Category Archives: Review

Why People Think Turn-Based is “Boring”

07/03/2012 – 12:36 pm

I started playing a bit of the expansion for Civilization V (Gods and Kings) recently. I will say that it brought Civ V mostly up to the level of the other Civ games. Combat is a little better than Civ IV, but some other things are a little worse. The new system for spies seems very cool, at least on my first impression. I’m pretty certain that vanilla Civ V did not have “quick move” and “quick attack” feature (even though every Civ before it did have that), but it’s been “re-added”. Is this the pattern Civ is going to take? Release a new game every 5 years stripping away various features, and then re-add them in an expansion?

But anyway, that’s not what I wanted to talk about. Most Civ players know that there’s an option in the game setup screen called “game speed”. It’s one of the things you can configure for your game; things like map type, map size, how many civilizations are playing, difficulty level, etc.

Now, there are four game speeds: Quick, Normal, Slow and Very Slow (I’m not sure if those are the names of the slower ones, I haven’t even clicked on them for reasons that will become obvious in a few more sentences). Each of them has a description. Here’s a screenshot I took of the description for “Quick” mode:

Let me ask you: how much do you like to “wait around”? I’m going to guess that even if a million people read this blog, nobody answered “too much”. I know, I know – they meant “too much” in a different sense of the phrase than I’ve just implied. Either way, let’s cut out the “too much”. Do you like to wait around at all? I’m going to dare to guess that most people don’t like to “wait around” AT ALL. Waiting around at all, pretty much universally, almost objectively, sucks.

Let me quickly clarify what I mean by waiting around. In games, the thing that really makes them games is the decision-making. Time where the user is not making any decisions is therefore wasted time. One exception might be if the user is watching an important cutscene, or something, but that brings up a whole separate issue. read more »

Tags civ, final fantasy, gods and kings, turn based, yomi | Comments (24)

Culture Review

On “Indie Game: The Movie”

06/12/2012 – 9:23 pm

It’s clear that Indie Game: The Movie is not a movie that was made for me. It was made not for developers, but instead for people who really have no idea what an “indie developer” is. In other words, most people. That’s fine – I have no problem with one of the purposes of this film being a public declaration of the existence of the indie developer.

It may be a bit of a problem, though, that that’s just about the only clear purpose of this film.

To those viewers that the movie was made for, I’m speaking to you, now. There are some things that you need to know. Mainly, the following two things:

1. Not all “videogames” are actually puzzle platformers, and

2. Not all indie game developers are spoiled, depressed and pretentious

Puzzle Platformers

You may be sad to learn that this bold new wave of indie developers are still basically just tweaking the same game that you remember playing back in the 1990s or even earlier. All of the games shown in the movie are just clones of older games, with a new theme, and some gameplay gimmick. Also, if you go and look around on the internet, you may find that it’s really true! Wow, there really are nothing but puzzle platformers everywhere! The number of puzzle platformers getting made every year is staggering.

However, there are some digital game developers out there who are doing new, interesting things. Chris Hecker’s Spy Party, Rodain Joubert’s Desktop Dungeons, Tarn Adams’ Dwarf Fortress, just to name a few. It would have been great to see a little of that in the film. Now, I do think that the growth of digital gaming is extremely stunted (for a few reasons that I’ve gone on about many times over), but other than a fleeting shot of Minecraft, the viewer would have absolutely no idea that digital gaming has advanced at all.

Actually, for years I’ve wanted to write an article addressing the “puzzle platformer” plague, but I never did, partially because I thought “okay, well, it’s so bad now, it’s probably going to get better.” But it hasn’t gotten better. Right now eight out of ten of the top posts on reddit’s IndieGaming subreddit are about (directly or indirectly), puzzle platformers. People are excited about a new Abe’s Odyssey? Really?

Now, I might be a bit biased here, because I don’t like puzzles. But seriously, even people who do like puzzles have got to be getting tired of this by now.

Most Developers Are Normal People

Of course, it’s a movie, and so I do take the presentation of these “characters” with a grain of salt. In fact, I’ll preface everything by saying that it could be that the people in this film were presented in a completely unfair way that made the appear to be nothing at all like who they really are. I am only addressing the characters that I was presented with. read more »

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Game Design Review

Review Time! “Façade” and “Rune Raiders”

04/22/2012 – 8:17 pm

Hello everyone! We’ll be having some big news in the next week or so regarding the AURO Beta, so stay tuned. A lot of people have begun following AURO on Facebook recently, stay tuned there for news. Today, I want to do a couple of reviews, since my book is finished and I finally have a little time to actually play new videogames!

The two games I’ll be reviewing are an iOS strategy game called Rune Raiders, and a Windows/OSX interactive fiction application called Façade (which I’ll be typing out as “Facade” for the rest of this article so I don’t have to keep grabbing a non-standard character). They have no connection, other than that I played them both today… and one other connection that I’ll make at the end. I’ll start with Facade.

Facade

Personally, I'd have preferred no artwork at all.

If you’ve read this blog before, you’re probably already aware of my opinions on “interactive stories”. If not, I think they’re a terrible idea, in short. I’ve gotten into many an argument online about the matter, and one friend of mine recommended that I try Facade. I had heard about it before, and from what I’ve heard it’s one of the best examples of what interactive fiction can be.

Now, obviously I knew getting into it that I was going to have problems with it, but I decided to really go into it with an open mind, giving it my full attention, and really trying. And that’s what I did! read more »

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Game Design Review

On “Civilization V”

02/19/2012 – 2:39 am

I’ve been a fan of the Civilization computer game series ever since the I first played the first one back in the mid 90′s. Sid Meier’s Civilization – the Civilization we’re talking about – was originally based on an Avalon Hill boardgame by the same name (interestingly, in 2010 Fantasy Flight published a boardgame version of Sid Meier’s digital game – “the boardgame the videogame the boardgame”, you might call it). I continued to play the games pretty avidly, up until something of a climax with Civilization IV. But I’d like to take a moment today to look at the fifth game in the series, and the series generally.

2010 was a really important year for me. If I were to lay out a calendar of my gaming life 20 years from now, 2010 would be marked “the point where I completely gave up on AAA games”. There are a lot of reasons why, which I go on about at this blog all the time: that story is a major thing holding games back; that designers are expected to degrade their games after release with extra content; that many of us can’t seem to understand that grinding is a bad thing. And it’s getting incrementally worse, but none of this was special to the year 2010.

Three games that I had been very eagerly awaiting came out in 2010, and all three let me down for a different reason. Those three games were StarCraft 2, Elemental: War of Magic, and Civilization V. I’ll briefly touch on the first two before I get to Civilization V.

StarCraft 2 – The biggest reason StarCraft 2 was a huge letdown was that it did not even attempt to advance the genre at all. For me, this came at a particularly bad time, because after a massive 6-year stint of serious Warcraft III play, I was really starting to see some fundamental problems with this kind of game. Essentially, I don’t think it’s relevant to have a crappy dexterity element to a strategy game. Both the dexterity aspect and the strategy aspect suffer.

Elemental: War of Magic – This was just a colossal fuck-up. I absolutely love 4x games, and my absolute favorite of them – a game I like better than any Civilization – is Master of Magic. Well, E:WOM was supposed to be a spiritual sequel to that game. Can you imagine how excited I was? I pre-ordered this game YEARS in advance. Me, Keith Burgun, pre-ordering something. Can you imagine?

Unfortunately, it actually ended up being a gigantic nightmarish mishmosh of every idea that ever popped into Brad Wardell’s head. My demands for game design have increased over the years, and yet this is years behind games that came before it. A horrible clusterfuck of sloppy, awful game design and high-fantasy fanfiction. And their description for a “sequel” they’re already making sounds like they simply have no clue what the hell is going on. I feel totally betrayed by Stardock and this whole chapter is a nightmare I need to forget about.

And finally, Civilization V.

I was super excited for this game, too, and I think I pre-ordered it as well (in fact, I think I may have pre-ordered all three of these games, and that probably accounts for half of the pre-orders I’ve ever made in my whole life). Why? Because, awesomely, they were turning Civ into a tactical strategy game! One unit per tile, ranged attacks, etc! And it’s hex based! Awesome! This announcement came when I was at the height of my Civilization IV playing, too, so you could imagine how excited I was.

But then when the game came out, and I got to play it… something was amiss. It’s now 2012, about 18 months since Civilization V came out, and I have yet to finish a game of it.

And I don’t have some lame meta excuse like having babies or too many jobs or whatever. I make time to play games, playing games is important to me and I think it should be important to any game designer. I’ve sat down with Civ probably 10 different times really trying to give it a go… and it just never goes. read more »

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Review

Review – The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword

01/11/2012 – 4:06 am

I’ve had a lot on my plate recently, with writing a book and working on our next game, Auro, and so I haven’t been able to sit down with Nintendo’s latest entry in their flagship The Legend of Zelda series. First off, I have to say one thing: I know, I know – the last few entries you played in this series have left you a little concerned. Trust me, I have the exact same concerns. The big question in all of our minds, the question Nintendo has forced us to ask is: will this game be a good fit for a one-year old infant? Lucky for you, my baby cousin Eugene came to visit last week and together, Eugene and I are going to get to the bottom of this question, once and for all!

Story

The story of the game is absolutely FANTASTIC (for infants). Having literally no frame of reference for narrative, Eugene simply loved the “bully” character Groose and the funny trombone music that played during his lengthy cutscene. It made him giggle and writhe around on the floor. I must also compliment Nintendo for making the cutscenes so long, as they kept little Eugene busy for a long time while I watched Breaking Bad in the other room. Now I realize why these games advertise “50+ hours of gameplay” on the backs of their boxes! The only time he would make loud noises was when the game actually asked him to do stuff, so I’m glad that this wasn’t too often.

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Review

Mini-Review: His Dark Majesty

11/17/2011 – 7:14 am

Today, I checked out the game “His Dark Majesty“, a turn-based tactical wargame created for Atari 8-Bit computers. If you like Advance Wars, I do recommend you give this a shot. Don’t worry, the game comes with an emulator and you won’t have to fiddle with anything to get it to work – it just works (Windows only). When I first found it, ran it, and started playing, I was very excited. After several missions, a few things dawned on me, that I thought I’d quickly share with you!

THE GOOD:

The game takes good lessons from Advance Wars and is similar extremely easy to control – all you need to use are the four arrow keys and the CTRL button. That’s literally it. It feels quick and graceful and amazing to play. You can even play with one hand and drink a soda with the other!
The level of depth is just enough to make the game tactically interesting. Terrain matters, units have defense and attack ratings, putting units near your Lord gives you bonuses, archers can’t move and fire in the same turn, cavalry can charge, etc. Lots of good, interesting tactical stuff going on here.
The difficulty is solid. I got to about the 5th mission without too much difficulty, but I’ve played many games that are just like this. Much of the skill of Advance Wars will carry over to this game.
Great sounds and music. Overall presentation is fantastic, actually… has a really nice “computer game moodiness” to it. Love how the music goes out of tune for a second after I alt-tab back to it. The whole thing feels almost “analog” in a weird way. If you’re a child of the 1970s or 1980s the almost “VHS”eyness of it will probably warm your heart.
There are cutscenes, but they’re damn short! Bravo on that.
The in-game “tutorial” (like, two lines of text) made every mission objectives, and even most of the game mechanics, perfectly clear.

THE BAD:

A linear campaign, and nothing else. This means that playing this game, overall, is just a matter of a process of elimination for each level. This means that the game will have almost no replay value, and feels more like a puzzle sometimes. Would have loved a random exhibition-game mode of some sort, or a score mode, or something else other than this.
Follows in the steps of many wargames before it, and makes the classic “make battles get bigger and bigger as the game goes on”. This is especially bad in this game because scrolling is painful, pretty much taking away almost all of the points I gave the game for UI being great.
In the larger battles, watching all of the enemy movements was painful.

LESSONS FROM “His Dark Majesty”

Lesson #1: Don’t trade a replay value for a cheap story. Is this story that gets told in this game so important that it’s worth trading off all the replay value that it loses by being a linear, non-random campaign-mode sort of thing? This game could have been so much more interesting with randomized battles, randomized terrain, etc.

Lesson #2: Technology Levels are IRRELEVANT to game design. This game could have been made in like, 1982 – it was just a matter of someone coming up with the idea. Hell, Super Smash Brothers could have been on the Atari 8-Bit computer. Good ideas are what’s important.

Lesson #3: Please no scrolling please. No scrolling in any game, ever, ok? Seriously, scrolling, or any kind of camera controls of any kind, SUCK every time. It’s just this moment that breaks gameplay up where the player has to “fix” something in order to continue playing.

Lesson #4: More isn’t better. These huge battles with 40 or more units aren’t more interesting, they’re just more tedious. I never beat Fantasy General – not because it was too hard for me – well, it was too hard for me, but I don’t mind that. What I minded was these MASSIVE levels that took 3 hours of play to attempt to beat.

CONCLUSION

Overall, this game is good, but the fact that it’s really just a little worse than Advance Wars in almost every way, combined with the fact that we’ve all played at least 4 different incarnations of Advance Wars, means that there’s not a whole lot of reason to play this. From looking at the website’s “Development” section, it appears that the “designer” (really programmer is probably a better title) actually had no real gameplay idea beyond “let’s just make an Advance Wars game”.

And at that – he succeeded, almost.