A month of games

It has been such a long time since I last blogged. I gather Rosi has been religious in her wordpress updates as I barely recognise the wordpress interface. Hopefully I can work it out, though.

Over the course of the last month I have played a wide assortment of games, some of which have been thought provoking while others have been more banal. I will now go through each of them, probably chronologically as I imagine I have a lot more to say about the games I have played more recently than I do about those I played a while back.

The following games will be talked about/mentioned and may or may not contain spoilers: Planescape Torment, Titan Quest, Bioshock, Anno 1701, Team Fortress 2, Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble, Exodus from the Earth, Fallout 1, Fallout 2, Icewind Dale, Baldur’s Gate, Darksun: Shattered Lands, The Longest Journey, Dreamfall, Diablo 1, Diablo 2, Guild Wars, Serious Sam, Doom, Doom 3, Half-Life 2, Pipemania, Arcanum, Starcraft, Warcraft 2, Warcraft 3, Neverwinter Nights, Settlers 2, Diner Dash

Planescape Torment:

In the last two weeks of university I played and finished Planescape Torment. For those who are unaware, Planescape Torment is an RPG that was produced around the same time as Baldur’s Gate, the first two Fallout games and the first Icewind Dale game (around 1997-2000). All of these games share similar elements in which you play as a person (or group of people) in an environment and have a specific central goal you need to complete. In addition to this goal (quest), you may have sub-goals (sub-quests) which may affect the ease or manner in which you complete your main goal. What makes these games stand out is firstly that there are multiple ways to complete a quest. The first game I played which featured this mechanic was Darksun: Shattered Lands, although great progress has been made since that was released. Secondly, the environment the game is set in is as interesting as the main quest. Of course, this isn’t the same for all of the games I’ve mentioned, but for many of them, there is a lot more to playing them than simply completing the main quest.

Anyhow, back to Planescape. Planescape has both of the features I mentioned above. Another thing Planescape has in common with the other RPGs I mentioned is that you play the role of a ‘relative’ amnesiac (in the case of Planescape, you play a total amnesiac); that is, your character doesn’t know or remember anything. From a plot perspective, this is sensible because the player will usually be ignorant of the setting/environment of the game prior to playing it. In Planescape, your character’s identity is your goal, so this mechanic works very well in this instance. This is contrast to, say, Fallout where your character’s identity is irrelevant and so their lack of knowledge stems more from naivety.

Here is a plot summary:

In Planescape, you play The Nameless One. You wake up on a stone slab in a room filled corpses, blood, skulls and a couple of zombies doing menial labour. Your body is covered in scars and your back is aching. When you get off the slab, the first thing that happens is that you are introduced to Morte, a floating skull who accompanies you on your quest thereafter. Upon asking Morte what the deal is with your back, Morte says something is tattooed on it. It’s a passage which tells you to things: find Pharod and find your journal. Later you discover that you were actually dead and had woken up in a place called the Mortuary; a place where a strange sect known as the Dustmen reside. The Dustmen pay people for corpses and then use those corpses to reanimate them to carry out labour. The Dustmen play a crucial role in the economy of the city of Sigil. The Mortuary resides in Sigil, which seems to be a sort of endless city.

Anyhow, the Dustmen’s demand for corpses means that an underclass of people known as collectors has sprung up. Collectors collect dead bodies and sell them to the Dustmen. Some of them kill people so that they can then sell their bodies to the Dustmen. It turns out that Pharod is the leader of a group of collectors, so you immediately set about meeting him. While carrying out a quest he gives you, you come across an elaborate tomb which you later discover is your tomb! In there you discover what could be said to be the ‘journal’ you told yourself to find. You even find a slab with the message written on your back on it. Alas, when Morte read it out to you, he neglected to read the last line which said ‘Whatever you do, don’t trust the skull’.

It’s at this point I should note that, for me, this game went from being very interesting to being incredibly awesome. Unfortunately, my imagination of the implications of this was far more radical than the reality that played out.

After finding the tomb, the game story enters a sort of lull period as you get side-tracked by other quests not strictly relevant to your quest of establishing your identity. One of the things the tomb you found teaches you is that you have been a busy man prior to waking up in the Mortuary. As the game goes on, you will discover that each of your incarnations has been radically different and, in seeking out your identity as those incarnations have, some have deliberately made that quest more difficult (not each of your incarnations has been of sane mind).

Midway through the game you discover that the holes in your identity are related to your absence of mortality, so you then set about trying to reclaim your mortality. It turns out you’re immortal because of a deal you made in the past, you never work out why you made this deal, but after you died the first time, you lost your memory and so that information is lost. At the end, you face your mortality, an incarnation of yourself that, like you, is immortal because it was divided from you. Unlike you, however, it has not ‘died’ before and so it knows everything. It is satisfied with the state it is in, so it has no interest in refusing with you. It can be persuaded to, either by force or by dialogue, the end result being… your condemnation to hell (there’s no escaping the sins of your previous incarnations).

Planescape is fascinating. The environment is fascinating. Your character’s predicament is fascinating. Unfortunately the game mechanics are somewhat less fascinating. The combat is clumsy, but thankfully you don’t have to fight often. Instead you spend a lot of your time reading, which is… well… it makes it a bit like a choose-your-own-adventure story, only you always get the good ending. Looking back, I have to concede that what made the game ‘fun’ wasn’t so much the game as it was the setting and story it was telling. I found The Longest Journey and Dreamfall a bit like that, too. That said, the story of Planescape is a bit like The Bourne Identity but set in a sort of steam-punk Dungeons and Dragons world.

That which made Planescape awesome stands in direct contrast to the next game I played and finished, which I found disappointing and almost embarrassing. What redeemed Planescape’s clumsy combat and excessive reading was the ingenuity of the story being told; but what if Planescape’s combat had been more polished and if all the text had disappeared, would it still be the same game? And more so, would it still have been ‘good’.

Titan Quest:

The next game I played was Titan Quest along with its expansion, Immortal Throne. Titan Quest is Diablo 2. It is not ‘like’ Diablo 2. It is not ’similar’ to Diablo 2. Titan Quest is Diablo 2. I can’t remember Diablo 2 all that well. I do recall it took me three attempts to finish it and I only managed to do so on my work computer in China (it was one of the few games that would run). I have also since replayed Diablo 1, which I actually found a lot more playable. This might seem strange given how many improvements were introduced in Diablo 2, but, looking back, it makes sense.

In Diablo 1, there was the town, Tristram, where you buy and sell stuff and heal; and then there was the dungeon. The dungeon was divided into four ’sections’ each consisting of four levels; meaning that there were 16 levels altogether. Each level was the same size, although the monsters got progressively more difficult. You couldn’t run and I don’t think you could reassign your mouse buttons either. You would sporadically be given quests when you returned to Tristram to buy and sell all your stuff; although you would need to talk to each person in town to get any new quests. This all sounds pretty bad, but it was fairly well spaced-out. I suspect the game could be completed in about 4-8 hours of continued play, including exploring each of the levels, although one might be persuaded to re-do the first 4-6 levels to get one’s level up. It’s an all right game, but when compared to Diablo 2, Diablo 2 is, or should be, by all accounts a better game. Yet I finished Diablo first time, while Diablo 2 took me three attempts. Why is this?

In Diablo 2, the four fairly short sections in the first game are now acts of varying length. Each act consists of a number of regions one visits, at the end of each is a boss. Improvements over Diablo 1 include: hero skills, the ability to run, the ability to assign the left and right mouse buttons, accomplices and a number of equipment enhancers (runes, jewels, charms). These are real improvements and, from my experience, they did make the game more fun; but at the same time, something was taken away. What it was? I can only guess. I have two theories, though. The first of these is that Diablo was shorter and, thus, it was just as ‘bad’ as Diablo 2, the agony just didn’t last as long. I don’t think this is the case, though.

The second theory is that, in Diablo 1, you can play your character however you like, within reason (using weaponry for warriors and spells for sorcerers) and still perform very well. In Diablo 2, however, you are ‘encouraged’ to adopt a particular play style (refer to any Diablo 2 walkthrough for a list of the various character moulds you should adopt), deviation from which will result in you being punished quite heavily. Actually, that’s not true, the game doesn’t ‘encourage’ you to build your character in such a way, instead it just punishes you for not doing so. I think this is more likely the reason why I found Diablo 2 a less enjoyable experience to Diablo 1.

Anyhow, back to Titan Quest. I think Titan Quest fixed this weakness of Diablo 2. You can play your hero however you like and still perform fairly well. That said, should you play multiplayer, certain character builds are still technically ’stronger’ than others, so you may yet find yourself playing a supporting role if you don’t play your cards right. The control system of Titan Quest is the same as Diablo 2, and either Jamie or Rosi assure me it plays very similar to Guild Wars. One thing that works against Titan Quest very heavily is its setting. Titan Quest is set in, presumably, Ancient Greece. The first act is very good and all until about mid-way through when you meet a character that has an unmistakable Chinese accent. For me, that moment was an omen of things to come. Sure enough, in Act 2, I found myself traversing ‘Egypt’ and exploring Pyramids and Sphinxes. It became rapidly more kitsch as the game went on or, rather, it became a source of comedy.

Act 3 takes you to ‘China’ which you run to from Babylon. That’s right, you run from Babylon to China along, get this, the Silk Road. Your trek also includes a stint along the Great Wall and you are also required to clear Chang’An, the capital of China, of Terracotta warriors that have come to life and taken over the city. What’s more, half of all the warriors you kill drop things like ‘Babylonian shield’ or ‘Alexandrian helm’. It just reeks of cheese. It’s depressing in how seriously the game takes itself despite pooing all over human history. Contrast this to, say, Serious Sam in which a redneck fights aliens in ancient Egypt, Babylon and Central America. Serious Sam, despite its name, doesn’t ever take itself seriously. Titan Quest, however, the developers have even gone to the trouble of putting storytellers in each of the towns to tell players stories from the various cultures (whether true or not). They are irrelevant and didn’t need to be added, but they serve to show how committed the game designers were to producing, what they thought was, a convincing game experience.

The best Acts, stylistically, of Titan Quest are Acts 1 and the expansion Act. I found Act 1 okay because I hadn’t really studied Greek history or anything before, and so I wasn’t as affected by the historical liberties I’m sure the game took. The expansion Act is set in Hell, so the designers could be forgiven for anything they did with it. I should note, however, that my ‘vision’ of Hell isn’t the same as the game designers’. I’ve always viewed hell as looking a bit like an abattoir but with people instead of animals. I think I have Doom and Diablo to blame for that. My biggest gripe with the last act was that, like the rest of the game, it was repetitive and I don’t just mean in terms of gameplay (the gameplay doesn’t change much from that of the first 15 minutes of the game), the levels looks the same and ‘just don’t end’. It felt particularly as though it was dragging when I entered the Fifth Domain… and 40 minutes later, the Fourth Domain… and then the Third. I felt as if the developers had just given up naming their monotonous landscapes and instead had resorted to numbering them.

As the gameplay of Titan Quest is the same as Diablo 2, its weakest in the various boss battles you encounter which, incidentally, are resolved in the same way every time. Of course, that could be because I chose warrior classes in building my character. Every single boss battle was won in one of two ways. Either you run up to them and hit them until they go down, or, if you take too much damage, you pull back, heal up using potions and then run back in again to finish off the job. There are no variations except maybe with other classes, but even then I imagine one will find a working strategy with that class and use it for every boss. Maybe one of the reasons why I feel so disappointed with Titan Quest is just that; having just played Planescape, being forced along a linear path with only one method with which to complete quests seems like a step backward.

When I finish playing a good game, I feel a little hollow inside as I know that there is no more to play. This is how I felt with Planescape, but it is not how I felt with Titan Quest. While playing that last act of Titan Quest, I couldn’t wait to move onto a better game and once it finished, I resigned myself to the fact that I would be quite happy not loading this game up again. This may have also led to the subsequent elation I felt when I started playing the next game I had lined up to play.

Bioshock

When I first loaded up Bioshock, I didn’t quite know what to expect. All I had heard about the game was that it was 1950s-themed, it was set underwater, it had little sisters and big daddies and it put the player in ‘contentious moral situations’. What I didn’t know about the game was that it was scary in much the same way as the Ravenholme part of Half-Life 2. I wasn’t prepared for this and so I felt uncomfortable playing it for long periods at a time. It affected me so much so that I actually replayed the first part of the game on ‘normal’ difficulty instead of ‘hard’ as I had originally selected. Of course, it was only later after I had reached the same point at which I had stopped that I discovered I could adjust the difficulty in-game.

In a nutshell, Bioshock is a first-person-shooter (FPS) set in Rapture, an undersea metropolis built by the industrialist Andrew Ryan. It was built as a kind of free-market Mecca away from the constraints imposed by big government and religion on mankind’s capacity and endeavours. You arrive in the city following a plane crash in the mid-Atlantic of which you are the sole survivor. You are then introduced to Atlas over a hand-held radio and he then proceeds to guide you around the city. He is effectively your only friend in the city as you rapidly discover that the very few people you come across are all crazy and try to attack you. Atlas reveals (or perhaps you discover on your own, I can’t quite remember) that the reason why everyone is crazy is because they are tanked up on a substance known as adam. Adam is a substance which is used for genetic modification. These modifications then give the recipient superhuman abilities. The setback of adam, however, is that it is like a drug and quantities of it are needed thereafter to stave off insanity. Most people in the game don’t have adam, though, so the city is filled with people who attack you or others in search of adam.

As first-person-shooters go, the gameplay has potential, but I found it on the one hand too easy, and on the other hand overly complicated. The ease of the game probably stems from the difficulty level, but I don’t think the difficulty changes the game as much as it changes the ‘numbers’. By numbers I mean the values of certain things, e.g. pistol shots do 10 damage instead of 20, enemies have 40 health instead of 30 etc. Maybe the AI was different, I can’t remember, I didn’t find the experience of playing on hard really all that different from playing on normal. I think the only difference was health and ammo, both of which I felt I had less of when playing on hard.

The complexity of Bioshock stems in part from the controls which, prior to changing them, I found clunky. In Bioshock, there are effectively ‘3′ types of weapons to cycle through. The first of these are regular weapons which include a wrench, pistol, tommy gun, shotgun, grenade launcher and a couple of other ‘oooo’ weapons (I stuck to those 5 mostly). The second of these is the ammunition used in each of these weapons. This I feel was a mistake. All it does it add a level of complexity to the game that is just doesn’t need. Examples of ammunition types include: anti-personnel rounds, armour-piercing bullets, electric buck, explosive buck and others. These are a mistake for two reasons. First, changing between bullet-types requires reloading and reloading in this game is slow. As such, you cannot (should not) change bullet types mid-battle. That doesn’t mean that you only get attacked by one kind of enemy at any given time. Ultimately, if you use anti-personnel rounds, you’ll take out the regular guys easily enough, but the turrets will take more shots; vice-versa, if you use armour-piercing rounds, you’ll take out the turrets easily, but the other enemies will take more shots. Now admittedly, turrets don’t move, but they do more damage than the splicers (the ‘human’ enemies), so nothing stops you from dealing with the splicers first and then moving onto the turrets (and changing ammo in between); but why not instead of introducing this frustrating mechanic, we have one gun that is good at splicers and another that is good at turrets? Changing guns doesn’t require reloading and can be done with limited penalty mid-battle.

Secondly, the bullet-types mean you effectively need another mouse wheel. I got around this by using mouse 4 and 5 (both thumb buttons on my mouse) as scroll through ammunition types. Oh, I should point out that each gun had three ammunition types. So maybe another mouse wheel is over the top; but the variety is enough that a single button doesn’t work because there is always one kind of ammunition which works better, and one that works less well against each kind of enemy. I think this can be overcome by either eliminating ammo varieties altogether, or by having only two types of ammo. Furthermore, when you switch ammo, you should be told somewhere near the centre of the screen exactly which ammo you are switching to. At present, the icon in the bottom left hand corner changes, but in a battle, you’re not looking in the bottom left hand corner.

The third ‘weapon selection’ is not really weapons so much as skills. In the game you pick up things called ‘plasmids’ which give you additional skills. These skills might be things like telekinesis, electro-bolt or incinerate. Changing to plasmids is, by default, set in right-click. I found this very strange as I don’t think I’ve ever had right mouse button set effectively to a ‘change weapon’ function before. As such, I found it impossible to use and instead changed the plasmid-weapon change key to ‘q’ (aka change to last-weapon in Team Fortress 2). I found it worked much better for me this way, but I found then that I didn’t have anything set to right mouse button. In the end I changed it to ‘zoom’, which… argh… ok… here’s another problem with Bioshock’s weapon system.

Ideally weapons are used for killing things and plasmids are used for doing things. That said, certain plasmids can also be used to kill. Unfortunately, there is one weapon which CANNOT be used to kill, this ‘weapon’ is the camera. The camera is used to research enemies and, thus, give you bonuses when fighting them later on. The problem is, after you’ve taken all the photos you can, you need to kill the target before they kill you. Now, up until you get the camera, you might find that you leave your plasmids on because there is stuff that needs doing, but when a monster suddenly appears, you switch to your weapon (using the weapon-plasmid switch button) and kill it. When you use the camera, I don’t know about other people, but I did the exact same thing, only instead of having a weapon in my hand, I had electro-bolt (used for stunning enemies, from what I recall, though, it can’t actually kill anything). What? I can’t kill with electro-bolt, so I switch again. What? Camera again? What cruel punishment is this? This happened to me repeatedly until I had finally finished researching all the enemies and never switched to my camera again.

The nightmare controls don’t end there, however. There is one particularly useful plasmid you pick up that is very helpful in both combat and in exploring Rapture. This plasmid is telekinesis. The first time I wanted to use it, though, was funny and a concern at the same time. In Bioshock, telekinesis is like the gravity gun in Half-Life 2. Actually, that’s incorrect, telekinesis is the gravity gun from Half-Life 2. The gravity gun in Half Life 2 worked as follows: left click nudges the target (I found this pretty useless in Half-Life 2, but it’s helpful to nudge things that are too big to pick up) and right click picks up a target. Once you are holding an object, left click throws that object and right-click drops it. This system is so simple, it is genius. Unfortunately telekinesis isn’t nearly as intuitive. When using telekinesis, left-click and hold picks up and holds onto an object. Letting go of left-click throws that object. (the first time I used it to get a key hanging on a wall on the other side of a room beyond a broken window, I left-clicked only to see the key vanish somewhere I couldn’t possibly reach it) If you want to search/use the object you have picked up you must push ‘e’ while holding the left mouse button. If you want to drop the object (rather than throw it) you must push ‘v’. ‘v’? What? The mind boggles.

Once you are used to the abysmal system, however, telekinesis is an awesome skill. In fact, it became my main weapon for a good part of the game. Walking around unarmed, getting ambushed and taking down your opponents using just the environment is very satisfying. Often the ‘target’ of your telekinesis is hard to judge. I frequently found myself using the skill in a wide open area or at the target of my attacks only to take the target’s hat or pick up a barrel I hadn’t noticed before to throw at them. Sometimes it can be a bit funny, but overall I found telekinesis very satisfying to use.

One thing Bioshock does very well is style. The game is stylish and the environment is so captivating that you’ll spend ages just exploring the city. The game is filled with tape recorders that function in a similar way to the PDAs in Doom 3. This seemed a little out of place in Bioshock, though, because I’m sure using a pen and paper would be easier for most people to record details (often the recordings sounded a bit like blogs) than recording their experiences on a voice recorder. Even Doom 3 had the guts to assume its audience was able to read, even though it would have been a lot more justified in using voice recordings instead. That said, exploring Rapture and piecing together its short history is a wonderful experience. I only wish that the city had… well… people. Usually cities have people, that’s why they form, but Rapture doesn’t have people, it has millions of crazy splicers and about three people, all of whom seem to think the city is thriving or at least is able to thrive again in the immediate future.

One last thing to mention about Bioshock is hacking, an aspect of the game which falls flat. Throughout the game you may be required to ‘hack’ safes, electronically-locked doors and you can also hack vending machines (which you can purchase health and ammo from), turrets sentry-bots. The idea of this is nice, but the manner in which it is done isn’t. ‘Hacking’ essentially involves playing the game Pipemania, i.e. you create a pipe that allows goo to travel from the start to the finish while navigating around obstacles. Pipemania is good. Bioshock hacking is not. As you play, you will pick up plasmids that will enable you to slow down the rate at which the goo flows or will create fewer obstacles while hacking; one thing a plasmid won’t do is skip the hacking process altogether. Throughout the game you can pick up ‘auto-hack’ tools which will skip the process, but you can only carry five at any one time and, well, in a setting such as thing, I don’t think you can hold hoarding against a player. I don’t like the idea of skipping through parts of a game because they are boring, instead I think those parts just shouldn’t exist. Options like the auto-hack tool, for me, should only be used for obstacles that are actually very hard or time consuming given the situation; by time consuming, I mean in game-time not real-time (i.e. If a terminator is hunting you down, an auto-hack mechanism would be a more sensible option than manually opening a machine up, twiddling some wires and carrying out a fairly extensive operation).

I have looked online and on youtube for information on Bioshock 2 and, well, I feel a little disappointed by what I saw. One interesting thing I forgot to point out about Bioshock is that, despite the game being set in an under-water city, there is no swimming! There is wading, which significantly slows down your movement, but no actual 3D swimming. It’s not that I have a problem with swimming, but I do find it less enjoyable than navigating in the presence of gravity. Back to Bioshock 2, there is one segment of the level where you actually go through the water. In the video you don’t actually swim in it, it’s just another environment you walk through, but, well, we’ll see what happens.

In the Bioshock 2 video, the player takes control of a Big Daddy. This seems like an odd move to me as I never recall wishing to be a Big Daddy as I was playing Bioshock 1. Furthermore, you actually do play as a Big Daddy in Bioshock 1 and that was one of the less enjoyable parts of the game. The changed identity added little more than numbers to you character and made your field of vision marginally less attractive. That said, it’s hard to say what I’d like to see out of Bioshock 2… There’s only one thing on my list of things that I’d really like to see in future games set in Rapture and I already mentioned it: people.

Oh, before I move on, there’s one thing I did forget to mention about Bioshock that all the reviewers and what-have-you raved about: the confounding moral dilemmas the player is forced to contend with. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Bioshock, I can safely assure you that this is all balderdash. The dilemma you are faced with is actually a choice between ’saving’ a little sister (to get a little bit of adam now and a lot more later) or harvesting a little sister (to get a lot of adam now, and nothing more later). Either way it sort of evens out, but of course you don’t know this while you are playing. The other issue is that, well, it just doesn’t arouse a ‘moral’ conflict within me. To me, a ‘moral conflict’ is most obvious when you, as the player, reload a previous save game to see what would have happened had you made the other choice because you weren’t satisfied with the result of the choice you made. One game where I did this was Dreamfall where at one point you are forced to make a decision just before a main character gets killed. In the end, it doesn’t matter which choice you make, the result is always the same; but at the time I was so sure that there was some way I could save the character.

Another example of a real moral choice is in a game like Arcanum or Fallout where you are required to adjudicate in a situation where you have limited information or where the ‘moderate path’ is not all that clear. I can’t think of an example off the top of my head, but in both Fallout and Arcanum, the decisions you make in the game affect the ‘conclusion’ of the game; although that isn’t all that different from Bioshock. The core difference I suppose is that in Fallout and Arcanum you have many conclusions while in Bioshock you only have one. How about a situation where the player is forced to, say, choose between doing what the society wants or doing the right thing? I don’t mean this in a sort of cheesy inter-society diplomat sort of role, but, say, a person in the society has picked up a baby-enemy-species-thing. The townspeople want to destroy it, but you know that that isn’t the ‘right’ thing to do. You know this, not because speech bubbles, dialogue and log books keep saying ‘killing babies is wrong’, but because you as a person know that killing babies is wrong. I think Bioshock had the potential to do something like this by making a bigger deal of Andrew Ryan’s small government anti-welfare movement in contrast to a big-government enabling conception of the ’state’. Both of these approaches are valid (why should I have to surrender my earnings to some ‘government’ vs. what about those who are unable to take care of themselves?) and I’m sure this conflict is able to manifest itself in moral issues, too. Well, maybe if Bioshock did do this, it would have been a different game; so I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what 2K Games do with morality… maybe legitimately bring the concept in.

After finishing Bioshock, I got that hollow feeling; that feeling that comes after reading a good book, watching a good movie/trilogy or watching a good TV show (or anime, American TV shows don’t really do this for me). It’s the feeling that was noticeably absent after I finished Titan Quest and it’s the feeling that followed my completion of the next game I played.

Anno 1701:

While I was living in China, I played a game called Anno 1701. In Anno 1701, you play the role of… well… I guess of a capitalist. The idea of Anno 1701 is colonialism but while history tells us colonialism was all about taking over foreign cultures, getting the locals to do your labour and shipping the profits back home, in Anno 1701 it’s a little more… well… Marxist I guess you could say. Trade is intrinsic to the gameplay and is the vehicle through which success is achieved.

The game plays from a top-down perspective and involves turning a group of pioneers in the New World into Aristocrats. In the beginning of the game, your settlers’ demands are few and their housing is dodgy, but by the end their houses are enormous mansions housing dozens of people and demanding about a dozen different resources. Anno 1701 has a cycle: you spend money to build your initial settlement including houses, a town square and a port; the houses only contain one person each, but this can increase provided the people are happy; the people are happy when the taxes are lower, but of course this means you have less income (that said, more people = more income over time); if you meet the pioneers’ demands, they will be happy to pay more taxes; once you have met all their demands and they are happy, they will ‘level up’ to the next civilization level; at the next civilization level (or class) the people at that level will pay greater sums of tax than those of the previous level; however, if the people at the higher level don’t have their lower level demands met, they will riot and burn your settlement to the ground (meaning you’ll have to start all over again… always make sure their demands are met). There are five civilization levels, so the game takes a fair while to play; that said, there is no building time, so the moment you have the resources to build something, you can build it.

This might sound very straightforward (albeit a modicum complicated), but I should point out that the game takes place on islands. Not all resources can be gained from one island, so you will need to settle several to accrue all the resources you need. Furthermore, once you have facilities on an island to start producing those resources, you still need to deliver them to your settlers on your main island; this means you need to establish trade routes. In some of the scenarios, you might face a situation whereby you can’t build facilities and, thus, must gain these resources through trade either with the free-trader (an NPC that exists solely to trade) or with the other players. You can also take over those other player’s islands by force, but the combat is pretty woeful… perhaps to discourage you from trying to use force.

Although Anno 1701 is a great game, it’s missing one thing… an objective. The game has a sort of objective, that being ‘independence’, but even if you reach independence, the game doesn’t end. As such, the game ends when you’ve had enough (I’ve usually had enough after I’ve achieved independence). Now, I should mention, I ‘finished’ this game while I was in China. The game has an in-built achievement system whereby you get medals for meeting certain criteria. The game has three difficulty settings which reward you with bronze, silver or gold medals for meeting the criteria within those settings. Easy and normal are both fairly easy, but hard is hard. In easy and normal, the computer players, at worst, will cancel trade relations with you. In hard, they will kill you. The way you play the game is completely different on hard compared with playing it on easy or normal. At first I found it frustrating, playing on hard essentially requires that you be intimately familiar with the mechanics of the game. I avoided doing that by getting a walkthrough from someone who was intimately familiar with the mechanics. I believe that last game on hard took me about 25 hours of gameplay (including time that was artificially sped up with the ‘+’ key), but the feeling of ‘euphoria’ at the end of it was great. Achieving independence in Anno 1701 on hard is very hard, but I can be said to have done so. The game also includes ten scenarios all of which are incredibly easy (especially after finishing the game on hard); but once all that was done… There was nothing left to do.

So why did I start playing it again recently? Well, when I played the game in China, I didn’t actually own the copy I was playing. I had bought a copy of it in China and I gave it to my nephew back home, but when he tried to install it, it didn’t work. It turns out the disc didn’t come with a CD key. When I had come to Sydney later, I wanted to get a copy of it for myself, but I could never actually find it for sale. Earlier this year, though, this all changed. One morning, when I logged onto Steam I was welcomed with a page saying ‘1701 A.D. now on Steam - includes The Sunken Dragon Expansion’ (I’m not sure why it is called 1701 A.D. instead of Anno 1701, I gather it’s only called that in the US). Not only had this game I had gotten so much out of been released on Steam, but it added more content. I believe I bought it on the very day it was released and have had it sitting in my account, waiting to be played.

Going back to it, it’s still a very good game. Just yesterday I started the expansion missions in The Sunken Dragon and they seem exactly like what one expects from a expansion. I’ve played lots of games and lots of expansions. Some expansions just add new missions, some add things that were missing in the original, others tweak the gameplay and others still take it to a whole new level. The first expansion I ever remember playing was Warcraft 2 - Beyond the Dark Portal, but, in truth, the game didn’t really add much. It only added one thing: heroes. Oh, sorry, did I say heroes? I mean units that look like all your other units, but have different names, more health, more mana, do more damage and fire further; and what’s more, there’s only one of each. From a developmental perspective, I guess the Warcraft 2 expansion was something of a letdown. I believe it added story as well, but I was so young then I think that I didn’t pay any attention to the story.

An expansion which went further was the Starcraft expansion, Brood War. Brood War introduced new (and very interesting) units and a much more engaging storyline than what Warcraft 2 offered. That said, from what I remember, aside from adding new units, Brood War didn’t do anything ground-breaking. I could be wrong, though. I do remember some of the Brood War missions being fairly unique, but then I can’t remember if the original Starcraft missions were all that stale. Perhaps one of the main things Brood War did was to teach budding map-makers what the Starcraft ‘platform’ could do. Well, maybe Brood War didn’t do this, but Warcraft 3 and its expansion, The Frozen Throne, certainly did.

Warcraft 3 didn’t revolutionize Real-Time Strategy (RTS) gaming, but it did have an impact. It took the Role-playing Game (RPG) genre and brought it into the RTS by introducing actual heroes that level along with inventory and shops. That said, the Warcraft 3 expansion didn’t add all that much to the gameplay. It added new heroes with new abilities, a new content delivery system (as manifest in the orc campaign and thus causing subsequent patches for the game to be enormous), a shop building that each race can build and… I think that’s it. On the other hand, it show-cased what the Warcraft 3 platform was capable of by showing us a whole heap of radical new levels (such as the caravan push level and the completely functional yet peripheral Naga race). The Frozen Throne was a real eye-opener, much like Warcraft 3 before it, and it paved the way for the explosion in the number of unique maps (or more like games in their own right) that were developed using the platform.

An expansion which provided what the original game was lacking was The Immortal Throne expansion in Titan Quest. I don’t remember what the Titan Quest expansion added because I didn’t play the original all the much, but I do remember the absence of ’storage’. Can you imagine Diablo without Storage? I can, because Diablo didn’t have storage, that was a Diablo 2 invention, but Titan Quest regressed! Thankfully the Titan Quest expansion brought us what we had all been expecting, and all we had to pay for it was another gruelling act and new items to pick up to make that agony a little less noticeable. The Immortal Throne also added a new class (much like the Diablo 2 expansion) which, as I discovered when I played with someone who was using it multiplayer, is horribly overpowered.

All these expansions are good and all, but I wouldn’t call them ‘taking it to the next level’. For that, the premier game that comes to mind is Neverwinter Nights. Neverwinter Nights was a bad game. I played it, finished it, and was terribly disappointed. The original story was predictable, the characters were uninteresting, the gameplay was boring and it felt long. I cannot in good conscience recommend that game to anyone, but if you want to see what an expansion should do, that is the game to play. Neverwinter Nights had two expansions, the first was ‘Shadows of Undrentide’ and the second was ‘Hordes of the Underdark’. Shadows of Undrentide wasn’t all that special. The story was mildly better than the original campaign, but it didn’t push the engine all that much further. Hordes of the Underdark, however, that took some liberties. The story was much darker than in any of the other games and it did some crazy stuff; or at least it seemed like crazy stuff given how inflexible the original game was. I remember finishing the expansion, not by fighting some lame boss, but by talking to him and, I think, by paying him off. I can’t remember all that much about Neverwinter Nights and its expansions, but I do remember feeling at least slightly sorry after finishing that expansion.

Back to the Anno 1701 expansion, it’s important to note that it doesn’t really add anything aside from new missions. What should be noted, however, is that these missions are a greater departure from the original game than the scenarios included in the original. In the in-built scenarios, you cannot lose. You can take one hour per scenario or you can take two hours per scenario, but you cannot lose. In the Sunken Dragon, you can lose. Furthermore, not all the missions are identical like they seem to be in the original. Every second mission involves building a base (unlike every mission in the original). I can’t evaluate it much more than this at the moment as I haven’t completed it yet, but so far I’m fairly impressed. They’ve gone ahead and given the game a story, but it remains to be seen if it is anything ground-breaking (so far it seems pretty cheesy).

The game that first drew me to Anno 1701 was actually Anno 1701 on the DS. The DS game was all right, nothing too incredible, though; but it was one of the first RTSs on the platform. Really all Anno 1701 on the DS is is a scaled back version of the PC game. I think the other thing that drew me to Anno 1701 on the DS was that another game I had been waiting for on the DS was a disappointment. That game was Settlers 2.

Settlers 2 was and still is a great game, but the original version at least fills a bit dated. Settlers 2 is similar to Anno 1701 in that you have a plethora of resources to work with. I find I like the idea of having lots of resources, because, to me, it makes more sense than just gold, wood, oil, stone, iron, minerals or gas. The way resources are used in the two games is very different, though. In Anno 1701, it’s a bit like Diner Dash, people want stuff and you must supply it. In Settlers 2, you have goals. Usually your goal is to wipe out the enemy (or occupy the exit gate, which is usually located on enemy territory), but you might have sub-goals to acquire the necessary resources to achieve this goal. To attack the enemy, you need strong troops. To make troops, you need swords, shields and, funnily enough, beer. To make swords and shields, you need steel and coal (to heat the steel), to get steel, you need raw iron and coal (to melt the iron). To get iron and coal, you need to mine it from the mountains and miners will only mine if they have food. To get food, you either fish it out of the lakes, ponds or out of the sea; you can grow wheat fields, mill the wheat and produce bread, or you can feed that bread to pigs which you can get butchered. Wheat can be used to produce beer, too. From this you can see very directly the relationship between your goals and your means.

Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble & Exodus from the Earth:

That just about winds up all I had to say about the games I’ve been playing this month and what I’ve thought about them. Before I finish this. I’d like to mention two other games I bought a while back and tried recently, but which I found didn’t really ‘make the grade’. The first of these was Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble. From what I can gather, this game involves a series of lame minigames with a loosely told story set in an all-girls high school in the 1920s or so. I wish I could say something good about it, but I just can’t. The minigames aren’t intuitive and the story is too poorly told to hold my interest.

The last game I want to mention is a fairly bland FPS I played called Exodus from the Earth. Graphically, the game looks dated. It looks very similar in style to Perfect Dark on the Nintendo 64, but the graphics have been marginally improved. It tells what sounds like a moderately interesting story, nothing ground breaking, but well-executed enough to grab the player’s attention. One area in the game that has fallen flat is the editing. From what I can gather, very little of the in-game text has been edited or formatted. So when you pick up a PDA, it appears on your screen in much the same way as a word-wrapped paragraph in notepad. For me, this significantly lowers my interest in the content of the message and so I ignored subsequent PDAs I discovered.

Both Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble and Exodus from the Earth are games I have tried out, but haven’t finished. Maybe they have redeeming qualities when played in their entirety, the question is: will I have the patience to go through them? I am not sure what I will play next. I have moved Beyond Good and Evil to my favourites and I am similarly tempted to try Assassin’s Creed; but I’ll have to see how I feel. There are still plenty of smaller games I have yet to try.

Consensus Society

Today I went around Beijing to do a number of things, among them:

  • buy pillow slips
  • buy table runners
  • heal a nation
  • check out micro SD cards

I managed to complete only two of the above, thus rendering my excursion relatively futile. For those interested, I managed to buy the pillow slips and discover that I couldn’t find the micro SD card I was interested in; but as I shuffled around the city, I got to complaining about how everything around me was wrong (which I suspect is a symptom of living in a crowded society).

It’s easier to point the finger at other people here, whether rightly or otherwise, and lament their lack of social consciousness. In a less crowded environment, we’re more likely to point our fingers at institutions or structures that we believe aren’t functioning properly and thus make our lives harder. Anyhow, thinking about this, usually with rhetoric like ‘people who board the train before letting others on should be shot’, ‘people who smoke in crowded areas should be shot’ and so on and so forth, it inevitably makes me wonder about what a world would be like if such criteria were met.

Ahem, that isn’t to say that I actually think all these various miscreants should be executed; I don’t think a society in which such people are produced should utilise such barbaric means to enforce its ‘developing’ criteria; but were such a society to exist, what would it be like? How could it come about?

Ideally, the only way it can come about humanely is for the city to determine the population, rather than the reverse as has been the story of human civilization. For the city to come before the population, it’s ‘beacon’, that is, the things that draws people to the city, must be capitalized and monopolized on. I’d like to think that everyone would want to go to the city because ‘everything just works’ there, but that seems like a fairly unrealistic and unsustainable expectation, so there must be some other resource that attracts people there initially. Later on, the everything-works idea can be relied upon to draw people, but in its early stages, it wouldn’t be sensible.

Now, in the early stages of this new city, if a resource has been identified and dominated, the next stage is for the company in charge of this initiative to engineer the rules that will govern the workforce that will seed this city. This is where the necessary ideals for this new city can be established and, not only that, be followed all thanks to operation of the company. Instead of a loose idea of a social contract, the citizens of the budding society would have the rigid guidelines of their actual contract; the breaching of which can thus see that person removed (exiled) from the company city.

This is all well and good in the beginning. I keep referring to this company as a city, but in truth, it would be more like a town (if that) than anything else, but it’s the only humane way I can see that a society can be built on certain ideas without infringing on the rights of those who don’t agree with those ideas. At first, the market would be the motivating force that would draw people to this place in exchange for their ‘rights’ to rampant individualism to the detriment of their peers and society as a whole. So long as that strain of consensus remains throughout the development of the city, it would add a dynamic that isn’t regarded as fair in cities today.

Well, all of this is merely a castle in the sky; but it’s good food for thought.

Games on PSP

I have just interrupted my game of Ultimate Ghosts ‘N Goblins, after having played Diablo on my PSP, to write on my blog. I think my experience with UGNG played a large role in prompting me to write here. I remember playing Ghouls and Ghosts on my Sega Master System, or was it my Mega Drive, back in the day. As I recall, it was the most frustrating game I’d ever played, but it had this wonderfully cheesy aspect to it that made it sadistically satisfying. Well, thankfully the youth of today can have the same experience I got when I was young by playing UGNG on their PSPs.

To give you some idea how frustrating UGNG is:

For those of us who grew up with the consoles of yesteryear, we all remember starting our platformer games with nothing but 3 lives. We would then travel through a hotizontal 2D environment collecting points, resources, rings, coins or children who say ‘thank you Michael’ before being forced to confront a boss at the end of the level. Often, if we were attacked or were hurt in some way, we would lose a power up, health or something else. When our health reached zero, we would lose a life and be forced to restart at the start of the level or at the last ’save point’ we passed.

In UGNG, when you start the game on ‘Novice’ your character runs onto the screen wielding javelins. A glance to the bottom left hand corner will reveal that your champion does not, in fact, have three lives, but somewhere between half and one dozen lives. You die after you are hit twice unless you survive long enough to pick up suits of armour or, I suspect, a shield. Thankfully, you respawn where you died.
Anyhow, needless to say, by the time I reached the first boss, I’d already died 3-4 times and had accepted that the only way I was going to be number one at this game was if I played it endlessly for hours at a time. The sort of activity only a 5-year-old would have the patience and time for.

Prior to playing UGNG, I was, like I said, playing Diablo on PSP. Now, I remember Diablo from back in the day. For those who are unenlightened, Diablo was the game that preceded Diablo 2, that tedious game that consisted of mouse-clicking, item acquisition and Mephistocide. Now, I found Diablo 2 a boring game, so boring in fact that it wasn’t until about 6 years after it was released that I actually got around to finishing it, and even then, only with the help of a dearth of games on the computer I was playing it on. This is distinguished from Diablo on PC, which I picked up about a year after it was released for about $5 from a garage sale, and finished soon after. If I recall correctly, it was a terrible game. Playing it on the PSP, though, it seems a lot better. Firstly, there’s autoaim, so you don’t need to worry about accuracy when firing bows or spells. Secondly, there double-speed which means that time in the game passes two times faster than it did on PC. With these in place, I find playing Diablo on PSP not all that bad. Hopefully it’ll get better as I play more.

Actually, I’m not sure where I am going with this post. I guess I just want to talk about the games I’ve been playing.

I recently finished Civilization 2, by which I mean I owned Civilization 2. If I can defeat the game on the highest difficulty against the most opponents in the largest world and triumph, the game is done and done. From this, I then moved onto Alpha Centauri which is very similar while being different at the same time. It almost feels like after having made Civilization 2, the designers thought ‘look, we can do this and this and this now, if only it made any sense in the context of civilization. I know! In the future on another world, anything goes, so lets set it there!’ And so Clinical Immortality was born.

Well, I’m going to leave it there. Bored of writing now. Need to find new games to play. Only 4 more days until Fallout 3 comes out, possibly 14 more months until I have a computer that can run it.

My MP3 Player

At present I don’t have an MP3 player. I have been using my DS as an MP3 player and, while it performs admirably, it is not the best device for this function. Two days ago I was paid and so now I’m looking for ways to spend my newfound wealth. High on the list of things I want to buy is an MP3 player, however while I have been looking around online at what my options are, it’s very easy to get distracted. I’m not too fussed about how much this MP3 player costs as, so long as the device meets all my criteria, it will just be a one-off purchase (although I certainly hope it will be covered by a warranty).

While looking at MP3 players, my biggest problem has been… well… the numerous distractions that seem to be bundled with them. There has been a big push in recent years for ‘integration’, that is, having all the functions you want bundled into one device; however I have found that this movement tends to ignore two big problems. The first has to do with battery-life, that is, if your device can perform a lot of functions - and you use it for all these functions - when the battery of the device runs out you will lose all of those functions. The second has to do with irreconcilable differences between what you want from each function. For example, if you want a portable MP3 player, you probably want it to be small so you can hang it around your neck or clip it onto something. If you want a portable video player, you probably want it to have a big screen and to have a fairly large capacity so you can store a fair number of movies on it. No matter which way you look at it, if these are the things you are looking for in each of the functions you want to take advantage of, they just can’t be combined into one device.

Turning to my present MP3 player escapade, I have looked at a few sites and almost all of them advertise a wide range of MP3 players, but they all do the same things. All of them can play music and video and display text and photos. Some of them support playlists, have external card support (usually SD, miniSD or microSD), support video input/output or can run a wide range of video and codecs. After looking at all these MP3 players for a few hours, it dawned on me that I really ought to compose a list of the things that are most important to me in choosing an MP3 player. Here is what I arrived at.

Essential:

  • Can play MP3 and OGG
  • Small (can hang around neck or can be worn conveniently)
  • At least 4GB
  • Playlist support
  • Shuffle support
  • Can be locked/unlocked
  • Drag-and-drop support
  • Single-hand operation
  • Blind operation

Other attractive features:

  • SD card expansion
  • Microphone
  • Text-display

If the MP3 player I buy has all of the above features, I would be happy, but I am increasingly concerned that this might be harder to find than it seems. A few of these features are not even mentioned in many of the reviews I have looked at. I imagine playlist support and drag-and-drop support are difficult features to reconcile, but in all the reviews I have looked at, these issues are not looked at in any great detail. Similarly blind/single-hand operation is very important to me as, living in China, I frequently find myself on very crowded trains or buses; one hand is usually holding onto the handrail and I’m lucky if I can even bring my other hand to my face much less while it is holding my MP3 player.

For the remainder of today I will likely continue my search for a suitable MP3 player and maybe tomorrow I will go out to one of the electronics shops to see what they have on offer. I’m particularly interested in finding out what MP3 players other people have and whether or not they meet my criteria.

DOTA DS

Last night as I was lying in bed thinking all the dota I’d played during the day - I’ve been playing DOTA AI for lack of a suitable online environment in which to play in - and was thinking about, firstly, what makes it fun and, secondly, why it isn’t on the DS. For the sake of logic, I will look at the second of these points first as that weighs upon my mind more and the first point inevitably flows into the second.

For those who are unaware, DOTA DS does exist. DOTA DS is, as the name implies, DOTA which you can play on your DS. I don’t know if it has multiplayer support or not, to be honest, I didn’t get that far. For those who haven’t played it, rest assured it is an affliction you needn’t subject yourself to. I enjoy playing DOTA and so when I heard about DOTA DS, I thought it would be awesome; but the experience of playing DOTA DS I imagine was similar to that of those who saw Star Wars Episode I after the long break following the previous Star Wars film. That said, this inevitably led me to ask the question, why is DOTA DS so awful? There are a few reasons for this not limited to:

  • There are only about 5 heroes to choose from
  • The sprites used in game mostly came from Warcraft 2
  • The controls were clunky
  • The game freezes after a few minutes
  • The controls were not intuitive

In brief, it was ugly, hard to play and very unstable; however, were these issues dealt with, would the game still be enjoyable? There is one thing I will say about DOTA DS to its benefit and that is that it is a fairly decent port of the Warcraft 1, 2, 3 interface, by which I mean, I think it would have been hard to make that interface any better given the restraints of the console. It is herein that I would like to try and resolve the gap between what makes a game like DOTA good and the strengths and limitations of the DS as a console. To do this we must ask ourselves what makes DOTA DOTA and what makes it fun?

For those that are unaware - if you’ve read this far, you’re most likely not unaware - DOTA is a Warcraft 3 map in which up to 10 players are split onto two teams of 5 players each. Each player controls a unique hero and the goal is to destroy your opponents’ base which is situated at the other end of the map. In addition to this, each team has one computer controlled player (not included in the 5) which controls all the various buildings as well as its own units (referred to as creeps) that endlessly spawn at the base every minute or so and march towards the enemy base in an effort to destroy it. Inevitably these creeps come into contact with the enemy team’s creeps and they fight. It is usually in this environment in which your hero tries to push back the enemy’s creeps to allow yours to triumph or, as is more often the case, you focus on eliminating the enemy’s heroes to make it harder for them to defend themselves. As the game progresses, your heroes gain experience which is used to allow them to gain levels hence making your heroes stronger and more able. In addition to experience, for killing units, whether they be enemy heroes or creeps, players gain money which can then be used to purchase equipment for your hero. The game is over when your team destroy’s the enemy’s base (although there are different modes in the game which allow you to change the victory conditions). This is, essentially, what DOTA is. The experience itself can be somewhat different and, most certainly, it’s rare that any two games are the same (the wide difference between the heroes makes this so). So, the question is, why can’t this simple concept work on the DS? Maybe we will see such a game on the DS in the future, but what would it look like? How would it play? And above all, how would it be received?

DOTA is a fairly old map and is based on a earlier map (from either Starcraft or Warcraft 3, I’m not sure) known as Aeon of Strife. What I have described above, I believe, is the same description of any Aeon of Strife map. Everyone controls a unique unit and you all try to wipe out the enemy base. Given the clunkiness of the DOTA DS I described above, perhaps simply porting DOTA to the DS isn’t such a good idea, instead it would be better if an Aeon of Strife map was specifically designed for the DS.

Now, I’ve just said that DOTA is a kind of Aeon of Strife (AoS) map, so for anyone who has played Warcraft, you are no doubt aware exactly how many dozens of AoS maps are available to play. The truth is there are heaps, yet more people play DOTA than any of the others, why is that? Perhaps it is because DOTA has the right balance between length of game (roughly an hour a match), difference between each game (rare is it that two rounds of DOTA are alike) and it offers a rewarding experience to both veterans of DOTA or AoS maps in general and beginners to the genre. DOTA is not a map that leads beginners by the hand, it assumes you are familiar with the interface of Warcraft prior to playing and, more often than not, the best and most effective way of finding out how certain skills or items work is by purchasing them and finding out first hand rather than by reading large slabs of text (almost certain to turn people off a game). There was one other AoS map which I and a few others were familiar with called Tides of Blood. I remember that being a perfectly enjoyable map, but the rounds took too long and there wasn’t much variety between each game. That said, as an AoS map, it was very enjoyable, so so long as the lessons of DOTA are learned and capitalised upon, a non-DOTA AoS game on the DS has the potential to be thoroughly enjoyable.

How would an AoS game on DS work? For this section, I will assume the reader is fairly aware of the DOTA interface and the DS hardware. DOTA is played in Warcraft 3 using a two-buttoned mouse in conjuction with a keyboard, granted you may say the keyboard isn’t entirely necessary, but even if you only use it for communicating with your teammates, it’s still used none-the-less. The DS consists of a D-pad on the left, 4 buttons on the right and two shoulder buttons in addition to a touchscreen. The number one frustration I faced when playing DOTA DS was moving and attacking with my hero. On computer it’s easy, you select your hero and right-click where you want him or her to go. On DOTA DS, you tap your hero to select it and then… well… I can’t remember. If you tap on another unit, you either select that unit or, perhaps your hero walks to that unit, but what if you want to attack it? Maybe you can push a D-pad direction to set you next tap to be ‘attack’ or ‘move’, but heaven help you should you need to control multiple units (eg. summoners, Geomancer in DOTA); that just isn’t effective. What about scrolling around to look around the map? Maybe the d-pad should be used for that, but then you still have the movement/selection issues from before.

It was at this time that I realised I was looking at it the wrong way. What I have said above is simply porting DOTA/AoS to the DS, but such a system just isn’t suited to the console. How would you normally control a unit/hero in a real-time game on a console. Well, normally, the D-pad moves your unit around, so it makes sense that the same holds true in any DS AoS game. Wouldn’t that create problems if you have to control multiple units? Well, yes and no. How do you control multiple units in console games? In a few of the games I’ve played you use things called ‘orders’. The other units would probably be a lot more independent than they are in a game like Warcraft, but remember even in Warcraft they are not fully independent. Unless you hold-position whatever unit you have, that unit is still going to attack any enemy that comes nearby and do a whole host of what we would regard as ’stupid’ things.

Another frustrating thing I remember about DOTA DS is what I would call the minimap/hero-config screen. There would be a button you would push to switch the screens around enabling you to access the minimap (to move around) as well as to level up and use your hero’s abilities and purchase items. What that meant was, when you’re in the heat of a battle, you would constantly need to switch screens to access your hero’s skills. Woe betide you should you need to urgently run away while you presently have a select-unit skill awaiting a target highlighted. Again, this is an example of a fairly decent port of a Warcraft function, but it simply doesn’t work given the constraints of the DS. Ultimately AoS DS will perhaps initially look to have more in common with Battalion Wars (GC) or Freedom Fighters (All) than it would with DOTA as we know it on PC.

Perhaps what I have said above seems somewhat boring or obvious, but it was the later thoughts I had that made me really excited at the prospect of such a game. At present, DOTA or AoS maps are a feature of Warcraft/Starcraft/RTS games. They are not games in themselves; but what if they were? What options would be on the table? As a standalone DS game, what would AoS DS look like? I can see a menu screen already:

  • Campaign
  • Skirmish
  • Multiplayer
  • WFC
  • Options

Looks like the exact same list you’d see in any RTS game and the possibilities seem equally endless. The excitement in my mind dwells on what the Skirmish and Multiplayer sections would look like. For those who have played DOTA, you’d be aware of some of its faults. The need to input modes at the start, leavers, unbalanced teams. AoS DS could ammeliorate some of these faults as, given it would be a stand alone game, it would be made with these in mind, not something tacked on at the end.

Can you imagine you and 4 of your friends together with your DSs about to play AoS DS. First you talk about what map you want to play, of course map in this case would mean terrain. This isn’t really an option playing AoS maps in Warcraft 3 as the terrains is invariably tied to the game. For there to be different terrain, the entire map has to be remade. What might other maps look like? Will it always be two teams on one map? Will one map always consist of one map? Is there a possibility of having two completely seperate terrains exisiting on the same map through which travel between them can only be achieved using special portals.

What heroes will be available to use? Presumably those from the ‘campaign’, but what about custom heroes? Perhaps a system could be set up allowing players to create their own heroes using the skill-set provided in the game.

What will the starting and victory conditions be? The default or something more exotic?

There are 5 of your altogether, so does that mean you will all be on the same team against X number of computer opponents or will you split up? If AoS DS is built on its own, unlike in Warcraft 3 AoS maps, the AI needn’t simply be tacked on after the fact. The game can be built with the AI in mind and, in that way, it stands a better chance of having a more sophisticated AI than present AoS maps found in War3 have. What’s more, if one of the players drop, that player can simply be controlled by the computer without damaging the team too much (provided the AI is sophisticated enough to adapt to the circumstances of the player that left).

All of this might sound interesting, but it is important to note that these should be extras in addition to a ‘default’. The default mode should be something that definitely works and is definitely enjoyable. These extras should be saved for those players that are looking for a bit more excitement.

That just about wraps up all my thoughts on DOTA/AoS for DS. I think it could work if it is made specifically for the DS and not just ported over. I believe the aspects that make DOTA fun can be realised on the DS in a game similar in experience but not necessarily in interface. I think it would be fascinating if such a game existed on the DS (provided the work goes into it), but I don’t see it happening in the short term at all.

The Greatest Country in the World

Today I made a fascinating discovery, that being that I am presently living in the greatest country in the world. I know this because it falls into one of the three catagories which I’ve determined deduce which country is indeed the greatest. These are:

  1. The country you’re from.
  2. The country you’re living in.
  3. The United States of America.

It appears to me that everyone on earth holds one or all of these three countries as being the greatest country on earth. It strikes me as being a bit unusual when you think how arbitrary a country can be. There are many ‘objective’ indexes that countries themselves use to determine which among them is the greatest: GDP per capita, military strength, population, proximity to Chuck Norris but formost among them which I remember hearing about is the Human Development Index (HDI). To me this is just another one of these methods of objectively determining which country is the greatest only, as I recall, the results are often more interesting because the number one country isn’t always the US.

Our Consciousness

Yesterday morning on my way to get my computer repaired I found myself thinking about the integrity of life. In particular about consciousness and, after death, what happens to this consciousness? Such questions seem to be the domain of faith; indeed, there don’t seem to be any solid facts regarding what happens to consciousness after death.

Firstly, by consciousness I mean that which allows us to think, feel and make decisions, our free will if you will. Everyone is not only in possession of consciousness but this consciousness is independent of other consciousnesses. The decisions you make and feelings you have might be affected by outside forces (biological chemistry), but you always have some control when it comes to adhering to forces administered by people other than yourself regardless of how strong the compulsions might be. The point of this is not so much that our consciousness is free of persuasion, far from it; rather what I mean is it is entirely independent of other consciousnesses. It is possible for two people, friends, to be talking to one another and be thinking about completely different things, each person’s mind is independent of each other person’s.

Next, given this fact, what is our consciousness and how did it come into being? I’ve often heard that who we are is mostly determined by how we were brought up. Does this apply to our consciousness though? If I were fed jam on toast instead of nutella on toast when I was younger would the very fibre of my being be something other than what it is today? This doesn’t sit well with me, for, from what I can see, during my earliest years, I would have to have been either someone else, or no one. From birth, aside from any chemical issues, from a consciousness perspective I would have been completely identical to every other baby of my age on the planet or at least significant portion of the population of babies would all consciously identical, meaning were they switched they could theoretically become completely different people in the place of those they would have been. This might seem a little confusing to follow, but it should become clearer later.

Related to this last point is another aspect which, while not an issue for us today I think is particularly interesting to reflect on. What if human cloning existed and you had a clone or two made of yourself. These clones, copies of you, would be, in short, you. That which makes you what you are would also make them what they are. Would this mean that when you make a decision, they too would make the identical decision? Should you all complete a test, would you all get the same result? Should you die, would you still feel in some way alive in one of your living clones? I think consciousness is something truly complex and appears completely illusive to our conventional experimental methodology we use to broaden our knowledge.

Lastly, as for consciousness after death, what happens to our consciousness after we die? Could it be that we will inhabit the body of another? It’s unlikely we would have any of the knowledge or experiences we gained in our last life though that said, would we really be who we are then? Imagine if we did ‘come back’, how would our next ‘host’ be selected? Would we as conscious beings actually be aware that we are again conscious beings? Could the consciousness that makes me who I am be the same as the consciousness that makes everyone else everyone else? Perhaps I as a conscious being am existing multiple times at the same time, but if that were the case, wouldn’t I feel something from these other consciousnesses? Wouldn’t I not care about dying because, would I, my consciousness wouldn’t actually die?

As a side note, looking at things in perspective, if you take the universe as a natural ‘order’ as it were and you see the development of life and humanity within this natural order, should human consciousness be little more than the sum of events which have created us, doesn’t it strike you as being odd? The natural order of the universe creating what could only be called historical machines, machines whose very existence is the product of natural development even though they are not identical to each other. Perhaps this is the result of that law of entropy, because chaos is spreading so too will there always be more independent consciousnesses than there will ever be (if ever be) identical ones and as time continues, won’t these consciousnesses diverge rather than converge.

The Ritual

For the past three days I have been performing a ritual of ever increasing mindlessness as the days wear on. It’s a ritual that has served me well in my past vocations but during this recent spate of intense indolence I’m inflicted with, it boggles the mind why I continue to bother.

Every morning I wake up at sometime between 7:30AM and 9AM, I stagger out of my bedroom to the fridge where I take a swig out of a bottle of orange juice. I then take my bottle with me, sit on the lounge, turn my computer on and check out a handful of websites including blogs, newspapers and a game website. Once satisfied with all the news I have read, I then return to my bedroom to retrieve the day’s attire and proceed to have my shower, the length of my shower determined in large part by my fatigue or the reliability of the hot water on any given day. After my shower, I get dressed, throw the dirty clothes on the dirty washing pile and return to my computer. Then, by any register of meaningful activity it could be said that my day ends. For the entirity of the past few days I have been doing one of four things, I will either be looking for and applying to jobs I find on the internet, playing on my DS, playing on my computer or reading my book all the while waiting for a response from the four different employers I presently have (and the rapidly declining half-dozen or so I might soon have) to contact me as they said that they would and, I quote, “make me busy”.

Now it is quarter past one and again I am waiting for my silent benefactors all the while writing on my blog, in itself a gross departure from my daily routine. With all the talk I get from so many employers, they seem to me to simply not understand that I require more minerals, not gas. I think I have accumulated a great deal of social credit in the month I have been looking for work, doubling the length of my Chinese MSN list with affluent, well-to-do people, but for all that, social credit just doesn’t pay the rent.

I will now as before continue to answer the questions plaguing my mind. Where will next month’s rent come from? Who will pay for my next meal? When will I be productive again? Not these questions, instead I must ask will I ever find a place to get rid of these acorns? What do I do with this pommel stone? and will Drew Latham be able to expose the neo-Nazi conspiracy affecting Russia and the US?

The Perfect World

When one is feeling as blue as I have been as of late, one becomes accutely aware of the imperfections present in one’s environment. Had I a better mood, I would shrug off these small imperfections with a smile and get on with whatever it was I was doing, but at the moment this is not the case. My latest bout of dissatisfaction, in large part born out of the extensive free time I now have has given rise to feelings of culture shock. I don’t think culture shock is quite the right term though because as frustrated as I am, I do think I would prefer to be somewhere in China than in Sydney although as time passes I suspect this sentiment might rapidly change. Rather I think cultural frustration would be a better description of what I am presently experiencing, and even that I suspect isn’t right because a lot of the things I am having issues with have little to do with culture.

So, how could things be better? Well, in the perfect world:

  • The buttons in wordpress would impart meaningful information instead of del, ins, img, ul, ol, li, code, more etc.
  • After going shopping my receipt would be put in one of the bags and my change handed to me.
  • “Here this is a good dish, you will like it” would always be followed by a good dish.
  • A menu would be located either at the door or outside the door of every restaurant.
  • Waiting staff would be hired on their ability to notice and respond to requests made by diners.
  • The word ‘penis’ would never appear in a menu.
  • Subway stations would be surrounded by places worth going to or have transport links to such places.
  • Subway stations would not be surrounded by (a) construction site(s).
  • There would be no smokers.
  • I would be paid to study Chinese.
  • I would have time to finish my quests in Baldur’s Gate 2.
  • I wouldn’t require more minerals.
  • The Personals>Friends section of www.thatsbj.com would be filled with friend-material instead of meaningless diatribe such as this and this.
  • The Settlers would be released on DS.
  • All three elevators in my building would be running all the time.
  • There would be an affordable supermarket near where I live.
  • A haircut would take no more than fifteen minutes.
  • People would always sit in the outermost chairs of the bus.
  • The bread would not be sweetened.

The cycle of despair

Since my parents left roughly two weeks ago, I have become acutely aware that I am almost completely alone and as such have been feeling very depressed. Not only this, but I have become aware of a cycle which could well see that this situation goes unresolved. The strategy I have followed to date has been successful in only one instance and for that I am grateful, alas all other contacts I have made through this method have turned up fruitless. I have been using this website to find and hopefully make new friends and by in large it has been unsuccessful, but I will get to that later.

The cycle I have become aware of has been born of my present isolation which I began feeling after moving into this new city without actually knowing anyone who lives here. In my first few months I met a fair few people although most of them I wouldn’t really call friends, rather they are better described as if-you-ever-have-a-problem-you-can-call-me acquaintances, I suppose you could call it the exact opposite of the friend in need. The overwhelming majority of these people have no time for me, but have all the time in the world for my problems which, as nice as the sentiment is, does little to placate my sense of devastation. The result is I am rapidly losing my faith in the people around me, in particular any new people I meet and hence feel a strong desire to coup myself up in my flat. In turn this generates more despair and creates a worsening situation with no really conceivable method of release save moving to where my actual friends are.

One of the factors contributing to my dissatisfaction with many of the people I have met since arriving in Beijing is that many seem to have very little idea of what a friend is. Over the course of the last two months I have added about six people to my MSN list, all people of whom live in Beijing and who claim to be looking for friends. All of them have expressed a desire in one way or another to be my friend. Of them, I have met four of them in person and for each of them we have only met once. The troubling thing is that, altogether, I have been ’stood up’ more times than I have actually had meetings with any of these people. Not stood up as in I go to the meeting location and they don’t turn up, rather an arrangement is made a day, two days, a week in advance and then cancelled at the last minute. It angers me to no end having this situation repeat itself over and over again and leaves me with little more than a feeling of despair. So, the end result is I have six more people on my MSN list who may as well be messaging from Afghanistan as it doesn’t look like I will actually meet them and I’m sure people in Afghanistan have far more interesting lives than those I seem to have encountered in Beijing.

On a brighter note, maintaining a connection to my Sydney friends has been much more rewarding. I seem to spend more time doing things with them than I do with anyone I know in Beijing and they actually do live miles away. I think the hard part of making friends here is that it is impossible for me to find people who are interested in any one of the niche activities I do and interests I have. I’d even go as far to say that the people who hold the same interests I do by nature tend to seclude themselves. Still, one can always hope if nothing else.