Free Games Profile - 5 Games I've Been Playing That Cost My Favorite Price.

Not so long ago, I posted on my Tumblr a list I'd seen somewhere else about awesome free games. I like awesome, and free is right in my price range at the moment, so I've checked out a few of these in the last week or so, to answer the question: Do you get what you pay for, or are there good free games out there? One of the games is a pretty complete alpha of an inexpensive project, one is a free-to-play, also known as “freemium”, where you get a feature set for free, but there are additional options/content available for purchase. Yet another takes the structure found in Mafia Wars-type games and turns it on its ear to produce something very interesting. The last two are complete, finished and free, no strings attached.

The first game I want to talk about is also the oldest. Cave Story, originally called Doukutsu Monogatari, was developed by one man over five years, a labor of love. The PC release is an old-school platform adventure that is most similar to Metroid, with weapons that level up when golden triangles are collected. The story follows a robotic (or maybe cyborg) soldier who wakes up in a cave with no memory and stumbles into a village of friendly creatures who are under assault by a mad scientist and his hench-things. The action is familiar in an old-school way, very difficult in spots and the story progresses in unexpectedly interesting directions. The version of the game translated from Japanese to English became so popular that a remake of the title with enhanced graphics was made for the Wii, and a 3D version is coming to the 3DS. This one is a lot of fun, and there are several endings and bonus levels to discover.

The surprised looking Lunchbox is named Balrog. I just wanted to type that.

In the same vein of free platforming action game is Spelunky, with retro graphics and random level generation, Spelunky is fun, but it makes no claim to be fair. The cave explorer is reminiscent of Indiana Jones, complete with hat and whip, and in the opening levels there is a golden idol which can be collected that triggers a rolling boulder trap when touched. You start with a limited supply of basic tools, 4 ropes which allow climbing up into areas that you can't jump to, and 4 bombs which allow blasting through floors and walls. Other items can randomly be found through the levels as you collect treasures, fight monsters and attempt to evade deadly traps. There's a lot to discover in this game as well, secret areas, occasional NPCs to interact with, and in a nod to Temple of Doom, even sacrificial altars to Kali.

Snakes... why did it have to be snakes...

The free Alpha release of Desktop Dungeons reminds me of a cross between Realm of the Mad God and classic roguelike dungeons, only on a smaller scale. Every dungeon is a single screen large, you start out with the possibility of four races and four basic classes to choose from with special abilities, and if you can level up enough to defeat the boss monster in the dungeon, more features unlock with every win. The game is random, very difficult, even less fair than Spelunky in some cases (sometimes it really isn't possible to do much of anything as every monster you can reach kills you in one hit.) However, individual tries at the randomly created dungeons don't take very long, so a lot of dying and restarting makes this one addictive. Also of note, this game has altars to various deities who your character can choose to worship. The gods give piety for completing certain actions, and penalize piety for others. For example, a warrior god might grant piety for every monster killed, but penalize for casting spells. After several days spending more time than I'd like to admit on this one, I've beaten the dungeon only three times, once each with a warrior, thief and cleric.

This game has no business being this addictive. I may drop the $10 for the finished game.

Another free game that I've actually been playing for a while now but only recently got back into is the fantastic Echo Bazaar. On its surface, Echo Bazaar looks like a Facebook game. You get a number of turns that refill slowly with time, you train skills by repeating actions over and over until a higher level of skill unlocks a new action to grind and train on. There are several things that separate Echo Bazaar from the pack of games released by Zynga for Facebook however. First, though you need to connect through Facebook or Twitter, Echo Bazaar is separate from the social networks aside from the ability to tweet short ads for the game for bonus actions once daily, and the ability to interact with friends and followers who also play. The setting is a Victorian London that fell deep beneath the Earth, claimed by the dark Masters of the Bazaar. Hell is literally so close they have an embassy, and demons and strange creatures walk alongside grubby urchins and gentlemen and ladies in a twisted and vaguely Lovecraftian setting dripping with mystery. Echo Bazaar also tracks decisions made in the course of telling your story, and makes those choices relevant enough that each player's experience is unique. My personal character is a debauched rake and hedonist, using a silver tongue and his wits to seduce, gamble and write poetry in society while searching for the Ultimate Game, a poker game with the Heart's Desire as the prize, and the Immortal Soul as the stake.

A game with secrets and souls as currency, be a thief, thug, scholar or some combination of all these.

The last of the free games I've been messing with recently is one of a category of games recently made available on Steam. I'm a big fan of free-to-play MMORPGs and multiplayer action games that make their money from a dedicated fanbase willing to part with a little cash in order to get something extra. I like the model a lot, in some ways this is the basis for Echo Bazaar. How much I like the structure, however, depends on how much content is behind a paywall. If the game has only a small amount of free content and makes me cough up cash for the full game, it isn't “Free to Play,” its a demo, and I feel cheated. A good way to get around this is to make most of the purchasable content earnable in-game over a long period of time. A few well-known games deserving of their own articles do this, including Dungeons and Dragons Online and League of Legends. Steam just put up access to Champions Online, Alliance of Valiant Arms, Forsaken World, Global Agenda: Free Agent and Spiral Knights.

I've been burned by F2P games before, this one seems worth the time investment.

I started on my “play to evaluate” on Spiral Knights, as I want to give each of these a fair shake on their own merits before judging them. Trying to play them all at once would ensure at least one game doesn't really get played nearly long enough to get a proper review. I started with Spiral Knights for two reasons, one, it was the most different of the five titles in presentation from other games I've been playing recently. The second reason lies with the developers. Three Rings is an independent studio that practically introduced me to the Free-to-play concept with their game Puzzle Pirates, that released in 2003. I wanted to see what these guys could do with a more ambitious project. Spiral Knights is best described as an Action-RPG like Legend of Zelda, but with a robotic, almost Lego, feel to the characters and multiplayer dungeons and towns. The game is very pretty, controls smoothly and is a lot of fun in party. The currency to enter a dungeon, resurrect when dead or craft items is “energy,” which can be refilled with time, real money, or tanks can be bought using in-game currency. Bonus! It passes my litmus test for “is this really free?” I looks forward to pushing into content and seeing where the content boundaries before it really makes sense to pay are.

I anticipate I'll revisit this topic many times as I do a LOT of gaming, and don't have a whole lot of budget for it, so finding my diversions without opening my wallet beyond WoW and Gamefly subscriptions takes up the time not spent writing, reading, looking for work or doing tabletop RPGs. I'll find the best and the worst that money doesn't have to buy, and come back and report on my findings.

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Blog Gadgets

Virtual Currencies – From WoW Gold to Bitcoin, with a stop in Second Life.

It is difficult to talk about currency in any form these days without the whole topic getting muddled and mired into politics. The economics surrounding the behavior of companies and governments and the attendant problems and crises are on everyone's minds, and they extend in particular to this blog. (After all, if not for unemployment, I'd just be the “Geek.”) However, there's one place where we don't have to worry about taxes, inflation, volatility of currency, government regulations, interest rates and the global banking community. The internet. Sure, there are a few places that you might have to pay sales tax online depending on where you live, and if you make money online you're probably taxed on that, but our day-to-day transactions online, whether they are in gold pieces in an MMORPG or credits on any number of websites... surely those are free from the standard economic worries and the politics that come with them. Or are they?

So I have to fill out form 1099-WOW and append it... can I claim my non-combat
pets as dependents?

There has been a bit in the news recently about a virtual currency that on its surface doesn't have much in common with a gold piece picked up from the purse of a dead virtual orc. Bitcoin has surfaced in reports several times in the last week with the United States Congress taking an interest in the system in light of its connection to buying and selling drugs, and a user recently reported that a hacker compromised a system he was storing bitcoins on to the tune of $500,000USD gone in a flash. The interest in the virtual currency has gotten a lot of attention, with attention comes people doing research, getting excited and participating, which increased the value of the coins in the system. Though highly volatile, each bitcoin is currently (as of June 2011) worth about twenty dollars in US currency. The upward trend attracts speculators, which drives the value up further.

So what is it and how does it work? Each bitcoin is a piece of code with encryption designed to prevent counterfeiting or duplication or other fraud, including transfer fraud. The verification of transactions using coins are distributed across the peer-to-peer network, making all transfers of coins public and verifiable, but the addresses of the people making the transactions secure and private. Without a centralized authority, currency goes from one person's hands to another without fees or regulations, and no government or bank can devalue the currency by injecting more into the system to create inflation. Libertarians, cryptology geeks, conspiracy theorists and criminals love the idea. It is like a digital version of briefcases full of cash. Governments and bankers aren't so keen on it. Individual coins are created by “mining” where the computing power to create the blocks of code in a new coin are purchased from any user running the mining program, rewarding the miner with a brand new coin after a lot of work on a powerful PC. Each coin takes exponentially longer to create than the last, so the amount of new coins entering the system is controlled and stable.

There aren't a lot of places to spend these coins for real world goods, at least not yet. There are virtual currency exchanges set up to turn regular money into bitcoins and vice-versa, and websites that allow purchases to be made using them. The anonymous and secure nature of the coins means that some are used to buy illegal goods online, such as the Silk Road marketplace that sells illegal drugs online, or for money laundering. Currency proponents insist that legitimate uses outnumber illegal uses for bitcoins, and they are no different from cash in what they can be used for or by whom. Governments, especially in the United States don't like currencies involved in untracable, untaxable transactions, and the future of the currency may well rest in its decentralized, peer-to-peer system's ability to resist governmental interference. (If the same strategy that makes it nearly impossible to stamp out piracy in P2P is effective in this, things could get interesting.)

This isn't the first time that a virtual currency has attracted the interest of powerful people who would really prefer you use the currencies they, not coincidentally, already have a lot of. The online game Second Life and its currency, the Linden Dollar gained a lot of attention from around 2004-2007 based on the idea that the currency could be traded for “real” money through a currency exchange using PayPal, and businesses could be run in-game to earn more Linden Dollars, including trading in real estate in-game and playing the currency market as a speculator. The fact that the company that ran Second Life explicitly retained ownership of all these credits and they acted as a combination central bank and clearinghouse for all exchanges and markets drew criticism concerning whether or not these Linden Dollars were currency at all. With regard to taxation, European users were charged the VAT (Value Added Tax) on certain Second Life transactions, including some dealing only in Linden Dollars.

I messed with Second Life for a while, off and on. A lot of it looks like the Sims, with a lot
more elves, catgirls, winged angels and porn. Hard to describe.

With the established value of virtual currency as something that can bring real, non-internet wealth, thinking about taxation and tracking of income is changing. Many online gamers know about the “gold farmers” who play MMORPGs to earn virtual currency for sale in online semi-legal or illegal transactions. In China, where many of these operations were run, the issues concerning running many virtual black markets up to and including theft of in game currency and property made it to real-world court systems. In 2009, China limited transactions concerning virtual currencies and how they could and could not be used to interact with “real money trading.” South Korea has ruled virtual currency the same as any other currency, and taxation on virtual goods as a policy is being floated throughout Asia.

New Class - Certified Public Accountant.

Are we inevitably heading towards a world with some sort of taxation on the transfer of digital goods and whenever gold pieces, credits, or coins change hands? Some economists say that we are, and there is no reason why we shouldn't. I wonder about the possibilities inherent in having to report gaming income, or on the flip side, being able to pay bills and buy groceries with currency I got by blowing up monsters in a fantasy world. Will I be able to write off repair costs for broken armor? Will we see prosecution for ninja looters, indictments for insider traders on the Auction House? When do the walls between the game world and the real world come down, and when does reasonable economic policy cross that line into the absurd? I expect many attorneys will make a lot of money answering these questions, and I further assert that they won't be taking their fees in gold pieces, Linden Dollars or Bitcoins.

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Blog Gadgets

The DC Universe is ending, long live the DC Universe.

A story that broke last week while I was busy writing about E3 has given me a little time to think about it and what, if anything, it means to me. I've made it clear that my comic book allegiance is primarily to Marvel, but let's face it. Superman was the first tradtional comic book superhero, and Batman... is Batman. In light of this, even a Marvel fanboy like me sits up and takes notice when DC announces that as if September 2011, all its superhero titles are canceled. Yep, in their current form, all those comics are done. There will be a relaunch of the entire DC line with any books being resurrected coming back with new #1 issues. The big reset button just got pushed on the entire Universe, and everything starts over.

Cover - Action Comics #1.

There are a few questions that arise naturally from an announcement like this. Why would DC do such a thing? Is it a publicity stunt or cash grab? What does all this have to do with the state of comic books in general? The announcement about some of the specific titles to be relaunched has provoked other reactions, most notably the return of Batgirl with Barbara Gordon in the cape and cowl. DC has been no stranger to controversy in storylines recently, but one thing is for certain. You make a decision like this, and it gets people talking, and people talking about your product is rarely bad for business.

This isn't the first time something like this has happened. DC had to clean up the overly complicated and confusing multiple continuities is had with the mega-event Crisis on Infinite Earths back in 1985. There were different versions of many superheroes depending on which continuity you chose to follow, and new readers were put off by trying to keep it all straight. Dimensions were destroyed, heroes died, and the DC Universe was relaunched as a single Universe, only one version of each hero and plot to keep track of. I suspect that the motivation behind the Universe reboot and series relaunch is very similar.

Not "Ultimate" anything... still the Goddamn Batman.

It has been said many times by many people, but it bears repeating here. The comic industry is in trouble. All printed media is feeling the strain of a digital age where people are slowly migrating away from purchasing paper copies of certain forms of entertainment and information. Comics gets hit particularly hard due to decisions made in the 1980s and 1990s of what to do with the medium. Once it became clear that it was profitable in the short term to appeal to nostalgic comic fans interested in re-purchasing pieces of their childhood, that's what comic companies did, at the expense of attracting new readers. This is a problem because long-time fans get disillusioned, move on to other nostalgia after a while, or just plain die, and when they do, there has to be a steady stream of new fans to fight the attrition.

Marvel tried to address this a few years back with the Ultimates line, which longtime fans hated and ignored for the most part, but elements of Marvel Ultimates seems to have attracted some sort of fanbase, so I'm not calling that a failed experiment, at least not yet. DC is taking it a step further than Marvel did, saying, “We've got this relaunch, we're going to give you a new version of our world, and its going to be the only one.” This is a bold move that is going to anger a lot of long time customers, and some will probably stop reading DC comics because of it, but sometimes, you have to lose a limb in order to save the body, and without some sort of timely intervention, the patient is currently terminal. Is this going to be viewed as a smart move? Maybe not, but something had to be done.

Some titles will be canceled and will not relaunch, and other new titles will start fresh alongside Batman, Superman, Green Lantern, The Justice League and Green Arrow. They will also be folding certain books into the DC Universe proper, including the Wildstorm characters Grifter and Voodoo who first appeared in the Image Comics WildC.A.T.s, by Jim Lee. (I could have told you in 1992 which two characters would survive if you could only pick two from that team, and I'd have been right.) They'll also be launching Suicide Squad, a team of Death Row supervillains chosen by the government to go on missions they aren't expected to return from, though this team, in practice, will turn out to be “Harley Quinn and the Pips.” Harley Quinn was the breakout wildly successful villain created for Batman: The Animated series, and she was added to the DC Comics canon officially by the late 1990s. Her extremely violent, insane and overtly sexual incarnation from the more “mature” comics seems to be the version they'll push to carry that title.

More like "Suicide Girls Squad," Amirite?... heh, her, err... okay, I'm done.

Most of the characters are being reset to earlier points in their careers, as one of the challenges for a writer is to actually be able to threaten superheroes who have been through so much and gained experience and power from, in many cases 25 to 50 years of fighting superpowered criminals and saving the world. How do you write a legitimate threat to these characters without treading well-worn paths and straining credibility? Quite simply, you don't. You tell the same stories over and over again and ask the fans to believe that this time, the danger to the hero is different somehow, even when it clearly isn't. The solution: Don't re-tell origin stories necessarily, but roll back the clock a little bit, see the heroes when they are still figuring things out and crime fighting is dangerous business again.

One of the consequences to a rollback is that it puts characters in a different place. For Barbara Gordon, that place is out of a wheelchair and into her costume as Batgirl. Since the classic Joker story “The Killing Joke,” Barbara Gordon was paralyzed from a bullet The Joker put into her spine, leaving her for dead. Her paralysis made possible her transformation into the superhero information broker and surveillance expert Oracle, and she effectively led the Birds of Prey team, which even got its own TV series (mercifully short-lived and probably another candidate for yesterday's article.) Barbara Gordon out of her wheelchair provoked an emotional reaction from some fans with disabilities, as Oracle is a favorite, and very strong character to many. The response from Gail Simone of DC, who wrote Barbara Gordon as Oracle for years, boils down to a simple question. If characters are being healed, brought back from the dead, if this is an earlier point in their careers, why would the one constant being that Barbara Gordon is always in a wheelchair? A strong argument.

Oracle is a great character, but that is a very cool cover for Batgirl #1.

We don't know the specifics of how this will all work, what the crossover that ends the old DC Universe and ushers in the new will actually look like. The cynical geeks among us will deride the company for publicity and for grabbing for cash because collectors love “Issue #1s.” Me, I'm going to wait and see. I'll pick up the titles involved in the crossover, and at least browse some of the new books up after the relaunch, though 52 issues is no where near my budget. When we get to see exactly how and why this all plays out, I'm sure I'll come right back to this space with my opinion.

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Blog Gadgets

The Worst Adaptations of Beloved Geek Properties On-Screen

After a weekend spent gaming, (what else?) reading and watching the penultimate episode of the first season of Game of Thrones I started thinking about how it is a pretty good time to be a geek. Many of the things we love are becoming more accessible, we can finally talk about a few of our interests with non-geek family and friends, and perhaps most importantly, it looks like film and TV producers are finally realizing that faithful adaptations of great novels, games and comics are the most popular and profitable. (Though there are recent exceptions.) I think a lot of the credit for this has to go to Peter Jackson and his Lord of the Rings adaptation, where the “sweet spot” between being faithful to the source and making changes to allow a story to be told properly in a visual medium was hit. This said, it wasn't always like this. It wasn't so very long ago that hearing a favorite comic or book was going to be in the movies or on TV filled geek hearts with dread. Those adaptations are the ones I want to talk about.

Too obvious. WAY too obvious.

Lord of the Rings (1978): Ralph Bakshi's animated version of the Lord of the Rings story has been much-maligned over the years, and for many of the wrong reasons. It isn't particularly unfaithful to the books, at least not more than the Peter Jackson trilogy was, it isn't badly animated or acted, quite the contrary, in fact. Some of the techniques pioneered in this movie were used in later animated films, and were later translated to animation in video games. The problem here was studio interference. The story ends abruptly at the battle of Helm's Deep (2/3 of the way through,) and Bakshi wanted to title the movie, “Lord of the Rings – Part One,” but he was overruled by studio executives who feared that audiences would refuse to pay to see half a movie. Audiences expecting the whole story were outraged at the ending, and those same executives used this fan disappointment as justification to not fund the production of the sequel that would complete the story.

And it doesn't even have Leonard Nimoy singing.

Ghost Rider (2007): GR was one of my favorite comic book characters, and this movie seems to have been done on a wager to see how many different ways a comic book adaptation could screw things up. To start, we have the terrible casting of Nicolas Cage who is not tough enough to play Johnny Blaze and too old to play Danny Ketch, the two mortals who became the Ghost Rider. The origins of the characters are changed in arbitrary ways, details thrown in missing key bits or context as though they were penned by someone who had the character's origin explained to them once by someone who kinda remembered reading them a decade earlier. The plot is nearly incomprehensible with ridiculous new elemental-demons tacked into the story and virtually every character from the comic sharing little with their namesakes aside from, well.. their names. If filmmakers are going to get everything from the comics wrong, they could at least do so in pursuit of making a decent movie. Every deviation from the comics made an already bad story worse. Oh... and they are making a sequel. Take that, Ralph Bakshi.

It takes a lot of hard work to make me hate something featuring this guy.

Legend of the Seeker (2008-2010) : Okay, to be completely fair, I am less than thrilled with the Sword of Truth series of books by Terry Goodkind, which this show is (loosely) based on. However, the first season covered events from the first book in the series, which I actually enjoyed a lot when I first read it. The biggest problem with this show is that interpretations of key characters was just plain wrong. In the book, Wizard's First Rule, Zeddicus Zul'Zorander is a quirky but harmless seeming old man who plays the fool and isn't taken seriously by anyone, despite secretly being a powerful wizard. In the show, Zedd behaves like a powerful wizard but no one suspects him because the script told them not to. The Kahlan Amnell of the novels is aloof and consumed by the weight of a power that defines her and keeps her from getting close to anyone. Her power is such that teams of three assassins are sent after her because she is expected to kill two with a single touch, and having no combat abilities, the third will kill her. The Kahlan of the show is a perky girl who fights by spinning in circles with knives. You could get everything else right, and the show fails by missing the point on two of the three main characters.

No. Just... no.

Mortal Kombat: Conquest (1998-1999): It isn't really hard to find a bad adaptation of a video game on screen. You could start with the whole career of Uwe Boll, for example. I hold up the single season of the Mortal Kombat TV show as how something can fail before it has even started, and then manage to end even worse. Mortal Kombat has dozens of characters in its universe, and other movies and show (including Kevin Tancharoen's recent excellent web series) have struggled to incorporate them all without it being ridiculous. The main characters of the show were two brand new characters never appearing in the game, and a minor character from the game best known for being “the asian dude who wears a sombrero.” I'm not kidding. They also portray Raiden, God of Thunder as a white guy with long white hair, just like the movies showed him because the film wanted to cast Christopher Lambert as somebody. The first (and only) season also gives us the “everybody dies” ending, with a man in a halloween costume laughing as the camera zooms in on the Mortal Kombat logo in the final shot. At least the show launched the career of Kristanna Loken, who was looking her absolute best in those days.

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003): One of the greatest graphic novels ever written, and the single largest crime against comic geeks perpetrated by Hollywood. They put in an unnecessary American character to appeal to audiences who wasn't in the comic (U.S Secret Service Agent Tom Sawyer? Oh, and they arbitrarily add Dorian Grey to the team as well, why not?) Fine. They dumbed down the plot and changed key characters' personalities and motivations. Fine. They took a Victorian adventure and tacked on a car chase on the streets of Venice. I don't even know where to start to explain what's wrong with that sentence, but.. fine. They had to utterly destroy the strongest female character I've encountered in any comic book. Mina Murray (formerly Harker) was the team leader, a proper lady with a dark past which may have left some residual powers. If she possesses any supernatural ability from her run-in with Dracula years ago, she doesn't show it. She doesn't need it. By intelligence and strength of character she manages a team struggling with homicidal impulses, limited capacity for loyalty or heroism, extreme sadism and near-suicidal levels of addiction. In the movie, she's a stock slutty vampire who spouts one-liners in a team run by Sean Connery. This is not fine.

We'll never get a good film based on this, now.

Yikes. On second thought, enough of these were recent that I think I'll still get nervous when I hear something I like is being turned into a movie or TV show. There are countless more obvious examples, and I'll probably be able to follow this up with “Worst Films based on comics” (Catwoman, anyone?) and a multi-part series of “Worst video game movies” at some point in the future. But for now, I'm going to do something nice and calming. Just writing about LXG makes me mad all over again.

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Blog Gadgets

Fable: The Journey at E3, Peter Molyneux's Legacy and Controversy as a Designer.

Wrapping up a week of E3 coverage, I've got one final article about video games, and then it is back to normal with gaming articles popping up now and again instead of every single day. Microsoft had the most tepid of showings of the big three console manufacturers, mostly pitching Kinect-based titles and sequels. Like clockwork, Peter Molyneux of Lionhead Studios trotted out in order to announce... a sequel, that uses Kinect for the Xbox 360. Now, it is easy to hate on Molyneux, and a lot of geeks are at the moment. Since Black and White, and throughout the development of the Fable franchise, he's caught a bad rap for exaggerating features and engaging in wild hyperbole about upcoming games, to the disappointment of fans when the titles hit shelves. The games are good, just not the revolutionary titles created through his overhyping. Let's not forget, however, that the man has been one of the most influential designers in video gaming, and was a titan in the industry before he became a target for nerds to vent their rage upon.

We were promised a world where every decision mattered. What we got was... kicking chickens.

Okay, before I get into trying to restore the image of one of the more vilified game designers through careful application of a history lesson, I'd be remiss in not talking about the elephant in the living room. The Fable franchise is a series of okay action-RPGs with elements like property and business ownership, marriage and family, and choices based on “good” or “evil” actions. I followed the development of the original game, bought into the hype and bought Fable for Xbox on launch day. Hoo boy, was I disappointed. So many features on the cutting room floor. Subplots set up and never paid off in the story. All these things you could do outside of completing quests, but never any real reason given to want to do them. I briefly played the two sequels, saw an improved (but still flawed) story, prettier graphics and some of the same problems. Most of what distinguishes the game from any other action-RPG is superfluous content that doesn't feel like it belongs there. Will Fable: The Journey be any different, or is it more of the same, with Kinect support as the newest gimmick?

Whew, that's out of the way. I want to believe in Fable: The Journey, but I fear that I know better. The reason so many geeks hate on Molyneux is tied to Fable. Black and White (which I liked, personally) had features missing or changed, but it was good enough that all would have been forgiven, until gamers felt betrayed and cheated by Fable, then the minor issues with Black and White were looked back on with a less favorable set of eyes. Unfortunately, the memories of gamers with regard to this single designer don't extend back far enough, and recent games have meant that his earlier triumphs are all but forgotten. I am, of course, speaking about his time with Bullfrog Studios.

Theme Park, one of the most imitated games from Bullfrog, Molyneux was Project Lead.

A short list of the best of Peter Molyneux's time at Bullfrog:

• Populous (1989): One of the very first, and still probably the best of all the “God-sim” games, players guide a civilization to build, develop and worship while expanding their culture and reproducing in order to conquer an enemy civilization. The terrain was deformable, and many godlike powers including miracles and plagues were at the player's disposal.
• Syndicate (1993): A top-down isometric strategy game set in a corporate dystopia with cyberpunk elements. Control of cybernetic agents acting as assassins, recruiters (through drugs and mind control) and defenders of the corporate Syndicate with a detailed story, Syndicate influenced the design of many Real Time Strategy games that followed it.
• Theme Park (1994): The original “Tycoon”-style business simulator game, imitated countless times using different businesses as the focus (or the same, in the case of Rollercoaster Tycoon), Theme Park put the player in the hands of a combination designer/owner of an Amusement Park, managing rides, concession stands, park employees and tickets/promotions to build and profit by keeping guests happy and spending money.
• Magic Carpet (1994): Technically ahead of its time at release, Magic Carpet was a 3D first-person action/RPG with an Arabian Nights flavor. Players controlled a wizard who could fly around a landscape fighting monsters, accumulating power to learn stronger magics and fight rival magic users with spells. Unique for the time were the real-time terrain-changing/destroying effects possible with the magics, and the deformable/destructible terrain lent toward the beefy system requirements that held the game back as a commercial hit.
• Dungeon Keeper (1997): Another simulation game in a style later imitated by others, Dungeon Keeper took traditional roleplaying video games featuring heroes invading dungeons to slay creatures and collect treasure, and turned the genre on its ear. Players control the evil “Dungeon Keeper”, training monsters, digging rooms, setting traps and piling up treasure to lure adventurers to their doom.

Dungeon Keeper was hilarious, you had to keep monsters happy, trained, equipped and fed.

I'd love to see some of the boundless creativity and innovation from Molyneux's early career return to modern gaming, and I do think that the focus on where some of the Lionhead titles have fallen short of expectations have set him up for criticism. The tech demo for Microsoft's Kinect, “Milo” which so many people hoped would be a full game shows that the potential is still there, the studio just needs to execute on traditional strengths. I'd welcome a return to the simulation genre, pushing new technologies and new ideas. I liked some of the things about Fable, but I think I, like so many others, are hoping so much for the next Syndicate or Theme Park, that it is easy to forget about those early great games and ask “What have you done for me lately?” in our disappointment.

The games get prettier, sure... but can they recapture what made Peter Molyneux a great designer? 

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Star Wars: The Old Republic MMORPG - Bioware at E3 2011, Almost Ready for Launch!

We're closing in on the end of E3 week here, and even a fairly ho-hum show has some gems, even if the best parts aren't surprise announcements. Bioware is closing in on a launch for their long awaited take on the MMORPG genre with Star Wars: The Old Republic. This is all sorts of exciting for me. I love Bioware RPGs, even the ones that disappoint me do so because I want more. My first-ever MMO was Star Wars Galaxies, though I didn't do much in it besides crafting and building structures. I also have a great deal of affection for how Bioware in particular handles the Star Wars setting, and I'm ready to see them make the leap from single-player experience to MMORPG.

A Star Wars MMO, and not a Gungan to be seen. Meesa glad to hear that.

Gaming in the Star Wars Universe is tough even for a developer writing for the single player game. If your game is set in the time of the films, there are all sorts of obstacles. Large-scale epic stories that this setting does best don't lend themselves well to a time period where we all know who is responsible for all of the major events. Add to that the fact that many people want to play a Jedi, but hate the prequels, and there just aren't very many Jedi around during the Rebellion Era. Stories are told in the background of established events, and they are mostly meaningless, or the fact that no mention of this plot worked its way into the films strains plausibility.

Add in the challenges of a persistent multiplayer world, and the challenges are nearly insurmountable. Bioware addressed this problem years ago when they developed Knights of the Old Republic. A gripping story, plenty of Jedi, room to play without disturbing canon, the distant past of the Star Wars Universe is ripe for development. Any character or element that is created new that doesn't have a specific place in canon? No problem, that bit was lost in the shadows of the distant past, the way details often are. Bioware gave their typical treatment to the setting too, with party members with their own attitudes, motivations and stories, and if you treat them right, you get to explore those tales with sidequests of a personal nature to your companions. Tabletop RPG geeks also loved that the combat system was based on the D&D-inspired D20 system.

If the lighting-fast block and parry of lightsaber combat actually is modeled correctly while still
feeling like MMO-style combat, it should be really, really cool.

How can the key elements of this setting be brought into the very different gameplay style of the MMORPG, without losing what makes Bioware games special? The developers have talked about this at length, focusing on a story told for each individual player that is just as important as the group experience. Bioware RPGs focus on individual actions having consequences, and those consequences having a direct impact on the gameplay experience. In Star Wars: The Old Republic, the first choice to be made is whether to play as Sith or Republic, which will also affect choice of classes (more on this in a bit) and starting areas. Though individual characters have the freedom to make “good” or “evil” choices, the morality of the Sith Empire isn't subjective, the developers have said that it won't be a “good guys from a certain perspective” thing, Sith are evil.

In both solo questing and group “dungeons” the impact of individual decision making is built in, with dialogue options (while talking with fully voice-acted NPCs, a first for an MMO) and “choice points” built into missions and quests. It's pretty obvious how this works for a single player quest, but the multiplayer missions and how they've made that work is the turning point that has made me decide to put down World of Warcraft, if only for a little while, when this finally releases. Rather than having a party leader make all the decisions, or making them up to party vote or some such nonsense, the narrative in individual missions provides key points, one for each player, to make a decision that will affect the rest of the mission, with consequences for all. If this can be pulled off without creating too much conflict or arguing with other team members after the fact, it is brilliant.

So, what can you play in Star Wars: The Old Republic? So far, for sure we've seen human, Twi'lek (like the dancing girl in Jabba's Palace) and Zabrak (think Darth Maul) as races in promos, and as I mentioned before, your classes are based on your faction. Both factions have four classes at launch, which doesn't seem like very many as compared to many other games, but the customization of powers and abilities as characters level supposedly will make this a non-issue. (We'll see.) For the Republic, the available classes are Jedi Knight, Jedi Consular, Trooper and Smuggler. For the Sith, there are Sith Warrior, Sith Inquisitor, Imperial Agent and Bounty Hunter. To my way of thinking, that looks like two flavors of Jedi for each, one dull sounding class (Trooper and Agent... really?) and one non-Jedi but still awesome class for each side.

Of course, not everyone will have a lightsaber. With the existence of the Smuggler,
though, expect this guy to be rare on launch day.

I have a lot of hope for this game, though I don't think it is a “WoW Killer,” if such a thing is even possible anymore. I want to see the focus on storytelling change the landscape of a style of gaming where story is secondary currently, players groan as they skip quest text and suffer through cinema scenes so they can kill something else and take its stuff. I really hope that Bioware can tell a story compelling enough to make gamers demand that kind of narrative out of their MMORPG experience. One thing I do know for certain if that I'll be giving it a shot at release. I'll be doing the bidding of those who pay the best for a talented Bounty Hunter... the Sith of Korriban.


One last bit of site-related news, I'm now on Tumblr at unemployedgeek.tumblr.com, posting small updates on topics I've covered here or stories too short for a full article, tidbits about myself, links to these articles and reblogs of interesting tidbits I find around the web that are relevant to my interests. Check me out there, and I encourage tumblr users to reblog anything you find on my tumblr if you like it!  I'm also @DocStout on Twitter, and of course, I have the Facebook link at the side of this very page. Slowly moving into Web2.0 as though I were an actual young person!

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The Elder Scrolls - Skyrim at E3, and a look back at the series.

Yesterday I wrote a bit about Nintendo's keynote address, and promised more E3 coverage. So far, the rest of the show hasn't done much to impress me, Sony announced a new handheld console that doesn't do anything for me at the moment, they'll need great titles as proof-of-concept as a legitimate challenger to Nintendo's stranglehold on that market. And Microsoft announced Halo 4. Whee. Some of the coolest stuff I've seen is a little more information on a game I already knew about, from a series I already love. The Elder Scrolls V – Skyrim is Bethesda's newest RPG offering, and the soon-to-be-released game marks a series that's been consistently good throughout its 17-year history. I've written about Bethesda's tackling of the Fallout series before, but I want to specifically look at Skyrim in particular, and the Elder Scrolls Games in general.

Can Bethesda keep a string of hits going with the prevailing winds blowing against classic RPGs?

The first Elder Scrolls game was called Arena, released in 1994, it was originally supposed to be a fantasy Gladatorial combat game with traveling teams, and sidequests between the arena matches. In development, however, the RPG elements took over, the engine moved into a First Person perspective, and the Arena combats seemed more and more 'tacked on' until they were dropped altogether. The game was late to publication, full of bugs and critically panned, but the world established there gave it a cult following, and enough of a fanbase to support a sequel.

Daggerfall (TES II) embraced the few things that worked about Arena, and was a game massive in scope and ambition. The continent the game is set in was twice the size of Great Britain, with over 15,000 towns and settlements and 750,000 NPCs to interact with. Players could explore many, many different dungeons, own property, become a vampire or werewolf if infected by those creatures, and the story had six endings so different that reconciling them for another sequel required Divine Intervention. Complaints about the breadth of the game at the expense of depth, as most of the nearly half a million square kilometers of space was randomly or procedurally generated by the computer, so none of the locations or characters not in major quest locations had very much to them.

There really wasn't anything quite like it at the time, or since.

The third Elder Scrolls RPG, Morrowind, was released to nervous anticipation by fans of the series. It was so much smaller than Daggerfall, did that mean it was dumbed-down, or a step backward? Upon release, fans weren't disappointed. The sandbox, open-exploration concepts in earlier games were present, but they were enhanced by packing the terrain in with carefully thought-out features. Instead of hundreds of miles of randomly-generated terrain with a few static landmarks, ten square miles (26 km) of well-developed dungeons, settlements and other locations with planned monsters and characters worth interacting with. Factions and guilds to quest for and advance in as well as a main story that was in many ways even better than Arena's or Daggerfall's made Morrowind really something special. Due to Bethesda's release of a development kit to the modding community, this game is still being played today, nearly ten years after release.

Oblivion was about twice the size of Morrowind, featured a complete overhaul of the graphics engine, and refined the option to zoom out from first-person to play in a third-person perspective, though the animations were a little clunky and awkward in this mode, though they were improved from the same feat in Morrowind. The fourth game continued to refine some of the elements that made the first three games in the series great, and allowed dungeons randomly littered throughout the world to scale up as characters became more powerful. Monsters would get stronger, dropped loot would get better. The freedom to explore any area you could see, steal any item, kill any NPC (though some would make the game's main quest unfinishable) and customize spells and weapons improved. One downside to Oblivion, however, were the hellish portals that needed to be closed to complete the main quest. Inside each was a depressingly similar generic “hellish” dungeon to trudge through and hit the magic “self-destruct” button at the end.

Typically cutting-edge visuals for the time in each game usually means that a
new Elder Scrolls game is time for a new computer.

Each of the Elder Scrolls Games since Daggerfall has worked on being more “epic” in scale and ambitiousness of content, with thousands of pages of text forming the many, many books that can be found in each world, rounding out the lore and history of the setting. The worlds are getting bigger as new games appear in the series, but deeper at the same time, so we won't be seeing more miles of empty fields like we had in Daggerfall, but instead an ever-increasing and continually interesting game world. Expanding on this promise to keep getting bigger and better at the same time, we have the newest game in the series, Skyrim.

The focus on the return of dragons to the world of the Elder Scrolls is a powerful one, with a lot of the early demos shown at E3 putting the great wyrms, and specific fights against them on display. The powerful “dragon shout” abilities garnered from defeating the winged titans give characters abilities themed on draconian powers including fire-breathing. The third-person engine and animations have been greatly improved, making that perspective a more attractive choice for play, and the complete redesign of all user interface, menus, inventory and character options is aimed at accessibility. Having seen the gorgeous graphics and read about the planned scope of the world, and some of the great moments in preview videos like a dragon suddenly swooping down and snatching up a humanoid opponent fighting the character, and dropping his mangled body some distance away... I'm excited for it.

There are a few parts of the announcement that give me pause, however. Skyrim is being developed specifically as a console game for the Xbox360 and PS3, and they'll work backward from that for a PC port. “PC port of a console game” is a phrase that gives many PC gamers the jibblies, and for good reason. All the talk of streamlining and accessibility is a great idea, until you realize that games in the past that have attempted to do this did so at the expense of depth and have greatly disappointed their fans in the process. (I'm looking at YOU, Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age 2.) I'm going to remain optimistic, as I remember the panic when the size of the world for Morrowind was revealed to Daggerfall fans, and how unfounded that turned out to be.  

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