I’d like to take a moment to tell you about Gothic. Crazy German RPG from a few years back, with an amazing take on action-adventure-rpgs. It wasn’t trying to be an RPG. It seriously had the bare minimum. You had hp, mp, strength, dex… 4 weapon skills, and a handfull of one-off abilities you could buy up like lockpicking, or harvesting trophies from critters. The weapons did get better, but the wielder is what was deadly.

The focus wasn’t so much on the RPG elements. It was on the world. You were set loose on a valley without any reason to care about anyone in it. Your quests often had multiple outcomes based on who you were willing (or eager) to screw over.

There was so much to do that you could play for days without even needing to mess with the main plot. Before you ever had to embark on saving anyone, you got to know the world.

The sequel, Gothic II, was a masterpiece. Sidequests were deep, varied, and kept cropping up throughout the game. Which makes sense, since you really can’t drive off robed mystery men from a man’s home until after they’ve invaded. It even had a good reason for playing the same character back at level 1 again… it took a few weeks to rescue you from the first game, and you were half-mad and half-starved from being trapped in rubble.

The 3rd game in the series… first change in the engine… and it sucked. The combat was tied to the animations, and they couldn’t change the animations by the time they figured out they’d built a set of rules where a wolf could juggle a seasoned fighter to death. Players feared barks, and would be relieved by a mere combat with dragons. They fight fair, flamethrower notwithstanding.

A few too many corners were cut. The game had clearly shipped on time, but at a brutal cost. Still, the quests kept their depth. And if you were willing to put up with a horrible combat system, the game did yield a truly impressive level of control over the fate of the world. Be a champion of light? Dark? Or go with the bright idea the necromancer has and kick all the gods out of the world, and forget this whole “every thousand years” war BS.

This brings me to Risen. Clearly by the same guys that brought us the first Gothic game. Since the combat isn’t broken by bad animation, it’s a much better game than their next most recent offering. But it does have a few problems. I can’t complain about the combat system, although it’s gotten a bit more depth. There are now 3 melee weapons skills to go with the 2 ranged ones, and raising skill gives you more maneuvers and lets you use a shield with even two-handed weapons.

The quest log has a button you can hit to see map locations for any given quest (if given). Always a nice touch.

The problem I had with the game wasn’t the combat, or the magic systems… or the (limited) crafting.

The problem I had was with the sidequests. But it’s a difficult thing to address. You have to understand that this is a game that gives you an open world at the outset. The only limitation to where you can go is what’s going to kill you. A bit of training and a lot of prudence (and cunning use of sheer cowardice) can allow you to go virtually anywhere from the beginning. So it’s quite simple to end up doing some parts of some quests quite out of order.

And that means that, while it doesn’t really break a plot to have you gather up vital macguffins ahead of time… the game does give you the quest update whether or not you’d started it. It’s not a terribly subtle way of saying “This seems important!” Also, it’s not possible to cover absolutely every permutation… so you get some very odd responses if you do things in a particular order.

One very beautiful quest line involves a pirate’s daughter. She’s looking for her father…’s treasure. So’s another pirate. At one point, you split up, and of course, she’s captured. You get to play Russian roulette with trapped chests (and a set of clues to tell which ones not to pick) and bring out the reward (including a main plot macguffin) to exchange for the girl’s location. All anybody really wants is the map to the other treasure hauls around the various islands. I don’t dig the ransom thing, so as soon as I had the key to the girl’s cell and her location… I slew five pirates and took the map back.

Problem was… when I rescued her, my side of the conversation said “I gave him the map.” She was a bit put out by this. Then I got the option to say “I got the map.” It was more than a little clunky, and it felt as though that method of resolving the quest should have been accounted for in the dialog.

Still, for the most part, as long as you aren’t expecting as much in the way of conversation options as previous games covered, it’s an awesome romp in a not-quite-standard RPG realm. There are some curious design choices… like, even if you are a mage, the endgame fight is basically Zelda. You use a shield to reflect glowies back at the boss, run up and hit him. Repeat. Try not to fall into the volcano. Your entire game’s combat practice is irrelevant, because someone wanted the end-game boss to be “different”, I guess.

A graphical glitch also marred my enjoyment. The sky would tend to flicker through day and night quite spastically. A quick internet search revealed a need to upgrade my graphics drivers. No problem. It worked nicely… for a while. A few days later, there are problems when moving into certain areas, causing the rapid flicker… and whatever time of day it stopped on when I left, all the NPCs would do whatever was appropriate then. If it stopped on night, they went to bed. If it stopped on day, they’d go to work. That’s… more than mere graphics at fault. Worse, the game eventually froze on midnight and refused to budge from there. I had to wake people up to complete quests… despite the risk of retaliation from trespassing.

Some who have played this game confessed disappointment to me… because the sheer volume of sidequests at the outset set an expectation… that there would be more as the main plot progressed. This was proven wrong, obviously. Only a few important threads tied into the main plot and were developed in the later chapters. I believe it has something to do with the design philosophy. The quests are things to do, and they’re scattered around the island. You are the only one determining how fast you plow through them. You alone determine if there are any left before you advance the main plot. It is like hunting down all the hidden packages in GTA before doing the second mission. Nobody forced you to do it in that order.

And that’s something most players don’t get out of an RPG… choice. It’s not even implemented particularly satisfyingly here, in all cases. It’s usually between two sides, and eventually just becomes a linear progression towards an inevitable destiny. Which… actually… is the theme.

Still, good to see these crazy guys are still working, still pounding out… well, it’s basically refurbished Gothic 1. But that was still better than 3, so… yay!

(Note, the above review contains spoilers. If you wanted to avoid them, you should have looked at the end of the review first, since that’s all you’d care about.)

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Everyone is wrong. Wrong is the default state of the universe. It’s the default of any idea, it’s the starting place of every rationalization, and it’s every step along the journey towards either greater or lesser wrong.

I know, it seems an exaggeration. It’s not.

Do you remember physics and chemistry? My textbooks had a few pages about the various models for atomic structure that have been proposed throughout the ages. In order from quite wrong to less wrong. And the implication is that our current understanding is wrong too, and we haven’t figured out how yet.

Every science, every art, every discipline… perfection is not attained. We strive not to be perfect, but to be less wrong than we start. It’s a process, and every one of us demands improvement from ourselves in some aspects of our lives. Lest we succumb to depression.

You don’t think it applies to you? How about sex? You like sex? Gets better with practice, doesn’t it? Anyone who hasn’t repressed (or not experienced) their first sexual experience knows for damned certain that virgins are not good lovers.

Or maybe you’re a bit of a puritan? Finding sex offensive, you spend your evenings in Bible study… trying to improve or maintain your spiritual purity… or just to deepen and improve your understanding. Because you are imperfect, and therefore wrong in some way.

It’s easy to spot wrongness in others, isn’t it? Laws passed that clearly didn’t have the best of brains behind them, or have wording so poor that every armchair lawyer is thinking how bad the loopholes are. That grumpy sourpuss in line ahead of you that’s getting fed up with everything not being 100% perfect in their life and letting the whole world know… that they’re wrong in their expectations.

But the only way that we improve as human beings is to say that there’s something wrong about ourselves… and then fix it.

I am fed up with my life. It’s not living up to my expectations. The problem is, what I want is a way to get from here to… self-supporting, and having a family. I don’t have that. I lack the education, the job market sucks, and I have a shitty work ethic when it comes to begging for a job I really don’t want. I don’t even have half a clue what I want to do with my life from here.

I’m wrong!

Nothing in my life suggests I’m actually going to be any good with starting my own family. That’s an expectation that I had for life when I was 6. Maybe I will, maybe I won’t. I barely stay in touch with the loving family I have now. We’re generally aloof people and even wanting a family, I’d have to learn how to be a real part of one.

I’m wrong about hating just about every sort of retail job… that’s bullcrap. I liked work that involved a lot of moving around. Was great for my metabolism in high school. Once my weight shifts to where it’s less strain, I’ll like that again. It’s not even the physical pain of menial labor that bothers me. It’s putting up with corporate bullshit… but… most low-end jobs have pretty obvious common-sense rules. Sure, some of it’s BS layout from corporate, or obviously bad legal compromises… but there’s stories there, and you can respect them. At the end of the day, your job is to move things to where they must go so people can find them, and money can be made. I’d probably hate management there, but that’s not what I’d be applying for.

And, for what I want? I do know. I want to help people. I want to see justice. I want to get paid… and I’d like to be creative and occasionally even underhanded when someone deserves it.

I’m not quick. I keep a level head under pressure… I think I’m describing police work. Bit of a surprise, I was expecting counseling. Something to look into either way. I just have to keep in mind that, with any expectations… I’m wrong about reality.

But we all start being wrong. So it’s all right.

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I am going to link to a flash game that breaks my heart: Zombie Assault 2 – Insane Asylum.

This is zombie survival with guns and upgradable barriers. I’d rather like to know how the zombies manage to carry cash, and what agency it is that sells you barrier upgrades that you have to fix your own self. But anyway, it’s a rather bog-standard mix of frenetic shooting, base defense, and upgrading your offense and defense to survive upgrading waves of undead. It’s a good formula. The mix this time around is needing cash to add on to the map, to find… well, it’s not the weapons themselves, like I’d expect. It’s an outline of the weapon that lets you buy them from the shop. Like pieces of a picture-menu for a mute customer.

At first glance, it’s a horrid trade-off. You buy, essentially, an increasing number of ways for zombies to enter. Some do not even allow barricades. Fortunately, the undead are stupid and stick with their assigned doors, even walking past an already-smashed barrier to beat upon one that had caught their fancy. The number of undead in each wave is static. These two details mean that you have spread out the zombie problem, so your barriers should last a bit longer. The kitchen and adjacent… porch-y area give vital obstacles to run around, exposing flaws in zombie pathfinding I haven’t needed to exploit since Lode Runner. (look it up, whipper-snappers!)

The undead themselves are a fun mix of speeds, toughness, and special effects. Clowns which are nearly unkillable… save for their own detonations a few seconds after they run near you and root themselves in place. Big beefy meat-cleaver wielders that have a few mutant tapeworms to share with you on their death. And even some demon-y guy who likes to chuck eldritch fire at you. The best bit is that you have some warning. The game’s sound effects include screeches and chilling clown laughs to let you know what a given wave is about to throw at you. But not from which direction… so that you might decide if you are using a good weapon for the upcoming problem.

All that is to the good, believe it or not. Each element listed enhances the experience. Even the pathing issues, as the difficulty is high enough to where exploiting the AI isn’t any guarantee of victory… just a slight edge.

Difficulty, as in all of this class of game, comes from a simple source… you need to buy things, and you don’t know what will help you survive until it’s too late to spend the money elsewhere. As you are spending the exact same cash on expanding your living space that you do on weapons… it becomes even more of a challenge. It is simpler if you know which areas contain which… uh, weapon potentials? Menu items? So you simply do not get to know what’s even available on the first playthru, until you have unlocked the entire map.

You do start off with the ability to buy better barricades tho. Which are repaired to full health instantly, by walking up to one and tapping a key. However… upgrading this to the point where the barriers will damage the zombies that bash them costs as much as the mid-range weapons… and represents the game’s obvious tipping point. If you get the barricades to full, and the map unlocked, you can hold off quite a lot. A sentry gun or two would also make it possible to survive to the endgame.

This is also the point the game appears calibrated to leave slightly out of reach. I’m not saying it’s impossible… there’s bound to be some cryptic range of upgrading and ultimate zombiefighting that allows a human player to survive. But the difficulty of the game… even with health restored between waves, the bulk of players are going to be stymied just short of being able to balance themselves against the ever-steepening difficulty.

Which is where the game promptly decides to break my heart.

You can register yourself with the game’s handlers to unlock a persistant profile, so your XP and character perks don’t go away (the shop and inventory is reset every time tho. Sorry!). And you are given a couple “premium” items for free. Few extra grenades, a rifle that’s quite a bit better than the starter pistol… and this brings you to the bloody shop. Don’t get me wrong. I am not opposed to paying money for a game. Good games are awesome, and worth supporting. This game is playable for free… but you pay to unlock certain… perks. For real cash, you can lower the difficulty of the game. There’s weapons ranging from autoshotguns to proton packs. Permanent boosts to damage, armor, health regen, and bonus income from zombie kills. You can buy the whole set of upgrades for $10 or $15 if you’re getting them individually. Clever pricing scheme, since $5 is the minimum, and would give you the most critical upgrades. But for twice the price, you can have it all. Nice marketing.

Now, if they had made this a bit like shareware, so that I were unlocking, say, an end-game boss… I could dig it. The thing that sends me into a bit of disgust is not that they are charging for the games… they are charging for things that lower the difficulty. This disgusts me. Thoroughly.

Some of you don’t need this explained to you, so I’ll try to be brief. Games used to come with a range of difficulty. There would be an easy mode so that you could experience the bulk of the game, but you wouldn’t be trying very hard. There might be a hellfire and brimstone mode where it would take weeks of training to survive the game… maybe in order to get a different ending. The ending wouldn’t really be all that great, but the elation of finally getting there… to no longer be banging your head against a bit wall in a silicon prison… that would give a giddy rush and instant bragging rights. And anyone sane would have long since found that one guy who could beat it, and watch them do it, so they wouldn’t actually have to.

But you didn’t pay money to make the game easier.

MMOs spend countless hours trying to destroy the practice of “Gold Farming”, wherein real money is exchanged for in-game currency, to allow for purchases that the player hasn’t earned. Ostensibly, you are outsourcing the grinding of the game. Frankly, the games are a bit grind-tastic, and like to keep you from having “fun” as much as possible… but the efforts to stop this industry are due to very real issues of in-game inflation (which puts prices so high that new players cannot buy any upgrades with their hard-earned cash) and of the farming activities crowding out “legitimate” gamers from vital resources.

These are beside the point, but I cannot truly express the outrage I feel without giving them as perspective.

The actual practice of requiring a player to spend money on lowering the difficulty level, and increasing fun… goes against good game design. It’s also a hideous business practice. You end up with a paying customer base of gamers who may be obsessive, but certainly do not have the skill it takes to conquer your game without your little perks… so every single customer is going to be ultimately dissatisfied with the experience, because they will know they couldn’t have beaten the game on their own. They are paying to cheat themselves of the very illusion of victory these games use as a reward for playing.

From a business perspective, you are giving yourself customers who will be disillusioned by the very game they bought into… which can’t do future sales much good. From a game designer’s perspective, I look at this and feel that there was a lot of playtesting put into making the difficulty exactly right… so the game will be addicting but impossible without paying, for most customers. The gaming purist in me scoffs at spending money to gain an edge in a game. The smart shopper who once bought a gameshark figures the price point is WAY off for cheats (But not bad for buying a full game of this type). The casual gamer in me… is intrigued, but not going to spend money when I have a book I could be reading.

I’m not sure what the target market is for this experiment, but as a mutation of the old shareware model, I can’t help but think it’s headed down the old Darwinian path.

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Hi. I play MMOs. At the moment, I’m going to take a bit of both our time to convey a concept about these colossal, yet awesome, timesinks. You have to learn how to play the game in order to excel at the game.

Right, points for the obvious, I know. Now, the usual method of training someone for doing well involves rewarding them for doing things right, and punishing them for doing things wrong. Right? Well… sort of. In order to actually learn, you would need to know what you did right, and what you had done wrong. If this were a sports game, you would see instant replay, and at the professional level, someone making more money than the average schoolteacher would patiently explain how someone on the team did something right in the heat of the moment, with imperfect information, and that the other guys weren’t ready for such a startling display of competence. MMOs lack this. Your random group of bored strangers may have simply succeeded on the 3rd try because one of the casters accidentally dispelled the enemy’s debuff… because he hit the wrong key at the right time. You did nothing different, so you don’t learn. Everybody thinks the other players game improved.

Now, it is possible to learn to play better… by listening to the advice of others. Sometimes this advice is actually good. Sometimes it is ranked slightly below frenching an electrical socket. I recall fondly my first serious group attempt in World of Warcraft, as a newbie warlock. I was repeatedly told 4 pieces of advice. I ignored half. One was to whip out the big ugly smoke pet I use as a tank when solo. I’m being told this by the tank. We have a tank and a healer. I can use my little imp to give everyone more stamina/hp, and set foes on fire. I ignore the advice.

I am told that I should not Fear an enemy in an instance. This makes sense. They run screaming for help, we get 5 guys in exchange for the 1 I sent packing. Bad news for the party. Good call. Instead, I use a power that prevents a foe from running. Curse of Recklessness. I’m told I should be using the mutually exclusive DPS power. I ignore this, because it’s a bad call. The foes aren’t living long enough to have a second tic of damage. And if they run, they tend to live just long enough to bring back grief.

The best advice I recieved was to “SS the healer”. SS turns out to mean “soulstone”. A bungee cord for the tunnel with the white light at the end. Brilliant! However, as a newb, it wasn’t ’till a breather halfway down the dungeon when I was able to type out “WTF is SS?” and actually get a coherent answer. Acronyms are not your friends when you try to train another person. They are used between people who already know what they are doing. When I used the power in the most tactically advantageous method, to let the healer survive a total wipe, so she could restore all of our bleeding corpses to life… it saved us all a long walk. And I got to disappoint said healer, who hadn’t known it was only usable once every 30 min.

Now, in all of WoW, the game itself never actually tried to train me on the most effective uses of my powers. It just sat there being Darwin. If I got it right enough, I survived. If I didn’t, I got to hike back to my corpse.

These days… I play LOTRO. One thing I really love in this system are the deeds. If you’re only familiar with WoW, think of them like Talents… that don’t suck, there’s far fewer of them, and you have to earn each one before you can spec it. Earning them is the critical aspect. As a game designer, you can never truly anticipate what stratagems the player base is going to roll out to break your carefully crafted balance. This is a reason that it isn’t altogether simple to train a player in using his class effectively. Sure, in the prior example, the tactical significance of letting the player who can resurrect  the party rez himself is a bit obvious. But not using the damaging curse, or the biggest looking pet… is a bit less obvious.

LOTRO’s deed system encourages experimentation. Because it rewards experimentation directly. You don’t know which of your abilities will advance a deed until actually using it, once you’ve reached a high enough level for that particular deed. So, to unlock all of them, you must practice your abilities to see what must be done. Granted, they are all simply “use ability x a few hundred or thousand times over a few days.” There is still a mighty opportunity to learn from such rote practice. The Minstrel has one that is simply based on using healing abilities. A thousand times. No deeper meaning here, other than training the player to spam healing. The Lore-Master, however, has one for an ability that simply drains power from a foe into his own reserves. While it’s never a horrible thing to have a mid-battle recharge, running out of power is extremely rare in the early game. However, against foes with low reserves, it also functions to drain them to zero. Which denies them further use of their most powerful attacks. If I didn’t have gamer OCD towards such traits, I’d never have understood how useful this could be. I’d have saved it for long boss fights when I needed the boost. This system improved my competence in the game.

I’m quite curious what the next iteration of gaming is going to roll out to subtly train the player. Because this sort of stealth education is powerful, and molds a playerbase nicely… when it works. Now, if only we could use it to weed out side-conversations in movie theatres.

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Yes, the videogame. Been playing around with this latest sandbox game. It does a lot of things right. And it looks pretty… but…

This is a game for killing Nazis from the point of view of an Irish race driver and mechanic helping out the french resistance. Seriously. You get to run around laying dynamite and evading patrols in a sort of reverse terrorism, because it’s to give the good people of France hope, restoring color to the world.

The actual gameplay is rather straightforward. It’s a GTA style game with wall-climbing, because that’s the new thing these days. In this environment, the Nazi army has established rather a large number of guard towers. You get to remove them with dynamite. It’s a bit of civic cleanup… rather literally, as the work is akin to picking up trash off the roadside.

Fortunately, once you clear the streets and rooftops of these eyesores, the game rewards you by not actually having any of them respawn. The major benefit is obvious! Uh… well, you get paid for it. A little. And when you run away from Nazi alerts, it’s easier to lose them in an area where you’ve destroyed all watchtowers.

About the only thing that’s really new here (since transforming a landscape’s color pattern is as fresh as Prince of Persia and as old as Q*Bert) is the “Perk” system. The game has a few skills and upgrades unlocked not by amassing loot and buying them, but by achievements. Each is a line of 3 tiers, unlocking the potential to finish the next, and giving progressively more game-changing rewards. In many cases, the work is really its own reward, as you can upgrade your ability to throw folks around in melee simply by throwing a few Nazis off their towers. Or not just getting some practice in with a sniper rifle, but by lining up shots where you cap 2 soldiers with one bullet. The abilities unlocked vary a bit from minimizing recoil to letting you summon a vehicle driven by a shopkeeper. Important, as, well, even with upgraded storage for multiple types of explosives, you are only one man, and you are trying to blow up several hundred structures.

Part of me really wants to enjoy this game, for the spectacle, and the unlockables. But I’m already most of the way through them, and… realizing about all the game has to offer from here is combat and sneaking around to eliminate a gigantic number of minor obstacles. Not that this is a bad thing, but I would be far more involved in the game itself if this realization had been delayed by another layer of accomplishments.

Playing this game on the PC of course provides another layer of fun in the form of crashes. Thank god for quicksave. That feature alone has made the game go from impossible to reasonable, due to a tendency to crash after 20-50 minutes playing at anything higher than minimum resolution. Whether this represents a holdover from the console editions or my computer’s shoddy design… the world may never know. I will, however, not forgive the game for having no quick way to access the full map. You can only enter the menu, select map, and then select Full Map. Which is ridiculous, because you only ever want the full map on that screen.
Most recently, in an event that probably sums up my impression of the game, I found a spot to drive downhill through a park, hitting a few ramps to jump the vehicle for profit. The game only requires that you get the car over the ramp, not to manage to land something you cannot adequately control. It is functional, and less frustrating than many GTAs, but a bit tedious for the rewards offered. Still, a bit of fun to take care of before moving on.

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If you are like me, you too are almost good enough. You have a dream. You have goals. And right now, you are not making real progress. You are surviving.

If you are like me, they told you that you could be anything you set your mind towards… and then never lifted a finger to help you find your calling; only two shoulders and raised palms from shrugging off the question nobody can answer for you.

If you are like me, you have squandered opportunities some would kill for. Not necessarily through carelessness, although that played a part. But because you didn’t know any right way to succeed… or where to turn for answers.

If you are like me, you’ve found an entry-level position with a soul-crushing company. Perhaps it’s not even your first. But you aren’t worried about finding anything better… not really. Not anymore.

If you are like me… you have lost that spark of hope. That belief that life can be better. It’s not because the news is horrible, though that is a piece of it. It isn’t even that you don’t make a difference in the world… because you do, in small ways, in personal ways… although it’s not enough.

I lost that spark of hope in four pieces. I failed college. I lost a job. I couldn’t learn to write a novel in two years time. I was passed over for promotion at a temp job so someone less competent, but younger, could turn to me for questions about the job I should have.

You may have lost it in other ways. But you are like me in more ways than you would like.

Someday… we will do something about it.

For today, we survive.

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