Just noticed that we topped 20K page views a very short while ago, which is convenient because neither Pike nor I have the first freaking clue for a blog topic today so I’ll just take this opportunity to profusely thank all our readers and commenters! You guys are quite wonderful and it is altogether too satisfying to watch those little numbers of page views and subscribers rise, and to get emails notifying me of comments made on my posts etc.
So yes, thank you very much, from both of us! I didn't know what image to use so I used Pinkie Pie as a human not knowing what to do about my not knowing what to do and oh no I've gone cross-eyed
I suppose it is expected that I at least mention videogames on our My Little Pony image blog, yes? Well, I’ve been playing a ton of SimCity 4 the last few days and I had an interesting experience. Last night when I was finishing it up I looked around what I had wrought and thought “Yeah, that’s okay.” This morning when I went back to it, I thought “Oh wow, I am some sort of urban designing genius, this looks great!” I wonder what caused this discrepancy? Do you guys find you can feel differently about stuff like that if you give it some time, or are you more likely to feel it’s worse than you originally thought, as I generally am? Also if anyone’s interested I might provide a few screenshots as I go along! Not now though. Because I have none to hand and the game takes forever to load when your mod folder is three times the size of the game itself.
Also playing through Human Revolution, which is brilliant, and waiting for Dead Island, which sadly doesn’t look like it’s going to be the horrorfest I originally hoped for but does nevertheless have the potential, I think, to be an enjoyable zombie-slaying romp. And there’s always Project Zomboid for real zombie survival stuff!
Please note this post will contain spoilers for Breath of Fire III.
As you may recall, I’ve been playing through Breath of Fire III lately. Well, last night I got to the end of it, and I did something I never have in the other times I played it – I chose the ‘bad’ ending. What you’re intended to do is fight and overthrow the Goddess, who is keeping the world in a static place, in the belief that change can only make things even worse. There are hints of this throughout the latter part of the game, and she admits as much herself – but in my adulthood I’ve found her case rather more seriously presented, and compelling, than I did when I played through when I was much younger.
Now, to be clear, the game suffers from what I would suggest are poor writing decisions. One of the characters is implicated as being very much more important than you presume, but they only actually reveal this when you are talking with the final boss before deciding whether to acquiesce or to fight. Therefore I can as a player understand it all and deduce that this character is probably speaking sensibly – but it should be rather less convincing to my character. Indeed, some of the other reactions to what they learn in the very last room of the game are a bit weak as well, though it’s somewhat more forgivable because the characters really couldn’t have time to develop more complex opinions at that point.
Also because one of the characters is still a freaking onion
It got me thinking about it all though. The ‘bad’ ending isn’t really presented as being all that terrible, as long as you keep in mind what the characters know rather than what you know about tropes. And what the Goddess said about the possibilities of the alternative mean it’s quite believable that they would be happy enough with the outcome. Despite this it feels a bit lacking – it’s clearly the “bad” ending because if nothing else, there’s a good deal less to it than the “good”. A lot of games seem to suffer from this sort of thing; sometimes an alternative ending is acceptably given less time, or is quite clearly the worse option to take, and very often it’s not left up to the player to fully decide whether their course of action was right. Games try to do this sort of thing, and for many “player choice” and the like is very vaunted, but a JRPG nearly 15 years old seems to make a better stab at actual ambiguity and leaving it to the player to decide the worth of what they did than a lot of modern ones with their binary DOUBLE GANDHI/EVIL LINCOLN dichotomy.
These days I would normally load up a save towards the end of a game and see the other ending(s) just for completeness. I’ve decided not to with this playthrough. It feels satisfactory leaving it where it is.
Back when I was a WoW blogger, I made no secret of the fact that I played WoW on Linux. In fact, my main was level 70– the then-level cap– before she even saw daylight on a Windows system.
Since then, I’ve managed to wheedle a select few other games into working on Linux (Kubuntu 10.04 is my current distro, before you ask) as well. It’s not always the easiest thing in the world, since getting games to work on Linux often feels like trying to push two similarly charged magnets together– they just seem to repel each other– but sometimes you can pull it off.
Which makes Pinkie happy.
Here’s my advice if you want to try:
1.) If you play a lot of PC games, have a working Windows install somewhere, either on another computer or on another partition. This is because, let’s face it, you’re not going to get every game working on Linux. Heck, you’re doing really good if you get over half of them working on Linux. I’ve got a Windows partition on my computer which I’ll switch to when I want to play certain games.
2.) Check theWine AppDB. Wine is the name of the program you’ll probably be using to run your games with– there are other programs, as well, but they aren’t as widely used and I don’t know as much about them. The AppDB is an extensive catalog of what applications (mostly games) will run in Wine, sorted into groups based on how well they run. Note that the database isn’t definitive, as every individual computer setup will get you different results, but it will give you a good rough overview at how tough of a fight you’re up against. Use the search box at the top to find your program out of some 17,000 they’ve got cataloged in there.
3.) Install Wine. Pretty readily available on most distros these days; use Google to find the instructions for your specific distro. On Ubuntu it’s just a “sudo aptitude install wine” away. (Last I checked it was, anyway.)
4.) Install your program! How you accomplish this varies from program to program. If you have an .exe file available you should just be able to run it through Wine and it’ll install. You can find more application-specific or detailed instructions on Google.
5.) Run your program and see if it works!
6.) Mess with winecfg if it doesn’t work or if you have other issues. You can get to it by simply typing “winecfg” into a terminal. Mess with your settings. Audio settings are often going to make or break you so try different options there. Occasionally you’ll have Library overrides that you’ll have to tweak; the Wine AppDB comments will help you here.
…aaand that’s pretty much it. If you’re having trouble running your game, Google will often be your bible here, particularly for more popular games.
And now a small list of things that I’ve personally gotten to work in Wine on my Linux install:
World of Warcraft – runs flawlessly most of the time once you’ve got your settings and config file properly configured
Starcraft 2 – albeit with some sound issues
Civilization 4 – runs flawlessly after messing with some libraries in winecfg
SimCity 4 – Works fine; there are a couple of very minor graphical bugs
Most anything I’ve tried released by Valve, including: Portal, Half-Life 2, and the Steam program itself– all work with minimal problems
Age of Empires 2 – worked with few problems
Warcraft 3 – worked last time I tried, although it was a few years ago and I think there were some sound problems
And now a couple of other games that I don’t need Wine for!
Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri/Alien Crossfire – If you can get a hold of the old Linux-native version it will run perfectly on modern Linux distros with a bit of dedicated tweaking. I describe how I did it here.
Minecraft – Runs in java right from your desktop.
A whole bunch of indie games because making your games work on Linux is the “in” thing to do right now
So! As you can see, I’ve got a pretty good library available to me while on Linux. Granted, those aren’t the only games I play, so I’ve still got to switch over to Windows on occasion (Paradox I’m looking at you nice and hard now), but I think people are often surprised by what you can get on Linux.
In conclusion! Obviously this is all a bit more complicated than I make it sound in this very, very basic guide. If you want to try running games in Linux, you’ve got to be willing to spend some time on Google or various forums and you’ve also got to be willing to accept that it might not always work. You should also keep in mind that results vary from system to system. But Wine is getting better every day, Linux is getting more and more stable every day (the Ubuntu of today is hardly recognizable from the Ubuntu of years past when I first started), and I know that this subject continues to be one that people are interested in so I figured I’d toss up a quick post on it.
The other day Pike and myself were looking back with fondness on a certain videogame company. It was quite stunning, once we actually sat and talked about it, just how many games they were responsible for, and not just games, but true classics, things that defined – even created – genres.
Which company am I talking about? Well, which one came to your mind when you read the above? In this case we were discussing MicroProse, but there are quite a few companies which could have been mentioned here and all would fit; Bullfrog, Rare (Of old), Codemasters (ditto), Psygnosis, etc. (And these ones are just examples from the UK!)
Tally ho, chaps!
Where are the equivalent companies today? Who are even candidates? You can point to people who have had huge impact – Bungie for instance – but one series of FPS games, however brilliant and however influential, does not put them in the same league as these giants who bestrode the 80s and 90s. Nobody that I can think of today has the ability to put out X-Com, Transport Tycoon, Master of Orion, Civilization, and Rollercoaster Tycoon. Now, okay, you look at any of these companies and they tend to have something of a narrow focus, at least in the games that really stand out, but still, nobody today seems to come close, regardless of focus. Maybe Blizzard and Valve, but the former seems to be determined to fall from grace, and the latter hasn’t released something that isn’t a hat since the Bally Astrocade was new. I’m not trying to say there are no good companies anymore or anything, but none seem to really have the scope and grandeur of some of these old-timers we so fondly remember.
Who is your favorite game company of yesteryear? Am I overlooking someone modern?
Games are ubiquitous. I don’t know if they’ve quite eclipsed movies and TV as the world’s entertainment medium of choice but they’re certainly close. Pretty much everyone plays games, to a greater or lesser extent.
Which is why I think it’s slightly unusual that a.) people tend to refer to “the gaming community” as a whole, and b.) tend to position it as something weird/edgy/underground/geeky/pick your adjective.
Now don’t get me wrong– gaming communities exist. Obviously. These, however, tend to be focused on a game or series, a genre, or a company. Or they’re centered around some other sort of common ground: a blogosphere, an idea, or what-have-you.
These communities have one base thing in common– a passion for games– but after that, you’re dealing with a very wide range of individual people with differences in opinion, taste, and so forth. And I think that sometimes, everyone forgets this. Players forget this. Companies forget this. The “non-gaming world” (as it exists) forgets this.
Just as one can’t make sweeping generalizations about any group of people, one cannot make sweeping generalizations about “gamers”. For example, not all gamers like DLC and microtransactions– but not all gamers hate those, either. Some like them a great deal. Some have complex opinions on them.
Likewise, not all gamers play Call of Duty or WoW or TF2, but some do. Not all gamers dress up and go to cons, but some do. Not all gamers think Portal jokes are still funny, but some do.
And now the obligatory pony image.
When you have a group of people that is this diverse in tastes and interests, you’re going to have a lot of differences in both opinion and background. And that’s a beautiful thing. Unfortunately, stereotypes exist, and so depending on who you ask, “gamers” all do this or “gamers” all want that. Even we, as game players, are guilty of making these generalizations sometimes. It’s okay, it’s a part of human nature. But I think the world as a whole would do well to try to remember that it’s a bit more complicated than that.
…anyways, not sure where I was going with that. I just thought it might be an interesting subject to toss around. I will tell you one thing that all these different communities have in common, though: friendships (and more) are forged in them. Heck, Mister Adequate and I met on a video game forum seven years ago, which explains how a couple of kids on opposite sides of the pond got together in the first place.
So recently, I’ve been playing through Breath of Fire III again. It’s not the best game ever made, it might not even be the best BoF (II is pretty damned great after all), but it really is simply, good old-fashioned fun that just emanates nostalgia from every orifice. I’m just going to copy-paste what Pike said in her SMRPG post:
a relic of a different time: a time when RPGs weren’t about who has the fanciest cutscenes or who has the most photorealistic hair or who has the most immersive fantasy world. Rather, they were about traveling from weird town to even weirder town, beating up random enemies for gear, and saving the world. No nonsense. Just beating the big bad guy at the end with all of the epic loot that you had to cross the universe to find.
It sums it up pretty well. One of my party members is an ambulatory onion mutant thing.
He's also the toughest sumbitch in the game
It’s all around just a solid, fun game that knows what it is, doesn’t try to hide it, but sometimes throws something subversive in that makes you stop and think “Wait a second…”. Like when you come across the disabled guy who has been placed in a chair by a window, the sun streaming in. He just mumbles, but if you talk to another person in the room you learn that he was injured in an attack by a dragon years earlier. That is to say, he was one of the first people in the game you fought, and he was just a guy doing his job, mining to make his living. Every so often it’ll hit you with something like that, something brutal or just a bit cruel, never hammering it into you too hard, just letting you think about it.
Starcraft 2 is a popular game, to make an understatement. I can go to pretty much any video game blog/forum/message board/whatever and people will be talking about it.
I think a lot of this is due to the huge meta-game that surrounds it. The tournaments, the websites, the streams, the wikis, and of course, all of that terminology.
I… don’t follow any of it. I’ve nothing against it, at all– it’s just not something I do.
It’s sort of weird, though. I’ve been playing Starcraft, oftentimes religiously, for over ten years. And yet, I don’t have a clue what people are talking about 75% the time when I wander into the middle of most SC2 discussions these days.
My exact reaction when I wander into an SC2 discussion.
So I tend to stay out of the discussions, and when I do occasionally play SC or SC2, I play the way I always have played Starcraft, or most RTS games, for that matter. Scout around. Expand. Build up a defense. Build up an offense. Troll the other guy a bit. Attack. Profit! That’s my strategy. It seems to work out okay. I don’t often play online, but when I do, I can hold my own.
So when I see people dissecting every move the Korean pros make and then getting nervous about trying to do it themselves, I shrug and go back to making a boatload of dragoons (or whatever they’re called these days, I know they renamed them), dark templars and observers. You’d be surprised how well that works. Sure, it’s not gonna beat any Koreans, but I’m not trying to.
So yeah. I’m Pike, and I’m a strategy game fan and a Starcraft fan, and I have no IDEA what any of you hardcore SC2 guys are talking about. We’re still friends, right?
No, I really did. A couple of nights ago, I had a dream wherein I played a remake of X-Com. Let me tell you about it.
This was my reaction when I woke up.
It was in glorious 3-D, still intended to be played as an isometric game, but you could move the camera around freely and stuff, and when you took a shot it would sometimes go into an over-the-shoulder camera or something (Think Fallout’s VATS camera, used fairly sparingly). It was turn-based, but because the characters had little animations and stuff based on what was going on it felt extremely active and fast-moving (e.g. ducking at the sound of gunfire, kneeling behind nearby cover, etc. – kind of how Company of Heroes does things). Also, though the basic calculations seemed to remain very similar to the original, your guy and an alien would look like they were having a firefight, and others on the field would give supporting fire which I don’t think actually hit anyone, but which could give some bonuses and stuff? Also it seemed like you almost always had reaction fire when fired upon, and your chance of success in that was determined by your remaining TUs. A character with 0 would just spray’n’pray and have maybe a 1% chance of hitting, but the added effects of it all really contributed to a sense of combat.
I only dreamed one mission, in which I had downed an enemy UFO and was doing the usual cleanup. As it turned out it was on the edge of a medium-sized town; the UFO was crashed in the forest and we had to fight through that, but several aliens had retreated into the town itself and were holed up there, meaning I had to chase them into it. The map was huge, but you could get around by commandeering vehicles and stuff; one of my guys rode into combat on a freaking motorcycle which promptly got blown right up by an alien grenade or something.
I was only fighting Sectoids, but they were really really vicious and tough to kill. It was a gloriously difficult fight and one which resulted in my guys getting slaughtered horribly. We finally made it through to the city streets; the civilians were inside, but a few bodies suggested they and the aliens had had a fight (At least one alien was dead in the city when I arrived, far from the crashed ship.) These last couple were really hellish to fight though, they just kept blowing my guys to hell no matter what I tried, it was obscene. Then they ran out of grenades or whatever and I won. Then I woke up, and I thought “Wow I can’t wait for this to come out!” and looked like Rarity, then I realized the horrible truth. And cried.
It’s every kid’s dream, isn’t it? Get a whole bunch of arcade machines, set them on freeplay, and put them in a dedicated room in your house? You know, alongside the vending machine that dispenses limitless candy and pop? You know you’ve had this fantasy.
I love arcade machines. I love how the way they look and how there’s art all over them. I love that they build a big fancy cabinet specific not just to playing games but to playing ONE GAME. These days it’s all the rage to make game consoles that double as Blu-ray players or internet browsers or whatever, but back in the day you had machines that played ONE GAME and there’s something great about that.
When I go to work, I pass a Chuck-E-Cheese’s that has these huge windows and you can see what’s inside. They have a ton of arcade games in there. None of the kids ever play them because they’re too busy climbing all over the slide/ball pit contraption they’ve got set up in there. Good for them, because ball pits are pretty great, but I feel kind of bad for the games. I’d give all the arcades a good home.
I know some people have actually made this dream come true and have a bunch of arcade games in their basement or whatever. I’m jealous. Have any of you guys actually done this?
I just want to make a very brief post to plug Troy Goodfellow’s National Characters series which he has recently completed over at Flash of Steel, a blog anyone interested in strategy games should keep up with. It’s essentially a look at how games implement different countries and civilizations, what this says about our perspectives, and what impact it has on games and gamers. It’s something to mull over on Sunday!
