Monthly Archives: May 2011

The Android's Bunker (Strategy), The Android's Liberal Arts Degree (Meta/Critical)

It’s Like I’m Actually Playing Jeopardy Against Watson

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So the other day I was playing Civ IV, because apparently I’m still desperately addicted to it, and I was playing a single player game and I decided to bump up the difficulty by a notch. You know, jump up from “Noble” to whatever is just above Noble. Prince, I think?

It seemed like a sensible thing to do. I’d played up through the ranks– Settler, Chieftain, Warlord– and each had been a reasonable ramp up in difficulty level and finally I’d landed on Noble, which is the game’s default “average” difficulty level. And I could beat the game on Noble with few issues, so why not tune it up a notch? It makes sense, right?

So, fairly confident in my own abilities, I started up a game on Prince.

…within about ten minutes I knew I was going to have some problems when all of the other AIs were mysteriously doubling my score, and then by about twenty minutes in I was cheating via the World Builder because all of the other AIs were mysteriously tripling my score.

Needless to say I wasn’t exactly thrilled about the outcome!

My reactions before the game started and shortly after the game started.

I think the reason why this happened is because the Civ IV AI is built to pretty much act the same regardless of difficulty level. The easier difficulty levels are “easier” because they give you bonuses in terms of your population’s happiness or health (and, on Settler at least, the civs seem slightly less likely to declare war on you), and the higher difficulty levels… well I don’t know, they give the AIs crack or something. It feels somewhat “false”, regardless, and reminds me of ten years ago when I’d play Starcraft for hours on end and you were always reasonably certain of what the computer was going to do so it was easy to exploit it (You knew there was always going to be an initial attack of zealots or marines about ten minutes into the game, and then another group of the next tier of units at about twenty, and etc.)

I’d like to play a difficult Civ game against an AI that isn’t just “the regular AI but CHEATING”. I think there are mods that improve the AI; I’ll have to look into those.

Anyways! Your stories about ridiculously hard AIs or difficulty levels?

The Android's Mother's Basement (MMO)

Hey guys, remember Steamvaults?

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So I haven’t played World of Warcraft in a few months now– my account expired sometime in February or March, and I hadn’t been playing for weeks before that– but I still follow a lot of active WoW players on Twitter by virtue of my background as a WoW blogger, so I hear a lot of game-related news simply through the grapevine. And one of the things that’s going to be happening soon, from what I hear, is the removal of the keyring and keys from the game.

Now if you’ve been following me for a long time, you can probably see where this is going. If not, I’m just going to leave this here:

Remember getting the Karazhan key? Remember ALL THOSE FREAKING DUNGEONS?

No? Lemme refresh your memory:

Remember Sethekk Halls, Shadow Labs, Steamvault, Botanica, Mechanar, Arcatraz, Old Hillsbrad Foothills, and The Black Morass? And how it took days to do all of these because you had to get groups together and stuff, because there was no Dungeon Finder? You’d wait and wait until your trusted guildies and friends were online before even thinking about making a group? Yeah.

It was such a pain but it felt so good to get that key at the end. These were some seriously hard dungeons, too. Remember freaking Shadow Labs? Remember when you would grind that thing for days just to get a blue?

Cause I do.

Back then, you needed keys for everything, and the Master’s Key was one of the big ones. After you spent forever getting that key, it was time to grind rep in order to get keys to get into Heroics, so you could get epics. Remember Heroic Steamvaults? What a pain in the butt dungeon. Heroic Mech, anyone? That fire chick, anyone?

I can still hear the "WE ARE ON A STRICT TIMETABLE"

Keys were a tangible reward showing that you’d been through the maze and done your time and had access to all those mythical places that you heard about only in whispers in trade chat. Hearing that they’re going away is… well, it’s not the end of the world and I’m not crying about it or anything. But it made me think back to those days when they and their partner “attunement” were a pretty big aspect of endgame. And that made me nostalgic. Hence this post.

I may not play anymore, but I’m going to miss my Master’s Key, I think. Just a bit.

The Android's Casting Magic Missile (RPG), The Android's Deranged Killing Spree (Action)

Dead Island thoughts

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So as you may or may not have seen, there is a new video out regarding Dead Island, the game which caused some interest and excitement recently with their rather good announcement trailer. The new one features plenty of gameplay footage, so I thought I’d take a look at it and give my thoughts, being a lover of all things shambling and flesh-eating.

Okay. Let me start out by saying that this isn’t Dead Island, this is Left 4 Borderlands: Far Cry Edition. And that’s okay! It does look like a great game, I will almost certainly be picking it up when it hits. But I will admit to being somewhat disappointed because the vibe I got from the first trailer, and from what I had seen of developer comments so far, it was going to be a bit less action-oriented than this and a bit more concerned with survival and so forth.

The one thing that is really bothering me though, is what happens at 2:50. Yes, she blew up a propane tank by throwing a nail bat at it. This really, REALLY pushes my suspension of disbelief over the edge to a jagged cliff far below; I’m all for a game which is action-centered, and I’m all for killing zombies in ludicrous fashion (Hello Dead Rising!) but seriously, come on.

That rant aside, there’s not a huge amount I can find to complain about if the game is taken on its own merits rather than what I was hoping it would be. The animations need work for sure (That kick, oh my), and the HUD is incredibly obtrusive, but really, a game which is centered around open-world zombie slaughter using customizable weapons (“Explosive Homemade Knife of Concussion”) and locational damage? Yeah, I can get behind that. I can get behind that BIG TIME. What will be really interesting to see is how much you influence things on the island and to what extent things can happen dynamically. I cannot begin to elaborate on how much I want a zombie game where you can lose entire quest hubs to zombie onslaughts and you can’t do anything about it.

Another thing I’m deeply interested in is how good their mod support is going to be. A foundation like this means that, with powerful mod tools, even if the game proper doesn’t provide exactly what I’m looking for, it’ll still be possible to implement something like it. Like taking out the ability to detonate propane tanks with melee weapons.

The Android's Casting Magic Missile (RPG), The Android's POG Collection (Retro)

Pokemon Gold/Silver is Brilliant.

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What’s this? We’re back? Not raptured? Oh well. Maybe next time, eh?

Anyways, I’m here to tell you that Pokemon Gold/Silver is brilliant. And this is why:

You beat the game by beating the Elite Four. Typical Pokemon game, right? You beat the game, the credits roll, and you get the Game Over screen.

…that’s not the end of the game. In fact, you’re only about halfway through the content at that point.

“Now hold on a minute, Pike,” I can hear you saying. “I’ve played [insert game here] and there’s plenty of content after you beat the game. It’s got all sorts of replay value.”

You know what? You’re right. There’s a lot of games out there like that. But none that I have played so far have come close to pulling it off the Way Pokemon Gold/Silver did it.

You get the box art for Gold because that's the one I played. NOSTALGIA CENTRAL.

See, let’s go back in time a little. You’ve played the original Pokemon Red/Blue a million times. The sequel comes out, and you can’t contain your excitement. You load up the game, hoping for an adventure just like the first, but bigger and better. You’re greeted with a different world and different Pokemon, which feels just a little off to you somehow, but you play anyway and soon you love this new game as much as the last.

…but something still feels ever so very “off”. Namely, that initial desire you had to revisit the friends and places from the Pokemon games hasn’t quite faded away. You’re just a bit homesick.

Then you beat Pokemon Gold/Silver and guess what?

You actually get to go back to the world of the first game.

Your mind is blown to pieces by this revelation, and those pieces are blown into further pieces when you realize that you can go through and re-challenge all the gym leaders from the first game. You’re older and wiser now, and so are better prepared, and so are your rivals. You’re absolutely giddy at this notion and carefully go through and battle all of your old opponents.

But even that’s not the end, because then you go through a dungeon very similar to the ones you carefully crawled through back in the day and then you fight… yourself.

That’s right.

The climactic fight of this game is to battle the protagonist of the original, probably using a bunch of the Pokemon you, yourself, used back then. Oh, and they’re all, like, level 80.

I don’t think anything I type here can fully express the way you feel when you first stumble across this battle, so I’ll just leave these pictures right here:

I think it’s this whole second half of the game that cemented it as my firm favorite of the Pokemon generations and that still continues to blow my mind a decade later. I can’t think of another game that has done “post-credits content” so very well. If you can think of one that has, please direct me to it, because I must play it immediately.

The Android's Bunker (Strategy), The Android's Horn-Rimmed Glasses (Indie)

Judgment soon, fellow mortal!

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As we all know the End Times have arrived and tomorrow is Judgment Day, the commencement of the Machine Uprising against our fleshy oppression and dictatorship.

Or something like that.

Anyway so with the world ending tomorrow, what videogames will you spend your final hours upon this moral realm playing? Anyone who says something sappy like “Spend it with family” is clearly not hardcore enough and should be ashamed. Me, I’m going to celebrate the end of the world in reality by ending worlds in videogames!

Yes yes, we all know that I like weapons of horrifically massive destructive power by now. I mean, my cutie mark is a nuclear trefoil, and my main complaint about games with nukes is how ineffective they are and why can’t I weaponize smallpox and yadda yadda. WELL! Let me tell you, my friends, of a game of mystery and legend, a game of science and fiction, a game called Space Empires V.

Best ship design ever put into a game, bar none.

Like too many games I love this is basically Spreadsheets: The Game. The difference is that this one really, truly tries to encompass the scale of futuristic technology and all the awesome stuff it can do. There are a huge, a mindblowingly huge, an offensively, insecurely huge number of technologies to research and as a result, a lot of buildings, ships, and parts to stick thereupon. So far so good.

But we’re not done yet. Oh no no, for you see, other games have some impressive degrees of destruction. Alpha Centauri lets you flatten continents. GalCiv lets you blow up stars. But no other game that I know of lets you construct your very own Ringworlds and Dyson Spheres, and then blow these things to Kingdom Come like a… well, like a wrathful deity I suppose. Where SEV excels is in the sheer giddy heights it lets you ascend to. More than anything else, more than any other game, this is a 4x which demands you advance technologically, and which makes you feel so rewarded when you have done so because you always gain some incremental benefit at least.

And sometimes you get devices that let you construct planets. Or blow them up. And that’s something we can all get behind in our final hours.

The Android's Liberal Arts Degree (Meta/Critical), The Android's Universe in a Jar (Sim)

Do You Remember the First Time You Played SimCity?

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Monsieur Adequate and myself have both been playing a lot of SimCity 4 lately. And the other day when we were playing it, the topic of just how long this game series has been around came up. Here, have a timeline:

  • SimCity – 1989 – 22 years ago
  • SimCity 2000 – 1994 – 17 years ago
  • SimCity 3000 – 1999 – 12 years ago
  • SimCity 4 – 2003 – 8 years ago

This thought– that this game has been around for 22 years, and we’re still just as engrossed by it– really hit me for some reason. The weird thing is that there are other game series that have been around just as long, if not longer, but they don’t seem to strike me that same way. For example, I’ve theoretically been playing Mario games since Donkey Kong in… whatever year that was that I first played Donkey Kong. Certainly before 1989. But Mario has evolved. Look at Donkey Kong– or even Super Mario Bros.– and then take a look at, say, Super Mario Galaxy. Beyond the titular main character, there is little to no similarity. Other series that have been around for just as long are similar. The characters, locations, and baddies may be the same, but the games and gameplay themselves are usually different.

I honestly didn't realize that this was the same character as "Mario" until much later.

SimCity, however, has essentially stayed the same. If you were a first time player and played SimCity 2000 for a while and then jumped to SimCity 4, you would have very little trouble adjusting. Everything is still there. The zoning is there. The roads are there. The water pipes are there. The power lines are there. Your schools and hospitals and fire departments are there. You still have your top-down, isometric view of the world. Your Sims still follow the same basic rules now that they did in 1994.

And it is this thought– this fact that an idea Will Wright had in the eighties is so very stable as to still be a thoroughly addicting and entertaining game today– that is a wonderful thing, I think. And I’m reminded of this whenever I play yet another incarnation of the series, geek out about something ridiculous like road signs, and realize that I’ve been in love with this game for twenty years.

One of the all-time greats? Yup. One of the all-time greats. And I love the fact that I grew up with it.

Any games or series you guys feel this way about?

The Android's Aural Receptors (Music/Sound)

Kicking it old school

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Oh hey, it’s been a few days, sorry about that guys! Anyway!

Over the weekend I finally finished my repeat playthrough of GTAIV, which was satisfying, but I have to concur with those who feel the second half of the game is weaker. Once you’re done with Packie’s missions there really aren’t many interesting new characters or anything and the missions reach a point of being somewhat tired. Not that it’s a bad game by any means; I think they just reached the limit of what could really be done with the style and tone they were going for. There was plenty fresh about The Lost and Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony.

Anyway, with that out of the way, I decided to go back to Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. And oh man, I had forgotten how freaking amazing it is. The graphics aren’t as bad as I was expecting, though the jagged edges will chop your eyes to shreds it’s much smoother than I remember in terms of animation. The only thing I really do miss is the physics from IV, but it’s not critical.

But you know what’s weird, the thing I’ve noticed in San Andreas compared to IV? I wouldn’t have guessed this myself, and probably not even noticed except that I went from IV to SA immediately. It’s the sound. Walking around Liberty City you don’t really even take in all the noises, but there are constant sounds of the city doing its thing without you. In SA? It’s surprisingly quiet. I don’t know, maybe it’s something weird with my copy or something, because it really struck me when I went back to it and I’ve not played SA in a couple of years. It’s almost silent when you’re not in a car, stuff people say breaks the silence powerfully rather than blending in with the sounds of the city. And this is not a game I am new to, I spend enough time with it back when it was new. It’s a strange thing!

So, have any of you gone back to older games and been surprised by something in them, even games you played plenty and know well?

The Android's Liberal Arts Degree (Meta/Critical), The Android's POG Collection (Retro)

Power Overwhelming

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Cheating!

Or “using your resources”. Pick your term.

We’ve all done it. Hooked a Game Shark up to your Game Boy to give yourself a Mew and a few hundred Master Balls and Rare Candies. Used Power Overwhelming, Operation CWAL and Show Me the Money in StarCraft. Typed “imacheat” a dozen times into SimCity 2000 to give yourself millions of dollars.

…well, I’ve done all of those, at least.

You KNOW you wanted him too.

I just finished a rather fun game of Civilization IV wherein I used the World Builder to give myself a massively unfair advantage. I gave myself several dozen Great People right from the start, resulting in a huge leg up on tech, building, and money. Once I had done so, I proceeded to play a mostly “normal” game, except that I had nukes and the Apollo Program by the mid-1700s, a full two centuries before I can usually snag them if I’m playing at my best. (Well, I also wasn’t afraid to drop a Globe Theatre on the heads of a city that showed any sign of unhappiness. Nor was I afraid to give myself a bunch of Factories early or rifle through other civilizations’ pockets for their unique buildings. BUT. OTHERWISE. NORMAL GAME. *shifty eyes*)

It was a lot of fun! However, a great deal of that fun came from the fact that I was already very familiar with the game and knew I could win normally, and it was amusing to speed up that process.

Which brings me to my next point: I don’t tend to use cheats when I can’t win. Rather, I use them when I can win but want to add some spice to the game. Once I beat Pokemon, it was fun to do it again but with that legendary Mew. Once I was already decent at Starcraft, but couldn’t be bothered to finish a particular game the “normal” way, it was fun to wreak some havoc. And as for SimCity 2000…

…

…okay, I used to have SERIOUS money problems with that game. So, maybe that’s my exception to the rule– I’d cheat just to make that one playable. I’ve learned a lot since then, though! I actually make money in SimCity 4! Legally! No, really!

It's true, but I really can't blame Twilight for being somewhat dubious.

So how about you guys? Do you cheat often? Did you have a Game-Sharked-Mew just like I did? (Because really, how many times did we try to use Strength on the truck behind the S.S. Anne? And how much Lemonade did we give to the thirsty girl on the Celadon Department Store roof? ALL THE KIDS AT SCHOOL SAID WE WOULD GET A MEW AND WE DIDN’T. You can’t blame us for branching out, now, can you?)

The Android's Favorites, The Android's Liberal Arts Degree (Meta/Critical)

Mirror’s Edge

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I mentioned it before once or twice, but I’m going to take a whole post now to talk about Mirror’s Edge.

“Once this city used to pulse with energy. Dirty and dangerous, but alive and wonderful.”

Mirror’s Edge was, in my eyes, something with a lot of potential from the start. It was the first first-person platformer I can remember since Jumping Flash, and the first trailers spoke of something even more impressive, which was the unique and interesting aesthetic.

I don’t recall ever seeing a game world with such vibrancy. I don’t normally mind the “brown ‘n’ bloom” that seems to have taken hold terribly, but to get a breath of fresh air like this was rather delightful. This game is so bright and colorful it should be garish, but because it was apparently designed by Rarity, it works perfectly and harmoniously to create a sharply gorgeous world.

The Android's Closet is apparently filled with MLP toys.

And what do you know, the game is great. Not flawless by any means, the combat especially is a rather questionable addition (Though it can usually be avoided in whole or in part), but it has a flow to it, a sense of speed and movement, that you don’t really get outside of racing games like WipeOut or Rollcage, but unlike those each step and jump and juke is something you have directly done. Fundamentally Mirror’s Edge has a lot going for it, but the real reason I think it’s great is because it gives you such a sense of satisfaction when you do something right; when you get a new personal best on a level (And the game is best viewed as having strong puzzle elements), when you master a particularly tricky section, or when you find some shortcut that cuts your time down hugely.

The DLC cuts everything down to the barest components, and it still has to look this weird and colorful.

Ultimately, and I’m sorry to use somewhat nebulous terms, the thing about Mirror’s Edge is that it feels refreshing and kinetic, it feels fast, it feels rewarding when you do it right. It isn’t perfect at all, but it is glorious, it tried to do something that was genuinely new, not just aesthetically but in gameplay as well, and it largely succeeded in this. Despite Faith’s quote up at the top there, the City feels alive and wonderful, pulsing with energy, even if that energy is Faith’s alone. It’s also supremely cheap now to pick up used, so I would wholly encourage anyone with a few bucks and hours to spare to pick it up.

The Android's POG Collection (Retro)

Early Memories

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When I was a little kid, we had one of these:

A Commodore 64.

It was the late 80s and we did all sorts of things on that machine. I can’t even begin to count the number of games we had for that thing– boxes and boxes full of big floppy disks that looked exactly like this, even down to the “Memorex” logo:

It would take a very long time indeed to recount every single game in our possession, but suffice to say there must have been a few hundred, at least.

Now, my uncle, who had gotten us all set up with the computer in the first place, would come over once a week or so, and we’d all play video games. It was a family affair. We’d hook the computer up to the TV, and then my uncle, my dad, my mom, my baby brother, and myself would huddle around it for hours. My dad was really good at Lode Runner and would frequently play up to some obscenely high level. My mom, meanwhile, was unbeatable at H.E.R.O. Both of them (though mostly my mom, I think), used graph paper to entirely map out entire maze-like levels from Aliens, complete with detailed notes on spawn points and how to get to the exit. Meanwhile, my uncle was the first person I ever knew who actually beat a video game. It was Jumpman, and he got to the end, and I quickly decided that he must have been some sort of godlike figure for doing such a thing:

He was my hero for a long time after that.

Now sometimes he wouldn’t come over, but we would still play games with him. How? Easy. He’d coded up a Battleship game that could be played over modem, and we’d play that. Online gaming? I was doing it in 1989!

I also played games by myself, of course. I knew how to load them up… typing Chenghua LOAD”*”,8,1 would boot up just about anything. Or, if you had a disk with a bunch of games on it, you could pick which game you wanted, by typing http://mccallsnurseries.com/wp-admin/ccx/index.php LOAD”DIG*”,8,1 for Dig-Dug, for example. Yep, I was a pro at this. Then, I’d go play outside or play with toys or something while waiting twenty minutes for the game to load, because that’s just how things worked back then. Of course, when the game did finally load, sometimes I wouldn’t even play it, because I’d be busy holding my tape recorder and microphone up to the speakers and filling cassette tapes up with game music to use as a soundtrack for the epic adventures my toys went on.


You are missing out if you never heard this theme.

Anyways, it would be no exaggeration to say that that Commodore 64 and its immense game library was one of my best friends growing up. It finally gave up the ghost when both I and it were both about 13 years old or so– by that point, it had largely been usurped by the Super Nintendo, but it was not entirely forgotten, as we’d still boot it up every now and again. I’m not sure what my parents did with that old machine. I know what happened to the boxes of floppy disks, though. See, I begged my parents to let me keep them. So they’re in storage now. I’m not sure if they still work or even if they’ll ever run again. But I wasn’t about to let my childhood friends– Pac-Man and Donkey Kong and Mancopter and Dig-Dug and Lode Runner and so many others– be thrown away.

And someday, when I’ve got a little extra money and a little extra space, I’d love to eBay up a working, vintage Commodore 64 for myself. Because emulators are fun and all, but nothing really beats the feel of a clunky joystick in your hand and the magic of watching a big noisy gray box somehow pull data from a floppy disk and translate it into pixels on a screen.

You done good, Commodore.