One Return, One Game, One Space Walrus

Rejoice my children! My time-table is no longer full of twisting, time devouring juggernauts. I shall make it my first order of business to return this sorry page to its' former glory, expect at least one post a week again - and let us get this straight, if there is only a single post in a week, it will be large enough to be easily viewed from space.

During our extended interlude I missed my chance to talk about many things that I would love to discuss in detail here, the death of the Duke, E3 and... well, those two are the main ones really. But both are sprawling subjects, and have both been discussed to death, as previously stated, I have missed my window of opportunity. Instead of dwelling on that, I decided that I would steer this post in a different direction, don't worry it will be completely unrelated to work being done here, as per usual.

Sacred 2 has been recommended to me by quite a few people whose opinions I trust, they admit that it is a really buggy game, that the occasional ability is useless, and that the restrictions on the Co-op that usually prevents you playing with your friends is annoying. But they still talk about it so enthusiastically, I look into the eyes of these men and I can tell that talking to me is hurting them, that every moment away from that game is like a punch in the eye. Every moment spent in the outside world is nothing but a test of strength for these people, the reward for passing being another slice of the drug that they crave so dearly.

Observing the effect on these people, people who are much less inclined to get hopelessly addicted to any single game, I concluded that I really shouldn't pick Sacred 2 up. None of these men even felt Word of Warcraft's terrible grip, they dipped their toes into the pool and managed to withdraw without an intervention, satisfied with the experience but not looking for more, whereas I start jonesing for a hit of it roughly every four months.

Having come to this conclusion it was obvious that I had but one choice, I made my peace with my deity of choice and ordered the unholy disc from Amazon. You can tell it hasn't arrived yet because I'm writing this post instead of slowly rocking to and fro.

This post could use even more tangents, lets create some.

I'm sure that admitting that I've never played any of the Diablo series, which Sacred is quite obviously imitating, is just another way of saying that I'm letting the side down in entirely unforgivable ways, but I have at least sampled a couple of its' tribute acts. An old Westwood studios game, Nox, is the first to come to mind.

Nox was great for many reasons, but the one I want to explore is its' multiplayer offerings, which were surprisingly robust considering the how old it is, and its' genre. You would expect it to feature only some form of half -arsed Co-op and maybe Deathmatch. It also boasted a few others though, my favorite being named oddball (Think football/soccer with more knights and hell demons), but Oddball isn't really what I want to talk about, I just wanted a chance to inform everyone of the following; remember the dick who summoned the carnivorous plants in front of the goal? Yeah, that was me.

What I really want to draw your attention to was the obligatory half-arsed Co-op, which was surprisingly not half-arsed. Nox Quest, as the hip kids called it, was an infinite dungeon of sorts, that up to sixteen players could band together to tackle, to balance out the huge number of potential players the difficulty ramps up pretty hard, by level twenty five the game had started populating the dungeon with obelisks which every thirty seconds spawned a copy of the single player campaign's final boss.

The coolest thing was the players in that game, In a safe zone once I mentioned to another player how I was saving up to buy a particular spell which was pretty expensive. The other player immediately informed me that he had a spare of that spell book and gave it to me, for free, bare in mind that this was a spell book he could trade for a fair bit of coin. This is a genre of game notorious for its' selfish players, who happily scoop up all of the loot on a level, regardless of whether their class can use it, but on multiple occasions on Nox I had people pull me aside and have conversations along the lines of: "Hey man, I notice you keep summoning stone golems, you may want to give this steel golem scroll a whirl, don't sweat it, just have it." (I played a Conjurer, because I don't like dying and the force of nature is the single greatest thing since time itself).

This happened to me so many times that it was a practice I got into once I started getting a fair bit of money or finding loot that I couldn't use, I would even buy extra lives for players running low occasionally, I'd give away any repeats of spell books I came across. The people I gave to, or at least quite a few of them, then started to do the same, then those who they gave to followed suit, etc, etc.

The point I'm trying to make is that a friendly player base is self perpetuating, as a designer there isn't much you can do to keep the bad apples away, but there are things you can do to encourage the good ones. What started as a couple of guys handing out free spell books in Nox turned into an entire legion of players making sure that each of their allies is as good as they can possibly be, these are the people who are going to see the high-end content, the jerks never will, and the jerks will fall off the band wagon.

This was a long post. Possibly the longest ever made here. I went off on many tangents, then a tangent or two within those tangents, so to summarise:

• I'm back, but I can't speak for the others
• Sacred 2 could be the end of me
• Conjurers ftw
• Good player bases are self perpetuating

I'll come crawling on back to you

A little like Frank West

It seems that every other post I make is constructed whilst I'm afflicted by one malady or another, this post included. If the trend persists I may have to investigate to see if there is a correlation between the two, maybe if I stop posting all my ills will miraculously disappear and never bother me again. But I would never allow this blog to fall into disarray, or worse, the unguided hands of Myke and Balai.

The Hawx demo came out on xbox live a while ago, but until recently I was the only one who played it, Balai not owning an xbox, Tetris currently having Internet issues and Myke either asleep in his impenetrable cocoon or not caring. A few days ago me, Myke and Tetris found ourselves all contained within the same four walls, we talked, naturally, but upon mentioning the existence of this demo my hard drive was briskly confiscated by a heavily sweating Tetris.
The boy, you have to understand, only has three different dreams stocked within the movie cinema of his head for his mind to play when he sleeps. One involves him flying a Harrier jet and playing a guitar solo at the same time, the second is similar but features an X-wing in lieu of the harrier. We don't talk about the third dream.

The drive was appended to the very top of Tetris' box and quickly transported him to a place of glee. I'm rarely excited by a flying game, I have nothing against them but they all seem very same-y to me, yet I found this demo very enjoyable. This is probably due to the inclusion of an experience bar, one of my many Achilles heels. Myke, on the other hand, said that assistance off mode (cinematic camera mode essentially) was cool to watch, but the game in general didn't make his happy place... well, happy.

The demo did bring back very fond old memories as well, of better days, of days when a game called Freelancer was installed upon my computer. If you ever see this game in a bargain bin and like things that are good I would strongly suggest giving it a whirl. There is currently a small contingent of us pushing to have a company server set up, and then start having "team building Fridays" where we would all play together. Also, from this point onwards, every day is now a Friday.

We sat around laughing

A return to tradition

As some of you may have noticed, I have a valid excuse to wish everyone a happy yesterday again, and so I shall do so later on in this post. I'm not sure why, but god I love doing it.
I probably should have warned you all about Myke's near fetishistic love of both the enter key and the new post button. Regardless, it is good to have him here on the blog.

We I joke a lot to the contrary, but I wanted to clarify that Tetris does actually get work done, and him not wanting to post here isn't a good reason to deny him the credit he is owed. He has been diligently working away in his little cave manufacturing the noises and sounds that mean that you guys don't have to listen to me shouting "bang" loudly into a microphone in place of a gunshot noise.

Here is some good news for people that like things that are awesome. I know that at least 80% (4) of the people working on Zombietopia sunk major amounts of time into AVP2 multiplayer, if anyone on the team for this game have any iota of sense they will bring back that old multiplayer legend, leaving the core game intact and building upon it with gusto.
If, for example, they even consider giving the marine team a feasible chance of ever winning a round I know many people who would want their blood. That games' multiplayer wasn't about winning or losing, and nobody really cared, in fact it was better for it. It was a given that either the Predators or Aliens would win, it was just the Marines' job to try to take an enemy or two down with him. For every five or so times he died. Getting a two to five Kill/death ratio as a marine in that game was once an entry requirement for the mysterious group of gamers who refer to themselves as the "1337", although this requirement has since been dropped, because it meant that only about four people qualified and they were getting a little lonely.

Oh, and happy yesterday.

She's not your typical girlfriend

A post tangentially related to game design

I said it was coming.

To quickly get anything you may actually be interested in out of the way, I promised publicly viewable work would be released at the end of last week, and I would be able to unleash such a thing upon the world right now, sadly I'm waiting on some stuff from Balai. Admittedly I have only communicated this need to him today. Within the last hour or so. This may mean that the delay is, in fact, still of my own doing, but I digress.

Now that is out of the way, have some incredibly one-sided opinions. Enjoy!

Over the last handful of years EA have been trying their very hardest to remake, repackage, reinvigorate and resell my childhood to me. To be honest, I'm cool with it. Kane's Wrath I especially enjoyed, a game all about a bald, charismatic madman prophet? Sign me up!
Their latest news may have made me pee a little.

I grew up on a diet of 'Command & Conquer' and 'Dungeon Keeper', I spent many a cold, lonely night weeping over their demise, so needless to say I am ecstatic about their Resurrection. Dungeon Keeper not only as an MMO, but an MMO made by a chinese developer - as opposed to it's original country of origin, our very own Britain - does make me more than a little nervous, but if EA continue their current trend of, you know, making games, rather than sticking to their age old tradition of releasing disc-based bowel movements, then maybe, just maybe it could work.

I played the demo for Red Alert 3 this week. If presented with this game with no prior knowledge of it's name, I would most likely believe it to be C'n'C Generals 2, a copy modded to feature Red Alert inspired units admittedly. Although unlike the original Generals, this is a game that I actually enjoy, I'm not sure why but I never did manage to get into that game. The controls to the previously mentioned 'Command and Conquer 3: Kane's wrath' were surprisingly good, and yes, I am refering to the Xbox 360 version of the game. With Red Alert 3 it immediatly feels like it was developed by one of EA's different studios (regretably, I can't be bothered to check if that is actually the case), they are aware of the interface used in Kane's Wrath, they have probably even had it explained to them, but the controls in RA3 feel very... different. I would like to stress that I do not mean worse, I merely find it a little jarring to find that most of the buttons have been re-mapped and have to completely re-learn allot of tricks I previously learned, heck, as far as I can tell certain features, such as setting waypoints, no longer exist. I have to say though, between the absolutely awesome new duds for the Tesla Trooper and the ability to have an attack dog and an attack bear go at each other's throats, I'm sold. God, I am such a consumer whore sometimes.