SteamBirds is a rather cool turn-based steampunk air combat Flash game. If that sounds like a weird combination to you, I’d have to agree. It’s very simple, and is extremely easy to get into, while not being actually easy. In addition, I came across it via a very interesting presentation on the Flash games industry by its creator Andy Moore.
Aptly-named Yankees blog It’s About the Money has an excellent post up about luck and competitive balance in the baseball post-season. One of its key points concerns how likely a given team is to win a particular series, and how that translates into their odds of winning the whole thing.
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I’m not a big fan of shopping, and more or less loathe the idea of it as an entertainment activity. That didn’t stop me from coming up with a scoring system for it, one which could conceivably be useful in restraining spending.
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The intelligence characteristic in roleplaying games is problematic. The advantages it confers are often mechanical—more spells, more languages—and it’s hard to have it work for players in ways that the physical characteristics do. A player checking against their strength score to break something is fine, but a player checking against their intelligence score to solve a puzzle—or a plot point, something my players have contemplated trying—just isn’t. Even less fine is a player requesting combat action suggestions on the basis that their character’s high intelligence would mean that they’d come up with something clever.
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This is old but good: a five-part animated tragedy set in the Mushroom Kingdom.
I was impressed by this article on marginal advantage by Sean Plott, who among other things is a high-level competitive Starcraft player. It discusses some more general points, suggesting that “a good competitive game should test a player’s skills and minimize the element of chance”, which I agree with, despite my long interest in Magic: The Gathering.
I also agree with his corollary that in a good competitive game, “the probability of a weak player defeating a good player should be as close to zero as possible”. Notions of “weak” and “good” players here should be as diverse as possible.
I’m not sure how this applies to tennis, the game I’m currently most interested in, but the winner of the match is often not the player with superior strokes.
I’m impressed and fascinated by this interview with Vincent Ocasla, who essentially “beat” Sim City 3000 as an art piece commenting on modern life, economics, and social engineering.
(I do think this counts as an art piece. While I think that video games can be art, no matter what Roger Ebert says, I also wonder about whether it means anything that they can be used to create art in this manner.)
After a highly enjoyable, productive, and extended period, it’s time for me to return to the world of paid work.
I’m quite happy with the things I’ve done during my time off. Many of them are important only to me, but then, it’s been my time off.
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An exploration, using 134 attempts to get Mario to finish a level, of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics. Using custom emulator software and a fan-produced ROM hack of Super Mario World, naturally.
“A Heavy’s 2fort Adventure”: Choose Your Own Adventure crossed with Team Fortress 2 crossed with YouTube.
At the beginning of March I kicked off a roleplaying campaign, the first I’ve run since early 1995. The setting is essentially the one I laid out last year in my fantasy world sketch, which now as the name “Q’Rith”.
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Yes, clearly my progress (or lack thereof) needs quarterly reports. And here’s the first one for this year.
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Today I ran for the second time the roleplaying one-shot I did in December, with a completely different group of players. Last time the new:experienced ratio among the players was 1:4, while this time it was 3:1 (also, last time the female:male ratio among the players was 2:3, while this time it was 3:1).
Because of the number of new players, I prepared a little introduction to roleplaying to give before starting play, and I thought that it was worth sharing more widely.
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I’ve been using the vector graphics editor Inkscape a fair bit over the last few days, and in the last few months have given it something of a workout. It’s been quite impressive. I was never a really heavy Illustrator user, but Inkscape seems to compare to it much more favorably than, say, GIMP compares to Photoshop. It’s a later-generation product, so perhaps that’s not being fair, but regardless it just feels a lot better to use. Maybe there are killer features that Illustrator has that Inkscape doesn’t, but since I don’t know what they are, I don’t miss them…
I’ve mainly been using it for map-making (related to this), and for that it’s been really good, and I’m rather glad it exists, because doing the same kind of work in a bitmap editor would probably be incredibly frustrating. I haven’t read through the documentation, but whenever I’ve needed to find out how to do something I’ve been able to without much trouble, so it seems that they’re doing a good job on that as well.
Continuing with the vintage video games theme, here’s “Coelacanth: Lessons from Doom”, an analysis of Doom by J.P. Lebreton, one of the designers of BioShock. Great piece, and especially interesting to me was his focus on how much easier it was for people to create their own maps for Doom than it is for modern FPSes. He wrote the commentary partly to accompany his recreation of one of his BioShock levels as a Doom II level, Arcadia Demade.
Incidentally, he’s also put work into an “abstract FPS” called purity, which makes me wonder what his take on CPMA would be.
I played Killer Instinct a lot in the mid-90s. It didn’t have the multiplayer depth of Super Street Fighter II Turbo, but I wasn’t playing it multiplayer much—rather, I was trying to get the longest combination move I could.
But what does this have to do with text editing?
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I’ve only played Nethack a handful of times, but have been aware of its place in the gaming pantheon for quite some time. I love the fact that a game using only symbols and text can inspire such devotion even in 2010, and reading the ascension tale of Garote-Mon-Hum-Fem-Cha makes me both curious about and wary of trying it out again.
Microsoft Surface is an advanced touchscreen display built into a table, backed by a fairly advanced suite of software for gesture recognition. I hadn’t seen many compelling uses for this technology… until SurfaceScapes, a group at the Carnegie-Mellon Entertainment Technology Center, released demos of Surfaces customized to hangle playing miniature-based D&D on them.
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Last Wednesday, I ran a roleplaying game for the first time since late 1994 or early 1995. It was a one-shot, using the same broad setting and rules system hybrid that I’m planning to use for a campaign later this year.
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Happy New Year!
Once again, my goals for the coming year.
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Duke Nukem Forever is the vaporware king of games, a game that was promised for so long that its release was a punchline even in the late 1990s. At one point it and Daikatana were frequently compared to each other; Daikatana was also extremely late and ultimately a failure—but it came out in 2000.
Wired has a long look at what happened, and it seems fair to conclude that one of the problems was a lack of limits.
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I’ve only played this game twice. That accounts to something around twenty hours of gameplay, however, so reviewing it on that basis seems acceptable.
Twilight Imperium is a board game of galactic domination set in the aftermath of the collapse of an empire; players control races seeking to become the new Imperial rulers.
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