Category Archives: Games

Games

Facebook games

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I’ve had a Facebook account for ages myself, but never did anything with it until recently. A thread on QT3 about the growing popularity of games on Facebook and the serious sums of money this new niche is generating prompted me to go check it out. It so happens that a few people on QT3 are actively involved in making these games and even established games companies are looking into developing applications for Facebook.

After checking out a few of them, it’s clear that there’s barely enough gameplay in them to actually qualify them for being called games. Two of the more popular games, Vampire Wars and Mafia Wars, both by zynga for example, are basically identical with the main differences being their themes.  Another game I checked out, the relatively new Vikings, Pirates and Ninjas tries to ape fantasy MMOs, except that everything is simplified and doing quests just takes clicking a button. Above all, everything is stupidly repetitive with next to variation at all.

Still, this clearly hasn’t stopped them from being popular or earning a great deal of money, which confirms the suspicion that all gamers really need is to see the numbers on their screen constantly increase. I suppose that aside from their accessibility, the close integration that they have with Facebook effectively means lots of free advertising and allows players to pretend that they’re meaningfully interacting with their friends. These things aren’t really going to hold my interest for any decent length of time, but the really sad part is that most Flash games offer much more gameplay and some are really quite innovative, but none can match the earning power of these Facebook games.

Games, Personal Life

Getting into boardgames

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I’ve been thinking about getting into boardgames for a while now but I’ve only recently started it doing it for real. I don’t really have much experience in this hobby. I was a fairly avid player of Magic: The Gathering and other assorted CCGs back in the day, but the only boardgaming I ever did was a few very memorable games of Space Hulk at the short-lived Temple du Jeu in Tours where I studied. Still, I’ve always kept half an eye on the field and felt a strange lust for those giant boxes filled with all manner of figures and dice.

It turns out that there’s a boardgaming cafe at City Mall here in Kota Kinabalu, which you can play the titles in their very extensive library for a modest table and food / drinks for each player, so my wife and I decided to give it a try. We played a game of Carcassonne with just the two of us a couple of weeks ago and on Saturday roped in my wife’s oldest brother to join us. We ended up staying a bit longer than expected and played a game of Carcassonne and a game of Settlers of Catan. We probably won’t be going every single week but I have a feeling that this is going to a regular source of entertainment for the both of us.

Right now, I’m thinking of buying a copy of Carcassonne: Hunters & Gatherers because it’s a great, easy-to-learn game to take out when we have family and friends visiting. I’m also thinking of ordering a copy of Arkham Horror, a highly regarded cooperative game that the cafe, CarcaSean, doesn’t seem to have in its library. According to what I’ve read it’s perfectly playable for two but would be better for more people. I’ve also been trying to connect with other boardgamers in town so that I can finally get into one of those epic games like Starcraft, Battlestar Galactica or Twilight Imperium. So if any friends want to give this hobby a try and are reading this, do let me know. We could always use more players!

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Games

Living the life in Liberty City

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As you can see, I’ve finally received my copy of Grand Theft Auto IV and despite some minor problems with signing up for Rockstar’s Social Club service and tying it to a Windows Live account, have managed to get it running. As expected, my PC is a bit too behind the curve to be able to turn all the dials up, so I have to settle for mostly medium quality graphics settings. It’s not painful on the eyes or anything, but the game does have an annoying tendency to makes shadows all blurry and everything is a little too jaggy for my tastes. I guess Rockstar hasn’t quite caught on to AA filtering yet.

Of course, no GTA game is ever going to win any beauty contests. The strength of the series has always been in the scope and detail of its cities, not in top notch graphics. Still, there’s no denying that the scope of Liberty City is beautiful in of itself. Cruising past the game’s rendition of Times Square is certainly an impressive experience. The city is wonderfully alive too with lots of interesting stuff going on in the background. Cops chase crooks and actually load them into patrol cars when they catch them. The bridges have working toll booths. Perhaps best of all, buildings and interior locations are now seamlessly integrated with the main city.

What I dislike most about this game so far is that it feels too much like a linear RPG set in an open city rather than a real sandbox. Previous GTA games had plenty of side activities that were mostly unrelated to the main plot, and I enjoyed being able to buy new houses and businesses. So far I haven’t seen any of that in this iteration of the series. Rockstar seems to think that GTA is all about the story and seems to be trying too hard to make it a serious epic, eschewing the over the top whackiness I loved in previous games. I’m enjoying it well enough so far, but my favourite GTA is still Vice City. We’ll see when I get to the end of this game if my opinion changes.

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Games

A Game: Midnight Club LA Remix (PSP)

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While I’m been away from my PC over the past week, I’ve been indulging my gaming habit with this gem of a game on my PSP. It’s essentially a shrunk down version of Midnight Club: Los Angeles for the PlayStation 3 and the Xbox 360 but it still packs an astonishing amount of content and will likely delight any racing fan for a good long while. It delivers seriously intense racing experiences, a very satisfying sense of progression over time and despite being somewhat repetitive and frustratingly difficult at times, a tremendous sense of achievement when you’ve finally won some of the harder races.

Midnight Club LA Remix is essentially an open world racer in which you drive around a complete and beautifully detailed city to find races to participate in, earning reputation, unlocking rewards and making money along the way. One of the things I liked best about the game is how much it felt like an RPG. Starting as a virtual unknown in a old and clunky car, you’ll painstakingly progress towards the flashiest and sleekest Mercedes and Lamborghinis. Unlike the Grand Theft Auto series, Remix uses actual cars and motorcycles from real world brands, so there’s that additional sense of realism.

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Games

A Quick Guide to the Ljosalfar

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Far from it for me to call myself any sort of expert on Fall from Heaven 2, but I thought there might be some interest in some simple guides for playing each of the factions in the game. They’ll include both stuff from my individual playing experiences and advice that I’ve read elsewhere on the net, most notably from the Civfanatics forums. I don’t know if I’ll ever actually complete playthroughs for each of the factions, but I’ll keep it up for as long as it holds my interest.

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Games

A Hero for a day

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The bad news is I’ve still yet to receive my copy of Grand Theft Auto IV, so no new game for me. The good news is that since I’m leaving on holiday on Thursday anyway, I probably shouldn’t start a new game for real just yet, so I decided to download a free trial for yet another MMO. The game I picked was City of Heroes, one of the more unique MMOs out there and one that I’ve often wondered about.

Until Champions Online launches later this year, CoH is still the only MMO that lets you play as a superhero (or a supervillain if you so choose). This means that it has an extremely powerful and versatile character creation system and is set in a contemporary cityscape, the so-called Paragon City. Unusually for an MMO, it has no auto-attacks. All attacks are essentially powers that must be manually activated. Furthermore, characters in CoH can physically obstruct one another and a crude physics system allows characters to be knocked down or even blown away a fair distance when hit by the appropriate power.

A few things were apparent from the first moment I started up the game. This game is old and looks it. Not only is the graphics engine terribly dated by now, but its interface, user friendliness and general game design all mark it as very much a pre-World of Warcraft MMO. What’s surprising is that even though CoH launched only a few months earlier than WOW, it looks a lot older, with plain textures and blocky polygons and is far less polished.

The character creation system is indeed as powerful as advertised and to me was probably the most fun part of my short trial. While the combat system felt suitably visceral compared to other MMOs, I was bothered by the fact that although characters use their powers on each other, there’s next to nothing that they can do with their powers to the environment. This felt silly to me and detracted from the experience. You’re not superpowered unless you can throw cars around and blow buildings up in my book. I was annoyed that gameplay seemed to consist mostly of grinding on random mobs or running missions in buildings with the same layouts over and over again. It reminded me unpleasantly of my very first MMO experience with Anarchy Online.

One nice thing that I noticed was that players were generally serious about their character and took the time to design a cool costume and picking an appropriate name. People who are already used to the multitude of dumb and meaningless names in MMOs should know how significant this is. Unfortunately, this game is still too dated and too clunky to warrant any extended interest on my part. I am however looking forward to Champions Online.

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Games

A Game: Fall from Heaven 2

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One of the most important lessons any aspiring designer can learn is to heed Sid Meier’s dictum that a good game is a series of interesting decisions. This is precisely what the dark fantasy-themed Fall from Heaven 2 is all about. There is no point in the game where a particular path of action becomes so overbearingly obvious as to make the choice a non-decision. While the ultimate objective remains, as in any 4X game, to achieve complete dominance over the other factions, there are many different paths to this end and countless means within each path to advance along it.

Fall from Heaven 2 of course benefits from being a mod of Civilization 4 which provides it with a sound base to work on, but the new mechanics, factions, units, religions and events it adds makes it a worthy game more than capable of standing on its own. The cornucopia of choices begins with choosing one of a total of 21 available factions. Each faction generally has two different leaders available. Then there’s a total of 7 religions to pick from, each of which offers synergies different enough to drastically alter your playstyle. Next, you’ll want to think about which victory condition to shoot for. In addition to the ones already in Civilization 4, the Alpha Centauri victory is replaced by the Tower of Mastery victory inspired by the venerable Master of Magic game and there’s a religious Altar of Luonnatar victory condition.

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