Another Castle podcast

Hear me talk about Mass Effect, Animal Crossing, interactive fiction and Wittgenstein in the latest episode of Another Castle. It’s always a blast to sit down and have a conversation about games with Charles J. Pratt (illustrious game designer and host of Another Castle), and I hope it’s fun to listen to as well.

I have an unshakably high opinion of myself, so it’s a big deal for me to say that I am by far the least interesting person ever to appear on Another Castle. Charles has been reeling in all the heavyweights of the New York City game design scene; the interviews with Frank Lantz and Jesper Juul in particular are can’t-miss. In my view, it’s the best podcast on game design out there. Download all the episodes here, and make sure to subscribe.

—Adam

Of secret sauces

Dennis Crowley, Foursquare founder, in a recent interview with O’Reilly Radar:

The game mechanics [in Foursquare] are the secret sauce. They keep people engaged long enough to see the interesting things that happen when they participate frequently. It’s kind of like with Twitter. If you drop someone in Twitter and don’t give them a reason to participate, they get bored of it really quickly. But, if you spend 10 days with Twitter, you fall in love with it. Foursquare is similar. Spend an afternoon with it, you’ll say: “This is awful. I get nothing out of it.” But as you start to get friends on it and as you check-in at different places, you realize complexities emerge. You see how people are using it and the content they’ve added. The game mechanics hold peoples’ hands through the first 10 to 20 days of the service.

I’m posting this as a follow-up to my post last week about achievements and Foursquare. It’s interesting to compare Foursquare’s “game mechanics” with achievements/trophies. Maybe one of the purposes of achievements is to “hold peoples’ hands” through the first 10 to 20 minutes of playing a video game?

—Adam

Cry Havok

“Cry Havok” is a fun game you can play if you have friends, roommates, etc. who play video games while you are in the room or who are often around when you are playing games. The only prerequisite is having played enough games to recognize the presence of the Havok Physics Engine, the most frequently licensed physics middleware in modern video gaming.

If you haven’t trained yourself to recognize Havok already, think back to interactions with movable objects in Halo 3, Bioshock, Half-Life 2, Red Faction: Guerrilla, or Dead Space. It’s hard to describe, but there’s a particular feeling that games running Havok have that is inescapable. It’s also spectacularly popular, so it shouldn’t be too hard to find a game whose physics modeling will instantly explain to you what I’m talking about.

Anyway, once you can easily identify Havok at work, “Cry Havok” is just a race to see, when starting a new game that has licensed this wonderful piece of software, who can first identify a blatantly obvious event where Havok’s exact gravitational model and frictional coefficients caused something hilarious and/or awesome to happen. At that point, you have to declare your victory— “We’ve got Havok!” is my personal favorite— at which point anyone else present can contest whether or not you’ve “spotted the middleware.” If you win, you get a point (which means absolutely nothing).

For bonus fun, feel free to build a big red button that can sit on your coffee table that will set off some sort of klaxon above your TV set. Whoever gets the point for a new game gets to press the button, which will hopefully make metal walls descend over all windows and doors in your apartment while your homemade alarm rings and rings. Maybe you can make it let some dogs loose or something. It’s a literary reference, and you only live once, you know?

—Casey

All Wark AND All Play

I recently finished the main quest of Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo’s Dungeon, coincidentally right around the time that Shiren the Wanderer for Wii was coming out and Jeremy Parish started talking about roguelikes a lot.  This got me into sort of a roguelike kick, so you may be seeing a few posts from me on the subject over the next week or so.

First I want to talk about about Chocobo’s Dungeon, since it was what initially renewed my interest in the genre after years of playing NetHack for five or six levels, not knowing what to do, dying, then not playing again for several months.  Chocobo’s Dungeon is lightweight enough to cause purists to scoff in its general direction, but I think it’s a pretty great way of introducing someone who’s used to traditional JRPGs to the dark side.  Beyond that, it’s just a fun, surprisingly polished game, and one of the overlooked gems on the Wii, if you ask me.

The story, such as it is (really more of a premise), involves a chocobo named Chocobo arriving in a mysterious isolated town where everyone has lost their memories, and it’s up to Chocobo to restore them by venturing into dungeons, collecting loot, and fighting monsters.  Oh, and there’s some kind of weird angel baby involved.  That’s all I can remember without looking up the plot synopsis on Wikipedia, but it really doesn’t matter beyond providing you with a hub world from which you can reach the various dungeons, in addition to buying and managing equipment (more on this later).

In case you’re not familiar with roguelikes, this is basically how it works: once you enter a dungeon, all movement and actions are entirely turn-based and grid-based.  The map of every floor is randomly generated and includes some combination of monsters, traps, and loot, and the challenge is not only to survive and make it to the exit, but to balance that with exploring the map thoroughly enough to prepare you for the next one by collecting equipment, food, and experience.  After enough floors, you reach the end of the dungeon (maybe after fighting a large monster) and escape with your spoils.

Chocobo’s Dungeon makes things a bit easier than some similar games by having fairly lenient penalties for death.  If you die, you lose the items and money you were carrying, but keep the experience and the gear you had equipped at the time (there are also places outside the dungeon where you can store any possessions you want to keep safe).  Most dungeons have checkpoints every ten floors that you can warp to upon re-entering, and at every floor’s exit you’re given the opportunity to escape back to the hub world (keeping and identifying everything you’ve collected).  You can also revisit previous dungeons to collect more items.  So while the occasional death is inevitable, with smart playing it shouldn’t set you back far enough to be too frustrating.

The parts of the game I found most interesting were the job system and equipment upgrades.  At the beginning of the game, you’re just a regular, “Natural” chocobo, but as you progress, you’ll unlock additional jobs, each with its own abilities, that you can switch between at will whenever you enter a dungeon (and occasionally at checkpoints within one).  In addition to Chocobo’s overall experience-based level, each job can be leveled up independently by collecting job points from slain monsters, granting it additional abilities.  The jobs make up a spectrum of specialties from combat to stealth to magic to item collection, and they all feel pretty useful while encouraging you to vary your strategies.

As for the equipment, every saddle and set of talons (the chocobo’s version of armor and weapons, respectively) that you collect may have special attributes such as immunity to certain status effects, bonuses against certain types of monsters, hunger prevention, faster HP regeneration, etc.  The interesting part is that these attributes are represented as “seals,” and each piece of equipment also usually has several empty slots for additional seals.  If you bring the equipment to the blacksmith in town, you can have her transfer seals from one piece of equipment to another to create combinations of effects that can eventually end up bordering on ridiculously powerful.  This adds a lot of depth and provides incentive to collect and hoard even equipment with crappy stats if you think its seal might come in handy on another item later.

Unfortunately, the lack of permanent death leads, seeming inescapably, to grinding.  Since you always keep your experience, there’s nothing stopping you from just going into a dungeon, fighting monsters until you die, and repeating (though it’s always in your best interest to get out of a dungeon alive so you can keep the loot you’ve collected).  This is a fundamentally un-roguelike idea — though of course, it’s extremely Final Fantasy.  It’s mitigated somewhat by the job system, which adds some variety, and of course you don’t have to grind any more than you want to… but a lot of the motivation to develop good tactics is lost when you know that if you just put in enough time, you can eventually brute force your way through the enemies.  But this may be a necessary evil for not completely turning off this game’s target audience, and if you do want more of a challenge, there are quite a few optional “special rules” dungeons in which your level is capped and there may be restrictions on which items can be used/generated, etc.  (There’s even one where you have to survive with only one hit point.)

For me, this game proved to be a great “gateway drug.”  The similar games I’ve been playing since have made it seem a little on the simple and easy side, but it still has its own unique charms, and I think it does a better job of distilling roguelike mechanics while remaining accessible than the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon games.  If you’re looking for a good RPG on the Wii (and are more interested in mechanics than story), I recommend giving this a try.  If you like it, perhaps you’ll be interested in going on to the game I’ll be talking about next time: Shiren the Wanderer.  Stay tuned!

—Scott

Trajectile: Aiming

Trajectile is a new DSiWare game developed by Q-Games and published by Nintendo that every Warp Skip! writer who owns a DSi has been raving over for the past week or two. It presents an interesting puzzle game that reminds me a little of Breakout mixed with Bust-a-Move. Its aiming mechanic requires the use of the stylus to pick an angle at which to aim your shot, which comes from the bottom screen and shoots up towards the square bricks on the top screen. What I find particularly interesting about this mechanic is that because the exact angle at which you make your shot can make a very big difference, the trail that shows the beginning of the path your missile will take is drawn with a series of faded grey dots while you’re dragging your stylus left and right. It’s only after you pause in one spot on the screen for a half second or so that the dots turn blue, indicating that you are free to lift the stylus and fire a missile. It looks like this:

Left: not ready to fire yet. Right: ready to fire.

The reason for this becomes clear if you’re using the stylus and aren’t being careful— it’s fairly easy to not lift your stylus directly off of the screen, causing a “adjust the aim” signal to be sent to the game. If you skid off of the screen before lifting, the angle could change slightly before your missile fires, ruining that shot and wrecking your chances of completing the level in the allotted number of turns! By requiring your shot to be lined up before firing, this aiming mechanic avoids almost any chance of that happening.

It can be annoying that you have to wait for this “lock-on” to happen at times, but after playing through the bronze and silver puzzles, I’ve decided it’s worth the hassle. I’d rather not fire when I meant to than vice-versa, and I appreciate Q-Games paying this attention to detail. That said, I also wouldn’t mind a D-pad + A button control scheme for this game since playing on the train in the morning can lead to more canceled shots than successful ones.

—Casey