Alexx's Journal

Being a long-time gamer who now struggles with the responsibilities of adulthood, I'm always on the lookout for games which have strategic depth, but which can be played to completion in under an hour. Two such have recently come to my attention. Neither of them has technically been released yet, but both are available for pre-order and can be played in some form now if you do.

The first is a board game called Fealty, developed by some friends of friends. It's a territory-control game with a medieval theme. They are handling pre-orders through Kickstarter, and that page also has links to their page on Boardgame Geek, and a pdf of the rules, so you can check it out pretty thoroughly before buying. Once pre-ordered, you can download and print a 2-person version of the game, to tide you over until the full game gets printed up.

The second is a browser game called Desktop Dungeons. This is a clear descendant of rogue-likes like Nethack, but has managed the impressive feat of compressing a typical play session down to 15-30 minutes. Like potato chips, however, you'll want more than just one :-) I spent dozens of happy hours with the (free) alpha version of this game. The beta is now available for customers who have pre-ordered, and adds a lot of interesting stuff over the alpha, while still maintaining the elegance of the basic gameplay model.

So, on the way home from work, I'm reading Walter Jon Williams' _Deep State_. It's a followup to his earlier (and excellent) _This Is Not A Game_. Both feature a protagonist who constructs Alternate Reality Games for a living. And I'm thinking to myself, "These ARG games are pretty cool, I should really get involved in one some time."

And when I log onto my computer that evening, I have a message waiting from mermaidlady, asking if I'm playing Gallow Green.

Sleep No More is playing in NYC soon, and they have put together an ARG to promote it. If you're in the Boston area, I recommend jumping in before the weekend is over. If I'm right, there will be something Cool happening near here early next week...

http://sleepnomorenyc.com/gallowgreen/

There's a book that was on my Wish List for a while, and herooftheage got it for me for Christmas: _The Ethics of Computer Games_, by Miguel Sicart. I've been reading it snippets, as my 'book to read during meals if kestrell isn't around'. So, this morning, the first words which presented themselves to my eyes were:

The ludic hermeneutic circle operates as a layered interpretational moral process, which starts with the becoming of the player and goes through a series of interpretative stages that conclude in the development of the ludic phronesis.

The scary part is that I understood it... (Approximately: "Games, players, and game communities influence each other in ways that lead to players understanding how they should play the game.")

Tom asked me to let him know if the book was any good. Well, I feel I am getting some value out of it -- but man, it's a slog. I can't really recommend it, unless you happen to have that rare intersection of interests: games and academic philosophy.

Those of you follow me on Facebook may have noticed some odd messages turning up lately. If you click on them, they lead to a rather fascinating little web game alled Echo Bazaar. While structurally similar to many clicky-grindy Facebook games, this one has at least a little bit of actual gameplay in it. But more to the point, it has a really interesting fiction. I could call it "Neverwhere fanfic", but it's got more originality than that implies. They are both stories about a mysterious London-under-London, with Dickensian flavor and weird mystic happenings, but The Neath has quite a bit to distinguish it from London Below. Recommended.

Also, they have an active forum for suggested improvements. If you do end up trying the game, please vote up my suggestion, Accessibility for the Blind. I think Kestrell would really enjoy this, if only she could play it...

I play a lot of the Lego-based videogames. Last night, for a brief time in a dream-within-a-dream, I was playing "Lego Shutter Island".

In a later dream, I was playing a complicated board/card game with, among others, rickthefightguy and tamarinne. There were three types of card in the game, Guest Stars, Girlfriends, and Armies. It came up in conversation that tamarinne probably qualified as all three :-)

Has eaten huge amounts of my life recently. It's a great videogame about Exploding Stuff For Justice. I could go on at length about it, but Darius has done a great job of describing it already, so I will refer you to his post.

I've been playing a lot of Borderlands lately. It's a new game from Gearbox, sort-of a cross between a First-Person Shooter, and RPG-lite; Diablo with Guns.

There's a lot wrong with the game. It's buggy, multiplayer is a mess, the story is thin to the point of non-existence, the UI is embarrassingly awful, etc, etc. But what it gets right, it gets very right indeed, to the point that I'm finding it quite addictive. The basic cycle of "shoot, shoot, take their loot" is a classic, and the execution of the shooting, and of the loot itself, are both excellent. And though the story is non-existent, the game does manage a fun sense of style.

The variety of loot is a big feature of the game. Almost all of it is guns, but there are zillions of different guns to find. Many of them are hand-crafted as plot rewards, but most are randomly generated out of a wonderfully rich set of variable factors. Many of these factors are straightforward: damage, accuracy, reload rate, etc. Some are a bit more exotic: extra damage when meleeing with this weapon, chance to set target on fire, and so on. And every so often, you'll find a weapon with a *really* unusual property. In my last play session, I discovered a gun that made me laugh out loud, and really sums up what kind of game this is. It was a Shotgun which also had the property, and I quote: "Holy crap! It shoots rockets!"

As it happens, I didn't keep it long. While the hack value of such a gun is immense, its practicality was greatly lessened by the fact that it still *aimed* like a shotgun. I couldn't reliably hit with it, except at close range, at which point the splash damage hurt *me* significantly. Besides, if I really wanted to shoot rockets at my foes, I found this sweet Rocket Launcher that fires its entire barrel of five in about a tenth of a second. I don't use that one often, but when I really want overkill, it gets the job done :-)

Starting last Friday, Melville Keep has had very intermittent internet access :-( Sine I was frequently prevented from playing WoW, I ended up installing a copy of "Heroes of Might & Magic V" that I picked up some months ago. The good news: Mechanically, it's almost an exact remake of HoMM3, the previous high water mark for the series, just with prettier graphics. The bad news: It's been so long since I played a game like this that my defenses against the "just one more turn" temptation have atrophied. Am very sleep-dep'd today...

This was my Christmas present from herooftheage, and now that my XBox 360 is repaired (actually, replaced), I've been playing it on and off for the last few weeks.

The game is (largely) set during the Third Crusade. You play an Assassin (*really* O.G.) who is sent on various missions to kill both Crusaders and their opponents. These Assassins are purportedly good guys who only kill for the greater good, to bring about 'peace'. Of course, the bad guys (Templars) say pretty much the exact same thing, so we're in a pretty gray zone, morally speaking.

The gameplay is a combination of stealth and action. The stealth is only moderately engaging, but you don't have to do very much of it. The action, on the other hand, is superb! The game's big selling point is the movement system. Your character can effortlessly scale almost any building, and leap with ease from rooftop to rooftop. The control scheme is good, and the animation is peerless. Seriously, playing this makes every other game's avatar animation look like bad marionette work in comparison. The bar has been raised a *lot*.

In addition to your primary missions, the world is full of things to do and see. The levels are huge, sprawling, and non-linear. There are collectables to find, citizens to rescue, pockets to pick, cathedrals to scale, and other optional challenges to undertake. I find these free-roaming sections actually more fun than the 'story' missions.

All that said, the game is not without down sides. Cutscenes, while not numerous after the opening, are unskippable and lengthy. The combat, while visually very appealing, is not very tactically engaging. And, ye gods, the frame story...

Remember how I said that this game was *mostly* set in the Third Crusade? Actually, those sequences are all genetic memories being relived via computer stimulation by a descendant of the protagonist who lives in modern times. This lets them get away with a fairly detailed HUD without breaking their fiction, but still jars at me. The modern-day protagonist is *also* an assassin, who has been kidnapped by mad scientists who want to get a specific secret out of his genetic memories. We don't know much about him at the start, as his story also starts in media res. And very early on, my story-sense tingled, suggesting that even the 'modern' storyline is a genetic memory, and there's an external frame around that waiting to be revealed. All very 'French'.

(Digression: French videogames have acquired a reputation for a certain degree of artsy surrealism. This leads to the word 'French' being used as an adjective within the industry. BioShock was a 'French' game, despite being made in Quincy.)

Later: I have now finished the game. The final twist was not nearly as cool as I had hoped. The modern-day frame story got no closure, just dropped some tantalizing hints about a sequel, then stopped dead. I still enjoyed the base gameplay enough that I want to *play* that sequel (if it ends up getting made), but the story really disappointed.

During the course of the game, I had an interestingly evolving relationship with one specific sound effect, which I document here because of the game design insights involved. When semi-alert guards are watching you, there is an insistent beeping noise, which rises in frequency the more alert the guard is. At the beginning of the game, I found this to be incredibly annoying, intrusive, and useless. Also ubiquitous, as you have to travel through areas which are heavily seeded with guards. As I played more, I started to realize why (I thought) they had done it: to punish players for not using the game's stealth mechanic. But this was clearly a bad move, since a) moving slowly in stealth mode isn't generally fun, b) even during the beeping, the guards didn't usually become alerted, and c) running like a madman to escape alerted guards *is* fun.

Roughly halfway through the game, things gradually changed. It turns out that, in a fairly typical move, the designers had tuned down the reaction times of the guards for the early sections of the game, to allow players time to learn the systems in a less punishing environment. Once they turned those reactions back up to what the 'meat' of the game meant them to be, my reaction to the 'alert alarm' changed radically. Now, the noise *couldn't* be ubiquitous; whenever it happened, I either needed to go into stealth mode (which makes the beeping shut up), or *very* soon the guards would go into full combat mode (which also turns off the beeping). The insistent nature of the alarm was no longer annoying, but welcome, as it was a clear indicator that my state was going to change soon, one way or another. With all the game systems in place, stealth mode also becomes more interesting; there are more ways for it to fail, and more significant consequences *for* failure. You still don't want to spend lengthy periods in stealth mode, but the time you *do* spend in it is more suspenseful

So what's the takeaway lesson here? If your games scales in difficulty over time (as most do), then you need to make sure that your feedback mechanisms scale appropriately with them. When they made the early game more forgiving in terms of gameplay, they inadvertently made this one feedback element more punishing.

Later: Hm, seems it wasn't (just) a late / early thing; it was also a country / city thing. The alert mechanic doesn't work well when the player is on horseback. You *want* to gallop, but always alert guards when you do. I mistook the problem for an early/late one because the game allows for instant travel between 'known' cities, so by the end of the first act, you no longer have to travel by horse -- until one sequence shortly before the end, when you have to go somewhere new, and the alarm proves just as annoying as ever.

So here's the new takeaway lesson: when you have radically different gameplay modes, feedback that works well for one may not work for another, at least not without radical retuning.

Someone at work brought in Rock Band today, and I watched for a while, then tried my hand at the drumming. Much fun! (No one in the office is bold enough to try singing, so far...)

This game does seem to have suffered some from difficulty inflation. "Easy" I found to be challenging (on Drums, anyways). And some GH veterans playing with me expressed amazement at how hard Medium was for the guitar and bass tracks on some of the songs. Not for the faint of heart, or lousy of rhythm.