Tag: games

Mastering the monster

Matrix Games announces a quasi-new game that borders upon the breathtaking:

World in Flames is Matrix Games’ computer version of Australian Design Group’s classic board game.  Covering both the European and Pacific Theaters of Operations during World War II, World in Flames is global in scope while simulating each branch of service in detail.  Land units are corps and army level, supplemented with specialized divisions.  Naval units include individual counters for every carrier, battleship, cruiser, and light cruiser in the war. Using 1000+ unique bitmapped images, air units represent groups of 250 to 500 airplanes.  With 6000+ unique units, 250+ countries, and a global map of 70,200 hexes, World in Flames is the premier World War II grand strategy game.

Nine of the eleven scenarios from Australian Design Group’s World in Flames Final Edition are included, and they range from the small 5 turn Barbarossa offensive in Russia and the 5 turn Guadalcanal battle in the Pacific, through to the 36 turn Global War campaign which spans all of Europe, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, the Atlantic, and the Pacific.  You can play either the Axis or the Allied side or take the role of one of the 8 major powers.  Besides solitaire and head-to-head, you can play over the Internet.  The last mode of play is for two players, Axis versus Allies.

In addition to the full set of rules from World in Flames, Final Edition, there are 58 optional rules.  Australian Design Group’s expansion modules Ships in Flames and Planes in Flames are incorporated into the basic game, but the inclusion of other expansion modules, such as Mech in Flames, Carrier Planes in Flames, and Cruisers in Flames, depends on which optional rules are selected.

This simulation models national production from conveying raw resources to factories  using rail lines and overseas pipelines for producing infantry, armor, naval, and air combat units.  Because oil was so important during World War II, there are separate optional rules for synthetic oil plants and deployment of oil reserves to the front lines.

This looks like an incredible blend of boardgame and computer game. No AI, but it is in the works, according to the developer. I have the computerized War in Europe, which was a somewhat similar concept, but this looks considerably more advanced and much more adapted for the Internet era. I think those hardbound rulebooks will look exceedingly nice next to my ASL folders, although I hope they will also include PDF versions for speedier reference.(1) I expect they will eventually add PBEM as well. I do hope you’ll be able to play over the Internet with a single copy.

And an interview with the designer, Harry Rowland, can be found here. It’s amazing to learn that 60,000 copies of the game have been sold over the last 30 years.

(1) Looks like they anticipated this: “The text from this section of the Players Manual is available during
game play as context sensitive help. During a game you don’t need to
leaf through the Players Manual looking for how to use a form, just
click on the Help button to bring up the text from the Players Manual
that describes the form.” That’s smart; it really is an integrated approach.

Turnabout is fair play

Some game reviewers crying because a developer played hardball:

Here’s a quote from Totalbiscuit:  Unfortunately, every day we have to sit there worrying, will some company decide to abuse the copyright claim system to destroy my livelihood today?

Another popular youtube guy, Francis, also chimed in with this: YouTube has saved my life, and it terrifies me that with this system in place, it’s possible all of this will disappear tomorrow morning.”

and this: Your dream, your livelihood, your future… everything you’re aspiring to be can go *snap* like that.  It’s terrifying.

That’s powerful stuff.   It is terrifying.  How do I know? Many video game developers live this every day of their lives.

Many of us, especially indies, have made staggering sacrifices to pursue our dreams.  Financial, mental, emotional, relationship.  Many of us pour our life energy into our creation.  We dream for success.  We dread failure.  Failure is catastrophic.

Especially indies, who rely almost exclusively – not on multi million dollar marketing budgets, but on the people who review and talk about their games.  A review by someone like Totalbiscuit can completely change the fortune of an indie developer.  And I mean completely.

First of all, having been a nationally syndicated game reviewer as well as a game developer, I am EXTREMELY dubious that any reviewer has the sort of power being described here. I suspect an amount of correlation/causation confusion. Second, while Totalbiscuit may be an excellent reviewer, (and he is clearly more conscientious than most with regards to playing through the entire game before reviewing it), it appears no wise old editor ever taught him a very important lesson concerning game reviews.

It’s one that I was taught by Chris Lombardi of Computer Gaming World when I was reviewing a very, very bad game for CGW, a game that has repeatedly made Worst Game Ever lists, and it was a lesson I never forgot.

After I emailed him the review, he called me up and said: “It’s a really funny review. It made me laugh out loud. And it isn’t publishable. Drop the ba-doom-boom stuff; it’s not professional.”

What he meant by “ba-doom-boom stuff” was lines like this: “In space, no one can hear you scream.  And when it comes to Salvation Prophecy, that might be a good thing.”  These sorts of one-liners indicate that the reviewer is sacrificing the game on the altar of a punchline. And that’s not only unfair to the game, it shows that the review has become more about showing off the reviewer’s clever wit than actually reviewing the game itself.

I don’t know if the game developer was in its rights or not to get the review taken down; that is outside my area of competence. I do know that as a general rule, I am 100 percent opposed to DMCA-related nonsense. But I also know that if reviewers are resolutely professional and play fair in their reviews, developers are unlikely to react in an unprofessional and unfair manner even when the reviews are less than flattering.

EA’s next debacle and the crash of 2014

Having played a considerable amount of Battlefield 2 and 3, I am not at all sanguine about the prospects for success of the next version of the franchise:

The Swedish Army drafted Patrick Bach in the early 1990s and tried to
make a soldier out of him. No such luck. Mr. Bach couldn’t see the point
of pretending to protect a country at peace since the Napoleonic wars.
The only part he liked was the shooting.

Twenty years later, Mr. Bach commands a high-tech army that is at war all the time. As the creative force behind the Battlefield series of video games, he must make sure that players come back again and again, no matter how often they get whacked. Which, if you are keeping score, is about seven billion times in the last two years.

For months, a development team in Stockholm has been frantically preparing a new version of the game. Played out in desolate cityscapes, on the sea and in the skies, Battlefield 4 is a dream of Armageddon without civilian suffering to make things messy. Already, fans are hailing what one early reviewer called “an insane new level of destructibility.”

Bloody and dramatic as it is, Battlefield 4 is only the opening move of a bigger effort by Mr. Bach and his colleagues at Digital Illusions Creative Entertainment, or DICE, a development studio owned by the Silicon Valley gaming powerhouse Electronic Arts. They are trying to create a new type of military shooting game even as the genre confronts technological, narrative and public relations hurdles. If they fail, video games will be that much closer to extinction.

Like big-budget movies, newspapers, printed books, DVDs and other once-dominant means of conveying information and entertainment, traditional video games like Battlefield — played at home, with a special console or maybe a souped-up PC and the biggest possible screen — are under digital assault. A handful of programmers in a garage can put together a crude but compulsive smartphone game in a few weeks. These games are designed to be played in snippets, anytime and anywhere, making them ideal for a busy modern life.

Mobile games are not exactly complicated. Fruit Ninja involves slicing animated fruit in half. ActionPotato is all about trying to catch potatoes. Candy Crush Saga consists of rearranging pieces of candy — and is played 700 million times a day, its creator says.

Immersive games like Battlefield, on the other hand, require years of intricate work by hundreds of software engineers and artists. They demand an investment by players, too: $60 plus quite a few moments of attention. And they are tied to technology going the way of the rotary phone. PC sales are dropping as users migrate to tablets, while sales of the Microsoft Xbox and Sony PlayStation consoles have wilted 40 percent in the last two years.

Traditional video games will not disappear tomorrow. It is a multibillion-dollar business, with shooters like Battlefield its most enduring category. The visceral thrill that players get from their virtual guns — the ability to reach into an imaginary world and destroy things — cannot be replicated on a smartphone, at least not yet.

Electronic Arts is nevertheless trying to extend franchises like Battlefield to devices, because it must. But at the same time, it has to grapple with the threats undermining traditional gaming. Though the classic consoles are getting reboots this fall, there is no guarantee that new models will permanently revive the format’s fortunes. In 2006, Nintendo introduced the Wii to iPhone-type excitement. The latest version had a tepid response. The new Xbox and PlayStation will get more attention but face an undercurrent of doubt.

“Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony are beyond the point of no return in this industry,” analysts at Asymco warned in a report last month titled “Game Over.”

Even a relentless optimist like Frank Gibeau, a veteran executive at Electronic Arts, acknowledges that the industry has become much more complicated.

“When you take technology and entertainment and slam them together for a highly demanding user base, you’re in the deep end of the deepest pool,” he said. “The movie business is tough, but this is really hard.”

The first-person shooter, which allows a player to be the character instead of just an observer, took off with the demon-slaughterfest Doom in 1993 but had its best run after 2001. The games drew inspiration from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the real-life exploits of the Special Forces. Studios often worked in collaboration with former members of the United States military.

Danger Close, a Los Angeles studio also owned by EA, released last fall the 14th incarnation of Medal of Honor, a shooter that was promoted as the ultimate in realism. But reviewers disparaged it and gamers rejected it. Don’t look for version 15 anytime soon; EA shuttered the studio.

Mr. Gibeau explained EA’s new shooter strategy: “We’re doubling down on the DICE team.”

Which is how it came to pass that a bunch of guys in Sweden whose knowledge of the American military comes from watching “Saving Private Ryan” and “Platoon” is now making EA’s only contemporary military shooter.

Good luck with that one. As one of the first designers of a 3D military FPS, (you can see videos of the unfinished Rebel Moon Revolution on YouTube that a Russian hacker team put together), I’ve watched the rise and fall of the mil-FPS with equal parts amusement and despair.

I can’t think of company that has blown more, and better, opportunities than EA. They have acquired, and destroyed, so many excellent game studios. Origin. Bullfrog. Maxis. Westwood. Now PopCap, Playfish, and Firemint. If it weren’t for their valuable sports franchises, Madden and FIFA, they’d have gone out of business years ago.

One of the startling points of the article is that EA has gone from publishing 67 console and PC games in 2008 to 10. They are doing the exact opposite of what Taleb recommends in Antifragile; they are increasing the fragility of the corporation. By putting so many eggs in so few baskets, a few failures will be all it takes to bring down the corporation once and for all. I have friends who are at the studio head level, and EA has closed down multiple profitable studios because their revenues are not large enough.

Which means EA is literally strangling in their cradles what would have been their next generation of blockbusters, because very few studios produce massive hits on their first or second attempts. Rovio famously succeeded on what it claims was its fifty-first attempt. Ultima was the successor to Akalabeth, or as it had previously been called, D&D Game #27. Wolfenstein 3D was id’s 14th game.

The game companies are failing to understand that the games market has not grown so much as bifurcated into games for gamers and games for non-gamers. The problem is first that there are more non-gamers willing to play Angry Birds and Candy Crush than there are gamers, second that the mobile platforms are far more conducive to non-gamer games than gamer games.  (Or use hard core vs casual if you like, it is the concept that is important, not the terminology.) So, in trying to chase both markets simultaneously, they are pursuing intrinsically self-contradictory strategies.

This is why I think we are well on our way to another 1983-style video game crash. Some in the industry think we’re already in it, but I think 2014 will be the year this becomes clear. It’s not a bad thing, though, as it will destroy the sickly giants and clear the way for a new generation of game companies, which likely will not include the likes of Electronic Arts, Rovio, or Zynga.

We are all war criminals

The Red Cross paints a target on its chest:

The International Committee of the Red Cross have called for video games to punish crimes committed in battle by adhering to real-life international war conventions.

“The ICRC believes there is a place for international humanitarian law (the law of armed conflict) in video games,” the organization that works worldwide to provide humanitarian help for people caught in war zones said in a statement on their website. “The ICRC is concerned that certain game scenarios could lead to a trivialization of serious violations of the law of armed conflict,” they added. “The fear is that eventually such illegal acts will be perceived as acceptable behavior.”[…]

Bernard Barrett, a spokesman for the organization said they were not trying to censor games or spoil people’s fun, but rather, “make clear that there are rules in battle and that certain acts are illegal.”

 I can’t imagine I’m the first game designer to read this and think, “hmmm, what if the Red Cross was taken over by liberal fascists and started behaving like liberal fascists usually do….”

Making it better by ruining it

Tom Hoggins is a harbinger of the scalzification of the game reviewer:

GTAV is a sensational video game and a
marvellous feat of technical engineering. However, as always with Grand
Theft Auto, controversy has not been far behind the adulation.

The series penchant for carnage and violence is well known, as you may expect
from an “open-world” game about criminality that gives players carte blanche
to cause havoc in its facsimile of the United States. Set in Los Santos, a
twisted vision of Los Angeles, V is Grand Theft Auto at its most barbaric;
torture, cannibalism and murder featuring in its nihilistic milieu.
There has also been much discussion about how GTAV treats women. That GTAV is
misogynistic is a defensible position. Women in the game are either bit-part
players or set dressing: strippers to throw money at, prostitutes to pick
up.

There are three lead characters that players can control in the game: all
male. The women characters are often leered at or cast as nags. One of the
player characters daughters has “skank” tattooed across her back, one
mission has you chaperoning a paparazzo as he tries to photograph an aging
actress’s “low-hanging muff.”

At one stage during my play-through of the game, I had a barrage of these
aspects which made me feel deeply uncomfortable. I commented to a friend
that I was concerned about the treatment of women within the game, that
there were few female characters drawn with any depth and that it felt a
deliberate decision to avoid an attempt to do so.

I was the first second nationally syndicated game reviewer, and it is a little sad to see how grotesquely standards have fallen since I ended my game review column. There are two ridiculous points here as well as a remarkable failure of observation.

  1. Torture, cannibalism, murder, and nihilism all get a pass. But the treatment of women, well, that makes gamma boy feel uncomfortable.
  2. The game has earned over $1 billion already and received a 98/100 critical reception. It is one of the most successful, best-reviewed games in the history of the game industry. Does the reviewer think that removing one of the GTA’s most well-known attributes is actually going to improve either its sales or its critical reviews?
  3. The reviewer fails to observe that the deliberate attempt to draw female characters with any depth is done so because that it precisely what its young male audience wants. They are sick of women relentlessly trying to control them. They are sick of women drugging them and punishing them because they don’t behave like little girls. And GTA V, like its predecessors, allows them to escape a ruthlessly feminized world in favor of one that, if nothing else, allows them to behave in an unapologetically masculine manner.  

The success of GTA V is because it is misogynistic. It is what games are supposed to be: it is escapist.  The Telegraph reviewer writes: “Games will not be able to take its much coveted place in
mainstream culture while these type of people get to dictate anything. Good
riddance to them when they are finally cast off.”

And the day that happens, the game industry will begin to die. Instead of great games like Doom and World of Warcraft and GTA 5, it will be Spamville, and Mafia Clicks, and Words with Friends, and 50 Shades of Necrobestial Rape Fantasy until the industry collapses amidst general bewilderment. If the McRapies ever replace the likes of Rockstar and Romero and me in the way that this guy has succeeded me in the mainstream media, (and McRapey has been trying to establish himself in the game industry), that’s exactly what you’re going to get.

Introducing the orc

Development is proceeding apace on First Sword, as we’ve now got the gladiatorial schools operational in a rudimentary manner, which means that the various gladiator statistics and portraits are now accessible in the game.  In Selenoth, orcs are even more fearsome in the arena than they are on the battlefield, because the superior human unit discipline can usually be relied upon to carry the Amorran and Savondese forces through to victory can no longer be utilized to compensate for the greater size, strength, and sheer aggression of the orcs.

And in the arena, there is no ranged combat, which means the human gladiator isn’t merely concerned with the threat posed by swords, axes, daggers, and warhammers, but has to deal with the very real threat of having his face literally bitten off by his opponent.  Not all ludi are willing to feature orcs, as in addition to them being nearly as dangerous in training as they are in the actual arena, the spectators tend to be harsh on defeated orcs and it is the rare orc indeed who is granted missio by the favor of the crowd.

But for the stable owner who is brave enough to accept the risks, the rewards can be significant indeed.

Setting the record straight

Two days ago, I referenced one of our previous game innovations in discussing the latest one, which naturally inspired the sort of individual who firmly believes their ideological opponents cannot possibly have ever accomplished anything of note to leap in with his ignorant version of events:

Vox: It will probably surprise no one to discover that the primary response of the forward-thinking futurists was to declare their opinion that First Sword was unlikely to sell enough ebooks to matter one way or the other, as if the universal adoption of 3D hardware texture-mapped acceleration that Big Chilly and I introduced in Rebel Moon, and the 16-bit color we introduced in Rebel Moon Rising, had anything at all to do with how many copies of those games were sold. 

Obvious: It’s really too bad that the game POD had full MMX support and was released a full six months before Rebel Moon Rising.

First of all, if one was to go by the publicly available information from IGN and GameSpy – which is wrong, by the way – one would learn that RMR was released by GT Interactive on December 22, 1996, which is obviously before POD was released by UbiSoft on February 28, 1997. But the fact is that both games were actually released together for the first time on the same CD by Intel on January 8, 1997. However, the following YouTube video should make it clear that not only were both of us incorrect, the entire MMX-related discussion is irrelevant as I’d forgotten that Big Chilly and I actually introduced both 16-bit color and dynamic lighting in Rebel Moon, which was released as part of the original VL bus 3D Blaster package back in November 1995.

I don’t know what possesses these people with the desperate need to denigrate everything I do, but history tends to render their efforts pointless. I have little doubt that if in-game digital sales are successful and become standard in the industry, the anklebiters of tomorrow will do their best to deny that I had anything to do with it, let alone came up with the concept. Anyhow, this sort of thing suffices to indicate how the Left’s revisionist instincts penetrate even to the pettiest micro level.

I was wondering how I’d managed to forget that we had the advanced lighting model in our first game, and I realized that I tend to think of the dynamic lighting in terms of the laser effects.  The colored lighting is so much more effective when the lasers light up the corridors as they fly back and forth, that since the first one was lacking that particular application of it, I assumed that we’d been still using the same 8-bit palette that everyone else had been until then. 

One bit of trivia that might be interesting; we were also the very first to discover the reason for the huge gap between expectations for MMX and the disappointing results.  And by very first, I mean that I was the one who had to call Intel and give the guy managing the project the bad news.  We couldn’t figure out why the game was running at about one-quarter the Intel-estimated frame rates when Big Chilly decided to simplify things as much as possible and simply blit a black rectangle.

I still remember his eyes narrowing in suspicion as he stared at the results, pointed to them, and said, “now why does that number look familiar?”  It was because it was precisely the same as the speed limit of the PCI bus.  It quickly became clear that Intel had produced a very fast CPU capable of processing graphics at four times the rate that the communications bus on the graphics card could accomodate them.  This had a huge effect on everything, because it meant that we couldn’t use the higher resolutions for which we’d been creating the art, but had to back it all down to the same resolution we’d used previously with the Creative Labs card.

The game still looked pretty enough and got a decent review from CGW, but it wasn’t anywhere nearly as graphically beautiful as it should have been, even considering that it was a 2.5D game.

And that wasn’t our only contribution to the MMX project.  I was also responsible for killing what was intended as Intel’s original marketing slogan for it: “On the
‘Net/Off the ‘Net”.  But that is a story for another time.  And on a tangentially related note that no one but Big Chilly will grasp the connection, SWEET BILLY GATES but the insanity of certain console makers truly knows no bounds.

“The new Oddworld game New ‘n’ Tasty is coming to every platform in the current generation and even the next generation but not the Xbox One.
It’s not that developer Oddworld Inhabitants isn’t porting the game.
It’s not that they hate Microsoft or the Xbox One. No, it’s that
Microsoft has taken an anti-indie dev stance with the Xbox One. While
the game industry is moving to Kickstarter and self-funded shops,
Microsoft has decided all developers must have a publisher to grace
their console.”

This Xbox One launch is reminding me more and more of the Sega Dreamcast. 

Announcing First Sword

This seems as good a time as any to announce the forthcoming release of First Sword, the first combat management game.  Digital Book World was particularly interested in one of the innovations the game is introducing:

For publishers looking to diversify their ebook sales channels, here’s an idea: selling ebooks through in-game stores. Alpenwolf, a small, international game-development firm is going to test this idea with a game it releases in November this year, First Sword. The game is a “commentary-based management game,” according to one of its developers, Theo Beale, who is also an author, musician, former game reviewer and game journalist.

I find it rather amusing that despite all of the frequent efforts to “out” me, no one ever figured out one of my alternate pseudonyms despite my use of it in one of the game industry’s leading publications for my monthly column there.  I mean, surely you never imagined that Vox Day would be the only one I use….  Anyhow, for those who are interested, here is another screen shot of First Sword in action.

This is a pre-Alpha screenshot of a combat between two equally matched fighters.  There are about 5,000 messages in the commentary system, more than 10x more than the leading game of this type, which allows for a wide variety of complicated narratives in describing the various arena battles.  In this particular screenshot, the stipex, Honorius, has just managed to score a reasonably damaging hit on Trebonius, the hoplomachus.

First Sword is a free-to-play game available for Android, iOS, Blackberry, Facebook, and web-based browser in November, 2013.  In directly related news, I will soon be posting a call for authors interested in selling ebooks of all lengths through the in-game retail medium described in the linked article.

Mailvox: of Game Informer and Calvin Klein

Conan asks my opinion about some old friends:

Have you ever met the group at Game Informer?  I could ask many questions, like how y’all mixed (as they come across as SWPL in their mag) but not really that important and probably boring anyhow.

We got along exceedingly well.  Paul was Big Chilly’s younger brother’s best friend, so I used to see him all the time at Big Chilly’s house when we were in high school.  Andy and Paul usually came to our parties at the Digital Ghetto, and I still have pictures of me at one of Andy’s band concerts.  Big Chilly and I didn’t actually mix with them all that much professionally, however, since they were console and we were PC.  I don’t think they ever wrote about our stuff, whereas CGW did, although they knew all about it and sometimes played the pre-alpha stuff when they were over.

In all the years I knew them, and hung out with them, I can’t remember once ever discussing anything political with either Andy or Paul.  We talked about games, music, girls, and botany projects, but never politics.  I suppose we all had too much in common.

If I recall correctly, Andy made some noises about me writing for GI ages and ages ago, but since I was in the St. Paul Paper and nationally syndicated in my own right as a game reviewer at the time, it wasn’t something that ever interested me.  To be honest, we tended to think of their magazine as a cool little thing, but not a truly big deal like CGW or Electronic Entertainment.  I wasn’t always clear on how it was different than, say, Nintendo Power.  I remember it being really, really, thin, actually, since it was put out by a game rental operation or something like that.

It’s amusing that Andy is a bigger deal in the industry than any of us now, although Micron is doing well as the audio director at Epic.  I’m absolutely pleased for Andy.  He did a remarkable job in building up that magazine from almost nothing and he’s one of the few people about whom I have literally nothing negative to say.  I mean, quite literally, nothing.

Paul was a very funny guy in a quiet way.  The kind of guy who would say something with a totally straight face and you’d suddenly start laughing a few moments later when you realized what he’d said. He was also astonishingly good-looking and somewhat embarrassed by it.  A funny story about him: Joel West, the Calvin Klein model, was a friendly acquaintance of mine and accompanied me to the Game Informer offices one day.  After meeting Paul, Joel told him he could have a lucrative career in modeling and should consider coming to New York with Joel to meet with Calvin Klein.

Paul just looked at him as if he was completely and utterly insane.  He didn’t even say anything, he just snorted and shook his head.  Joel didn’t try to argue with him, Paul was clearly no more inclined to pursue a career in underwear modeling than one in infant cannibalism. His ALS and death at 38 was just ridiculously tragic and unfair.

It’s all in the perspective

The fourth image is the one I find most amusing. Unless you play ASL, you can’t truly appreciate the level of awe with which ASL players are regarded in the wargaming community, or understand the suspicions which other gamers tend to harbor concerning wargamers.  On the one hand, the ability and commitment required to master a game of its encyclopedic complexity is, quite rightly, deemed impressive, bordering on insanity.  On the other, there is an idea that the average ASLer is just a little bit too enthusiastic about those 8-3-8 assault troops, especially if he happens to have sprung for those cool black counters provided by Heat of Battle.  For some reason, people who grasp that playing WoW doesn’t make you an elf don’t always seem to understand that playing the role of a German tactician doesn’t make you a Nazi.

I tend to find it more than a little amusing that the only site from which I’ve ever been banned was the wargame site ConSimWorld, when, in response to a discussion about the “right-wing” Nazis, I posted the complete text of the Munich Manifesto.

But I was rather proud of Ender this morning.  When I showed him the latest version of the forthcoming Selenoth-based game, he immediately identified the 1981 Avalon Hill game from which I’d taken the basic hit-damage mechanism.