I haven’t really been following Gears of War at all, except to occasionally notice that it looks pretty nifty. But I have to applaud this this GoW trailer, which juxtaposes the game’s bleak setting with the haunting version of “Mad World” I first heard on the Donnie Darko soundtrack. Classy.
by 
“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.”
by 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.
by 
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….
by 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.
by There’s a good rundown over at Gamasutra of ground-breaking electronic roleplaying games. A few quick comments on their list:
First, it does the heart good to see Planescape: Torment at #2 on the list; it’s certainly one of the most literary RPGs ever created. (I’d personally put it at #1, of course, but Fallout was so good I can’t really begrudge its place at the top of the list.) The time I spent playing PS:T ranks as one of my best gaming experiences. I’ll stop now before I’m reduced to blubbering fanboy praise….
Second: No System Shock 2? That seems an unusual oversight, given that game’s excellent fusion of roleplaying with the traditional FPS-style interface. I do note that Deus Ex, which seems to me to owe an awful lot to SS2, made the list. That said, I can see why Deus Ex might have surpassed SS2 as a roleplaying game–in DE, the player faces meaningful choices and interaction with others, whereas SS2 mostly kept you on the run from enemies who didn’t interact with you much outside of trying to kill you. I grudgingly submit to the wisdom of the list-compilers in this case, although SS2 remains a must-play game.
A really scary must-play game. A perfect choice for some Halloween gaming, but good luck tracking down a copy….
Third… Dragon Warrior! I sometimes wonder if anybody else played this game; it’s gratifying to see it on the list. It completely consumed my life for a period of months back in the NES days; it deserves more recognition than it gets for bridging the gap between Zelda-style exploration adventure games and the later Final Fantasy-style console RPG genre. I tried re-playing this recently and found its crude and repetitive console RPG gameplay to be almost unbearable; but back in The Day it was quite something to behold. Also, this game has an absolutely beautiful and haunting soundtrack (even if it did get annoying when looped repeatedly through the NES’ speakers for hours on end). It’s the sort of music you find yourself idly whistling 15 years after you beat the game and packed the cartridge away in storage with your NES.
This game had to be one of the only ones where, upon confronting the final Bad Guy, you were given the chance to abandon your quest and conquer the world at his side. And you could actually choose! (Of course, if you chose to side with the bad guy and betray everything you’ve been working to accomplish, the game ended and played some sad music, which was sort of boring. But hey, at least it was your choice, freely made!)
I used to have the Dragon Warrior world map set as my desktop background, but after a while it started making my eyes bleed, so I reluctantly changed it.
And finally, a general comment: it’s a downright shame that almost all of these games are completely unavailable outside eBay or sketchy ‘abandonware’ sites. Book publishers and movie studios don’t let their groundbreaking titles simply disappear from general availability after a few years–but most of the classics on this list are long gone from the market. While a few of these titles (like Dragon Warrior, as I note above) are too dated to be enjoyed by most gamers today, there’s no reason that the Ultima series or Fallout should be so hard to find. Come on, Game Industry–figure out a method by which you can keep classics like these alive and available for future generations to enjoy!
And now you’ll have to excuse me. I have a date with Shodan, and she doesn’t like to be kept waiting.
by 
Kender fans, rejoice! If you just can’t get enough of the world’s most annoying halfling, and you’ve got the cash, you can now treat yourself to a leather-bound, gilt-edged compilation of the Dragonlance trilogy.
OK, I’m smirking at it. But hey, if Dragonlance floats your boat, go for it–I’ve certainly spent more money on less significant cultural artifacts. But personally, I’m not sure if it really feels right to move the Dragonlance novels out of the comfortably cheap, read-’em-in-an-afternoon Elmore-illustrated paperback format into this sort of artificial sophistication.
If I sound like a literary snob, I really don’t mean to. I mean, I wanted to be Raistlin the Brooding Angst-Ridden Archmage With Godlike Powers just as much as any other teenage male, and those Dragonlance novels are right here on the bookshelf next to me. But this reminds me of the day a few years ago I stumbled across The Annotated Dragonlance Chronicles at the bookstore. Annotated? The Dragonlance trilogy? Annotated editions are for, like, James Joyce and the Bible and stuff. What exactly are they… annotating?
So then: up for a little literary challenge today? I dare you to provide a scholarly annotation for the following excerpt from Dragons of Autumn Twilight:
The slug, sensing success, slithered forward, dragging its pulsating gray body through the door. Goldmoon cast a fearful glance at the huge monster, then ran to Tanis. Riverwind stood over them, protectively.
“Get away!” Tanis said through clenched teeth.
Goldmoon grasped his injured hand in her own, praying to the goddess. Riverwind fit an arrow to his bow and shot at the slug. The arrow struck the creature in the neck, doing little damage, but distracting its attention from Tanis […]
Raistlin ran to Fizban’s side. “Now is the time for the casting of the fireball, Old One,” he panted.
Have at it!
by Ah, the Minus World. What teenage boy during the NES years didn’t spend countless hours of his life trying to unlock the secret entrance to that legendary, and possibly imaginary, hidden level in Super Mario Bros?
The internet, in its all-seeing wisdom, has of course laid bare the secrets of the Minus World. Enjoy watching somebody do what you never could: find that elusive spot at which a simple jump would teleport you to the forbidden halls of the Holy Grail of 8-bit gaming.
The Minus World–which actually turned out to be a simple glitch in the game, not a carefully-planted Easter Egg–has to be one of the earliest and most potent Gaming Urban Legends. Nobody you talked to had ever actually been to the Minus World, but everybody had a cousin whose neighbor had stumbled upon it on accident and knew the precise sequence of moves required to access it. I myself spent more than a few hours in front of the Nintendo with my friend Derrick in search of the Minus World. Scrawled on a crumpled piece of paper in our possession were instructions that claimed to describe the twisting path to the Minus World–I think Derrick transcribed the instructions, scribbling them down as a cousin or friend or babysitter or some other vague authority revealed them in a conspiratorial whisper.
But the instructions never worked. We never found the Minus World, although viewing the video above, I swear we got really, really close. If only….
It seems to me that the golden age of video game myths is over. Back then, there were no strategy guides or incredibly exhaustive online walkthroughs to reveal to you every corner, every secret, every Easter Egg to be found in a given video game. No, back then these things were mysteries–you heard about them second- or third-hand, then rushed home to try and find them yourself. The myths were usually wild goose chases… but they were true just often enough to keep you coming back for more.
I think the day of the Game Urban Legend lasted up to about the release of Doom and its sister games. Doom and its ilk featured countless hidden spaces and Easter Eggs, and I’m guessing that you, like I, spent at least some of your adolescence running alongside the walls of Doom levels hitting the spacebar in hopes of finding a secret door. But that was about when strategy guides were hitting game store shelves, and about the time that people were compiling their collective Doom knowledge on the fledgling internet.
Those strategy guides and walkthroughs gave us the hidden knowledge we sought… and they stripped the veil of mystery away from the games we played and loved. Suddenly, we knew everything–and this gamer at least, gazing into that abyss, longed for the bliss of ignorance, forever lost. Was the price we paid for our encyclopedic knowledge too high?
by 
This weekend, I played my biggest game of Star Fleet Battles yet. My opponent and I each had 600 points with which to purchase a squadron of starships. We each showed up to the field of battle with four ships–my force consisted of a Federation command cruiser, two heavy cruisers, and a plasma cruiser. He was playing the Vudar (a former subject race that rebelled against their Klingon overlords) and fielded a Vudar battlecruiser and three war cruisers. What diplomatic debacle had pitted the peace-loving Federation and the Klingon-hating Vudar against each other that day, none can say.
It was an epic battle–at least in comparison to the one-on-one starship duels we usually play. The Federation and Vudar primary weapon systems are fairly similar–the Feds have their famous photon torpedoes while the Vudar equip their ships with ion cannons; both are heavy-hitting weapons that work best at short range. (The Vudar are weaker in the phaser and drone department, but compensate with a defensive system that can make their ships extremely difficult to hit.) That meant that my opponent and I both pursued the same basic tactic: close to within striking range, concentrate the squadron’s fire on one or two targets, then peel away and maintain a safe distance while frantically reloading our weapons.
And that’s how it played out. On the initial pass, I learned what happens when four Vudar ships all concentrate their firepower on a single Federation vessel: said ship goes BOOM. I lost my command cruiser, but my surviving ships quickly exacted revenge by damaging his battlecruiser and destroying a war cruiser while they tried to escape. We both backed off and stalked each other for the next few turns while we reloaded weapons, then I charged. In the ensuing chaos I lost a heavy cruiser and took down one more of his war cruisers, leaving us each with two fairly battered surviving ships. Reflecting that no sane starship captain would continue an engagement after suffering 50% casualties (and noting that it was creeping towards 11:00 pm), we called it a draw.
Going by the point value of ships destroyed, he did manage a technical victory–he scored an official Marginal Victory and I suffered a corresponding Marginal Defeat. But that’s about as close to victory as I’ve ever gotten against this particular opponent, so in my mind I had done the Federation at least somewhat proud.
I’ve got no brilliant observations about the game, except that it did show me that SFB does not necessarily become unmanageable when you play larger battles. Having multiple powerful ships adds a lot of tactical options–and the amount of concentrated firepower they can pour at a single unfortunate ship is a bit scary. And I also learned that splash damage from exploding ships is nothing to be laughed at–one of my heavy cruisers (rather unluckily) took serious internal damage when the plasma cruiser went down in flames.
All in all, a great match. I don’t know when the next match is, but now that I’ve witnessed the awesome firepower of a starship fleet, I’m going to have a hard time being satisfied with just one or two measly starships…
by Although it’s updated somewhat sporadically, Scott Miller’s Game Matters is one of the more thought-provoking game blogs out there. While catching up on my reading there, I came across an interesting post suggesting that World of Warcraft‘s extreme popularity is due at least in part to the fact that almost alone among massively-multiplayer games, it can be played alone. Says Miller:
There’s one overriding reason I played WoW, while I never played previous MMOs: I could solo all the way to the top. Not once did I group to enter an instance. Occasionally I grouped with players in the same area doing the same quest, and occasionally with a friend to share a quest, but 95 percent of my experience was as a solo player. And that’s how I prefer it. I like to be able to jump into the game and play without waiting to form a group, getting right down to the business of fun.
It’s a relief to see somebody else admit that, because I’ve had a similar experience with WoW and have wondered how common it is. For a multiplayer game, WoW works surprisingly well as a single-player game. I enjoy grouping up with other players a bit more than Miller apparently does–when the teamwork comes together, the experience of conquering a tough dungeon as part of a group is a real thrill–but I confess I’ve rather guiltily enjoyed a lot of the game without interacting much with my fellow players.
Miller then asks the obvious question: if you’re going to play the game solo anyway, why not stick with single-player-only games like Morrowind and its ilk, and avoid paying the montly Warcraft fee? It may sound strange if you’ve not experienced it, but his answer is dead on: it’s somehow just more fun when the world is populated by “real people,” even if your interaction with said real people is quite limited. Crossing paths with other lone adventurers in the far corners of Azeroth, making my way through the teeming, diverse crowds of Orgrimmar, and knowing that the potions I’m selling at the auction house are being bought and used by other real people–there’s just an intangible thrill to it all. There’s a hard-to-define depth and sense of immersion that simply isn’t there in even the most elaborate single-player games.
So it’s good to know that on those days when I just don’t feel like interacting with other players–when I just want to hike off into the Badlands without having to chat it up with guildmates, when I don’t feel like spending an hour organizing an expedition into the Wailing Caverns–I’m not alone. Solo players of World of Warcraft, unite keep goin’ it alone!
by 