Communication

Quakecon is going on. I played a sort of demo version of the original Quake and was the proud owner of Quake 2. I even participated in online multiplayer back when you needed a carrier service like gamespy to play online. I didn't play all that seriously. I mostly derped around with god mode and no-clip cheat codes. But I did encounter one seriously aggravating problem: talking. This was way before voice chat was prevalent. The online way to talk was to type in the chat box. Now its pretty obvious what the problem with that is; on a computer the keyboard is your game pad. You can either move or type, not both. Nowadays, voice chat is more common, but by no means universal. And I would like to thank Valve for developing three different methods of streamlining communication for those who don't have voice chat.

First was Team Fortress 2. It includes text chat, but its not anymore convenient than on Quake 2. What was included was quick chat keys. There are three keys (z,x,c) that open up a menu of 9 convenient quick chats for your character. Some are silly like battle cry, but most are useful, like building requests and command calls. The best inclusion was the medic call button. By making the E button the button that draws the attention of healers was genius; its right next to the movement buttons. There is also a basic auto speak, where your character will say things independently of your control when it appropriate.

While it certainly works, its very basic. Left 4 Dead 2 includes these key commands but builds on the idea that characters auto talk. Its really clever. When a special zombie comes into view or sound they make is heard, characters will automatically say something about it, regardless of what you are doing. Same thing with health warnings and map navigation. But whats most useful is the way characters relate discoveries. If you walk close to weapons and items, your character will say what you found and usually refer to it by name. This takes a lot of the worry out of play but it stills requires voice chat for more nuanced communication.

Portal 2 included a multiplayer mode, and as a puzzle game it needed a nuanced communication system that didn't require voice chat. So Valve got creative and invented the ping tool. Its a sort of point and click flagging tool. You point at the spot and select the flag: portal, stand, or button. This will stand out to your partner and draw there attention. Another good addition was a way of seeing in a little window exactly what your partner see's in live movement. While all these wouldn't work in FPS's were time is more of a factor, the ping tool and auto speak should definitely be looked into by other developers. Not everyone has voice chat, and for the foreseeable future some people still won't.

Anomaly Warzone Earth

I said last post that I would go into more detail about the above indie game Anomaly Warzone Earth (said together, no colon), so here we go. This game takes the old formula of tower defense and reverses it. You attack the towers with a small convoy of tanks and support vehicles.

in this world, missile launchers have legs

The concept of this game is that aliens have crash landed in Baghad and Tokyo and erected huge energy fields as a defensive measure. Your team has been inserted to go in, do recon, and potentially stop the expansion of the field. The story is pretty light and not so well voiced by a cast of Australians, but thats OK because its really the gameplay that shines here. There aren't a lot of tower types or vehicle types, but its enough that you have to employ plenty of strategy. Most of your strategy comes from planning your route on the level map.

lots of choice. The red are the towers. 

The game gives you the choice of taking your time and slaughtering the towers for money, or blazing through to get out as soon as possible. The arrangement of your vehicles also makes a huge difference. Yes shield generators for all your tanks will increase your surviveability, but it lowers your offense so the towers can attack you for longer. As the commander, your main use is to deploy power ups to help your convoy. You can drop health fields, smoke screens and call in airstrikes.

Don't die, don't die, don't die, don't dieeeee

This big switch on the tower defense format is really fresh and doesn't get old too fast. The game is fun and legitimately hard; haven't made anywhere on the higher difficulties. It has full online leaderboards; they don't list any names but they give you your relative position. Again I repeat to any readers, this game is a steal for 10 dollars on steam. Pick it up.

Indie games

Indie games, for those who don't know, are games not made by major developers but instead made by smaller companies with only a few small title to their name. When the video game industry was young, just about every game was made by small developers. Then when consoles gained there footing with the NES, Nintendo drastically cut back on indie games by only allowing games they approved of to be published for their system. Other developers also had a certain level of propriety, but the main disadvantage to indie publishers was the shear cost of producing games and distributing them to gamers.

While not really a bad thing, the lack of indie developers did put a bit of a block on creativity. Games are expensive to make so developers tended to focus on well established formulas and genres. Indie developers don't have the money or skills to compete in the established categories, so they must focus on concepts and ideas that aren't being addressed by the major companies.

Of late, indie game makers have gotten some avenues for distribution. Xbox live Arcade and the Steam game download service allow gamers to pay money for games without having to buy a physical disk. This works well for developers since it allows them to focus there capital towards game development and not have to worry so much about distribution.

This was a very long way to say that I have some indie games that I would like to suggest for any readers. The first two are traditional RPG's called "Breath of Death 7" and "Cthulhu Saves the World" by the same publisher. For $3 dollars on steam, these games are steal for the level of fun they give. They sort of parody the whole RPG genre, which is always fun. The other game I would like to suggest is "Anamoly Warzone Earth" on Steam. This is in interesting game that I will go into more next time, but its essentially tower defense, except you attack the towers. Give it a look.

this is you leading tanks.

Women of Games

This is the signature image I recently commissioned, credit goes to Katsumeragi of the freefrag forums. The featured women is an artists interpretation of what Team Fortress's pyro looks like. It has never been confirmed what the Pyro's gender is, but Valve has dropped hints and references that go both ways. I believe (and hope) that the Pyro actually is a women. I mean, that would make the Pyro the only women in a team with 8 men. She goes around in a suit that completely conceals any shape to her body and her preferred method of attack are lighting people on fire and hitting them with an axe. That would just be to awesome for words. IF the Pyro is a girl, she definitely qualifies as the second greatest woman of gaming.

Of course, the greatest woman of gaming is and forever will be Samus Aran. She has been kicking alien butt since 1986, and we have loved her for it. Unlike most of the women in games, she doesn't flaunt her hotness to get our attention. Most of the time she is encased in a big suit of body armor that pretty conceals any indication of her gender.

and sometimes it was the graphics

The fact of the matter is, most video game women sport enormous...... assets for gamers to drool over. Now I am a red blooded man, I like boobs. But its all pixels, so there really isn't much value added by huge chests and asses on video game characters. I won't ever like a woman in a game unless she has character substance. Funnily enough, very little is known about Samus, but the way she stoically handles herself through all her games says volumes about her ability.

and she does look nice, so thats a plus

The thing is, we can't relate to bimbos. I've never met one, and if I did I think they would annoy me. Gamers want our women to have substance. And the mysterious clothing certainly sets our brains a spinning.

Shmups

For those who don't know, shmups is short for Shoot 'Em Ups. Its a type of game that used to be very popular back in the 8 and 16 bit era. The games usually featured planes or spaceships blasting the crap out of other planes and spaceships. There defining features were lots of power ups and one hit lives. I haven't played a lot of shmups mostly because of when I was born, but I encountered a few in arcades. I do have a ROM of a shmup from the NES that I am rather fond of. The game is called Metal Storm, and it hails from the twilight years of the NES.

pretty standard Japanese robots

The game boasted rather advanced graphics for the NES. The screen shot doesn't really show it, but the background moved with you in a layered effect in this game, which was pretty advanced for the time. Not a lot of powerups in this game, but the gameplay is very clever, the levels are varied as are the enemies. But what really set this game apart was the gravity switching. Pressing up or down while jumping would reverse the direction of gravity for you and some enemies.

like this

This mechanic is most intriguing and should really be included in more games. You almost feel sorry for poor Mario being stuck with only one gravity. I have never gotten past level six in this game because of the sparse supply of lives. I could save state, but that feels like cheating. So good luck to any readers who give this game a whirl.

RMT

I recently made a somewhat monetary trade with regards to Team Fortress 2. I am  a member of a forum associated with my favorite TF2 servers. One of the members offered to design post signatures for people in exchange for some hats. Hats are rare items in TF2 (used to be rarer) and it seemed like a fair trade since I have no skills for photo shop. I traded one hat and a set of shoes for the design, which I should have tomorrow. It was a beneficial trade for me, but it got me thinking about how other people trade things in games.

I haven't played a lot MMORPGs, but I know how the Real Money Trading thing works. High level players have so much money and so many rare items that they trade them for actual dollars. The idea is that the value of fun you get from these items is so much that they are worth roughly the value of some games, in the range of 50-60 dollars. I can only chalk this up to laziness on the part of some players.

Of course, I could be wrong. Purchasing that rare Bone spear may bring just as much enjoyment as spending the same money on Halo3. I just can't understand how that works. Its a sweet deal for the people who get the money, I just kind of wish they wouldn't. It reflects poorly on the human condition in general.

Horror

I love a good horror flick. The feeling of my blood racing and my adrenaline flowing is such a great high. Its sorta like spicy food; you love it but it hurts. And thank god game makers have found a way to make video games legitimately scary.

The first scary game I played was Silent Hill, which is to this day considered one of the scariest games ever made. Unfortunately, I was only 9 and couldn't finish the game (I regret that now). I have heard people swear that the isolation of the first Portal game was so unnerving they couldn't play it. But I want real horror. So I got Dementium for the DS. 

Now I know what your thinking. How can a hand held game be scary? Well, you have a point, but damn, with the lights off and the headphones on, this game can scare your pants off. Its pretty standard survival horror where the monsters are creepy and bullets are scarce. But it pulls all the right tension strings and builds the atmosphere just right. Plenty of torment, and a healthy dose of gore. They even made a sequel that I sadly haven't played.

A lot of games are called scary, but what they really are is nerve racking with good atmosphere. Take Bioshock: the games plenty creepy and the atmosphere is spot on and well developed. But at its base, Bioshock is a shooter. The fun of the game is mixing and matching your weapons and powerups to make you into a killing machine. So here is a real horror game.

by Frictional Games

This game almost turns the concept of gaming on its head. You cannot fight. It seriously tells you not to fight back in the intro. You have no choice but to flee and find cover. This is a wonderfully immersive element. It takes away all feeling of control in the game; you aren't some fighter who can stand and resist the monsters, they are all stronger than you. This helplessness greatly increases the terror and when combined with the very intuitive controls, it makes you feel like you are in that castle. Summing it up, this game is very hard to play with the lights off. 

Facebook and Google Plus

I was never a huge facebooker. I have always strived to keep my friends list below 100 people and at the height of my use never posted more than 5 times a day. One of the things that always turned me off to facebook was the way games will nag at you to play, join, or follow them.

Farmville is a great example. I have never played it, but as I understand it takes at least a few days for some of your crops to grow. I'm sorry, but I don't like to measure any one task in gaming in terms of days. Its one thing if its a long achievement because you opt into that challenge. Don't make a necessary game activity take that long. They should have made it more like Harvest Moon, where plants take days in the game to grow, not real life days.

All these games on facebook have led to it being waaaay too crowded in its design. I recently got an invite to google plus and am making the transition. Its really quite refreshing, its like walking into a recently built office; all clean looking as though it were a blank canvas waiting for you to get started. hopefully the transition will be smooth. I have some invites if any readers want in. Just leave your email.

Legend of Zelda 2

Sorry about the long delay. I was away on a family trip and there wasn't really a good time to post. Also, you lose the habit of posting if you don't keep it up. So, in celebration of over 100 blog views (queue muted clapping) a quick look back at The Legend of Zelda 2: The Adventure of Link.

Yeah, I played it.

This game is considered the funny cousin of the Zelda series, even more so than the wind waker branch. The game was also on the NES, just like the original, but was a departure from the action/adventure dungeon crawling of the rest of the series. It instead had a much greater emphasis on platforming and combat, but it still had puzzles. The overworld map had enemies running along it that you had to fight. 

The game was also wicked hard. In general the combat was tough but what would really get you was some of the platforming. If you've played Castlevania, it was like that; the jumps were challenging in themselves, but trying to make those jumps while dodging enemies is just unreasonably brutal. I wouldn't recommend this game for everyone, but I would say it is an interesting chapter of the Zelda franchise that is worth a look. At least it isn't the monstrosity below.

COG: Animal Crossing: Wild World
Starting to lose interest, but I will stick with it for a while longer. Got the lunar surface rug from Sahara. Saw the Kings Crown in the Able sister's shop. Cost was 1,200,000 bells for a hat...... 2/3 of the way to the next piece of my house. Its summer, so there is a bigger variety of bugs and fish.

Crystallis

I wonder how many readers now this oldy. Crystallis is a adventure game for the NES. It had no sequels, except a port to the gameboy. The game was hard in the old fashion sense. Figuring out what to do with very few hints, but fortunately with fairly balanced leveling. It sort of a trip down gaming memory lane. The game is almost entirely composed of abandoned game mechanics, but it executes them with such care and pinache that its still fun.

This first thing you realize in this game is that despite awakening from a high tech cryo chamber you enter on old world town to find a sword and buy a shield. And the sword is magic. Oh, and to find that sword, you have to talk to people in the town because if you don't you are totally lost. That is one game standby that I am glad was abandoned. I know the makers wrote dialogue for those guys and would like us to read them, but don't arbitrarily force us by hiding the necessary info in the dialogue of one NPC out of 50. Give us a reason to read those snippets. Have bonus items offered up, make the dialogue hilarious, but don't hide necessary info please. Anyhow, I would suggest any readers give this game a shot. Its fun, if old. It did give this one girl who saw me playing it conniptions because the graphics were so dated.

COG: Animal Crossing: Wild World.
Payed off my loan today. Cost was 527,642 bells. That really cleaned out my bank account. Got to get back to saving.