aplenty. I high quality guests with a good hit rate and usually Dan keeps the questions coming. I have enjoyed listening to the back episodes of this show, especially the ones where he interviews someone who later becomes a cohost on other shows.
The Big Web Show – Generally the topics here are good and the guests are important, but sometimes the show sometimes slows to a crawl. Zeldman isn’t as good as Dan at keeping guests on topic. Sometimes Zeldman’s questions actually lead the guest into bigger tangents.
Critical Path – An amazingly insightful show about the mobile phone industry. Super informative and educational, but seems to come out rarely. I’d love more!
Hypercritical – Definitely my favorite show and the one most relevant to me. I read Siracusa’s giant OSX reviews before I even had a Mac and I appreciate his super thorough style. I’m hoping he can keep up the momentum. The recent programming episodes have given me hope.
Dragon Age 2 Ending
(Spoilers, certainly)
I enjoyed much of DA2 but a good portion of the ending sequence played the wrong way for me. I made some notes to try to figure out why it didn’t quite satisfy.
- Anders didn’t succumb enough to Justice. He just sorta blows things up but seems otherwise pretty mellow about it afterward. He doesn’t go through a character arc, unlike some of the other party members. He’s the same character at the beginning and the end. Maybe if I had played Awakening he would have made more sense. I’d like him to actually get tense and angry and more badass instead of just staying the same Anders afterward.
- Orsino is a weak character with few traits. He should be more brainy, more calculating, so that it’s even remotely believable that he could be a bad guy. Meredith is way more evil than him and it hurts the struggle. It would also help if there was some sort of reasoning why he turns into a demon and then attacks the players instead of Meredith. That, or play him as very feeble and passive-aggressive, so when he turns on everyone it makes more sense.
- The Circle also has a weak portrayal once you get inside. A half dozen mages doing the “idle conversation” emote doesn’t seem convincing enough. The circle in Origins was better delivered. Perhaps a quest or two could have traveled into the circle during the game. Maybe this is better explored if you’re a mage character.
- I wish there was some sort of basis to why Meredith could summon giant clockwork monsters. Is lyrium mean to grant immense magical power to summon golems? I understand it’s the end of a videogame and it’s necessary to provide giant bosses. Fighting Meredith as she slows down and petrifies would have also been awesome.
- It was probably a time crunch thing, but the city does not change over the course of 6 years and nor do the residents. Nobody seems to react to the battle with the Qunari besides your party members. Shouldn’t something have moved in there?
More iPhone Gaming
Axe in Face – Cute music and funny setup, but the gameplay didn’t catch me. I like the use of iPhone/drawing controls.
The Blocks Cometh – A platform set in a world like Tetris, blocks constantly fall from the top of the screen. Enjoying it but death seems to come out of nowhere.
Chaos Rings – Grabbed it on sale and glad I didn’t pay full for it. A decent iPhone adaptation of Final Fantasy-style games, but the combat isn’t exceptional and it has less story and character than most RPGs.
Cut the Rope – Fun puzzles! Definitely recommended.
Disc Drivin’ – Funny multiplayer game… it’s a turn based driving game! Shuffleboard around a racetrack. Fun was had by all. Great design for both local and online multiplayer.
Dungeon Raid – Really addictive puzzle game with RPG trappings. Games can sometimes go “infinite” and never end, which gets really dull.
Gravity Guy – There seems to be a sub-genre of “auto-run to the right and tap to jump” games, and this has the same problem as the others: it has a ton of cheap deaths. They have a clever menu option that allows for high-res graphics to be downloaded on the fly, which seems smart to keep the download size small.
Kami Retro – Like Lemmings as a platformer, with swipe controls. One weird part is that you must complete each level four times to proceed. Didn’t hold my interest.
Meow Meow Happy Fight – “Twin Stick”-style deathmatch game with a cute art style. Doesn’t seem very skillful so far.
Tiny Wings – Love it! A perfectly implemented and simple gameplay mechanic with all the great graphics/sound/music you’d want. Big recommendations!
6th Planet - Advertises that it has a comic book story along with the game. The comic is awful and the game is just Lunar Lander. Lots of hype, little game.
Shadow Era – Freemium clone of the World of Warcraft card game. A cool way to play some cards for free, but I can’t imagine actually buying packs for this game.
Infinity Blade – Great touch controls, great visuals, interesting equipment, but repetitive. It feels like all iPhone games are doomed to be arcade style games with little narrative, exploration, or adventure.
Gaming on iPhone so far
Battleheart – Biggest game for me so far. Lead a party of adventurers in a series of battles. No story or exploration, just combat, but it’s fast and the controls are great. Typical addictive RPG elements seals the deal.
Super Mega Worm – Eat people as a giant worm. Controls are solid but the game doesn’t feel challenging. For a buck, it’s fun and silly.
Death Knight – Uhhh played about 2 minutes and deleted. Creaky controls that got in my way and didn’t like the art style.
Rage HD – Good ideas with the controls, but tilt control still feels unnatural for me, especially in a first person shooter.
Astronut – Cute, easy to play, solid controls. Fun with gravity.
League of Evil – Adorable graphics and Super Meat Boy/N+/Splosion Man gameplay. Great so far.
Helsing’s Fire – Promising puzzle game with awesome art and an interesting gameplay style involving shining light.
Street Fighter 4 – About as good a port as one could hope. A novelty buy/play for me.
Space Miner – Hoping to get into this game but the graphics are a weird combo of anime guys, hillbillies, and 90s-looking 3d. Controls have only been so-so.
Angry Birds – Yeah.
Puzzle Agent - Fun puzzles and hilarious characters and story. Release more of these, please!
Anyone have a favorite?
Civ 5 gets modern game balance
I was heartened to read there is another large Civ 5 patch on the way.
We wanted to improve the effectiveness of buildings. We also wanted to improve how cities interact with the map. Adjustments to terrain have increased production, while buildings that modify production have been adjusted in tune with these changes.
The perennial balance problem in the Civilization series has the tension between “Tall” nations, which have a few big cities, and “Wide” nations, which have as many cities as they can fit. The problem with enabling Wide nations comes when Wide goes to “Extra Wide”. A 10 city civ doesn’t have many advantages over a 20 city civ. Enabling Wide while discouraging Extra Wide is a problem that all previous version of Civ have punted on. This massive patch directly addresses the lucrative incremental bonuses that city sprawl generates.
What’s clear now, beyond the specifics of ICS balance, is that this team gets modern game balance. With rabid and intelligent fan discussion on the internet, balance problems are quickly identified and exploited. Internal testing, before a game launches, lacks the scale, diversity, and especially the critical nature of the gaming community. Patching has become commonplace in modern gaming, but fan communication is still an emerging art.
We’ll see how many companies can successfully adopt the ongoing development style made famous by Blizzard. With Starcraft 2 and World of Warcraft, even small updates receive careful attention and long stints on “Public Test” servers. They have also exemplified the benefit of ongoing development: sustained interest in the company and their products. In the age of DLC, it is possible to monetize fan bases. Civ 5 has released a few DLC packs that add new leaders and scenarios, and more.
360 Retail Good and Bad Bits
Haven’t been posting a lot, so here’s a few retail games I’ve played in the last few months and a few good and bad parts of each of them.
Final Fantasy 13
Good Bits: Once it gets going, gameplay is unique and exciting; captures the feel of raiding (a la WoW) in a single player experience; surprisingly sympathetic characters; many challenging late-game side quests
Bad Bits: Takes a long, long time to get going; uninteresting antagonists; linear areas with little exploration until near the end of the game; character customization often doesn’t feel very customized; item purchasing and crafting systems are way more work than they are worth until the very end of the game
Bayonetta
Good Bits: Awesomely over-the-top main character that even my girlfriend can love; dodge button also gives a sweet slow-mo effect, which is the foundation of better-than-Devil May Cry gameplay; perfect difficulty curve that invites multiple replays; easy to replay stages and try for higher scores
Bad Bits: Hardest difficulty strips out all the fun game mechanics; occasionally frustrating enemies, though maybe that’s the idea; token obnoxious young guy character
Assassin’s Creed 2
Good Bits: Hilariously adorable Italian accents; much less repetitive than AC1; beautiful setting and wonderful environments; cool and often wild combination of sci-fi, historical setting, and conspiracy theories; combat has a lot of options and variety, especially for a stealth-based game
Bad Bits: Modern day segments are lame and poorly acted; some weapons, like the smoke bomb, make combat too easy; money and villa development are cool at first but run out of tricks halfway in; still has inane collectibles that are impossible to find without a guide
Red Faction: Guerilla
Good Bits: Destructible buildings really bring out the “Tim the Tool Man” grunts; one of those games you play on Easy mode and never look back; laying into a dude or a pillar or a wall or a vehicle with the super sledgehammer; weapons provide radically different ways of approaching most missions
Bad Bits: Combat isn’t actually any fun on higher difficulty levels; pretty repetitive; failing missions is often a huge time drain; really corny plot, voice acting, cliche characters, wasted subplots (though these are missed opportunities rather than knocks on the enjoyment of the game); vehicles often feel way too vulnerable and dangerous
Borderlands
Good Bits: Full blown RPG-style features in a shooter; fun and funky take on a mad max world; guns have much more variety than usual games; DLC adds whole areas and new features; occasionally genuinely hilarious and quotable
Bad Bits: Weak story and poor characterization of main characters; quests after quests can feel like the worst parts of World of Warcraft; keeping track of quests in multiplayer is difficult; hard to find people at a similar quest level online; although weapons are interesting, grenades and shields seem like wasted opportunities
Wolfenstein
Good Bits: Solid shooter gameplay with a variety of guns and special powers; easy to replay missions to look for new secrets; fun upgrade system for weapons; well paced level design with a good tension between all-out action and sneaky segments
Bad Bits: Laggy, buggy multiplayer that has a ton of missed opportunity; non-story, blank main character (actually reminiscent of GTA3′s protagonist), etc; the basic machine guns are strong enough to make the other, scarce weapons feel marginal; it would be nice to get some help finding the obscure secrets after finishing a level; cliche super-fast mutant enemies are obnoxious to fight; boss fights devolve into “shoot the glowing spot”
Halo ODST
Good Bits: Cool weapons and fun weapon achievements; the low key story is a good contrast to the “save the world” of normal Halo
Bad Bits: Celebrity voice acting is absolutely wasted on awful dialog and one-dimensional characters; having “stamina” and “health” instead of “shields” and “health” is confusing and leads to way too much red screen and panting hurt dude sounds; weapons only have a few clips and enemies take entire clips to kill, which leads to constant weapon scavenging; still has those occasionally cheap-feeling sections where tanks one-shot vehicles or several brutes pile on and once, causing instant death
Tennis for One
Tennis game’s single player modes, such as in Rockstar’s Table Tennis and Sega Superstar Tennis, have been letting me down lately. Matches become tedious and occasionally super hard. To me, shot assistance is the central issue.
Shot assistance comes means automatic position and timing “lock-on” when pressing the shot button as the ball inbounds. So long as you’re reasonably close to the trajectory, the character gets in position and hits at the appropriate time. I liked this at first, as it makes huge rallies happen right away, but it undermines the skill involved in this basic action.
Without shot timing, smaller things such as movement and shot selection become all-important. This is OK in multiplayer, but the AI can do these things trivially: if the AI can get to the ball, it will. Only pulling the AI out of the position will consistently work. The other way to win, unfortunately, is to continue a rally until the AI completely gaffes and lets by a free point. These points feel really frustrating, like I’m just grinding away at each match.
The structure of the single player modes in these games contributes to the tedium. Much of the content takes the form of arbitrary “tournaments” where win streaks are all that matter. Especially in Rockstar’s Table Tennis, a tournament can take over an hour and losing a match makes all that time feel wasted. I did enjoy some of the minigames and bonus content outside the tournaments, but it doesn’t replace a good single player progression.
These games, like other casual sports games I’ve played, seem to exist in a deadzone between good party games and good single player games. They are neither as ubiquitous as Wii Tennis nor as skill-intensive as Virtual Tennis. Ultimately, my dissatisfaction with the single player modes made the games feel incomplete. I picked them both up used, and I can recommend them for that price.
Introducing Invade the Ruins, my Warcraft 3 project
Hey everyone, this is a post to explain what I’ve been doing with my days for the last few weeks and on and off for many years now. I work on an add-on adventure for the Warcraft 3 game called Invade the Ruins. Normally Warcraft 3 is a strategy game, but my project is a cooperative action game. It’s meant to be played online with 3 other people through Battle.net, which is built-in to WC3.
I’m working on an update to Invade the Ruins, and I want to make the best version of my map I’ve ever released. To do that I need feedback from you about your experiences with it. The focus of “Update 1″ is on the Hero characters and their abilities. Are they fun? Interesting? Useful?
Download and try out the new beta release, read about the hero changes, and leave me some feedback on the forums!
Hey, Some Forums
Invade the Ruins now has Forums!
Stay on Target
The Dune Strider revamp completes the hero overhaul for Update 1 of Invade the Ruins. She’s an archer meant to pump out damage but also heal allies occasionally. Her low health means she must use her healing, invulnerability, and teleportation spells to evade danger. Her design has always been one of the weaker ones, which is a shame given how popular archer characters are. Here are her spells:
- Sand Slash: Hits two nearby enemies for good damage. Maybe the best way to turn excess mana into killing. Great for emergencies.
- Glass Barrier: Invulnerability bubble. Extra ranks decrease the cooldown. Sorta lame.
- Sand Surgeon: Summons a spirit that pulses heals to nearby allies. Can dismiss the spirit early to reclaim some mana. For a variety of reasons, she’s the worst group healer.
- Tearing Winds: Teleport to an allied unit, including special “Shop Wisps”. Unique and well-loved by players. A perfect 2-rank spell.
- Searing Sun: Adds big fire damage to each arrow attack. Not an impressive ultimate, though it has fun synergy with her mid-dungeon bouncing shots upgrade.
General spell tuneup: Faster heals from Sand Surgeon, no more “Dismiss” option, lower base mana cost. Sand Slash grants a temporary attack speed buff, providing Searing Sun synergy. Glass Barrier moved from 6-rank to the “boss reward” slot, replacing her old lame ability there.
Searing Sun is too boring to be an ultimate OR a 6-rank spell, but fire shots fits her too well to trash it. I’m unable to do a pure “exploding shot” for technical reasons, though my compromise might be just as good. When enemies are killed by Searing Sun, they create a spirit which explodes and hurts other nearby enemies.
These explosive “Sunsparks” proved fun in early playtests, so I added a chain explosion effect. Anything killed by a Sunspark also forms a Sunspark. Her Sand Surgeon will also turn into a Sunspark when it’s done, giving her more ways to set up a big combination explosion. Her Ultimate will take the concept even further, giving her an on-demand way to deal area damage.
Bathe in Heat, her new Ultimate, creates a spread of Sunsparks which explode in succession. When cast on a pack of enemies, it generally kills a few enemies outright, who form Sunsparks, which explode for more damage. It can be really satisfying when it chains out several times.
This represents a huge improvement to her options and interactivity, so I also want to improve her spell names. Sand Slash becomes Sandstorm. Sand Surgeon becomes Desert Oasis. Glass Barrier becomes Mirage. It’s a little thing, but making the names more distinct should help players learn the different spells more easily.
Thanks for reading! The next article up will cover some general game changes. After that, a post about the Beta release of the map! Stay tuned.
