Barrier to Entry

After my earlier failed video attempt I got into a discussion about how much it costs to play Magic Online. To create an account you need to part with US$9.99, which gets you an account, one M12 booster, 2 Magic Online tickets, 5 Avatars, 1 Planeswalker 2012 Deck Pack (cards that can only be used in the Planeswalker format), and 300 additional cards, after this it is up to you how much you want to spend buying new cards and playing in tournaments. However, it is worth noting that is cost nothing to play casual games.

With this in mind I have put together two casual decks that each cost less than two tickets. The first is an aggressive tribal deck featuring allies, and the second is a combo deck with creatures that have the unearth ability. Once again I had some trouble making the videos, of the seven games I attempted to record with the Allies deck (all of which I won) only one of them actually worked. The Unearth deck actually recorded but in all three games I had to revert to plan B of actually playing creatures, rather than being able to combo off. However, I did manage a turn four win in a test game I played when I was first putting the deck together.

I'm still not 100% happy with the videos, I become far to quite when thinking so have resorted to using some of kurtjmac's patented snarky yellow text to try and stop things getting too boring, but this provides a starting point for future videos to improve on. If you are having trouble reading the cards then you need to increase the video resolution.

I've Gone Mad

The free to play model for games has really taken off lately. Everquest II, DC Universe Online, Team Fortress 2, and Star Trek Online all changed to free to play and from what I understand have higher profits because of it. There are also games which have just released as free to play such as Realm of the Mad God and Tribes Ascend, both of which I started playing recently.

The strange thing about these games is that they have almost all of the content available to free users. The only items a non-free user can't obtain in Tribes is bonus xp and possibly some cosmetic upgrades, while in Realm real currency is used to buy extra character slots, guilds, additional vault space, and cosmetic changes. Personally I don't understand why someone would part with real money just to change the colour of their character's costume, but plenty of people seem to be quite happy handing over £1 just to have a polka-dot shirt. In truth, had they just asked me for a few quid to buy the game and have all the features then I probably would have, but I'm not willing to pay for cosmetic changes or just for the additional convenience of extra space in the item vault.

In Tribes the use of real money is purely so that you don't have to spend excessive amounts of time playing just to unlock everything. For example to unlock a new class you can either play for several hours, or simply hand over a couple of dollars. For $50 you can unlock and buy practically everything in the game, which is the equivalent of having just bought a new game. However, for me at least, part of the fun associated with the game is the levelling up process. As my experience and skill with a character increases so too will the equipment and items that character has, this could just be because I enjoy RPG's and other people who play more FPS style games would be more frustrated and bothered by not having access to all the equipment, then again CoD also uses a level system.

I suspect that the market for free to play is getting over saturated. The business model of get people into the game, take a few dollars off them as they try it out and then not care if they leave only works when people have enough time to try out all the different games. I think of this as similar to Facebook games where there are now so many of them that I just can not be bothered trying to work out which are worth while any more and have stopped even trying new ones.

The Failings of Technology

I'm currently trying to learn French. To facilitate this I started by going to the Apple App store and downloaded about half a dozen different trial versions of the various learn French apps. Unfortunately, none of them really stood out as being anything special, that's not to say they were all the same, just that none of them made me want to part with any real money.

Next I downloaded a couple of audio guides, but I found it was far to easy to zone off while listening, and also it was very hard to hear the correct pronunciation while travelling on the underground. So in desperation I decided to do things 'old school' and went to my local library.

Now, while travelling I read through Living French, an old text book from the 50's, and read about the adventures of the Dubois family. A couple of days ago I noticed that most people who were reading around me were doing so with a Kindle and it dawned on me that a Kindle would be terrible for reading this book. The reason being that I am constantly flicking back and forth looking up words and declensions, something the Kindle isn't suited for.

I find it slightly ironic that with all my love of technology and gadgets, the best way I've found to learn French on my own is an old, yellowed book from 1957.

How I Made Skyrim Fun!

Over the years I've played a lot of RPG's. I've player every numbered game in the Elder Scrolls series, except for Arena, but strangely when I first started to play Skyrim I found that I wasn't enjoying it.

The first game in the series I played was Morrowind. I decided that I wanted to play a character that was a master of various combat styles and so picked a Redguard and chose various weapons and heavy armour as my key attributes. After playing for a while I found that having a high level in multiple weapons wasn't worthwhile and was also constantly frustrated by my inability to open locks, cast spells, or sneak. So I rerolled, still using a Redguard as a base, but this time I spread my skills around. I was still primarily a fighter but had lockpick and destruction as key skills to give me some diversity.

I next played Daggerfall. Daggerfall has a very detailed character creation system, letting you choose advantages and disadvantages, so I min-maxed like crazy. My character couldn't use any weapons less than steel in quality but had much higher stats as a result. This made the first few hours quite difficult but in the long run made the game much easier.

In Oblivion I wanted to try out some of the less usual star signs and my first character was a high-elf mage, who regained MP by absorbing the spells cast at them. Unfortunately I kept having to fight people armed with swords and arrows, so my magic meter was never full. Feeling dissatisfied I rerolled as an Argonian who was good at everything. I had a high skill in sneak, lockpick, archer, swords, alchemy and speech. I was also reasonable with some of the magic schools. This made the game easy enough to play through, but the character felt like a generic Jack of all trades.

When I came to Skyrim I started with a Khajiit, and began leveing up the same skills I had used in Oblivion. Once again they prooved useful and I was making good progress, but I found myself getting bored. The character just seemed so generic and lacked flavour and depth. I then found that I just stopped playing the game altogether. This was a strange situation, I had a game from a series I enjoy and in a genre I enjoy, but I wasn't enjoying it. I decided to try the game again, but this time I was going to be a character, not just someone moving through the plot while being good at everything. So I made a Dunmer mage, I realise that in Skyrim you don't actually pick a class but rather equip class stones as you move through the game, but I resolved to only use magic in combat, unless I ran out of MP at which point I could draw a weapon. I also only equipped mage robes on my torso and light armour elsewhere.

I now have 21 hours play time clocked in and am greatly enjoying myself. Because I want to be this character, rather than just do everything in the game, I have refused to progress the Brave Companion's quest line as I don't want to become a werewolf. In some ways I think it is a shame that Skyrim took such a relaxed approach to character creation, although it's better than letting players 'cheat the rules' as they could in Daggerfall.

The Scary Door

Back during GAME's firesale I picked up a copy of Cursed Mountain for £1.98 and about a week ago I finally got around to putting it into my Wii. I went in with very low expectations as the game had received 'mixed or average reviews', with most positive comments relating to the game's setting and intent, with heavy criticism of the controls.

I must say that the game starts very strongly, your character's brother went missing on Chomolonzo (the titular mountain) and you're looking for him. You arrive at the village of Lhando to find that it is deserted, all the food spoiled, and there is a briefly glimpsed strange ghostly entity running about. As you move through the city you collect notes and diary entries which give you hints about what may have happened, but nothing definitive.

It is during this early exploration of the city that you discover the first 'problem' with the controls, you can move at two speeds, slow walk or slow jog which just feels wrong when most other games give you the ability to quickly dash about. However, I like the forced slower pace because it means you can't just run past any game areas that are potentially dangerous (as you walk through the city the camera will often shift to an oblique angle and the colour drain from the screen making you convinced that something bad is about to happen) and secondly it seems more realistic, you are after all high in the Himalayas so the air is quite thin.

Eventually you meet a strange monk who teaches you to open the third eye, which enables you to see runes throughout the city and interact with them using a magic ice axe (it's wrapped in various holy ribbons). Next you finally get to come face to face with one of the ghosts, the first time you simply flail to fight them off, the second time you hack at them with the axe. Then your axe gains the ability to fire energy bursts and the game stops being scary.

The ability to pew pew laser the ghosts, and also get a free heal in the process, hurts the atmosphere of the game. What makes it worse is that it instructs you how to do this in an on screen tutorial after which there is a cut scene that tries to retroactively say that it was a strange and daunting experience. Up until now your character's various outbursts of "what's going on?" have matched your own confusion, but this time I knew exactly what I was doing, I was using this axe shaped gun to defeat a baddie.

This highlighted for me that what makes horror game scary is the unknown and feeling of potential risk. Giving me an energy blaster so early on ruined this. Making me flail at the first ghost before getting up the courage to actually take a swing at the second was the correct way to do things. The game had previously stated that the way to regain health was to burn an incense stick at a shrine, so the idea getting in close to battle a ghost felt risky. Letting me fight from a distance removed this feeling of risk, making matters even worse was that when using this distance fighting method you can perform a finishing seal which will restore part of your health.

It is a shame because if they had made trying to run from the ghosts a legitimate strategy, at least at the start, then it would have created an interesting dynamic, especially considering how slowly you jog.

Thanks for Letting Me Win

A while ago I wrote about needing to have a plan for victory. How, by identifying a way to salvage a bad situation you can win against the odds. Quite often these plan involve having your opponent make a wrong choice.

When presented with a decision, your opponent will always try and take the route that should be best for them. However, people make mistakes and quite often they don't have all the information needed to make the correct decision. Last week I was playing Magic Online and was up against a much better deck. I knew how I could still win but first I needed to draw the correct card and then I needed my opponent to block in a specific way. There was a video but the quality got severely reduced when I uploaded it so I'll have to redo it. But trust me it illustrates how by giving your opponent the opportunity to make a wrong decision you can come out on top.

Going for Speed

Yesterday a new world record for speedrunning The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time was set at 22 minutes 43 seconds. This involves using a glitch in the game and a video of the play through can be seen here.

This got me thinking about speed running, playing a game with the intention of reaching the end a quickly as possible. Speedrunning is generally considered to have been popularised by Metroid as this game had five different endings which were determined by the length of time it took to defeat Mother Brain. The 'best' ending is achieved by completing the game in less than an hour and not only reveals that Samus is a woman but you get to see her in a purple bikini.

There are different types of speedruns with the easiest to conduct being the tool assisted speedrun. These use emulators in ease some of the challenges associated with a legitimate play through of the game by enabling the use of save states and also the option of slowing down or speeding up the game's frame rate. Twin Galaxies keep a record of what they consider to be the legitimate records for games on their website and looking there we can see that the record for Super Mario Bros. is 5 minutes 8 seconds and for Metroid is 17 minutes 22 seconds. Generally the rules associated with these records do not permit the player to exploit glitches or use cheats and as such the fastest listed Ocarina of Time completion time is just over 5 hours.

I find it interesting to note that after helping to create the sport of speedrunning the Metroid series revised their ending system to instead rely on what percentage of items were collected during the game.