Warp Skip!

Another Castle podcast

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 08:00:00 -0500

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

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 09:10:51 -0500

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

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 09:09:51 -0500

“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

Tue, 02 Mar 2010 09:08:19 -0500

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

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 11:06:05 -0500

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

Low-fi Lowdown

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 10:07:52 -0500

Platformers with blocky, pixelated graphics have been on a big comeback recently, especially in the form of downloadable indie titles. We’ll leave an analysis of how the low pixel count makes it easier for individual developers to draw each frame of animation themselves and simplifies collision detection to the Gamasutra member blogs, though, and instead just link those of you who want to play some games to the (free) goods(!).

I will warn you that along with this resurgence of old-school graphics comes old-school difficulty. A couple of these games had their share of serious controller-throwing moments. Luckily my keyboard isn’t wireless, so I was safe. So, the games:

MoneySeize (Flash or Windows download)

My favorite part of MoneySeize is that it makes it cool to be a fat rich guy in a suit and top hat again. Since I’m halfway there, I figure by the time I find my suit and top hat this will be what everyone in Brooklyn will be aspiring to and I’ll have a head start on the latest trend. Anyway, as a FRGiaSaTH, you of course have to gather up all the money so that you can build a fabulous tower on the main map. Along the way, you have to do some serious platforming just to get the bare minimum of coins in a given level.

The game isn’t perfect— the pixel art aesthetic is occasionally ruined by some weirdly smooth animations or particle effects, and there is some weird anti-aliasing that Flash is doing that makes the graphics look a little fuzzy sometimes. However, it’s fun to see just how many coins you can collect on each stage, and there is one thing more rewarding than filling your coffers: the feeling you get just from mastering chaining together the double jump, the wall jump, and the skid jump in various combinations. When you manage to pull off an impressive feat and get a single coin that was out of your way, you will feel extremely proud. Go out and swat an orphan with your cane, FRGiaSaTH, you’ve earned it.

Star Guard (Windows/Mac)

A fun distraction with an appealing aesthetic that gave me flashbacks of playing Apple IIe games at my friend’s house as a kid. Anna Anthropy wrote a thoughtful, well-illustrated breakdown of the game from a design perspective that highlights the cleverness of the stages, but I found the fight against the boss frustrating because it broke the Bioshock-like mechanic of the game that kept the world persistent across multiple lives and as such required a total shift in play style. Still, it’s definitely worth spending some time on, as it reminded me of other games from 2009 like Jumpman and AsciiPortal that add some new gameplay ideas to very classic, stripped-down engines. Jumpman and Star Guard in particular do a great job of letting you enjoy the mechanics without being burdened by B- narrative and load times.

Broken Cave Robot (Windows only)

Broken Cave Robot requires multiple playthroughs. It has a manual mapping system and a cavernous expanse filled with steep drop-offs, crazy power-ups, and a lot of dark labyrinthine segments. It also has a weirdly charming protagonist and a very “Metroid” feel in its exploration and power-up structure. The constant pressure of a time limit proved to be too much for me to handle right now, but the time I did spend with this game was enjoyable. If you like games that are punishingly hard but expect you to take what you’ve learned from each playthrough and apply them to the next, you may like this one.

You Can’t Possibly Expect Me To Do That (Windows only)

The name says it all— You Can’t Possibly Expect Me To Do That does, in fact, expect you to do that. You have to continuously commit suicide, aiming the trajectory of your corpse in such a way that it will collide with a block that will revive you, often on the other side of some wall or otherwise impassable obstacle. This game is kind of crazy. Are you crazy? You might like this crazy game.

Tower of Heaven (Windows only)

I enjoyed Tower of Heaven most out of all of the games listed here. It’s really simple, and not particularly long, but the way it imposes “laws” that complicate your passage through initially simple levels is really neat and I liked the Game Boy aesthetic that the game featured. If you don’t play any other game on this list, please at least play this one.

—Casey

It's dangerous to go alone take Church-Rosser Theorem

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 10:06:52 -0500

I was at work the other night, getting my feet wet for the first time with a tool that’s known an automated proof assistant. Now there’s no need to go into all of the details of an automated proof assistant (or of Coq, the specific tool I was using. Incidentally, none of this is really specific to Coq. I just wanted a reason to include a picture of a French rooster in a white suit) to get something out of this post, which should after all, be talking about video games at some point, but the basic idea is something like this. A mathematical theorem isn’t taken for true in mathematics until it has a complete, fully-hashed out proof that should be a beautiful model of objective perfection. But that’s kind of BS, because in reality, a proof boils down to an argument (albeit a very careful one) that convinces enough mathematicians, and for which the other ones can’t find a flaw.

Coq makes the ideal of objective perfection in proofs a reality. If you have some theorem in mind, then you write it up in the language of Coq, and then you do the same for the theorem’s proof. The key feature of Coq is that never lets you off the hook when you’re writing your proof. Each step has to follow the established rules, or it doesn’t let you take the next step. This is why Coq is sometimes viewed as “needlessly formal and pedantic,” and keep in mind this is coming from a group of people that see articles with titles like Round-Efficient Broadcast Authentication Protocols for Fixed Topology Classes and lick their lips with excitement. So it was at least a little surprising to me that as I was sitting there hacking away with this thing, and I was actually having fun in the process. And not just “fun” in the sense of “pretty fun as far as educational software goes”: I realized that something about this felt like gaming back in the 8-bit days: a little like Zelda or Ninja Gaiden for some reason. This got me thinking on just what I loved about those old games, or good games from any time, that could possibly overlap with something like a proof assistant. I think it boils down to the following.

First, I have a hunch that people (and this includes kids playing old NES platformers) can really enjoy doing something that’s demanding and rigorous, as long as they don’t feel like they’re being cheated. Ask someone what math course they hated the most in high school, and a large amount of the time it seems like the answer is “geometry.” For a mathematician, that’s a pretty depressing answer to hear, because high school geometry is supposed to be everyone’s first introduction to the notion of formal proof. But is it really? Sometimes for me it felt like a few steps of a proof intuitively “worked” for the teacher but other steps, indistinguishable to me from the good ones, were no good, and I could never get a clear answer why. But consider that kids a lot younger than high-schoolers do something that arguably takes a lot more dedication than geometry whenever they play through Ninja Gaiden, yet they do it willingly. In their own free time. Why? Personally, part of the reason I slogged through that cruel, cruel game was because even though so many of the victories were so hard-won, you knew that when you beat friggin Stage 6-4, then that win was really yours, not caused by the whim of the game spontaneously not liking the way you plaed or deciding to finally go easy on you. I think a lot of the satisfaction of working with Coq stems from the same thing. Coq doesn’t give you any breaks, so getting practically anything done is a huge pain. But when you finally prove the theorem that you set out to prove, it makes your sense of satisfaction that much more complete.

Second, working with Coq gives you satisfaction in incremental pieces. You have an overall goal (to prove your theorem), but to get there, Coq forces you to break your goal down into subgoals, and further subgoals until you can handle your task one chunk. Each time you prove a subgoal (or lemma), the background color of your environment resolves to a pleasing shade of blue, and the system prints a gratifying “Subgoal proved. Lemma definition added.” It’s a very “Shine Get” moment. Now that you’ve put in the work to prove the lemma, its yours to use as a tool as you see fit for the remainder of your task. So maybe Zelda or Megaman are better analogies than Mario.

Above: a typical Coq session, mid-proof. In the top frame, text in blue has been checked by Coq. In the bottom, text below the “====” gives your current subgoal, and text above the “====” gives the hypotheses you have available to you to prove the subgoal.

Above: proof completed: the day is won… for now.

Finally, Coq introduces complexity by asking you to master only a few basic rules, and then letting you build (and hopefully, eventually solve) bigger and bigger problems from those rules. A lot of good games do something similar: consider the first half of Portal or pretty much all of Splosion Man. Those games only obligate you to figure out how a handful of basic mechanics work, but then they’re are able to crank out level after excellent level by gluing those mechanics together, each time in more and more complex and ingenious ways.

Of course, I’m not about to go out on a limb and say that Coq will be the next big game development platform. For one, their character design has a long way to go (although you have to admit, the ”Proof General” here wouldn’t have looked all that out of place if he’d come on the scene sometime in the mid-90’s):

—Bill

Pantene Paragon

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 10:00:00 -0500

I can’t be the first person to notice this. The “Paragon” icon from Mass Effect looks suspiciously similar to the Pantene logo:

Maybe this is subtle symbolism. The concept of hair here is clearly being equated with the concept of virtue. It’s telling that in the Mass Effect universe, humans seem to be the only sentient race with hair of any kind:

Turians, asaris, drell, krogans—all of them! Hairless as baby infants. Who knows, though. Maybe quarians and the volus are super furry under those suits of theirs.

—Adam

About Warp Skip!

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 23:35:00 -0500

About Warp Skip!:

In case you were wondering who we are, there is now an “About” page accessible via the sidebar of the blog. Not that it contains any actual useful information. But hey, faux Game Boy Camera pictures! Retro-chic!

Achievements, Foursquare, and Donald Norman

Tue, 23 Feb 2010 09:21:40 -0500

In a recent article at Gamasutra, Ian Bogost declares his distaste for Foursquare. In the article he groups Foursquare badges and mayorships with Xbox Live gamerscore and achievements, saying that both are essentially customer loyalty programs—along the lines of frequent flyer miles. The main argument in the article is that Foursquare, in particular, is a lousy customer loyalty program, as it rewards loyalty to Foursquare, not to the venues that Foursquare users check into.

I have some beef with this argument.

I do agree that Foursquare and XBL gamerscore/achievements share a number of similarities. But I don’t think that they’re customer loyalty programs. Maybe they do function in that capacity, but their real benefit to users is more basic. Foursquare, gamerscore, achievements—these are all engines to lend feedback to activities (like going out, or playing video games) that don’t have feedback built in. They make playing video games and going out with friends more usable.

[pictured above: Don Norman’s gamer card. Note: not actually Don Norman’s gamer card.]

I’m talking about “feedback” here in the Donald Norman, Design of Everyday Things sense. Feedback is the information that a system gives you about its internal state. Good feedback is a vital part of any usable system.

Normally, your social life and your video game habits don’t have quantifiable feedback. Until I started using Foursquare, for example, I had only my memory to count on when it came to figuring out how often I went out—or, when I did go out, where I went to. Foursquare’s popularity, I think, lies in making this information visible: it helps you keep track of where you’ve been, and compare your activities to those of your friends. It gives you useful feedback on your social activity.

Foursquare provides a number of mechanisms for displaying and quantifying this feedback. Friend notifications are one, mayorship is another. Foursquare mayorships aren’t really about loyalty! They’re just a means of quantifying the way you interact with a place. It’s not about rewarding repeat customers—it’s about letting you know whether or not you’re a repeat customer.

Gamerscore and achievements serve a similar purpose. They give you feedback on your play; they give you acknowledgment when you do something noteworthy; they let you know (in broad terms) how much of a game’s content you’ve completed; they let you compare the way you’re playing the game to the way your friends are playing it. Achievements are one of the reasons I prefer playing games on the 360 to playing games on (for example) the Wii: more feedback, more context, makes for a more fun gaming experience.

With a few notable exceptions, no one plays games just for the achievements. They’re not a goal in and of themselves. Likewise, no one “plays” Foursquare just to get the badges. Both badges and achievements are there to let you know that your activities follow a particular pattern. As an added benefit, badges and achievements you haven’t earned yet suggest what other patterns are possible.

Foursquare, achievements, trophies, whatever—there’s a reason that these systems are popular, and they’re not going away any time soon. I’m interested to see more game designs that exploit or subvert these systems. Achievement unlocked is a great place to start. (Could a similar game be made with Foursquare?)

—Adam

Shut Up And Play This Game: "Record Tripping"

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 08:30:00 -0500

“Shut Up And Play This Game” is a recurring feature here at Warp Skip! The deal: you read the blog post, then you play the game that we link you to. No questions asked. See the first “Shut Up” post for a full description, or view all of the “Shut Up and Play This Game” games!

If you asked me how you could create a video game that was relevant to my interests, I’d say “aww shucks, I already play video games! Just keep on making great games, folks!” But if you kept insisting, and forced me to make a list of things I like that should be in a video game, I think it’d look something like this:

The music of Gorillaz and Spoon
Rhythm and puzzle gameplay elements
References to Lewis Carroll’s “Alice” books (I can’t help it; it’s a programmer thing)
Pretending to know things about turntablism
Bill Murray

“Record Tripping”, a game by the Bell Brothers, combines the first four of these elements (and until all five are incorporated in something, a boy can dream) into a short, fun Flash game that makes use of the mouse wheel in a way I’ve never seen before. It starts off very easy, but by the end its challenges made me think a bit about how to complete them. It’s nice that while you’re graded on how well you do each stage, failing to complete the challenge doesn’t block you from seeing the rest of the stages. The whole time you’re working over loops made out of music by artists like Gorillaz, Spoon, and Death Cab For Cutie. Forget about the disappointment that was DJ Hero and play this game for a few minutes— it’s free, and you might as well get some precious Flash gaming in now before HTML5 kills it forever.

SHUT UP AND PLAY “RECORD TRIPPING”

—Casey

Double Buffered: A Timeline of Western MMO Development

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 10:00:00 -0500

Double Buffered: A Timeline of Western MMO Development:

Longtime friend of the Warp Skip! staff and game developer Ben Zeigler put together a really awesome diagram showing the often-convoluted development process of MMORPGs in the Western game design world. There’s a lot of information there and it’s pretty cool to see how much migration there is of high-profile talent from company to company while staying within the MMORPG genre. Go check it out!

—Casey

Side-Quest Side Effects

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 08:03:43 -0500

Welcome. We’re here today to compare the way side-quests work in two popular role-playing games: Mass Effect and Persona 3. (A warning: there may be mild, mild spoilers for both games.)

This is a screenshot of Mass Effect’s “Assignments” menu, which amounts to a list of side-quests. As the game progresses, the list gets longer: it seems like every character you talk to has something new for you to do. ”My mom’s boils became sentient, I heard there was a healing salve on Borblizzia. Can you fetch it for me.” “I’m a scientist interested in Prothean toenail clippings. Please find out whether or not Protheans had toes.” And so forth.

So what’s the problem? More side quests mean more content, right? And everyone likes content. The problem, as with so many things in (the original) Mass Effect, is in the interface. In the screenshot above, you can see that the assignment list provides a hint about the side-quest’s importance to the narrative, but no information about how the side quest plays.

In particular, you’re can’t tell how difficult a side-quest is, or how long it will take. This is important information, considering that any given side quest in Mass Effect might sprout a sub-side-quest, which could in turn require a sub-sub-side-quest. And once you’ve shuttled from one end of the galaxy and back to fetch a thing for a guy, you might find that your reward is completely trivial: a few credits, a grand of XP, an item or skill that turns out to be irrelevant to the way you’d been playing the game.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I like side-quests. I’m a completionist: if a game has a list of things, I want to either acquire or eliminate those things—whichever puts a checkmark on the list. But with Mass Effect, it got to the point where I didn’t want to do any side-quests, since it was so difficult to determine whether or not a side-quest would be worth the effort. I knew that those checkmarks would go unchecked, unless I was willing to bounce the Mako around a featureless 3D fractal for hours on end tracking down some Geth guarding magic hair or something. The lack of foreknowledge made the decision whether or not to do a side-quest seem arbitrary.

The interface for side-quests in Persona 3 FES, on the other hand, gets it right.

The interface in Persona 3 immediately presents you with all the information you need about a side-quest: the relative difficulty (indicated with a star rating), the reward for completing the side-quest, and an in-game time restriction (you must complete the side quest by a particular date in the game).

This information in this interface actually makes it an interesting choice whether or not to do a side-quest. You can ask yourself questions like the following: Given how I’ve been playing the game so far, can I fit the quest into my schedule? I really could use that reward, so would it be worth dealing with the difficulty level? More information, in this case, leads to more challenge (and, therefore, more fun).

An interface like this can make a completionist feel fulfilled even if a number of side-quests are left undone. An interface like this encourages replay, because you can formulate a strategy for the next playthrough: how might I arrange my strategy in order to make it possible to complete side-quests I missed the first time through?

It’s differences like this between Mass Effect and Persona 3 that explain why I’ll probably never play Mass Effect again (even though I enjoyed it), but I put over 150 hours into my first playthrough of Persona 3, and will probably do the same when I play it again on PSP this summer.

For all its streamlining and general improvements of the RPG formula, Mass Effect 2 has the same obscure interface for side-quests as the original. Interestingly, Persona 4 took a step back from Persona 3 FES, removing the date restrictions, difficulty ratings, and reward appraisals for side quests. (This is just one of many regressions in Persona 4. But that’s a topic for another blog post.)

—Adam

I'm getting awful tired of Counter-Strike remakes (CoD, AA and the rest). Are there any fun-based FPS games coming out soon, or should I just stick to TF2? I'd love for solid multiplayer over a singleplayer only game, but both is obviously better

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 00:32:00 -0500

I’m sure anyone who is interested in this kind of thing is aware of the big titles coming out with multiplayer this spring— Bioshock 2, MAG, Bad Company 2, etc. There are, however, a handful of lesser-known first-person games (not necessarily shooters, and not necessarily multiplayer, but still cool-looking) that I’m excited about this year, so I thought this would be a good opportunity to spread the word about those.

Zeno Clash is already out on PC, but Atlus is publishing it on Xbox Live Arcade this March. It was a finalist in last year’s IGF awards and was spoken of very highly on Idle Thumbs and 1up.com. It looks like a unique take on first person action games.

AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! – A Reckless Disregard for Gravity is another game that came out last year, but it didn’t get as much press as I thought it might. This one is PC-only, but is on my short list of games on that platform that I need to check out. It’s not a FPS, but it’s first-person and so I’m including it here anyway.

The Unfinished Swan looks like an interesting puzzle-based game with FPS mechanics. Details on this game are unfortunately few but I hope we find out some more detailed information about it soon.

Natural Selection 2 is a multiplayer FPS that’s going to be on Windows, Linux, Mac, and Xbox 360. I had a lot of fun with the original Natural Selection in 2003-2004, so I have high hopes for this sequel. This could be the next multiplayer PC game after TF2 that I actually play!

Lost Planet 2 is probably the big-budget game I’m most excited about this spring. (It’s also third-person, but obviously at this point I’m taking liberties left and right here) Lost Planet 1 was polarizing, and it definitely had its flaws, but once I replaced the awkward default controls with something that better matched modern shooters on the 360, I had a lot of fun with it and its beautiful environments and cool boss battles. The sequel looks like an improvement in almost every way mechanically and graphically and I feel like it’s being marginalized because it’s by a Japanese developer instead of the Western studios that dominate the shooter genre.

Red Steel 2 is an interesting case. The first game was definitely underwhelming; after trying it out at a friend’s house I decided it wasn’t worth buying, but the past year has seen a lot of big franchises turn things around in a major way, and it would be cool to see that happen with a Wii franchise that didn’t live up to its potential on its first outing.

—Casey

Ask the Warp Skip! staff your questions!

You have received bears

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 00:25:00 -0500

I’ve spent all month enjoying Might & Magic: Clash of Heroes on the DS. It’s the most fun I’ve had with a video game in a long time. They’ve managed to find a way to integrate RPG elements with a puzzle game like Puzzle Quest did a few years ago, but their core mechanic doesn’t end up introducing a feeling of unfair competition from the AI— the introduction of new units onto the field is appropriately “random” for both your board and your opponent’s, and the rest is all strategy.

The art style is appealing, and I really like the way the story is broken up into multiple chapters, with each chapter featuring a different set of units and abilities. It lets the game frequently introduce new ideas without having to just constantly scale up the complexity, which wouldn’t work in the long-term for a game like this without doing something wacky like expanding the grid size and requiring larger configurations to make attacks/defenses.

There are a few rough edges, the sorts of things that AAA titles would have ironed out through million-dollar playtesting programs with complicated metrics tracking and so on, but nothing too bad. In some campaigns it’s best to ignore the side quests for fear of losing too many resources if you don’t play ultra-conservatively; in other campaigns the side quests are easy and give items that make the main campaign much easier. That ends up just upping the difficulty, though, which I’m ultimately okay with.

The only thing that I’ve thought over long and hard and been unable to come up with a reason for why it wasn’t included is an undo button. A quick bit of context for anyone who hasn’t played it: each turn you take starts with 3 “moves”, which can be refunded for getting combos. Once you run out of moves, your turn is over and your opponent gets a turn. In some ways, the process of making these move decisions reminds me of the Panel de Pon/Tetris Attack/Puzzle League series’ “Puzzle” mode. This mode contained a handy button for “undo”, which allowed you to rewind your most recent move. There’s no way to do this in M&M: CoH, and as long as you contain it to within your turn, I don’t see how that would hurt anything. It would make learning how to find and make large combos much more easily.

Small complaints aside, this game is a fantastic DS game for anyone who likes RPGs or puzzle games. The campaign is of a decent length, and if you can find other people who have it, the multiplayer should provide a lot of depth. I hope to find people at PAX East in March to play this with, so if you’re going to be there, get this game and bring it with you!

—Casey

Questions

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 18:08:12 -0500

Questions:

Looking for some gamer’s advisory— know what games you like, but don’t know what to play next?
Hoping to see opinions or information about a particular game on our site?
Want to hire Scott as your digital choreographer?
Want to know more about Chris Kohler’s sordid past as an unlicensed Yoshi-based game designer?

Ask the Warp Skip staff your questions now!

Shut Up And Play This Game: "Choice of a Dragon"

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 02:01:34 -0500

“Shut Up And Play This Game” is a recurring feature here at Warp Skip! The deal: you read the blog post, then you play the game that we link you to. No questions asked. See Casey’s post about “Small Worlds” for a full description.

“Choice of a Dragon” is a short, text-based, choose-your-own-adventure-style hypertext game. You are a dragon. You make choices in the story, and your choices earn you points, which in turn affect the way the rest of the game turns out. The humor and joy comes from the narrative voice, which bubbles with sarcasm and fourth-wall winks. Also, let’s face it: it is fun to eat something after having set it on fire with your breath.

The game does a remarkable job of making it seem like your choices change the outcome of the game, and the character of your protagonist—which is more than any BioWare conversation tree has managed to do.

There are iPhone and Android versions of the game available, which you might download later. But right now, you’re going to…

SHUT UP AND PLAY “CHOICE OF A DRAGON”

—Adam

Underground ludonomastics

Sat, 09 Jan 2010 17:05:00 -0500

Read now noted scholar and game designer Nick Montfort’s epic post on the etymology of “Zork.” Nick gives a number of possible origins for the word; here’s my favorite:

The letters [on a Belgian keyboard] are laid out just as they are on a French typewriter, in the AZERTY scheme. As you can see, if you’ve learned to type the word “WORK” on a typewriter like this, and someone then substitutes a British (or US) typewriter without your noticing, and you then try to type that word without looking at the keys, you’ll type “ZORK.”

Other possible origins include the ubiquitous TMRC jargon and a Lin Carter novel.

Nick frames his research as etymology (the study of word origins) but it’s also a work of onomastics—the study of how things get named. Specifically, it’s ludonomastics (to coin a term): the study of how games get named. Leonard Richardson wrote a series of blog posts entitled “How Game Titles Work”, which, as far as I’m concerned, is the founding document of the field, and should be required reading for anyone interested in studying games.

You may also be interested to read an interview with Nick Montfort concerning interactive ficiton, and in particular his book Twisty Little Passages (which is highly recommended).

—Adam

Steam News

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 12:06:00 -0500

Steam News:

From the latest Team Fortress 2 update notes:

Added a “virtual mousepad” concept to rework how bots track enemy players

They now periodically estimate the position and velocity of the enemy they are tracking, instead of “locking on”

After rotating beyond a maximum angle, they will pause for a fraction of a second to re-center their “virtual mouse”

Allows for over/undershoot “slop” in aiming.Looks more natural, and allows skilled players to dodge

Addresses the “180 spin around and fire”, “Heavy bot is OP”, “Sniper is OP”, and “I can’t fight a Heavy bot as a Scout” issues

This is fascinating to me. They recently added bots to Team Fortress 2 as an experiment, and I’ve always found the idea of programming bots for multiplayer-focused 3D games to be an interesting concept but I’ve never seen anyone go into this much detail about the things they do to make the bots seem more human. Having to re-center your mouse when looking around is a motion that I think a lot of people take for granted¹, but when you think about what that does to movement and control it makes sense that it would be helpful to try to simulate that for computer-controlled opponents.

In the next patch, I hope they’ll go the extra mile and occasionally let us hear the bots’ moms screaming at them about needing to leave for soccer practice over voice chat.

—Casey (Thanks to jrr for the link!)

Except for the most expert players, I’m sure, who do something like hack their mice to have ridiculously high sensitivities and then train their wrists to make subtle movements invisible to the human eye that turn their view the exact angle required to line up headshot after headshot. But those people have arguably surpassed humanity and its concerns. ↩

Memories: SHATTERED!

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 13:21:00 -0500

Silent Hill: Shattered Memories is an unusual game for me in several ways. For one thing, it’s the only game I’ve played in recent memory that I ended up more enthusiastic about after I’d finished it than I was before I started playing. I’d always had a vague interest in the series, but never actually played anything more than the beginning of Silent Hill 2, and as far as I could tell before Shattered Memories’s release, it sounded like it was just going to be a watered-down remake of the first game with tacked-on motion controls and the “otherworld” changed to be icy for some reason. Fortunately, the advice of my fellow WaSki contributors convinced me to pick it up, and it turned out that not only were my preconceptions wrong, but Shattered Memories ended up being my favorite game of 2009.

It’s also an anomaly in that it’s one of the few games in which the actual gameplay mechanics, while perfectly serviceable, are probably the least interesting part of the game. The “nightmare” sequences, in which you must get from point A to point B while avoiding the invincible creatures pursuing you, can be tense and exciting, but they’re used sparingly (which is for the best, otherwise they’d get pretty repetitive). The majority of your time in the game is spent just exploring a mostly empty, dilapidated town at your leisure, and it’s these sections that really grabbed me. This isn’t a game about BONE-CHILLING TERROR; instead, there’s a more subdued, melancholy atmosphere over the proceedings.

As you explore the world, static coming from your phone (through the Wii remote speaker) will indicate that you’re near something important, and when you approach it, you’ll receive a voicemail or text message. Most of the time these are not directly related to the plot but tell the stories of traumatic or sad memories from various anonymous townspeople.

The actual plot of the game, too, is surprisingly well executed. While the basic premise is the same as the first Silent Hill (Harry Mason searches for his daughter in Silent Hill after a car crash), the story goes in a different direction from there, and no knowledge of previous games is necessary at all. I don’t want to give anything away, but the story actually made me both think and feel something, which is not something I can say about many games, and I continued thinking about it even long after I stopped playing.

This is helped by the way that decisions you make as you play determine what you will see later on in the game based on what it perceives to be your interests. The changes can be as subtle as different posters on the walls or small dialogue changes, or as dramatic as leading you through different areas and puzzles or radically changing characters’ appearances. Soon after playing through the game the first time, I went through it again, making an effort to play differently, and got a substantially different experience. The game’s structure is always the same, but you’ll see different things along the way that may inform your interpretation of what’s going on.

Of course, the degree to which these changes are significant depends largely on your level of investment in the story. When I say that, in this case I’m not so much referring to the plot as to the overall atmosphere the game creates, which to me is its greatest asset. From the visual design to the (excellent) music to a few really inspired uses of motion control, all the elements come together to form an unusually cohesive, memorable experience.

I think it’s a real shame that most of what little attention this game has gotten is from people complaining that it’s so different from the other Silent Hill games. What makes it so interesting is the fact that it is so different — not just from the other Silent Hills, but from most other video games.

—Scott