Category Archives: The Android’s Liberal Arts Degree (Meta/Critical)

The Android's Hardware (Tech), The Android's Liberal Arts Degree (Meta/Critical)

Significant Develapements

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I look at gaming currently and I look at gaming in the past and I just see such a big gulf in terms of how important the “big new things” are. Maybe I’m somewhat abalone in this but I just can’t work up a lot of excitement over recent developments. The iterative process of making computer hardware more powerful continues, as always, and is not used for terribly much aside from better graphics, as always. But I’m thinking specifically here about control schemes.

When I was but a lad, when there were only 151 Pokemon and arcades hadn’t quite died out yet, we were very impressed by the move to 3D and saw that it had potential. (Also screw Mario 64, Jumping Flash was the best 3D platformer ever.) But what was just as amazing was this newfangled thing called a DualShock, or more properly Analog control. We sometimes forget this today but there was a time when controllers did not have such things as analog sticks, just the D-pad and some buttons. Now it’s not like analog control itself was a new thing – heck, even Pong’s paddles probably count. Not to mention the PC joysticks and meese and trackballs, all commonplace at the time; but on consoles this was something else (If you mention the neGcon I will find you and punch you).

But Sony weren’t content with just having a new thing. No, they knew they needed something to show it off, to demonstrate why this new thing battered. They needed…

And now the true purpose of this post is revealed; Puns.

Ape Escape (Another platformer better than Mario 64 incidentally) wasn’t just a great game, and it wasn’t just a demented dose of Japan for my quaint British brain, it was a game that did – or at least convincingly pretended it did – something that you could not do without analog sticks. And that was the key. Not just selling a game that needed a DualShock controller to play, but one which showed you why you needed it, why it was a serious development that would influence games. So it did. Can you imagine a console today without analog controls? Everyone who didn’t already have it on the drawing board scrabbled to ape Sony. As for the cusomters, well, it might have cost a few squid to get the new controllers but tanks to Ape Escape it was demonstrated to be worth it.

See, this is what new motion controls have failed, and are failing, to do. They aren’t showing us what they can do that our existing schemes either outright cannot do, or can only do to a much lower standard (DooM was ported to the SNES remember, no analog there!). There are games which you can’t play without the motion controller but the few which seem to actually do anything that is both a) fundamentally new and b) fundamentally engaging. It doesn’t take a brain sturgeon to see all this! Actually, we can go back to the verboten neGcon here; it offered analog controls but who the heck even had one? Now the Wii and Kinect might be successful but that is very much more down to marketing than having an actual solid library of games backing them up. The few attempts to do something that can’t be done elsewhere, like Red Steel, just seem to consistently be macaquehanded.

Of course it’s not that these things don’t actually have some potential. Wired has covered some pretty amazing things done with the Kinect. They just aren’t getting translated into games like Ape Escape. This is a real shame because gibbon half a chance these new systems could actually be the revolutionary ones they are trouted as being; or at least be a very nice compliment to what we already have.

I’m so sorry but when the opportunity arises I can’t kelp myself, no matter how out of plaice the puns might be. I will try to keep them to a minimum but I can’t promise this will be the sole post packed to the gills with such awful puns! But I shall at least try to keep them to a minimum. Shall we agree to no fish puns on any day of the week, barramundi?

… Address all complaints to – ahem – Pike.

We're not foals. We know what the mane attraction of our blog is.
The Android's Liberal Arts Degree (Meta/Critical)

I think I had a revelation

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Not to turn this into Mr. Adequate’s Angry Blog Of Rage but…

You know how they’re destroying all our beloved old games with stupid remakes that have nothing to do with the original? FaceBook versions of complex strategy and simulation games? ‘XCOM’? Syndicate*? And so on?

We sit around whenever some such bastardized abomination is announced and wonder “Why”. Why are they doing this to our beloved SimCity? Well I think I’ve figured out one reason this happens. Now don’t get me wrong, a good chunk of it is still just because designers (And I’m looking at you Brian Reynolds) seem to not really grasp certain facts about their own game, such as the fact that nobody WANTS SMAC Effect, we want SMAC, the 4x. Otherwise it’s better left alone. Sometimes (And I’m looking at you Will Wright) they just go right off the deep end and decide that Spore needs to be an incredibly casual, cartoony disappointment instead of, you know, good. But these out-of-left-field revivals, the ones that come out of absolutely nowhere and do their best to destroy treasured memories? That I think I’ve got figured out.

I just spent 20 minutes looking for this picture so you better appreciate it

See, Pike (Because she actually takes pleasure in my suffering) linked me to this article. Now that’s a long and depressing read, but the gist of it is a guy who tells us all about why games aren’t about games anymore, but about reducing them to the most mechanistic profit possible. Now, we’re not opposed to profit here. I just think that it should be one among a number of considerations and that profit is best made through quality rather than microtransactions.

But anyway. That particular page I linked you to is what sparked my theory. See, the people making these games need monetary support. They have to go to investors, i.e. old dudes in suits, and explain to them why X is a good investment. And that’s not going to be easy because the old dudes will probably think gaming ended with Pac-Man and is still the exclusive preserve of 12 year old boys. So. What’s a prospective developer to do?

Well if you’re smart, you’d go in and say “We’ve got this videogame idea. The franchise already exists – in fact it’s 20 years old, has sold millions of copies, and is hugely critically acclaimed.” The suits won’t understand the nuances here – they’ll just see “Hey this is already a winner we just need to cash in”. It’s doing half the job for you. The players who actually played the old games don’t enter this equation at any time. It’s not a poor attempt to rouse interest through using a known name (Though they will tell the investors this will happen), that does not factor into this process until the thing is green lighted and the poor bastards in PR have to try and spin it.

Or am I just being a conspiratorial nutbird who should join the ranks of those who think we need to return to the gold standard and that the moon landing was faked?

*In this edit: I forget that I had intended to append something. Syndicate is being made by Starbreeze, so it’s likely to be a damned good game. Just not, you know… Syndicate. Maybe. Who knows.

The Android's Liberal Arts Degree (Meta/Critical)

Finishing Games

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I don’t remember the first game I ever played.

I do, however, remember the first game I ever beat. It was “The Lion King” for SNES, and I was about 10 or 11 years old… in other words, I’d already been playing games for nearly a decade by that point. (It was actually a pretty terrible ending, but it did feel good at the time.)

Since then, I can count the number of games I’ve actually played all the way through on, well– probably just a couple of hands. Ocarina of Time. Super Mario World. A handful of other platformers, like Yoshi’s Story. A few different RPGs. Mario Kart and Mario Kart 64. Goldeneye 007. Probably a few other racing and FPS games that I can’t think of off the top of my head.

Then you get to all the games I played a very great deal of and never actually beat. Sometimes it was because the game got genuinely very difficult– Banjo-Kazooie, I’m looking at you. Other times, I don’t know why I quit playing. I got bored, I guess. I have an FFTA save parked outside the final mission and I just never got around to beating it. Actually, I’m sure there are more games I’ve played to 90% than there are games that I’ve actually beaten.

It's an endless cycle of starting new games before I beat a previous one! An ENDLESS. CYCLE.

If you’re like this, then you’re not alone. According to a recent article, of all the people who started playing last year’s Game of the Year, Red Dead Redemption, only about 10% of them beat it. In fact, the article also says that game developers are actually making games with the thought in their head that most of their game’s players won’t see all of their carefully crafted content. What a bit of a sobering thought. Imagine writing a story and knowing that 90% of your readers won’t read through to the end.

I think there are a few different reasons why games have such a low completion rate. The fact that we’ve grown up is a big one. And I don’t mean that in a stereotypical “We’re too old for video games now” way. This is what I mean: Remember when you were a kid? You only got a few games a year, one or two for Christmas, one or two for your birthday, and maybe a couple others at special occasions throughout the year. “Someday,” you resolved to yourself, “I’m going to grow up and I’m going to buy SO MANY GAMES.” So then you grew up, got yourself an income, and did exactly what you said you were going to do. Which is great. Unfortunately, there are only 24 hours in a day. And you’re probably spending most of that time either sleeping or working.

And then you find yourself asking this.

Or perhaps your gaming tastes have changed a bit and now you mostly play stuff that doesn’t really “end” (MMOs, Minecraft) or you play games that can be played as a “match” in one relatively short session (Starcraft, Civilization, LoL, TF2, etc.)

For whatever reason or variety of reasons, though, people don’t beat a whole lot of games. I’ve acknowledged my own problem in this regard, and my current quest to either beat or re-beat as many Final Fantasy games as I can is part of a personal goal of mine to prove that I’ve still got what it takes to play a long game all the way through.

What about you guys? Do you have a backlog of games that you still need to beat?

The Android's Distracted Boss (Casual/Flash), The Android's Liberal Arts Degree (Meta/Critical)

I am legitimately angry about this and you should be too.

5 Comments

Games are no stranger to controversy. We’ve had Carmageddon, we’ve had Mortal Kombat, we’ve had Postal, and these are just games the media gets worked up about. Of course a lot of this is just nonsense, it may be crude but it boils down to “old people don’t get hip new things”. Or they tell outright lies. Then there’s things which actually warrant comment, such as Custer’s Revenge or Super Columbine Massacre RPG! Well we can add another one to that latter list, a list of games which probably warrant genuine criticism.

It is called Lady Popular. Kotaku has a writeup, but I will relate the gist of it here for those of you who are understandably averse to anything Gawker-related (Though it’s written by one of the Rock, Paper, Shotgun chaps so it’s not their usual drivel).

Lady Popular, explicitly billed as “A game for girls”, is a game where you play the role of a female. Or, a female in the bizarro reality-TV world that someone clearly conflates with real reality. Your first task to becoming a “smart, talented, and successful woman” is to move out of your parent’s house. You do this by completing three tasks. One is to rent an apartment – all fine and dandy so far.

The other two tasks are to get a haircut and to buy something at the mall. Getting haircuts and going shopping seems to be quite literally half of the stuff you can do in this alleged game.

But okay. Let’s stretch the definition of charitable beyond all reason and allow this. After all, people do give a lot of consideration to their appearance. It’s part of one’s identity. Being able to take care of such things and to make purchases is a part of being an adult, even if it’s not exactly up there with raising kids or paying off your mortgage. So we’ll allow it, because much worse is to follow.

An early objective sees you invited to a party. But oh no! You don’t have anyone to go with! Yes, a fundamental and early objective in this game is to seek a boyfriend. “But Mister Adequate!” you cry, “That may be poorly presented, but relationships are a part of growing up as well!” Yes, well. Put aside that acquiring a boyfriend is presented as a central objective to a young woman’s life – not as one part of it, not as an option among many options from abstinence to having many one-night-stands, not as something that tends to just happen when you meet someone you click with – a central objective without which her life literally cannot proceed – put that aside. Because do you know what happens when you do find a boyfriend?

Do you? Can you guess?

He gives you money.

Every day.

Us too, Twilight, us too.

He gives you a daily stipend. Although there are jobs in the game this appears to be a major source of income, and as far as I can gather you keep getting your girlfriend allowance as long as you’re dating someone. A core part of this game is literally to find a sugar daddy. Now I don’t know about anyone else, maybe things changed whilst I slumbered wreathed in fire beneath the earth for a hundred thousand years, but last time I checked the concept of a “successful woman” did not tend to involve finding a boyfriend for the sole purposes of attending parties and paying for your hairdressing and shopping needs. If you wanted one at all (Dear God can you imagine if these people tried to allow for lesbian relationships? That would be such a clusterfuck I’m glad they just plain pretended it doesn’t exist.) it was more about companionship, having fun together, and being a best friend. You know, equal parts of a whole. Maybe I have become the old fogey who doesn’t understand the hip kid way of doing things? But I doubt it. Of course this also means that the monetary success of the guy is THE major factor in his worthiness. Truly a good message to send to our young ladies in this straitened economic times, with unemployment rising around the world.

Another important objective, and one which seems to persist throughout the game, is to watch your weight. Now I’m a lazy neckbeard, so I freely admit that messages about good health tend to pass over my head unheeded, but this isn’t even that – this is just straight out “Remember that excessive weight loss or gain is not healthy and will make your lady unhappy”. Getting too fat will MAKE YOU UNHAPPY; this is presented not as a societal construct but a simple fact of reality.

I honestly cannot begin to fathom just who on Earth would come up with something like this, who would greenlight it, and who would program it and put the art assets and everything together. This game seems to be designed to travel back in time and kick Emmeline Pankhurst and Susan B. Anthony in the ovaries so hard their great-grandkids feel it.

Now for a palate cleanser. Something that has strong female characters with realistic flaws, motivations, and personalities, which is neither patronizing nor insulting. Something like…

Girls, you've got an important mission. You must save our fillies from this horrid thing!
The Android's Liberal Arts Degree (Meta/Critical), The Android's POG Collection (Retro), The Android's Sandbox (Sandbox/Open World)

Games as a Medium

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I’ve been thinking a little bit lately about using a game to, well… do something besides “play the game”. Here, I’ll tell you where I’m coming from. Back when I was little– six or seven years old or so– we had a game called The Railroad Works.

It looked like this.

The game was basically supposed to be a model train simulator, and it was divided into two different “segments”. The first segment involved building your train track and decorating it with various bits of scenery and the like that you were given, and then the second was playing a sort of proto-Railroad-Tycoon-esque game that involved taking goods from train station to train station and juggling schedules and whatnot.

If you think I ever played that second portion of the game, you’d be wrong.

The entire point of the game, to me, was to build the nicest, most picturesque scenic railroad route I could. There was no game strategy involved in where I placed my train stations and depots; there was only aesthetics. The game basically gave you several dozen grids (screens) on an overarching map and you could build in each of these grids and connect them, and so I made biomes and “zones” so to speak– here was the forest, here were the mountains, this was the farmland, this was the city.

Once I had finished constructing my masterpiece, I’d start the actual game proper, watch my train chug around my world for a few minutes, and then, satisfied, I’d quit. I didn’t have to play the actual game. The joy for me was in the creating.

This is similar to how a lot of people today play Minecraft. While Notch is busy trying to introduce things like dungeons and monsters, most people play the game either as a UI for virtual legos or as a pixel art program. You’d think, before you’ve tried it yourself, that this wouldn’t be as enthralling as it is. And then you try it and suddenly you can almost see why someone would spend weeks using Minecraft to recreate scenes from Pokemon.

This took me about an hour and a half yesterday; I can't even begin to comprehend how long that Pokemon animation must have taken.

I think it’s rather neat when people are able to take an open-ended game like that and do whatever they want with it. It usually adds more replay value than millions of optional sidequests/levels do, that’s for sure.

The Android's Liberal Arts Degree (Meta/Critical), The Android's Thinking Cap (Puzzle)

Foldit and Why This is Really Nothing New

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This has been making the rounds recently so I imagine a lot of you have already seen this, but if not, have a neat little news tidbit that one of our most ardent commenters, Bamos, reminded me of:

Basically, a bunch of researchers created a puzzle game, called Foldit, which is designed to simulate actual protein folding. The idea was that human players could come up with more interesting solutions to real life problems than the AI could.

This was recently proven true when scientists decided to put a particularly tricky puzzle in the game– a puzzle with an answer that had been evading researches for a decade. Ten days later, it was solved. The article itself explains it best, so let me quote a bit of it:

In the past year and a half, users of the program had demonstrated their potential to solve real protein-folding problems, Baker said, so when Jaskolski came to him with this enigmatic viral protease, they decided to put the gamers to the test. Baker posed the problem to the Foldit players, and watched the responses flood in.

About 600 players from 41 teams submitted more than 1.25 million solutions. Narrowing those down to 5,000, Jaskolski and colleagues subjected them to a computational technique called molecular replacement (MR), which tests the models against X-ray crystallography data. For MR to work, the proposed structure has to be very close to accurate, in which case the MR calculations can help perfect the details. But previous attempts at MR for this protein had failed because the protein models were too far off the mark.

But The Contender’s proposed protein structure was a winner. “When we took [their] model, it was a beautiful fit to the X-ray data so we knew [they] had solved it,” Baker said. “We were just totally blown away. This is the first time that a long-standing scientific problem has been solved by Foldit players, or to my knowledge, any scientific gaming participants.”

The final breakthrough came from Foldit user mimi, a member of The Contenders and a science technician at a high school near Manchester, UK, who has been playing Foldit for about 3 years. She “tucked in a flap” of the protein that was sticking out, she explains, to make the protein more “globular.” But she emphasizes that “the achievement was very much a group effort,” noting that it wasn’t possible for her to tuck in the flap until others in the group had made their key adjustments to the protein’s structure.

“It’s kind of an unprecedented case of using computing non-specialists to solve a longstanding scientific problem,” said Alexander Wlodawer, chief of the Macromolecular Crystallography Laboratory at the National Cancer Institute.

Scootaloo's face upon making the breakthrough

What I like here is that this isn’t just “gamers vs. scientists” or “real people vs. computer programs” or anything. It’s a lot of people (and AI) working in tandem to figure this stuff out. And this time, a game happened to be at the center of it.

The fact that gamers played an integral role here shouldn’t come as much of a shock to anyone who has spent a lot of time around Elitist Jerks, CivFanatics or SimCity Devotion. Heck, remember Magnasanti, brought to us by the guy who “beat” SimCity? Even little kids memorize hundreds of Pokemon and all the moves and combat details inherent to gameplay. Humans hate math and theories in school, but they sure do love it when they can apply it to a game. Perhaps because there’s a tangible feeling of mastery, or perhaps because it’s a competition. Maybe it’s just because it’s fun. Who knows? The point is that it works.

And so finally we have the news pointing out to the public what all of us who have grown up knee-deep in video game subcultures have known for a long time: that we’re all a bunch of anal-retentive nerds, and that this isn’t necessarily a bad trait.

Bring it on, science!

The Android's Favorites, The Android's Liberal Arts Degree (Meta/Critical)

Deus Ex: Human Revolution

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I like Deus Ex. And I liked Invisible War okay as well, as a game it wasn’t at all bad, it just looked bad next to Deus Ex. Because it’s one of the best games ever made.

So when there was news of another DX game on the way I was predictably skeptical. Might be an okay game, but it’s really not going to match the original. And I was pretty wrong about that. But the reason HR works is not because it has good, solid controls, not because it has developed characters and a good story, nor even because it offers several ways to pursue objectives. The reason it comes close to matching the original is something intangible, often overlooked, and always of great importance: Atmosphere.

The setting is amazing, now that I’ve been further than Detroit. In fact it took me about two minutes of walking around Heng Sha before I declared it one of my favorite game settings ever. Heng Sha is by far the magnum opus of HR in fact; a cyberpunk dystopia that hits all the right buttons. As RPS said, it’s not just night, it feels like it hasn’t been day in years (And in the Lower City that’s pretty much exactly true). It’s dirty and cramped, and hugely wealthy buildings sit beside apartments barely above corrugated-iron shanties. Above, monorails buzz around on the underside of the Pangu (The plate upon which the Upper City sits). You get a vista of the Lower City at one point and it is a scene straight from Blade Runner; clearly so full of hardship and suffering and matchlessly beautiful despite it.

Also known as the floof

Then you see the Upper City, and it is not just a nicer place, it is a completely different sci-fi aesthetic. It is clean, green, sleek, and searingly bright. It is definitively Utopian in style. Juxtapositions are generally nice and a pretty commonly used too but I’ve rarely seen one so well handled, even though your contact with the Upper City is limited. The buildings are pale and quintessentially futuristic, compared to the cyberpunk skyscrapers of the Lower City. There are parks and plazas everywhere; the biggest open space in the Lower City is a dirty rooftop.

Crystal Spires and Togas

This is what the original DX did so very well, and where IW was weak. This is where HR succeeds as well. It has been a long, long time since I’ve felt that palpable knot of excitement in my stomach that comes from just exploring somewhere awesome, but I felt it in Heng Sha. HR is a game that succeeds, and it’s because of the amount of attention paid to the details and the setting that elevates it from “good” to “memorable”.

Are you enjoying HR? Do you agree? Which game settings have really stuck with you thanks to being well executed?

The Android's Liberal Arts Degree (Meta/Critical), The Android's Universe in a Jar (Sim)

A Little Story For You All

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The other day Mister Adequate and I were on Sporcle doing quizzes together, which is a fun little pastime that we do on occasion. We had discovered the mother lode of strategy game related quizzes and were having a blast doing things like trying to name all the Civilization IV techs in 14 minutes and whatnot, and then we discovered one particular quiz that was called “Name Every Sim Game” or something.

So we took the quiz. We knew full well that we weren’t going to remember every single Sim game, but we wanted to see how well we would fare anyways, because we both have a huge soft spot for the Sim series. We did pretty well; we probably got about 75% or so, and then at the very end we eagerly went through to see which ones we had missed. It was standard stuff that we should’ve gotten; SimRefinery, Streets of SimCity, Sid Meier’s SimGolf…

…

…

Wait, what?

Sid Meier’s SimGolf.

Sid Meier’s SimGolf.

It’s actually a thing. That neither of us knew existed. Quickly we scoped out the Wikipedia article:

Sid Meier’s Sim Golf is a computer game created by Sid Meier, Firaxis, and Maxis in 2002.

Okay, so, let’s get this straight. Firaxis and Maxis got together. And made a game.

Firaxis and Maxis made a game together.

But instead of taking all the strategic turn-based depth of Civilization and combining it with the sandboxy micromanagement of SimCity to make the ultimate civilization simulator… they made a golf game.

Have a picture of our exact reaction.

And then we were confused for the rest of the day.

The end.

The Android's Horn-Rimmed Glasses (Indie), The Android's Liberal Arts Degree (Meta/Critical)

Rise of the Indies

5 Comments

In contrast to my post earlier this week, I’m now going to talk about the people out there who are making games “as they want to make them”, that is to say, indie developers.

To be clear on the definition, I’m just using Indie to mean a game which is made without the financial support of a publishing house or anything.

And if you don't like my definition, you can take it up with Fluttershy here.

This has created a pretty interesting model. Increasingly, Indie games are implementing a model whereby you can pay a small sum now, in the alpha or beta stage, and get all later updates for free even after the price increases. Minecraft is the foremost example of this, but we can also look at games like Project Zomboid or Overgrowth to see the same model. This has all kinds of benefits; it brings people in and generates an active base of players before the game is officially “out”, the players can fulfill the role of testers, can give feedback and advice (If the dev wants to listen, of course), and most importantly the early sales generate money that mean the game can actually continue to be developed.

The thing is, because these games are made by individuals or small teams, and thus have far lower overheads than triple-A titles like Gears of War or Modern Warfare, they can be far, far more experimental and unique. Sure, you get games like Katamari Damacy from the bigger houses but those are the exception rather than the rule. Indie devs have an easier time in this regard. I doubt you could sell the idea of Dwarf Fortress to EA or Sony and have it still resemble DF once it’s been minced by their focus groups and marketing and what have you. Hell, you can’t even get a decent version of long-running, successful franchises like SimCity anymore.

But indie developers can. They can make extremely complicated games, niche games, experimental games,

games that are banned in Germany,

games that look like spreadsheets, games like Mount and Blade or Kenshi or a zombie game where one bite infects you 100% of the time. Or that are Minecraft, but with a dimension removed.

Which isn’t to say that all indie games are classics and we should bow down and worship their creators. Just that I have an appreciation for them because of the freedom they are afforded, compared to big name publishers.

The Android's Favorites, The Android's Liberal Arts Degree (Meta/Critical)

Favorite Video Game Quotes

11 Comments

None of our readers will be remotely surprised to find out that most of my favorite quotes come from SMAC. I mean, really, were we expecting anything different? No. No we weren’t.

This is my all-time favorite quote:

I haven’t a clue why I love it so much. It tickles me in just the right way, though. I quote it on a near-daily basis (just ask Mister Adequate for confirmation on this.)

On a more serious note, have another quote from that game. I dare you to read it and not get chills:

I sit in my cubicle, here on the motherworld.
When I die, they will put my body in a box and
dispose of it in the cold ground.
And in all the million ages to come, I will never
breathe or laugh or twitch again.
So won’t you run and play with me here among the
teeming mass of humanity?
The universe has spared us this moment.

Anonymous

Beautiful, no?

Now it’s a little unfair to every other game to have have a blog post called “Favorite Video Game Quotes” and then spend the entire time lovingly quoting SMAC, much in the same way that it would be unfair to blog about the “Hottest Places in the Solar System” and then focus on the sun. So let’s talk about some other games.

For starters, Blizzard games have given us a multitude of memorable quotes, between “Stay a while and listen”, all the unit quotes from Starcraft/Warcraft, and, of course, so much stuff from WoW that I wouldn’t even know where to begin.

More recently, Deus Ex: Human Revolution has given us “I never asked for this”, another quote that I find hilarious for some reason.

This leads us to our obligatory pony image.

Video game writers have truly given us some great stuff, whether humorous or thought-provoking. What are some of your favorites?