Playing my main character in Star Trek Online has been illuminating. She had her own gig for several seasons, and it was interesting, watching her go from a fresh-faced Lieutenant to a Captain through sheer pluck and determination. Season 1 was mostly about her sorting out her crew and how she related to officers frequently trained not to accept a Cardassian in command; season 2, meanwhile, was much more focused around her past and what she actually intended to do with her command. It wasn’t until season 3 that she really started exploring how she interacted with other officers, developing friendships and rivalries; but she left a lot of that behind when she climbed just a little higher. Now she’s in season 4, and she’s learning that it’s quite lonely at the top of the ladder, and perhaps not as focused on what she actually finds important.

Obviously Star Trek Online focuses its updates into what it calls seasons, but just as obviously not what I’m talking about here. Organizing your character’s past and present into seasons and story arcs can be a major boon to playing your characters while keeping a strong sense of their development over time. Even though much of the time you’re going to be imposing order after the fact, it’s still a good way to organize your thoughts and get a good sense of the past without becoming overly bogged down in details.

Challenge Accepted: How games challenge you

This particular game also challenges a large number of other games to manage the amount of storytelling this game did with almost no investment.

Sometimes it’s just challenging to keep your feet underneath you.

Consider a simple game for a moment. Your objective is to tap a key as fast as you possibly can, let’s say the letter X. Every time you hit the key, your score goes up by one. If you stop hitting the key for five seconds, your game ends. Now let’s consider another equivalent game with a different end condition: if you don’t alternate between X and C, your game ends, although you can take as long as you like between presses.

Both games are functional, both offer a challenge, and both could be dressed up to provide a sense of opposition. (Although sometimes all we need is a Flash interface telling us to hammer on the X key to waste two hours of an idle afternoon.) But this isn’t the same game repeated. There’s a different challenge in both versions. In one, it’s all about speed; in the other, it’s memorization. If you’re going to think about challenge, you have to think about more than just the existence of same and more of the types that can be faced.

04/09/2014

The Final Fantasy Project: Final Fantasy I, part 5

Artwork from a sketch by Yoshitaka Amano

You know, I’ve tried really hard to keep this project free of personal quirks. Not in the sense of making this less of a personal experience, but insofar as I recognize that some things I think are cool are just strange on an objective level. Having said that, I still think the ending of Final Fantasy is really neat on a conceptual level.

If you’ve been paying crazy careful attention to the map, you realized that all four Fiends were located at points equidistant from the Temple of Fiends. You don’t even think about how weird it is that the first dungeon in the game is the Temple of Fiends until you’ve been through most of the game. And yet there it is, staring you in the face – the bats surrounding Garland, the black orb right behind him, the nature of its location. It all comes around to the same circle. Garland is the root of everything. Your first boss is your last boss.

04/08/2014

The benefits to free games

I had initial misgivings because Penny Arcade seems to love it, and frequently that doesn't mean anything good.

I don’t know where I’m going to put all of these.

So I own Dead Space now. Not because I had planned on owning Dead Space, mind you, although I’d always looked at it with a bit of curiosity, that sort of blushing giggle that you use when dealing with a game that you might like quite a bit but haven’t explored yet. No, I own it because Electronic Arts decided to just give it away for free on Origin.

I would like to take this opportunity to point out that this is the company voted as the worst in America, which has also been honored as an excellent workplace for LGBT individuals. But that’s not the point here.

What is the point? Well, now I have a game that a lot of men and women worked hard to produce without paying any money, something that seems like it should be anathema to an industry which as a whole is always playing catch-up for costs. Budgets get bigger, player demands get bigger, and how is any of that going to be made easier by using “free” as a price point? Yet free is increasingly an accepted entry point, and not just for multiplayer games. And there are some real benefits to it.

04/07/2014

Demo Driver 8: Imperium Romanum Gold Edition (#374)

I didn't realize the key I use for screenshots is also the key used for pausing in this game by default. Boy, is my face red, right?

Our artist’s recreation of the city before the incident under discussion. He works, like, really fast.

Before I explain what happened in Genoa, senator, I feel it’s only fair that I set the appropriate context.

When you sat me down in Genoa, I didn’t have a forum, I had a shack with a central road. There were no roads linking the forum to the fishing regions that the Senate considered so vital to restoring the town. There were no houses. You had even neglected to inform me that a warehouse had been constructed on the other side of the nearby mountain line, thereby necessitating an expensive (and troublesome) expansion to the east just so I could establish a supply of timber and stone. When I found out later that there was another deposit, I of course was overjoyed.

But the demands of the Senate in this situation were unreasonable. You have asked me to build more fine stone architecture, more homes made of stone, a monument commemorating the city’s restoration. Do you know how much stone that takes? Do you know how much stone there is around Genoa? Because I do. The answers are, in order, “a whole lot” and “not much.” Not nearly enough for the temples and the fine stone homes and the monument and the other temple.

Once you understand that, it’s a lot easier to understand how the fire got started.

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