My computer is a hulking six-year-old leviathan that is turning into more and more of an eldritch horror as the days go on. Recently it decided that it was no longer going to run my beloved Crusader Kings 2 without throwing a major fit. I’ve been going through several phases of emotions and actions since then, like a twisted grief cycle:
Denial
Trying the game four times in a row (each one resulting in a major crash)
Playing Sonic 2 while waiting for my computer to run fsck and dskchk
Reattempting Crusader Kings 2
Playing Sonic while I reinstall EVERYTHING because CK2 crashed again
Retrying CK2
Playing Victoria 2 when CK2 crashes again
Feeling dissatisfied with Vicky because it’s not The Sims Medieval CK2, and giving it another shot
Playing more Sonic while waiting for my computer to check itself again because it crashed again
And so forth. So… basically I never got past the denial stage.
Twilight: Me, Scootaloo: Anyone who knows me
Really, I think I just need a new computer. You know you’re having problems when a.) you can’t run a simple map-painting simulator game because it eats up all of your RAM, and b.) you can’t add more RAM because your computer throws a snitfit. Unfortunately getting a new computer is much easier said than done, especially when you’re busy saving for other things, so I’m trying to talk myself into playing other games while I wait.
…stay tuned for “Things Pike Does While Trying to Talk Herself Into Playing Games that Aren’t CK2.”
Well, it’s time to eat my words. I’ve been playing this since getting it on Friday (Thanks to the bizarre insistence on releasing games on a Friday here in Blighty) and I have to say, my impressions from the demo were pretty incredibly off the mark. This game is amazing so far. Weirdly the intro section is still very lightweight and relatively poor, and as you may know there is a HUGE backlash at BioWare regarding the very end of the game (I imagine I’ll write a post about that specifically at another time), but everything between that is solid gold.
Also, and very surprisingly, multiplayer has turned out to be very enjoyable as well. When I first heard they were including it I was surprised and dismayed – it seemed like a game where a tacked-on multiplayer was inevitable, and would take resources from other aspects, but it works very well and is very much a great way to spend some time with a couple of friends. The form it takes is that of a co-operative mode of up to four players, lasting for eleven rounds (Of which the final is to escape the area). On rounds three, six, and ten, you’ll have special objectives to meet; kill particular enemies, or defend a specific room, for example. Success gives great rewards whilst failure ends the mission there and then.
It doesn’t quite reach Gears of War levels of desperation and panic, but it is still excellent, as I said, and fully worth investigating if you’re not convinced of its merits so far.
Going back to single player now, the game isn’t without its flaws. Most specifically to me is that some of the choices from ME1 are handwaved away (One specific choice which should have significantly changed things here made me a bit annoyed when I saw it was ignored). Nonetheless things from ME2 are much more closely tied into this game and I’ve already had a notably different experience from friends at some parts. The spread of enemies is very narrow, but the ones which are there are extremely well-designed, detailed, and superb to fight.
Why does she need a gun? She can just stare a Reaper into going home.
The voice acting and writing is, for the most part, very good as well. My character is FULL RENEGADE and has been since ME1, but everything I’ve seen has been done well as a renegade – my choices are very rarely, if ever, needlessly unpleasant or cruel. They are, rather, cynical and stern, and the series has definitely come a long way in making these choices seem immediately serious and consequential. The ending, of course, destroys all this entirely, but that’s an aside. My character has done some truly atrocious things in this game and yet it makes sense and has had positive effects.
I’m not gonna lie: I never got around to playing much of the Assassin’s Creed series. While the premise looked interesting, it was never quite interesting enough for me to give it a shot.
Then Assassin’s Creed 3 was announced.
For starters, it takes place in colonial America. For those who aren’t aware, I am a major sucker for anything that takes place during this time period.
Look at this. LOOK AT THIS. I want to run around here forever.
Then, they started announcing several tantalizing details. Here is some select information from Game Informer:
“You will see the great fire of New York. You will visit Valley Forge as a location that is currently occupied by Washington’s forces. You will visit these places in the moment that they were important, and hopefully, experience the reason why we know where they are today. That’s the goal.”
Not all the Colonists will be cast as good people, and not all the British will be cast as evil oppressors. They’re trying to focus on how both the Assassins and Templars viewpoints exist in a gray morality as the Templars really believe they’re saving the world.
The wilderness traversal plays a big part in the gameplay in the Frontier, allowing you to use trees, cliffs, ledges, and more to set up kills and combat.
The world changes as time passes, so a field where a battle happened in one year may just be a series of empty encampments a few months later.
The entire world will change with seasons, so the cities and the wilderness will all exist in both Summer and Winter settings.
In the winter, soldiers will move slowly and stumble about in the snow, and lakes and rivers will freeze over allowing you to go new places. This gives Connor an extra advantage since he can still use the trees and wilderness pretty effectively during this time of year.
This is just a small sample of the stuff they’re talking about. Now I don’t know about you guys, but when you take all of the above stuff and toss it in a blender with some delicious Redcoat uniforms, you get Pike throwing her wallet at the screen and wondering why nothing is happening.
So, though there’s not a huge amount of information yet, the new SimCity looks like it has potential! Here is the good stuff we know so far:
Curved roads.
PC-only.*
Modding supported.
Launch Arcologies
And the GlassBox engine seems to have a great deal of potential for detail. Here is a link to a GamaSutra interview regarding it, and I’ll quote one of the most interesting parts. It may look a little intimidating if you’ve never seen code before but if you take a minute to read through it you’ll see it’s really rather simple and intuitive.
Here is an example of a unit rule, showing a chaining effect: as a sim consumes mustard, they create an empty bottle, which then adds to a city’s pollution. If mustard is unavailable, they then go buy more mustard.
unitRule mustardFactory
rate 10
global Simoleans in 1
local YellowMustard in 6
local EmptyBottle in 1
local BottleOfMustard out 1
Map rules are simpler than that. In this example, grass will grow only where there’s soil, water and nutrients, which are all depletable resources
Putting aside the amusing image of your Sims eating an entire bottle of mustard and nothing else for a meal, I don’t know if that is the actual way GlassBox stuff can be written, or if modders will have access to this side of the thing, but if it is it will be simple for modders to wrap their heads around but have a great deal of potential for changing how the game operates. It does sound like, hopefully, they are aiming to have a level of detail and fidelity that even SC4 fell far short of, and that in turn should help the development of natural looking cities.
If that still doesn’t make sense, take a look at these videos from the GDC giving some examples of how the engine works:
Of course these are early days. There’s a great many ways this game could go wrong, and there are already things I’m wary of, such as the DLC elements already announced, and how multiplayer is involved. Nonetheless, although rather cautiously, I do have a smidged of confidence that this game will be a worthy update to the series – and if it isn’t, that modders will be able to fix it! What do you all think of what we know so far?
*I have nothing against console games, it’s just that a game as complex as a good SimCity is something that no right-minded company should consider porting to a console.
A criticism I often see leveled at games and gaming is that it’s an “escape”. The idea is that, by immersing yourself in a game, you’re removing yourself from real life. Usually– though not always– there is often a sort of “hiding from your problems” undertone here. And is there a valid point here? Of course there is. One can escape into anything and games are not immune from this.
But what if an escape is good, sometimes?
Let me tell you all a little personal story. As you may or may not know, I have an anxiety disorder, and it’s one that is bad enough that I’m on meds and therapy for it. This disorder manifests itself in a few different ways, including panic attacks that strike at random and a never-ending undercurrent of worry. Aside from these, I’ve pinpointed a couple of specific triggers as well, one of which is being surrounded by people and having no escape route. I wish I could express how terrifying this is to me. I guess I’ll just say that when that feeling strikes, I’ve never felt more like the rabbit species that I frequently compare myself to.
I'm certainly not a very terrifying one.
To make things worse, I currently work in retail, where being surrounded by people is a given. Working weekends– the busy days– is hell, but nothing is more hellish than working during the holiday season, which basically feels like a neverending stream of weekends.
Where am I going with this? Well, let me tell you a bit about this last holiday season. It was about halfway into December and with just a couple of weeks left before Christmas, things were really starting to pick up. Going into work every day was utterly terrifying. We were understaffed, overworked, and I was surrounded by hundreds of squirming, loud, and demanding bodies coming from every direction. I think my anxiety must have been emanating from my brain and pouring out my ears. It was pretty rough. There is one thing that really kept me from completely losing it, though:
Skyrim.
See, Mister Adequate, sweetheart that he is, got it for me as an early Birthday/Christmas present, so I started playing it at right about the time that work was getting really bad. And for those few anxious weeks, it became my escape. I could come home from the worst, most anxiety-inducing day at work and bury myself in a beautiful world of near-solitude, wandering around and harvesting herbs and listening to the gentle flow of the rivers that crisscrossed Tamriel. Sometimes my mind would start to wander back to real life and to the impending next work day, but I soon learned to keep my mind “bounded” within the confines of the television screen, so to speak. If my thoughts wandered, I’d catch myself and refocus myself on the crisp visuals of the game and lose myself in them again. Skyrim taught me this skill, and I was able to use it to calm myself and keep my anxiety levels down even after the very worst days.
The game’s story, too, was therapeutic; this will sound remarkably cheesy but the truth is that thinking of myself as Dragonborn and of every day of work as a dragon to slay made going in so much easier than it would have been otherwise.
Just like this.
Well, to make a long story short, I survived the holidays and came out none the worse for wear. It’s March, now, and Christmas is long gone. I haven’t played Skyrim in a little while. In fact, I sort of fizzled out on it not long after the holidays were over. I’ve returned to my strategy games. In a way, though, I think of that game as a digital guardian angel which descended from the gaming gods to make sure I got through a rough period in my life alright, and then stepped back into the shadows once it saw that I’d be okay. It’ll be there if I need it again, just like all the other games which held my hand and guided me through rough and uncertain times in my life: Final Fantasy 6. Yoshi’s Island. Ocarina of Time.
Gaming is an escape, but sometimes it’s an escape you need more than anything else. And that’s a truth that this little bunny knows very well.
There is a big big BIG rumor going around right now that Maxis has got SimCity 5 in the works. Now as you may recall, Mr. Adequate and I are rather devout fans of this series, so upon hearing this we did some digging around and discovered this very roughly translated article (from German) as well as pictures which, from what we can tell, are concept art.
Very lovely concept art! (All dem delicious curvy roads)
Supposedly we’re going to get confirmation and more details in the coming weeks, so in the meantime all we can do is speculate and feverishly hope that this isn’t going to turn into Spore or SimCity Societies.
What do you want to see in SimCity 5? Besides more Arcologies, I mean. Because we always need more Arcologies.
Last night Mrs. Pike Adequate, co-blogger and better half of mine, were discussing the future possibility of creating, through arcane and unholy science, progeny of some manner. As is our wont the conversation turned towards videogames, and specifically how we would best go about educating Adequate II (Electric Boogaloo) in the history thereof. The thing is that yes, anyone can just pick up a game today and have a good time, but this is an important artform and cultural expression to us, so we would want them to have a comprehensive and informative education. There are a huge number of classic games from back in the day, but unlike other artforms the constant advancement of gaming technology means some of them won’t be so readily picked as others; this is something we intend to avoid.
So far we have come up with the following policy. Beginning 1985 with the C64, the child will play every major console from the successive generations. They will be assigned a number of classic games of particular importance, and be allowed to choose a handful of electives per system as well. Once they have completed these, they will move on to the next console, until they reach the current generation of the day. They will also be playing PC games throughout this time, of course, keeping rough pace with the console generation they have reached. Only when they have achieved a sufficient knowledge of how gaming has developed, and of the classics of yesteryear, will they be getting any kind of contemporary system or game.
Now, the thing is that we want to demonstrate games that are important as well as ones that are good. It’s all very well making them play Strategy Games Throughout The Ages, but that’s not going to be broad and rounded enough – how will they understand why DooM was important, for example? So Pike and I need to come up with a list of games that had significance in the history of gaming, not only because they were good but because they were important, for whatever reason. And this is where you all come in, readers!
If they don't know Vvardenfell geography better than real-world geography, they're no child of mine!
What would you consider the canon required for a comprehensive gaming education? Not just those that are the best, or personal favorites, but ones which can be identified as important to the development of the field – perhaps even ones that can be argued to have harmed it? No matter how obvious it might seem, tell us what you would call essential, and if you feel inclined, tell us why!
Being a bit slow (due to playing a stupid amount of Paradox games) to get around to it, I just played the Mass Effect 3 demo. You may recall I recently said I was determined to see this through even if I wasn’t tremendously hopeful about it, but I’ve just cancelled my preorder on the ‘strength’ of the demo. I’ll get around to it sometime, I’m sure, but I’ve got no desire to pay a bunch of cashmoney for something so strikingly mediocre and unenjoyable.
Oh don’t get me wrong, seeing old faces like Wrex, Garrus, and Anderson was great. The Reapers attacking Earth looked pretty cool too (Though there was no sense of impact or weight to it; more on that in a moment), and I approved of… well actually no, those two things was about all I approved of. Everything else was standard and run-of-the-mill at best.
The controls are floaty and don’t respond as I wanted them to. Maybe I’m just getting too old for this, but I distinctly don’t remember having similar problems with 1 and 2. Here though I kept trying to do one thing, and another thing happened, such as diving out of cover into the open. Cue death of Shep. The graphics seemed weirdly low-res, maybe it was just to save space for the demo download but it wasn’t impressive. The weapons and combat is some of the most lacking in impact and weight since I played BioShock, a game that managed to make crushing skulls with a huge wrench feel uninspiring. And that was really the heart of it; everything else I could tolerate or forgive, but the combat was just so completely meritless, so downright unenjoyable, left me feeling so detached and removed from the action, that I just don’t think I can bring myself to play this anytime soon.
It does not, in short, make my mass erect.
Edit:
Last night I went and gave it another try, and I’m going to have to admit my judgment was a little premature. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still seeing quite a few problems, but the gameplay itself was definitely quite a bit more enjoyable now that I’ve played around with a couple of classes. In previous ME games I could grab any class and have a great time; that seems not to be the case here.
Lately I’ve been playing Super Mario RPG. This game is, as I’ve written before, one of my all-time favorites, and it gladdens me to see that, replaying it years later, I still love it.
One of the things I’ve noticed about it is how relentlessly upbeat the game is, between the happy music, happy visuals, and overall way that it doesn’t take itself too seriously. The result is a game that, almost unfailingly, cheers me up and puts me in a good mood. It’s really been helpful during these last couple of weeks where work is stressful and piling more hours on me. At least I can come home and play some Super Mario RPG and cheer up a bit.
In videogames, difficulty is a difficult thing to get right. It’s one of the reasons multiplayer is so popular after all; to date we’ve not come up with an AI that comes close to a human opponent, outside of chess at least. Now, it’s not hard to just make an enemy hit harder, have more health, or shoot with greater accuracy. Those things aren’t difficulty in a meaningful sense, but they do make the game harder.
Still, there’s not a lot original to say about this tendency to take the easy route and bump up the enemy’s pure abilities rather than their intelligence. What I want to talk about is a different aspect of AIs, which is something I’ve not seen often addressed, but which will ultimately be core in creating convincing enemies who are challenging, but can be defeated.
That aspect is making mistakes. Making believable mistakes, based on oversight, or failure to account for something by accident, and so on and so forth, rather than the result of glitches or the programmer’s failure to account for something. This may not seem like a huge concern while we’ve still got to figure out a way to be outwitted by the AI, but as we do get better at that this sort of thing is going to be crucial to correct for it in order to keep the game both fun and engaging.
A lot of victories in real conflicts are borne from taking advantage of mistakes the enemy makes. Sometimes this is a tactical error, sometimes strategic, and sometimes it’s more deeply rooted and occurs in the years before the war breaks out, when someone’s guess about the important factors of the next war prove to be incorrect. Oftentimes these things will be corrected over the course of the conflict, but sometimes not. In any event the point is that for the player to remain engaged and interested there can’t be an optimum strategy in all situations, which a ‘good’ AI would seemingly be prone towards, and which would thus force the same degree of efficiency from the player.
Of course in the real world there are all kinds of factors that are very hard to emulate. The Confederacy’s best option was probably a Fabian strategy – ceding land for time, and winning by attrition. But the political nature of the CSA meant that border states could not be sacrificed in such a fashion, and they had to be fought for (Well, except when McClellan was in charge of the Army of the Potomac, then not much of anything needed to be done by the Confederates). You can, to some extent, work with this in a game through mechanics like supply lines, dissent, and partisans, but it really has trouble with the nuances of the situation.
Had Lee had this little filly on his side, things would have been different.
Now, getting games to that stage would be a tall order of course. Nevertheless I think we could stand to start thinking about how AIs might make believable, varied mistakes. Things that an astute player can see and exploit, but which the AI might realize and fix very quickly as well. This isn’t a completely untried concept of course, Galactic Civilizations 2 is the obvious example of an AI being designed to do this sort of thing, and it’s a commendable attempt, especially because the AI is actually pretty darned smart without cheating. Halo likewise had some clever foes, for its day, and their dynamic nature meant mistakes on their part could emerge pretty naturally and an observant, smart player could exploit those very well.
What do you all think about this idea? Am I getting too far ahead of our current, braindead AIs, or is this something we should look towards?
