Before I launch into this post, let’s define “ragequit”. How about: quitting something in the heat of the moment, without putting much thought into it, because you are thoroughly and completely frustrated. Does that work?
Your anger fuels Pinkie Pie's giggles.
I don’t ragequit games very often. I mean, I quit mid-game a lot, sure. I’ll quit because I’ve been playing for a while and my mind is wandering; and sometimes I’ll quit because the game isn’t going my way and I can’t be bothered to spend a bunch of time changing it so it IS going my way– especially if I know I’m already proven and capable of doing this.
Quitting out of rage, though, is not a typical aspect of my gaming modus operandi.
…until recently.
X-Com. This game is hard. There is no mercy. There is no handholding. There is just your troops being shot in the head by an unseen alien the second they exit their ship.
I ragequit this game pretty much every time I play it. Then I go play something easier for a while. Like, you know, Hearts of Iron II.
You know your game is hard when a World War II era grand strategy game made by Paradox is easier.
…but then I go back and play X-Com again, because there’s something deliciously addictive about it and I just can’t help but wonder if maybe this time I’ll figure it out. I mean, if I keep trying, then eventually I might live for more than five minutes. Right?
There is a lot of talk in gaming, and has been for many years now, about realism. Realism is a holy grail, or at least a magical totem, something which developers are expected to strive for and gamers expected to appreciate.
But this reflexive attitude needs examination, because we actually don’t want realism at all. Or to be more precise, realism is only one path the getting what we really want, which is immersion. Realism has a couple of benefits compared to unrealism (Or perhaps more properly, non-realism), and I will come to those in a moment, but in my experience ‘realism’ is not in and of itself a recipe for a good game, and it may indeed be harmful to pursue it too far.
Let’s start with the benefits of realism though:
A) We have an unarguable, universal blueprint, in the form of… well, of reality. Realism, if pursued, is easier in at least the conceptual sense because we only have to look at the real world to see how things work. As an author I can confidently say that using reality as the basis for a novel is a lot easier than keeping track of all the unique rules you have invented for your universe! And moreover, because it is universal, everyone can see that something is realistic and doesn’t need to learn any new rules. (I know that Reality is Unrealistic but that’s not the point right now!)
B) Closely linked with the above, realism (If we assume it’s executed well) is very consistent and coherent. Cause and effect, relationships between objects and actions, all that stuff – reality is ultimately immersive.
That is what we’re really after – immersion.
This is the most immersive game ever. Fact.
But we don’t need realism for immersion, not by any stretch of the imagination. That’s why we have the term ‘suspension of disbelief’. We need coherence and consistency to be immersed – we need it to be realistic with reference to itself, not to our reality. To a large extent we are also talking about atmosphere, which is something occasionally ineffable. It’s a combination of mechanics, art (as opposed to graphics), sounds, music or its absence, and so forth. It does not require any particular degree of technical fidelity; Pike is plenty immersed in X-Com despite it being 20 years old and having pixels you can individually count. Immersion is not limited to games based in history, or to first-person shooters or any other given genre. Some of my most immersive games are sci-fi, like Deus Ex and X-Com, and tactical or strategy games, like Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri.
Now, there are times when realism is desired. If you’re making a game about the Roman Empire, you should probably do some research, and I will simply refer you back to my post about why mods are great rather than go on a long rant about Rome: Total War, fantastic as it is. The more knowledgeable someone is about a topic the harder it is to suspend their disbelief – so the concessions made to playability over realism and accuracy can end up harming a game. Realistic games have their place – ArmA II is a great example of a game which takes a fairly realistic approach; in that video he scrambles around in the dark for five minutes before getting shot and killed by an enemy he hasn’t even seen. Fun? Absolutely! But I sure as hell wouldn’t want TimeSplitters to play like that! Plenty of immersive games aren’t realistic, but remain hugely engaging to the player.
Then again, that's a strikingly realistic rendition of excellent fashion.
And then again, immersion isn’t always what people want. Earth Defense Force 2017 is a shockingly lacking game in almost every sense – except for raw fun, which it is almost unmatched in. It is the quintessential B-game; bad graphics, voice acting that would make Barry Burton blush, questionable physics, and absolutely rollicking great fun from start to finish. Though I propound the capacity for games to be art, and encourage things in such a direction, not every game needs to be art. Not every movie needs to be Citizen Kane. Sometimes, Transformers is just more fun.
So in short, we have put the idea of realism up on a pedestal, when what we really want is immersion, which is a factor of coherence and consistency. Realism has a couple of benefits in that sense but any break from it will be easily noticed by the knowledgeable, making their disbelief even harder to suspend!
So, to turn this over to you, what games have you found most immersive and why? To what extent do you care about realism, if at all?
After having written up a post a few weeks back on how I didn’t “get” Minecraft, I, uh… went back and tried it again.
Now, first thing’s first. I played the free, in-browser “Classic” edition, because as it turns out, I can’t afford the actual game at this point. (When I first tried the downloadable game, waaaay back in the day, it was free and in Beta.) This version of the game is different from the real thing. There’s no creepers, no night-time, and no crafting. Just you and an unlimited number of different colored blocks.
…oddly enough, that made the game a lot more palatable for me. No longer having to worry about things like “OMG HURRY UP AND FIGURE THINGS OUT AND MAKE A SHELTER BEFORE NIGHT FALLS *panic panic*”, I was free to let my inner obsessive-compulsive demons happily make sure all my blocks were counted and lined up exactly right.
BEHOLD MY DERPY TEAL AND PURPLE MASTERPIECE. THE CEILING IS MADE OF GLASS.
So, there you have it. In what is possibly a textbook case of meeting games halfway, I played Minecraft for about a half hour last night, and I enjoyed it.
[Insert some sort of witticism here about purging my system with X-Com and/or the fact that my dear partner-in-crime Mister Adequate has also recently fallen to lure of crafting blocks. Seriously though, I got no sleep last night for the second time in a row and cannot currently brain good, so you’ll just have to pretend I wrote up a hilarious ending line here. Okay?]
Remember when Grand Theft Auto IV came out? Remember the massive critical acclaim, followed by increasing backlash on the part of players who deemed it too negative, too dour, too boring? Well I’ve been playing it again and I’ve rethought some of that, which I had largely subscribed to.
Let me be clear, I think GTA4 is a masterpiece either way. It’s vast, brilliant, important, and though the humor is a bit less stark, still has plenty of laughs. Now, I appreciate that those who loved San Andreas (i.e. those who played San Andreas) would possibly miss the craziness which that game became, especially in the endgame. Understandably so: Stealing jetpacks and airplanes was hilarious, and the antics of CJ (Especially when he was terrifically obese and dressed as a truck driver) were just insanely enjoyable. I still think San Andreas is the better game, and I think given the iterative return to craziness in The Lost and Damned, and The Ballad of Gay Tony, that Rockstar listened to the reaction from the public.
I'll have a number nine, a number nine large, a number six with extra sauce, a number seven, two number forty-fives, one wit' cheese, and a large soda.
But in replaying GTA4 I’ve been playing along with what it asks. I’ve been using the subway to get around, taking cab rides, going on mandates with friends, all that jazz. And it works. It really does. When I got into the mindset it really started to all click into place in a way which it hadn’t before, however much I had enjoyed it. Last night I was doing the mission The Snow Storm, where an attempt to retrieve a ridiculous amount of coke goes very south. I had an epic, massive chase across Algonquin (The game’s stand-in for Manhattan) which ended with me disappearing into the subway to avoid the cops. And when I rode that train across to Bohan (The Bronx), with the sun coming up and the city bathed in dawn light, with barely any health left, the bag of coke slung over my shoulder… I really felt the game in a way I hadn’t done before.
So to give this post a point beyond my own reflections, have there been any games which you have really had to adopt a particular mindset to fully enjoy? Anything where you’ve gone back with a new approach that really meets what the developers had in mind, and found it better? Or am I all alone here?
Mister Adequate and I lean toward having a pretty similar taste in games. Oh sure, we have our differences– I grew up a Nintendo kid and he a Sega kid, for example– but by and large, we like a lot of the same stuff. Strategy games, for example. Oh, do we love our strategy games. He’s played a lot more of them than I have, though, so he’s usually the one giving me recommendations. Which I have learned to take seriously. Here’s what’s happened the last few times he’s recommended a game to me:
Civilization IV: “A;GLKHSLKDJF BEST GAME EVER OMG. WHY DID I NOT KNOW ABOUT THIS EARLIER.” 225 Hours played within two months. Several more hours of sleep lost.
Hearts of Iron II/Darkest Hour: “Hmm, shall I troll Poland today, or randomly turn Montana into a huge industrial powerhouse?” Either way, expect lots of Pike hurling insults at the AI, getting excited over tech trees, and ranting about the map.
Europa Universalis 3: “OH MAN IT’S LIKE SOMEBODY ROLLED CIV, AGE OF EMPIRES, AND HEARTS OF IRON ALL UP INTO ONE DELECTABLE BALL OF AWESOME.” Hours of playing as Britain and rolling over other navies with my own.
Anyways, the point is that Mister Adequate recommends me some top notch games. So now at his recommendation I’m going back– waaaay back– in time and playing X-Com: UFO Defense for the first time.
Guys. Guys. Guys.
It’s like… an RTS. And a tactical strategy game. And it’s amazing. AND I CAN ALREADY TELL THAT I AM GOING TO PLAYING THIS AND NOTHING BUT THIS FOR THE NEXT MONTH.
It’s too hot today for my brain to really work well, so instead of the ideas I had for today’s entry, I’m just going to write about something I love in vidya.
Mods.
I don’t mean any particular mods – though there are morethana fewworthtalkingabout – but just the whole idea of mods in general. Now, there are occasions when mods can be vital. A game which ran out of funding for example, and which gets tidied up and refined by the modding community. Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines is the first example that springs to mind. They can take the rough edges off any game, wherever a player feels balance is off or something doesn’t work quite right. Now, this isn’t to say that developers have an excuse to be lazy, of course! But sometimes reality ensues and things don’t quite work out as one would hope – and mods can help reduce the impact of that.
If only someone could mod out the sewers :(
More than this though, they are a source of content. I like SimCity4, but without sites like SimTropolis I’d have stopped playing it long ago. As it stands people are still putting out content every day for the game, even though it’s seven or eight years old now. And you can see real talent among the modders: the PEG team, the HKBAT team, the NAM team, and so on. They’ve done some truly impressive, amazing things given the constraints of the game, and they deserve much credit for it. In fact, modding is one of the better ways into the games industry these days, it seems. Make a solid mod and you could end up getting noticed by designers. And it is, ultimately, a great way for the communities around videogames to emerge and find each other. I know that there are names of people who worked on stuff as long ago as Morrowind who I always keep an eye out for, because their new mod for New Vegas, for instance, is likely to be great. That’s more loyalty than I display to most of the people who makes the games themselves!
What about you guys? Thoughts on mods? Any in particular that stand out in your mind as worth mentioning, and as examples of what can be achieved?
It has come to my attention that not everyone is aware of this brilliance, so I’m here to rectify that.
First, an intro. Pac-Man was one of the very first video games I ever played. I don’t even know how young I must have been– two or three– either way, I don’t remember not knowing what Pac-Man is and how to play it.
In the years since, I play versions it sometimes when I’m feeling retro. It’s held up well, but it doesn’t keep my attention as long as it used to when I was a little kid. The same maze over and over just got old.
At first, I assumed it was just a bunch of player-made mazes that you’d play through one at a time. Eh, okay, I’d give it a shot, it’s something different. I picked a maze at random and began the game. I was about halfway through when I decided to use one of the tunnels to get a ghost off of my tail and warp over to the other side. You know, like a normal Pac-Man game.
My mind. Was. BLOWN. When it took me to another maze.
After that I was hooked. If I start this game up, I’m inevitably going to be playing it for a really long time. I don’t know if I’ve ever been so thoroughly impressed by a version of Pac-Man. But this. THIS. I dunno. The desire to “see all the mazes” is just ridiculously strong. Stronger than you may initially think.
So go check it out, but BE WARNED: It may suck your entire day away.
Oh, and some of these mazes are truly devious. It’s great.
So I’ve decided that every now and then we should tell you about games worth playing that you may have missed the first time around (Much like Pike’s classic Videogame posts over at Clockwork Hare). This is the first one of these.
The Warriors
Come out to plaaaayy-eeayyy
This right here. It came out of nowhere, it was based on a cult movie from 25 years previously, and it was on top of that a brawler game, in the tradition of Streets of Rage and Final Fight. Not exactly the hottest genre in the middle of the Noughties.
And it. Is. AWESOME! It’s brutally violent, hilarious, chaotic, and absolutely ridiculously fun to play. It’s great by yourself but even better with a friend, so if you can get a friend and a copy of this game, I urge you to sit down and bro-op through it, because it truly is an awesome time. It’s a little hard to pin down what it is that makes it so great. I sympathize with Troy Goodfellow’s position that simply saying something is ‘fun’ is a copout, and yet – it is. It’s ‘fun’ in a manner which I have a lot of trouble defining. It’s not a complicated game, nor a deep one, but it is deeply amusing and engrossing.
The other day I was alerted to this deal, which allows you to pay as little (or as much) as you want for a pack of games in a donation that is split between the developers, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Child’s Play Charity. No catch, as far as I can tell: all the games are DRM-free, can be installed as many times as you want (including via Steam, if that’s your thing), and are workable on all platforms– yes, including my beloved Linux.
Now I’m not gonna deny that I’d never heard of any of the games before, but really, I’m not gonna pass up nearly-free video games, and I always have a soft spot for developers that are willing to make Linux versions of games, so I coughed up a few coins and downloaded the bundle.
So far, I’ve only played Trine:
A 3-D side-scrolling game which is delightfully pretty, easy to learn, and far more addictive than one might expect.
Don’t get me wrong: it’s nothing too complex. It’s a puzzle game that ultimately could probably be emulated fairly well in Flash. The main difference between this and your average Flash game is that it’s heavily physics-based and, oh, did I mention it’s pretty? It’s pretty, and the music is relaxing.
The premise of the game is simple: You switch between three different characters to solve puzzles and work your way through obstacles in various rooms. Your three characters are a warrior, who cuts things up with his sword, a thief, who can shoot things with an arrow and use a grappling hook, and my favorite character… the wizard. See, the wizard is probably the most clever aspect of the game, because he doesn’t fling fireballs around as one might suspect. No, his powers are levitating objects, and making MORE objects– specifically, boxes which he can use to stand on or stack on top of other things.
Anyways, you’re armed with these three characters to dispose of undead and solve puzzles. The whole game was actually sort of giving me Portal vibes, not really in the nature of the puzzles so much as the way the puzzles are arranged room by room and the whole way in which the game starts you out slowly and easily and then ramps you up in difficulty level.
But yes!
I haven’t tried out the Shadowgrounds game that comes in the pack yet, but Trine alone was worth the download. It had me hooked for a good couple of hours yesterday and I can see it having me hooked for a while to come yet.
Anyways! Do go over and take a look at The Humble Frozenbyte Bundle if you haven’t already and have a few pennies to spare. It’s to prove a good point— namely that consumers are willing to pay for what they want to support– and even if you’re not really into that, it’s games for a cent, right?
Just a short post because I can’t brain good after so little sleep. Here’s an idea I’ve been bouncing around for awhile and I thought I’d throw it out there to see what you all think of it!
The premise is a co-op game, most probably in a horror setting. It wouldn’t work in couch co-op, which goes against everything I stand for, but sacrifices must sometimes be made. The basic idea is that the players don’t always necessarily see/hear/etc. the same stuff. The game should be fairly spooky and slow-paced, interspersed with dangerous, violent action. But, imagine, for instance, that you’re slowly walking down a hallway when suddenly your buddy goes completely nuts emptying his clip at NOTHING AT ALL. Or you keep hearing enemy noises around the corner, down the hall, in the next room – and your bro hears nothing at all. Or you’re forced to split up for a short while and afterwards you’re invisible to each other, or you appear as monsters to each other. It could be hard to do this well, especially if it’s unsubtle or plays on such ideas too much and it becomes routine. But occasionally, here and there, a chance for something weird and spooky to happen would be neat.
