Platypotamus

Imagine for a second that I'm working on a kind of old school game.  Imagine further that as I'm working on said game, I'm open to suggestions and other sorts of help from the Internet at large, rather than going it alone.

Now, if I were going to do that, it's possible that the game would feature a sort of overhead-ish perspective for some/most/all of the game.  There's a decent chance that this game would feature sort of arcadey actiony gameplay.  If that were the case, a combination of my indecisiveness and the fact that I'm just not an authority on visuals might lead me to be unable to choose a perspective.  So imagine you're in the position that you're imagining that I'm in.

Here's some screenshots of some older games with some  overhead perspectives that I think might be good for visualizing what perspective this imaginary game might take.  This hypothetical me could definitely use some feedback here though, as this isn't my area of expertise.

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The Adventures of a Noob is a recurring column in which I dive into a (potentially) complex game without reading the manual, FAQ, any help files, or playing a tutorial. I then catalog my first impressions and thought process as I attempt to figure out the game. This may end up being amusing, or it may end up being informative. Hopefully a little of both.

Note that in these types of articles, information in regular font represents my thought process/knowledge at time of first playing. Addendums in italics represent information I learned after the fact, inserted into the article to clarify which of my original thoughts were accurate and which were leading me astray.

Stuff I know going in:

Star Ruler is supposed to be huge, strategic, with lots of cool AI and randomization stuff.  Oh, and it's a space game with a silly name.  Yes, that's really about all I knew going in.  I don't even think I'd viewed the official page I just linked.

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In a thread over on NeoGaf, I got linked to a blog called the Unamommer (awesome name, btw).  The thread in question was discussing the recently released Elemental: War of Magic, from Stardock entertainment.  The nerdier parts of the gaming Internet have been abuzz about some controversy about the game's release, but I don't really have anything meaningful to add to that particular discussion, so I'm mostly going to leave it alone.  Elemental could use a little more polish, certainly, but it'll come.

Instead, I want to talk about the Unamommer blog, and particularly her take on Elemental: Destiny's Embers.  Destiny's Embers is a novel accompanying the War of Magic game, set in the world of the campaign, and presumably crossing over at some point.   If you're like me, you have already instantly written it off as terrible by virtue of it being a game-related novel.  This is where the Unamommer comes in.

The Important link gets it's own line:

Unamommer » Blog Archive » Elemental: Destiny’s Embers

From perusing her site a bit, it seems like the Unamommer's M.O. is to read bad books, and then write snarky reviews about them.  Some choice quotes from her review of Destiny's Embers:

In my last review I drew a distinction between fun bad and facepalm bad.  Fun bad books may have terrible plots or characters but there’s a baseline level of competency that keeps the book readable.  Sentences may be simple, but they are still constructed in a way that generally makes sense and the writing itself fades to the background, leaving you focused on what the actual story is trying to tell you.  Elemental is not one of those books.

Her favorite Character in the book?  I'm glad you asked:

The dress is actually my favorite character in the book. A few short pages later she is accosted by bad guys and they have a conversation about the dress. Her thoughts reveal to us the backstory and political importance of the dress. After she is rescued from the bad guys by the clever orphan boy she has a crush on and a handsome knight, she flings herself into her father’s arms while sobbing and he stops to notice the dress before noticing the knife wound on her neck.

Sounds like that character had a lot of competition though:

So anyway, the story follows a couple of difference people around. There’s the Clever Orphan and the Magical Princess who are off to find some sort of magical artifact that is a circlet that is also an orb. Along the way they pick up The Bad Guy’s Henchman Who Is Not Half As Clever As He Thinks He Is, a golem, and a Thief With A Heart Of Gold who has been cursed to be unnoticeable to everyone except the orphan because the orphan is, obviously, special.

I highly recommend heading over there and reading the rest of the review.  It's fantastic.  Anyway, Mrs. Unamommer, I have subscribed to your blog, and hope others do as well.  I look forward to the next review!

I've started making quick prototypes of games out of captchas, because really, "why not?"  A general post mortem follows.

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Today's Penny Arcade has started a bit of an online dialogue, focusing on the topic of buying games used vs. new.

Penny Arcade! - Words And Their Meanings.

A quote from the accompanying newspost:

The idea that THQ is somehow "disrespecting customers" with this kind of rhetoric misunderstands the situation as completely as it is possible to do so. In a literal way, when you purchase a game used, you are not a customer of theirs. If I am purchasing games in order to reward their creators, and to ensure that more of these ingenious contraptions are produced, I honestly can't figure out how buying a used game was any better than piracy. From the the perspective of a developer, they are almost certainly synonymous.

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Off and on lately, I've been replaying Oblivion.  I tend to do this with any Bethesda RPG... play it extensively when it first comes out, and then revisit it years later after modding it into a mostly unrecognized state.  This makes the game feel almost like a sequel at this point, because of how little I remember and how different the gameplay experience is.  It also almost makes me want to revisit Morrowind (again) with crazy mods.  Maybe I will down the road.

In any case, several folks have asked me about the mods I've been using, and so I've decided to share the rather extensive list I'm using, as well as some thoughts.

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The Brainy Gamer has a piece on how Portal is being introduced as required reading for a course called "Enduring Questions" at Wabash College.  This is awesome.

The Brainy Gamer: Portal on the booklist.

Our charge from the faculty made it clear that we should apply a broad definition to "readings," and I believe my special purpose on the committee was to help identify films, music, art, and other 'non-textual' sources to challenge our students to think hard about the questions raised in the course.

And so, as you might expect, a little light went off in my head. What about a game? Why not? Which one? Will they bite on this? Who knows? Let's try.

Been a while since I updated, due to some travel, some visitors, and some other general busy-ness (as opposed to business).  Not only have I fallen behind on updating ye olde blog, I've fallen behind on my reading too.  So I've been generally catching up, and sometime during that time,was linked to the following piece, which is just fantastic:

The Brainy Gamer: Fun Factor Catalog.

If you've been following my recent posts, you already know about my Fun Factor project. I'm trying to account for the many ways games provoke us to play them. A few days ago I asked you to help me 'catalog the fun' delivered by some of your favorite games, and you came through big time. Thanks again for that.I've sorted through your responses and added some of my own. The result is below: a collection of fun factors and a list of games that exemplify them.

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This was a great idea for a feature.  Read what actual Yakuza guys have to say about the game Yakuza 3:

Yakuza 3 reviewed by Yakuza - Boing Boing.

Kiryu is fighting all the time. He's gotta be a fucking idiot. No yakuza is going to run around getting into fistfights like that. Especially not an executive type. He'll wind up in jail or in the hospital or dead, maybe even whacked by his own people for being a troublemaker. These days, he'd probably get kicked out before even going to jail. Guys like that start gang wars and nobody wants that now. When a yakuza gets into a fight, it's serious business.

Bad Pitch/Good Pitch is a recurring feature in which I take some sort of creative work, and pretend that I am pitching it to the executives.  One pitch is terrible, and would never get the project greenlit, and the other is presumably better.  In theory, both are factual portrayals of the content of the project.

Bad Pitch:  A society is built entirely on the premise of pleasure and stability as the highest goal of society.  Citizens routinely engage in sexually promiscuous acts, including orgies, while taking a euphoric drug called soma.

Good Pitch:  Wait, that was the bad pitch?  How am I supposed to compete with that?

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