Dancing Tentacles
I might not look it, but I’m pretty good at Dance Dance Revolution. I know this might seem unlikely, especially for those of you who have seen me. I’m 6’3”, 280 pounds, and as gangly and uncoordinated as they come. I very much think my parents rolled a 4 or 5 for my DEX score. My life is a game of pinball, where I am the ball. When I was 6, my mom was walking me to school, and I somehow managed to fall off a curb and embed my teeth (and several ounces of gravel) into my lower lip while holding her hand. I was not built for physical activity.
Despite this, I have somehow managed to survive 20 years of karate training. I have no illusions that I have somehow become more coordinated as a result of this; to wit, my sparring partners facing me described as “an angry jungle made of arms and legs” or (as my BFF/dojo-mate Dante from Stupid Ranger puts it so eloquently) “like fighting a giant bag that contains kittens, hundreds of elbows, and also some musk”. I’ve also been told I am very fast for someone my size. This is great, at best. The other 99% of the time it just means I have hurled myself and my tentacles at my opponent at terrifying speed and nobody knows what is about to happen.
My first exposure to dance-genre gaming was a PSX title called Bust A Groove. Well, I thought it was, anyway. Bust A Groove was played with a controller just like everything else. Dance Dance Revolution is not – it is usually played on a dance pad, where you step on arrows in time to the music. When I first played DDR, I just thought it was some variant of Bust A Groove, so I tried it with a controller (the arrows are mapped to the D-pad) and I was astounded at how quickly I became overwhelmed as soon as I ventured beyond easy. I became far more overwhelmed once somebody brought over a dance pad. Everyone who tried it was reduced to giggles as they proceeded to make a fool of themselves and we all would quit after awhile after getting frustrated.
I really don’t know why my roommate Ryan and I kept playing as long as we did. At first, we’d go to our friend’s dorm room who had the dance pads to play every day. It wasn’t too long before we were at the arcade a couple times a week, dropping $10 on the arcade machine and its FAR superior dance surface (the plastic dance mats are not even remotely capable of handling someone of my mass – I have destroyed a good half-dozen of them). It became a ritual, and we kept at it for months. Soon, we started playing progressively more difficult songs, eventually working ourselves up to 8 or 9 foot (very hard) songs. I’ll never forget the day we finished a song and noticed we had drawn a crowd of 12 year old girls who then clapped and cheered. I almost wept. With joy.
It’s important to note at this point that when I play DDR, just like everything else I do, a flailing mass of arms and legs somehow makes it happen. It is not a pretty sight. Additionally, a peculiar thing happens to me when I start getting too tired playing DDR – my core muscles loosen and my top and bottom half become independent of each other. Then, two things happen. First, my arms retract until I am holding them as a T-Rex might. Second, my dancing begins to resemble that of a drunken pirate. The “Pirate Dance”, as it became known, is basically my DDR equivalent to Ultraman’s chest-light beginning to flash. I only had a few more songs left before my superpowers fade (and I risk crashing headfirst through the screen).
With the amount of money I was dropping at the arcade every week, I decided it made financial sense to pick up a Cobalt Flux pad. Made of metal and fiberglass and not quite as sturdy as an arcade machine, but about $4,000 cheaper, these could withstand my might. Still, they weren’t cheap at about $300. As it happened, I found a friend willing to sell me one for a bit less, and for a few days it was DDR paradise at my apartment. Then a funny thing happened.
We stopped playing DDR. Almost entirely.
To this day, I have no idea why we stopped. Several years, a marriage, and a house later, my wife and I decided it might be fun to work out to DDR together, so I bought another Cobalt Flux pad. I still have both of them. After another week of DDR paradise, they’ve been used exactly once, at a party I threw when (after what I believe may have been some sort of intoxicating beverage) I showed everyone that yes, I can in fact play Double Mode. I have no clue what to do with them. (Best plan so far: pressing leaves and flowers beneath them. You know, for all my crafts.) I’m sure many of you out there have made similar purchases, fitness-related or otherwise, and had your spouse huff and ask if you are buying “another thing that’s just going to take up space”. Sadly, my wife is right to huff and ask this, as the DDR pads were not the last such paperweights to grace my home. Two years ago, it was Wii Fit. I used it for about a month. It got boring, and then it got shelved.
Now, I pin my hopes on a new device: Microsoft’s Kinect. I have to admit, it was a little weird to have my first thought upon hearing about the Kinect be “wow, fitness games without a controller”. (I do feel slightly redeemed though, as my second thought was “LIGHTSABER GAME PLZ KTHX”). I just got a Kinect yesterday, and for the moment I have resisted the urge to buy a fitness game (per se). What I did get was a game called Dance Central. I wasn’t expecting this game to be like DDR, but I was not even remotely prepared for how different a dance game is when you’re required to do more than make sure your feet are in the right place at the right time. DDR could make me work up a sweat. Dance Central, at least right now, is making stuff hurt that I wasn’t aware of. As I am currently trying to get back into shape, I find this to be a very good thing. It has a “workout mode” where it estimates how many calories you’ve burned, but I find it a little depressing when a song puts me through the wringer and I am informed that I have burned 30 calories and I can now eat an entire grape guilt-free. Right now, the game has piqued my interest in much the same way as Guitar Hero/Rock Band did a couple years ago, and that meant a solid year of obsession and practice. If that happens here, I stand to experience far more cardiovascular exercise than the treadmill/coatrack we bought last year will ever yield.
And yes, I look like a complete doofus playing Dance Central, too. If I wind up starting a dance crew as a result of all this, I’m going to call it “8-bit Tentaclez”.
Fable 3 Half-Review Part 2 – Freedom: The Final Betrayal
Last Time, On Albion Hills 90210
Those of you who were reading my column last week (and for some reason decided to come back for more) may remember me venting a wee bit of rage at Lionhead Studios and their new game, Fable 3. Some of you thought I was perhaps being a bit harsh. The expressions system that I so vocally excoriated was not, in fact, necessary to complete the game. I can concede this point. I still think it is intensely stupid, but I could probably have skipped the majority of it. Believe it or not, I actually do like it when our readers keep me honest. (Sometimes, I consider it a challenge, but that is beside the point.)
With a newfound sense of peace given to me by our faithful readers, I once again immersed myself in the world of Albion. In both previous Fable games, you could buy property. When I was playing Fable 2, I found it interesting that the rent and/or business profits you collected would accumulate over time, even if you were not playing. You got paid every 5 minutes (or a lump sum when you loaded the game again). I decided to see if this same thing worked in Fable 3, so I bought up a bunch of property. It did not, which was a little disappointing. But it was getting me enough profits that I decided to do it a lot. It beat playing Lute Hero or the other “job” mini-games. Those would have been fun, but the interface would stutter or skip frames (which is, in my opinion, the kiss of death on timing-based games) so I hated playing them. So I went around questing and completing more of the story and buying up properly and having myself a very nice time for a night. My rage died down. Perhaps this game would have a happy ending after all.
Suffice it to say, the opposite of that happened. Actually, there will be no sufficing. Those of you in the first five rows will find a tarp located under your seats. You might want to hold that up so your clothes don’t get messy.
The Glorious Reign Of King Vanir
Soon, it was time to take back the crown from my rampaging dire butthole of a brother. He apparently only had the budget for like 12 guards, which I promptly set on fire. Then I was king! Hooray! I decided to be a very nice king, and to undo all of the horrible things my brother did, and make wise financial choices and make the kingdom prosper. LONG LIVE ME!
Oh, wait. It seems that there’s some Giant Evil coming to kill us in a year, and the reason my brother was being a jerk is because he was trying to raise money for an army to stop it. Yes, I’m sure that’s why you killed my girlfriend because I was insubordinate in the beginning. Jerk. And apparently, there are 6.5 million citizens in Albion, and it just so happens that I need 6,500,000 gold to raise a sufficiently large army to stop the Giant Evil. How tidy. OK, that’s cool. Oh, wait. It seems we start 750,000 gold in the red. Well, I’ll just set smart financial policies, and we’ll fix this right up. So I go into the throne room and prepare to be Excellent to All My Subjects.
Oh, wait. It seems all of my choices revolve around living up to a promise I made to someone else earlier, which always involves me blowing a crapton of gold OR letting the sexually deviant industrialist that tried to kill me earlier in the game at his weird orgy do something tremendously horrible but profitable. (As an aside, whose sexual fetish is balverines? Don’t answer that.) Your choices are things like “let the mountain people hunt again and restore their lands” which costs 200,000 gold for some unknown reason, or let Thrusty McProfitable strip mine the entire thing and use the resulting crater as a high-priced water park to get you a million back. There’s never any boring or sensible choices to be made. You can either A. do the bad thing and you get money so your people will live at the end of the game, or B. do anything else and lose a ton of money and have someone constantly remind you that your people will be happy and very dead at the end of the year. Fantastic. I get it, it’s the “heavy is the head that wears the crown” narrative, and you’re forcing me rather heavy-handedly (crowndedly?) into it.
If I was playing D&D right now, this would be where I’m getting creative. I’m the King, dammit! I get to decide how these things work. So you say either I have to pay 50,000 gold to open a school or earn 1,500,000 gold by opening a brothel on the same property? I say it’s a school during the day and a brothel when the kids go home. You live in an industrialized society. It’s called hide-a-beds, people. And the ladies of the evening could help grade papers in their off-time. Everybody wins! What’s that? We don’t have a way to deal with the sewage problem? We don’t have to ruin the marshlands by diverting everything there. That is a silly idea. There’s a Giant Evil coming. Who needs an army? We’re going all B.A. Barracus on them, and making POOP CANNONS. Don’t f*#k with me, Giant Evil. I’ll cut you.
Better Living Through Real Estate?
Wait! I have a plan! A real, sensible plan! A plan that lets me escape from your stupid narrative! You can contribute gold from your personal funds into the royal treasury – and, as it happens, I have been buying up all the property I can get my Heroic hands on. Since I get paid every 5 minutes, I should surely have enough money by the time a whole year passes. Right?
Well, the first thing I learned about being the King of Albion is that 30 days passes in the blink of an eye once you make your rulings for the day. And apparently, I need to fire the Royal Real Estate Lawyer because he completely missed the clause that lets all my tenants go rent-free when I black out for a month. OK, that is infuriatingly stupid, but I can still win this thing. It’s become clear to me at this point that Real Time and Time Before The Giant Evil Kills Anybody are two separate things, and my personal coffers are filling up nicely, so I decide to buy everything in sight and jack up the rent just a little bit (with the full intention of making it ridiculously low after, you know, we’re not all going to die). And it’s working great. I’m questing, I’m raising my skills, I’m occasionally making some rulings and letting a month go by, and the money keeps rolling in. Before I know it, I’ve got 2 million gold, and another 2.5 million in real estate I can sell. It wouldn’t be long now. I would beat this stupid game at its stupid game. I’ve got almost 90 days left, and the clock on my living room wall read about midnight, so I decided to make one more set of rulings before I went to bed.
It was the worst decision I could have possibly made. Aside from, you know, purchasing Fable 3.
The Facepalm Of The Gods
At this point, I wish I had heeded the advice of my readers, as one of them warned me of something very important. I ignored his comment after reading the first few words, not wanting to ruin the experience. What a horrible idea.
Turns out when you make a ruling, it’s not always a month that passes. Actually, there’s no consistent amount of time that passes. In this particular case, with 90 days left, I had just made the very last set of rulings before the Giant Evil shows up. Guess what? I wake up, it’s suddenly the one-year anniversary of my taking the throne, I’ve got a crapton of gold sitting in my personal treasure room that hasn’t been used for buying an army, and everyone in Albion is dead. Better yet: the game thoughtfully autosaved for me after I made my rulings, so there was no going back. A week of gameplay, wasted. Hours of careful planning and managing real estate, wasted. Remember Fable 2? When you were going to go to a critical part in the story, and it puts up a message that says in big bold letters “HEY THERE IS NO GOING BACK AFTER THIS! ARE YOU SURE? NO, SERIOUSLY.ARE YOU SURE?” Did that not test well with the focus groups this time around? Maybe they did tell me, but it was through expressions? I knew I should have paid attention to that copiously-farting businessman back in Bowerstone Market!
So, after the whole total annihilation of millions of people bit, me and the four guys I was hiding in the castle with went to go fight the Giant Evil, handily gave it a good thrashing, and took its Evil Lunch Money. I kind of wish we’d done that, you know, before it killed everybody. You know. Advanced battle tactics and all. Anyway, I rush back to the castle to find my wife. She is waiting there in the Royal Bedroom, as she always is, to greet me. Somehow her “approval rating” meter is well into “Happy”, but clearly something is amiss because she decides to divorce me right there on the spot. That’s right, everyone. If you accidentally get everyone in the kingdom killed through no fault of your own, your wife is programmed to automatically divorce you. A final twist of the knife. I loved you, Freedom the Eco Warrior. Even if you never bathed.
The Final Analysis
This is why, dear reader, I am compelled to give Fable 3 the worst review any game has ever received.
I genuinely believe Fable 3 to be a threat to our very way of life. If you give this to your children for Christmas, you should be thrown in prison. If you buy this game for your significant other, you should probably start hunting for an apartment now. If you bought this game for yourself, do not remove the shrink wrap from the game box, lest some of it gets on you and causes you lifelong depression and anger management issues, and that is IF you do not suffer an explosive aneurism that levels everything in a 2 mile radius. I will never be the same. I am a broken man. My pants will never be the same, and neither will what used to be my guest bedroom. I will approach every game I play, every experience in life, every breath I take with the fear that it will be as bad as Fable 3. There are proven links to the spread of Restless Leg Syndrome across the world and the development of Fable 3. The Black Plague that ravaged Europe in the 1300′s was actually caused by Fable 3 sucking so badly that it travelled backwards in time, where a bunch of rats played it. All of these things are 100% true and backed by SCIENCE.
Don’t do it. Don’t hurt yourselves or the ones you love. Don’t play Fable 3. Really, don’t do it.
Also, it will make you mad because stupid things happen in a lot of very critical parts of the game. I don’t recommend it. But mostly, never play Fable 3.
Photo credit. Please do not blame the photographer for this awful game.
Fable 3 Half-Review: It Is A Giant Waste Of Time
Expressions
I enjoyed the original Fable. The whole “people react to you differently if you’re a butthole to them” thing had been explored in other games, but it was still relatively fresh at the time. What set Fable apart was that in games like Knights of The Old Republic, you made choices in the story or took quests that affected your goodness/badness rating and everybody treated you accordingly. You could do this in Fable, but you could also interact with random villagers and affect their individual opinions of you. If they loved you, they would give you discounts or you could marry them and have sex with them. However, since you were always dealing with characters unimportant to the story, the game still treated them as such, and you interacted with them the same way you’d interact with any other non-important character – “expressions”. These were simple actions you could do to be good or bad to someone. You could dance or “hero pose” and make people love you, or act like a jerk and fart all over them and they’d hate you. When a member of the opposite sex loved you enough, an option to marry them would open up. When you were married, an option to have sex would open up. All the while, they would say weird, repetitive pithy sayings and your character’s voice would mumble. It was a little weird, but charming enough, and it didn’t really get in the way of all the epic awesome in the rest of the game.
Fable 2 was released a couple years later, and the world had been expanded and everything got redesigned, and the amount of interaction you could do with the townspeople increased somewhat in that you got more silly expressions to play with. It was still pointless, and had sort of a childlike charm to it. Oh, except now you were equipped with some kind of magic Hero gaydar that could tell you if someone was straight, gay, lesbian, or bisexual, and you could have premarital sex with whatever gender and/or orientation you wanted. Oh, and there was an achievement for having group sex. Wait, what? And you could have children. And they grew up insanely fast. And I’m not quite sure what happens to them if you divorce your spouse. You had a little approval rating meter that would appear and show you what everyone you talked to thought of you, which I wish I had in real life, and it was a lot easier to tell if someone was indifferent, friendly, really friendly, or like, OMG SUPERFRIENDLY. If you improved your relationship with a person sufficiently, the game made no bones about telling you that you have formed a Deep Personal Bond and they are now your BFF.
I laughed the first time I saw that message. I am no longer laughing.
Mindless Betrayal
I bought Fable 3 earlier this week, having been happy with its predecessors. They sucked me right into the story and made me HATE the evil king, who they basically tell you is destined to be overthrown by your hand in every advertisement for the game ever made. They filled the world with pain and suffering and character and they have me absolutely rabid to free Albion and to ease the suffering of its people. To do this, you have to first gain the support of the people.
One of the first quests you get is to shake hands with 20 people, which is done via an expression. These have been greatly simplified, and the computer randomly chooses a good and bad one for you and you just push a button. I was getting pretty damned tired of shaking hands by the end of that, but I was OK with getting through it to get to more of the saving and alleviating and regime-changing and eradicating the practice of child labor. CHILD LABOR. God, I was having FITS. Of JUSTICE. And then I play a little more and it isn’t too long before I’m informed that I have to collect a bunch of these little “guild seals”, which are kind of like XP. And I have to get them by making all the townspeople everywhere like me. Which I can only do by performing a bunch of mindless expressions.
In case you’re wondering why my hair is three times its normal height and glowing yellow and my power level is OVER NINE THOUSAND! right now, allow me to put this into perspective.
I’m viewing a cutscene where an evil industrialist boss is shooting a protester and threatening all his workers and their families with death if they protest, speak, or take over a three second break. I hate that son of a bitch with all of my being. I want to shoot him in the face, but he leaves before I can. I am emotionally invested all the way up to my eyeballs. Then, in order for the resistance fighters to take me seriously, I have to dance with 50 townspeople and do the “flying” lift at the end of Dirty Dancing with all of them. Men and women, nobles and working class, most of which who don’t know me. There are a couple of alternatives. I can play Pat-A-Cake with them, or I can tickle them, all the while making noises that if I used them on my two year old would smack me and tell me to stop treating him like such a baby. Also, anytime I make friends with someone, I have to go dig up something in the mountains for them or deliver a package. And I have to do it again if I want to be BFF’s. Which I had better do if I want to unlock anything anytime soon.
Basically, my emotional investment in the story and suspension of disbelief were struck repeatedly in several sensitive areas with a pickaxe and then I wake up five hours later disoriented and furious that not only has my precious time been wasted, it has been wasted on ruining the mood.
Stop it stop it stop it stop it STOP IT
I really have no idea what Lionhead Studios was thinking. My best guess is that Peter Molyneux has been trying to convince people since 2004 that Fable’s expressions system is a deep and complex metaphor for human interaction, and that after six years of people going “LOL that’s kind of weird I guess”, he decided to make them mandatory this time around. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if the expressions used weren’t so damned goofy. Maybe it would help if I wasn’t watching the same set of four ten-second-long sequences a hundred times in a row. Maybe if it didn’t require me to do three expressions, a jaunt into the mountains, three more expressions, and another trek into different mountains all for ONE PERSON to declare their emotionally-devoid everlasting fake friendship to me, I would not be laying mushroom clouds right now really quietly so as not to wake my son. Perhaps if I did not have to repeat the aforementioned ridiculous sequence of events dozens of times during the game, I would not be saying “perhaps” so much. If you are troubled by how many times I have said “perhaps” in this paragraph, perhaps you should avoid Fable 3 like the plague. The bad kind.
Really, the thing that makes all of this several orders of magnitude more awful for me is that, as I mentioned before, the rest of the game is wonderful. Sure, I have some issues with the UI, and I’ve seen a bug here and there, but I can cheerfully look past that kind of stuff if I get immersed in the story. Honestly, if anybody should be mad that this game went this direction, it’s the developers and writers and artists who worked so hard to make all the nonstupid portions of the game so amazing. I think I would lose my mind if I weaved such a beautiful world into being and somebody demanded it be turned into a Fisher-Price Sexual Deviancy Playset. It’s like I’m trapped in a nightmare about Fable and Brave New World, and everyone in the whole world is Epsilons, and they’re all horny. And, though it may not seem like it currently, I actually believe there is a time and place for these kinds of things. The Sims is a great game. Running around doing whimsical metaphorical actions to symbolize true human relationships or whatever might be OK if it were its OWN GAME. But trying to blend this sort of thing with a real story and well-developed characters is inconsistent and confusing at best and infuriating at worst. I opted for the latter. It damn near ruined the whole experience for me. It may yet.
All this vitriol, and I’m only halfway through the game. That’s why it’s a “Half-Review”. It is not some sort of weird genealogical thing, nor is it radioactive. Well, maybe it is radioactive. Regardless, I am going to finish this game, free all the children, kill the king and wear his skin as a cape, ride a rainbow pony off into the sunset, and fix the economy. Just like Obama. No matter how many times I have to put Baby in a corner. So listen up, Lionhead. If I finish this out, and the plot falls flat, I am going to write a really negative review.
Review: “Resident Evil Deck Building Game”
Bandai Collectible Games is soon releasing their first foray into the “deck building” genre, the Resident Evil Deck Building Game. The best known example of this genre is Dominion. But in case you don’t know the genre, there are a variety of different cards on the play field that you “purchase” to place into your deck. Each turn you draw some cards from your deck to make up your hand to do things like buy higher cost items, draw more cards, or perform special actions. When your deck runs out of cards, you shuffle your discard pile and start all over again, making your deck grow more powerful with each passing turn.
The important question is, does this game offer anything beyond using the license of one of the most enjoyable video game franchises out there? I think so.
The Resident Evil Deck Building Game is for 2-4 players (with one solo play option). The game touts three different play styles; Story Mode, Mercenary Mode, and Versus Mode. The most common mode of play in groups will most likely be Story Mode so I’ll explore that in the most depth, and then other versions stem off of it.
Choose Your Character
Each player takes on the unique persona of one of the characters from the Resident Evil world. Ten individual characters are in the base game and promo versions of Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine are also out there. Each character has unique abilities that they gain access to once they have racked up enough decorations (awards for killing infected). Almost all of the characters have fun abilities that seem to try and capture some essence of the characters from the game. Albert Wesker, for example, is all about gaining more wealth and power while also putting other characters in dangerous situations. However, some just seem to be trying to use some sort of game changing mechanic that may or may not work well in the current scenario. [Read the rest of this article]
Orgrimmar Politics As Usual
It’s the end of a brutal election season, and the race for key positions in the Horde have never been closer. No one could have expected Thrall to step down from his position as Warchief, but it was no surprise to anyone just how heated the battle to ensue would become. Soon after announcing he would be leaving office, Warchief Thrall decided to try to quell unrest between the various races of the Horde, and declared the next Warchief would be determined by popular vote. In a controversial move, he then decided the Horde needed a new emblem to symbolize this new, democratic union, and chose famed Troll artist Bet’si Rahz to design it. Soon after, the battle for the Warchief’s throne began.
Candidate vs. Candidate (CvC)
Garrosh Hellscream is the son of legendary Orc hero Grom Hellscream, and has the political backing of Thrall himself. Many cried foul, citing the Warchief’s differences with Garrosh during the war against the Lich King, and waving off Thrall’s trust in the younger Hellscream as misguided loyalty to his belated father (and Thrall’s former best friend). Like everything else anyone named Hellscream has ever done, Garrosh’s plans are bold and decisive (or, as some suggest, even reckless). Despite this, his charisma and willingness to decapitate have gained him the loyalty of many.
Key issues on Hellscream’s ticket: [Read the rest of this article]
Review: Costume Quest
I have to admit, when I saw Costume Quest show up in the list of new releases for Xbox Live Arcade last week, I rolled my eyes. Then I came to work, and one of my friends was raving about the game, telling me how it was so funny and awesome and oh my God you have to try it just go home now and do it. So, later that evening, I downloaded the demo. I was surprised to see the logo for Double Fine Productions appear. It wasn’t so long ago that I channeled the awesome power of rock with their last title, Brütal Legend, and I had to take a moment to run a few tests to make sure this was real and not in a dream within a dream within someone’s else’s dream inside a llama’s dream inside of a dream. I’m still not sure in my life what, if anything, is real. What I am sure of is that if Costume Quest is part of a dream, I don’t want to wake up.
Costume Quest is based on a simple premise. You’re a kid who loves Halloween more than anything else, and you go trick or treating with your sister (or brother, if you play the girl). You’re wearing a cool robot costume, and they are dressed like a big piece of candy corn — a fact that would not normally matter except it becomes clear early in the game that the town has been overrun with candy-stealing monsters, and they think your sibling is a huge piece of candy fit for grand theft and proceed to kidnap them. Using the power of your imagination, you become a mighty warrior based on whatever halloween costume you are wearing, and you then proceed to stomp monster ass in the hopes of getting them back. You eventually wind up getting more costumes with different powers. There is an achievement for watching every single costume’s special power, and it is worth it to do this even if you don’t want the achievement because they are all awesome and special in their own way. Just like a snowflake! [Read the rest of this article]
Afraid Of The Dark
As an adult, I frequently enjoy the strange and colorful fruits of my imagination. As a child, these fruits would come crashing down at high velocity upon my head at night, and they tasted terrible. My parents used to call it a blessing and a curse. By day I’d write stories and draw comics. At night, they would often find me standing in the middle of my bed screaming. Sometimes, I would calm down and not know what terrified me so. Usually, though, it was very fresh in my mind, and all too real until somebody calmed me down.
The number one thing I used to have nightmares about is tornadoes. I blame this on my older brother, who delighted in making things up to terrify his little brother, who was fantastically gullible. One time, he convinced me that there was a new kind of killer bee that looked just like dandelion seeds. Convincing me that tornadoes were sentient and out to get me personally was not difficult by comparison.
Upon thinking about it, though, there really isn’t a clear #2 night terror on my list. Sure, I had my share of monsters and killers and the occasional Sith lord, but that was not what found me screaming for Mom and Dad. Usually, it would be something vague and sinister. I’m in the dark, and I know something is hunting me, and I can’t outrun it. Something evil has replaced my parents. I’m paralyzed, I can barely breathe, and I can hear something awful coming for me.
There’s a common thread in these nightmares: even in the realm of my own subconscious, not knowing everything is a hell of a lot scarier. You can’t plan. You can’t prepare. You can’t even fill in the blanks for what is after you or how it will get you (but you know it will).
Fortunately for me, my imagination and I get along a lot better these days and my dreams are typically more weird than terrifying. Every now and then, it’ll still drop some fruit on my head, but it’s as the old saying goes: when life gives you nightmares, make nightmare-ade. Scary things make for good stories and interesting thinking. Besides, scaring the crap out of yourself can be fun, as long as the light switch is easily within reach. Even so, to this day, movies that use this concept well mess with my head. Not during, mind you. It’s in the middle of the night when I get up to use the bathroom and the thought creeps into my head that maybe, just maybe, something is behind the shower curtain. Or that I’ll look in the mirror and suddenly someone’s behind me. I’ll never forget the first time I watched the original Halloween. I was in college, and I lived in an apartment that had a closet within a closet, and for two weeks straight I could swear I could faintly make out a William Shatner mask in every darkened doorway. Many times it’s just the idea behind a scary movie far more than the movie itself that does the trick. Freddy Krueger, despite numerous campy sequels, is one of the most terrifying concepts I’ve ever seen. How would you fight something like that? Why would it choose you? And let me tell you from experience, when Freddy shows up in one of your dreams, you’re very grateful to see the sunrise despite his being fictional.
Games that can exploit this are worse because the level of interactivity makes it that much easier for my imagination to insert me into these nightmare scenarios. Curse those damnable little scissor-babies from Silent Hill. CURSE THEM!!! Best of all is a good Call of Cthulhu game with a nice, evil GM that knows how to get under his players’ collective skin, and evil right out of one of my nightmares: nobody knows what is out there, or how it will get them – but it will. Try it in your game sometime. Since I tend not to DM much, I look for ways to enrich my roleplaying experience. It adds to the experience for me when I don’t really know what the hell that thing is that’s trying to kill me – which I why I tend not to read the Monster Manuals. I don’t want my internal Bardic Knowledge to kick in when the DM describes a creature, especially if it might arm me with critical information on how to defeat a monster. It’s hard for me to force myself not to make strategies using this information. Besides, minmaxing and metagaming aren’t usually conducive to good roleplaying to begin with. I mean, really. Do you want to watch Paranormal Activity with the idea in your head that “oh, that’s just an invisible stalker. If she just had a +1 weapon or greater, that thing would be toast”? Okay, I do too. But you get my point.
Turn out the lights, put all your ill-gotten knowledge down, suspend your disbelief somewhere and put those accursed child-lock doorknobs on the entrance so it’s hard to get back. I do my own laundry. If anything bad happens to my undergarments as a result of my superior roleplaying, the consequences are mine to bear. Happy Halloween, everyone!
Photo credit
The Lion, The Witch, and the Progressive Enhancement: CRAZY DELICIOUS
If you don't want to read the whole article, consider this image the digest version.
When I am not being angry at BioWare or working feverishly into the night coming up with Star Wars-themed sexual innuendo, I sometimes show up to my day job as a web developer. One concept that we frequently use at work to make websites usable and friendly to everyone is called progressive enhancement. Put simply, it is the practice of making a website fully usable no matter what browser and settings the user shows up with. This is fantastic for visually-impaired people using screen readers, people with old browsers, and people who have new browsers and are convinced Javascript and Flash are vectors for the government’s mind control beams and have them turned off. Progressively enhanced sites try to load their various bells and whistles, and if they don’t work, then you’re left with something less pretty that still works. TA DAA! Neat, huh?
What does this have to do with gaming or anything else this site is usually about? Well, it’s a little-known fact that I moonlight on occasion as a blogger, and a frequent technique many bloggers rely on when they query their brain-computer for article ideas and come up empty is to rely heavily on metaphor.
If you are still reading this, you are my special friend.
It occurred to me today that progressive enhancement has been around for quite some time in video games. No big surprise there, it is not a web-only idea. It has been a good usability practice since there have been user interfaces and non-identical computers. You can see a form of it when you select “use optimal settings” in the graphics settings for some games. You can wish it was there on some games that were clearly designed for HD televisions. (Ever try Dead Rising or Every Extend Extra Extreme on a standard definition TV? It’s like an illiteracy simulator.) I suppose if you really wanted to reach a little bit, you could make a case that skill settings in games are a form of progressive enhancement. You have a core game that anyone can play (like Rock Band 2′s no-fail mode), and if the player has the ability to try the harder modes, then they can. Of course, this made me wonder if a skilled hardcore gamer basically has a “mad skills” graphics card installed OH GOD CATASTROPHIC METAPHOR FAILURE EJECT EJECT EJECT.
After the smoke cleared and I came back online, I started to think (marginally) more useful thoughts. Thoughts like “if I glued all of my spare WoWTCG and M:tG commons together, could I make a throne for myself, and would it have adequate lumbar support?”. Also, I started to wonder if progressive enhancement could be leveraged when planning one’s tabletop roleplaying game.
At first, I decided to approach this idea as if combat and other “crunch” mechanics were the base functionality of the game. It did not seem an unreasonable assumption at first blush. D&D’s roots do involve a lot of tromping around a dungeon, no questions asked, with very little regard for the devastating effects the party’s actions will have on the dungeon’s delicate ecosystem. If you have these things, then surely you can layer some “fluff” atop them and every conceivable player will have an optimal gaming experience. Right? RIGHT?!!
It is a rare occasion that I realize that I am full of crap before anyone else does. This was one such occasion, triggered by the realization that I personally prefer my roleplaying experience to be about 90% storytelling and 10% senseless violence. My algorithm was flawed, like Achilles’ decision to wear sandals to battle, and my own decision to use that as an example without checking to make sure Achilles was aware of his only weakness before making footwear choices. So, what could I do? Scrapping the idea completely would be boring. So I flipped it on its head. Storytelling was now the core functionality of the game, and game mechanics were now features that could be disabled if the players weren’t compatible with them. This, unfortunately, made sense too. So many times we have seen “the rules are just a guideline”. So many times have we seen house rules implemented to suit a particular group of players. But this too didn’t work out. What if you have a group that doesn’t much care for story and just likes the stabbing and the immolating? Besides, I just scientifically proved not one paragraph ago that you could base a game off of crunchy mechanical stuff. What gives?
Those of you smarter (and less long-winded) than myself have no doubt come to the conclusion at which I eventually arrived: crunch and fluff are not the core of the game. A bunch of people sitting around the table having fun is the core of the game. (It also helps if you are all pretending as a team, but if you’ve figured out some way around that, please let me know.) The crunch and the fluff are the features that don’t show up if your players aren’t compatible with them. You figure out what works best and what causes everyone to have the most fun, and you do that. It might not be the textbook example of progressive enhancement, but if everybody is having a good time, I suppose that’s OK. Here I was, thinking that I was going to revolutionize gaming, and I just wind up with the same old stupid advice we always give out. Ugh. How frustrating.
I have to salvage this somehow, or at the very least cause you all enough brain damage to forget any of this ever happened. Let’s see, how about this: I’m going to write a book to help the self-esteem of PC’s who get level drained. After all, their core functionality always exists even at level 1, and all the abilities they accumulate over time by levelling are just superfluous. Therefore, when a wight gives them a hug, it really doesn’t mean anything at all. Heck, it just means that monsters above that character’s level don’t really exist because they’re not compatible. Or is it that the player isn’t compatible. Or the adventure OH GOD I’M LOSING THEM QUICK THINK OF SOMETHING!!!!
Wait! I have it! Anybody else want to level a Progressive Enhancement spec Shaman with me with Cataclysm drops? Anyone?
Thank you, thank you. I’m here all night.
Nerdy-Five
“You’re going to be thirty-five?” – Vanir’s wife Sarah, upon hearing the tragic news.
In a couple of days, the Earth will complete thirty-five rotations around the Sun since I was unleashed upon this world. Being born in mid-October, it’s always neat to have all the trees in full color around my birthday. I guess I can either look at it as capping off a great summer, or have it bittersweet as the cold and snow and ice prepares to crap frostily on my head for 5 months. You know what I want for my birthday every year? No #*&$^# WINTER.
When I was little, I’d count down the days until my birthday for a whole month. I was a greedy little fellow, and I wanted PRESENTS. Star Wars toys were usually a central pillar of the bounty both at birthdays and Christmas, and I had a habit of giving my stuff names. I have a Tauntaun named “Bryan” and a Wampa named.. well… “Wampy”. As the years passed, the action figures changed but the goal remained the same, and I accumulated lots of He-Man and Thundercats and Real Ghostbusters and even some totally sweet AD&D figures (which I deeply regret getting rid of now). In 6th grade, my great grandma got me a Nintendo Entertainment System, and my focus pretty much shifted to the acquisition of as many Game Paks as I possibly could.
Around college, a funny thing happened. My birthday would sneak up on me, and I wouldn’t have any idea what I wanted. In retrospect, it’s easy to see why. I started getting disposable income, so I was buying all the stuff I wanted when it came out, instead of locking all my wee capitalistic fury away until OH MY GOD I CAN FINALLY PLAY SUPER MARIO BROS. 2. Well, actually, in college it wasn’t so much “disposable income” as it was “a massive credit card balance I would pay off ten years later”, but it’s the same idea. I already had almost everything I wanted, and the stuff I didn’t have was either too expensive or too complicated to make a good present from non-techie relatives. My birthday just sort of became that time of year to get family together, eat cake, and to open a whole bunch of envelopes with money in them.
At my son’s first birthday party, it occurred to me exactly what I was doing a year ago on that day (namely, watching him come out and not sleeping for 6 months), and suddenly the “birth” part of “birthday” took on a lot more meaning for me. I can only begin to imagine how my parents must have felt, watching their present-crazed little boy running around screaming year after year, a birthday hat clinging to dear life by its uncomfortable rubber chinstrap. At the very least, it has restored a little of the magic for me, albeit in a dramatically different way.
I didn’t feel old at 20. I felt awesome. I didn’t even feel that old at 30. This birthday, it’s starting to hit me, but more because I’m noticing how old other people are relative to me. I have a brother and friends who are over 40. I have friends who are in their mid twenties that weren’t alive when I was in 5th grade. I’m used to seeing my dad and my teachers and other, well, adults as being in their 40s. What the hell, time? Who authorized this crap?
It’s especially bad when I see, for instance, some teenager walking around ironically wearing a Centipede t-shirt. Listen, you little punk. In my day, we were making corridors of mushrooms to guide the centipedes driven mad by the scorpion’s poisoned mushroom straight into my oncoming line of laser death, maximizing my score by hitting only 100 point heads so go buy a Justin Bieber shirt or something. Oh great, I just told some kid to get off my digital lawn.
It’s not so bad, though. I have to admit, I still don’t feel old. Sure, my body doesn’t quite work the same (and I’m told it just goes downhill from here), but I haven’t let life beat all the kid out of me just yet. I’m looking forward to my son getting old enough to play some more complex stuff with me. I want to keep imagining and creating and getting weird looks from coworkers. I want to be running a daily D&D game when I’m in a nursing home. Give me another 35 years, and we’ll see how that turns out.
Photo Credit: ME! From my 31st birthday fleet of Galacticakes.
Do the Evolution
I realize I could be a little dated. I mean I’m 38 going on 39 the day before Samhain starts. My supposed heyday was about the same time as that of Grunge. (Hence the title of this piece.) Back then, the Dark Sun Campaign Setting (boxed set!) was also the new hotness for the D&D game, and the SSI video games based on it were bleeding edge. (Man, I wish a new Dark Sun video game was coming out for PC or consoles.)
My age, and the fact that I feel life gets better and better, got me thinking about the ways things change. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about the way games change.
I started my history with gaming, I realize now, with the D&D Basic Set in 1981. I got the red box, and my twin, Neil, got the blue box—the Cook Expert Set. At the time, neither of us realized that the AD&D game was out there in all its hardbound glory.
We soon rectified that oversight. With our pocket money for doing chores, we bought AD&D books. Despite the fact that we had those hardcover tomes, the boxed sets really shaped the way we played. Sure, we used the advanced rules, but we routed around convoluted bits and anything that was more work than fun.
As the years rolled, and because we had overzealous Christian parents who did away with our D&D stuff, my brother and I expanded our gaming taste. We played the original Palladium Roleplaying Game, Car Wars, Gamma World (Second Edition among others), the first Star Frontiers (dralasites rule), Marvel Superheroes (FASERIP version), and more. I even fooled around with games such as Powers & Perils (now free online), although I couldn’t get others to play it. We later moved on to games such as Rolemaster, GURPS, and the original Shadowrun, as well as the first Vampire the Masquerade and its World of Darkness descendants. (Mage the Ascension, played with GURPS rules, is still among my favorites.) Other D&D grandchildren followed for me, such as Arcana Unearthed (new Evolved) and Mutants & Masterminds.
My time on this planet has allowed me to explore all sorts of games. I played computer games such as Adventure, Venture, Temple of Apshai, The Bard’s Tale, and so on, up to modern games such as Fallout 3 and Dragon Age. Working among a fine gaggle of geeks has allowed me to learn other games, such as Savage Worlds. I’ve also dabbled in indie roleplaying games such as 3:16 Carnage Amongst the Stars and Fiasco.
What I never gave much thought to when I was younger but amazes me now is that all these games owe their existence to the D&D game. All of them, including those companies other than TSR produced, are evolutionary offshoots of the original D&D game. D&D itself is an evolution of even older forms of wargaming, such as Little Wars and Floor Games by none other than H.G. Wells.
RPGs as Organisms
What if we imagine the original D&D game as the evolutionary link between wargaming and modern roleplaying games of all sorts? I looked again at the basics of evolution before I wrote this, and it seems very relevant. Every derivative game has some part of the original, signs of its ancestry. Like with organisms, variations from the original are introduced in the process of creating a game. Further, more game “offspring” tend to be produced than the gaming environment can support. Traits that ensure survival in a given environment become more common in descendants.
The long and short of all this is that a game cannot remain the same over successive generations in a changing marketplace and hope to survive. It might be able to carry on in limited numbers in isolated ideal environments, the way OD&D still survives among groups who play and love it. If old-school D&D is enjoying a renaissance, that revival is because the game has adapted to the modern gaming environment in important ways. Swords & Wizardry, as just an example, is not the OD&D game—it’s a new animal derived from the old, built to be accessible and free for the new gaming jungle. Still, it lives and breathes only in a carefully cultivated milieu.
To thrive, a game system has to reach its prey, us gamers, and keep us interested. It has to be accessible for new players, yet keep a level of complexity for the seasoned user. It also has to innovate and entertain, this last point based on those among us who read but rarely, if ever, play. (I read tons of games I never played, such as Star Wars d6, TORG, RIFTS, and more.)
The D&D game and its offspring of the same name have always been in a state of evolution, trying to keep up with the changing environment. At times, it evolved too slowly, and although it remained the most widely known of roleplaying games, it almost went extinct. AD&D Second Edition came about ten years after the original, and the D&D 3e came more than a decade after that. (4e came about 8 years later.) We were graced with the third edition only because some folks who loved the game helped carry on its legacy. D&D‘s diverse descendants almost had to go on without it, and they would have, like any organism does, and might have lived better without their ancestor. (That’s a big maybe that’s also another topic.)
Those descendants changed more rapidly. Shadowrun, for instance, has had five editions in twenty years if you count the most recent 20th anniversary edition. GURPS has had five editions in twenty-five years if you count Man to Man. (The Fantasy Trip might make six versions of GURPS in thirty years, if you’re willing to make allowances. It’s still available.) Vampire: The Masquerade had four revisions in thirteen years. Mutants & Masterminds has had a new version every few years—it was released in 2002 and the third edition is coming this fall (scroll to May 12th).
Game evolution, though, is actually much more rapid than versions of a core game might suggest. Every supplement changes the game. Each sourcebook attempts to adapt the game to its environment and keep the game fresh and young. When system overhauls occur, they’re often based on reasonable forces that call for an improvement. Not the least among these is audience use and feedback, which is easier to come by today than ever before.
Long Live Evolution
The D&D Essentials line might be taken to be a revision of the edition, but to me, it feels more like regular old evolution than any normal revision does. Essentials takes its legacy and tries to thrive in a fresh way. Characters in Essentials can use earlier materials, and non-Essentials characters can play right alongside their newer counterparts. That’s unlike many game system revisions, and nothing like the update from 3e to 3.5.
The Pathfinder game is a more significant system evolution from 3.5 than the Essentials line is to 4e. Preexisting classes receive a working over in Pathfinder in ways that can make past 3.5 materials incompatible or at least in need of serious scrutiny. Changes to these and other aspects of the game can be significant enough that you have to pay attention when using older D&D material.
That fact doesn’t bother me in the slightest, though. Pathfinder is a product of an honest process of evolution, too. It takes hereditary material, gives it a good shake to see what works for the modern environment, and then gives survival a sincere go. Nothing is wrong with that.
If we acknowledge game supplements and updates as part of the evolutionary process, a lot of our games—D&D, Pathfinder, Fiasco, Savage Worlds, and so on—are always evolving. The truth is, and if you’re honest I’ll bet you’ll admit it, we gamers like it that way. In all sorts of games, from the latest Shadowrun sourcebook to the newest Fable video-game release (this month!), we gamers want new stuff to think about, to talk about, and to play with.
My inner fanboy loves game evolution. I express my love by trying out some new games now and then, although admittedly, more and more are electronic games. (Something is to be said for ease and speed of access and play.) Further, I do so by buying a few and even playing a few on an irregular basis. In your way, I’m sure you like game evolution, too, and you put your money where your heart is. Can you fault another gamer for doing the same? It just seems silly to decry another’s evolutionary path when you have your own.
Thunderdome!
I’ve decided to put my money where my . . . keyboard is. I want to play more games with my fellow gamers. My aim is to expand my horizons and to witness more game evolution. I’ll admit I’m going to favor games I think I might like, but that’s natural. I’m also going to favor games I can play in real time and space rather than virtual, at least for the first part of my trial. My aim is to have fun with potential new friends.
Cameron McNary came up with the title, or I did after failing to completely understand a series of tweets from him. The point is: If you live in the Washington State area and might want to play a game with me sometime, send me an email at the address in my bio below. Include the Thunderdome in the subject, and tell me what you want to run or play.
I’m no Keith Baker with “Have Dice Will Travel.” What I am is willing to do a little roving with my dice, and I might end up in other areas from time to time, such as Virginia and the upcoming NanoCon. I’m also willing to help in a little reaving by running D&D 4e or the new Gamma World occasionally.
I’ll keep you posted on twitter and here. ‘Til next time, I’m out.
