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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While talking to my friend Jeff recently, I realized that I’ve played quite a few different roleplaying games—by which I mean Sit Around The Table roleplaying games, and not MMORPGS, LARPS, or computer ”RPGs” like the Final Fantasy series—and my list-making tendencies more or less decided at that point that a blog post would have to be made.
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Naturally, as soon as it became popular to use Facebook to promote political causes, it became attractive to distort the practice. The ease of online ”participation”—clicking a button or, at most, filling out a form—makes it rather difficult to judge just how committed to their causes participants are.

Furthermore, if it’s easy to click, then it’s also easy to persuade people to click, which is not always a good thing.
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Last Saturday I finally got to play Dominion. I gave it to Monika as a present around eleven months ago, but she didn’t deign to play it until now. Thanks to Mike Pollard for showing us how to play. It’s not a particularly complicated game, but almost all games are far easier to learn from someone who’s played them before than from written instructions.

Dominion is a four-player card-based game with a medieval theme; the object of the game is to have the most land at the end. It has some innovations I hadn’t encountered before:

• Players build their decks as they go along; deckbuilding isn’t a pre-game phase of play but is integral throughout.
• All players build from a shared card pool each game, and this card pool is potentially different every time, meaning that each game can have quite a different feel.

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The 2009 ATP year-end championships have finished the first, round-robin, stage, where the field of eight is split into two groups of four, and each group plays round-robin to winnow it down to the two who go to the single-elimination rounds (semifinals and final). There have been some interesting effects of running the tournament this way, and I wonder whether a different setup would be superior.
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This is mainly referring to weapons in Dungeons & Dragons-style roleplaying games, but also fantasy literature given that magic weapons are staples of the genre.

In my Fantasy World Sketch, I suggested that magic would have altered human development significantly, primarily in the realm of food production. I didn’t go down the route of completely reimagining how societies would have developed, in part because I wanted to end up with something that resembled a “classic” fantasy milieu, but it seems clear to me that since food production is a priority for most species, magic would be used to improve it. Historically speaking, war is another important societal endeavor, and its import is clear in most fantasy realms—that is, the impact of magic on warfare is discussed at length and covered in the rules.
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This is an old-school platformer/shoot-’em-up, very retro with a focus on gameplay. It’s fun, with a couple of interesting touches: one is that you get infinite lives, somewhat unusual in this type of game; the other is that the plot is revealed through text that appears in the background as you progress.

While it is Flash, it’s still a download with separate Mac and PC versions.

I came across Orisinal while browsing Play This Thing!, and I’m not sure what to make of their games. The first one I tried was Sunny Day Sky, which involves controlling the umbrella of an ambulatory teddy bear so that the bear can fly above cars and buses while avoiding flying ducks (I think they’re ducks). There’s just a single control—clicking the mouse button opens or closes the umbrella.

An exceedingly simple game, based on a single mechanic. It’s very cartoony, but its aesthetics are very polished. I was curious enough to look at some of the other games there.
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The Robotics and Computer Vision Lab at Queen’s University Ontario has produced a working robotic system that can play pool. Called Deep Green, it appears to have an excellent understanding of geometry, although it’s not clear that it understands the rules of the game per se, or that it can do its own shot selection.
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I played Fantasy Flight Games’ Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game last night, and was extremely impressed by it. I’ve played two other games by them in the past, Twilight Imperium and A Game of Thrones, and liked both, but I think that Battlestar Galactica: The Board Game is the best so far.
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Via Greg Costikyan comes The Nemean Lion, a very short text adventure. I find it interesting partly because it’s somewhat like microfiction, and because it plays with the form somewhat.

While I’m here, I should also mention Hamlet—The Text Adventure, which I’m rather fond of (and which is a signficantly larger game, although probably not huge by text adventure standards).

My friends Niall and Léan introduced me to this tile-based word game the other night, and I’m quite impressed with it. It’s like a speed version of Scrabble played without a board and without points. Each player starts with facedown tiles, and players simultaneously turn them over and try to form crossword-style word layouts with them. When a player runs out of tiles, they say “peel” and each player has to take a tile from the pool. When there are fewer tiles than players left in the pool, the first player to use their tiles wins.
I was happy with this winning effort from last night:

However, the first thing I noticed when I opened the photo today was that I should have gotten rid of “par” and ”age” to make ”programmed”…
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My brother sent me a link to Shift the other night, and I’m quite impressed with it. It’s a fairly simple platformer, but with a nice twist that adds a little more of a puzzle aspect. I haven’t finished it, but it seems worth spending some time with. It reminds me a little of both Jumpman and Portal: The Flash Version.

Over the last couple of days I’ve encountered, more or less randomly, references to three computer games that each seem extremely deep, and as if they would consume vast amounts of time and attention. They are Defense of the Ancients, Dominions 3, and Europa Universalis III.
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I recently started playing the daily Set puzzle again, and was thinking about other ways to play the game without other players.
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