Getting it on the Cheap

As I have recently moved, I find myself having to be a little more frugal with money. As gaming can be expensive and is a non-essential expenditure, I've been looking into ways to get my fix for less, without turning to piracy!

The first way is obvious, prioritise your wants and or wait for sales. Over the last month a large number of triple A titles have been released and of these the only one I've bought is Skyward Sword, although I did receive a free copy of Arkham City. Now I would have liked to have also gotten Skyrim and will eventually pick it up, but it will just have to wait.

If however you are the kind of person who likes to have lots of new games then you should consider supporting the indie gaming scene. The reason I say this is that not only are indie games cheaper than AAA titles, but indie developers support the community that supports them, and as such you can often find bundles of their games for sale on specialist websites. The most well known of these sites is the Humble Bundle, where you choose how much money you pay, and how it gets split between the games makers and charity. Recently a new website, Indie Royal, has started selling bundles of games with the price starting low and increasing with each bundle sold, the price can be driven down by someone paying more than the current price. These websites will usually result in you picking up the whole bundle for the price of a single indie game.

Another option is to become a retro gamer. Last generation consoles sell for about 1/10th the price of current  consoles and their games are also significantly cheaper (there are a few exceptions to this rule for example Suikoden II). The important thing to watch out for when retro gaming is resellers, these people buy the cheap copies of the games and then mark them up. I strongly recommend doing your research, otherwise you might end up paying £20 for a players choice edition of Super Mario Sunshine (I just checked ebay and there is one up there for that price) when you really shouldn't be paying much more then £5.

My final way to help keep your price of gaming down is to make some friends. Websites like Meetup let you find groups of like minded gamers and even if their are no active groups in your area you can also search for individuals. Although I have mainly focused on video games, some of these principles can also be applied to board and table top games.

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword (Impressions)

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword recently released and has received some very positive reviews, including the claim of 'greatest Zelda game ever created' from IGN. Let me start by clarifying that this is not a review as I haven't finished the game, but rather am about 1/3 of the way through. However, as that represents about 15 hours of play time I decided that I would give my impression of how the game is shaping up.

Graphics: This game is gorgeous, the cell shaded look from Wind Waker combined with the more realistic character proportions from Twilight Princess combine to create a water colour effect which just demonstrates that good art direction doesn't depend on resolution! At no point have I ever been confused by what I'm looking at or what elements I can interact with.

Music: As soon as I first started playing I was grabbed by the music. The game features an orchestrated musical score, which incorporates leitmotifs and past melodies, and creates a very memorable musical experience. The game also includes a CD of orchestral arrangements of music from Zelda's 25 year history.

Controls: There has been some controversy regarding the controls after Tom McShea from Gamespot gave the game a 7.5 review score strongly criticising the controls. Part of what made his comments so controversial is that he didn't describe the controls correctly, claiming that the sensor bar was involved in aiming, when in fact it is all handled by the gyroscope inside the Wiimote. He was also critical of the 1:1 swordplay claiming that often his motions would miss-register. The only time I have experienced any control issues is when I have been trying to use the sword with just a flick of the wrist rather than using my whole arm (I did this quite a lot at the start as this is how most other Wii games control). Once you realise that this game controls differently to most other games you have played then the depth and immersion of the scheme is realised (I often find myself standing for boss battles). Actually my one criticism of the controls is that sometimes you are not sure if you are playing the game to experience the story or as a sort of tech demo of what can be achieved through good motion controls.

Story: The story follows the standard Zelda fare with you needing to rescue the princess and defeat evil, with a few twists that I'm not going to go into as I don't want to spoil anyone. The pacing in the game is quite slow compared to most other modern games, you seem to be almost encouraged to take your time and look around before solving the puzzles that are presented to you. For people who have played Zelda games in the past they will be use to this, however, if someone who is new to the franchise sees that the game is classified as action-adventure they might be surprised by this slower pace.

Innovations: While the game doesn't stray too much from the main Zelda formula there are some welcome changes. Firstly, there are now many more save points, and when you return to an area you can choose any of these locations as your start point. Secondly, the map you are carrying is much more detailed, after you visit someone or something it is recorded on your map, also you are able to place beacon markers to help you find what you are looking for. Thirdly, while Link and friends are still silent you are presented with multiple options during conversations, this is especially noticeable when you talk to Fi and can ask for a reminder of what you are supposed to do, a hint about how to go about it, or for rumours (each of these has a couple of sub-options). And finally, the controls but I've already mentioned them.

Nostalgia: I've played Zelda, Zelda II, A Link to the Past, Link's Awakening, Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask, Wind Waker, Twilight Princess, and Phantom Hourglass so for me there were many small jokes and reference that I greatly appreciated. Right at the start the game talks about how they will tell you a story that has been retold time and time again, later on you meet a character who uses the line 'it's a secret to everybody', and I'm just waiting for someone to tell me that 'it's dangerous to go alone'. Link is still his usual anti-social self breaking things and sleeping on people's beds, sometimes with them still in it, but now the town folk sort of call him on it with a side quest revolving around paying for the damage he caused. I do wonder how someone who hasn't played a Zelda game before would find Skyward Sword, as for me it was exactly what I expected and wanted, but could easily see someone being confused by the way that various things work and the more rustic game design.

Closing Comments: I am greatly enjoying Skyward Sword, it is exactly what I want in a Zelda game, with just enough innovations to prevent it from feeling like I am playing Ocarina of Time again. The game that I am most reminded of when playing is Wind Waker, and that's not due to the art style but rather the way you fly around Skyloft visiting different islands and dungeons; thankfully it's much quicker to get around than in Wind Waker. I think about the slow pacing and believe that if you changed things to provide a full warp system it would detract from the sense of adventure and trivialise a lot of the experience, maybe if they created a faster paced more action orientated game then a quick travel system would be appropriate, but then again I could just go buy Skyrim if that is what I wanted.

No One to Blame But Yourself

A couple of days ago I did something I haven't done in a long time, I played a game of chess (three to be precise). Chess is an interesting game in that there is absolutely no luck involved, both players always have all information about the game state and what moves are possible available at all times;so when you lose it is entirely your fault.

I lost both of the first two games due to a mixture of not having played for a while and also when I did last play it was against novice opponents, which meant I had gotten use to the types of moves and mistakes that these players make and as such made poor and/or risky moves expecting them to work anyway. When it came to the third game I had finally come to the realisation that I couldn't just walk it in and would actually need to pay attention and think. I'm pleased to say that doing so got me a win and also made me think about a couple of things.

The first was how you can get into the habit of playing your opponent rather than the game. I often see this in Magic the Gathering (yes another Magic story), were new players despair at being paired against top ranked played, and then the way they play comes to reflect a feeling of inevitability about the game. Sometimes a lack of experience works in a player's favour as they don't notice when their opponent is representing a threat, make an attack a more experienced player wouldn't, and end up winning as the stronger player was bluffing.

The second thing I was thinking about was whether being black or white was an advantage, as each time one of us won we were playing black. In general, the consensus is the opposite of what we observed with white being considered to have a slight advantage (usually somewhere in the vicinity of a 52-56% win rate), but this only applies to high level players who make few mistakes. This issue of a player going first or second being advantageous is found in many games. In Go black, which has the first move, is given a points penalty to balance out the advantage of playing first. While in Magic the starting player is penalised by having to skip their first draw step. Even in games of pure chance there can be an advantage to going first, for example in Snakes and Ladders if each player rolls identical numbers throughout the game (while this is unlikely the average of their die rolls will be similar) the player that went first will win.

Ultimately what I really learnt from playing chess again was that without regular practice, against players of a similar or slightly higher ability than you, your skills become rusty and your play level decreases.

Just Do Whatever!

With Minecraft due to be released tomorrow it seems like a good time to reflect on my experiences with this extremely open ended game. Minecraft is one of if not the most open ended game available; it simply drops the player without instructions, quests, or goals, into a world where they can gather resources, make tools, explore, build structures, and construct machines (I have seen videos of people who have built simple CPUs in Minecraft, so technically it would be possible to write code for these very rather slow computers and play a video game within the video game). The freedom to build whatever you feel like has seen some very impressive projects undertaken and even resulted in the invention of a new sport called Spleef.

I originally purchased Minecraft back when it was still in alpha after hearing someone in the card shop excitedly talking about having found redstone, I had heard of the game before this but hadn't been motivated enough to check it out. Before downloading the game I watched a couple of videos on YouTube so I already had a basic idea of what to do during your first day, but still decided to venture outside with painful results.

The first structure I built was a sandcastle, I had to use dirt inside to hold the roof up. In the basement of the castle was my mineshaft, furnace, workbench, and a path to an underwater observatory; later following the update to 1.2.0 I added a Nether portal. The only big problem with the sandcastle was spiders would make their way onto the roof, and in the event of a creeper explosion half the structure would cave in.

Deciding I needed something to look at from the parapets I built a small village on the other side of the water; this village had one house, a farm, a mine, and a lighthouse. I then built a nether portal and used it to get as far away from spawn as possible. At this new location I build a giant fire pit using netherrack (I ended up having to put it out as it made the game unstable) and a glass pyramid, before making the long trek back to spawn. It seems odd to admit that there was a feeling of excitement and 'I'm home' when the village lighthouse came into view.

I then started playing on an online server with some friends; in order to encourage building we started out with the game world set to peaceful. I built a small house, a shop, and a mine with a secret entrance under the town jetty. The structures being built by the other players were much more impressive, so I began to experiment with red stone circuits and pixel art. Then the sever crashed and the world corrupted.

This forced us to start a new game world, this time we included monsters. Once again I built a store, played with red stone (note blocks had now been added so music was played as people entered the main village), and did some pixel art. Unfortunately, due to forces beyond our control the server died during an earthquake induced power cut, again corrupting the world. Having learnt our lesson from the last time, we had a backup but as it was several days old we decided to once again shift to a new world.

With the move to the next world my interest in the game started to wane, I felt like I was just rebuilding the same things over and over and that eventually we would again have to shift and anything I made would be lost. However, now with the full release of Minecraft due I am once again enthused, and am looking forward to again playing in an online server.

The Rise and Fall of the JRPG

Back in the 80's and 90's the Japanese Role-playing Game (JRPG) genre was huge, at the top of which was the Final Fantasy series. Other notable JRPG games from around this time were the Dragon Quest series (published as Dragon Warrior in the US), Pokemon, Earthbound, The Secret of Mana, the Soul Blazer series, and Chrono Trigger. However, as time moved on consumer taste started to shift towards Western developed games, and although many JRPGs continued to receive positive reviews from critics they just didn't have the same sales power as they had in the past. I believe that the original popularity of the JRPG came from the depth of story and character advancement that they offered the player; most other games at this time were made in an arcade style with trying to get further than before being the main incentive to keep playing. The generally accepted consensus for the JRPG's drop in popularity is that their mechanics became old and tiresome, so let's take a look at some of these mechanics.

Random Encounters: You are walking along trying to advance to story when suddenly random monsters that you don't care about jump out and attack you! Once defeated you are free to continue on your way, that is until the next random filler monster jumps out. This is one of the most common complaints levelled at JRPGs, but when you consider the limitations of the time there was no way to script every encounter in the game. Unfortunately random encounters still make appearances in many modern games, with justifications such as they enable you to advance in level if you need to. One of the easiest way to work around random encounters and still enable additional levelling is to have the monsters visible on the map and leave it up to the player to decide if they wish to engage them.

Grinding: While character advancement is generally fun, forcing a player to fight filler monsters for no reason other than increasing their level enough to advance the story is frustrating. Sometimes people make the complaint that you can be 'over-levelled' as a result of grinding making the main story too easy. In Tales of Symphonia there is a random side quest monster that you are at least five levels to low to even have a chance of defeating the first time you encounter the area it is in, leaving the player with two options, either comeback later or grind until you can defeat it. Due to the ability to set all the characters to full auto grinding can be done with minimal input from the player, making the whole experience rather pointless.

Random Drops: The 'Old Man' wants six MacGuffins which are found on 'Monster X', sometimes. These types of quests are generally quite bland and boring and simply serve as a way to add padding to the game. Sometimes it gets even more stupid, for example in World of Warcraft only some spiders have legs and/or eyes when you try and loot them. The other way that random drops are used/abused is that sometimes a super rare item will only be found on a specific monster, for example The Sword of Kings in Earthbound is a 1:128 drop from a Starman Super.

Railroading: Generally speaking JRPGs force the player to travel through the game along a set path, some option minor quests may also beincluded but for the most part you are going to go from point A to point B. Even Chrono Trigger, famed for having multiple endings, forced the player to move through the game in a set order as going to the wrong time zone generally ends with the characters being killed by something which is too strong for them or simply not advancing the plot.

Lack of Regular Save Points: This was another limitation of the early consoles, but still some games persist in using it. I suppose that the threat of dying can add tension to a play session but losing an hour or more worth of progress is just frustrating.

Being Weird: This final complaint isn't a problem at all as it gives the games a unique Japanese feel and has helped to ensure that they continue to be played even if it is as a niche market.

What Happened to Facebook?

In addition to keeping track of friends and family, Facebook also enables users to indulge in a little casual gaming to help pass the time. Originally these games were all very simple 'click the button to get some set outcome' affairs with people who wanted to click the button more often having to pay some real world money for the privilege. Farmville was the king of these early days with its 'click the button to choose what new buttons to make and where to put them, and then get your friends to click those buttons' system having enough window dressing to make it seem like a deeper experience than it actually was. And so it was that after a brief dabble I gave up on Facebook games, that is until I saw a notification saying 'your friend is play CivWorld'.

I've always enjoyed occasionally playing the Civilisation games (while I always enjoy playing them I just can't ever seem to bring my self to play through them more than twice, the exception being the original Civilisation and Colonisation on the Amiga) and thought I'd check it out. I was pleasantly surprised, rather than running a whole nation you are given control of a single city which you decide they layout of and also which resources it will generate. While basic resource gathering is still a simple click the button experience, CivWorld manages to make that the minor part of the game. Most of your play time involves gathering additional resources through minigames, joining a nation, and taking part in votes to determine which path to victory your nation should pursue. While I did enjoy playing the game I still had the same old problem of after playing through twice I couldn't really be bothered playing it again (yes unlike most other Facebook games CivWorld has an end).

I next saw that people were playing The Sims Social and again my interest was peaked. Much like with CivWorld I was pleasantly surprised by this game. The main differences between The Sims Social and a normal Sims game is that you only control a single Sim and can only carry out a set number of actions per unit time (unless you are willing to part with real world money). In addition to the usual teach your Sim skills to get money and upgrade their house, the game sets lots of small goals to keep you playing and interested. What ultimately killed my desire to play The Sims Social was that it was too popular and I was receiving so many notifications and requests from other players that it just got annoying (I know that you can adjust how these messages are handled but they should default to off and not make me put in the extra effort to remove them).

The final game I will talk about is War Metal: Tyrant an on-line CCG. What makes Tyrant enjoyable is that it has a main quest arc which, as you play through, gives you more and better cards; in addition to this you can battle other players, form factions, and take part in tournaments that have in-game prize support. While the actual game is neither ground breaking nor revolutionary it is enjoyable enough, its biggest problem is that the game usually comes down to who can build the most momentum in the first few turns, making the second half of the match often a forgone conclusion.

I am pleased to say that the quality of games on Facebook has greatly improved over the years and I look forward to seeing what the future holds for this gaming medium. I just hope that future games are less intrusive and find a way to do away with the play limits for non-subscribers (maybe in-game product placement would fix this, although The Sims Social has both product placement and energy limits).

How to get Lucky

Have you ever noticed how some people just seem to be lucky? The reason for this is twofold, firstly the Barnum Effect (people tend to remember positive results) and secondly these 'lucky' people set them selves up to win against the odds. What I mean by this second point is that some people are good at recognising when they are no longer able to win in the conventional way and so adapt their play style to favour a much less common victory condition.

In Magic: TheGathering (yes another Magic example) we often refer to someone getting lucky and drawing the card they need as 'top decking'. People who are considered good at top decking are actually good at adapting their play style to maximise the number of cards in their deck that can win them the game. Here's an example from a game I played, I was loosing and my opponent had just declared all his creatures as attackers and while the damage that they would deal to me wouldn't make me lose it would mean that I would lose on their next turn, I had one card in hand which was a removal spell. Now you might think that I should destroy the largest of the attacking creatures, but in my view that would only mean I die in two turns instead of one, also I know that there is a creature in my deck that if drawn when they have no blocker will win me the game, so I decide to take the damage. In their second main phase my opponent casts a blocker and goes to end the turn, at this point I use my removal spell to get rid of the blocker. Now because I believe in top decking with style, I untapped my land drew the top card of my library and placed it face down on the table without looking at it, I then announced the creature that would win me the game, tapped the appropriate amount of mana and turned the card over revealing the named creature. While I didn't do very well in that tournament, my game was the only one people still remembered a month later.

So did I get lucky? Well yes and no, while the chance of me drawing the required creature was about one in twenty had I not saved the kill spell for the blocker my chance of winning was zero. It was this recognising a way to win and adapting my play style to it that actually won me the game. Let's have another example this time for Cribbage.

It is your opponents crib, they are 4 points from the end and you are 15 points away. You are dealt a hand of A, 4, 6, 6, 10, 10 (the ace and 4 are not suited) and now have to decide which two cards to discard to the crib. Because maths is fun, I can tell that the average points value for the possible hands are:

A, 4, 10, 10: 7.913

6, 6, 10, 10: 5.217

A, 4, 6, 6: 4.696

A, 4, 6, 10: 4.261

4, 6, 6, 10: 4.087

4, 6, 10, 10: 3.347

So if all we want to do is maximise the number of points we get we should keep the A, 4, 10, 10 hand. However, the most this hand could score is 12 (an A, 4, or 10 as the starter) meaning that we would have to score three points during the play to have any chance of winning, which is not very likely as we have to lead. On the other hand the 4, 6, 6, 10 has a two in twenty three chance of being worth 14 points (a five being revealed as the starter) and in this case we would only need to get one point during the pay to win. So the way I view the situation is do you want to definitely lose but keep the margin as small as possible, or take the gamble and either lose by a larger margin or win? So once again we will have had to 'get lucky', but before we can do that we have to identify that our path to victory involves keeping the hand with the second worst average return, and not the one that you would normally want to keep.

Don't Fear the Reaper

Or at least mildly inconvenienced

 Last week I wrote about how permadeath can add tension to a game. It can also add frustration and kill the replay value if you have to go through a long slow introduction period at the beginning of each new game. While permadeath is a lot less common in modern games, back in the 'good old 8bit days' where games were heavily influenced by the arcades it was the norm. Sure some games used a continue system or passwords but there was almost always some serious set back associated with dying.

Jump forward to today and most games try to minimise the inconvenience of death. Quite often they include regular check points to keep the amount of lost progress and time following death minimal; other games use a respawn, rather than reload mechanism, where you are returned to life at or near the point of death in exchange for some kind of penalty. I find looking at the different ways developers approach player death interesting, especially as it can have a major affect on the feel of a game.

In Bioshock I find that the respawn near to where you die with no penalty (and sometimes even a benefit in the form of more health or eve) to greatly weaken the experience. When I first started playing it, I found the whole game world creepy, the splicers calling out in the darkness and the boom of a Big Daddy's feet as it walks the halls gave a fantastic atmosphere. And then I died, which resulted in me promptly popping back to life in the room next door with health, eve and the damage I had inflicted still on the enemy that had killed me. So when I had my first Big Daddy fight, rather than wasting health packs and eve stims I just let him kill me, and ran back to continue the fight. This lack of penalty had turned the 'big bad' into a timid kitten and as a result I find the game most engrossing and exciting when not fighting. Borderlands has a similar respawn system except it docs some money and heals all the enemies on the map, so you can't just advance by attrition.

It's interesting to note that often 'lets players' (people who record video and commentary of themselves playing a game) often change the rules regarding death, either by making the game easier through cheat systems or harder with restrictions such as one life runs, no healing or no continues. It make me wonder what it would be like to do a permadeath lets play World of Warcraft, especially on a PvP server.