Author Archives: Andy

This game is terrible (I play it every day)

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A friend passed along a link to this amusing Wired piece on the whiners and complainers who populate game forums. It’s funny because it’s true–it’s really uncanny how many people spend their valuable time sitting in official game forums complaining about how much the game sucks. The offenses against which these forum warriors rage usually range from the petty to the insignificant to the outright delusional. If the game is that bad, I always wonder, surely there are better things to do with your life than rehash the point loudly in front of a bunch of strangers on an online forum? Clearly I’m missing something.

If you were to spend time at the World of Warcraft official forums (which I no longer do, for this very reason), you’d soon emerge with the impression that WoW is the worst-designed, most unplayable piece of trash ever to be released; and you’d almost forget that every day millions of people–including, most likely, the whiners–happily log in and have a good time playing it.

Whatever it is about the internet that fosters rampant and petty negativity is not confined merely to game forums, of course. It’s especially noticeable in gaming forums because the emotional investment of the whiners is so disproportionate to the real-life significance of the problems they’re griping about. There’s a good dissertation just waiting to be written on the Psychology of People Who Are Clearly Obsessed With Game X But Can’t Stop Talking About How Much They Hate It. And heaven help the PhD candidate who has to spend time in the forums doing research for that one.

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Why weren’t the Clone Wars cooler?

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The portrayal of the Clone Wars in the Star Wars Episodes 1, 2, and 3 has long bothered me. Long, long ago, when I first watched Star Wars and heard crazy old Ben Kenobi’s offhand reference to the Clone Wars (in which he had served alongside Anakin Skywalker, the best starfighter pilot in the galaxy!), my young mind conjured up images of an epic conflict that ravaged the galaxy.

The Clone Wars of my imagining were all part of a civil war in which brother fought brother, master fought apprentice, and hero fought hero. The schism started small but grew to engulf every known star system. There were true heroes on both sides, all struggling to fix a failing Republic: the Loyalists (who believed the dying Republic could be reformed from within) stood on one side and the Separatists (who believed that the Republic had passed the point of redemption and needed to be torn down) on the other.

The heroes of the Clone Wars were to the people of the Rebellion-era Star Wars universe what the heroes of Greek myth are to us today–they were larger than life, with power and might far beyond anything that would come after. And like the heroes of Greek mythology, their flaws were just as great. In time, noble ideals were lost beneath beneath monstrous egos; the forbidden science of cloning was tapped to make good on never-ending battlefield losses; and in the end, Jedi on both sides even turned to the Dark Side in a desperate quest for something, anything that would give them an edge and bring the devastation to an end.

And somewhere in the midst of all this, the Emperor came with the promise of peace. I never thought too much about the details, which didn’t seem all that interesting anyway, but as a young Star Wars fan I saw the Empire that grew out of the Clone Wars as a sort of populist movement. The people of the Republic may have hated the corruption of their government, but they grew to hate the hell of galactic war even more. The idealistic Jedi struggle looked more and more to the average Republic citizen like the squabbling of children with too much power. The Emperor, who had earlier fanned the flames of civil war, now tapped into this frustration. The details are lost to the passage of time, but when the bloodshed ended, the Emperor was in charge, the Jedi were on the run, and both Loyalist and Separatist found that they had lost the war.

That was how I envisioned the Clone Wars, at least. But the Clone Wars as portrayed in Episodes 1, 2, and 3 seem… well, pretty lame in comparison. Lucas’ Clone Wars isn’t a tragic clash of mighty heroes, but a battle between the Good Guys and the Goofy Evil Robots. Despite the extreme amount of boring detail we’re given about the state of the Republic, we never get even a mildly satisfying reason why the Separatists are trying to leave the Republic in the first place, except that they’re Evil. The Jedi aren’t mighty but flawed heroes; they’re utterly worthless bureaucrats who can’t even stop the Trade Federation from invading the Happiest, Most Peaceful Planet in the Galaxy. Despite the fact that the Republic Senate and the Jedi Council are both portrayed as useless, corrupt, or both, the films expect us to side with the Loyalists simply because the Republic is a Democracy. The battles of the Clone Wars are not tense, tear-jerking dramas in which former friends are forced to fight and even kill each other over their ideals; instead, they’re dull CGI engagements between faceless clone soldiers and droids with silly accents. Even the most epic battle scenes of the prequels, like the space battle at the beginning of Revenge of the Sith, manage to evoke only the barest scrap of emotional investment.

It was probably foolish to imagine that Lucas’ vision of the Clone Wars would match mine perfectly. And as frustrating as the prequels can be at points, Lucas has packed them with quite a few cool ideas. But the Clone Wars themselves–what should be the epic backdrop against which the fall of Anakin Skywalker occurs–are far more dull than I had hoped they would be.

I wanted the American Civil War in space, and I got a confusing and poorly-explained war between clones and robots.

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Playing Star Wars like it's actually, you know, Star Wars

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While browsing the RPG.net fora today, I came across a link to a great essay by Steve Darlington on how to run a Star Wars RPG in the spirit of the movies. Even if you’re not a gamer, the essay has a lot of good observations as to what makes the films so immensely enjoyable. (Now if only Lucas had followed some of this advice while making the prequel trilogy….)

Darlington’s main point is that a SW game needs to convey the epic, space-opera feel of the movies–the heroes must be at the center of everything, they should always be fighting against impossible odds, and the stakes should always be huge. Epic lightsaber battles against a Sith Lord (who is, of course, actually your father) over a lava pit, outrunning the entire Imperial navy in your junk-heap space freighter (with a few little modifications), suicidal trench runs to take down the Death Star with twenty seconds left before it reaches firing range to blow up your planet…. those things are all Star Wars.

Fending off random thugs while delivering spice shipments to a backwater planet for the umpteenth time… that, while it is more along the lines of a typical RPG scenario, is definitely not Star Wars–unless along the way to deliver your spice shipment you get attacked by Imperials, escape legions of Stormtroopers ordered to capture you and send you to the Spice Mines of Kessel, and end up singlehandedly blowing up a Super Star Destroyer seconds before it destroys the whole frickin’ universe.

I’ve run several Star Wars games, and none of them felt nearly as fun as they should have, given my love for the SW movies. Reading this article, I think I have a better idea of why those games didn’t work. Next time, I’ll try to make the adventure a bit more epic and exciting than “get through the Imperial customs station without being noticed.”

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A lifetime of roleplaying, or roleplaying a lifetime: generation-spanning RPG campaigns

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Many people keep a list of things they want to accomplish before they slough off this mortal coil. That’s a bit too serious a topic to address in a game blog like this, but I suspect that I am not the only gamer who has a list of game activities I want to experience before I hang up my gamemaster hat for good. One of the things I want to do is run or play in a generational RPG campaign.

By “generational campaign,” I am referring to an RPG campaign that spans a much longer span of time than do most adventures and campaigns. I’m talking about a campaign that covers events all throughout the life and career of a PC–and maybe even the adventures of the PC’s children, grandchildren, and beyond.

Most RPG campaigns cover a relatively short span of time in a character’s life. The longest adventures–and here I’m thinking of some of the truly epic D&D campaigns of yesteryear–might take your character months or even a year or two of his fictional life to fully complete. And a game group that plays regularly for a few years might see their characters age a few years, maybe even a decade. And that sort of campaign can be mighty satisfying.

But in all of those cases, the PC doesn’t really have time to evolve and develop like a real human would; most campaigns take place during the PC’s “peak adventuring age” and end not when the character grows out of adventuring age and into the next phase of life, but when the gaming group gets bored or decides to do something else for a change.

In a lifetime-spanning campaign, however, you’d play out the most important or interesting adventures and experiences spread throughout the character’s life. Assuming your character isn’t killed by 3rd-level goblins during his first adventure at age 18, you’d see him pursue long-term goals; you’d see the consequences of choices made in youth cropping up later in his career; you’d see his goals finally achieved or forfeited in old age. You’d see relationships come and go, enemies rise and fall, and values stand firm or crumble in the face of a lifetime of challenges.

I’m aware of only a few published generational campaigns like this. One is the Sengoku campaign Shiki, which spans an 18-year period in feudal Japan during which the characters safeguard an important heir from infancy until he is old enough to assume his birthright. Another is The Great Pendragon Campaign for the Pendragon RPG; it spans 80 years and allows the characters to personally witness and take part in the Arthur legend from beginning to end.

Going even further are campaigns that span not just a character’s life, but several generations of characters. In these campaigns, characters might be connected through the years by blood, loyalty, or chance; but whatever the connection, their lives all fit together to tell a grand story. As far as I know, outside of Pendragon, only White Wolf has published much of anything along these lines. The four-part Transylvania Chronicles for Vampire: the Dark Ages spans hundreds of years of history, beginning in the medieval world and continuing all the way to the modern day. And the newer Vampire Chronicler’s Guide contains guidelines for creating and playing entire vampire family trees–the sins of the father visited upon the children to the fourth generation, and all the drama and horror that implies. I’m not a Vampire player, but I’d jump at the opportunity to participate in one of these uber-epic campaigns.

So why haven’t I tried to run a generational–or multi-generational–RPG campaign yet? Mainly because I have enough trouble getting a gaming group together for more than two consecutive game sessions; the idea of committing a year or two of real life to play through the entire lifespan of our characters is logistically daunting. There’s also the matter of such campaigns requiring quite a bit more preparation than most short-term games, both for the players and gamemaster. But one day I will run a game like this, or at least take a decent stab at doing so. And if I don’t, perhaps my children, and my children’s children after them, will…

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Symphony of the night, again

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There so needs to be a heavy-metal rock opera based on the original Castlevania trilogy soundtrack–preferably by a European prog rock band with crazy hair, Ren-fair stage costumes, and a ridiculously melodramatic Goth name.

But until that day, I’m content to listen to this guy’s hard-rock renditions of the music of Castlevania. His in-progress “Unchosen Paths” album is an effort to rework the entire soundtrack of Castlevania 3, and let me tell you–I’ve been listening to it all day, and it’s a work of freaking genius. “Creeping Dusk” is an 18-minute metal epic that takes you on a whirlwind tour of every great tune from CV2: Simon’s Quest and CV3: Dracula’s Curse. And “Scourge of 1691,” in addition to having a darn cool name, covers what must be every song from the original game in one great Medley of Awesomeness.

Rock on, my Castlevania-music-playing friends. Rock on.

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Scribblings from my notebook: the Case of the Overdue Book

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“I’m not sure I follow.”

“Think it through again.” Mike leaned forward suddenly, his eyes burning with excitement born of an epiphany. “We know from Paulus’ diary”–he jabbed his forefinger at a thin leather journal, one of many such volumes strewn haphazardly across the desk—”that he had the book when he rode into town.” A thrust of his leg sent the wheeled chair on which he sat rolling noisily across the hardwood floor to collide with a large metal filing cabinet. Mike pulled a folder from atop the filing cabinet, sending random papers fluttering through the air like wind-tossed leaves. “And we know from this report that when the Sons of Horus caught him trying to sneak out on the South Shore Line, the Manuscript wasn’t on him. He ditched it somewhere before trying to leave.”

“So? He passed it off to somebody else. Or sold it.”

“Come on. Who’s he going to trust with it? Its misuse was why he stole it in the first place.”

“But if he hid it somewhere in town, why is there zero trace of it? The Sons aren’t stupid. That thing packs an aura like… I don’t know. I mean, we could feel it all the way out in Des Moines. No way Paulus could hide that.”

Mike was tapping his fingers on the desk, impatience writ clear across all his features. “You’re not thinking. OK, so no geas can hide the Manuscript. But nobody can see it, so obviously something’s hiding it. Something else right here in the city.” He was channeling the condescending teacher now; he was going to reel me along until I stumbled upon the destination he’d clearly already reached. When I didn’t reply immediately, he dropped the subtlety another notch. “What is there, in the city of Chicago, that is powerful enough to smother the aura of the third-most-potent magical tome on the continent?”

I was slow, but I was trying. “Something to smother an aura—not a spell, which’d leave an even bigger footprint than the object it hid.” Mike nodded, and I felt a surge of schoolboy pride. The last piece clicked into place, and I blurted excitedly: “Manhattan.” Mike nearly squawked with glee. “Fermi. The nuclear reaction.”

“Yes! The birth of the modern world. It’s a magical dead zone. When the reaction went off, it must’ve blown a hole in the ley-line grid big enough to drive a blimp through.”

“Or hide the Preter Manuscript.” I was grinning like an idiot.

“Exactly. The Sons were looking for an aura spike, not a gap. And get this: Stagg Field is long gone, but guess what’s sitting right where it used to be?”

I knew this one. “A library. The University of Chicago.”

Mike nodded. “We need to get there fast. If we can figure it out, so can the Sons. Persephone still owes you from the whole Hellfire Club business, right? Think she can conjure us up some faculty IDs in the next half-hour?”

She certainly wouldn’t appreciate being invoked at this hour, but she did owe me. “No problem.”

“Then pack your bags and your library card. We’ve got a book to check out.”

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All the leaves are brown and the sky is gray

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I miss California.

I’m visiting the Golden State on a work-related trip. I genuinely enjoy living in the Midwest, and it’s not like I sit around all year in Michigan pining for California. But I’m always surprised, upon setting foot back in my home state, at how much I still miss it even after nearly a decade in the Midwest.

California just feels different to me than anywhere else I’ve ever lived. The trees are different, the buildings are different, the people are different. The hills and rocks and brush are different. The road signs and streets are different. I’ve learned of late to temper my nostalgia with a healthy dose of realism–California is also crowded, hectic, smoggy, and expensive–but being here is comfortable and familiar.

There’s a Santa Ana today, and the sky–beyond the thick layer of Los Angeles smog, of course–is utterly clear.

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Games on the road

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I’m out of town on another work-related trip, so not much gaming of any variety is going on. However, I made sure to pack a few RPGs, “just in case.” Just in case of what, I’m really not sure; but here’s what I packed:

Shadowrun, 4th edition and Ex Machina: a few years ago I thought that cyberpunk in gaming was officially dead. No sooner did I make that pronouncement than the market was hit by a slew of new cyberpunk games: a new Shadowrun, the gorgeous Ex Machina, and a new edition of Cyberpunk. Reports of cyberpunk’s death have been greatly exaggerated by me, it seems.

Hunter: the Reckoning: this game never seemed to get much love from the general gaming public, but I still flip lovingly through its pages from time to time. Hunter captured a lot of Call of Cthulhu-esque themes–“average Joe faces unknowable horrors, goes insane, and dies”–while giving them a nice modern twist.

Shadows over Baker Street: OK, this one’s not a game book; it’s a collection of stories about what would happen if Sherlock Holmes went up against the mind-shattering horrors of the Cthulhu mythos. Lots of fun, and if I can’t find some game-able ideas in there, I don’t deserve my Gamemaster badge.

So rest assured, while I’m not talking about games too much here at the moment, I am in fact continuing to read them incessantly. And I just learned that the coworker traveling with me on this particular work-related trip is an off-and-on D&D player. Perhaps my neurotic habit of bringing game books everywhere I go will finally pay off. If only I hadn’t left my dice at home….

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You'll never beat me: games with show-stopping bugs

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There are games that seem impossible to beat, and games that really are impossible to beat. That’s the story with the recent Bubble Bobble Revolution, which

includes a game-halting bug. Apparently the big boss battle in Level 30 isn’t much of a battle at all because the boss never appears, meaning that the game just sits there on an empty level waiting for a boss who will never come. The remaining seventy or so levels are unreachable.

Ouch–this doesn’t sound too good for the publisher’s Quality Assurance department. If this were a computer game, a downloadable patch could fix the game, but since this is a handheld console game, fixing it will probably involve recalling the game from store shelves and shipping out corrected copies to stores and customers.

It is not uncommon for games to ship with serious bugs–in fact, it’s a common computer gamer gripe that the availability of online patching has made it easier for developers to release buggy titles and patch them later. But it’s fairly uncommon for a game to ship with a bug so severe that the game is unfinishable.

The only such game that I’ve personally encountered was Mechwarrior 2: Mercenaries, a very fun game that also happened to be riddled with bugs. The bugs might have been tolerable, except that one of them made it impossible to progress beyond a certain point in the game. After completing a particularly difficult mission partway through the game, you are told to wait for your dropship to pick you up and end the mission. The dropship showed up, all right–but it never landed. I spent a good hour chasing it around the map; I tried shooting it down; I tried reloading old saved games; I tried replaying the mission from scratch, but the dropship never landed and the mission never ended. So I stopped playing the game. (I later learned that a patch was made available, but this was in the mid-90s before internet connectivity was ubiquitous; by the time I came across the patch, the game had long been gathering dust.)

The only other game I’ve played that comes close to the “unfinishable” level was Ultima 9–a famously buggy game that, like MW2:M above, was quite enjoyable… during the small windows of time between crashes and lock-ups when you were actually able to play. I had to completely reinstall the game and start from scratch twice. The third time I made it halfway through the game only to have it corrupt all of my saved games was the last… while there was no one single bug that rendered the game unwinnable, the odds of making it through the entire game without running into a game-killing glitch were so low that it probably counts as “unwinnable” in my book. (The game’s bugs were so severe that the publisher actually shipped out fresh copies of the game to registered customers; but I didn’t have the willpower to start over from scratch again in the hopes that it wouldn’t just die again after sucking up fifteen more hours of my life.)

Extremely difficult games I can handle. Even games so difficult that they might as well be impossible for me to complete. I can shrug off a few bugs here and there. But completely unwinnable games? That just makes me wonder if anybody over at the game company actually played the thing before slapping a $49.99 price sticker on it and bundling it off to Gamestop.

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