PS Vita Test

General Game-related Blathering,

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.

I’m Back

Even More General Blathering

Thus ends the winter break.

Christmas was good, had a lot of great food (game – har har).

Japan. Oh my. It’s every bit as good as I remembered in almost all respects, and the rest is still fine. I need to make a battle plan now to finish my PhD. I want to go back. So much.

If anybody knows of a great job opportunity or a language+work program in Japan, for a fresh PhD, starting about mid-2013, pray tell. I’m interested.

Intermission

Even More General Blathering

I’m still in Japan, but through the miracle of scheduled posts, I can give you this picture or men (well, a dwarf) at work (or not).

Hardly working...

In other news, this blog is still in December hibernation, and will be until I’m back and Christmas is over. I’m totally enjoying Japan right now, and it will allow me to skip the presumed massive landslide of SWTOR posts, a game that I decided some time ago I won’t play anyway. Definitely not at release. So I’m not missing much there.

I’m going to play on a PS Vita today or tomorrow though, when it comes out! Muahaha!

Blog Vacation

Even More General Blathering, ,

Technically, it’s not only my blog, because I’m gone for some time, too. And technically, it’s not only vacation, because the first part will be conference travel for work, where I’ll present some of my work (yay for it being an important step towards handing in my dissertation, boo for the inevitable stage fright). By this time tomorrow, I’ll already be on my way.

It’s special for me, not only because it is one of the better conferences to end up at, but also because it means returning to my old love Japan, and Tokyo to boot! I was there for a year when I was still an undergrad (it’s been six years?!), and it was immensely awesome. I hope everything is as great as I remember. Can’t wait to finally go back to Kyūshū Jangara Ramen. If you ever are in Tokyo, don’t miss them. And then there’s Akihabara. And Shibuya. And I still got friends there I can visit!

Yes, I’m excited, how did you guess?

However, vacation also means that I’ll only have intermittent Internet access. And I won’t have time to play games. That means I don’t have much to write about in he first place. And when I’m back, I’ll have to get the last presents, and jump right into pre-christmas stress. So don’t expect a lot of posts here until Christmas, or even New Year’s. I’ll be back, though. Promise.

I still got a lot of games to play, after all!

Busy playing Sky…blivion

General Game-related Blathering, , ,

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?

General Game-related Blathering, ,

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.

Mana as the Easy Way Out

Vanguard, World of Warcraft,

I’m a bit behind because I was ill last week, and then had to catch up on work, so it might take a bit until I’m actually talking about news again. Right now, I’m just going through everything I missed, and this quote from Blizzard caught my eye:

As a Monk you can heal competitively without ever having to target a friendly player.

Monks will be similar to how a Discipline Priest can heal or cast Smite.

Balancing a non mana using healer would be too hard, so Monks are going to use mana to heal.

All Monks (DPS, Tank and Healer) will use the “dual combo point” resource (Force).

Monks are getting less and less interesting with every news update. I wonder whether they’ll ever reach the greatness of Vanguard’s disciple. It sounds like monks will just be a mobile healing stream totem, or restricted to the equivalent of atonement spam. I’m not sure what to make of the last quoted point. Will monk healers have some interesting mechanic to manage, or just some blue Chi bar, and the “force” just being neglected?

Besides, wasn’t there some developer discussion a while back when they said that Mana was a somewhat annoying mechanic, because it wasn’t as easy to balance as energy and similar ones that deplete and refill faster?

Cannot vs. Can Not

Even More General Blathering,

Because I have been reading, commenting, and correcting papers and theses for two days straight at work, and because of the extraordinary cumulation of people (one a fairly good writer of scientific English) I had to tell the following during that time; furthermore, because this has left me little time to do anything worthwhile to report in my blog, I want to reiterate:

“Cannot” and “can not” do not mean the same. “Cannot do” means that you are unable to do something. “Can not do” means that you are able to refrain from doing something. So “cannot” and “can not” cannot be used interchangeably.

That is all. Thank you for your time.

Definitions, Conciseness, Win

General Game-related Blathering

(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:

  1. 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.
  2. Thank you Incobalt for some nice related work!
  3. 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?