The negative reviews that actual challenge in games earns

Ran into this twice, recently. The first is here. It's a review of the latest adventure time mechanic and it mentions that you can only get back to town after every five levels.

To make matters worse, you can only return to the surface after every five floors, so if you happen to lose all of your health before you reach the next checkpoint, tough luck--you’ll be dumped back above ground without any of the loot you’d accumulated. Worse still, there’s no way to quick-save in the middle of a floor, forcing you to continue playing until you reach the next checkpoint (or die trying).

Tre sigh!

And the next is of a review of might and magic in PC powerplay, where they say that whenever you rest, you use up supplies and can only carry six at a time. This is then described negatively as having to cut short the adventure instead of continue exploring.

It's so incredibly wearying to hear things that provide difficulty as being things which actually reduce the score a game is given. Perhaps unless they dark souls-like cram the 'this is tough!' meme down their throat, it's all exploro land to them?

Okay, caveat - Lord of the Rings, war in the north had checkpoints where if you died you'd lose your previously found gear. Which annoyed me greatly.

The thing is, it didn't announce when the next checkpoint was, unlike the adventure time game, where you can see how many levels you are away from the checkpoint.

Without stating where the checkpoint is, it's not a challenge that you're facing, I'd say. It's just struggling to 'not lose'.

Dragon's Crown (6/6)

There's also a weird power you can get for the dwarf which is eagle dive - the higher levels have you dropping bombs as you glide across the screen after a double jump. The more skill points in it, the more bombs. Not sure where the heck this comes from - it seems like an unholy mix of warhammers dwarven flying steam helicopters and D&D.

Anyway, that's my current look into the game - entering into the hard mode now, still with the dwarf. Haven't played the other characters much yet still enjoying it just on the one character...but then again, maybe the wizard needs to step boldly into the dungeons, yet again...

Dragon's Crown (5/6)

Not sure about the toughen up power. You have to stand there for a period to do it. I presume it's like the wizard having to recharge - except they coded it that if you hold down the recharge button after using it for another attack, the wizard will start recharging, while the dwarf ignores the button if it was also held down during another attack. Which is annoying.

Also it's duration - I really have no idea. The visual indicator is so subtle it's really impossible to tell amongst the leaping and flying bodies and beatings when it ran out. Still, it's something you can do to prep before a battle and if you are doing really well, do so inside a battle as well!

Dragon's Crown (4/6)

And the wrestle mania!? The dwarf does a lot of crowd control (compared to the archer, who seems more attuned to boss killing). Grabbing enemies above his head - if you jump he takes them with him and you can throw them down. Buy into a skill for that and they create a blast radius when they hit, no matter if it's a great big lizard or a tiny fungi guy, boom - damage all the other enemies. If you can get into a sequence of making half the screen get slammed by a falling body then go to the other half, grab somebody who was just getting up from the last slam you did and knock them all down again, you can just make the screen shake with thrown bodies! A rare few enemies can't be picked up, but they are pretty rare - even in hard mode, it seems. Though it is annoying when the old grab 'em and throw em reflex kicks in but they stay resolutely on the ground!

Dragon's Crown (3/6)

The funny thing is is how much of Dragons Crown captures D&D style tropes - yet it utterly ignores one of them completely. It even has you drag along a thief to open doors and chests (instead of the main characters kicking them open - but it is fun to have a comedy relief character (whom you can trick into walking into geysers of fire!)).

But there are no clerics! Where are the clerics!?

Well, probably because it doesn't really work so well as a brawler. Sure, you work together, but you independent characters working together, not dudes who cannot do anything unless a cleric is patting you on the back through the whole thing. Which is probably fairly like D&D in a way, as you could go in sans cleric. Though mostly you didn't. So DC slips in on the edge case, with that one!

Dragon's Crown - Who let the Dwarves out? (1/6)

* I've played the side scrolling brawler 'Dragons Crown' a fair bit, recently. Decided upon the Dwarf mostly, though I dabbled in the arts of wizardry for brief while (which was good but whoa, you get weak when your mana runs out and you can't get the few seconds you need to recover it!). Called him Braddock - I was playing AD&D a little while back with a dwarf called Murock, so I don't know if that was a call back to him. It's funny sometimes when you take a table top character you didn't get to play out fully into a CRPG! Anyway, it's a great game in many respects. It gives you points if you don't die at all during a stage, but on the other hand if you use up your lives, you can spend gold to recover and to me the amount wasn't that much per revive. So you both strive to do well, but at the same time you can just push through with accumulated points if the going gets tough (and that boss really does just need to be killed! Stupid 'Gazer', I'm looking at you, you Beholder with the serial numbers filed off!!). The magic gate in the game becomes randomised after awhile, while unlocking the stable - so you can choose to go to a random stage for free, or pay to go to a specific one. And after doing a stage, you can press on to another random stage. And you can buy more bags to hold more supplies for these extra long excursions! It's actually a very nifty design, meaning you don't just need to find one good weapon, but instead it's beneficial to find several, to put in other bags, because doing several dungeons in a row gets higher gains, cumulatively.

More about it in the following five parts on Dragon Crown!

Dark Souls - Moonlight Butterfly

Not even sure why I took this on - I guess you peek through the grey mist for curiosity. Then for revenge, after being killed!

Ended up upgrading my crossbow to max, buying 100 heavy crossbow bolts and kindling the nearest bonfire so as to have ten flasks (I had some miracle healing, but it's kind of slow, the flasks are the fastest). If you have a couple of points of humanity, probably better to spend two of them to kindle the bonfire above the blacksmith (the one who just keeps hammering - shuddup!) rather than die to the butterfly, then possibly lose them to a slip up trying to get back to it.

Also I upgraded my shield a bit as well. Though the butterfly will tempt you to fire one to many times (probably because it wobbles up a little bit and your shot sails past it) and your guy seems to think he's in a happier, huggier game and when you hold down the shield button, he should just keep reloading his crossbow and thus take various spike blasts the butterfly pumps out on a regular basis.

Regardless in the end I recommend just shooting early and shooting often (from the far end of the walk way though, to let the spikes dissipate a bit). Some of that insects attacks just seem unavoidable - when I did kill it, it was from shooting it. Shooting it lots and lots. Till it died. Didn't let it get to that stage. Still, seems a chancy way to kill it - there's probably a more elegant method. On the other hand it worked!

Not sure if the thing at the top of the castle further on is always dead, or dead cause I let some guy out of a cage awhile ago. Curious.

* Good luck * * Praise the sun! * * Try rolling! *

Dynasty Warriors: Gundam

Strange game this - on normal difficulty, the enemies sort of stand around not doing much of much. In their defence, soldiers on your own side don't do much of much either. I think it'd be better if they fired alot of bullets at you which are easy to dodge and which only damage a regenerating bar, so you can shrug them off - then they'd appear to be trying to be threats (but you are just that tough) rather than kinda standing around doing nothing. Perhaps they fixed this in the latter Gundam games?

And then you get to the fourth mission of a character and fail over and over again, after about twenty minutes of play. Eventually I took up the two player option, still failed the once but then beat it! Nice to bring in a ringer!

It does have that 'well, I beat you, but I want to one shot you - and your friend, and your friends friend!' to it, as you can level up pilot and Gundam.

I got it for around $20, so it's engaging for that price.

The 'Evil' option in games

What exactly is 'evil' supposed to be in a video game?

There's like this notion that it can just be a seperate 'evil' option that somehow differs from the other options.

But what does it come down to - inefficient actions?

Unless were talking about stupid 'evil', then it isn't inefficient.

In fact 'evil' could be running a research facility that finds cures for various cancers.

What would show up as 'evil' is when the individual shuts down the research, even though it was on the edge of a breakthrough, because even with the breakthrough it wasn't going to make the bottom line.

Except in games made today, the way they are made will mean if it fails the bottom line for the player character, then it fails the bottom line for the player. To not shut down the facility is playing the game stupidly.

The exact parralel between player character and player means 'evil' isn't, as doing anything else is playing the game stupidly.

Which essentially means the game designers would condone it - and they avoid that like the plague, so the games have you only on the up and up.

Then someone wants an 'evil option', so they put in kicking puppies. Because the designers don't want to incriminate themselves (incriminate in the sense of condoning bad things to any degree - I'm not getting legal).

Ala what was often discussed at the now closed forge, it could all do with less exact parralel between player character position and player position. So the player could be winning/gaining points by getting his character into a position where the cancer research is becoming unprofitable.

The plausible escape: Are reloads jarring?

What'd be nice is if more games didn't rely on the reload button for death.

Far cry 2 (despite its flaws) did this really neatly where you had a buddy and if you went down, you had these great black out scenes of him carrying you and shooting enemies. It'd black in and out, making you want to see how bad things were each time (and also skipping some time in between to save you waiting as long, I suspect). After they saved you, they then had to get away themselves (they could get shot doing this) and to 'recharge' their save you had to go meet them in a safehouse.

This is just so much better than hitting reload!

To a small degree lord of the rings online does this as well, in that once an hour you can recover from being downed, so you never leave (ie, jarringly teleport to a recovery circle) where you got hurt.

A way of being beaten in the game, but without the completely story flow jarring effect of a reload.

Or; that's a question - are reloads and their effect on continuity potentially making games less fun for you?

FPS idea where you don't die every minute

I think maybe there's a moral in multiplayer first person shooters - I mean, you tend to get wasted time and time again. Kind of pounds in the idea that you'd just die if you went into a real life gun battle. And in real life, you tend not to respawn (if the games are somehow giving people the impression they respawn after death, well, that's surprising...)

So possibly my idea is more violent for there being less death.

The idea is that you have some sort of beat down status, instead of dying. Your character goes into a sort of defensive mode - you can't shoot, only try and get away. In the levels, there are escape hatches, which only people in beatdown status can use. You get to one, you crawl in and you see your character run down a series of escape tunnels, grab some supplies to replenish themselves, then exit from another escape tunnel point. Effectively much the same as respawning, but you have a solid narrative link from one event to the other.

It is possible to get killed whilst trying to get to an escape hatch, you only have X amount of life left. Getting killed lowers your beatdown score. So you want to develop a strategy with where they are, in case you get beat down. Or maybe your good enough you wont need it...hehe. Sure!

Getting killed can only lower your score, say, three times. And only after you've made two beat downs. So if you've only beaten down one member of the other side, you don't loose that (to give newer players some sense of accomplishment, rather than losing their very first three points of beatdown score). But if you beat down two then being killed loses that second beatdown score.

I think it'd be interesting to play in a combat where the core of the combat isn't...so freankin' rediculous, ie, coming back to life just out of thin air? Ahh, that's stupid!

Some sort of play where self preservation is actually part of play, instead of a stupid macho fantasy of going in guns blazing, neva gunna miss a shot. A fantasy that can only be supported by a rediculous respawn mechanic, showing just how stupid dumb ass that macho fantasy is!

Challenge doesn't need a penalty? What if it's for exploration of an aesthetic?

Ready, Set, Crow!

I read an interview in the Australian game magazine 'Game Informer' on bioshock infinite with Ken Levine, Irrational president (I love how that title comes out) and Irrational creative director (love that one too!).

The question

In Bioshock, vita-chambers essentially made death inconsequential. Is that mechanic changing in Bioshock infinite?

The responce

My feeling about the vita-chambers was this: I think they set a certain tone for the game in twerms of how it felt and the progression. It was not a game about dying and restarting. It was a game about experiencing the feeling of being in Rapture. Certainly there are arguments to be made about whether there was enough disincentive to get killed.

I think that's a reasonably legitimate concern. I would say that it's unlikely we'll have the exact same approach we use in Bioshock 1 as it shipped - without any option to turn it off or any penalty.

Notice the penalty.

Now the first thing I thought was that they were reconsidering supporting gamist play to win/play against something that, through penalties, might be too tough for you to complete (not everyone can climb everest).

But then I realised I was projecting my ideals into it. No, why he's considering a penalty for 'death' is to further the experience of being in the setting he's making. The penalty, atleast to his mind, is possibly necessary to the aesthetic of the experience. Here's a post of someone trying to weve a mechanic into the aesthetic of a game, as an example.

Now the funny thing is if he's considering it because of fans who actually carry my idea - a hard game. Where a penalty is the thing that might stop you getting to the end. Like, alot of people might be able to climb a cliff - it's when you put several in a row (like everest) that it becomes an even bigger thing. Anyway, that's a real crossed wire - if he's into some sort of 'experience the aesthetic' but the fans here are into a hard game - they just want two different activities. Each of which just gets in the way of the other - and even if you compromise, your just doing one or the other activity to a lessened extent, in a sort of nerd fallacy attempt to include everyone.

But the main point was : Penalties - part of the explorers experience, perhaps?

Defeat 'penalties'. The bigger picture.

I wrote this on someone elses blog and thought I'd put it here. Though google bots will hate me for 'duping'.

Now, basically if you see it as a penalty, your (selectively) losing sight of the bigger picture and missnaming everything. Imagine you have a game of snakes and ladders that lasts for 600 hours. Is going down a snake a penalty? No, it's part of play.

Now you could even take out all the snakes and have either a few squares of advancement, or jumps up a ladder. Would not going up a ladder be a penalty? No, it's just part of play.

Well stick with having snakes for now because it's clearer.

Okay, what's happening is your looking at the short term picture and inventing a game there - your thinking 'Hey, I'll shoot for that ladder - hope I can make it! That's the challenge, to get to that ladder!'. Then you hit a snake instead and go 'Aww, what's the point of this snake! You don't need snakes/penalties to have the challenge of getting that ladder!

Your problem is, your focusing on the small picture, and when you do, the snakes become penalties instead of just normal gameplay elements.

Even if you removed the snakes, you'd probably treat not hitting a ladder as a penalty. After all, in wow death means earning less in one hour and you already see earning less as a penalty.

You think you can have challenge without penalty. It's only because you cherry pick, seeing the bigger picture when it's a ladder, but when it's a snake you only see a smaller picture and go 'what's the point?'.

Think about it, do you say '1000 gold? What's the point? - it could just say I win! I don't need to earn 1000 gold for it to be a challenge!'. Do you? No, I see no rants on that! On complaints about the apparent 'penalty'. You only say 'I don't need a penalty for it to be a challenge'. You never say 'I don't need a reward for it to be a challenge'!

Inside, you like winning in terms of the big picture, but when you lose in terms of the bigger picture, you game ambiguity, look only at the short term and call it unnecessary 'penalty'. Equally the 1000 gold is unnecessary 'reward' if your really only interersted in the short term challenge, but you don't complain about that, do you?

Neither is reward or penalty. Just ladder and snake on your way to the end. And yes, unless you buy the hype the game is endless, there is an end as much as Die Hard had an end, despite Die Hard 2.

Was that even an ad? Or zeal for the emperor?

I have to say this zelot take on this video is different. It's like their not even trying to sell you a game! They are just so damn focused on the empire retaking a certain sector, it's like them just getting pumped about it, rather than trying to assure you it'll be fun.

It's an interesting take - certainly someone that focused on the fiction of their gameworld is atleast interesting to watch exactly how they'll get hyped next!

Subscription Model Idea

I thought of this when I first head of games selling lifetime subscriptions for over a hundred.

I'm assuming they take most of the lifetime sub money and bank it, drawing on interest from it to pay for the player.

So what if you took that to the traditional subscription model?

You pay a subscription as usual per month, but part of it is taken and banked. Once you have paid for a certain amount of time, the game becomes free to you!

'Cept for expansions and stupid mini pets/the usual gouges.

The ironic thing is I think anyone reading this might start comparing that they'd be paying several hundred dollars for a game when other single player games come out at around a hundred or less. So it might not seem like good value if someone presented to you that you can buy the mmorpg lifetime by subscribing for several hundred dollars. But yeah, your already doing that with wow or whatever, anyway.

That's another post I was gunna write - With people who play wow, if you take how much they've paid in subscription then go back in time to just before they started playing, and told them they have to pay all those subs upfront in order to play, would they pay it? Like say they've been playing for two years - before they started playing, if the game asked for them to pay $360 upfront or they can't play, would they have paid it?

I bet the honest answer is no.

Some target numbers for mmorpgs would be nifty

I was playing runes of magic the other day and I realised that in play, I'd simply be made quite alot happier if there was some sort of rating system for beating monsters - like killing them in X number of seconds. And your character would get to a new zone, and be lower level and lower kit, but you'd see your number improve and get closer to the number then finally beat it!

A bot from global agenda, simply because it looks cool!

Yeah, sure, it's still basically accumulating numbers to beat it. But it'd be more interesting than accumulating numbers and just going 'more is gud!'. Atleast it's hitting a goal here.

Also I hate bloggers labels box - I wish it showed the more commonly used ones, like wordpress does! I can't find the important ones at all easily!

New Game! Bullet Prose: Have No Part

Some bullet hell plus some prose: Bullet Prose

I made another quickie game! Dodge the bullet hell, try and read the strange quotes of a real life public domain book! Hear the strange music! Try and beat my retry score of 12 for the whole game!
Play it here!
http://gamejolt.com/freeware/games/other/bullet-prose-have-no-part/1741/
Or even just check out the page, since it grants me some ad revenue (thank you!)

Excerpts taken from the interesting public domain title:
War Birds: Diary of an Unknown Aviator
http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks07/0701101.txt

This is a short development time game.
Made in about thirty minutes, using a preexisting engine that itself was made in about an hour.

I was looking at this post on RPG net...

As I understand it, Insanity isn't actually balanced with the game's challenge model in mind - it simply cranks all the numbers way, way up in order to cater to the masochists, regardless of whether doing so breaks anything.

 The short, clipped responce RPG netters don't want to hear (so I'm posting it here)? If someone can finish the game, it's not broken. It's just that your not good enough to do it.

Caveat: If you have to load and save every five seconds, that makes it sucky gameplay IMO. But it's not broken.

Playability

Awhile ago on 'play this thing' I said I put the program 'everyday the same dream'  in the same pidgeon hole as 'the graveyard', in that there is no gameplay. No playability.

Recently I've been on the recieving end of much the same claim myself for my game 'invaders from space', so it's interesting to be in this position. Check out the comments section. The guys saying because it 'has no sense of menance' and 'no sense of journey' it's not playable.

Now the thing is, I consider playability to be that the outcome of play is uncertain. You have to play it to find out. If the outcome is certain even before you start 'playing' then it isn't playing at all.

I also include, not surprisingly, games like playing catch in the backyard as having playability and is a game. You may fumble and drop the ball.

So it's interesting to be in between these two assertions of unplayability. Invaders from space does have play - I lost at it during beta tests - the ending, as in whether you'll win, is uncertain. It used to only give one life, making it more uncertain, but someone suggested adding more lives so I did. While everyday the same dream - there is no uncertainty to the outcome - or atleast as far as I could tell. There seemed so little uncertainty I didn't play it all the way through. So someone might be able to blow me out of the water on this. But in terms of this blog entry, there was no uncertainty. Thus no play. Thus not a game.

But then I'm being told that games, for some reason, need a sense of journey and menace to have playability??? No, a game needs a sense of journey and menance in order to have a sense of journey and menace.

Now, I don't think my own standard for playability is just something I made up in my head - I'm sure catch has been played for thousands, perhaps millions of years by humans.

Having to have a sense of journey and menace? No, this is just made up shit.

Which I don't mind, except when someone takes the shit they made up in their head but doesn't take responsibility for it. They just pretend their invented shit IS the way the world works. Which still isn't so bad EXCEPT when they act upon it. In this case downrating. Because while they'll whine that the game has to have journey and menace, really they are saying 'do as I tell you - put in journey and menace'. But there's disconnect where they pretend to themselves they didn't invent the idea it has to have that - thus they can pretend to themselves they aren't telling you what to do or they will downrate/punish you.

But it's interesting to be in the middle, to claim non playability and to hear it too. I will say, every day the same dream would make an excellent music video that I would watch. Indeed, it basically was a music video.

Review quickie - Borderlands

A quick review! Borderlands manages to mix the short term, instant gratification of a first person shooter (ie, the fun of shooting big guns at people alot!) and the long term pursuit of greater power through money and levels/experience.

So your continually playing it at two levels. Sure, you might be side stepping and shooting a skag real good with your gat, but your also thinking about how good it would have been and how good it will be when you auto gun turrent power had killed it. While healing you. And making you fresh ammo.

More information below



Essentially they grant you some awesome FPS fun, and have made a leveling system that hands out more awesome FPS fun over time that you actually want. I've played alot of games which give you powers and...while they may be nifty, it doesn't feel like you needed them. It just feels like its for show. While with this game what it hands out, you feel you have a good use in mind for it (and it's cool fireworks to boot!).

And spitscreen on console play is great - was really looking for something else split screen, since weve played time splitters and army of two a million times.

However, on the flip side, you get a thin smear of a game world. Not that I think that's important to develop further, but I think this game was modeled somewhat on fallout. And that sense of a rich world...is kind of muted. It's not absent, it's just doesn't have the centre stage.

And a couple of little things that bug me is that the game insists, when you find a more damaging weapon, to switch your current gun for it. There seems to be no way to turn this off, and it doesn't work out that this is a better gun in terms of the job. And the loading screen shows a cool picture - then snaps it in two and seperates them...then shows it again and repeats, over and over. That's just painful! Clearly not huge issues, but worth noting incase somehow in some magical way that helps it get cleared up next time.

I really recommend buying this game. Like some books are a bit of a classic (not absolute classics, just a bit), this game is a classic. Like a book can capture a certain spirit, this game has captured it's own particular spirit. That and go shoot shoot now now!!!1!!!