Challenge Accepted: The virtues of easy

Also it's not easy on some of the higher levels, but that's a different discussion altogether.

Why play this instead of something harder? I can think of dozens of reasons.

If you can’t understand why someone would want to play an easy game, I don’t think you understand why people play video games at all. I’m not saying you have to want to play one, I’m saying you have to understand why someone will do that. No, saying “because they can’t play well enough to be at the top” does not qualify as understanding.

I like talking about challenge in games – a lot – but I also can’t stand the chest-pounding portion of the general gaming audience who seems to collectively believe that if you’re not turning every game into an arduous challenge then you’re obviously unworthy of purchasing any more games over the course of your life. As if there was no way to enjoy a game that tried just being easy, as if there was nothing to be derived from a game that’s not terribly deep, as if there was no modulation or middle ground between people who enjoy challenges and those that enjoy challenges. Or, for that matter, as if every game wasn’t easy in the right light.

Spoiler warning: all of the above are true.

05/21/2014

The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy II, part 6

Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano

I realize that I’ve been pretty hard on Final Fantasy II up to this point, generally for good reason. The game has a lot of ambition, but ambition is only commendable insofar as it leads you to reach upward, and this is a game that continually falls short of where it wants to be. What was innovative more than twenty years ago is less so today, and even then I imagine these holes and weaknesses were visible to players; breaking the game’s mechanics is hardly a new thing, for instance.

That having been said, the Mysidian Tower is kind of thoroughly enjoyable. It’s a dungeon where all of those well-designed dungeon elements that the game has sported can really get up and do a dance, and the enemies have tricks that feel like they’re at least meant to be interesting rather than annoying. I couldn’t autopilot through these fights, but neither did I find myself painfully bored as I made my trek.

05/20/2014

in Craziness, Gaming Culture, Online Games
21 Comments

Where did World of Warcraft go wrong?

Of course, then I'm tol time and again that I don't have a place in the game as it's structured and I go back to not wanting to give Blizzard my money.

I should not be looking at an expansion filled with draenei and not be excited. This is literally everything I’ve ever wanted.

Something is rotten in the state of Azeroth, and it has been for a while.

The problem of talking about World of Warcraft‘s decline is that no one is interested in doing so. The game’s fans are eager to point out that the game still has an impressive number of subscribers rather than talking about the fact that, on average, the game has been losing more than a million subscribers per year since the launch of Cataclysm. The other side of the coin likes to forecast the game’s death, neglecting to acknowledge that even if the game keeps bleeding off subscribers at this rate it’s got several more years of life left in it while discounting spikes.

But there’s a frank discussion to be had, one that doesn’t invest itself in hyperbole, and it’s obvious that the game is on a downward arc. Over the past four years (Cataclysm launched at the very tail end of year six) the game has lost an extraordinary number of subscribers. Its growth has stalled. This is a stark reversal when the game was in an upward trend for the first six years of its lifespan. Why is that? What’s changed its fortunes so thoroughly? I wonder about that a lot, and I think a lot of it comes down to learning the wrong lessons from its height.

05/19/2014

Demo Driver 8: Insaniquarium (#403)

This looks like nothing so much as a testament to all of our sins with mice.

You probably pictured halfway to this to begin with, and that’s fair.

PopCap games, by their very nature, are not complex beasts to decipher. You can get a sense of them within a few moments. Oh, sure, they ramp up in complexity a fair bit, offer new wrinkles and the like, but these are not games with deep narrative structure and bewildering turns. These are games in which brightly colored things interact with other brightly colored things in a fashion which is fun enough to play for a few hours without realizing that you’ve been playing for a few hours.

If you are turned off by the idea of bright colors being a fun ride, you may wish to re-examine your life goals, as at some point you appear to have mistaken cynicism for depth.

Insaniquarium is one of PopCap’s earlier offerings, and as such it’s a bit rougher than their later offerings but still offers more or less what you’d expect. Sure, the game is probably best defined as a puzzle game, but it’s more of a fish-management simulator with pooped coins and alien invasions. If you like PopCap games, you’ll like it. You get the idea.

05/16/2014

in Craziness, Online Games, Roleplaying, Telling Stories
Leave a comment

Telling Stories: And I’ll form the head

When you trust people, you’re usually willing to let them borrow your things. Your books, your movies, your roleplaying characters.

I’ve seen various people share their characters in the years that I’ve been roleplaying, ranging from fully shared accounts to versions of characters being controlled by multiple different players. (I’ve also seen players controlling multiple versions of the same character, but that’s a discussion for another day.) The idea is that it can form a shared experience, both players getting some of the fun of roleplaying in theory. In practice…

Look, I’m not one to say that this is something that can never work. But there are a lot of really big hurdles to climb here, ones that I don’t think are necessarily easy to surmount or even suggest a methodology. So before you even consider it, you need to really think about what you’re doing and why, especially if you’re talking about your main character and not an alt.

« Older Posts

Newer Posts »