Author: Anthony Salter

Name That Game 93: Dig for Exotics!

May 10, 2013
Name That Game!
7 Comments

America has a habit of creating new media and then getting completely surpassed in the use of that media by other countries.

Rock & Roll was invented in the US; the greatest Rock & Roll band of all time? The Beatles, a bunch of Brits. Oh, you don’t like the Beatles? Who would be your number one? The Rolling Stones? Black Sabbath? Led Zeppelin? Queen? The Police? Cream?

America invented animation but ghettoized it into nothing but kiddie fare; other countries like Japan took the medium and did incredible things with it.

America invented video games, and while America has produced many fine video games, other countries like have taken this ball and run like crazy with it.

And this is the subject of today’s Name That Game!

None of the following ten games were conceived of or developed in the United States. Can you name the games, and even better, their countries of origin?

1. This first-person shooter, a welcome throwback to the brainless fun of game like Wolfenstein 3D and DOOM, had you fighting hordes of enemies in exotic locals. The game is completely crazy – early in the game you fight enemies with bombs for hands.

2. This seminal third-person action-adventure game combined excellent level design and fiendish puzzles with some slightly-frustrating combat. It also had one of the first major female protagonists.

3. This action-adventure game resurrected a long-moribund series by updating it with 3D graphics and gameplay and adding an excellent feature that allowed you to manipulate time. This acted as both a wow-factor and an excellent anti-frustration feature.

4. This incredibly sprawling RPG was based on a series of successful books. It had an interesting combo-based combat system, systems to both craft potions and upgrade your weapons, tons of quests and sidequests to complete, and the ability to bang a whole bunch of different women.

5. This slightly more realistic take on the third-person stealth-action genre spawned a host of sequels. It combined excellent gameplay with an interesting plot and excellent voice acting. And silent takedowns. God, I love silent takedowns.

6. This action-adventure game combined Zelda-style gameplay and a few stealth sequences with a surprisingly deep plot despite its cartoony presentation.

7. This strategy-sim game series starts you with a single ship and tasks you with finding an unoccupied island rich in resources and building a thriving colony. As the game progresses you’ll have to manage multiple colonies on multiple islands, using shipping lanes to ferry needed goods from one island to the next to keep all colonies successful.

8. This first-person shooter series is famous for having incredible physics and graphics that will make even the best computers melt trying to keep up. The actual gameplay quality has also improved as the series progressed.

9. This is the most popular puzzle game in the world. Bar none.

10. This series of cerebral, historical games combines turn-based action on a larger map with real-time strategy in individual battles. It’s also notable for being pretty darn hard, thus it has a fairly rabid fanbase.

Good luck! If you win, I’ll name the next country I found after you!

Name That Game 92 – Signature Style

May 2, 2013
Cool PeopleName That Game!
14 Comments

Just like any other sort of artist, a lot of game developers have wells that they like to revisit. Sometimes it becomes possible to know who (or what studio) made a game just by watching some of the gameplay. (Though this can get difficult if a lot of other developers start biting their style.)

But sometimes a developer simply transcends and a mechanic, theme or combination becomes a signature of a particular developer.

Below I list ten styles for you to match with their creators. How many can you name?

1. This company made a game with a signature over-the-top art style featuring all-out war between elves, dwarves, men, and orcs. They then moved on to make a very similar game set in the far future between hulking marines in power armor, inscrutable glowing aliens, and nearly-unstoppable assimiliating alien bugs. They then went on to write an MMO based on the first game series.

2. This developer loves little semi-autonomous people and puts them in practically every game he makes – and he’s been making games for many decades. While he usually designs his games around the concept, he isn’t above shoehorning them into games where they don’t strictly belong.

3. This developer, choosing to work in the oeuvre of the text adventure, created some of the most fun, wacky and memorable game situations that had been seen at the time. His games also tended to be less difficult than other text adventures (even those created by the same company), allowing players to experience more of his games. EDIT: It has been impressed upon me that there is more than one designer who fits this description; I will accept either as an appropriate answer.

4. This developer took a board wargame, programmed it into a computer, then sold it as his own. (Seriously, the designers of the original boardgame should have sued the pants off him.) Since the game dealt with science fiction man-to-man combat and was fairly technical, computerizing the game made it a lot easier to play. He has since spent his entire career updating and remaking that first game in various genres.

5. This developer got his start making games for the Commodore VIC-20 when all of his friends were working on the ZX Spectrum. He pounded out lots of little fast-action games, some of which were krep but at least one of which is considered a classic. His trademarks are synesthesia and…uh, yaks.

6. This developer got his start by taking top-down, tile-based roleplaying games like Rogue, setting them outside and using tiled graphics to represent terrain, monsters and characters instead of numbers and letters. As his skill grew, he began to focus on the world simulation of the games he was making. Each one grew more and more detailed, with NPCs that had branching dialog trees, much more detailed (though still top-down and tiled) graphics and game worlds, and, ultimately, more thought-provoking plots than competing games.

7. This developer has worked on graphic adventures, action games, adventure games and real-time strategy games. His schtick is to make whatever game he’s working on completely bizarre and usually hilarious.

8. This developer pioneered both single-screen and online multiplayer games years – perhaps decades – before their time. Also famous for being one of the first transgendered game designers in history.

9. This developer wrote the first smash hit for the ZX Spectrum, then followed it up with an even bigger hit. He then disappeared, not only from the gaming scene but from society in general. It took years to find him, and it turned out that after blowing all his money he had just wandered around Europe living in communes, planting flowers, and working at fish canning plants.

10. This company had the goal of making movie-style experiences on computers and consoles – a difficult task given how primitive the machines were at the time. Their goal required them to become pioneers of game graphics and their games usually looked better than any of their contemporaries. Gameplay usually consisted of movie-style scenes with some degree of interactivity interspersed within a larger strategy or resrouce management game.

Name That Game 91 – You’re Not Supposed to Be Here

April 19, 2013
Name That Game!
10 Comments

Like in any other storytelling media, a common mechanic is to have the main character be a fish out of water. A stranger in a strange land. A victim of the timey-wimey ball. It’s a great way to associate the player with the character they are playing – when the game starts, both have the same amount of knowledge about the game world.

In the following ten games, you play as a character transported to a new world. Can you name the games – and even better, can you name the worlds they are sent to?

1. A scientist working with a particle accelerator is suddenly transported to a brutally dangerous, alien world. He is captured by one alien race and escapes by befriending another.

2. A humble roadie is sent into a world where every heavy metal album cover has come to life and gone to war.

3. A patron of a renaissance fair is suddenly thrust into a classical fantasy world where his moral decisions become incredibly important.

4. A young boy and his friends are drawn through a magical book into a fantasy world where they must become mercenary soldiers while trying to find each other and find a way home.

5. Three astronauts – a soldier, an archaeologist and a reporter – are zapped through time and space to an alien world. They must fix broken alien technology, learn about the culture, and fight the temptation of immortality in order to get home.

6. A young boy uses crazy technology to travel to another world dominated by shadow creatures in order to save his dog. Or does he?

7. After its mothership is destroyed, a spacecraft scrambles away…only to be trapped in space warped by someone.

8. A young woman, born of a world of technology, accidentally transports herself to a parallel world of magic. She is then tasked with bringing balance back to both worlds.

9. You find a book with odd pictures, which transports you to a strange island. Other books lead to other worlds, and only by unraveling the secrets of the books and their authors can you get home.

10. A comic book artist, working late one night, has his current artwork struck by lightning. This causes him to trade places with the villain of his comic, who then spends the rest of the game drawing enemies for the artist to fight.

Good luck! If you win I promise I won’t cast my next experimental teleport spell anywhere near you. Or think about you while casting it. Wait…

Aw.

April 18, 2013
Cool People
0 Comment

Richard Le Parmentier, who played Admiral Motti in Star Wars but much more importantly signed my cheesehead, has died.

I’m sad now.

JRPGS (Jewel’s RPG System)

March 24, 2013
FamilyGame DesignGamesRole Playing
0 Comment

I ran a game for my youngest child, Jewel, this weekend. She’s eight, and in the second grade.

Now, just like her older sister, she has been immersed in Dungeons & Dragons and roleplaying concepts in general for her whole life. Hitpoints, mana, elves, orcs, swords, sorcery – she’s seen it all in video games and movies. Ever since she saw me buy the D&D Basic Set for her older sister Megan, she’s been asking if she could play Dungeons & Dragons.

And I’d been putting her off, for two reasons. First, she couldn’t do the math. Second, she really didn’t have the attention span.

Now that she’s eight I felt she was ready to experience roleplaying in some fashion, but I still didn’t want to let her play Dungeons & Dragons. Why? It’s just too heavy and confusing for a young roleplayer. In order to play that particular game she’d need to be able to read and do math at a much higher level than she can now.

But I felt that she was more than ready for the roleplaying experience itself, especially since she would have her older sister helping her along. What I needed was a simple, easy-to-understand roleplaying system. My goals were:

* Based on 2D6; I didn’t want to introduce polyhedral dice yet
* Low modifiers to make the math easier
* Fast-playing. I mean, really fast-playing. No charts or tables for the players.

Now, I had written up what I thought was a pretty good system based on the old Traveller rules. It had rules for buying stats and skills and general task resolution. I asked Megan to read it and she said something brilliant. She noted that high stats gave bonuses and low stats penalties when buying skills, and asked the question, “Why are there skills at all? Why don’t we just add or subtract those stat bonuses when we’re trying to do something related to that stat?”

“Well,” I huffed, “it would mean that someone with a high Intelligence, for example, would be able to do everything Intelligence-related well. They’d be able to program a computer, solve a Rubik’s cube, do theoretical physics…”

“Oh, please,” she retorted. “You effectively pick what you’re good at when you pick your class. If you’re trying to do something very different from your class description then you’d get a penalty. There isn’t any real reason to have skills; they just make things more complicated.”

I’d already had a nagging suspicion that the system I was coming up with was more complicated than it needed to be, and buying skills was one of the worst parts. Megan’s one question allowed me to greatly reduce the complexity of the system without it being any less fun. She is definitely my daughter.

I hereby present the system for your perusal and critique.

JRPGS (Jewel’s RPG System)

Characters

Characters consist of five stats – Strength (STR), Dexterity (DEX), Intelligence(INT), Endurance (END) and Personality (PER). Stats range from 2 to 12. Characters start with 7 (an average score) in each stat and players take away and add points to stats until they’re happy with what they have. Every point of a stat above 7 gives a bonus and every point below 7 gives you a penalty. Characters have (END * 3) hitpoints and (INT * 3) mana points to begin with.

Examples:

I asked Jewel what kind of character she wanted to play and she said a wizard (of course). To make things even easier, I asked Jewel what two stats she felt would be most useful to her character and she picked Intelligence and Personality, surprising me. Then I asked her what two stats she wanted to give up; she chose Strength and Endurance. So I simply gave her a +2 for the ones she picked and a -2 for the ones she gave up. I gave her three times her Intelligence in mana and three times her Endurance in hitpoints so, she ended up with this:

Name: Nyan
Race: High Elf
Class: Wizard

STR: 5 (-2)
DEX: 7
INT: 9 (+2)
END: 5 (-2)
PER: 9 (+2)

Hitpoints: 15
Mana: 27

Her sister Megan wanted to play a rogue, and she juggled her numbers herself to get this:

Name: Dahlia
Race: Half-Elf
Class: Rogue

STR: 7
DEX: 10 (+3)
INT: 4 (-3)
END: 5 (-2)
PER: 9 (+2)

Hitpoints: 15

Task Resolution

The basic throw to succeed at a task is 8+ on two six-sided dice. Based on the type of task you are resolving, you will add or subtract whatever stat bonus or penalty the DM thinks is relevant to that task.

For instance, Jewel’s spellcasting would pretty obviously be an INT-based task, so in order to successfully cast a spell she would roll two dice, add her +2 INT bonus and try to roll 8 or higher.

The GM can make tasks more difficult two ways – they can assign penalties or they can have tasks be opposed. Penalties are fairly obvious, so let’s talk about opposed tasks.

An opposed task is one where another character is trying to stop you. A good example would be attempting to lie to someone convincingly. You would roll a Personality task to do so – if you roll 8+ then you have spoken well and there’s a chance the other character will believe you. But then they roll against their Intelligence. If they also roll 8+ then your attempt fails – they’re too smart for you.

Combat

I initially thought about having all combat rolls be opposed – a player would roll a Dexterity task to see if they hit, then the enemy would roll a Dexterity task to see if they could dodge the attack. I realized this would be slow and frustrating (I could hear Jewel saying “But I hit!” in my mind).

So melee attacks are Dexterity tasks; succeed and you hit. A basic attack does 1d6 worth of damage. If you have a Strength bonus, you add that bonus to your damage. Damage can be reduced by wearing armor; one point of armor negates one point of damage from each attack.

Magic

This required the most work and imagination on my part. I absolutely did not want a huge list of spells with their effects cluttering up everything so I gave Jewel a basic attack spell and a sleep spell and went from there.

What I did was allow her to tell me what she wanted to do, and then based on how effective that task was I would assign it a mana cost of 1, 2 or 3. (If I felt it was too game-breaking, I didn’t allow it at all.)

She would then roll an Intelligence task to cast the spell. Her attack spell would do the same damage as a weapon attack – 1d6 – plus however much mana she used to cast it.

Armed with this system, I was ready to run Jewel’s first roleplaying session. Since this is already a bit long, I’ll save that for the next post…

Remember Me

March 12, 2013
Games
4 Comments

Why hadn’t I heard about this game before?!

Wow, this just feels like an amalgam of my favorite games. Third-person action like Prince of Persia/Assassin’s Creed/Splinter Cell. Combat reminds me of Batman: Arkham City. Hacking your enemies? Syndicate.

And puzzles! Puzzles where you screw around with people’s brains!

Hopefully that’s just a starter puzzle and the ones in the game get tougher and less directed.

In short, this game is out real soon (June 4) and I hope to have another Xbox 360 by then. It seems like a good game that might fly under a lot of peoples’ radar. And hey, new IP is always good.

42

March 6, 2013
FamilyFriends
3 Comments

Well, maybe this is the year I figure out the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything.

Now Arriving At Your Destination

March 5, 2013
CareerFamilyFriendsUncategorized
3 Comments

So, last Friday around 5 PM we pulled into The Lakes at Deerfield Beach, an apartment complex here in Florida. Weary, exhausted, we went inside and signed some papers and handed over a huge wad of cash…and became the proud renters of a beautiful new apartment.

Then we just had to get all the stuff inside. We had called ahead and hired some movers but we’d told them that we would be there at 1 PM and we were really, really late.

But they were still there and they moved us in. I tipped them big; it was a lifesaver.

Then it was a matter of juggling finances (and ending up having to borrow some money) so we made our March rent on time. Then it was just time to wait until I started working.

And yesterday I went to my new job for the first time. Everyone there seems very nice, the corporate culture seems laid back (and I need that after General Motors, honestly). The work looks like something I can do.

Here’s a thing though…I hadn’t slept much the night before (I do have an anxiety disorder, after all). So by lunch I was dragging.

So I had a Coke.

(gasps from the audience)

Yes, I deliberately drank caffeine for the first time in over four years. Other than the small amounts of caffeine in chocolate, I had not consumed any since my heart problems started in October of 2008.

Now, I had already asked my doctor years ago, and he had said that a caffeinated soda a day wouldn’t hurt me. In fact, a doctor once put me on modafinil, a much strong stimulant than caffeine! (I didn’t realize what it was at the time.) But I was afraid to do it until today. Today, I felt like it was necessary for me to be at my best.

And the worst part was, it worked. I felt great! I got lots of stuff done. I felt like things might be okay now.

I was kind of half-hoping that it wouldn’t work, so I could tell myself, hey, I tried it, it doesn’t work, no need to be tempted any more. But it did.

I guess programmers really are machines that turn caffeine into code. So I guess I’ll be having a (single) soda each day to fuel that.

I just have to be careful. Now, there is still no clinical research showing that stimulants cause heart attacks, but when you tell the paramedics that you drink a lot of caffeine and are taking pseudophedrine and they look at each other knowingly, that’s evidence enough for me.

Wow, this got off course. The upshot is, we’re here and it looks like we’re staying. My first-day jitters are over and it looks like, for a while at least, I’m going to be working for a living and we’ll be getting back to what normal people consider normal.

Thank you to all my friends and family who helped us. It really does feel like waking from a nightmare.

Travellin’ Family Circus

February 19, 2013
FamilyUncategorized
2 Comments

Today is moving day. We spent all last week finding a place and late Friday we finally got one to accept us. We finalized the deal yesterday and since we wanted the earliest move-in possible (for obvious reasons) we need to be there on Friday.

That means we are leaving today. The big stuff is packed but there’s lots of loose little stuff (like there always is). Fortunately the movers don’t get here until 10:30.

Then it’s off to begin a twenty-hour-long trip to Flowida, baybee!

At Last

February 7, 2013
CareerFamilyUncategorized
6 Comments

This must be what it feels like to make parole.

This evening, I found out that I passed my background check and I will be starting work at Pace America, in Boca Raton, Florida, on March 4th…two days before my birthday 🙂

We got a bit of money from our tax return and hopefully it will be enough to get us down there. If anyone knows any good & cheap apartment complexes near Boca Raton, please let us know!