Traveling

Will be on the road on my way to Portland, Oregon, my new home!  See http://castleorange.livejournal.com for text updates or http://youtube.com/castleorange for video. :)

Comments (1) | October 27, 2008

Seven More Things I Like About CivRev

(Civilization Revolution is the excellent console rendition of the classic strategy series.  A great way to talk about a strategy sequel is to point out the small things. My first post talks about general subjects.  Here I talk specifically about factors related to building toward victory.)

  1. Leader bonuses kick in each era, unlocking new strategies.  When America’s triple production Factories, England’s double power naval support, or Japan’s defensive Loyalty bonus kick in, it’s business time.   Era bonuses can also mean cheap units or buildings, supporting different strategies.
  2. Successful strategies exist for both wide and tall civilizations.  Cities explode exponentially, so one enormous city can be as good as several smaller cities, which is different from Civ4.  Big, well-defended cities and cultural capitals are a reality and don’t sell out on long term growth.
  3. Unit selection tightened just right.  Each new type of unit represents a significant milestone in a close match.  The difference between archer and pikeman armies on early defense is a significant bump.  Defensive units are good for protecting siege units, but later rifleman units can kill many aggressive units.  High end units cap out relatively early in time, so tech-heavy civs don’t have an automatic combat advantage.
  4. Domination victory means a couple of hard battles instead of fifty easy ones.  The biggest cities can be hard to crack, but strong armies always have a chance.  Duking it out with huge offensive and defensive armies is so much more fun than the single-unit meatgrinders in Civ4.
  5. Technology victory gets unique bonuses from fast teching.  Each technology has a bonus for the first civ that researches it, and a lot of these bonuses are incredible.  Whichever civ is leading on technology receives bonuses to gold, military, and pretty much anything else.
  6. Economic victory packs lots of new options.  Rushing units and building is potent and flexible, just the sort of bonus that makes sense for a capitalist advantage.  While not posessing the best technology, the most cities, or the strongest culture, a civ with a lot of money can barter for science, summon an army out of nowhere, or bring a small town up to great size.  The tricks are in knowing where and when to spend that money.
  7. Cultural victory is strength through details.  Great people confer great bonuses, wonders provide unique upgrades, and a strong border offers good options.  Growing borders flip cities, which provides more sources of culture, which produces more great people.  More rapidly than any other, culture victories reward strong city building and empire expansion.
More to come!

Comments (0) | October 21, 2008

eBay’s Magic Is Gone

CNN Money writes about eBay’s slide from a financial point-of-view.  This quote from an earnings call made me reflect on some of the things I knew:

“Buyers are increasingly buying from the highest rated sellers and buying less - in fact, they have stopped buying - from lower rated sellers,” Donahoe said Wednesday in a conference call with analysts following eBay’s third-quarter earnings release.

Donahoe cast that shift as a positive one for eBay. “We see clear evidence that the site today is safer and easier to use than it was six months ago,” he said.

This smells like spin to me.  Browsing eBay is painful these days.  I searched for “ipod mini” to see what I could get for my old ipod, and 90% of the results were for headphones, cables, adapters, and so on, all of which were spammed for multiple entries each. User-generated titles and product information makes eBay’s searches worse, not better, with so many results.  The site has always been a little tedious to navigate, and if the trend is more and more big sellers and fewer small sellers, good deals will be harder to find.

When it came to selling off my old videogames for my move, I started on eBay but moved to half.com.  eBay’s tools for listing games are worse than half’s, and half hasn’t been updated significantly in years!  Listing and re-re-re-listing items on ebay is a bigger task than list-and-forget half.com.  There are few items where it makes sense to list as an auction.  Even for powersellers, or perhaps especially for powersellers, the auction format makes little sense.

And yet eBay is still structured as an auction site, in the seller’s tools, in the time format, in the searches, and in the user-generated content.  But they’re also focusing on BuyItNow and powerseller storefronts in their business model.  The one-click option does seem natural for online shopping, but that doesnt mean that eBay is doing it well.  Compared to Amazon or Half, which show new and used products side by side for easy comparison alongside user reviews, and letting people BuyItNow just isnt measuring up.

There’s no going back for eBay, business has taken over and the fun is gone.

 


Comments (0) | October 21, 2008

Xbox Live Thumbs Up: Retro-Modern

Realize that old games are awesome.  A new breed of remakes keep the fast pace, immediate action, and simple controls.  The stuff to improve is the meta-game outside the gameplay.  Replace game-over-means-blank-slate and build strong progression.  Our XBLA games this week find ways to keep things simple yet make sure the action doesn’t stop.

Bionic Commando: Rearmed

Old-school controls get serious.  No jump button in a platformer?  It works.  Bionic Commando is a classic because the grapple arm has always been so fun.  Swinging on the arm involves frenetic adaptation and has a lot more variety than jumping.  Great boss battles, cheesy-fun dialog, good secrets, upgrades galore.  It’s hard to imagine a more pitch-perfect remake.  

Braid

What if they made a whole game out of Prince of Persia’s rewind mechanic?  Like Portal, Braid is an extended tutorial, a series of realizations and discoveries.  Feels like a artist speaks through the game, quirks and all.  Walks the line on almost-too-hard puzzles.  A whimsical and melancholy story with a perfect ending.

Castle Crashers

Good local multiplayer is hard to find.  A paragon of the Newgrounds style… old-school arcade mechanics (Final Fight/Streets of Rage here), violent but sharp humor, pristine vector graphics, and occasionally (gleefully) broken gameplay.  One highlight is the CPR-style buddy revives, which adds some timing and skill to keeping friends in the game.  Also loved the massive air combos!  

Duke Nukem 3D

Duke’s always been a great entry in the Doom generation, with lots of weapons, interactive environments, and sarcastic humor.  A shame they never made another one.   Play the XBLA version to try the “rewind” system, which provides a beautiful antidote to the quicksave/quickload syndrome.  Rather than ever having to save mid-game, all gameplay is recorded.  When Duke dies, a timeline of the entire play-through aappears and the player can pick exactly where to come back to life.  Duke is a hard game, where just a few bad hits can kill you, but in this version that’s totally fine because of rewind.  Joe is my barometer for game save systems and he wants this system in every game forever.

Mega Man 9

A pure sequel to NES-style Mega Man that reminds us how many ways there are to die.  A different kind of retro remake than Bionic Commando, MM9 packs each level with a sharp and cruelly creative assortment of traps.  The new bosses are original (hard considering the vast history) and the new weapons deliver a tangible sense of power.  There are many details that wink to the flaws in the original games, such as the way the music is clipped by the sound effects or how the final levels reshuffle and reuse all the previous stages.

Rocket Bowl

Minigolf+Bowling seems so obvious that the entire game has a retro feel, like a lost lost idea from PC gaming’s annals.  The pin physics feel realistic, tight, and challenging yet the courses encourage players to roll around and have fun.  High scores unlock new courses and hunting tricky and secret stars earns new bowling balls, so both playstyles have rewards!  Cute music provides a light 1950s feel… we couldn’t stop mimicking the girl singer’s “Rock-et-Bowwwwwwl”.

Comments (0) | October 10, 2008

Should Mass Effect Be An Action/Adventure Game?

Mass Effect represents the latest Bioware console RPG tech.  The production values in this game are so high that it does some things no other game has done.  The main character feels badass and smart and driven by the player’s dialog choices.  Bioware gets action gameplay right (very right) for the first time with FPS-style combat.  There’s a big world with plenty of crazy aliens, mysterious quests, and big villains.

If Mass Effect was an FPS, it would be a landmark game, unparalleled in the genre.

It’s stuck being an RPG, yet the RPG elements are almost entirely superfluous.

Experienced Soldiers

Experience points, the most recognizable element of the genre, provide a sense of growth and a universal prize for every action.  In Mass Effect, the XP reward for quests and kills is normalized.  In other words, completing a quest at 5th level or 45th level results in different XP rewards.    Money and items earned also scale up with the player’s level.  Enemies scale up directly with the player’s level as well.  The idea here: no matter how much or how little of the optional content players do, they are always challenged and given appropriate rewards.

When everything is normalized, though, leveling up ends up meaning very little.  Phrase things like an FPS.  What does a level 35 sniper rifle mean compared to a level 43 sniper rifle if both take two shots to kill a target, since the target scales up with your level?  Numbers are completely hidden in combat.  Health is displayed as a bar and shields are a series of one to five blocks.  There’s no visible difference between having 200 or 600 health, nor is there a substantial practical difference due to the scaling enemies.

The simple satisfaction of earning XP is undeniable and it motivates players to kill every enemy, hack every computer, and fill every codex entry.  In other games, XP and items float otherwise mediocre content, too.  Mass Effect had no problems with the content or story, instead, the problems are in complications springing from the leveling and scaling!

Weapons Locker

In order to have an appropriate selection of weapons for every level, Mass Effect has a catalog of several “brands” of each “type” of weapon (pistol, rifle, shotgun, sniper), each of which has several “ranks”.  For example, a pistol found in a weapon locker might be a Raikuu III at level 16 or a Raikuu VII if opened at level 41.  To have a shop selection, there are several weapon brands at a given level.  This means there are something like 80 pistols in the game, none of them distinct in capabilities, only in stats.  Tons and tons of weapons drop from enemies and dealing with so many weapons is 80% tedious, 20% useful.

Money doesn’t feel valuable because better stuff is gained by leveling up and opening lockers and cabinets in combat areas.  Why spend time buying and selling when cruising through the game works as well, if not better?  Purchased weapons might be 10% stronger, which is a good upgrade in a typical RPG, but an intangible upgrade in a FPS.  Other upgrades, such as grenade and medkit capacity upgrades, are always pitifully cheap and lack the feeling of progression.

Hacking and social skills feel more like required expenditures rather than cool upgrades.  Convincing someone of your way is just a matter of spending skill points on maxing Intimidate skill, not clever choice of dialog options.  Disabling a hardened security system only requires putting a lot of points into the Decryption skill, with little player interaction.  Spending experience points on these upgrades isn’t fun.

Mass Adventure

What if Mass Effect was an adventurous FPS, unburdened from scaling, and advancement was simplified and tightened to be closer to a modern action game?  Here’s my plan:

No more XP, no more need to scale.

Instead of getting skill points (aka talent points in other games) from leveling up, skill points are awarded from completing quests or other major achievements.  This gives players a big upgrade at the end of every story arc.  Instead of getting 2% more assault rifle damage, these points would buy and upgrade the special skills like Overkill (which temporarily hones assault rifle accuracy and knockback).  Skill points grant usable skills instead of invisible and intangible “spreadsheet” upgrades.

Weapons no longer need new editions every 5 levels.  Instead, differentiate the different brands of each type of weapon.  Fast firing but hot weapons.  Accurate but slow firing.  Let players feel out their style.  Later weapons can actually be different and better, giving players something to save up and feel rewarded by, knowing it won’t need to be replaced.  Meeting new merchants could introduce new items instead of a random assortment of level-scaled items.  Other money-upgraded stuff, like grenade and medkit upgrades that are presently no-brainers, feel like tradeoffs and a customization of the player’s style.

The supreme reward for this change would be improved pacing and flow.  Focus on the story and the action, not on deciphering stats or sifting through dozens of too-similar items.  Turn the immersion dial all the way up and keep players involved in the tense shootouts and invested in saving characters and puzzling through mysteries.  Achieve perfection by taking away.

Comments (0) | October 7, 2008

Xbox Live Thumbs Down: Ketchup Edition

Many games aim for that epic quality and movie-like storytelling.  I don’t think any game has ever achieved it.  There are some epic games with little real story (Gears of War, Halo) as well as games with top-tier cinematics completely segmented from bouts of quirky, complex gameplay (Metal Gear, Final Fantasy).  Some games, like adventure or horror games, have simple gameplay and try to weave story into every facet of the game.  Maintaining interactivity often means Simon-style button repetition or obscure puzzles.  There’s games in each of these categories in this batch.

Alone in the Dark (Retail)

Why must “cinematic adventure” gameplay always mean terrible, slow controls and tedious, contrived puzzles?  Does one of the face buttons really need to be “switch between 1st and 3rd person camera”?  All the villains randomly die to a mysterious magical monster and all the bystanders are whiny and say the same lines over and over.  Does it really have to take a minute of extinguisher spray to clear a fire?  Ten gun shots and several hits with a stick to take down a zombie?  Immersion is impossible here.   I can appreciate the desire to provide a variety of gameplay experiences, but when all of them are slow, tedious, and fumbling, the storytelling suffers and the high production values fail to save things.  

Fracture (Retail)

The gimmick in this basic shooter is a special gun can elevate or drop the ground to create new ramps, walls, or passages.  This could have been fun and wild, unfortunately it’s quarantined to specific little sandboxes so it can only happen exactly where level designers says it can.  Well, damn.  There’s nothing else here!  Maybe they should have focused the game more purely on the world manipulation, I don’t think anyone will miss yet another opportunity to shoot another thousand generic scifi troopers.

Galaga Legions (Arcade)

Stylish and very pretty!  I just don’t think anyone still wants to play Galaga/Space Invader games anymore.  Another old shooter, like the 1942 remake, that is too much about predictable waves of enemies and too little about high tension and difficulty.

Pirates v Ninjas Dodgeball (Arcade)

The most tragic squandering of a totally sweet game title ever.  Terrible camera and no gameplay, what else do you need to know?  There’s so little here that it is hard to critique!

Shotest Shogi (Arcade)

I’ll try anything on XBLA and I was excited to try this “Japanese Chess”.  Catan and Carcasonne have fun graphics and good sound and have fast paced gameplay.  Shotest Shogi’s tutorials move slowly and could be made a lot simpler.  The UI could easily show helpful summaries of each piece’s move instead of hitting me with a long tutorial.  I also didn’t feel like there was much meta-game to the package… not much to shoot for, no interesting opponents, not as many cool challenges as a Chessmaster sort of game.

Shred Nebula (Arcade)

Another arcade-style ship shooter game which suffers from the usual problems of the genre.  Powerups are too small and impossible to tell apart, enemies shoot from off-screen, graphics and music are generic.  Everything is explained in way too many pages of detail and lingo.  I don’t need to know the name of the pinwheel enemy in Geometry Wars.  Controls, such as a trigger to move foward and a bumper to move backward, are neither tight nor particularly inclusive.

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed (Retail)

Fits well as a secret niche of Star Wars lore but Jedis make awkward games.  Lightsaber behaves as a glowing stick, unable to actually slice through anything.  Force Grab always seems to target something different from what I want.  The big boss battle against an AT-ST should be an epic fight throwing everything in the area at it or slicing up its legs with a lightsaber (Skywalker vs AT-AT-style).  Instead, it’s a mash-the-buttons God of War finisher.  The story and settle are perfect-pitch Star Wars, but the gameplay never felt authentic.

Too Human (Retail)

Tries to be the ultimate RPG but botches every part of the equation.  The story is laughably uncomfortable, slow, cliche, and bad.  Combat involves killing many of the exact same robogoblins all the time and although looks cool at first, it feels ultimately skill-less and bland.  Equipment is comprised of insignificant bonuses such as “1% faster ranged attack”, level-up skills are similarly watered down.  Ambition and scope can sustain an RPG for a pretty long time, even with pretty rough gameplay, but nothing works here.

War World (Arcade)

Worst-made demo I’ve seen on XBLA.  Seems to have decent Quake 3-with-mechs gameplay but the demo is limited to sixty seconds.  Sixty seconds!  That’s not even enough to figure out all the controls!

Comments (1) | October 5, 2008

Xbox Live Thumbs Down: Trying Too Hard

Some games are too big, some are too small.  Some don’t know what they want to be and others don’t understand why nobody likes who they are.  Since I started playing and reviewing everything on XBLA, I found a lot of games that aren’t bad, only limited.  Most any game that makes it on Xbox Live is fun, I play demos to decide whether they are worth buying.  

Facebreaker (Retail)

Analog control pioneers like skate, Fight Night, and Wii Boxing bring superior, subtle, and satisfying control that obsoletes the competition. In other words, Facebreaker is old and broken. The controls and fighting system are fast and responsive but the generic, humorless cartoon characters damper enthusiasm. Who would buy a $60 throwaway sports game?

Puzzle Quest: Revenge of the Plague Lord (Arcade Add-on)

I installed this add-on, started the game with my old character, and had no idea what to do. There’s no indication where the new stuff starts. This completely apathetic approach reflects the lack of effort in Revenge of the Plague Lord. Bland, churning content can’t resuscitate Puzzle Quest from the first game’s “I only finished it cuz I got this far already” ending. Lame new quests, not a lot of new gameplay, and the stores and items still suck. One of the abusers of the low-price-for-good-value trust that XBLA tries to engender.

1942: Joint Strike (Arcade)

I wrote earlier that I admire the style of remake being done in Commando, 1942, and Street Fighter HD. While I do still appreciate the graphics in 1942, I’m not so fond of the gameplay. Lacking the danger of Geometry Wars 2 or Commando 3, 1942 is unexciting and easy, except when bosses sprays millions of bullets for a cheap kill. The slow, pattern-dodging “escape” scenes are especially tedious, contrived, and action-free. While I like a lot of things about the style of the game, I just can’t quite get into the actual game.

Schizoid (Arcade)

Billed as the most co-op game ever Joe and I fired it up, excited.  The game has moments of Geometry Wars-like tension as each player is completely dependent on the other.  After finishing the demo, though, we neither of us reached for the “Buy it now” button.  Although the gameplay has tension, players share a pool of ten lives, which feels weirdly bottomless.  Most of the levels are not particularly hard, either, and playing through the stages lacks immediate goals.  I like the aim of the game but it wasn’t compelling.

Go! Go! Break Steady (Arcade)

A mash-up of rhythm and puzzle gameplay but lacking the precision of either. Right after getting into the groove of a song, gameplay swaps to match-3 “Zuma” gameplay with only seconds to succeed, then back into rhythm. The product feels like a zany single idea that got funded and had ace production values layered on top. I bought into the art style and presentation but pushed the game aside because of the jarring gameplay.

Comments (0) | August 31, 2008

Xbox Live Thumbs Up: Geometry Wars 2

Geometry Wars 2 advances the two-stick shooter and the XBLA platform.

Geometry Wars 1 was fun but limited. What could a sequel bring? How about improvements to the menus, scoreboards, and other “shell” elements along with some gameplay tweaks, tons of fun new modes, and great Xbox Achievements. A perfect bite of Arcade goodness.

Score multiplier, the key to big points, no longer directly result from killing enemies, but instead builds by collecting Geoms, which pop out of dead enemies. Early on, collecting these Geoms (and the charge-at-your-enemies style this requires) are a great way to risk your life. The explosive nature of multipliers combined with a less deadly gun and faster-appearing enemies give the game a fresh, fast feel. Successful GW runs start fast and keep a great pace, fueling the addiction.

The new modes are great and go beyond simple tweaks, altering the fundamental GW experience. In modes like King, where players are helpless and unable to fire except from safe bubbles on the screen, or Pacifism, which strips weapons away in favor of slalom-like gates that explode when crossed, Geometry Wars 2 shows itself to be more than just a shooting game but also a nimble dodging game. Listed next to each mode are the top scores of you and the best scores of your friends list. Friends compete in 6 different fields instead of one, increasing the re-playability several times over!

My personal favorite are the achievements in GW2. Each of them highlights some core skill in the mode. Often they ask the player to survive a very long time in unusual circumstances or without killing enemies. I love these kinds of achievements that serve as fresh content and fun secrets.

GW2 is a worthy and addictive sequel with a great combination of game improvements and new content to try!

Comments (0) | August 13, 2008

The Dark Knight - The Message Board

The Dark Knight was awesome!  In my post-cinema glow, I poked around for the trolls on the IMDb message boards.  The mind of the forum troll is complex and nuanced, full of anger, and sometimes just perversely hilarious.  Let me be your tour guide.

(Note that there are mild-to-major spoilers deep in the actual posts, but I won’t be directly spoiling.)

One thing IMDb posters hate are new, popular movies that are higher rated than Godfather/etc.  Absolute panic.  These movies settle down in rating eventually, but for now we get:

The next most common post is the misogynist post.  With the lovely Maggie Gyllenhaal replacing Katie Holmes from the first movie, the lady lead has an especially big target painted on her.  One can only wonder about why people make these sorts of posts:

Casting threads speculating future characters are such a cliche on IMDb’s boards that you can rarely find serious posts.  So nonsensical they make me laugh.

Some people can’t take the firehose-level blast of posts that a new movie entails:

Even I’m not alone:

Comments (0) | July 21, 2008

Ten Things I Like About CivRev

(Part one of… many… of my adoration for Civilization Revolution, the console version of the long-running PC strategy series. I will revisit some concepts (like armies) several times but from different angles.)

  1. Armies make battles badass. In Civ4, attacking a city means sending one warrior in after another. In CivRev, battles for cities are often one or two large fights ending with dramatic results.
  2. Small world size pumps up tension. In Civ4, players learn bad habits because it is often completely possible to avoid dealing with all but one or two other countries. The first 200-300 (of 430) turns can go by before a conflict even arises.
  3. Borders are tighter and the world is smaller, improving mobility. Early warfare is clunky in Civ4 due to reinforcement delays. Cities are safe and hard to take. Nothing can happen!  In CivRev, fights are easier to start and maintain with fewer turns spent on travel time.
  4. Roads sew together large countries. Road travel is convenient and empowering in CivRev, whereas they’re just a mandatory, mediocre sprawl in Civ4.
  5. Gold is useful and a viable victory condition. Gold can be used for roads (which are awesome now), buying tech, rushing buildings/units, and above all, reaching “wealth milestones” that give you bonuses just for reaching certain amounts of money! In Civ4, gold is just a stockpile used to upgrade a unit or two occasionally.
  6. Special buildings are specialization rather than rote requirement. By 1500AD or so in Civ4, there are 12 or more buildings each city must construct to achieve stability. Several research buildings, several money buildings, military buildings, construction buildings, etc. In CivRev, there are fewer turns yet buildings still take a long time. Each building is a useful, substantial prize rather than a box in a checklist.
  7. Civilization bonuses directly affect gameplay. In Civ4, civ bonuses are smaller, usually half price on a few (of many) buildings. Many early CivRev bonuses are game-changing and new bonuses are added for every era. In just a few games I noticed big differences between the expansion-minded Romans and Englands amazing archer defenses.
  8. Barbarian villages are more plentiful and peaceful villages give better bonuses. Cash being so useful improves the fun of exploring. Early exploration is now a fun part of the game rather than 5-15 minutes of same-y drudgery. Most fights lead to new things to explore rather than dead ends.
  9. Unit upgrades don’t get in the way. In Civ4, it’s common to train several units a turn and then manually pick upgrades for them (usually the same two out of nine or so every time) before moving them around. The first upgrade in CivRev is always a general combat upgrade, so less clicking there. Elite upgrades are rarely gained “out of the gate” and are instead rewards from big fights. Like the building changes, this clears up the gameplay and focuses it on the fun parts.
  10. Resources are bonuses rather than chances to get cheaped out of units. If your Civ4 nation is not near copper or iron, it may never be able to build any of the low- and mid-level attacking units! Without living near horses, it’s possible to be miss out on building any of several crucial support units. In CivRev, those resources are single city bonuses that enhance cities rather than un-blocking your ability to play the game fairly.

More coming!

Comments (1) | July 19, 2008

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