The good news was that Demon’s Souls was coming from Gamefly.  I played this around the time it came out, and had real difficulty with it — something I now understand was made more difficult by there being “black soul” weekend events when I had it. When I played this on Thursday, it was substantially easier, aided by a different class (Royalty, this time) and an almost incredible amount of healing drops.  I finally finished off the first boss, and am getting into the meat of the game.

I guess it befuddles me a bit, Demon’s Souls has a reputation for being incredibly hard, picky and punishing, and I’m not only doing well, I’m enjoying the game. RDR does not have anything like that reputation, and I find it stupid and frustrating.  I’m not sure why this is; certainly I wasn’t invested in RDR’s story, but DS doesn’t really supply a story to be invested in (beyond my own narrative, of course).  Certainly there’s overall less different options in DS, so I’ve focused on what I have in front of me, and have a general idea of what is available (if not entirely possible) to do next.  Some part of me still wants to play RDR to answer that conundrum, but, well, maybe some other time.

Kongregate has a few games that caught my attention this week. Necronator is a sort of 16-bit game about a necromancer out to destroy a fantasy world. It’s by Toge Productions, who also did Infectionator, a similar game about destroying the world with zombies.

My favorite flash-game developer, jmbt02, put out  a new game this week, as well.  I did a little happy dance when I found out, although this isn’t one of my favorites of his, his games seem to be regularly high quality.  I followed his blog, so I wouldn’t miss this sort of thing again.

I also spent a bit of time playing The Enchanted Cave, a sort-of rogue-like rpg.  Much like Demon’s Souls you lose all progress when you die, and can leave (dropping all normal equipment). There are ways to progress, and I think I’ve got the strategy down now.  The other game that kind of intrigued me was Castle Wars 2, a game very much like the card game from Might and Magic VII.

As you can see, there’s a real problem for flash game developers, as I found four enjoyable games in a week. Getting noticed is hard, and while Kongregate has some tools for that (it’s how I found these games), I imagine there’s a lot that is good and is missed.   Of course, this was a particularly good week for this, too.

Given that Fantasy RPGs were the theme for the week and weekend, I returned to Dragon Age: Origins, this time to play a violent warrior.  I was reminded of one of my favorite D&D fighters, a character who didn’t want to be still. She always just wanted to go on to the next thing, and be pointed at the next batch of monsters to kill, or door to knock down.  I created her to take a break from the more intense story and characterization of GMing, and she was simple and a blast to play.  My City Elf Warrior is much the same, and it made the clichéd City Elf origin story much more fun to play. Particularly when I got to the king.  (Of course, I k new I didn’t have to make nice with someone who was just going to die, anyway, too).

The big focus for my weekend was tabletop roleplaying.  I’m getting the Dresden Files RPG books soon, and I need to pound out an adventure and more characters over the next two weeks, as I’m running it at origins on the 26th.  This weekend was also the Columbus D&D Meetup, and I’m running a game there. I’ll write more about that later, but overall the adventure was fun to run, and I think everyone enjoyed it. It was a bit short, I admit, but, again,  that’s what Girl and I want, and worked for our players.

Of course, I spent a good amount of time playing Dungeons and Dragons Online this week. We had a couple of good days playing our low-levels.  I really enjoy these particular quests, when it doesn’t feel so overwhelming and where we feel competent and successful. Of course, it could also be that our complement works better, since we have most of the roles covered (Fighter/Cleric and Rogue/Wizard).  It’ll be interesting as we get a few more levels and take on some more difficult dungeons.

I had a good run with Tam in Puzzle Pirates, as well. One issue with Puzzle Pirates is that there’s very little you can do on your own or with a small group.  That means that until you join a steady crew (which requires being a more steady player than I am, I think), you are always risking joining a group that has overshot their ability or who has interpersonal problems.

Tam and I got planked (kicked off the ship) during a battle we were winning, because someone’s little brother had a fit of pique. So we headed out to do something a else, perhaps a bit easier.. “I want to win,” I told her, so we joined something easy.  And did very well with a smaller group, and even made pretty decent cash.  Hopefully we’ll play again one night this week.

Heavy Rain is on its way from Gamefly as I write this, and I guess we’ll see how long I keep that one. I don’t have high hopes, but again, it’s a game I feel I should at least try before passing on it.

Royal Envoy

I do play a variety of games, beyond the big-budget AAA games, and Royal Envoy is one of those side, casual games.  I played through the 80-minute demo from Reflexive Arcade (which goes away at the end of the month).  Royal Envoy is a building/time management puzzle game, where you meet certain building goals on each level, getting more difficult as the levels progress.  The primary difficulty here is in getting the time bonus on levels, as that requires some thought and planning; otherwise my 7-year old GoddessDaughter has no problem with the game.

I thought it was fun, and think that’s a good way to gateway difficulty, allowing you to decide a level is too hard to meet the speed goal. The voice acting and story appeal more to my 7-year old than to me, but that’s not surprising.

Blur

I picked up Blur, and the next two games at Blockbuster, which means I have five days to decide whether to bump these games from my Gamefly queue (or to bump them up).  I tend to rent games several different ways, and rarely buy them.  I’ll hang onto them from Gamefly if they deserve serious play.  Blur is more for Tam and for me, as she loves racing games, and still plays Burnout: Paradise on occasion.

Blur was criticized for it’s “making fun of casual games” ad that came out, mocking Mario Kart, but given the presentation and style of the game, the marketing of it makes sense. Blur is basically Burnout style graphics and aesthetic, but it’s Mario Kart-style game play.  Yes, the cars handle like real cars (at least ones in racing games), but there are power-ups that mimic those in Mario Kart.  There’s a shield, mines, a weapon that attacks the next player in front of you, etc.

Given the other games I wanted to try out, I didn’t play this much longer than enough to get an impression for Tam. If she likes it, we’ll Gamefly it and, I’ll have a chance to get competent at it, at which point I think it will be fun.  If I can’t manage that, it wasn’t for me anyway.

Red Dead Remption

I’m not sure why I keep trying Rockstar games.  The last one that I liked at all was GTA:Chinatown Wars, and before that, just GTA III. I didn’t like the expansions, and couldn’t get into San Andreas. GTA IV never really interested me, and Bully recently left me cold.  And that’s about the right answer for these games, I’m given a world to explore and do things in, but nothing that I want to do or explore.

I spent some time riding around in RDR, and I like the mechanic that keeps me with the people I’m riding with, but it just made me miss Agro.  I don’t think any in-game horse will ever touch my heart the way she did, though.  I did enjoy the riding, what gets me though, is that it was mostly aimless.  I never got invested in the story, and then I got killed, and when I went to load my game, I thought, “Why?” and watched some Doctor Who instead.

There’s more to say about this, and Rockstar, and open world games, but that’s a blog post, not an impression.  RDR is definitely beautiful, and I suspect I’d like it more if I were competent at it (much like Blur in this respect), I don’t feel any pressing need to become competent.  I loved Westerns as a teenager, so I get some of what they are doing (but surely not all of it), but I’m just not invested in what is going on enough to continue.

Nier

When I rent games from Blockbuster or the G-Box, I tend to pick up games that I’m less likely to love. Something I can play for a couple of days, realize I was right about not liking them, give them back, and cross them off my Gamefly queue.  Why play a game that I don’t think I’ll like? Well, I want to make my own determinations, and even bad games do some things well. Also, it’s sometimes instructive about why games fail, which can inform other things and game designs.

This time, Nier was my game like this.  And of the three I got, I like playing it the most.  It’s brawler style combat is something that I’m generally competent at already, and that’s part of it.  It’s environments (and some of it’s characters, particularly the daughter) evoke Ico in a positive way.  This game isn’t graphically brilliant.  My character is kind of ugly, actually.  I’m not sure the story is complicated, and it’s filled with fetch quests.

I probably have a lot more to talk about with this, and want to play it more. I definitely had an interesting moment with those fetch quests, though, that’s worth some more writing. But first, more playing.

Hello Worlds

Hello Worlds is a pure platformer and flash game (this is a link to it on Kongregate) that has some interesting platforming ideas, notably that your character exists in multiple worlds, and is affected by the floors, walls, and other environmental features.  I played through it a week or two ago when it first showed up on Kongregate, but they’ve added achievements, so I went back and played it a bit more. They’ve cleaned up and added some levels, and it’s worth a look.

The ever-present Dungeons & Dragons Online

Girl and I play DDO at least once over a typical weekend, and this was no exception.  We spent a lot of time over the past week playing, actually, as it was a loot-bonus week (they’d upped the level of chest loots by two levels, allowing us to get some nice drops — or at least stuff that sold well).  Friday we did a bit more, but had gotten tired of the Dave Arneson area, realizing it was as hard and annoying as the Gary Gygax area (Imagine!).

We took our level 10’s and tried to do some level 6 quests we’d never done, and got wiped doing them, until it was at a point where we weren’t succeeding just because we were in a fail mode.  Our characters (a Wizard and a Rogue + henchmen) don’t seem to do well with elementals.  Give us humanoids and we waltz through a level, but elementals always kill us.

We switched to our level 3/4 chracters (my Wizard/Rogue and her Fighter/Cleric) and tried a mission which we somehow failed at the end. We just quit and decided to table DDO for the weekend. I did a couple of solo quests on Sunday with my level 3 Wizard/Rogue, and nearly leveled, but tried another dungeon and died, again, and decided I was done.  Maybe my fascination with Nier is that it was the only game I didn’t fail in all weekend.

Non-Video Games

Girl and I also played the next module of Descent, which we got through by changing one rule that I don’t understand why exists. (Or how the players would ever win with that rule in place).  We also worked pretty hard Sunday morning creating characters for my Dresden Files RPG game that I’m running at Origins. I have a feeling I’m going to crash and burn.  I really need to run combat before I’m doing it for people who paid for the privilege.

And finally, I finished The Toughest Developer Puzzle Ever 2 last week.  Talk about feeling competent (and failing a lot)!

In Emotional Design he backs away from this, and talks a bit more holistically about design.  We interact with objects three different ways, Normal says.   To illustrate it, he talks about the many tea pots that he has.  One is a beautiful object, and is just aesthetically pleasing; it is nice to look at, but not practical for making tea, this appeals to us in the visceral mode, emotionally and aesthetically. Another is totally impractical for making tea at all, as the spout is on the wrong side of the tea pot — this is the illustration that is normally on the cover of Everyday Things — yet this is an important tea pot, it has a story and invokes conversation and thought: we interact with it in the reflective mode, by thinking about it and telling the story..  A third tea pot is the one he actually uses to make tea — it’s nothing special, but it works for it’s purpose: this tea pot is for the behavioral mode, used so often we don’t even think about it.

Ultimately, Everyday Things is about design for the behavioral mind.  It’s about controls that disappear in use, because we no longer think about them.  It’s the part and kind of object we rarely talk about, because they are not by nature beautiful, and their ease of use means they add nothing to the story, by virtue of disappearing.  All three kinds of design are important to video games, but behavioral has been developed quite a bit, in large part because of Norman’s own work.  Everyday Things is considered required reading for the game designer. (Interestingly, Emotional Design has a whole chapter on Game and Human Interface Design.)

To recap what I wrote previously, the visceral/emotional mind of Normal maps to the experiential mind Kahneman talks about at TED.  That mind is the eternal now, with about a 3s life-window.  It’s the mind that senses, and responds immediately, often through emotional reactions.  The reflective mind is the storytelling mind.  It’s the part that remembers, analyzes, processes and tells you the story about what happened.  These two minds aren’t really separate, they influence each other, back and forth, as the story of who you are provided by your reflexive minds, tells you (to some extent) how to react to the now.  How you react (and how you feel about how you react) affects your story.

One thing that Norman points out in Emotional Design is that many things which we value as experiences are not actually viscerally pleasing at first.  He talks about coffee (or any food with a bitter flavor).  These are acquired tastes, and ones which we have to work to acquire.  The visceral mind doesn’t like these things at first, but can be trained to like them by the reflexive mind.  We build up a picture of ourselves as someone who drinks coffee, and someone who likes coffee, and we come to like it. It’s who we are, and we value coffee all the more because it was difficult to come to like it.

I, personally, remember going through this process as a pre-teen and teenager, gradually learning to drink my coffee “the way Dad does”, as a way to be like him, and to be ‘adult.’  Now, as an adult, I use much more cream than then (Dad drank his coffee black), and I probably use more sugar, but I’m a coffee drinker now, and so it’s okay that I changed how I drink my coffee, since I acquired that taste.

This has a lot of implications for games.  You’ve got people of all ages and skill levels, some of whom want to acquire the taste of certain kinds of games.  Certain parts of games appeal to the visceral mind, and certain parts don’t.  Some games are strongly reflexive games (RPGs and Farmville come to mind), some strongly visceral (Flower? Tetris? Or perhaps Tetris i’s more behavioral).  Games, unique to media, use all three modes of interacting, and offer both kinds of experience.  We need to think about this if we want to offer experiences beyond just ‘fun’ (and even if we want to make sure that we offer fun).

Then, earlier this week, I saw a TED talk, by Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel prize winning founder of behavioral economics. He talks a lot about happiness, and two ways in which we view happiness.  This can be expanded, I think to two ways in which we view anything that happens to us.  One of those minds he called the experiencing mind, the part of us totally in the now (or at least a 3 second-moment); the other he calls the remembering mind, which is the storytelling part of us, that reflects on the experiences.  These two minds are often in conflict and give different answers to the same question.

I’ve heard these called the visceral and reflective minds, with the behavioral mind added as a third. (While I may have the terms slightly off, this is in Norman’s Emotional Design.) That analysis is a bit better for games, and I’ll want to talk about the behavioral mind later.  It has less direct impact on our thoughts and emotions as the visceral and reflective minds.

The visceral mind is the one that experiences things. That’s what it does. It has an immediate reaction to them, one that is often fed more from emotion than from logic. It’s where we experience joy and sadness, ecstasy and despair.  The reflective mind doesn’t do this, although it can conjure those emotions in the visceral mind — because reflection itself, is an experience that we are doing at a moment in time.

The reflective mind is the storytelling mind.  It thinks back on the experiences, and says, “That was fun.” or “I enjoyed that.” or “It was good until the end, too bad the ending spoiled the whole thing.”  Of course the visceral mind was having fun there, right up until the end.  But the reflective mind just can’t shake how bad that ending was, and it obliterates all those other, theoretically good, experiences you’d had up until then.

What does this mean for games?

A lot, I think.  The visceral mind enjoys the moment-to-moment aspect of the game, and the reflexive enjoys the memory of the playing.  This is why endings are so important, as it’s what the reflexive mind will enjoy.  I think this has a lot to say about short games vs long games, fun vs serious games, and even can inform our discussions about cutscenes.

Different games respond or entertain  the different minds.  Tetris is a visceral experience.  We don’t typically weave a long story about playing the game, or say much about it. A game like Final Fantasy may not engage the visceral mind much at all, with turn based battles and long story segments. We remember the story of it, perhaps more than the long boring sections because the reflexive mind edits out redundant things (just like it does with Tetris).

We have to understand this to understand how games work, in order to design them and talk about them reasonably (particularly since it’s the reflexive part of our mind that does the talking about part).I think a lot of our discussions about what should and shouldn’t be in a game (eg “fun”) come from a misunderstanding of those two ways of experiencing games.

Neither side is right or wrong, but they are comparing two different kinds of things.  And we haven’t even gotten to the behavioral mind, because it doesn’t experience so much as do.  I’m going to be looking into these debase over the next few weeks, looking at how they can enlighten our game design, and hopefully tying it into liminality (which my intuition says is a reflective property that affects the visceral).

Appointment games run forever, but I’m not willing to pimp out my friends just so I can do well in them. I play them for a week or two, and the interest wanes pretty quickly,or I reach the end of what I can reasonably do by myself or with the handful of people I know who also play these games.  It would, frankly, be a good time for the game to end, and start over — only few of these games have the random component to support free play.  They aren’t designed for that.

Well, I’ve found a game that is both competitive and appointment gaming, and it’s fun.  The game we just finished took sixteen days, and I admit I won our first game. I think a good portion of that winning was luck, but that’s okay.  The game? Neptune’s Pride.

It’s a 4X game, where the ship travel times and scientific research, and economy times are measured in real days.  The goal is to control a certain percentage of the stars (in our newbie 8-person game the goal was 89 stars, which I think was slightly more than half the stars.)  You build fleets send them off to explore, and the other X’s.  Players can interact in limited ways, but the basic information about players is globally visible (with some limits based on technology).

It’s very simple: 4 different kinds of technology, three planetary stats, and only one kind of ship.  The combat is based on the player skill, not the number of ships, per se.  Most battles are of attrition, unless there is a serious imbalance between the player’s technology skills.

It takes anywhere from 30minutes to an hour to play every day, and most of that — for me — was checking a website two or three times, and adjusting orders. It starts off fairly simple, ad things get complicated and faster as the game matures.

NP is monetized by the selling of premium games, and the ability to create games limited to friends, or free for friends.  They sell “galactic credits” for real money, and you win 10 as a prize for winning a game (Free or not).  That’s enough to join a premium game, but not enough to create one, which costs twice to five times that (depending on options).

We had about half the people drop out of our game, and become AI controlled, which changes the strategy (and technically gives you a few days to get ahead of them).  The AI in our game seemed to give up at one point, but realistically, the game was over except for cleanup.

There are some UI things that bother me with selecting things (I kept having the wrong fleet selected when sending them out, because of the way they’re selected).  That’s pretty minor, and the game is still being modified and upgraded.  That’s an advantage of these web-based appointment games.  The fact that it can be over, quickly or slowly (there’s a premium game which lasts for monthis) make sit feel more like a board game I play a little bit as I go along.

Kind of nice, and we’re enjoying it.  Plus, it’s generally free to play.

Join us!

Of course, typical of JRPGs, this couldn’t be a half hour game because it takes that long to get to anything.  I accept that, though, it goes with the territory.  I was surprised that a good chunk of that time was spent making an avatar.  Pleasantly surprised, even.

The character editor that let me create an avatar with, perhaps, more options than Oblivion or Fallout.  I messed around with it for a bit, got something I was reasonably happy with. I could have spent a lot more time with it, tweaking and messing, but I chose not to (and to be fair, it gives you the option to change it alter.)  Fifteen minutes or so, and  Zhenette was entered out onto the world.

Then the story started, and I, or rather my avatar, wasn’t in it.

The story is about some guy who works for a weird looking dude who runs a winery.  The boss guy is upset with the Wine Delivery Dude, needs him to do something ASAP, and oh, take the new girl with you.  Oh, yeah that’s me. I nod and smile, or rather my Avatar does.  That’s really all she does.

We do the first mission, which is predictably simple, travel across a low level monster-filled wilderness, wind up being late anyway, coming back at dark.  We’re joined by a useless guest and Unrequited-Love Girl Then we’re attacked by a ridiculously large monster, which we (being buff wine-making delivery people) dispatch with apparent ease. (Well nobody died or anything, anyway).  All of this, of course, interspersed with cutscenes and stuff that’s going on back at the palace.

When we do get there, the bad guys had done bad things, including destroying part of the town and killing the king.  Wine Delivery Dude saves the Princess (who he met when he was younger) and runs off with her, while my avatar and Unrequited-Love Girl are separated from them by a burning pillar.

I should say at this point, that combat is semi-active.  Position appears to matter, but doesn’t really, except perhaps for area spells, and that’s more luck than anything else. You can control any character, and I chose to control my avatar for most of that.  Zhenette is usually a mage, as I’ve said before, so I had a bunch of spells.  I set wine delivery dude up as a swordsman, and when we got unrequited love girl, I made her a healer.  Each of them runs on their own, while we all fight, using a very basic “all out” or “conserve mana” type setup.  (Nothing like, say, Final Fantasy 12 or Dragon Age:Origin’s tactical setups.)

This works fairly well for a while, but after most movies, Wine Delivery Dude is set as the main character, so I had to switch back to MY avatar. After the split up, I’ve got him in my party and only him, and the princess as a (useless) guest.  He’s built totally wrong to be on his own, with no healing or magic, and no customization so, I have to spend time figuring him out, while he was just on automatic before.

Still, the Princess and Dude fight through a dungeon, and then he gets a big eponymous superpower, that makes him boss-sized, and he fights and wins against the boss. So far I’m okay, we’re really still in tutorial land, and things have just gotten bad.

The princess gets kidnapped and taken to another castle. An Old Grumpy Mentor shows up and Wine Delivery Dude plan to set out on your quest, taking along Unrequited-Love Girl, and oh yeah, Silent Chick Who Happens To Be There (aka: your avatar).

If you follow the story from then on, you’re avatar is there at the end of every cutscene, standing there and saying nothing while everyone else talks. Of course what everyone else says is kind of stupid, especially as we’re running around.  Wine Delivery Dude complains we’re not going the right way; Unrequited-Love Girl complains that it’s hot in the desert; and Old Grumpy Mentor tells them to shut up and get moving, we don’t have time for this shit.

I decided then, to do a quest. They opened up and I could join the adventurer’s guild and go do something else. And here’s where White Knight Chronicles steps out of it’s cliche and off a cliff.  I went in to do a quest, and was suddenly alone.  This time, at least, I was my Avatar, but by then, even more skewed to being a mage, and certianly not to being alone.  Oh, the deal is quests are designed to be multiplayer. For extra bonus annoying points, they are also timed.

There’s a lot geared in the game to the multiplayer content. Quests, your town which you can waste spend gold on, I suspect there’s going to be real money stuff you can buy too.  I died a lot doing my quest, which I was under powered for by myself.  I’m much higher level now, but  since the surprise end bosses are to giant ones, I don’t know how I’ll manage with two. I could barely stand up long enough to fight the first time.

I still wasn’t completly discouraged at this point.  I hadn’t gotten to crafting yet, and that’s about the point that you’ve got most of the tools you need to play a JRPG (technically, you usually go everywhere, then get a ship to allow you to travel faster, and then it opens up, but crafting is a good place to define the cut).  The quest to get crafting was ridiculous.

Not silly or funny, although I suspect that was the intent.  You deliver a love message to someone who turns out to be a monster, only to return (with a response letter, mind) to discover that the person you were acting on behalf of was married. Someone in your party knew this, and didn’t mention it.  You then get roped into the lie because you need a pass to go out the other gate of the city.  Yeah, a pass.

In other words, a totally contrived plot door makes me run through one of the more stupid (and from where I sit, kidn of offensive) plots.  Oh, and the Don (the very large guy who sent the letter) knows how to meld items together to make new ones.  Okay.  He has shops everywhere, and now (for a fee) you can use them.  Why did I go through this, again?  I saved, quit the game, and popped the disc out and ranted to Tam while I stuffed it back into it’s GameFly envelope.

I realize that there are people who work hard at making these games. They spend hours and hours doing writing, coding, deisgn, 3D modelling, voice acting, rendering and all that. This quest probably took a team two or three weeks — or more — to write and do (it was a small one, but still).  Did no one look up and say, “This is stupid. And not funny?”  I kind of feel sad for those people who worked so hard on something so very stupid.

There are good ideas in here. I like having a customizable avatar! I don’t like being supernumerary in every way (to the point that i’m not longer controlling my Avatar, which is a freaking misnomer.) Online co-op play is good (not as good as couch co-op, but yay!.  Having it be a separate thing entirely from the game, but embedded within the game? Not so good.

I’m actually kind of angry with it, but then I don’t like lying (particularly in the space of relationships).  The heteronormative cheating crap gets on my nerves a lot.  But even allowing for my own strong bias, the whole things was silly and contrived.  I’m done with my rant now, and the game is in the mail.

So, like a few other games, this first impression is almost certainly also a last impression.

Most of my code errors these days come from syntax errors, and a few come from overall logic errors.  A very very few come from not understanding something about a new library. The former are caught by Chrome’s developer panel, the logic errors are pretty obvious: things where a character moves left instead of right (this actually happened).   The latter error can be really hard to fathom, as it’s something not in my code, per se, but in my understanding. I couldn’t get a graphic to display, and didn’t understand I hadn’t callled startGame() yet. Which is required by the library.

Otherwise it just quietly does nothing, exactly like I told it to.   And that’s a minor example of coding under a timeline.  I was going to come back to it, but I wound up working on some other things, and generally feeling kind of stupid about it. I’ll work on the game (I think it’s an interesting, if not revolutionary idea), but I was annoyed, and my computer is acting up according to plan.

I think, above all, that’s what’s bugging me today.  We’ve been money tight since January (and isn’t everyone a little tight around Christmas?), so I haven’t bought the copy of win7 to replace my release candidate. My computer will shut itself down sometime tonight.  While I have more than one computer, and beyond PC Games, there’s not much I use it for, it still has the power to make me grumpy.  We’re going to try to buy the OS next payday (which isn’t far, since I get paid weekly).  Still it made me not want to sit at my computer and do things like program games.

Feh, I say. Feh!

I did get my DresdenFiles RPG Origin’s game sent off to the proper folks.  I got my linux machine back online (it used to run this blog, but no longer).  I have some gaming plans for that, but they’re still working out.  I need a really long USB cord to run from that PC to my couch — anyone know how long a USB can be before degrading?

I’m a bit rambly this morning, I know.  I played a bit of Overlord II this weekend, and got White Knight Chronicles from GameFly.  I’m still formulating my thoughts about this one, but expect a First Impressions post soon. Borderlands, hopefully, will be here later this week; Girl and I are going to try out the co-op modes on this one.  Hopefully they’ll work well on the couch.

I’m feeling that bit of winter blah today.  It snowed again this weekend, but this week i’ll be warm enough for that stuff to start melting, and I’ll get a bit of color back in my world.   That probably explains the tone of my post today.  I owe you a self-indulgent character diary from Friday, so maybe I’ll do a couple of those this week.

I’m feeling the need to tell stories.

I’d just managed to get Cole and Trish back together by being particularly good. She respected me, we were getting back together “after this is all over.” Then the villain decides to ramp things up, and make them much more personal. You run around town saving people, barely making it to the next choice, but you have to do it, he’s got Trish held captive, and is going to kill her if you don’t.

You finally catch up to him, and he’s set up two bombs. One has six doctors, the other has Trish. The game flashes up it’s overdone/overdramatic dual choice: save Trish and be evil, save the doctors and be good. (Trish is a medical professional, so it’s not like saving her is strictly Evil, but this game seems to equate Evil with selfishness.)

The choice was easy for me, as Trish would want me to save the doctors, and at that point I felt that I cared more about what she thought of me than having her.   She is, effectively, the good moral compass for your character.  How well this works is questionable, as some of my later research implies that she’s not well liked or established. My playthrough latched onto her, perhaps because I identified with her grief and anger, and saw it as a natural process. Miss that though, and she’s capricious and annoying.

Happy with the movie that played after saving the doctors, and getting absolution from Trish, I continued on the game.  Last night, I finished it.  The in-game movie ending describes how the villain had killed Trish in order to make you a better hero made sense, but it had my mind working a bit.  That might not have happened, right? I might have saved Trish?

That interested the programmer in me, so I did a bit of research both on the two endings (good vs evil) and on the different ways the Trish Vs Doctors mission works out.  The developers of the game set up a Magician’s Choice with this mission.

For those not familiar with it, it’s a card force technique where you change what you do based on the choice of the audience assistant.  If you have two cards, one in your left and one on your right, and you want to be certain that the assisatant gets the one in your right, you have them pick a card.  If they pick the left hand card you say, “Okay, I’ll keep the one you picked,” and hand them the right card.  If they pick the right card, you just hand it to them, “Here’s the card you picked!”

This is a great trick when everyone knows what the card is except for the assistant, and if you do it well and quickly enough, it looks like the assistant picked the card, when instead you’ve guided them to it all along.

With the Trish vs Doctors mission, if you pick the Doctors, Trish is on the other building, and dies.  If you pick Trish, then the woman on Trish’s building is a fake, and Trish is on the building with the Doctors, and dies.  This is against the simulationist in me, and we can argue about how the villain knows which you’ll pick, but the truth is, the story makes sense either way, but not both ways.

I’d have never realized it, if they hadn’t mentioned it in the endgame movie, and I consequently wondered if there were other versions of the movie.  So very few of your decisions affected the game that I was surprised that they would change that bit of movie for more than one possibility.  If they had modified things more, I might have bought it, but as it was, I didn’t see it.  Maybe I’m a victim of my on analyzing here, but maybe it’s a poor technique overall.

Ultimately, I’m not sure why there are so many stupid choices.  Evil here is selfish and apathetic, not actively bad (based on the choices I was given).  I would say it was also brutal, but even good was brutal in this game, if only so that good can survive.  The choice mechanic is the weakest thing in this game — and the fact that it can be replayed as an opposing alignment also undercuts the Trish vs Doctors mission by showing their hand a bit too clearly.

Infamous is a decent game, a good game but not a great one. I’m glad to have played it, but I don’t think it’ll make it’s mark on me beyond how not to do a morality system.  It’s not that morality systems are inherently bad, but I can think of a better way to manage one in this game that would have been more satisfying.

I guess that’s a worthwhile take-away if nothing else.

Duncan proved to be a good, and understanding, travelling companion. The trip from the Circle Tower to Ostagar was not a quick one, and I quickly had to learn many things that I’d never had to bother with inside the tower. How to make a campfire (aided somewhat by my elemental magics) as well as how to catch and cook game, and how to set up a tent. Thankfully, Duncan had some idea what sort of person he was getting, and he assured me my skills as a mage would more than balance any lack of fieldcraft.

About the Grey Wardens he said little, except for their mission. How fighting darkspawn was accomplished, or why Grey Wardens were more adept at it he was loathe to comment. He obviously kept his own council well, and I respected that. His mind reminded me of the First Enchanters, cagey and devious. But where Irving had been focused inward, to the Circle and Chantry, Duncan’s mind was focused like an arrow on the destruction of the darkspawn and protection of Ferelden, and all the lands of world.

I found some comfort in this familiarity. If I was trading one master for another, perhaps one with more focus would be better. Duncan would take care of his people, I knew, if only because they were weapons against his primary enemy.

During our journey to Ostagar, Duncan kept his own counsel. We did discuss the role of the Grey Wardens, but only in general terms, and not the particular details.  He did teach me a great deal about basic fieldcraft, and had a certain amount of patience for me, as I’ve lived inside the tower all my life, and had little practical knowledge of the outside world.

Upon arrival at Ostagar, I met the King! I was amazed at his personableness, although it was obvious he held the Grey Wardens in high esteem.  This, I felt was a good thing.  I would be joining them, and what better leader to aspire to than the King himself? Duncan was reticent, and concerned that there was more at stake than the King believed, but I could hear the care with which he picked his words.  I hope to learn from him in this, as diplomacy seems to be one of the Grey Wardens’ more common tasks.

Duncan gave me leave to the camp and I wandered a bit until I found Alistair, who was having a hard time with a Circle Mage.  I watched bemused, then we talked for a bit. He was ex-Templar, and therefore ex-Chantry.  He didn’t seem to care that much about the Chantry or their beliefs, though, which relieved me a bit.  I wasn’t sure I liked him, but he was a Grey Warden, and my guide.

We gathered up the other candidates, and got our task from Duncan.  We had to gather some materials from the Wilds, and find some old contracts.  I was also looking for some herbs, both for my own potion making, and for one of the dogs which was suffering from a darkspawn attack.

I hadn’t thought much about the darkspawn through this process. They were our enemy as Wardens, but I’d never seen one.  Chantry legend is that they were created by ancient Mages, which is as good a theory as any, I guess. Maybe I could learn more through my work with the Wardens.  I still didn’t believe the gift of magic was really a curse.

Our mission was essentially successful, although when we arrived at the magical preserved and sealedchest, we found it magically looted and gone.  At that point someone who may or may not have been a “Witch of the Wilds” showed up.  Alistair and the other two compatriots seemed pretty concerned about who she might be.  I spent most of my time trying to figure out how her top stayed on.  The remainder of that time I spent ogling the parts her top didn’t cover.  I know, not very Grey Warden of me.  For once I regretted such a sheltered life.  Certainly Circle Mages never wore anything quite like that.

She took us back to her mother’s place, and the guys all freaked out over the woman, someone named Flemeth.  I should have probably paid more attention.  I certainly know how to concentrate and focus better than I did at that moment.  Flemeth finally asked me what I thought of everything, and I just told her I didn’t know, because, honestly, I hadn’t been paying attention.  She seemed to think this was really wise, and that made me let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding.

We took our documents and made our leave.  We had things to do back at camp, and Grey Wardens to become.  I don’t know what this thing is that Duncan wants to do, but I’ll write about that the next time, as well as what we plan to do for the defense of Ostragar

I’d hoped to get past Ostagar with this post, but I’m still introducing things, and developing Chelon. Next week I should catch up and pass my current play point. Which means I can play again this weekend, this time taking freaking notes.

I did the same thing a long time ago, my friend Jason and I planned to see several underwater horror movies.  We went to see Leviathan and Deep Star Six both of which were craptacular movies that had Jason apologizing for even suggesting them. When The Abyss came out, we’d both had enough and skipped it entirely.  On the other hand, it meant that the first time I saw The Abyss it was the extended director’s cut, which had a much clearer ending.  Still, it’s the one I’d see in the theaters if I had to do it over.

While the horrors of Leviathan and Deep Star Six were pretty obvious compared to The Abyss, I’m struggling with what makes inFAMOUS different.  I know that I want to play and finish it.  I can only list a couple of things that really annoy me about it, but I can’t list anything that’s particularly amazing about it.  I suspect that that’s the main issue at work here:  it isn’t a great game, but it is a good, solid game.

In Infamous (I’m dropping the ridiculous spelling now) you play as Cole, someone who survives a horrible accident.  You later learn that he was duped into creating the explosion that also gave him powers based on electricity.  He lives in Empire City, a metropolis which is both isolated form the the outside by a quarantine enforced by the military, but also the three islands are separated from each other.

Play involves a mix of fighting using your electricity powers, and climbing buildings, and running around rooftops.  The parkour here is less fluid than Assassin’s Creed, since you have to perform the various jumps and drops yourself, instead of just entering a climbing mode and pressing up or forward. It’s much easier than, Mirror’s Edge as Cole sticks to everything a bit too well (the first of my complaints) and is therefore much less precise, and more forgiving.  You aren’t plummeting to your death here, ever, but you might lose some progress because the stickiness over- or under- applies.

There are main and side missions, items to collect (which, I discovered show up on your radar only after over ~10 hours of playing). The characters you interact with, friends, allies and enemies talk to you on your cell phone (or in your head), giving you story as you’re moving around the open world.

There is also a binary morality system.  This would be my second, and larger complaint.   In fact, it was someone’s post on Infamous that provided part of the spark for the Transgression posts.  The argument of that poster (I have, unfortunately, lost the link) is that by giving the player specifically good and evil choices, the game condones the choices and reduces the fun of being bad (since it’s accepted).  Obviously, I disagree, since there is a larger (and in-game) world that provides for this kind of feedback.

I’m not going to talk a lot about Infamous in terms of transgression yet, as I’ve not even tried the evil options yet.  Certainly being good in the game doesn’t feel like a transgression, despite the fact I’m someone I won’t ever be.  That’s certainly not where the fun comes from, and in fact, I think Infamous would have been a much better game without the morality system altogether.  Give us a character with wants and needs (he has these, and they seem out of line of being evil), and let us follow that.  It’s obvious to me from the Assassin’s Creed games that you can have an open world game with an essentially linear plot and have it work.

Part of what does make Infamous work, however, is that Cole is uniquely suited to his environment.  The modern world is filled with electricity, and it both powers, heals, and sustains Cole. One of the challenges he has to deal with is the power being turned off, and losing that lifeline that he’s used to. The game then turns the fixing of that into a chance to give him more powers, as well as a mini tutorial on how to use the new power.  I’m well over 2/3 of the way through the game and I don’t have all the powers yet.  This seems appropriate to me (but then I didn’t see AC2 as one long tutorial, either.)

In fact, this game uses a very Zelda-like structure, minus ‘dungeons’. Go into a new ‘dark’ area, bring back the electricity, do story and side missions there, and then move on to the next area. You return when you’ve opened up some new types of missions, until the area is complete — something that is also optional.

The combat is a combination of first and third person, mainly because so much of it is ranged.  That’s the hardest part for me, and I died more often in Infamous than I did in the same amount of time in Bayonetta. Dying doesn’t have a huge penalty, merely setting you back to a nearby clinic, or the start of a mission (or for longer missions, a mission checkpoint).  Mission failure is treated like dying, so I rarely felt I was being punished by the game (there were a couple of larger monster fights that took some time to figure out how to defeat them, which resulted in repeated deaths).

I’m close to the end of this game, so I’ll be keeping it until I’m done, I think, a few more days.  Then I suspect I’ll have more to say about it, and transgression. Probably next week sometime.