Category Archives: General Game-related Blathering

What I’m Playing: Mass Effect

2011-12-28General Game-related BlatheringBioware, Mass Effectflosch

Or rather, what I played. I finished the game on the 23rd. I checked, and it seems to be the first Bioware game I ever played in earnest. (I had bought Baldur’s Gate at some point, years after its release, but never had the time to actually look at it.) Overall, I can say I was pretty happy and will look at more Bioware games in the future. Let me start with the bad things first, though, to end the post on a high note.

The Bad

The combat was a bit meh. That’s probably because I’m not any good at FPSs. What happened was that I started the game on Normal difficulty, and then got annoyed at the seemingly random deaths. I could play a combat scene four times, dying three times at different stages, only to finish the fourth time, but without any idea why it went better this time. My squad members also were quite useless, either standing around doing nothing, or getting killed almost immediately. I guess I just sucked at squad management. At some point I just got annoyed (still relatively early on) and switched to Easy. That helped, but almost a bit too much. Especially as the game went on and I got shock trooper specialization, I got nigh invincible. Even my squad members survived every now and then!

Control was pretty annoying overall. It was better than with many other console ports, but the game still could’ve made use of more keyboard shortcuts.

The romance stuff felt tacked on. About midway through, I couldn’t talk to Kaidan any more without ending up in sappy talk. I didn’t like him enough to let that get anywhere though, so I had to be very careful around Kaidan not to inadvertently end up with him.

Which ties in with another problem I had: Sometimes it wasn’t clear what effects a certain line in conversations would have. More than once I chose a reply, only to realize that the way Shepard put it was the opposite of what I wanted. A preview option would’ve been great here.

The final decision who to choose for the council. That felt manipulative. You had the choice between someone who had always tried to help you vs someone who had stabbed you in the back. Still, I think I’m happy with my choice (more about that later).

The Good

Real choice. That was very nice. Not all decisions were clear-cut, many situations weren’t black and white. It didn’t always work, but sometimes is better than never.

A good female character and model. I decided to play a female Shepard. The default model was thankfully very adequate, it didn’t suffer at all from the chainmail bikini water balloon problem. Jane Shepard is more a crossing of Ellen Ripley and Samus Aran than of Wonder Woman and generic fantasy elf no. 23. (Which incidentally reminds me of this interesting site; thanks to Toldain for the link. It seems that the more reasonable the armor of a woman, the lower the risk of weird stereotype body proportions.) I took the default model with very few changes and haven’t regretted that at all.

The story was for the most part interesting. Some of the side quests didn’t seem to go anywhere or have much reason. I think, for example, of the heritage armor that everybody agreed on in the end was a piece of crap. Overall, it was enjoyable, though. It wasn’t necessarily innovative, what with fighting the greatest threat to all life ever. But I liked the way it was transported, and the fact that not all decisions were obviously right or wrong added to that.

My Playthrough

This is more for documentation purposes. If you have played the game, too, you can compare your choices with mine. In case it’s not blindingly obvious, this section will be 100% spoilers.

I let the Rachni queen live. I didn’t see any reason to kill it, other than: “They’re bad, bad things. We fought them before and thought we had driven them extinct. You better make sure they don’t come back!” That wasn’t enough for me to kill off a whole species.

When I had to decide, I saved Kaidan. That was the only logical choice. I sent Ashley with the troops, because she’s a solider and Kaidan isn’t. So Kaidan is with the bomb, which is of utmost importance. The Salarians died as distraction, and you’re destroying what potentially is a cure for the genophage. You better reach your goal with those stakes.

Wrex lived. I didn’t see any reason to kill him. Everybody in his situation would protest. Also, he was, with Garrus, my squad throughout the game because I like the two characters most. It also gave a subtle tension between a race that’s on the verge of dying out, and the race that is responsible for that, even though that tension wasn’t very apparent between the two in the game.

I rescued the council, but only after I realized that my choice didn’t have any effect on the outcome of the citadel battle, and killing the council would lead to what looked like a human hegemony over everybody else, which didn’t sound good, seeing how humans are still upstarts compared to many other races. When asked who to suggest for the council, I deferred the decision. Shepard is a soldier, not a politician. It’s not her decision to make.

Next Up: Mass Effect 2

I actually started last night. I’ll probably finish it before I return to Oblivion. Mass Effect 1 at least didn’t feel very long, I finished it in less than 30 hours. (Not that I’m complaining, at 3,74 Euro that’s still a lot fun for little money.) I hope it’ll be just as good or better. I’m looking forward to more good story. My two big wishes coming from Mass Effect and having seen the intro to ME2: I want to find a cure for the genophage, and I want to break free from Cerberus as early as possible.

PS Vita Test

2011-12-27General Game-related BlatheringGravity Daze, PS Vitaflosch

As I said in my last post, I went and tested the PS Vita in Japan. I did this on the 16th, which incidentally was the day before release day. That, coupled with the fact that it was a normal weekday, meant that there were no queues at all in Sony Building. Nevertheless, I was ushered into a dark room with black walls and subdued lighting, lined with pillars that each had a PS Vita connected to them, as well as a pair of headphones, with a badge and a timer that gave me 15 minutes to test a game of my choice. Not having any prior information or idea about the games at launch, I eschewed the “traditional Playstation console series release racing game aka Ridge Racer” and went with Gravity Daze.

Gravity Daze was quite interesting, though I’m not sure the novelties would keep fresh long enough to make it a great game. My Japanese is pretty hit-and-miss, and I rushed because I wanted to see as much as I could in the allotted 15 minutes, so I didn’t get the full story. You have to find a black cat and then get introduced to your gravity-defying super power (whether or not you had it before, or the mysterious cat gave it to you, I missed). Basically, a hit on the right shoulder button lets you levitate. You can then look around with the analog stick, and tilt gravity to the side, allowing you to run up a building, jump over to the next, and so on. Hitting the left shoulder button restores gravity for you. The game then made me follow another character and fight enemies by levitating, and then using my gravity control to kick stuff until it was dead. It might actually be a nice game, but I reached the end of the demo after 13 minutes. (so I could’ve spent more time reading! damn!)

The game suffered a bit from a typical problem for games that release with a new console: they seemed to cram a couple of gimmicks into it to showcase the new technology. As far as hardware goes, the PS Vita is basically an upgraded PSP. It’s almost the same size (maybe a bit smaller and lighter than the original PSP), but now comes with a touchscreen. I guess somebody at Sony decided that everybody needs a touchscreen these days, and that they should follow the example of the Nintendo DS. Anyway, at some point in the game, you were supposed to collect things by tapping on the screen with your finger. Now, I’m not a huge fan of touchscreens. They need constant cleaning and such. I’m more a button person. Besides, it felt like you might have collecting thing just as easily by running over them (maybe that is even possible, but it wasn’t advertised).

Definitely the weirdest part of the hardware built into the PS Vita is the rear touchpad, though. Yes, the Vita doesn’t only have a touchscreen. No, Nintendo already had that before, so they needed something even better at Sony! So they installed a touchpad… into the back of the Vita. Hm. It sounds like a very weird idea. I sadly had no opportunity to test it out, because neither Gravity Daze nor Shinobido 2, the other game I tried (where I totally got lost after about 5 minutes, so I gave up) seemed to support it. Come to think of it, though, it might actually be a neat idea. If you’re like me and don’t like touchscreens because of the fingerprints on your screen, you could use the back touchpad as if you touched the screen from behind. There was a tech demo that seemed to hint at exactly that use. It would be neat. I just wonder whether the average human has enough hand-eye coordination to hit the right spot immediately all the time. I would rather try that out first, I don’t trust myself enough here!

Playstation Vita, front and back (with touchpad)

On the “evolution rather than revolution” front, the PS Vita got a second analog pad, moving it closer to how the “big” playstation controllers work. I think except for a second pair of shoulder buttons and the ever-annoying “L3” and “R3” buttons that require you to push the analog sticks, everything is there now. That should make ports easier. The second analog pad was the thing I missed most whenever I played on my PSP.

Would I buy a PS Vita? Well, seeing how I had the chance last week, and would’ve gotten bragging rights as the first person I know to have one (I imagine people crowding around me, forming queues to play just a little bit, trading the lunch their mum packed them for just one more minute… ok, getting carried away there!), and still didn’t buy it… I probably won’t. I liked my PSP, but I never played it that much in the end. I think after a certain age, handheld consoles only make sense any more if you spend a lot of time commuting on public transport. That’s probably the reason handhelds are so immensely popular in Japan, but not so much here. If I lived there and had a 30-60 minute commute each way, I’d definitely get one. As things are, my commute is less than 10 minutes by bus. I’d rather play at home on a big screen. I just won’t get enough out of the Vita to spend my money on it.

Busy playing Sky…blivion

2011-11-29General Game-related BlatheringOblivion, Skyrim, The Elder Scrolls, xkcdflosch

Except for those blogging about SW:TOR the last weekend (and many finding it not what they are looking for right now), there have been a LOT of posts about people sharing their experiences with Skyrim. So, I obviously joined the bandwagon in my typical slightly twisted way:

xkcd is still the best.

I had eyed Skyrim, but I wasn’t sure I’d like it, and for that, the price seemed a bit steep. But Steam, in one of their typical sales, had a 75% discount of Oblivion the week before the Skyrim release. So I bought the Game of the Year edition (game + expansions) for a mere 6.24€.

I wasn’t sure about that, either. I had played Oblivion close to when it was released. Our local video store had it, and I tried the PS2 version. However, it was a localized German version. A very badly localized one. The voice actor were horrible, and German (especially badly translated German) has the tendency of producing very long translations. So every second inventory item (I’m not exaggerating) needed abbreviations to fit the limited text space. I got sick of juggling “Schw. Trank d. Strk.” pretty fast. I think I made it out of the initial dungeon and then stopped playing.

I very much enjoyed the game this time around, though. (In English. I always play games in their original language if I can. I might make an exception for The Witcher, but even there, I’d be fine with subtitles, actually. Used to it from movies anyway.) Steam tells me I played 43 hours so far. That’s about 100% of the game time I had since the sale. And 95% of my blog time on top. Sorry for being so silent for such a long time.

I really enjoy the quests and the flavor, the flow of the game. I find most of the characters quite interesting, though few of them genuinely likable. But I guess that’s not a bad thing if you can’t easily pinpoint the obviously good and obviously bad guys. It’s a kind of game I had almost forgotten still existed these days. I especially like how NPCs move around and actually talk to each other about gossip and rumors. I’ll admit, the conversations feel somewhat disjointed if you listen to them, but props for at least trying. Better than nothing in my book.

I haven’t progressed all that far into the main quest line, I think. I left it behind at some point to go explore. I will probably get back to it again soon.There’s a lot to do, and I have the feeling I haven’t even scratched the surface in some areas. I have done a lot of alchemy, but basically without any plan and only to sell the potions and make money. I still have no real idea how soul gems and enchanting work. And I haven’t bought any houses.

There are only two things I dislike about the game: the clunky controls (but I heard Skyrim is not any better in that regard), and the fast travel option. It’s too tempting. There are so many quests that send me back and forth all over the map. I didn’t want to use it, but I finally broke down, and now use it more often than I’d actually like to. But otherwise, I feel like I’d spend 80% of my time traveling, and while that’s fun for some time, it gets old eventually if you have to do it all the time. The voice acting is a bit repetitive, because they didn’t have enough voice actors for every single person in the game, but at least they do a good job for the most part. Oh, and I wish it wasn’t so easy to misclick and inadvertently steal something under the eyes of the person you actually want to talk to.

I found it quite amusing to read how people either say that Oblivion had sucked in comparison to other TES games and they had never gotten into it, or how Oblivion had been ok, but Skyrim is SO MUCH BETTER. That sounds like I’ll have a great time when I finally pick up Skyrim. In 5 years or so.

Jumpgate: Evolution Officially Dead?

2011-11-18General Game-related BlatheringEVE, Jumpgate, Privateerflosch

I came late to the MMORPG party. In fact, my first MMO wasn’t an RPG at all. Before I ever set foot into Britannia, and years before I had even heard of Azeroth, a friend of mine pointed me to this awesome game in the summer of 2001. It was like Privateer, just with many people around! This sounded awesome. We all had loved Privateer when it first came out (being too young and having missed Elite, which I heard was basically Privateer, just cooler). So I went and downloaded the game client for Jumpgate: The Reconstruction Initiative.

It was a nice game. However, the “many people around” never really materialized. At least where and when I was playing. The most vivid memories I have are from undocking, licking rocks until my cargo bay was full, and docking again. It sounds like mining in EVE, but you actually maneuvered your ships yourself. Several times, I crashed my poor starter ship into the space station trying to dock. The “fly yourself” added some kind of entertainment, but in the end, mining got boring, I never really got around to do anything else (like killing stuff), and my friends stopped playing. And that was that. Sadly, the screenshots I had got lost in The Great Data Loss of 2003(tm), but Google of course has quite a few. I’ll refrain from copying any to this post because I’d rather stay clear of convoluted copyright issues.

But I always had a weak spot in my heart for the game, and checked on it every year or so. At some point, I realized there was a successor in the making, called Jumpgate: Evolution. I was intrigued, and decided I’d definitely give it a shot when available.

Well, over time, it looked more like an “if available, ever”. There were few news, and those that came out weren’t good. People were laid off, how many nobody could (or wanted to) say. No release dates were shifted, but that was simply because there never had been a release date to start with.

When I checked on the game two days ago, I found out that jumpgateevolution.com was offline. No server reachable. Is that the end? It would be sad. It sounded like a fun game. Different from what is on the market for the most part, like a small brother to EVE, with real flying. It was one of the things I always found off-putting when I tried EVE: if I buy a humongous freighter, I want to fly the thing. I want to have the feeling of sitting on my front porch and flying my house around.

I still have a joystick sitting somewhere in a crate. I wonder whether I should dust it off and try and find out how the original Jumpgate is doing these days. I’m not holding my breath though.

Definitions, Conciseness, Win

2011-11-04General Game-related Blatheringflosch

(I wanted to make this a comment first, but it got too long, and in some way, it merits its own post. Definitely as much as Steam advertisement does…)

Nils is a very thankful target these days (sorry Nils!). First he spearheads the anti-panda movement, now he tells us definitions are bad. (I’m half-joking. Only half, but definitely a bit.) Specifically, that “casual” and “hardcore” are better left undefined.

I’m genuinely surprised. Nils studied, among other things, mathematics. In mathematics, definitions are immensely important. It doesn’t really matter how you define something as long as you do define it, preferably concisely and consistently. (One of my eye-openers was when I sat in two basic lectures, and one defined the natural numbers as including 0, one didn’t… but it was consistent within the scope of what they did.) But even the “lesser” sciences need concise definitions. Max Weber‘s most lasting legacy was his body of definitions that helped to give sociology a foundation of basic terms that was used and widely accepted by many important researchers after him.

Without definitions, there is no way to discuss properly. If we discuss about “huduhadugugu”, and to me it means “the feeling of despair over the cruelty of the world”, but to my discussion partner it means “the feeling after eating 72 chicken wings”, we will not be very productive. And if you look at the factors that can play into the terms “casual” and “hardcore”, they don’t seem to be much more specific that “huduhadugugu”.

Originally, at this point in the post, I wanted to lay out some ideas of dimensions that could create a possibility space for casual–hardcore. For example, the original Bartle types use two dimensions, acting–interacting and player–environment, with a later added third dimension of implicit–explicit, which gave you four or eight types. (The first four are the well-known explorer, socialiser, achiever, and killer). Some ideas for spanning the casual–hardcore space were time commitment and state of mind (as in serious–flippant) during play. However, I stumbled across Incobalt at Tobold’s blog, an his list of related work ground my efforts to a halt, at least for now. He reminded me that you should always be aware of what other people do before you start with something that will take longer than a couple of hours. As I could have imagined myself, there has been a lot of work in the field of definitions and categorizations. Research didn’t stop after Bartle published Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades. Because I’m too dense to figure out how to link to a specific comment on blogger, I’ll just quote Incobalt’s great comment in (almost) full:

In 21st Century Game Design, Bateman and Boon use Myers-Briggs typology to define four player types, which were each broken into hardcore and casual (The DGD1 model, though there has been a DGD2 model and the newer BrainHex model). See also http://blog.ihobo.com/ (Chris Bateman’s company related to his research).
In Playing Video Games: Motives, Responses, and Consequences (eds. Varderer and Bryant), Sherry, Lucas and Greenberg used the Uses and Gratifications model to show player motivation (“Video game uses and gratifications as predictors of use and game preference”).
Kallio, Pauliina, Mayra and Kaipainen looked at why players play games and found three groups (each with three subgroups): social players, casual players and committed players. They found this using surveys and cluster analysis. (“At least nine ways to play: Approaching gamer mentalities.” In Games and Culture Volume 6, Issue 4)
So there is work being done, but a *lot* of it is based on the original four Bartle types (and ignoring Bartle’s later work), as well as examining how players play existing games (which exclude a lot of personality styles).
I realize this is a bit off topic from the original post, but I would say that, if you’re going to use Bartle types, perhaps try taking a peak at other kinds of typing, or Bartle’s work after “Hearts, Spades, Diamonds, Clubs: Players Who Suit MUDs” (specifically, Bartle’s Designing Virtual Worlds, and his chapter in Bateman’s Beyond Game Design). there may be newer, better insight in them.

(In case you’re wondering, the original post didn’t have links either. However, most of the stuff should be easy to find, though good luck getting the full texts if you don’t work/study at a university.) It seems I have some reading to do. Might as well add another field of science to my portfolio of areas in which I’m up to the rank of dilettante.

In conclusion:

You see how many efforts there have been to define terms and categories in different areas of game-related science. That’s for a reason. Definitions are the foundation of good research.
Thank you Incobalt for some nice related work!
Maybe there is a reason that Bartle types are considered lacking in some respects when it comes to describing social interactions and the micro-sociology of MMOs. Bartle made it very clear his results are only applicable to virtual worlds (see also his talk at Multi.Player’11). Maybe we have problems with Bartle types in WoW, or what we call “themepark MMOs” because they’re not virtual worlds any more, but “just” games?

BTTF: Final Verdict

2011-10-31General Game-related BlatheringBack To The Future, BTTFflosch

In the last two days, I played the remaining 4 episodes (the first being discussed here). My overall impression is still more or less the same. But I got some screenshots, and a couple of things to point out, and what better way to get rid of them than to put them in the form of a post. Since I’m on a four-day weekend at the moment, my original plan was to play one episode every night, but I liked it so much that I played it a lot more.

Maybe this is a good point to mention, for those that are allergic to it, that the rest of the post will contain spoilers, though I’ll try to keep it down.

In short, after the daring escape in 1931 in Episode 1, you (you being Marty) have a serious problem with your existence. It seems you got your dad in trouble, so in Episode 2, you go back a couple of hours in time 1931 to solve that. That leads to a lot of other problems, and you end up in an Orwellian 1986 Hill Valley in Episode 3. So, in Episode 4, you go back to 1931 yet again, at which point you have a bit of a fallout with Doc, which you have to deal with in Episode 5. Oh, and Episode 5 also has an alternative catastrophic 1931, because you inadvertently changed something in 1876, which you’ll also visit. Still with me? No? Great. That keeps spoiling at a minimum, and after all, isn’t that how time travel stories are supposed to if you don’t revisit them afterwards? Oh, and don’t even try to understand why Doc went to 1931 originally. You won’t until the very last scene. You’re welcome to guess throughout the game, though.

Episode 2 was quite funny again, with the 30ies appeal of prohibition, corrupt cops, and all those things. Episode 3, on the other hand, was probably my least favorite. The Orwellian Hill Valley felt depressing, and without Doc around, there were fewer fun dialogues. It had a couple of nice one-liners though.

Don't we all?

Hairdressers, always at the forefront of bad puns.

Orwellian 1986 Hill Valley, in a strange twist, has a thing for 30ies-style agitprop banners.

In Episode 4, the focus is back on the weirdest kinds of research again, as is the first part of Episode 5. You’ll get to know a couple of Doc’s early inventions, most of which rightfully never made it into everyday use. But that’s nothing a good researcher should be afraid of! I should put one of these lines on my office door.

My thoughts exactly... as long as my suit doesn't look like that afterwards.

Hill Valley Expo was merely a setback!

Overall, as I already said, I really enjoyed the games. On the other hand, I probably would’ve enjoyed them almost as much if they had been a movie of about the same length. The game part is somewhat weak, don’t expect any hard puzzles (one or two are frustrating, but that’s because they feel random). The scripting and voice acting is great though, and the characters are likable (except for those that aren’t supposed likable, which aren’t, obviously) and believable as much as a you could expect in a BTTF-style adventure. There are a couple of minor bugs and typos. It is kind of sad to see that somebody, for example, mixed up “your” and “you’re”. The grammar geek in me died a little.

Good thing this is an exception, and doesn't happen all the time.

There is also a very annoying bug in Episode 5 that cost me quite a bit of time. You have to solve a puzzle revolving around a cactus, and I didn’t realize what I had to do, because the game already displayed everything in place, when in fact it wasn’t. Sure enough, after I went through the motions and manually draped everything required around the cactus in the way the graphics already showed to me, the puzzle was solved. Things like this really should be caught by your QA. But oh well. At least there were no game-breaking dead ends.

If you can get the game on sale, and you liked Back To The Future, get it, no questions asked. At full price, it’s up to you whether you consider 15-or-so hours of game time worth it.

Final verdict: don't discard the game! Or if you do, at least recycle correctly.

Back To The Future: The Game

2011-10-29General Game-related BlatheringBack To The Future, BTTF, Episode 1flosch

As I said earlier this week, there was a Steam sale for Telltale’s BTTF game. I couldn’t resist and got it for 10€. After I played Episode 1 (of 5) last night, I can say it was worth it. The rest of the text will contain spoilers, but the game is so easy that you will probably see everything I’m going to talk about in a matter of 2-3 hours anyway.

The game starts with a scene that every BTTF fan will remember.

You disintegrated Einstein!

It took me a couple of minutes to get used to the models. They’re closely modeled after the film characters, but just that slight bit off. Oh, and don’t get me started on the walking animations. The voice action is spot-on, though (for the most part), and very enjoyable.

The story in Episode 1 is relatively straightforward, for a time traveling one. We start in 1986, where Doc’s stuff is getting auctioned off because he has gone missing (in 1885, if you remember the movies). Suddenly, the DeLorean appears in the parking lot, with nobody inside but Einstein, and a tape recorder telling you the newly added homing device has automatically brought the DeLorean back to 1986. A very smart idea, it makes sure that, if something happens to Doc, Marty can go back in time and rescue him.

Of course, the DeLorean time machine, being the fragile thing it is, forgot which time it departed from, so that’s the first thing to find out. Helps comes in the unlikely form of Vice Principal Strickland’s sister. Anyway, you find out you have to head to 1931, where Doc apparently was murdered by a mob for being a suspect in burning down Hill Valley’s speakeasy.

You run into a Tannen during your trip…

The Tannens, charming as ever... I think I'll stay up here for a bit.

… as well as Marty’s grandfather and Doc’s younger self, who is just starting his scientific career against the wishes of his father. (The scene where you listen to their argument while Doc gives you some hints of how to operate a complex alchemical setup is one of my favorites.)

Like the movies, the Episode ends in chase scene; you have to break Doc out of a police transporter.

This is a rescue, BTTF-style.

In the end, all ends well, or not so much… but that’s when we’re told that the story is “to be continued…”

It’s a fun little game. As I said, the animations are weak, and the character models need some getting used to, but the voice acting is great. 10€ was totally worth it (seeing how there’s four more episodes waiting). For fans of the series, even 25€ might be okay. You basically pay 5€ per episode, and it’ll give you a couple of nights of fun. Just don’t expect a lot of puzzle solving. They are all so easy that I didn’t get stuck once. It was more like an interactive movie at times. But the heydays of point-and-click adventures are long over, so I’ll take what I can get these days.