NO! Don't stand there!

For many reasons I have decided to start this rant. The game that sparked this complaint was Final Fantasy 13 which was recently released, but I have made the same complaint in past games. But first some backstory!

As many know me, they know I play World of Warcraft. I am a raid leader and as such my experience with the game is a little different than others (a little). Most people play WoW to take on the identity of a fantasy warrior and build the character up in order to kill stronger and stronger enemies. My little difference is that I gain my biggest pleasure in the game by working out strategies and organizing a team to be successful.

Part of this organizing involves making people do their jobs. Success on this front is dependent on my ability to communicate what I want, the ability of the player, and my capacity to pick the right players for the job. I have experienced a varied amount of success here, mostly because choosing the right player presents some nasty issues when your friends… suck.

Its terrible during a fight to see someone making a dumb mistake. Standing is what is obviously an unsafe spot is a great example. Sometimes in Warcraft, enemies tend to use area of effect attacks. These attacks damage anyone in a defined area as opposed to one target. It is a valuable skill as a player in an MMORPG to identify the risks of an area effect attack and avoid it. You have an amount of control over this, in the form of direction, which I like.

Now to my complaint: Final Fantasy 13 fails completely to simulate any character’s desire to avoid area of effect attacks. In FF13, battles take place on a battlefield that allows characters to move and never stand in the same place. You on the other hand hold no control over a character’s movement on this battlefield, unless you were to order a melee attack. The artificial intelligence is given the task of movement. The artificial intelligence also has a hard on for characters strafing into each other. This grouping tendency leads to multiple party members being by strong attacks. A couple steps to the side could decrease the overall damage I take by 50% or 66% depending on the range of the attack. I’d lost count of how many fights my team took multiple unnecessary hits while I yelled at the screen.

Final Fantasy 12 had this problem as well, so obviously Squaresoft has not learned its lesson. The same thing happened there. Party members would circle the boss but prefer to keep near their teammates. Nevermind that they were constantly bombarded and never took on to the clues at had. At least in FF12, you could cheat it by using gambits to encourage one of your party members to stay the fuck back.

The solution to this would be to add a tactical element the new game. Simple orders to group up or spread out, or stand behind the boss would be extremely welcome to a player like myself. We are already using multiple attack types, and changing jobs on the fly during fights (and very constantly in the end, this is a strength of FF13). Final Fantasy games tell the story of people who become strong enough to defeat creatures that only exist in legends. Is it too much to ask that they act like it?

Clan Lord: Huh?

My shareware plan ended up evolving into a whole “games I played when I only had a Mac into Middle School.” So I begin with Peter’s first MMORPG. To the uninitiated, MMORPG stands for Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game. These games involve a persistent world. This is in contrast to how most view games, as having a beginning that moves through a set of levels to reach an end. Persistent worlds in MMORPG’s are changed by all of the players interacting with them. This is done either by defeating enemies, finishing tasks, or creating communities. Some MMORPG’s let players even add and build objects in the world. MMORPG’s also tend to work by playing in collaboration with many other (real) people at once, as opposed with most games which work on a competitive basis. That is not to say there is no competition in MMORPG’s. Players will tend to form large communities (terminology varies based on the game) and which point the communities compete. Some small group competition exists but most like to focus more on the larger picture.

Anyone who knows me, knows that I play World of Warcraft now along with the millions of others with me. Although Everquest, released in 1999, was the first MMORPG that seemed to grab a wide audience outside those who played it, WoW has become a behemoth. With no end in sight, the WoW population continues to grow 5 years after its release. WoW might end up being my last MMO, but it sure wasn’t my first.

That honor goes to Clan Lord. I played this game starting in elementary school and seeping a bit into my 6th grade years. That said, I’m willing to bet that maybe 2-3 of my close friends reading this even know what the hell I’m talking about. I would be lucky for other readers to recognize the game. This isn’t because it was bad, but its scope was very small. Made by Delta Tao (www.deltatao.com), Clanlord was a simple online role playing game exclusively made for Macs. Other games Delta Tao was known for were a solitaire game, a space colonizing game which is overshadowed in every way by either of the first two Master of Orion games, and a platformer series called Dark Castle.

The Logo

This will be the first game I don’t completely drool over here. I think what kept me playing the game were the two friends I played with, Eric and Devin. This game provided me the first opportunity to interact in a way I enjoy playing games with my friends from long-distance. This is what makes Clan Lord such an important game of my past. My friends and I never got into MUD’s (Multi-User Dungeons) so this was my first step into online gaming, and I have loved it ever since. I would say I have this game to thank ultimately for all the relationships I have build through online gaming. So thank you to Joe Williams and everyone who made Clan Lord happen.

And another thanks to Joe for getting me out of trouble. You see, Clan Lord taught me a valuable lesson very early in life as it is the first, and only, place I have been the victim of an internet password stealing scam. I was a dumb 4th grader [I believe, memory is fuzzy] playing innocently one day when I was approached by a character in the game. He informed me of an error in my account and I needed to re-log with a new password so things could be fixed. This man even gave me the right password to use, how nice of him! So I log out, change my password, and… shit. I immediately realized my mistake and tried to fix it but was too late. Being the suburbs-raised white kid that I am, I cried my ass off for a while. My parents were smart enough at the time to send Joe Williams an email explaining my plight [yes that’s right, Delta Tao is so small that the owner is also customer service]. Within the day I was playing again. Thanks again, Joe, lesson learned.

Clan Lord is a very simple game. It hosts the ability to play as seven different races ranging from human to dwarf to walking kitty to Admiral Ackbar. The races are a bit different: dwarfs are hardier than elves, humans define average, Admiral Ackbars are great healers for a few examples. When I played there were two classes that actually worked and a third that just kind of existed at the time. The two basic classes are warriors and healers. Warriors damaged enemies by walking into them. Healers healed people by walking into them. Complicated does not describe this game whatsoever. You build your character by killing or healing a bunch to develop training points, and spending those points on different aspects of how you play. Warriors for example could focus on doing damage, receiving less damage, increasing ability to hit, and decreasing ability to be hit in a basic sense. Healers focused on healing intensity and how long they could heal. Both could focus on health pools. Mystics only existed in a beta form while I played. I believe nowadays they act as a sort of magic class that doesn’t involve healing.

This is what combat generally looked like (from Delta Tao's site)

This led to lots of repetitive play associated with MMORPG’s. This is where the team play came in. Obviously you could get more done with more players. You could especially get more done by combining classes, sending warriors in front with healers ready to prevent deaths. Group play became important. Clan Lord, appropriately, used player-made Clans to help facilitate this. The Clans formed the basis of the communities that existed within the game. To this day I still remember I was a proud member of Neko no Kessha, a clan which still exists to this day in the game.

One last thing, Delta Tao’s involvement with the game has always been strong. A fond memory of playing the game was from one particular Halloween. It started with a small zombie invasion. The problem was though, any player killed by a zombie became one themselves. This snowballed, quickly, as people died and started to lost control of their avatars. You watched as you cut down your friends with nothing you could do about it. The players had a lot of fun with it. And yes, WoW did this, but Clan Lord did it first successfully without pissing off most of its player base.

While digging up pictures, I learned that Clan Lord is not only still running but also dropped its monthly fee about a year ago. If you own a Mac and at the very least like to support small game companies, definitely check this out!

Next up, I’m thinking the Exile series.

Planescape Torment: The Namesake!

I have decided that chronological order can go fuck itself.

There are other games in the genre I’m going to talk about that came first. The choice in skipping order a bit comes from the name I gave my little piece of the tubes. That game is Planescape: Torment. This game with an off-putting name was released in 1999 using a modified infinity engine. Like SCUMM, the infinity engine was a popular older engine that was made to accommodate multiple games. This time the engine was made to create games that tended to the role playing genre. The games also had a common element of using a Dungeons and Dragons toolset. Yep, these games were made to emulate the same sort of thing you might play on a tabletop with a drawn map and dice! Some other Infinity Engine games were the Baldur’s Gate series (1998-2001) and Icewind Dale (2000-2002).

The first part of the game’s name, Planescape, refers to the world that the story takes place in. When the non-meganerd hears dungeons and dragons they like to think about the traditional Tokien-derived fantasy setting. Planescape is not that. Instead of going into painstaking details that even I don’t know, I’ll just go ahead and link to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planescape). Generally speaking, it is a world that consists of many different worlds that, as my understanding follows, exist simply because someone has decided to believe it exists.

Planescape is a unique game. It’s presented in the form of a game where combat present around every corner, but it is not a game about fighting. This is a game about talking, and learning. Don’t misunderstand me, you will fight monsters, but that’s not why you keep playing. The point of this game is to discover yourself. You take on the persona of The Nameless One. You are nameless because you did someone, long ago, to prevent you from dying. Every time you do die, your memories reset themselves and you wake up a few days later. This process has repeated itself over such a significant amount of time that nobody knows you by name, also explaining the fact that your entire body is essentially a giant scar. When you wake up at the start of the game, this is the last time you will forget. The rest of the game is about figuring out who you are, and why your identity (and mortality) is so important. The party members and people you meet in this game all have some connection to you, and it’s up to you to discover what this past is. Maybe you were friends with this person in a previous “incarnation,” maybe you manipulated someone, maybe someone loved you. The previous incarnations were not necessarily the person you want to be now.

HOLY SHIT IS THAT A TALKING SKULL? YOU BETTER TRUST IT!

Planescape has its flaws. If you hate lots of reading (it’s OK if you do), you won’t enjoy this game. When I mentioned earlier the combat wasn’t the focus of this game, I was not kidding. Its point-and-click boredom most of the time and maybe a little strategy of picking the right spell at best. On the plus side, the combat is easy, it’s only a short time before you’re talking to someone again. If you like stories of discovery, this is a great game. If you want an example of doing amnesia right, this is a great example. If you love choose your own adventure books, you are doing yourself a disservice by avoiding this game.

Again I’ll focus in on one aspect of the game that had really shown out to me early on. In the case of this game, it was the first example where I could be the most evil thing to ever live. There are games today that gloat about their moral choices which amount to “Jesus” or “Wow you’re just an asshole.” In Torment, you can manipulate others into slavery, strip a commoner of their belongings and kill them on the street, or doom a friend to an eternal prison for no really good reason. Now I said you can do those things, but you don’t have to. You have the option to be equally good, roleplaying a man looking the right the wrongs committed in the past. This is what makes the game so great. Either choice is “right” for the game, neither really grants more reward than the other in the long run, but those choices define your character and how the game plays out.

OK. It’s time to slow down a bit. The next article is going to be a megapost on the shareware days of old.

The Secret of Monkey Island: My Love Letter to Ron Gilbert, Tim Shafer, and Dave Grossman

Ignoring for now some great children’s games that I grew up on, the Monkey Island series is one of the first series of games that I was introduced to. I could really make this post into a book by talking about all the similar games surrounding Monkey Island. The Secret of Monkey Island, the first in the series, was released in 1990. This makes me 4-5 years old when I first played it, and am continuing to replay it annually. The game was published by LucasArts (yep, the Star Wars people) on an engine called SCUMM (Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion). A game engine is like the basic framework that a game is built around. Engines are generally reused due to the time it takes to develop a new one. As the name suggests, Maniac Mansion was the first game to be released using SCUMM in 1987. A good deal of games were released with the engine, a lot of older gems have come from LucasArts during this period. Some of these included Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), Loom (1990), Day of the Tentacle (1993), Sam and Max Hit the Road (1993), Full Throttle (1995), The Dig (1995). Beyond LucasArts, Sierra was also putting out memorable games in the form of their Kings Quest (1984-1998) and Space Quest (1986-1995) series.

These games, including the whole Monkey Island series, are considered to be part of the adventure game genre. You use a mouse pointer to indicate where you want to move, what you want to interact with, and what items you want to use with other items. With the exception of Full Throttle, you cannot lose these games. They are puzzles with a story attached. Sometimes the puzzles were quite tricky, while others were silly in their simplicity. There are only so many uses for a rubber chicken with a pulley in the middle, for example.

Adventure games rely on their story and writing to become enjoyable. A good puzzle can only take you so far if you’re missing the motivation to move forward [I’m looking at you, Myst!]. An interview with Tim Schafer that I wish I could find brought up a very good point on why this is so difficult. The people who make video games are generally not writers, or very creative at all. These are guys who spent their education learning computer languages to make programs. Early in the life of video games as a whole, these people might not have even known they were going to be making games. In modern times, larger game budgets are letting companies hire professional writers to flesh out a story and character interaction. But in the beginning, we had to rely on the few who really had a knack for writing and the even fewer who could make it funny.

The Secret of Monkey Island is a blessing in this sense. The heads of the project, as mentioned in the title, are responsible for the creation of a great, hilarious experience. I want to tell you about it without spoiling too much. Money Island puts you in the shoes of Guybrush Threepwood, a wannabe pirate whose name nobody can ever remember. The first game sets the story: Guybrush goes through three trials to become a pirate (treasure hunting, thievery, and sword fighting). As he progresses through the trials, he falls in love with the local governor. When the trials end things go wrong at the hands of Lechuck, a ghost pirate who seems to have a problem with Guybrush. The rest of the game involves a trip to Monkey Island to take the fight to Lechuck. Chaos Ensues.

I want to highlight one particular gem in the game: Insult Sword Fighting. As a satire on pirating stories, Monkey Island suggests that sword fighting has absolutely nothing to do with actually swinging a sword. The best pirate sword fighters out there fight with words, insulting their opponents into defeat. I could go through all of the insults but figuring them out is part of the fun. I’ll leave you with the first given out: “You fight like a dairy farmer!”

What are the creaters of this gem doing now? Tim Shafer is heading a company called Double Fine which just finished a game called Brütal Legend. Ron Gilbert has been working on a game called Deathspank, and helping the Penny Arcade boys with their game. Dave Grossman works with Telltale Games, who are recently responsible for reviving the Monkey island series with Grossman as their Design Director.

The accessibility is what made this game such a great starting point for a budding gamer. The Secret of Monkey Island in particular was not a difficult game, the fun came from the experience. Last year it even get itself a remake, you can buy it now for 10 bucks off of the Steam distribution service.

A Little Introduction

So here I am, writing seriously for the first time since I graduated from college back in 2008. I’ve been throwing around ideas for a blog of sorts for a while, but never found any specific topic. This changed last week in a good chat I had with my friend Matt. Matt is in Korea for a while teaching little kids english, and as such he has access to a truly interesting portion of their culture. In Korea, much like sports in America, a video game called Starcraft is played on a competitive level. Now we do this in America too, but we don’t televise it. Matt and I were joking about how we’d love to be the first announcers for an American version. Then the “duh” moment hit me: why don’t I talk about video games?

But I didn’t just want to talk about video games in general. I would have no direction and wouldn’t get any substance from it. It was here that I read a topic on the SomethingAwful.com forums titled "No, the OTHER right!" helping other people play games (Thanks to the user Coyo7e for creating the topic). The topic started out as a place for experienced gamers to go and complain about the frustrations of getting the people they love to play games with them. Those of us who have played games for a long time are more attuned to the controller and the way games play. When we see others play games from the first time its much like watching someone drive a car for the first time, lots of silly mistakes and you immediately enter backseat driver mode.

The topic began to drift from its original intent, and that was why are us gamers more attuned to the games. I sort of gave my answer to the question already in that we’ve been around them longer and therefore know how they work better. So there lies the root of what I want to tackle: what has turned me into the gamer I am today. Each person probably has different answers to this, but I know damn well where my influences came from. My plan is to start by talking about the games I have played through my life that got me especially excited about the medium, then take it from wherever that leave me. I want to explore what about these games made me (and many others) love them, and then why non-gamers might find them interesting.

The first update is coming soon! Get ready for some piratey goodness!