Category Archives: Games

Games

Race for the Galaxy, 102pts vs. Keldon AI

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I usually lose to the AI, but just now I scored huuuuuge. First time trying the drafting variant. 3-player game, Rebel v Imperium (haven’t tried Brink of War, yet).

Hidden Fortress is a monster, and, because I drafted cards, I had crazy synergy with 6-pt Devs that took advantage of that high military score.

Don’t know what the hell I’m talking about?

Read about Race for the Galaxy on Board Game Geek (scroll down to the Files section if you want a copy of the rulebook) and check out a user named Keldon’s computer AI version of RftG!

Mark's screenshot of a score of 102!

Games

Assassin’s Creed 3 bullet list

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Spoilerish.
  • The Green Dragon a nod to The Hobbit?
  • Sometimes lockpicking is misaligned, to get a weird visual glitch.
  • The safe running is welcome, for sure, but it introduces the (less annoying) problem of running up every goddamn lightpost or market stand when I just wanted to run past it.
  • The story is suitably ludicrous; this *is* Assassin’s Creed, after all. Throughout the Ezio stories and now with Conner, I kept wondering what would happen if the Assassins and Templars actually sat down with a beer and talked things over. There’s some nice gray areas, but too bad the protagonist and enemies are all so stabby happy rather than, “well shit; let’s just talk about it first.” As usual the most lucid moments are right after you’ve stabbed someone. “Well, damn, sorry I stabbed you; why didn’t you say earlier?”
  • The Desmond story bits are also kind of crazy. I assume they ran out of money to CGify the massive solar flare and world seismic activity, etc., and maybe they thought to themselves, “well, let’s just make another game and render those scenes in its intro instead.” Also, the Cross story just sort of fizzled.
  • Not enough stealth; too much running, and it wasn’t even good pakour running since the rooftops felt slower and jolty, not to mention attracting the guards.
  • I liked the naval battles and wish there were random encounters instead of just the set ones.
  • I feel like I learned a lot about colonial America and got some good background on the Seven Years War and the Revolutionary War. No idea how accurate it is, but I could easily see this game as supplemental material for an American history class, especially if there’s other resources that help students critique the game. (or use the game to critique the textbooks)
  • The dual pistols never seemed to work for me.
  • Jarring to see the standard Assassin’s outfit in cutscenes when I had chosen a different dye to run around in.
  • There’s no point in crafting anything except the items Conner can use. The easiest way to make money is to just buy and sell bear and beaver pelts. And there’s no point in getting naval convoys going since, by the time you can reliably do so, you’re rolling in cash.
  • I did like the side missions, especially the homesteader ones.
  • The recruitment of Assassins was great. The leveling up by assigning them to missions was pointless. I didn’t get a sense that higher level minions actually did anything.
  • Really long epilogue. Surprisingly nice and meaningful.
  • Very pretty looking game. The Caribbean waters were great.
Games, Life

That’s a lot of games…

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For the past 6 weeks, while keeping appointments, applying to a few jobs, following research project leads, etc., I’ve mostly been playing digital games. Attempting one or two sentence descriptions/reviews…

FTL: Faster Than Light – A gem. Roguelike meets Space Alert is an odd description but sort of makes sense. IMHO, best game of 2012. I played this in September (got early access as a kickstarter) but threw it in this list since it’s so good. 59 hours.


XCOM: Enemy Unknown – The atmosphere of the original mixed with simpler 2-actions-per-turn mechanics, almost like a board game. Almost reminds me of Incubation, which btw is a really great tactical puzzle game. 130 hours.

Divinity 2 – Action RPG with lots of quests but not much decision making. Combat is engaging and challenging on higher difficulties, but. ultimately. it’s mostly a grind, like Kingdoms of Amalur. 70 hours.

Dishonored – Stealthy play through. Love the art design. Game was so-so. ~20 hours.

Defender’s Quest – Tower defense meets RPG. I kickstarted this for the artwork. I wish there was a branching storyline with interesting decisions and less grind. 46 hours.

Cthulhu Saves the World – I love the humor and the attempt to minimize the grind, but man… I just couldn’t do it. 42 minutes.

Cognition: An Erica Reed Thriller, episode 1 – I kickstarted this one, too, mostly due to their previous work on the indie King’s Quest fan game. Episode 1 is really quite good. Longish wait times between screens, though. Reminds me of Still Life (the really good first one, not the meh second one). Erica Reed, like Victoria McPherson, is an FBI agent tracking down a serial killer. ~8 hours.

East Side Story: A Carol Reed Mystery – Odd 1st-person adventure game featuring photographs using Photoshop’s watercolor filter. One in a series of games. Unfortunately, I found it really quite boring and the artwork more quaint than edgy. No relation to Cognition. Didnt’ finish. ~1 hour.

Nancy Drew: Alibi in Ashes – I’ve got this love hate relationship with Nancy Drew games. Each one has needlessly time-consuming travel elements (the town map that you drive around in is cool, except that you don’t actually get to drive and just point at a location–after tediously hotspot searching with your mouse–and wait, wait, wait). The voice acting is getting a little tired (same woman for like a bazillion games whose voice is starting to sound pretty old), making me hope they recast soon. But still… I like the NPC interaction (though I wish it had branching dialog). The Haunted Carousel, btw, had the best, almost Planescape-like, dialog. ~8 hours.

Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel – The very first scene has possibly the worst voice acting I’ve ever heard, killing the game. ~15 minutes.

Captain Morgane – I liked So Blonde, but this game felt like a step backwards, actually. Bizarre choice to give the main character a French accent (while the rest were mostly English) yet not know any French. Three art styles mashed together (lovely manga/comic-book-inspired illustrations for the cutscenes and backgrounds, dated low-poly character models during the main point-n-click adventure game, and bizarre super-deformed animation during mini-games). Sometimes humorous writing, but really weak intro and ending. ~8 hours.

Clover: A Curious Tale – I like it a lot. Reminds me of the later and much shorter Android game Quiet, Please! Unfortunately, I got stuck, and, apparently, there are no walkthroughs for this game. I would have thought this game would’ve been more popular… ~3 hours.

Dirty Split – Wow. I love the retro 1960s art. Short but fun game with good voice acting. Free! ~3 hours.

This puts a too-small dent into the backlog I have. Seriously. I think it would take another two months to get through all of the games on my list. Starting December, however, I’ll be ramping up research projects and game design, probably reserving only about 20-30 hours a week for playing instead of 50 or so.

 

Academia, Art, Games, Games Research, Life

And that’s the end of that chapter….

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Yesterday was my last day at UW as a postdoc with the LIFE Center, the Institute for Science and Math Education, and the Center for Game Science.

I’ve decided to pursue a few research projects that I think would best be done while not distracted by a day job.

Namely, I’ll be reviewing an ass-ton of free game making tools, while also playing around with game interface design and some simple game design in the process. I’ve gathered a list of over 2 dozen free tools out there covering all sorts of game genres: adventure games, RPGs, platformers, interactive fiction, etc. My hope is to 1) get back into game design, practice art, try out some ideas, 2) produce a document/series of blog posts that is useful to a k16 educator who wants to incorporate game design into their existing courses (whether that’s English, social studies, math, or whatever) but doesn’t know which tool is appropriate for their needs, and 3) get ready to teach a course on game design in the spring at Pepperdine. What’s great about this teaching gig is that it’s primarily an online course (with face-to-face meetings bookendings), so I can stay in Seattle.

Anyway, I’m also hoping to play a ton of games, as I’ve accrued quite a backlog over the last few years. Look at my Steam profile. Most of those games I haven’t played yet.

First up: the remake/sequel to X-COM, named… XCOM!

Yes, that X-COM. The game that I used to wake up at 5 in the morning some days to play before classes while a senior at Reed College. The game that I used to stay up til the wee hours for. It was the only time in my life when I could be totally fine with 5 hours of sleep per night for weeks. The game that started my love affair with the turn-based squad-based tactics genre (Jagged Alliance capturing my heart in later years). What’s funny is that at the time, I felt like nobody knew what I was talking about when I described these games. I always wondered why the creators of the original X-COM moved onto smallish projects, thinking they were underdogs, not capturing people’s attention. (Anyone remember that email tactics game?) And now, sort of out of the blue, X-COM is getting a massive, big budget remake. Looking forward to it. I hope Julian Gollop is getting props.

Games

Secret World thoughts

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very brief thoughts, which I may or may not fill in later:

  • I wish the main PC had voice over and dialog choices like in SWtOR (or Mass Effect)… or maybe just dialog choices… or maybe just choices that affected dialog and mission results while still staying the silent one.
  • I wish there was follow-up with more NPCs rather than leaving them wondering if you acted upon their information by not returning to them after you report in to your home faction.
  • I wish there were fewer assholes in chat. That’s not unique to TSW though…
  • I wish there were more instances for investigative missions, so we didn’t have to constantly compete with other players who were working on the same puzzle missions. I think a lot of bugs people are reporting are actually because other players are messing up with their solutions midway.
  • I wish chat wasn’t broken. Often the group channel or whispers won’t go through, which is pretty annoying when you’re trying to group with someone.
  • I love the Lovecraft influences in Solomon Island.
  • I like how characters can dynamically adjust their build for more dps, more heals, more hate generation, etc. depending on situation and group composition.
  • And I like how individual abilities aren’t actually more powerful than others, just that you get more of them unlocked as you go, and it’s the combination of them (you pick 7 active and 7 passive abilities; the rest are just idle) that makes for interesting synergies.
  • I love the puzzle missions that have me breaking coded messages, thinking outside the game sometimes, looking stuff up on Wikipedia, reading Poe, brushing up on art history, etc.

Games, Humorous

SimCity Social is surprisingly post humanistic

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Been getting SimCity Social invites in my inbox this week. Tried it this morning. I like how the advisor that helps you is a spinning wheel. So post human.

Also, apparently, it runs on Dunkin Donuts.

Games

The Secret World and TERA

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I tried out the open beta weekend for The Secret World (TSW) last weekend and preordered it. (Join me on the RP server. I’m Mcdanger.) And this week I’ve been playing the 7-day free trial of TERA.

Some things I liked about TSW:

  • less emphasis on leveling. There’s still a progression but much of it is in the abilities that get unlocked and the range of things a player can do rather than a sheer numbers-based power curve.
  • non-linear (tho still tree based) ability unlocks, and later abilities are not necessarily better than earlier abilities. It’s how a player combines and chains them together that matter.
  • emphasis on story. Each NPC is voiced like The Old Republic (TOR). Unlike TOR, it’s not always in a camera-limited dialog event. This is both good and bad. You can leave the NPC mid-sentence, which may be good, but there’s much less animation during their spiels, making you kind of want to leave… The dialog can be hilarious, though, as with two federal agents bantering about popular sci-fi and superhero cliches (eg. Is it a “flight” of super heroes or a “fray” of super heroes?). The fact that it takes place in modern day makes this possible… lots of nods to popular culture.
  • first zone is Lovecraft based. Awesome.
  • players from the three different factions can group up. So I hear… I didn’t group with anyone while I was trying out the game. There’s no open warfare between the factions.
  • monsters sometimes charge up or ready attacks and the game provides an on-ground indicator of where the cone or AoE will land, giving players a chance to dodge out of the way. I like this. It makes the fights more active.

Some things I didn’t like about TSW:

Continue reading The Secret World and TERA →

Academia, Games, Games Research

March 2012 update

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Wow, a lot has happened in a month.

Finished replaying Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords: How Many Subtitles Can We Add. I played TSL with the Restored Content Mod (1.7), and, because of it, the game was amazingly good–better than the first one, even. I played these to remind myself of the references that I’d been seeing in Star Wars: The Old Republic back in Dec/Jan, but since finishing those two games, I haven’t really had much time to hop back into SWtOR.

Instead, I went to the Digital Media and Learning conference, March 1-3 in San Francisco. It was good, but the most progressive and interesting stuff came from panel talks and hallway conversations, imho, not the keynote or plenary sessions. I think this has to do with who I am, as the main events were a lot of proselytizing to teachers and policy makers. While the conference was happening, I started a Google doc to take DML 2012 collaborative notes (like the previous two years and at other conferences I attend). This year, we got some pretty good coverage (thanks to Cathy Tran and Kat Schenke).

Hung out in San Francisco *during* Game Developers Conference, March 5-9, and, as luck would have it, someone gave me their pass on Wednesday since they were leaving early. I totally squandered it and mainly went to the expo, but I did see a really great talk by Rich Lemarchand. The energy at GDC put DML to shame, and surprisingly, the innovative game play and talks that I did go to I felt were better and more substantial than those at DML. Too bad, it costs 17 times more to go to GDC than DML.

Was introduced to Draw Something, the mobile game where you and a friend guess what each other are drawing, kind of like Pictionary. I love how it’s encouraging a lot of people who don’t normally “do art” draw and be creative. It’s pretty much taken over as my idle activity of choice, leaving my twitter feed languishing.

Played Mass Effect 3, March 11-18. (Massive) spoiler warning!!!

 

 

Spoilerz aheadz!

 

 

There’s a bit of controversy over the ending. I thought the ending took away player agency in a way that was dissatisfactory, not letting me make choices that I thought Commander Shepard would make. (The most awesome rewrite of the ending is, by contrast, very satisfactory, and I’ll pretend that’s how it ended.) The synthesis ending is completely bizarrely space magic. And when I think about the whole game, I am a little disappointed that so much of if felt like I was just hitting a button to continue to watch the cutscenes play out. In many cases, there wasn’t really a choice to make, and most of the cutscenes felt like Bioware was just dotting Is and crossing Ts, methodically tying up loose ends from the previous two games.

These activities and events have basically prevented me from attending to my inbox, and it will take me a while to go through everything I marked with a star to check out later.

 

Games

more thoughts about KotOR

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It’s pretty amazing how much I’d forgotten. I remembered the CCG mini-game Pazaak, but I’d forgotten the first Knights of the Old Republic had podracing. For some reason I thought that was part of the sequel. And, man, I gotta say… the podracing line of quests on the first planet, Taris, so that you can win Bastila, the Jedi-turned-slave, is so freakin ridiculous. That sentence is freakin ridiculous. Podracing. Slavegirl. Taris (and rakghouls). All of that.

Plus, during it, the crazy wookiee, Zaalbar, swears a life oath to you because you unlocked a door. And it wasn’t even your character who unlocked it; it was his bff, Mission Vao. But noooo… he sees you like he swallowed some Love Potion #9 and swears to stay by your side forever. That must have been some door.

Zaalbar: Oh, yes, I had a life, full of hopes and dreams, but then that door came along and I fell into deep despair. I was just about to kill myself by repeatedly Ram Manning that door. Then you came along. Then you came along, and I will never leave your side. I hereby swear a life oath to you, having no idea if you’re an upstanding guy or not, knowing NOTHING about you, I swear a life oath to you.

Zaalbar (4 seconds later): Wait a sec, Mission. Where did you come from? Oh, you’re the one who unlocked that door? DAMMIT!!!

Actually, this reminds me about something in SWTOR. During certain cutscenes in the trooper storyline, various NPCs say, “you did it all by yourself!” and you reply “I’m a one-woman army!” all the while… hello? your companion is standing *right* *there*!

Anyway, KotOR. There’s also a man-the-turrets mini-game when you first get on the Millenium Ebon Hawk. Clearly Bioware was taking iconic scenes from the movies and threw them in the game with podracing and the turrets and the fastest ship in the galaxy knock off. No idea where Pazaak came from, but that’s really the only mini-game I like.

So, this game was a great game. It got about 94% on gamerankings. It had a lot of stuff in it that was amazing. Yet I’m encountering stuff I think is crazy ridiculous. Maybe if it didn’t have these inclusions, it would have been closer to 98%. Or maybe back then these things didn’t irk like they do now. Or maybe the main story (despite the Taris beginnings) is just as awesome as I remember. And maybe I’ll actually finish this play through, so I can answer that question!

Games, Games Research

thoughts about Knights of the Old Republic

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Yes, that’s the original Knights of the Old Republic (KotOR), not the new MMO, The Old Republic (SWTOR).

From Games

Some of you may know that KotOR was an influential game in steering me to become a PhD student looking at cooperation collaboration and teamwork in (online) games. Anyway, I decided to reinstall it, throw in some mods, and check it out, now that I’ve played SWTOR for a while. Here’s some really brief notes:

  • Low poly count and textures. The extent of this surprised me. I remembered it being much more detailed, but that was back then… It’s not as bad as playing Deus Ex these days, at least.
  • Sparsely populated, so… no change, really.
  • You can actually talk to everyone and get a line of banter, it seems. There’s even just people who’ll engage in a one-line dialog with you. Nice flavor.
  • I like that it isn’t clear who are quest givers.
  • I love how NPCs appear as recurring characters who you just sort of chance upon at first, like Cordo, the bountyhunter, or Mission Vao. You see them in a scene but then have hardly any interaction with them until later in the game. Lots of foreshadowing or “here’s some info and set-ups, which we won’t tell you when they come together for something bigger or if they’re just flavor.” I like the unpredictable nature of it… uncertain nature of it.