emptying my brain onto the internet since 1998…
I’m a gamer. I game.
While my wife may lament the exclusion of female character models in the upcoming Battlefield Heroes, I can’t wait to give it a shot. This video trailer for the game just shows me that the guys at DICE really do get it. To have a great game you don’t need gritty realism with guts spraying the walls with every gunshot, you just need to have a game that is fun.
Damn that looks like fun.
No, this is not Brad McQuaid’s failure of epic proportions Vanguard: Saga of Heroes, GameTap doesn’t have that. Instead, they have the 1981 side scroller Vanguard. Perhaps Mr. McQuaid’s game would have done better had he not lifted his title from a previous game.
Vanguard is… fairly awful. Its typical, side scrolling and shooting while avoiding stuff. The game has one minor twist in that its not all side scrolling. It is also diagonal scrolling and top scrolling. As you progress through the level, sometime it changes direction. And then at the end of each level, it stops scrolling so you can fight the boss. The controls are as you would expect, using a dual stick game pad the left stick is movement and the right stick is shooting. Oh, because you can shoot in 4 directions. If you do decide to play the game, I give this advice: Ignore the North, South, East, West options for firing, instead use North-East, North-West, South-East and South-West. Hitting these will fire two directions at once (North-East will first North AND East). Seeing as your goal is to kill everything, there is never a reason for you to not be firing in two directions at once.
All in all, the game is a bore, and I found myself thinking that I’d rather be playing Defender. However, I did find the game to be more fun when instead of being some valiant soldier fighting for survival I imagined myself as the invading force. This was made easier through the sections where you are blowing up alien houses, people and their pets, none of which fire back at you. To paraphrase a film that does not deserve the indignity of being associated with this game or its review: Anyone that runs is an alien hostile! Anyone that stands still is a well trained alien hostile!
… and… I’m out.
One thing that has always bugged me about MMORPGs is that in order to play the game, mechanically, to its peak, I must relinquish control of certain aspects of my character.
As far as spells, skills, talents, etc are concerned, that I don’t mind because those are the mechanics of the game. If getting skill X makes me better at dealing damage than skill Y and I have chosen my role to be damage dealer, there is no choice. I pick X. Picking Y would be self defeating. Sure, the idea of Y might be cooler than X, but mechanically, to maximize the efficiency of the game, I have to pick X.
To a degree, the same goes for items… except often times the best items don’t look the best. Ask any WoW player if he enjoys the water cooler shoulder pads of some of the highest level loot and you’ll get a mixed response… on the look. When it comes to the math, you can’t argue, much like skills, item X is better than item Y for reason Z. Period. The math doesn’t lie. The problem comes in that the axe you got a couple of weeks ago has the really cool look, and it is dripping fire, and the new one that just dropped, which is mathematically better than the axe that drips fire, just looks like a typical hand axe, one that doesn’t drip fire. Or perhaps you have this wicked cloak with a pattern of a bat on it, and you like bats, but now you are presented with a cloak that is much better statistically but is has a pink butterfly on it… ick.
For that reason, I fully support any design that allows for the separation of form and function. Recently I’ve been fooling around with EverQuest II and I just hit level 20 which opened up a second “paper doll” (i.e. – slots for items) that was just for the visible look. That way, the robe I had that I really liked the look of for my monk I can keep wearing for the appearance, but I can slip on the chest straps in my normal equipment spot for the stats. This is a concept that should be implemented into every single game that uses gear as progression… stat!
Thinking on this concept though, and knowing that I love it, I wanted to be sure I had considered all the possible “down sides” to it, and my thoughts on how to deal with them. So, let’s go…
1. PvP.
Problem: In Player versus Player combat, the fact that certain gear has a specific visual look can be an asset to sizing up your opponents. If he’s got on the water cooler shoulder pads and the unique dark blue chest plate from that super elite raid dungeon, chances are the guy is going to be decked out in awesome raid gear, so you’ll need to approach him differently, more carefully, than you would some poor schmoe in head to toe rags from random outdoor adventuring.
Solution: Gear from raid zones (or as PvP rewards) generally has designated “tiers”. In fact, World of Warcraft openly supports this idea of tiered suits, especially in rewarding players with bonus stats and effects for wearing pieces from the same tier. I’d suggest supporting this idea from day one, even at the lowest level. Design all gear to be handled in tiers, and then provide next to a character’s name (both floating and on player listing pages) they tier average of all their gear. If a player has 14 slots for gear and currently the game has 200 tiers of gear, a player with a tier average of 200 would be fully decked in the best gear possible. Of course, players could try to “cheat” by equipping lower tier gear, for example dropping a tier 1 piece of just in, say, the ring slot would drop a 200 tier player down to 186 (200 * 13 + 1 = 2601 / 14 = 185.78…, round up), but in doing so, he’d be robbing himself of an entire slot worth of stats. While this might be an odd concept at first, I think it would fairly rapidly become second nature to players. Games could even help out by providing the number for the current max tier rank, so you’d see a player as 191/200 or 185/200 as a quick judge of their gear.
2. Nudity.
Problem: Sometimes the problem isn’t just the look of a piece of equipment, but that you don’t want to see anything in a particular slot at all, and if you allow people to turn off the visible graphic for slots, you are going to end up with “naked” characters running around.
Solution: While I would support some form of “disabling” visibility on slots for most locations (gloves, boots, helmet, etc), I cannot think of any reason I would support disabling the visibility of the chest and pants slots on a character, and I would be perfectly happy leaving those two slots as forcing a graphic, either from the equipped stat item or from the visibility override item. If a player really wants to be “naked” back to the fully unequipped graphics of a new character, they’ll have to have nothing equipped, at least in those two slots. Besides, as far as I am aware, Age of Conan is the only game I’ve heard of that is going to have any real nudity anyway, most games already don’t allow true nudity.
…
And that’s it… I tried really hard to think of a 3rd problem with separating the form and the function of items, and I even feel number 2 there is a stretch. If anyone else thinks of a reason not to divide form from function, or any other problems, please, let me know. I’d love to discuss it.
To me though, it seems almost like a no brainer, especially to extend the accessibility of any game to role players and women. And I’m not being sexist there… its from experience, almost every woman I know who has played an MMO, one of the first things they want to know is how to turn the camera and see how they look. Women, in general, care more about how they look than men do, even in a game.
This week for my GameTap review, I decided to take a chance and hit the random button. With 996 titles to choose from, of course, it landed on Sam & Max first. After that it landed on a couple of educational type titles that I just didn’t feel like playing, until finally it landed on Pyramid Magic. Originally for the Sega Genesis and available only in Japan, it looked to be your typical console puzzle game so I fired it up.
I’m sure there is a back story for this, but the story page was in Japanese, and while I speak a little of the language, my grasp of it is not enough to dive in and read a story. I’m mainly limited to asking where the bathroom is and other such travel necessities. But, its a puzzle game, so who needs a story? Right?
The game play works like this. Every board has 3 boxes: a wood crate, a red chest and a green chest. So, according to the Old Man Murray “Time to Crate” scale, Pyramid Magic rates at 0 seconds. Anyway, you have to break open the wood crate to get the red key which opens the red chest to get the green key which opens the green chest that reveals the magic piece of burlap which disables the robot. Yes, the burlap disables the robot. Take note of this, because after Judgment Day, you better have your stock of burlap ready to fight the Terminators. Watch out Sky Net, I’m armed with textiles! I suppose it is worth noting that in the age of KISS video game design, you break open the wood crate by kicking it… and you unlock the other crates also by kicking them. I mean, if I’m just going to kick them, why do I need the key? Because kicking it before you have the key doesn’t work, that’s why. In addition to the crates, keys and burlap, your intrepid robot fighting archaeologist is faced with a problem: he’s got a bad back, or something… what this means is that you can’t duck. Instead, to get through small spaces you must pick up large blocks of stone to force yourself to crouch down so you can fit into the smaller space, and then drop the block as you enter. Of course, it is absurd to think of it that way, which is why I did it, but really is just a way to add another dimension to the puzzle solving.
Every level of the game presents you with the challenge of using the blocks of stone to climb or crouch your way through to the crates to release the burlap and defeat the evil robots. Or at least that’s what the first 15 or so levels are like, then I got stuck and used all my lives trying to beat one stupid level (not the one pictured). Thankfully, in the style of a bygone era of gaming, every few levels the game gives you a code so you can jump back in approximately where you left off.
Pyramid Magic is a decently enjoyable puzzle game, in fact since graphics aren’t the main draw to casual puzzle games, it actually holds up fairly well given that the game is 17 years old. And if you like the game, Game Tap also has Pyramid Magic 2, Pyramid Magic 3, and a Pyramid Magic Special which is billed as a 4th game in the series but uses the graphics of the first so it really may have been the second game, essentially the first with new puzzles.
One element that seems to follow around many fantasy genre MMOs is the idea of putting the lore’s gods in the game as defeatable content. Largely, when this happens, it leads to my arguments of why I feel raiding is stupid. Its not that I think the act of raiding or the existence of raid content is stupid, I just feel that often times it is done poorly. I always love beating up on EverQuest at times like these… so lets continue the trend. In the Planes of Power expansion, they put in a long series of flags with a lore to back up the players storming the planes, the homes of the gods, and killing them. You fight and kill pretty much all the gods on the EQ Pantheon, and at the end of the story ***Spoiler!*** one of the surviving gods makes time go backwards to before you went through the Plane of Time and killed off all the gods for good. Actually, not too bad of a story, and if this were a fantasy novel, that’d be a fairly nifty end to a series.
The problem, of course, is that EverQuest didn’t end. There have been more expansions and more mudflation, and now you can defeat the god of fire with a single group. There are insignificant monsters in the new worlds that put the gods to shame.
Wait… what?
Exactly. The biggest hurdle with putting gods into your game as defeatable content is that, unless it really is the end of your game, your gods will become trivial content in the future.
In my opinion, the gods, and the true homes of the gods, should never exist in the game world. Your players should, at best, fight the creations of gods, avatars of the gods imbued with power, but distinct from the gods themselves. If you feel that you must absolutely put the gods in your games, consider making them nigh unkillable.
My wife took one look at Team Fortress 2 when I got it and immediately wanted to play. She took a second look at it, and hasn’t played it… her one complaint, “There are no females.”
Looking out across the FPS landscape, its usually generally a safe bet that my wife won’t want to play them. First off, she doesn’t like PvP in most games. Secondly, the grim and gritty realism that many games try to attain just doesn’t interest her. But when she saw the outlandish graphics of TF2, she was willing to put aside the dislike for PvP (“I think I want to play a Medic.”) and give it a shot. But without being able to play a woman, she lost interest again.
Just this week I was reading Games for Windows magazine’s March issue and perusing the article on the new Battlefield game: Battlefield Heroes. Once again, she saw the stylized graphics and immediately wanted to know more. So I showed her the article and dug around the Internet for more info. Not one single scrap mentions female characters, likely because there aren’t any… no more interest in the game.
I’d really like to play some FPS games with my wife, so, please, could someone put a game with really cool stylized graphics AND have female models in it? Please?
Last week, while writing up my initial GameTap post, I wanted to end it with “Ready. Set. Game!” and I was sure I was plagiarizing it from someone, so I hit up Google for the 4-1-1. It turns out lots of people have used it, and I was unable to determine who said it first, so I went ahead and used it. But what really interested me was the first link that showed up. It was for “10 tips for dealing with game cyberbullies and griefers” and it was published by Microsoft back in November of 2004. Five links down the Google results, I learned I wasn’t the first person to find this list.
Now, I might get in trouble for this, but I really hate when I link to a website to discuss the content and the content changes or gets removed. So, for the sake of my own posting continuing to make sense through the years, I’m going to quote the Microsoft page in its entirety:
Ready, set, game: Learn how to keep video gaming safe and fun
10 tips for dealing with game cyberbullies and griefers
Published: November 4, 2004Known as griefers, snerts, cheese players, twinks, or just plain cyberbullies, chances are that one of these ne’er-do-wells has bothered a kid near you at least once while playing online multiplayer video games such as Halo 2, EverQuest, The Sims Online, SOCOM, and Star Wars Galaxies. Griefers are the Internet equivalent of playground bullies, who find it fun to embarrass and push around others.
What griefers do
Typical griefers: taunt others, especially beginners (also known as newbies); thwart fellow teammates in the game; use inappropriate language; cheat; form itinerant gangs with other griefers; block entryways; lure monsters toward unwary players; or otherwise use the game merely to annoy a convenient target or to harass a particular player who has reacted to their ill will.
Although they are only a small percentage of the video-game community, griefers have some game companies concerned they’ll lose subscribers. As a result, many game sites and providers are less tolerant of griefers and employ new methods to police for them and otherwise limit their impact.
The best way to deal with griefers is to educate yourself and prepare your kids to deal with them on their own terms. Here are ten tips to help you handle griefers.
10 tips to deal with griefers
- Ignore them. If your child doesn’t react to them, most griefers will eventually get bored and go away.
- Change game options. Have your kids play games with changeable rules or options that prevent certain griefer tactics, such as eliminating teammates.
- Create a private game. Most newer, multiplayer video games and related sites allow players to form their own exclusive games that permit only their friends to play.
- Play on sites with strict rules. Play on game sites with enforceable codes of conduct or terms of service and live game administrators who can ban serial griefers.
- Do something else. If a griefer continues to bother your child, have your child try a different game, or take a break and come back later.
- Report game glitches. Work with your child to identify exploitable glitches in the game or new methods to cheat. Report these to the game site administrator.
- Play games that limit griefers. Suggest to your child that he or she play newer games that provide specific resources to deal with griefers. Kids can use these resources to report offenders to game administrators, block or mute messages, and to vote griefers off.
- Don’t fight fire with fire. Make sure your child doesn’t use griefers’ tactics against a griefer, as this will likely encourage more bad behavior, or worse, label your child as a griefer.
- Avoid provocative names. Your child can preempt any problems if he or she avoids screen names or nicknames (often referred to as gamertags) that could encourage griefer behavior.
- Don’t give out personal information. Griefers (or anyone else) can use real names, phone numbers, and home or e-mail addresses, to further harass your child or cause other problems.
First off… snert? Seeing as I have never heard that term in over twenty years of gaming, I had to go look it up. I found it at the Urban Dictionary, and even my favorite site to look stuff up, Dictionary.com. And while I was familiar with the word twink, I decided to look it up too and discovered that I really hope the author intended the meaning more closely related to video games.
But enough about passing fads in the English language, lets look at the actual advice. It is, in and of itself, not bad advice, and actually is pretty much the same advice you give to kids about dealing with bullies in real life. However, the problem, as discussed in this article on Wired.com, is that especially in these virtual worlds the “griefers” are just playing a different game. The clearest example of this comes in the article through the discussion of how members of the Something Awful community approach the game EVE Online:
“The way that you win in EVE is you basically make life so miserable for someone else that they actually quit the game and don’t come back.”
and
“You may be playing EVE Online, but be warned: We are playing Something Awful.”
Overall, you, the player who does not want to be griefed, are at the mercy of them, the player who wants to grief you, because the whole point of most MMOs is the social interaction, which is exactly the tools they need to grief you and actually removes the tools you need to prevent them… well, unless you want to ignore rule number 8. “Back in the day” some of the Anti-PK guilds of Ultima Online were actually more vicious than the PK guilds they hunted.
About the best you can hope for is that two griefers lock horns trying to out grief each other, which allows everyone else to ignore them and continue on with their game.
For my inaugural GameTap review, I decided to hit one of the original games designed for the service – Sam & Max: Season One. If you don’t know who Sam & Max are, take a moment and quickly skim through the Wikipedia entry. As a kid, I read a few of the comics, but I wasn’t a collector. And at 18, I played the video game. I always enjoyed the humor, and I’m happy to say the humor isn’t lost here in Season One. Playing through the game was fun and funny for the writing, the dialog.
Actually playing the game, on the other hand, was alternately boring and frustrating. Sam & Max is one of those “click on everything” games. You drag your mouse pointer around the screen and when an object is highlighted, you click on it and you’ll either interact with it, pick it up, or talk to it. Items in your inventory are picked up, your mouse pointer changes and now when you click on things you’ll try to use that item on the object. Its also one of those “you can’t lose” games. There is no time limit. Every mistake, no matter how bad, loops back into the story, in fact, is actually part of the story if you want to hear all the witty dialog. When I say boring and frustrating, what I mean is that the puzzles in the game were either a) painfully obvious and amounted to just making sure I clicked the objects in the right order, or b) painfully obtuse. I won’t ruin the game by using an example from it, instead I will use a classic maddening example from the walk through of the old Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy text adventure:
Firstly, eat the nuts. If you don’t, you will die of protein loss. Take off your gown, and hang it up on the hook. Then, get the towel and put it over the drain. Wait until Ford is asleep, then nick his satchel and put it in front of the panel. Put the junk mail on the satchel, then press the dispenser button. A babel fish will land in your ear, and you will be able to understand all languages.
Nothing in Sam & Max is quite that bad, but sometimes it does feel like it, especially when you are missing just one element of the “logic” and failing over and over again.
Overall, I love the art style of the games, and the humor, but as a “game” I’d almost rather be watching a cartoon or reading a comic book.
I’m introducing a new subcategory under gaming here and it is specifically for GameTap. I have had a GameTap account for over a year, and in that time I’ve mainly used it to play a few dozen old Atari and arcade games, and the occasional DOS/Windows game, like The Incredible Machine: Even More Contraptions. To be honest, I haven’t used the account to its full potential.
Last week while I was working on moving the website, I decided to go look for something to do on GameTap to fill some time and I found Uru Live, the Myst MMO. I’d seen it before and had always wanted to play it, but had never made the time. Just my luck, the day I decide to start playing was the day they announced they were planning to shut it down. Oh well… I guess you can’t win ’em all.
Getting myself back inside the GameTap tool, however, reminded me of why I agreed to sign up for it in the first place. With 990 games listed, its a huge library of past games with a few newer titles and some originals within which there has got to be some fun… or perhaps just some lessons to be learned.
So, I’m setting a goal for myself, every week I am going to play at least one game from GameTap and post a review about it. It will probably be easiest to do on Sunday mornings, so that’s likely when I’ll play and post. I’ve already downloaded a few old favorites and a few “I can’t believe I never played that” titles, and if I ever get stuck, GameTap provides a handy random wheel spinner that will select a game for me.
Ready. Set. Game!
As previously mentioned, I’m back in the world of Norrath. In addition to picking up the reins on Ishiro, I decided to also start up a new character so I could run through the new tutorial and see some of the changes to the game. So Jhaer the Drakken cleric was born. At the same time, since I did sign up for the Station Access, I started up EverQuest II to see how the game had changed since I later played.
In EQ, the new tutorial is fairly fantastic. It does a great job of introducing you to the features of the game, even grouping. EQ2 is pretty much the same… in fact after going into game I realized how much Sony cribbed the new EQ design off EQ2. The default UI layout, the quest logs featuring step by step goals. They are very similar.
After playing both for a couple of days, I came face to face with one of the reasons I tired of World of Warcraft but had not noticed until now: Breadcrumbs.
In game design, this is the idea of quests, tasks and objects that slowly lead a character through content. In WoW as a human you start in the newbie area and after a few quests you get one to take a note to Goldshire, where you find your next few quests, which eventually lead you to the lumber mill, and then you get lead to Westfall, and so on. In WoW though, quests are some of the best source of experience and loot in the game. The quests are the game. EQ, being that at its core it is still the same game that came out in 1999, is based largely on killing monsters with quests being secondary. The two don’t always mix together well.
For World of Warcraft and even EverQuest II, since the game was made for these sorts of quests and the quest log design, if you need to collect gnoll scalps, gnolls scalps don’t drop unless you have the quest. In EverQuest, gnoll scalps drop even if you don’t have the quest, but while under the old style quest system (no quest log, no stage tracker) if you got 10 scalps before being given the quest, you could turn them in anyway, however, under the new system it only counts the scalps if you loot them AFTER getting the quest, so if you have 10 scalps and get a quest to collect 10 scalps, you have to get 10 more.
Over in EverQuest II, I ran into a different problem. One of my quests asked me to find evidence of the missing soldiers. After getting fed up looking for this evidence, I went to a spoiler site and they explained I just needed to go to one spot and find the dead soldier body, which would then spawn a defiled soldier that I would have to kill. So I went back into game and went to the spot, but there was no dead soldier. I ran around the area for a couple hours killing everything, but no dead soldier. The problem here is that this quest is the second quest in a series of six or so breadcrumb quests that are supposed to lead me around the island. This tutorial area is built with two lines of quests, and if you complete both sets before leaving you end up with a basic set of armor and weapons to carry you into the game. I fully completed one line, but the second is halted because of this dead soldier who doesn’t seem to exist. To make things worse, there are usually eight or more of us waiting around for this dead soldier.
In addition to a single broken quest halting an entire line, breadcrumbs quest lines also funnel the players through areas without exploration, and in fact since quests are where the real rewards are in newer games, you are often passively penalized for getting off the path and looking around as progression of your character virtually halts if you don’t play the game the way they want you to play.
I don’t know if there is any solution to this, or if it even needs a solution, its just something I felt like rambling about.