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28 May 04
It's Friday again and time for some highlights. In the US this is a long holiday weekend. The Memorial Day weekend traditionally signals the start of summer. Fittingly as we celebrate the freedoms, beauty and opportunity America offers us, we also remember those who paid the ultimate price to secure them for us and future generations. Don't forget to take a moment of silence and say thank you.
For most students stateside, school is out and high quality game time has begun. Don't forget to get outside and have some fun because you never know when the alien invasion is going to begin. Old school gamers remember that strange sightings started to increase in the 90's. Finally, the world came forward in 1999 to found Xcom to do something about the strange alien menace. Yes, our highlight today is Xcom: UFO Defense.
I've mentioned before that many designers are still trying to recreate the magic of Xcom. So let's look at some of the features that made it great. If you start anywhere in Xcom, the first highlight has to be the named squaddies. Yes, even though you could recruit the best soldiers from around the world, if you wanted, you could name them all after your friends (or enemies). On the surface, that seems simple and almost pointless. Once you've tried it, it becomes quite compelling. Character advancement, promotion and death take on a more personal and emotional tone when you know that person. Creating a personal connection with characters is one of the hardest parts of a game, so why not use the simple and elegant solution of letting the player do it for you. It's almost amazing how your close friends seem to get the best weapons and armor. Of course, that just makes it harder when they finally get vaporized.
Progressing naturally from the squaddies is the character advancement system. Green recruits are often almost worthless. They're prone to panic. They have few time units to perform actions and their skills are so low it's amazing they can hit the broad side of a barn. Oh yeah, they tend to die if a shot comes near them. However, if they survive a few missions and maybe get a kill or two under their belt, they get promoted, skills advance and perhaps most importantly, they gain time units for actions. Officers have the additional advantage of improving the morale of troops around them. This, along with their higher skill levels strongly encourages players to keep their officers on the battlefield.
Death is all around you in Xcom. While that might not seem like a highlight, it is. Early on, you're fighting a significantly technologically superior enemy. Rookies and squaddies dying left and right. Eventually, you get on a more even footing, but the fear of death is never far away. Even the best unit can be felled unexpectedly. This forces the player to use sound tactics to keep units alive as well as creating the feeling that you're in a real war. Sometimes the motto was 'any mission where the entire team wasn't annihilated was a good mission.' Read through CSL's stories and count the bodies. War is a dirty business.
Combat in Xcom was just done right. Sure it was turn based, but the tension was kept high. You could hear enemies moving, catch glimpses of them between buildings, and see them pop up take a shot and run to cover. Just when you got basic tactics down, you encountered new and more powerful enemies. The first time you encountered a chrysalid or had a unit under enemy mind control could almost stop your heart. I never used the 'primed grenade defense' but I was impressed when I first heard about it. It really sounded like something soldiers in that situation might come up with.
Finally, Xcom provided great feedback. Success would build on itself. More successful missions would result in more money. More money would lead to more troops, bases, research and equipment. All those lead to more successful missions. Although you needed a few key technologies, many items were at your discretion as to whether you developed them or not. Which ones you chose were often dictated by your play style. Combine all those strengths and you've got a game that gave you a great deal of freedom to play it as you wanted.
Today's game is no Xcom, but it does have aliens, cute ones in fact. It's Pikmin series (official site) from Nintendo. Pikmin has you playing as an alien crash landed on a strange planet. You are able to enlist a small army of plantlike creatures to do your bidding to help repair your ship. Along the way you must overcome a series of enemies and obstacles that you must literally throw your army at. Pikmin is available now for the gamecube and Pikmin 2 is coming this fall.
Jason
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27 May 04
Well, I'm going to wrap up pen and paper RPG's today. I'd like to go over a couple more games including Traveller/Megatraveller and Twilight 2000/Dark Conspiracy.
Traveller was one of the first games I remember making a splash after D&D took off. Of course, there was the demonic, witchcraft, satanic backlash against D&D, so it wasn't surprising that the next thing would look different at least. Traveller did that. It was a far future setting. It had a universe full of high technology, large space craft and alien races. There were even mysterious relics from a race of ancients that might hold the keys to untold power or not.
Traveller inspired many daring space adventures. We pillaged as pirates. We took contracts from governments as bounty hunters. Then a war came and we became freedom fighters. Strangely the things I remember most were the PGMP and the jack of all trades skill. The PGMP was the Plasma Gun, Man Portable. It was a weapon so powerful that you had to wear power armor to use it (or it would rip you apart). The jack of all trades skill struck me as a brilliant idea. The idea was that if you knocked around space enough that you'd get a feel for how things work. Most tasks to have even a chance of success, you had to have trained in some skill. So if you wanted to hack a computer, you needed computer skills. But with the jack of all trades skill you had a chance of success at trying most things. Essentially you could try to guess or bluff your way through a problem.
As a side note, Megatraveller did spawn two computer RPG's. I played one of them. It was quite good with very satisfying combat (probably because I ended up with a couple of PGMPs and a FGMP, fusion gun, man portable).
Game Designers Workshop followed up Megatraveller with Twilight 2000. It was from the late 80's or so and hypothesized that the US and the USSR would engage in a limited nuclear war. The world wasn't destroyed, but large parts of the armies are. Many governments lost control of large chunks of their territory. The game focused on small unit tactical combat. Long before First Person Shooters, that's where I got my first taste of sniping. It was amazing how a good sniper could turn the tide of a battle.
Dark Conspiracy grew out of the Twilight 2000 rules. It was set in an alternate present. It came out before the X-Files but there was a strong connection. Dark Conspiracy had you looking into the strange and unexplained. Sometimes fairy tales seemed to have come to life. Other times people were disappearing. You had to discover what, if anything, tied these strange events together. It was a thick, bleak and atmospheric world. It was also a fun world to adventure in.
I think of all the game worlds I played in, I'd have to say I enjoyed Dark Conspiracy the most. Unfortunately, since few had heard of it, I had to evangelize it. That meant that I was the game master. One of the drawbacks of the game, is that as GM you knew too much to just be a player again. The thing I loved about GMing the game was dropping little clues here and there about the larger picture. Sometimes the players would pick up on them sometimes they'd go right over their heads. That tension kept the game fun for all of us. I'm sure there's a game design nugget in there somewhere.
The GDW games impressed me with even more freedom than Dungeons and Dragons. You really felt that there was a world or universe out there to explore. Often events would be going on around you that would only make sense later on when you had more information. The playing to get that information was pretty fun too. I don't know how well I kept on point, but I could go on and on about some of the game, so be thankful I restrained myself.
Today's game is a wacky space game to go with our Traveller theme. It's Space Colony (official site) from Firefly Studios. You have to manage a space colony in the next century. You have to balance the needs of the crew with the needs of the mission. Oh yeah, there are some friendly and unfriendly aliens out there. Space Colony is available now.
Jason
Comments?
26 May 04
A quick contest reminder if you're not interested, please tell a friend who might be. The more successful this contest is the bigger the next one will be.
Well, let's see. I was talking about pen and paper RPG's and specifically my experiences with them. I wanted to go over a couple of more games that I played with my brother's group. Then tomorrow I wanted to wrap up with some of my more recent experiences and hopefully tie everything back to my main point about how the creativity and freedom in pen and paper RPG's carries over to strategy and tactical games in the cyber realm.
I also need to make one quick point to tie things together. Freedom is still the holy grail of game design. Just look at Grand Theft Auto 3. Gamers and designers quickly realized that GTA3 made great strides in the concept of freedom within a game. Its sales took off like a rocket and suddenly everyone is incorporating those features in their games. Of course, the great thing about greater freedom is that no matter how many times you copy it it doesn't get old. It may not always be well implemented, but freeing gamers from restrictions never wears down.
So what does this have to do with pen and paper games? Well, the heart of those games is the freedom of choice that the players have. Even choosing among the games to find a game world you want to adventure in is another example of freedom. One of the first things TSR (makers of the original D&D) did when it took off was to create new worlds to play in. Sure there were always new books and modules for D&D, but they showed that role playing wasn't limited to one world or game type. In doing so, they created a new industry. Personally, I think the games industry would be several years behind its current pace if they hadn't done so and inspired the imaginations of so many.
One of my favorites of those early TSR worlds was Gamma World. It was a post apocalyptic world. World War III had come in the future and destroyed most of civilization. Many people survived, but they lived in a radically different world. Radiation has created great wastelands. Plants, animals and even humans have mutated. Most of the poor and fatal mutations have died out, so the mutants are strange and powerful. Many adventurers seek out old settlements in search of lost technology or goods to trade. It's an interesting world combining high tech and primitive settlements.
Gamma World was fun partly because it was so different from D&D. It really showed the flexibility of the concept. I once played a mutated plant. I healed in sunlight. I took damage in the desert. Games that allow you to do things like that embody freedom. I remember one module that had you visiting an old space station. Everyone had died due to an alien virus. If you did things wrong enough (and just enough right), you could spread the infection to the planet below and decimate it. Gamma World also showed (really reminded) you that shooting a ray gun was just as fun as casting a spell. The fun was in the free form world, gameplay and personal interaction. Not a bad lesson to remember.
Today's game just had a demo released for it so you can check it out right away. It's Soldiers: Heroes of WWII (official site, 1C site) from Best Way. You lead a small team of special forces troops from America, Britain, Germany or Russia. You need to accomplish your mission objectives in whatever way you can. There are a variety of weapons, vehicles and tools at your disposal. Look for the demo now at the usual suspects.
Jason
Comments?
25 May 04
First off, I'd like to apologize for the forum problems. It turns out that my web host was upgrade the version of PHP on the server. The upgrade is complete and everything is working again. Feel free to post away again. Oh, and don't forget about the Railroad Tycoon contest. Get your entry in soon.
Yesterday, I went over the idea of the collaborative efforts that go into the playing (story telling) of a pen and paper RPG. I tried to show that those experiences are what help create this site. And that the same creative energy found in those RPG sessions is best found in the computer world in the collaborative experiences we can have in strategy and tactical games.
Now I'd like to go over some of my pen and paper experiences both so that you know me better, but also to further my "creative energy" case. I first played Dungeons and Dragons, I think, around 1979. We visited my older cousin and he played a little. It was starting to catch on as a fad around then. After we got home, my brother and I were both interested in playing. We got a copy of the old basic edition rules. We played a little one on one. Since my brother was older, he usually was the DM.
Eventually, my brother convinced some of his friends to join us to play. We had a regular group that would play several times a month. We usually played in the basement where it was usually darker and a little dank. We quickly moved on to the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons rules. It was much more involved, but really opened things up as well.
I was the youngest of the group, so I usually ended up playing the characters no one else wanted to play. Often it was a Magic User or Cleric. When we had multiple characters, I'd often have both. By computer terms, game progress was painfully slow. Months after starting a campaign, our starting characters might have made level four or five. Often we didn't even find that much cool loot. So why did we keep playing?
Mostly, it was because we were having fun. Gameplay wasn't about the levels or the loot. Those were just perks when they came along. We were visiting a fantastic world and creating our own fantastic story within it. Some characters were senselessly mean but my cleric would be unfailingly kind. Sometimes the conflict within our group was more interesting than the quest we were supposed to be completing.
I remember once our leader was so rude that he got himself thrown in jail. Since the only punishment in that town was hanging, our next quest was to break him out. We ended up creating a sort of jailbreak riot to cover our escape.
The point was that we created our stories. Our characters grew beyond a collection of stats and items. They became real to us. They had their war stories to tell. They (we) knew how to complement each other's strengths and defend each other's weaknesses in battle. Perhaps more important, we could do the same out of battle. In fact, many times we talked our way out of battle if we weren't sure we could win.
We went through a series of modules from TSR mixed in with a few of our own unique adventures. Someone else who had played those modules would have been able to pick out some things from our adventures to say that was from module so and so. But for the most part we shaped our adventure as much or more than the module did.
Tomorrow, I'll go over some of the other pen and paper games I played. Maybe we'll stumble closer and closer to the strategy and tactical games of today.
For today's game I thought I'd look for a D&D style game. I found it in the Age of Wonders series (official site) from Triumph Studios. You play a powerful wizard who must lead armies to save the world from destruction. It combines magic, empire building, heroes, supernatural creature and fantastic races into a large turn based strategy game. The original (AoW), the sequel (AoW2: The Wizard's Throne) and the sequel's expansion (AoW2: Shadow Magic) are all available now.
Jason
Comments?
24 May 04
I hope everyone is having a great start to their week. Don't forget we're still running the contest. Don't hesitate to send your entry in. A free game is a free game. Come on, you can make me happy and still have a good shot at winning. What more can you ask? The game is sitting right here waiting for a happy winner. If you've forgotten, you can check out the rules right here.
This week I want to talk about RPG's. I know we already cover strategy and tactical games. Don't worry, we're not expanding into RPG's. In fact, I want to talk about Pen and Paper RPG's. As they are, somewhat indirectly, responsible for this site.
There are two parts to this site. Just look at the title, we have game strategies and game stories. There are plenty of strategy sites, so it's the stories that set TS apart. So why are the stories important? Well, first I think they can convey the experience of a game in way that a simple review cannot. More importantly they reflect your interaction with the game. Through your story I know how the game made you feel.
So what does this have to do with RPG's? Simple. RPG's were where I started my real creative writing experience. Sure I did some projects for school, but where I really learned to express my fantastic leanings was on the pen and paper RPG table. So this week I'm going to go over some of my experiences at that table and try to draw the connection between them and this site.
In fact, I'm going to start there, sort of. If you've never played pen and paper RPG's, you might not understand without some background. Many of you can skip over this, but it never pays to lose some of your audience. I'm sure many people have seen caricatures of Dungeons and Dragons (like the Tom Hanks movie). Most of you have probably also played a computer or console RPG. The two don't seem to reconcile.
I'll give you the straight skinny. Computer RPG's (CRPG) use the processing power of modern systems to automate the mechanics of resolving combat, feats, apply modifiers and providing a visual representation of the play world. However, they only tell a scripted story. A well done CRPG will give you more options for dialogue and side quests, but you're freedom is severely limited if you want to progress further in the game. Sometimes there are even many parallel quests (or quest paths), but for the main story continuity they have to keep intersecting at regular intervals. A few like Gothic and Morrowind grant you more freedom to go off and do you own thing, but that doesn't translate into a new story very often.
Pen and paper RPG's don't usually have any automated processes. Their strength lies in the other direction. Players have their characters and they fight monsters and they advance through a story gaining loot and experience, but that's about where the similarities end. A good Game Master or Dungeon Master (DM) is in charge of the general direction the story is going, but it's through interaction between the DM and the players that a full story is told. Even when using a prewritten module, the experience from one group to the next can be completely different. A good DM ends up tailoring every part of the game session to the interests and strengths of the players. The session itself becomes a collective storytelling effort.
I'm saying that by playing the game you are telling a story. Hmm. That sound familiar. And that story is unique to you and the people play with you. Again, familiar. Pen and paper RPG's can be incredible fun. For my money, strategy and tactical games are the ones that come closest to recreating that experience in the cyber world. Yes, I do know about the D&D client/voice programs. I know about Neverwinter Nights online mode. They're close and I imagine they'll keep getting closer. But I think the stories we'll tell here will more than stand up for the near future. In some ways you get the strengths of both worlds right here. Tomorrow, I'm going to recount some of my early D&D experiences.
Today's game is another Russian RTS. It's built off the Blitzkrieg engine. It's Stalingrad (official site) from DTF Games. You can either play as the invading Germans or the defending Red Army in its defining moment. It's scheduled toward the end of the year.
Jason
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