Winning the Wrong Way

About a week ago a new deck called Monogreen Tron started making waves in the 'Modern' format of Magic: The Gathering. What is interesting about this deck is that at first glance it looks to be playing the wrong number of lands. Earlier decks based around the Tron strategy (playing the Urza's lands to generate large amounts of mana) had run around 25 lands, while this deck was only playing 18. The deck works because it has 12 cards that can find a land, 8 cards that can draw a new card for only one mana, and 4 cards that can generate mana. In reality it only has 10 cards with which it can actually win the game and the rest of the deck is devoted to getting the correct lands in play.

This made me thing back to when I first started playing. I had quite a bit of success early on playing 'Limited' format decks with the 'wrong number of lands'. I built my decks with 16 creatures, 16 lands, and 8 other spells. It wasn't until later that I learnt that 17-18 lands is considered the correct number because having the extra land or two helps to make the deck more consistent. By running fewer lands your deck is more likely to have mana problems, but in the event that it doesn't you have one more threat that your opponent so actually have a more powerful deck. Actually some players suggest that if you have an unfavourable match up (the concept of the metagame was described in an earlier post) then you should remove a land to increase the threat density of your deck, and vice versa.

Another misconception that some early players have is that it's okay to keep a hand with 6 or 7 lands in it. Their logic being that the chance of drawing another is low so they'll be fine. In reality you need to consider what actually happens if you do draw another land? The short of it is your opponent gets a free turn. Also you have no control over the order that your non-land cards arrive in, which can often mean that you do nothing besides play lands for the first four turns even though you are drawing non-land cards. This results in your opponent developing their board position and applying pressure while you do nothing.

In truth, the correct answer to how many lands you should play and what hands you should mulligan come down to what's in your deck. A deck that doesn't need large amounts of mana can easily cope with fewer lands. However, when building a deck there is no point in cutting a land to make room for a low impact card, every card you play needs to help you win in some way. Finally there is a deck called 38 Lands which will quite happily keep a six land hand, just as long as they are the right six lands.

The Science Says No

The most recent episode of the show Game Theory discussed the idea that Captain Shepard is a zombie in Mass Effect 2, because he died and was then brought back to life. However, the show then goes on to suggest that this wouldn't have been possible because exposure to the hard vacuum of space would have caused his brain to be destroyed by the eventual boiling of his internal bodily fluids. Normally I would just say it's just a game, it doesn't need to make scientific sense but the gauntlet has been thrown, so here is my rebuttal.

The first thing we need to consider is what happens when a person is exposed to a vacuum? Total Recall would have us believe that they will begin to swell and their eyes will pop out on stalks, but does Hollywood have it right? There are two commonly referenced examples of a human being exposed to extremely low pressures, the first is a NASA test pilot who was exposed to a vacuum of less than one psi (about 7% of normal atmospheric pressure), the test pilot lost conciousness after about 14 seconds. However, pressure was restored and the test pilot regained conciousness at around 50% normal atmospheric pressure and suffered no permanent injury, but did report feeling the saliva on their tongue boil.

The other well known example is Joseph Kittinger's high altitude jump from 31,300 meters. During his assent the pressurization around his right hand failed exposing it to a near vacuum of around 1% normal atmospheric pressure. His hand swelled up to about twice its normal size and became very painful. However, as he fell back towards Earth, his hand returned to its normal size and function. It is important to note that the blood inside his hand did not boil even through at 0.01 atm 37 C is above it's boiling point. The reason being that the skin helps to maintain our internal body pressure so the blood was never exposed to such a low pressure, undoubtedly any sweat on the surface of his hand would have quickly evaporated, much like the saliva on the test pilot's tongue.

So we see that exposure to a vacuum doesn't result in people exploding, or having their internal body fluids instantly start to boil. One possible cause of serious injury would be the lungs rupturing, but this would only occur if you tried to hold your breath. Another commonly held idea about being exposed to space is that is will instantly freeze you. Yes space is cold, but due to the vacuum the two main ways for you to lose body heat are through evaporative cooling, the sweat boiling off your skin will lower your temperature, and by radiation of heat energy, which is a slow process.

My final reason why the ideas expressed in the video are wrong is that if we are to apply hard science to the cut scene where Shepard dies then he is never exposed to a vacuum. How can we tell thing? Well firstly we can hear the sound of the Normandy exploding behind him and sound cannot travel in a vacuum, and secondly we can hear Shepard gasping for air, which is the sound made be air being desperately sucked into his lungs, it there is no air then there is nothing to inflate the lungs so the gasping sound can not be produced (also the whole sound doesn't travel in a vacuum thing again).

In general I don't think it's a good idea to apply science to video games, after all almost every space combat game has the ships handle as though they were fighter planes in an atmosphere (Wing Commander's afterburner system is a major example of this), and all you end up doing is potentially reducing your enjoyment of the game and getting drawn into pointless internet arguments.

Some Grand Lessons

The game map

Several years ago I helped to co-write a Grand Strategy game (imagine a 30-40 player game of Risk). We had written a couple of LARPs in the past and played in several Grand Strategies so we thought it would be quite easy to do this. How wrong we were.

Best Laid Plans
We decided to do a space exploration, combat, and mining game, and right from the start we had several ideas for how to fix problems we had seen in earlier games. The first was speeding up game play, it was not uncommon for some games to end with only three complete game turns being finished because combat and issuing orders took too long. To this end we computerised the combat and game map, which also meant that we could do more 'realistic' stats on the game units with descriptions rather than hard numbers, of course the computer software had numbers for the units but we didn't see why the players had to know these details.

Other features we included were zones, so a player could be on Earth with access to the stock exchange, markets, and government; in space, where they could see the game map, plan in private and issue orders to their fleet; or in transit between the two where they could interact with the somewhat corrupt government intelligence agents. So what went wrong?

Player Like Numbers
Because we had not given numerical stats and a detailed description of how the space combat was worked out*, players were unwilling to commit to a fight and as a result there were no battles the entire game. This was also due to a lack of incentives as players could only destroy other teams mining instillations and couldn't capture them, which made them think that they would be spending resources on damaging another players production capability which they could instead spend on improving their own resource production. The lack of information relating to combat only furthered this problem as players weren't sure what percentage of their fleet would survive the attack, the reality was that more often than not only a few ships on each side would be destroyed and the losing side would retreat before the casualties got too high.

Players Will Exploit Any Loop Hole
As I mentioned there was a stock exchange on earth. This stock exchange had a random element and a player driven element and was designed so that the random element should dominate. The problems started when one team decided to sink all their game cash into just one resource, and noticed that its price rose slightly, they then sold it back and noticed the price dipped slightly. So they went and found the team with the second largest amount of money and they both invested in the single resource, which caused its price to spike, they then sold and the price plummeted, so they then spent the rest of the game playing the stock market. It turns out that their was a level at which the player driven element would dominate, which hadn't shown up during play testing because no one had invested so heavily in just a single resource.

Friend Computer is not Your Friend
The first thing that happened on the night was the discovery that the wall separating the Earth zone and the Space zone was made of some magic material which resulted in the Wi-Fi not working so the head GM who was located on Earth couldn't update the map, which was located in Space. So some furniture was rearranged, ethernet cables were fetched, and the problem was resolved. The next problem came right at the very end, I previously said that there was no combat which isn't entirely true, on the very last turn the Earth fleet engaged a player fleet and as a result the software crashed. During play testing we had run numerous battle simulations, tweaked numbers so that the results agreed with what we expected and we had even run a small combat only version of the game, all without incident. But, on the night the one and only combat crashed, and crashed hard. The head GM (who also happened to have written the code) had to manually work out what orders had and had not been processed before being able to give the final end game positions, as the combat result wouldn't affect the final standing it was ignored.

Players Find a Way to Have Fun
You might think that with all these problems the players would be bored and disappointed, but they still told us that they had had a good time. One team had found fun in a bottle of Vodka (this tends to happen no matter how engaging and well written the game is, as it is run as a social event) while another team had fun by being as devious as possible. The corrupt intelligence agents would sell you information relating to what other teams were up to, show you their orders, or even sell you ships at sub-market prices. One team realised that if they bought information from the agents then there was nothing stopping them from selling this on, better yet why even bother actually buying the information in the first place, the great thing about secrets is that they are secret so no one knows if they are true or not. It was quite a shock when a player came up to me with an envelope of game currency and asked for a full report on Project Pegasus (no such project existed), still I took the cash and told them that I would go and prepare the report. After a quick GM meeting we gave them a report and suddenly a player invented rumour was official, much to the amusement of the team that had started it.

Conclusion
From being involved with this game I learnt a lot about how players think and what they want in a game, and despite the technology issues on the night I still like the idea of automating the game map, and have since done so for a LARP without incident. I just think that in future I will be sure to include numbers for unit stats and a description of how combat works, along with some incentives for fighting.

*Combat was worked worked out with the capital ships launching their fighter and bombers. The fighters would attack the bombers and enemy fighters, then any undamaged bombers would attack the capital ships. Finally the capital ships would fire on each other. Then a moral check was taken, if this was passed another round of combat occurred, otherwise one of the two sides would retreat.

Something Old, Nothing New?

New console, same plumber. 

I recently heard someone saying that their problem with the Wii is that with the exception of the Wii Sports, Wii Play, Wii Music, and Wii Fit series there hasn't been any new first party IP released. They pointed out that the Gamecube gave us Pikmin, Animal Crossing (although Japan had a N64 release), and Luigi's Mansion. I have three major problems with this objection.

The first is 'if it ain't broke don't fix it!' One of the main reason's people buy a Nintendo console is to play the latest Mario or Zelda game. More often than not third party companies are heard to complain about how hard it is to get their product noticed on a Nintendo system.

Secondly, the Wii implemented a new control scheme, so everything that was old was new again! They were even able to rerelease half a dozen Gamecube games under the New Play Control heading. Skyward Sword played like no other Zelda game before it, sure it used similar ideas and plot points but that's what you expect, after all I expect that the next Call of Duty game will have players shooting people.

My final point is that such a mentality is incredibly harsh and disrespectful to the many great second and third party new IP exclusives. For example Endless Ocean, Xenoblade Chronicles, Zack & Wiki, Little King's Story, Lost Winds, Boom Blox, Red Steel 2, No More Heroes (although this has now gone multi-platform), The Last Story, Mad World, and The Conduit.

So sure the Wii might not have given birth to the next great Nintendo gaming franchise but it has managed to inject a new spin on a lot of the classics, while also providing a platform for some fantastic new titles, many of which were criminally over looked (Zack and Wiki)!

Why make a fantastic new IP when people will just walk past it?

Don't Believe Everything You Read

WARNING: THIS POST HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH GAMES!

During the last week I have had two friends share articles on Facebook because they thought they were so interesting that others needed to read them. The first related to a cardiac surgeon who was challenging the current explanation of heart disease, and the second was the 'Hand of Hope' picture complete with the original viral email text from around 1999.

In the first article a 'world renown heart surgeon' of 25 years experience was claiming that the current view that cholesterol causes heart disease is wrong, and actually it is inflammation. Further more, he claimed that the dietary advice to stop eating naturally fatty foods and start eating low-fat processed alternatives was causing the inflammation. What evidence did he give? Well he claimed that in every one of the 5000 people he has operated on over the last 25 years has had inflamed arteries. He also pointed out that more people in the US will die of heart disease this year than in any previous year. Finally it was stated that he was so passionate about replacing these misconceptions with fact that he 'recently left surgery to focus on the nutritional treatment of heart disease.'

I was immediately suspicious for three main reasons. The first was that he stated that his theory was 100% correct, it is medical fact! Scientist don't like to come out and make such bold statements, especially not when an idea is still new, consider the announcement from CERN that they have seen an intensity peak at about the correct mass for a Higgs boson, but will need to continue testing for at least a year to be able to make a definite claim that something is there. The second problem I had was that his evidence was anecdotal, based entirely off his own observations. Personal observations are fine for forming a hypothesis but they are not sufficient to make a conclusion from, for that he would need to do an epidemiological study and present it for peer review. The final problem is that the one non-anecdotal statistic (more heart disease in the US today) is meaningless because it doesn't take into account the increase in population size nor the increase in the obesity rate.

So having these concerns I decided to dig a little deeper, thanks Google! And it turns out that in 2008 this doctor had his medical license revoked following several years of reprimands, probationary periods, and cautions due to failure to maintain proper notes, surgical errors, and mismanagement of several patients; so the statement about him choosing to stop surgery was a lie. Also he has not published a peer reviewed article or made a presentation to the medical community since 2003, choosing instead to publish books designed for sale direct to the general public. This doesn't mean that he is wrong, but it does mean that he is not credible and I would strongly suggest against making life decisions based on his advice.

The second article was a picture of a foetus 'holding the finger' of a surgeon. The text claimed that the child 'thrust it's hand out of the uterus and squeezed the finger of the surgeon as if thanking him for the gift of life.' Unfortunately the doctor has officially stated that the child was anesthetized and couldn't move and that the picture is of 'me pulling his hand out of the uterus.' So while the picture is still very cool it is not the 'miracle' some claim it to be.

In both cases these articles gain popularity because they tell a certain group of people what they want to hear. The first article, amongst other things, says to eat natural unrefined foods (not actually a bad suggestion), and most of its supporters are people who oppose GM crops and were already adopting this style of diet. While the second article resonated with pro-life groups who took it to show that the child wanted to live. Personally I like the photo in second article because it shows how clever we are and what we are able to achieve with modern medicine.

So Tasty

When you consider how many games use the same core mechanics and rules the importance of using flavour to differentiate them becomes apparent. Game flavour can also provide a justification for why things work the way they do. One of my favourite pieces of game flavour is the Orks in Warhammer 40,000.

The original Warhammer Orcs were a thick brutish race; so how do you justify them being in space, travelling between worlds, and being a serious threat to the highly advanced super human Space Marines? First their existence is explained by them having been genetically engineered by the Old Ones, a now extinct alien race, as guards. Secondly, the way that these brutes get by is justified by giving them a collective psychic field, which means that anything the Orks believe in will work as long as their are enough of them around. For example if an Ork paints his vehicle red is will go faster because that is what they believe, also yellow missiles make larger explosions for the same reason. However, if a human were to pick up an Ork shoota it wouldn't fire as it is actually just a piece of junk.

When playing the game Orks still follow the same rules as everyone else and it is possible to use them as an army without even knowing about their origins, beliefs, and diet (fungi). The background flavour just helps to flesh them out and answer any smart alec who wants to try and poke holes in the idea of Space Orks.

Sucks to be GAME

The UK retailer GAME and Gamestation continue to do poorly. First they didn't stock The Last Story, then they didn't stock any Ubisoft launch titles for the Vita, then came the announcement that they wouldn't be stocking Mario Party 9, and finally they announced that they were not going to stock Mass Effect 3. But that's all right because they still have their used game sales to keep them going...

Yesterday I got wind of a 'firesale', GAME and Gamestation have dropped the price on many of their pre-owned games in an effort to generate some cash. So this morning I went to my local GAME store and walked away with six pre-owned games for less than £20. The games and their prices are:
Super Scribblenauts £4.99
Tomb Raider Anniversary £4.98
Cursed Mountain £1.98
Conduit 2 £4.98
Red Steel £0.98
Trauma Center New Blood £1.98
Sure, I still overpaid for Red Steel and the same could probably be said for Tomb Raider Anniversary and Conduit 2 but at these prices I didn't really care. Cursed Mountain is supposed to be a good idea that was poorly executed, so for less than two pounds I thought it was worth checking out what redeeming qualities it might have.

The sad truth is that it looks as though GAME will soon go bust, as they aren't getting in new titles and they are clearing out the old titles I would guess that they are minimising the number of assets the receivers have to deal with. The question is why can they not stay in business? Video games are hugely popular and the industry continued to grow during the recession. I feel the problem is that the stores lack any sense of community, so people who read up on games online have no need to visit the physical store because they can also order the game online, often for less. The only reason to visit GAME is if you are buying for someone else and would like advice, or you are trading in your old games for new ones, something that online stores also now cater to.

While it will be sad to see these stores closed I just hope that either whoever buys them out accepts their gift cards or another retailer, such as HMV, makes a deal which enables them to still be redeemed.

Fighting in the Rain

Thanks to the efforts of Project Rainfall both Xenoblade Chronicles and The Last Story have been released in Europe and have USA release dates. As both of these titles are in the same genre it is interesting to compare them, especially as the JRPG is generally considered to be becoming something of a niche market.

Critical Response
Metacritic gives Xenoblade Chronicles and The Last Story meta scores of 92 and 82 respectively. So while it might appear that we can make this a very short article and crown Xenoblade Chronicles the winner, it needs to be considered that Metacritic only sources western reviews and Famitsu (the Japanese gaming bible) gave Xenoblade Chronicles a 36/40 and The Last Story a 38/40, also sales for these two games in Japan and during their first week in Europe have been very close with The Last Story selling slightly more. I believe that one of the reasons for this difference of opinion between the East and West is due to the way the story is structured, in Japan linear story book style games are much better received than in the West, for example 428: Fusa Sareta Shiibuya de an interactive novel involving scrolling text, visual stills, and short video sequences was given a perfect 40 by Famitsu.
Winner: Draw

Sound
For me this was the easiest category to decide. When I turned on The Last Story I literally just sat there looking at the main title and listening to the opening theme. When eventually I did get into the game I was rewarded by voice acting that didn't make me want to stab pencils into my ears. Xenoblade Chronicles also has good sound, it just didn't grab me in the same way. One thing it does have in it's favour is the option to turn on the original Japanese voice acting, which I did after only an hour of play as the English voice actors are a tad weak, and also they repeat the same catch phrases over and over in combat, which quickly started to grate.
Winner: The Last Story


Graphics
Both of these games look good and push the Wii to its limits. Xenoblade Chronicles uses low resolution textures to enable the game to have a massive draw distance and large area maps. As you make changes to your characters equipment these changes are reflected in game, this means that the cut scenes have to be rendered in-game and it is during these cut scenes that the low resolution textures are most obvious.
The Last Story on the other hand, looks best at a set distance from the camera, and the game knows it. In order to optimise it's performance and have good looking character models the game blurs out any object which is too close or too far from the camera. Other graphical 'cheats' include giving unimportant NPC's low resolution textures and only giving limited camera control, no zooming in or out. Once again changes made to character equipment are displayed in game and players are able to customise the colour and appearance of their gear. The game's cut scenes use a mixture of pre-rendered and in-game rendered graphics, however, the pre-rendered scenes are only slightly higher quality than the in-game graphics which prevents the transition between the two from being too jarring.
Winner: The Last Story, this was close and comes down to a personal preference between having certain game elements looking better than others or wanting an equitable distribution of graphical power.

Dagran (left) has a better quality character model than Dunban (right),
however you can see how the background is blurred in order to achieve this.

Story
So as to not spoil anything I will simply say that both games involve a young man gaining mystical powers and setting out to save the world. But while both games have a similar premise the way the story is presented is quite different. Xenoblade Chronicles gives you free reign to advance the plot at your own pace, with plenty of side missions to distract you along the way, while The Last Story is a much more linear, directed affair. I prefer the story in Xenoblade Chronicles because it feels more original. In The Last Story, when a red haired villain, claiming to have powers similar to yours, appears and tries to kidnap the female protagonist I couldn't help but be reminded of Zelda.
Winner: Xenoblade Chronicles

Gameplay
Both games use an auto attack feature with additional special attacks that can be activated. In Xenoblade Chronicles these special attacks are activated by selecting them from a gamebar, while in the The Last Story they involve context sensitive button presses. Unfortunately, using the same button for all the special moves can result in the wrong action being performed, in particular I found the wall running vertical slash to be particularly difficult to perform in a timely fashion. Both games let you charge a meter to perform combined party attacks, and I particularly enjoy the way that physical and magical attacks interact in The Last Story.
Winner: Xenoblade Chronicles

Overall
This is very close as both games are excellent, but in the end I would say that I prefer Xenoblade Chronicles as it does more to revitalise the JRPG genre. The open nature of the game world and the way that the fast travel system enables quick backtracking to complete additional side-quests provided a more detailed and engaging game world. In addition, the way that completing side quests can effect the way that NPC's interact with each other makes it feel like you are making a difference even when not actively following the main plot line.

Time for a Change?

Last night I watched Raymond Keene, the second British Chess player to be awarded the title of Grandmaster, play twenty games of chess at once. In each game he was the white player, which as I mentioned previously should give him a very slight advantage. Unfortunately I missed the start of his games so I don't know what his initial move was, but I do know what mine would have been. The King's pawn would have moved forward two squares to e4. I begin almost all my games of chess with this move, the reason for this is simple, when I was taught how to play I was told that this is a good strong starting move. From my personal experience this seems to be true, but I have never actually sat down and given it any due thought, rather I have just accepted the validity of this statement and gone from there.

This make me wonder what would I do if the layout of the board was different, say for example the knights and bishops were swapped over, moving the piece forward does nothing to the possible move set of the knight so would this still be the best move? Maybe it's time we played chess differently, how about instead of placing the pieces in the standard positions we randomise the placement of the non-pawn pieces? Not only would this force us to think about our pieces and what kind of game could develop but it would also remove the symmetry associated with the standard layout. It would now be possible for a player to have both bishops on the same coloured squares and if their opponent notices then they could exploit this.

Part of what appeals to me about trying this type of game is that it wouldn't be fair and even, players would be forced to make the best of a bad situation, and try their best to capitalise on any advantage they see. It would add the excitement of slowly clawing back a game that you looked destined to lose right from the start. I enjoy these kinds of challenges, which is part of the reason I don't just lose interest and give up when a game isn't going my way. I was playing a game of Carcassonne against opponents who have a poor track record against me, when they decided that they should all gang up against me. So every time the option to remove a meeple from the board arose mine was removed. Rather than get annoyed I found it hilarious good fun as I was made to work for every point and took a minor victory in still being able to get over 50 points, although this was still last place by a long way.

I guess my point is that the fun of a game comes not from the winning or losing but rather the path taken to get there. Which is why I have no problems playing unfair but intellectually stimulating games.