I haven’t really been following Gears of War at all, except to occasionally notice that it looks pretty nifty. But I have to applaud this this GoW trailer, which juxtaposes the game’s bleak setting with the haunting version of “Mad World” I first heard on the Donnie Darko soundtrack. Classy.
Games on the road
October 26, 2006 at 1:55 pm (Books, Roleplaying)
I’m out of town on another work-related trip, so not much gaming of any variety is going on. However, I made sure to pack a few RPGs, “just in case.” Just in case of what, I’m really not sure; but here’s what I packed:
Shadowrun, 4th edition and Ex Machina: a few years ago I thought that cyberpunk in gaming was officially dead. No sooner did I make that pronouncement than the market was hit by a slew of new cyberpunk games: a new Shadowrun, the gorgeous Ex Machina, and a new edition of Cyberpunk. Reports of cyberpunk’s death have been greatly exaggerated by me, it seems.
Hunter: the Reckoning: this game never seemed to get much love from the general gaming public, but I still flip lovingly through its pages from time to time. Hunter captured a lot of Call of Cthulhu-esque themes–”average Joe faces unknowable horrors, goes insane, and dies”–while giving them a nice modern twist.
Shadows over Baker Street: OK, this one’s not a game book; it’s a collection of stories about what would happen if Sherlock Holmes went up against the mind-shattering horrors of the Cthulhu mythos. Lots of fun, and if I can’t find some game-able ideas in there, I don’t deserve my Gamemaster badge.
So rest assured, while I’m not talking about games too much here at the moment, I am in fact continuing to read them incessantly. And I just learned that the coworker traveling with me on this particular work-related trip is an off-and-on D&D player. Perhaps my neurotic habit of bringing game books everywhere I go will finally pay off. If only I hadn’t left my dice at home….
You’ll never beat me: games with show-stopping bugs
October 18, 2006 at 1:32 pm (Computer Games, Industry, Video Games)
There are games that seem impossible to beat, and games that really are impossible to beat. That’s the story with the recent Bubble Bobble Revolution, which
includes a game-halting bug. Apparently the big boss battle in Level 30 isn’t much of a battle at all because the boss never appears, meaning that the game just sits there on an empty level waiting for a boss who will never come. The remaining seventy or so levels are unreachable.
Ouch–this doesn’t sound too good for the publisher’s Quality Assurance department. If this were a computer game, a downloadable patch could fix the game, but since this is a handheld console game, fixing it will probably involve recalling the game from store shelves and shipping out corrected copies to stores and customers.
It is not uncommon for games to ship with serious bugs–in fact, it’s a common computer gamer gripe that the availability of online patching has made it easier for developers to release buggy titles and patch them later. But it’s fairly uncommon for a game to ship with a bug so severe that the game is unfinishable.
The only such game that I’ve personally encountered was Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries, a very fun game that also happened to be riddled with bugs. The bugs might have been tolerable, except that one of them made it impossible to progress beyond a certain point in the game. After completing a particularly difficult mission partway through the game, you are told to wait for your dropship to pick you up and end the mission. The dropship showed up, all right–but it never landed. I spent a good hour chasing it around the map; I tried shooting it down; I tried reloading old saved games; I tried replaying the mission from scratch, but the dropship never landed and the mission never ended. So I stopped playing the game. (I later learned that a patch was made available, but this was in the mid-90s before internet connectivity was ubiquitous; by the time I came across the patch, the game had long been gathering dust.)
The only other game I’ve played that comes close to the “unfinishable” level was Ultima 9–a famously buggy game that, like MW2:M above, was quite enjoyable… during the small windows of time between crashes and lock-ups when you were actually able to play. I had to completely reinstall the game and start from scratch twice. The third time I made it halfway through the game only to have it corrupt all of my saved games was the last… while there was no one single bug that rendered the game unwinnable, the odds of making it through the entire game without running into a game-killing glitch were so low that it probably counts as “unwinnable” in my book. (The game’s bugs were so severe that the publisher actually shipped out fresh copies of the game to registered customers; but I didn’t have the willpower to start over from scratch again in the hopes that it wouldn’t just die again after sucking up fifteen more hours of my life.)
Extremely difficult games I can handle. Even games so difficult that they might as well be impossible for me to complete. I can shrug off a few bugs here and there. But completely unwinnable games? That just makes me wonder if anybody over at the game company actually played the thing before slapping a $49.99 price sticker on it and bundling it off to Gamestop.
On the Minus World and the death of mystery
October 10, 2006 at 12:08 am (Culture, History)
Ah, the Minus World. What teenage boy during the NES years didn’t spend countless hours of his life trying to unlock the secret entrance to that legendary, and possibly imaginary, hidden level in Super Mario Bros?
The internet, in its all-seeing wisdom, has of course laid bare the secrets of the Minus World. Enjoy watching somebody do what you never could: find that elusive spot at which a simple jump would teleport you to the forbidden halls of the Holy Grail of 8-bit gaming.
The Minus World–which actually turned out to be a simple glitch in the game, not a carefully-planted Easter Egg–has to be one of the earliest and most potent Gaming Urban Legends. Nobody you talked to had ever actually been to the Minus World, but everybody had a cousin whose neighbor had stumbled upon it on accident and knew the precise sequence of moves required to access it. I myself spent more than a few hours in front of the Nintendo with my friend Derrick in search of the Minus World. Scrawled on a crumpled piece of paper in our possession were instructions that claimed to describe the twisting path to the Minus World–I think Derrick transcribed the instructions, scribbling them down as a cousin or friend or babysitter or some other vague authority revealed them in a conspiratorial whisper.
But the instructions never worked. We never found the Minus World, although viewing the video above, I swear we got really, really close. If only….
It seems to me that the golden age of video game myths is over. Back then, there were no strategy guides or incredibly exhaustive online walkthroughs to reveal to you every corner, every secret, every Easter Egg to be found in a given video game. No, back then these things were mysteries–you heard about them second- or third-hand, then rushed home to try and find them yourself. The myths were usually wild goose chases… but they were true just often enough to keep you coming back for more.
I think the day of the Game Urban Legend lasted up to about the release of Doom and its sister games. Doom and its ilk featured countless hidden spaces and Easter Eggs, and I’m guessing that you, like I, spent at least some of your adolescence running alongside the walls of Doom levels hitting the spacebar in hopes of finding a secret door. But that was about when strategy guides were hitting game store shelves, and about the time that people were compiling their collective Doom knowledge on the fledgling internet.
Those strategy guides and walkthroughs gave us the hidden knowledge we sought… and they stripped the veil of mystery away from the games we played and loved. Suddenly, we knew everything–and this gamer at least, gazing into that abyss, longed for the bliss of ignorance, forever lost. Was the price we paid for our encyclopedic knowledge too high?
Weekend game report: the great Federation-Vudar beatdown
October 9, 2006 at 11:34 pm (Wargames)
This weekend, I played my biggest game of Star Fleet Battles yet. My opponent and I each had 600 points with which to purchase a squadron of starships. We each showed up to the field of battle with four ships–my force consisted of a Federation command cruiser, two heavy cruisers, and a plasma cruiser. He was playing the Vudar (a former subject race that rebelled against their Klingon overlords) and fielded a Vudar battlecruiser and three war cruisers. What diplomatic debacle had pitted the peace-loving Federation and the Klingon-hating Vudar against each other that day, none can say.
It was an epic battle–at least in comparison to the one-on-one starship duels we usually play. The Federation and Vudar primary weapon systems are fairly similar–the Feds have their famous photon torpedoes while the Vudar equip their ships with ion cannons; both are heavy-hitting weapons that work best at short range. (The Vudar are weaker in the phaser and drone department, but compensate with a defensive system that can make their ships extremely difficult to hit.) That meant that my opponent and I both pursued the same basic tactic: close to within striking range, concentrate the squadron’s fire on one or two targets, then peel away and maintain a safe distance while frantically reloading our weapons.
And that’s how it played out. On the initial pass, I learned what happens when four Vudar ships all concentrate their firepower on a single Federation vessel: said ship goes BOOM. I lost my command cruiser, but my surviving ships quickly exacted revenge by damaging his battlecruiser and destroying a war cruiser while they tried to escape. We both backed off and stalked each other for the next few turns while we reloaded weapons, then I charged. In the ensuing chaos I lost a heavy cruiser and took down one more of his war cruisers, leaving us each with two fairly battered surviving ships. Reflecting that no sane starship captain would continue an engagement after suffering 50% casualties (and noting that it was creeping towards 11:00 pm), we called it a draw.
Going by the point value of ships destroyed, he did manage a technical victory–he scored an official Marginal Victory and I suffered a corresponding Marginal Defeat. But that’s about as close to victory as I’ve ever gotten against this particular opponent, so in my mind I had done the Federation at least somewhat proud.
I’ve got no brilliant observations about the game, except that it did show me that SFB does not necessarily become unmanageable when you play larger battles. Having multiple powerful ships adds a lot of tactical options–and the amount of concentrated firepower they can pour at a single unfortunate ship is a bit scary. And I also learned that splash damage from exploding ships is nothing to be laughed at–one of my heavy cruisers (rather unluckily) took serious internal damage when the plasma cruiser went down in flames.
All in all, a great match. I don’t know when the next match is, but now that I’ve witnessed the awesome firepower of a starship fleet, I’m going to have a hard time being satisfied with just one or two measly starships…
Back in the saddle
October 1, 2006 at 6:26 pm (Culture)
It’s been a while since my last post–but between a work conference and other Real Life excitement, I’ve not had much time to devote to gaming. I will note quickly, however, that the results of the gaming hobby survey are in, and have been compiled over at Wargamer.com. Interesting reading–go check it out!
