Monthly Archives: September 2011

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

Games as a Medium

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I’ve been thinking a little bit lately about using a game to, well… do something besides “play the game”. Here, I’ll tell you where I’m coming from. Back when I was little– six or seven years old or so– we had a game called The Railroad Works.

It looked like this.

The game was basically supposed to be a model train simulator, and it was divided into two different “segments”. The first segment involved building your train track and decorating it with various bits of scenery and the like that you were given, and then the second was playing a sort of proto-Railroad-Tycoon-esque game that involved taking goods from train station to train station and juggling schedules and whatnot.

If you think I ever played that second portion of the game, you’d be wrong.

The entire point of the game, to me, was to build the nicest, most picturesque scenic railroad route I could. There was no game strategy involved in where I placed my train stations and depots; there was only aesthetics. The game basically gave you several dozen grids (screens) on an overarching map and you could build in each of these grids and connect them, and so I made biomes and “zones” so to speak– here was the forest, here were the mountains, this was the farmland, this was the city.

Once I had finished constructing my masterpiece, I’d start the actual game proper, watch my train chug around my world for a few minutes, and then, satisfied, I’d quit. I didn’t have to play the actual game. The joy for me was in the creating.

This is similar to how a lot of people today play Minecraft. While Notch is busy trying to introduce things like dungeons and monsters, most people play the game either as a UI for virtual legos or as a pixel art program. You’d think, before you’ve tried it yourself, that this wouldn’t be as enthralling as it is. And then you try it and suddenly you can almost see why someone would spend weeks using Minecraft to recreate scenes from Pokemon.

This took me about an hour and a half yesterday; I can't even begin to comprehend how long that Pokemon animation must have taken.

I think it’s rather neat when people are able to take an open-ended game like that and do whatever they want with it. It usually adds more replay value than millions of optional sidequests/levels do, that’s for sure.

The Android's an Amateur Developer (Ideas), The Android's Deranged Killing Spree (Action), The Android's Sandbox (Sandbox/Open World)

Why GTA V should be set in the future.

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Speculation about a new GTA game is always going to be widespread and wide ranging, and until I get news that it’s going to be something I really don’t want, like GTA Stockholm or something, I’m going to talk about and dream about GTA being set in the future.

1. Scope for all kinds of neat toys.
What is the coolest thing about the future? All the crazy gadgets we hope to have. Rayguns, flying cars, moonbases, robots, etc. etc. San Andreas already went a little in this direction towards the end, with those crazy jetpack missions and suchlike, but the scope for including all kinds of completely crazy vehicles, weapons, and other gadgetry is never going to be higher than in a game set in the future. Given that the point of the GTA series is fun, and that R* seem to have realized this in making Gay Tony much more flamboyant and contain much crazier missions than IV, a setting where pretty much anything you can imagine can legitimately be said to exist opens the door for that.

We could even imagine a future where there is a Dreamcast 2...

2. Scope for social commentary.
“But Mister Adequate!” I hear you cry “GTA relies so heavily on making commentary on the period in question! How could a future GTA do this?” Well, okay, it can’t actually comment on the future proper for obvious reasons, but it CAN comment on our imaginings of the future. And it’s not like we have a shortage of that. R* can quite easily poke fun at futurist utopians like me, as well as cynics or those who feared despotism and destruction, or anyone else. Moreover, it’s not hard to imagine issues in the future which will parallel existing or historical ones; clone rights, human-robot marriage, and so forth and which would be ripe for making fun of, as well as letting R* comment on current events with references to ‘history’, e.g. “Remember back in 2013 when we legalized gay marriage and within a month, the military collapsed because of all the gay sex?” or whatever.

3. Variation in setting.
Of course, there are a multitude of visions of the future, both in terms of individual ideas and broad movements. This doesn’t constrain, it does the opposite. R* has so much to choose from that they could use a great deal of it to create a varied and engaging environment. The high-end part of town could be all 1920s modernism in appearance and style; the middle-class suburbs 1950s all streamline moderne and raygun gothic; the business district could remind us of Mirror’s Edge with businessmen in their mile-high gleaming towers overlooking a city rife with crime, poverty, and misery; the densely packed urban areas reminiscent of Blade Runner and Judge Dredd, with blocks of intolerably densely packed buildings overlooking perpetually gloomy and rainy streets, all while, off in the distance, the Space Elevator that carries hopeful immigrants to Mars is always visible and is the dream of millions. This ties in again with #2; what if America’s population was falling because people were so desperate to leave?

4. Music.
As with #2 there seems on the surface to be a problem here, but #2 itself actually solves the problem. Assuming the setting is fairly unpleasant (And it’s GTA, so it will be), it’s pretty easy to say “Well everyone’s on a massive nostalgia kick because things suck” and then voila, you can pick any music from any period. For contemporary stuff you can just get people like Brian Eno to create it – he knows how to make it sound like the future. If done right the setting could be sublime precisely because it isn’t so constrained by a specific era.

The future sounds like the 80s and looks like ponies.

5. “Five” and “Future” alliterate.

The Android's Bunker (Strategy)

In lieu of an actual blog post today…

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I present to you SMAC Ponies, made with generalzoi’s Pony Creator.

I think some of these “translated” into ponyfication better than others but I’m proud overall. If I ever get around to redoing it, I think I’ll give Morgan yellow eyes or something (to portray his “faction color”), and I might make Deirdre an Earth Pony– my original thought was that she’s “flying naked through the trees”, but the whole Earth-Pony-bond-with-animals thing might actually fit better. Then, I’ll add faction symbols as cutie marks.

…I’m beyond help, aren’t I?

The Android's Mother's Basement (MMO)

Just when I thought I was out…

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… they pull me back in.

Yes, I’m talking about that old standby that nobody ever truly escapes from, the game that both codified MMOs and redefined what they could commercially and culturally achieve – World of Warcraft. Now, our dear Pike has as most of you will know been a very long-time player of WoW, and played solidly for years, which is of course where her delightful Aspect of the Hare arose from. In fact I first played the game considerably before she ever touched it (I got it just as Patch 1.6 came out.), but unlike her I come and go in waves. I play for a few months, then put it aside for a few months, repeat. Apparently ad nauseum. I had thought I had escaped for good; I last played in early Spring if I recall correctly.

But here I am, and I know the signs by now. I’ve started reading the WoW forums. I keep an eye on the patch notes. I’ve updated to the latest version. I’m looking for the best current plugins to use. Sooner or later, no matter how long and hard I resist it, I’m going to give Blizzard yet more of my altogether too scarce money and I am going to spend an extraordinary amount of time playing World of Warcraft.

Again. And I’m sure I’ll drag Pike along with me, because she’s susceptible to that sort of thing and hearing me ooh-ing and ah-ing over some mediocre Green I just found will make her itch to play it.

Goldshire, my body is ready!

Are there any games, MMO or otherwise, which just seem to always manage to call you back to them, an irresistible siren song that must inexorably conquer you despite your best efforts?

Also how is WoW these days, to those who still play?

The Android's Liberal Arts Degree (Meta/Critical), The Android's Thinking Cap (Puzzle)

Foldit and Why This is Really Nothing New

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This has been making the rounds recently so I imagine a lot of you have already seen this, but if not, have a neat little news tidbit that one of our most ardent commenters, Bamos, reminded me of:

Basically, a bunch of researchers created a puzzle game, called Foldit, which is designed to simulate actual protein folding. The idea was that human players could come up with more interesting solutions to real life problems than the AI could.

This was recently proven true when scientists decided to put a particularly tricky puzzle in the game– a puzzle with an answer that had been evading researches for a decade. Ten days later, it was solved. The article itself explains it best, so let me quote a bit of it:

In the past year and a half, users of the program had demonstrated their potential to solve real protein-folding problems, Baker said, so when Jaskolski came to him with this enigmatic viral protease, they decided to put the gamers to the test. Baker posed the problem to the Foldit players, and watched the responses flood in.

About 600 players from 41 teams submitted more than 1.25 million solutions. Narrowing those down to 5,000, Jaskolski and colleagues subjected them to a computational technique called molecular replacement (MR), which tests the models against X-ray crystallography data. For MR to work, the proposed structure has to be very close to accurate, in which case the MR calculations can help perfect the details. But previous attempts at MR for this protein had failed because the protein models were too far off the mark.

But The Contender’s proposed protein structure was a winner. “When we took [their] model, it was a beautiful fit to the X-ray data so we knew [they] had solved it,” Baker said. “We were just totally blown away. This is the first time that a long-standing scientific problem has been solved by Foldit players, or to my knowledge, any scientific gaming participants.”

The final breakthrough came from Foldit user mimi, a member of The Contenders and a science technician at a high school near Manchester, UK, who has been playing Foldit for about 3 years. She “tucked in a flap” of the protein that was sticking out, she explains, to make the protein more “globular.” But she emphasizes that “the achievement was very much a group effort,” noting that it wasn’t possible for her to tuck in the flap until others in the group had made their key adjustments to the protein’s structure.

“It’s kind of an unprecedented case of using computing non-specialists to solve a longstanding scientific problem,” said Alexander Wlodawer, chief of the Macromolecular Crystallography Laboratory at the National Cancer Institute.

Scootaloo's face upon making the breakthrough

What I like here is that this isn’t just “gamers vs. scientists” or “real people vs. computer programs” or anything. It’s a lot of people (and AI) working in tandem to figure this stuff out. And this time, a game happened to be at the center of it.

The fact that gamers played an integral role here shouldn’t come as much of a shock to anyone who has spent a lot of time around Elitist Jerks, CivFanatics or SimCity Devotion. Heck, remember Magnasanti, brought to us by the guy who “beat” SimCity? Even little kids memorize hundreds of Pokemon and all the moves and combat details inherent to gameplay. Humans hate math and theories in school, but they sure do love it when they can apply it to a game. Perhaps because there’s a tangible feeling of mastery, or perhaps because it’s a competition. Maybe it’s just because it’s fun. Who knows? The point is that it works.

And so finally we have the news pointing out to the public what all of us who have grown up knee-deep in video game subcultures have known for a long time: that we’re all a bunch of anal-retentive nerds, and that this isn’t necessarily a bad trait.

Bring it on, science!

The Android's Deranged Killing Spree (Action), The Android's Favorites

Giant Manly Men Being Manly

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I spent the great majority of yesterday playing Gears of War 3. Now, Gears is not the highest-minded game series ever made, it’s true, but it also highlights why not every game has to aspire to being meaningful and special in that sense. Because this is gaming at its absolute finest, it is sheer, unadulterated fun.

Gears of War is a game where people are made of muscles the size of oak trees. Pretty much everyone can take a stupid amount of punishment before dying, they’re as strong as oxen, and the whole game is basically Violence Is Fun Part 3: Electric Boogal…ee? Whatever. The point is you shoot a lot of stuff. And it’s great. Now I’m doing Gears a bit of a disservice because it does actually have some rather good characters and does some heavy stuff story-wise (Both far better in this than either predecessor), but really, the main point of the game is killing lots of Locust.

Everything here has been polished to an impressive degree. Absolutely everything about the game shows attention to detail and refinement, everything works brilliantly, the whole system just feels like it’s put together properly out of a lot of solid and well-tested parts.

As a tribute to my good friend Paul, here is a picture of Carmine.

I’m being a very poor blog person here because I’m not really conveying what it is that is good about Gears 3. It just… it just works, really really well, and is stupidly fun to play. I’ve not even touched the improved Horde mode yet, though I messed around in Beast mode (Where you play the Locust side in a Horde game, basically) a bit and it was just glorious. Epic Games seem to have held nothing back here. You fight the most ridiculous, over the top enemies, all sorts of insane things happen, and the game includes one of the best siege defenses I’ve ever had the pleasure of playing through in any action game.

In short, if you like FUN, get GoW 3. I guess it won’t convert you if you’re not a fan, but if you’re on the fence I would wholly endorse joining in now and getting into some multiplayer with friends, because few games do multiplayer as well as this one does.

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

Atom Zombie Smasher: Losing Is Fun!

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This is a game I’ve had for a while but, for some reason, never actually got around to playing until yesterday: Atom Zombie Smasher. Don’t be fooled by the silly-sounding name or what appears at first glance to be a rather simplistic layout: this is a full-blown real-time strategy game, complete with troops, weapons, and evac helicopters to position and (eventually) tech to research. Unlike many strategy games, though, this particular game isn’t about deciding which of your many available units/buildings to build. Rather, it’s about the tactical execution. It’s about “Here’s your stuff and it’s all you’re gonna get for this mission. Good luck.”

There's a giant artillery cannon in the game so this image is officially relevant.

The game’s premise is simple: There’s a zombie outbreak going on and it’s your job to evacuate as many civilians to safety as possible. Get any ideas of grandeur out of your head right now: there are going to be casualties and collateral damage. A lot of it. In any given scenario if you manage to rescue about a quarter of a town’s population you’re doing quite well.

This is the map where you’re going to be spending most of your time:

Click to enlarge!

The glowing golden dots are your civilians and the purple ones are the zeds. If a zombie touches a civilian, the civilian turns into a zombie. In other words, if one purple dot touches a clump of golden dots, you can say goodbye to that particular clump. The above screenshot was taken about ten seconds after the start of the mission so the zombies haven’t had much of a chance to do anything yet, but believe me– they will.

The meat of the game is juggling the weapons, troops, and other assorted help that you’re given at the start of the mission. You’ve got various types of explosives (artillery, dynamite, landmines, etc.), you’ve got infantry troops and rooftop snipers, you’ve got barricades and zed bait, and most importantly you’ve got your evac helicopter. Watch out, though: not everything is available for every mission, so you go into each one feeling rather crunched for supplies. But that’s part of the beauty and fun of the whole thing.

One of my favorite parts of the game is that it takes “real-time” to its fullest extent. Your helicopter doesn’t just land the second it tells you to. It takes a while to do so, and then it takes its sweet time loading up survivors, and then it has to fly away offscreen somewhere and unload them before it returns. Likewise, your artillery cannon not only has a giant cooldown, but it doesn’t actually fire until several seconds after you tell it to, so you can’t just fire where the zombies are– you have to think and then fire where the zombies will be. Oh, and buildings (and your own weapons/troops) aren’t invincible to your explosives, by the way. Once I piled a bunch of dynamite around my artillery without thinking and before I knew it, my artillery was out of commission. Hmm.

The game also has an experience system so you can upgrade your stuff, and eventually you’re able to research your own upgrades on top of that.

Another thing the game does really well is give you a sense of things spiraling out of control as the zombies multiply exponentially. What begins as one or two available missions on your map turns into this after about four or five successful ones:

Take a guess what the higher numbers mean.

Oh, and did I mention that you’re racing the zombies to a high score and that every single one of those numbers contributes to the zombies’ score? Yeah. Every time you feel good about a successful evacuation mission, you’re taken to the map screen and three or four more infected areas show up and previously infected areas become… well, even more infected.

Losing is fun? Losing is fun.

In short, this is a surprisingly unique and addicting little strategy game that you will easily lose a few hours to. It’s $10 on Steam or $15 elsewhere, which might be a bit high depending on how often you play this sort of game, but I’ve seen it packed in with those pay-what-you-want Humble Bundles a couple of times so it’s well worth the couple of bucks if you ever see it there or otherwise on sale.

Come on, you really can’t go wrong with a game that involves blowing zombies up with dynamite. Right? Right.

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

Deus Ex: Human Revolution

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I like Deus Ex. And I liked Invisible War okay as well, as a game it wasn’t at all bad, it just looked bad next to Deus Ex. Because it’s one of the best games ever made.

So when there was news of another DX game on the way I was predictably skeptical. Might be an okay game, but it’s really not going to match the original. And I was pretty wrong about that. But the reason HR works is not because it has good, solid controls, not because it has developed characters and a good story, nor even because it offers several ways to pursue objectives. The reason it comes close to matching the original is something intangible, often overlooked, and always of great importance: Atmosphere.

The setting is amazing, now that I’ve been further than Detroit. In fact it took me about two minutes of walking around Heng Sha before I declared it one of my favorite game settings ever. Heng Sha is by far the magnum opus of HR in fact; a cyberpunk dystopia that hits all the right buttons. As RPS said, it’s not just night, it feels like it hasn’t been day in years (And in the Lower City that’s pretty much exactly true). It’s dirty and cramped, and hugely wealthy buildings sit beside apartments barely above corrugated-iron shanties. Above, monorails buzz around on the underside of the Pangu (The plate upon which the Upper City sits). You get a vista of the Lower City at one point and it is a scene straight from Blade Runner; clearly so full of hardship and suffering and matchlessly beautiful despite it.

Also known as the floof

Then you see the Upper City, and it is not just a nicer place, it is a completely different sci-fi aesthetic. It is clean, green, sleek, and searingly bright. It is definitively Utopian in style. Juxtapositions are generally nice and a pretty commonly used too but I’ve rarely seen one so well handled, even though your contact with the Upper City is limited. The buildings are pale and quintessentially futuristic, compared to the cyberpunk skyscrapers of the Lower City. There are parks and plazas everywhere; the biggest open space in the Lower City is a dirty rooftop.

Crystal Spires and Togas

This is what the original DX did so very well, and where IW was weak. This is where HR succeeds as well. It has been a long, long time since I’ve felt that palpable knot of excitement in my stomach that comes from just exploring somewhere awesome, but I felt it in Heng Sha. HR is a game that succeeds, and it’s because of the amount of attention paid to the details and the setting that elevates it from “good” to “memorable”.

Are you enjoying HR? Do you agree? Which game settings have really stuck with you thanks to being well executed?

The Android's Bunker (Strategy)

An Army to Crush People With

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According to my mom, who went crazy with genealogy research one year a while back, I’m a direct descendant of both William the Conqueror and Charlemagne. I like to jokingly tell people that this makes me naturally good at strategy games because it means conquering people is in my blood.

If that is actually the case, though, ol’ Willy and Charlie both would be disappointed in me. My usual strategy in something like, say, Civ, is to sit around and tech and then win by space victory. I’m usually not the aggressor unless someone gives me a really good reason to be.

So yesterday I was rather surprised by the sudden urge I felt the urge to play a Civ game specifically to go around and destroy everyone. I did so, and it was glorious. Why build more cities when you can just plunder some for yourself? Why worry about diplomacy when you have a military that could take on three or four other civs at once? Why worry about tech when you’re going to be ahead in tech by the end of the game anyway due to, well, conquering everyone?

The rules of the game.

Anyways, going against my usual grain was a lot of fun and by the end I even found myself juggling things I didn’t think I’d have to, like culture– when you take a lot of cities from other people, culture becomes a big deal in order to avoid losing your new prizes.

I did inevitably end up winning with a Space Race Victory, despite taking about half of everyone’s cities for my own. I just can’t resist the lure of flying to Alpha Centauri. Mister Adequate has issued me a challenge, though: Next time, I have to turn off all victories except for Conquest. Bring it on.

The Android can't be arsed with a real topic (Weekend)

This weekend!

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Okay kids, it’s that time again, when I categorically fail to come up with a post topic and so resort to something pretty mundane! What are YOU going to be playing this weekend?

Orestiáda Dead Island

I only use violence as a last resort

http://woosterglass.com/author/bgardner Deus Ex: Human Revolution

I'd explain what these do for me, but then the blog would need the new .xxx TLD

DORF FORT

You will NEVER kill this many Elves.

Suikoden V

In a game filled with waifus, she still stands out.

ALSO!!!!!

Tomorrow is the premiere of Season 2 of My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. So… yeah, if you thought the blog overdid it on Pony pics before now…

... then you may want to bail, because it's only going to get worse.

So what about you, dear readers? What entertainments shall be occupying your precious free time this weekend?