Electronic House published my review of Sony’s Qore. Check it out, I need the page views!! 🙂
Category: Gaming
Bartle on games and politicians
Here’s a quote for you. Richard Bartle speaking out against the “self-righteous politicians and newspaper columnists” who “beat on computer games”:
Call them [gamers] social inadequates if you like, but when they have more friends in World of Warcraft than you have in your entire sad little booze-oriented culture of a real life…
Richard Bartle: Gamers have won the battle against the censors | guardian.co.uk
It’s a fun rant, but really nothing you don’t already know if you’re a gamer.
Virtual World meets real life?
Can anyone think of a practical use for this? I’m coming up blank, and it was apparently designed more as a social experiment than anything. Weird though.
Avatar Machine – Marc Owens’ wearable simulator of virtual worlds. – Boing Boing TV
Arcade Nostalgia
For the old-skool gamers among us, here’s a post that’ll take you back:
Coding Horror: Rediscovering Arcade Nostalgia
I really miss the days of (relatively) easy programming languages. You could make a simple game in Atari Basic pretty easily, and I spent countless hours typing in games from magazines (not easy on the Atari 400 chiklet keyboard!) and then tweaking/customizing them. Then saving them on cassette tape. Heh, frustrating good times.
Mudcraft
Here’s a pretty neat little indie game that I found thanks to Play This Thing (Greg Costikyan’s site).
Mudcraft is a real-time strategy game that challenges you to work with Mother Nature as you build a strong mud community while foregoing the violence associated with most RTS games. Mudcraft is a lighthearted game designed to be enjoyable to male and female players of all ages.
Technorati Tags: indie games, gaming
Playing Lately: Jeanne d’Arc (PSP)
I don’t often talk about gaming here, but I might start coming back to it since my other site (Jaded’s Pub) is awfully quiet these days.
Normally I’m an MMO junkie but every so often I burn out on the endlessness of those games and need to take up something more finite. Lately I’ve been doing just that with Jeanne d’Arc on the PSP.
Last fall I splurged and bought the PSP-2000 (or PSP Lite) and it’s made the PSP more enjoyable to use. First it’s lighter, for standard handheld gaming. But curiously enough, I really like the TV-out feature. I know the whole idea of TV-out on a handheld seems silly to a lot of people, but there are times when my eyes are just too strained to peer at the PSP screen, and blowing things up to TV-size means I can continue to play in comfort.
Anyway back to the game. The genre here is turn-based strategy-rpg, a la Tactics Ogre or Final Fantasy Tactics. It’s a genre I’ve always loved and as I get older I find I enjoy turn-based gaming more and more and action gaming less and less. The game follows, very loosely, the story of Joan of Arc…if France had been over-run by beastmen and wizards at the time.
There’s nothing really revolutionary here. Jeanne has a band of companions that keeps growing and growing, although battles are generally limited to 6 individuals at the max. You earn gold and skills during fights, and can spend the gold at shops to buy better arms and armor. Skills get equipped on your characters and offer either passive buffs or spells/actions that require Magic Points. After each battle, non-combatants get some exp too, so they don’t fall too far behind in levels.
I’m taking my time, trying to keep everyone leveled up. I don’t think this is really necessary, but the game is fun and relaxing and I’m in no hurry for it to be over. At any point you can backtrack and enter a “Free Combat” zone to get more experience, gold and skills, so I don’t have to worry about ending up gimped at the end of the game.
I can’t say the challenge level is very high, but my play-style has some impact on that, too. If I were pushing always-onward and never doing the Free Combats, I’m sure things would be more difficult. I have had a few tense battles and certain game mechanics (several of the characters can transform into uber-soldiers for a few turns) can really change the tide of battle drastically if used correctly, adding more fun to the game.
Granted I haven’t finished it, but I’m pretty confident giving Jeanne d’Arc a thumbs up. It’s been out for quite a while and has a metacritic rating of 87, so I’m not sticking my next out by saying its a decent game.
Techie Funk
I’ve been in a bit of a funk lately. Normally, my relaxation time is spent playing games or reading. Mostly playing games, and even more specifically, playing MMOs. But lately nothing is scratching the itch for me. I spend all day at work bored and wanting to go home. Then I get home and I’m bored and trying to find something to do that interests me.
I finally took the time to sit down and navel-gaze about this. First of all, why am I bored at work? Well that’s pretty clear: I have no challenges. I was hired for a position I’m quite over-qualified for, and rather than use my skills, my manager (who really has no technical savvy) has me doing busy-work. On the bright side, the pay is rotten.
And I think this revelation leads me to why I’m bored at home, too. My brain is starving and playing games, which used to be my recharge activity, is just starving it more.
So I’ve decided its time to let my geek flag fly again. I was thinking maybe instead of playing a game, I’d take a shot at creating a game. But what language to use? I write PHP at work these days, and I’m tempted to build some kind of web game, but maybe I need a change.
And then I happened upon this post at Raph Koster’s site: Raph’s Website » A letter to a 12-year-old It’s a fun read, but as kind of an offhand part of the post, Raph asks his audience: BTW, if you had to recommend a programming language to today’s 12-year-olds, what would it be?
Now I’m a good deal older than that, but often enough I can act like a 12-year old, so I was interested to see what people suggested. One of the things suggested was Alice, developed as a system to visually teach programming to kids. It’s pretty neat! Basically it uses methods that are tokenized into draggable widgets, and you ‘stack’ these up to give orders to a 3D avatar. From some of the examples it looks like you can do a lot more, with collision detection for gaming and so forth. I haven’t dug that far into it. To me it was more a curiosity than a tool I’d use (I think!) but it was well worth a look to anyone with a taste for geeky stuff.
Another option mentioned was PyGame which is some kind of game development toolkit based on Python. I’ve never taken the time to learn Python and have always been interested, so I might give that a look. Some kind of open source UO emulator called RunUO was mentioned as well, but I’m not sure if that requires a UO client or what. Another item to dig into I guess.
Lots to dig into, and I’m still not sure that a web-based PHP game isn’t what I want to do. I have a rough idea of the kind of game I want to make: a turn-based dungeon crawler of some kind.
Anyone have suggestions as to other ‘get up and running quickly’ game creation tools out there?
Rock Band vs Guitar Hero 3: Day 4, Finishing Up
Well, I’ve gotten pretty far away from actually comparing the two games at this point, but that alone is indicative of my personal preference. Tonight right after dinner I fired up Rock Band and played until my hands started to ache. Yeah, just a tad addicted.
I finished out the Easy Mode career and unlocked all the bonus songs, then started on a Medium Mode career. When I made the jump from Easy to Medium in Guitar Hero 3, the difference was crushing…I just couldn’t manage to do Medium songs at all well. In Rock Band, I hit 4 & 5 stars on my first two Medium mode songs.
This felt pretty ‘right’ to me. Finishing up the hardest Easy songs and then the bonus songs on Easy, and then moving onto the easiest Medium songs…it should (I think) feel like a pretty seamless progression, and in Rock Band it does.
At this point it’s hard to imagine me going back to Guitar Hero 3 for anything. I’m just hoping for that patch that’ll let me use the GH3 guitar in Rock Band so I get some use out of the purchase.
Rock Band vs Guitar Hero 3: Day 3, the Rock Band Drum Kit
Today was my day to test out the Rock Band drum kit. The biggest challenge for me here was setting it all up. Now everyone’s gaming space is different, but for me, I have a 52″ LCD TV, and directly in front of it, a couch and a coffee table. So the very first thing I had to do is drag our rather substantial coffee table out of the way. Then I needed someplace to sit. Really, if you’re going to do this drum thing seriously you’re probably going to want to invest in an adjustable stool. A quick Google search tells me you can spend anywhere from $20 to $200 for a drum kit stool.
Well, the best I could do in a pinch was a plastic Adirondack chair. So I dragged that into the living room, and spent some time fiddling with the arrangement of the drums and particularly with the drum pedal. Since the chair didn’t adjust, I ended up pushing the drum kit pretty far away from me in order for my foot to feel comfortable on the pedal (to where it felt almost like the gas pedal in my car). Anyway eventually I got something workable set up.
My first experience with drumming was pretty frustrating. I admit I’m no musician, but I can at least tap out a steady beat, and on Easy mode there’re a lot of places with long strings of evenly placed notes to hit, and I kept messing them up. Finally in frustration I called in the girlfriend for a second opinion, and she had the same kind of troubles. Finally I remembered that there’s a “TV Calibration” feature in the game. We’d had no problems with guitar or singing, but I tried it anyway. I just had to tell it I had an LCD TV and it calibrated automagically (there’s an option for a manual calibration as well). And that did the trick. I went from getting 2 stars to getting 4 stars immediately after the calibration.
Drumming is fun but requires a lot more real talent than the guitar does. And even though the drums aren’t as loud as I’d feared they would be, I think I was still subconsciously trying to hit them ‘gently’ so as not to disturb the neighbors. I think that’s ok for Easy mode, but if you watch the YouTube video below you’ll see that to get good you have to be willing to go for it.
I honestly think most Rock Band Drum Kits are going to end up gathering dust, at least with the casual players. I’d love to have a practice area where I could get a stool and set up the drums and not worry about bothering the neighbors, but that isn’t really practical for me, and I don’t think it will be for most people. And the reality is that I don’t see myself dragging furniture around after a long day at work just so I can relax with a little Rock Band. Right now you can get Rock Band in two configurations: the game only, or the set with drums, guitar and mike as well as the game. If that has changed by the time you read this, think long and hard about buying that drum kit.
After dinner, I picked up the guitar again and played some more of the solo Rock Band ‘career.’ I guess I’ve played through about 20 songs so far. One of the big differentiators between Guitar Hero 3 and Rock Band is the play lists. I found Rock Band is pretty middle of the road for my tastes. There aren’t a lot of songs I just love, but neither are there many that I hate. GH 3 is more about the ups and downs. There are songs in that game I just adore, and some that are just horrible noise to my old ears. Now this is going to be really subjective, and I’m an older gamer. Suffice to say I’m really happy when I run into Rolling Stones or ZZ Top, and a lot of the bands I encounter in Rock Band I’ve never even heard of.
Of course ultimately you’ll have played through the careers and you’ll just be playing for fun, and at that point you can start buying downloaded songs, and cherry pick your favorites, so long-term I’m not so sure this is going to be a huge factor.
I’ll also reiterate that the learning curve in RB is a lot smoother. I’m still getting 4 or 5 stars on all the songs (and managed a 100% once). Over in the GH 3 camp, there are still “Easy” mode songs that just destroy me (Slayer, anyone?).
So I’m still standing by my preference for Rock Band. Oh, I did find one ‘gimmick’ here, and that’s “the big rock finish” which is a freestyle section at the end of some songs…you basically just mash notes as fast as you can to generate a huge pile ‘o points at the end of a tune. I could really do without this section since it generally ends up sounding likes two cats fighting in a 50 gallon drum. But it still isn’t as awful as the GH 3 Boss Battles.
Anyway, here’s a great video of someone rocking out like mad on the RB drums. It’s pretty long, but if you can, watch it at least until they cut out the game audio; it gives you a good idea of how loud the drums are.
Rock Band vs Guitar Hero 3: Day 2, The Newbie Experience
I put the Rock Band drum kit together today. It’s big. It looked pretty big in the store but in my living room it seems to expand. And it really seems like it’ll require a stool; I don’t think that playing standing up is going to work for very long, or very well. The drumkit stand seems like it’ll break down pretty easily, but the ‘drum heads’ are all one big, rather large, piece, so I’m a bit concerned about storage.
On the plus side, they aren’t as loud as I’d feared they would be. There’s a Rock Band demo kiosk in the local Best Buy, and those drums are pretty darned loud. The sticks are regular drumsticks, and the drums at the store are plastic so the whole time someone is playing they’re bashing plastic with a wooden stick. Loud and unpleasant. But the drums that I got have a rubberized surface and aren’t too bad as far as noise goes. I still don’t think I’d practice my RB drum solos in the middle of the night though, out of respect for other folk in the apartment building.
As I mentioned in my last post, as of about 2-3 weeks ago I’d never played one of these games. Guitar Hero III was my introduction to the genre. Today I experienced Rock Band for the first time and I thought I’d compare the newbie experience.
Both games offer tutorials, but Rock Band’s guitar tutorial is longer and more informative. However if you fail the tests, you have to listen to the whole explanation before trying them again. In Guitar Hero if you fail you can just retry the test right away. Some guy named Izzy narrates the Rock Band tutorial and he’s fine. In GH3, the “god of rock” and some other character take turns. They’re pretty corny, but y’know, it’s just a tutorial; I guess its not a big deal.
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