Hey Man, well this is Babylon

I’ve found lately that I have been listening to two specific albums more than anything else while working on my design projects. They are:

1. Forbidden Forest: Impressions of George Winston by Taliesin Orchestra. There’s something about this album which deeply inspires me in the way no other music does. I’ve listened to all the original piano pieces upon which these tracks are based, but the originals just don’t compare to the orchestrated renditions. Starting with the very first track on the album, “Tamarack Pines,” I am swept away into a different realm of my creativity. Thanks immensely, Chris, for introducing me to this one.
2. Silent Hill Shattered Memories – original soundtrack by Akira Yamaoka. This is so far my favorite of the consistently amazing Silent Hill soundtracks, narrowly edging above the previous favorite, Silent Hill 4: The Room. Mary Elizabeth McGlynn’s vocal performances are stellar, as always, and in my opinion this album showcases the best work she’s done so far on the series. Something about the haunting ethereal underscores mixed with stellar (and sometimes totally rocking) vocal tracks keeps this one consistently repeating in the background while I work. I actually attempted to make a mix of nothing but McGlynn’s vocal tracks, but the project was only partially successful: the playlist was pretty damn awesome, but I found I couldn’t stop rocking along with the music long enough to get any actual work done.

There are a few others in rotation, including Danse Macabre by The Faint, Vegas by The Crystal Method, Nothing Lasts… But Nothing Is Lost by Shpongle, and the musical score to the movie Master and Commander. These play pretty frequently on my background mixes, but it is the two albums detailed above which always start it off, and which I always kick back into play when I hit a lull in the process.

What are yours?

Been a damn busy week. Not enough time for blogging! So here’s my weekend update, a day late.

First, a link. Check out Universal Dead, a new low-budget web series about zombies. It’s… not bad. Not bad at all.

For the last few days I’ve been going back and forth between Dragon Age and Alpha Protocol. My current goal in Dragon Age is to play as a solo Archer Rogue + Dog combo for as long as I can manage, outside of the few spots in the game where other companions are forced upon you. I’ve always been a fan of odd “challenge runs” in video games, and I figure this one would be called the “Post-Apocalypse” DA run – survivor + dog, in other words.

Alpha Protocol has been fun. I see a game series in the making here, and this one’s a good start. It reminds me a lot of the original Mass Effect – awesome in many ways, but marred by some rather aggravating design choices. I’m only a few hours in, though, so I’ll save my full decision for a later time after more hands-on experience with it.

I met a few awesome folks and sold a few more copies of Cannibal Contagion this past Memorial Day. Guardian Games hosted their second annual “May of the Dead” celebration, and I was there pimpin’ my game and hanging out with my fellow nerd. Had some great talks with a fellow from the local chapter of the Zombie Squad, and ran a hilariously fun session of my game for a new crew of survivors. Thanks for playing, folks!

I’ll close this post with some thoughts on video game trailers. First, read this article. Go ahead, it’s a good read. Watch all the trailers.

Done? Understand that I get where the writer is coming from, and I whole-heartedly disagree. I want actual game-play footage in my video game trailers, goddammit. Without actual gameplay footage, I might have made the mistake of purchasing any number of generic “guns plus one cool trick no one else does” first-person shooters. I want to actually see how this game is different. You can take a shitty game, give it an awesome story, and fill the trailer with so many awesome cinematics and popular industrial tunes and the consumers won’t know the depth of your deception until they pay for it and hate it, because you never showed them the actual game.

I want to see the game. I don’t give a rat’s ass about marketing cinematics which most likely won’t even be in the final product, and probably look better than that product will, too. Yeah, that new Deus Ex trailer looks cool, and shows us a wonderful cyberpunk world with a compelling story. SO did the trailers for Neocron. Remember how much that game sucked?

Over the last two nights I’ve played a few hours of Alpha Protocol, Obsidian’s new “Espionage RPG.” I mostly like it – it’s basically Mass Effect with spies, but I’ll write more on that in a later post. But something about it rubs me the wrong way…

Okay. Have you ever noticed how, with few exceptions, just about every video game out there that incorporates stealth into its play defaults to the old “Stealth = Crouching” setup? Alpha Protocol does it, and so do Fallout 3, Second Sight, Escape From Butcher Bay, Metal Gear Solid, Rogue Ops, and pretty much all the others that I’ve ever played¹. In all of these games, “stealth mode” is usually triggered by pressing or holding a single button (frequently the “L3″ button beneath the left trigger), which throws your character into a crouch which frequently looks comically ridiculous, reminiscent of old Looney Tunes characters sneaking along by their toes while rapid the sounds of a xylophone play.

I find this to be both unrealistic from a gameplay perspective, and flat-out lazy from a design perspective. One notable and wonderful exception to this ever-present crouching rule is Thief: Deadly Shadows². I previously mentioned thief in my post on lighting mechanics as an excellent example of that concept, and it serves well here, too. In this game, stealth is accomplished simply by *gasp* walking slowly. The game does have a crouch mode, but it only marginally affects your stealthiness and is primarily used to access smaller places in the environment. In T:DS, the slower you move, the quieter you move, softening your footsteps and blending more into those “deadly” shadows.

While at the gym this morning I had an idea for a new way to implement stealth in console game. Both the PS3 and the XBox 360 have controllers which feature pressure-sensitive triggers. My idea involves having the left stick move the character around the screen, always at a full run. Use one of the triggers, then, to pace that movement. The further down you hold the trigger, the slower and more stealthy the character moves. Incorporate that with a context-sensitive cover mechanic (good examples of cover can be found in Mass Effect 2, or Wanted: Weapons of Fate), and you will have a much more enjoyable and intuitive stealth system that doesn’t lazily default to crouching. This would make stealth itself something of a pressure-inclusive mini-game. To make it more RPG-compatible, put a gauge of some sort on the screen showing a scale running from “completely stealthy” to “completely obvious.” The scale would contain certain set areas of stealthiness, and an arrow would float between them as you move. Raising your Stealth skill or related abilities would widen the stealthy areas, shrinking the less-stealthy areas, to the point that a true stealth-ninja master would have a scale mostly comprised of the “maximum stealth” area.

I would love to play something like this. I would keep this mechanical idea a secret for my own video games, but who the hell am I kidding? I just don’t have any intentions to design them myself, so perhaps someone will steal this idea and make something awesome.

Footnotes

¹ I admit I’ve never played any of the Splinter Cell games. How are they? How do they handle stealth?
² I’ve also never played the first two Thief games, ’cause I’m just not a big fan of stealth in First-Person Shooters. Of course, I’m not much of a fan of non-stealth FPS games, either. For me to like a FPS it usually has to be a truly fabulous paragon of its kind.

After hitting some major design hurdles in Forevergotten, I decided to take a break from that project last night and return to my prior one: Billions and Billions of Bullets. I’m glad I did, too, because the issues that had previously halted my progress on that one a few months ago were easily overcome with time and a new perspective. Now I’m happily trucking along that creative track again, with some fresh new ideas and some fitting updates to old ones.

Probably the biggest update this time is that I’ve made a major breakthrough in redefining the four main Gun Characteristics, and how they tie into the core challenge mechanic. I’m pretty excited about this, because after a good couple of hours of work I had revamped the conflict rules and tooled them into something truly rewarding in all the ways they’ve been lacking until now. Faster-flowing, and with a speed-based strategy that I just love.

This weekend I’ll be running my very first Dogs in the Vineyard game. Judd gave me some initial pointers and it was a purely downhill ride from there to create a town that I hope will really hook the players. I’ll post the details after I run it. I’m hoping this can lead to a good three-to-five-session mini-campaign before we move to the next game in our new rotating group configuration.

This coming Monday – memorial Day! – sees the second annual May of the Dead celebration around the corner at Guardian Games. Last year’s event was stellar fun, and this year’s plans are promising to at least equal that level of awesome, if not exceed it.

My play-through of Alan Wake continues slowly, primarily because I’m playing it with at least two other very interested people watching along. We finished Chapter 3 on Wednesday night, and all were in agreement: that chapter took too damn long in comparison to the two that preceded it. On the other hand, if the following chapters are going to be that long as well, then maybe this game will have a satisfactory play length. That right now is a concern we all at my place share: that this game will be disappointingly short when played out-of-the box. My worry is that with two chapters of DLC already announced at launch time, this sixty-dollar new game might not actually be complete. If I finish the game without a feeling of satisfaction, I’m not certain how I will respond to that. The reviews have been pretty positive, however, so I’m not allowing myself to dwell too heavily on the possibility of disappointment just yet.

At this very moment, I’m glad to see that my XBox Live Gamertag here shows four of my favorite games on it, and one really awesome one that I mentioned just one paragraph above.

Here are some links:

1. Yet Another Fantasy Gaming Comic – I devoured the entire 1300+ strip series of this over the past weekend, and want all of you to enjoy it as well. It made me laugh something fierce, but actually brought a couple of tears to my eyes at various points. A damn fine epic comic.
2. Agree-a-Date – Got problems matching up your gaming schedules, or heck, your social calendars? This is the best free web tool I’ve found to organizing gatherings when the free time of the intended participants is hard to sync. I’ve used it several times, with smashing results.

I’m curious to get your input on this subject. When you have a creative project that steadily gains steam and then suddenly screeches to an inspirational halt, how do you handle (and hopefully overcome) it? Do you step away for a bit and work on other projects? Do you immerse yourself in entertaining distractions, hoping to feel out some new streams of thought fodder from the strata? What methods have you found to effectively jump-start your faltering creative processes?

Last night Veira and a handful of fellow nerds gathered around the tee-vee while I started up a game of Alan Wake. For most everyone present, it was their first exposure to the beginning of the game. We kicked it off by watching all six of the extremely Twin Peaks-inspired “Bright Falls” webisodes, which set the stage for the very beginning of the game itself. The connections to Twin Peaks were many and blatant, and very appreciated¹. Alan Wake (the game itself) opened with a very poignant quote from Stephen King, verbalized by the game’s eponymous protagonist and narrator. That singular quote, which I will not spoil here, captured the essence of things to come so perfectly that I think it might have displaced the opening to William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer as my favorite opening to a work of fiction².

I’ll save my detailed game opinions for a later in-depth review, but so far I’m liking what I’ve played. I found myself getting a little too loot-happy at times, though, which is definitely a holdover from my history with other games of the Survival Horror genre that provided the foundations for this game’s own unique experience – while it isn’t technically a straight-up game of that genre, it definitely feels like one in many regards. When we continue our group play-through, I intend to focus less on loot-hunting³ and more on making sure our mutual initial experience with the game’s story plays more like the developers intended. This will be fun, yes, but old habits are hard to kick.

On a different note, I end this week with thoughts from today’s morning commute, on the subject of elimination games. Specifically, I refer to games with three or more players wherein the purpose is not to gain victory for yourself, but instead to cause failure upon everyone else in the game, kicking them out of play one by one until you are the last player standing. In recent years I have grown noticeably less tolerant of elimination games, to the point of refusing to play many of them when suggested by friends at various game-gatherings. I’ve come to support the belief that if a game’s primary goals involve removing your right to actually play the game, then there’s a serious flaw in its design.

Perhaps the only elimination game I can still tolerate these days is Twilight Imperium. While elimination of other players is technically possible and sometimes encouraged by random game objectives, a few factors of gameplay innate to the game’s core implementations tend to prevent that from actually happening. Twilight Imperium takes forever and a day to both set up and then play, for one, and there is usually an unspoken understanding among the players at the table, an acceptance that they all made this time commitment and by removing any one of them from play, they would be performing a logistical “dick move.” Plus, in addition to the Space Combat rules required to remove players, the game offers several other equally interesting play mechanics, and when all are combined together into the greater whole of the game’s flow, the effort required to remove another player becomes more of a hassle than it is really worth in the end⁴.

I’m a major believer in drawing out games for maximum fun potential. When I’m with a group of pals enjoying a wicked fun board game or card game, I want that fun to last as long as possible, and for everyone to enjoy it for the majority of that time. By removing players from the game, you are bringing it closer to an end, and limiting those players from participating and having fun. I’m not cool with that.

Footnotes

¹ You can download them all from the Bright Falls website, or direct to your Xbox from Xbox Live. I’m not a fan of Twin Peaks, finding its story long and unnecessarily dragged-out, and its characters largely uninteresting. But I love it’s creepy style and vibe, and it worked wonderfully for the Bright Falls miniseries.
² Neuromancer opened with the famous line: “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” It’s hard to get much cooler than that.
³ ALAN NEEDS HIS COFFEE!
⁴ In all the years I’ve played this game, I’ve only ever seen another player forcibly removed once, and that jerk deserved it.

After re-reading my last post, I started thinking a lot more heavily on the idea of lighting mechanics, and how they both are and can be implemented in games both video and tabletop.

Video Games

I find that lighting is most often used in video games for purely atmospheric and aesthetic purposes. That’s all fine and good, but let’s get down and talk about actual mechanical uses of lighting in games. In these cases, we’re looking for games in which the lighting has direct effects not just on the mood and sensory input of the player, but on the game’s tangible play. What I’m not talking about are games which use light to limit your intake of the game (Google the infamous “duct tape mod” for Doom III to see what players think about that kind of thing). What I am talking about are implementations of lighting which enhance the actual playing of the game.

While Dragon Warrior was already discussed as having a nicely-implemented lighting system, it doesn’t fit my criteria as defined above: DW’s lighting limits your perception, and doesn’t actually enhance the mechanics. I am hard-pressed to think of a single video RPG that I’ve ever seen to make use of lighting mechanically, in fact. Read more

A blog entry draws near!

I’ve been working on this idea for a while now, and have decided to take some time to write up some nostalgia-injected mini-essays on the games that changed my life. I’ve got a list worked out now, which I will go through in chronological order of my exposure to and immersion within them. The titles on this list do not necessarily correspond to those on my list of all-time “favorite” games, mind you. Instead, each of these interactive gaming experiences somehow made its own unique impact upon my existence, and my overall development as a human being.

I’m going to kick this list off with the game that got me started as a gamer: Dragon Warrior, for the NES.

Dragon Warrior was the game for which I originally begged and pleaded my mother to buy me a NES at the ripe and impressionable age of ten. I recalled seeing it elsewhere – at a friend’s house? in a magazine? on TV? I can no longer recall – and instantly believing beyond all doubt and concern that every. single. ounce of my essence needed to acquire and play this game. I cannot now tell you how I knew this then, or from whence this undeniable need stemmed, and I doubt I could even begin to explain it back then, either. All I can tell you now, in hindsight, is that this craving somehow manifested itself into me purchasing a subscription of Nintendo Power Magazine before I even actually acquired a Nintendo. Why? Because Nintendo Power gave the game away for free with every subscription. Read more

Just a small handful of things spring to mind in review of this week. Two nights ago I started up a new Fallout 3 game, this time with the intention of playing it like a true Wastelander. That means: not hoarding every single thing I find back in my locker at Megaton, foraging as I go, using only the weapons I can scavenge and maintain as I go, dropping what I can’t carry, and leaving small caches of equipment stashed here and there. This time my name is Shrike, a no-nonsense tough bitch from Vault 101, self-proclaimed protector of Megaton and its environs following the unfortunate violent death of its previous sheriff, the late Lucas Simms¹.

So far, my quest has been well-fought but hard-won. I’ve lost a few circumstantial allies on occasion, including a poor scavenger who got caught in the crossfire when those no-good Talon Merc goons jumped me, but thankfully, word is getting out: Shrike’s gunning for the bad guys, and the bad guys be scared. Just last night I donned my favorite leather jacket², pumped myself up on Buffout and MedX, and took out an entire clutch of nasty Raiders using only a Louisville Slugger I had affectionately named Pablo. I barely had time to catch my breath as I led my assault, needing to take them out with as much celerity as possible so as to maximize the effectiveness of my chemically-skyrocketed battle prowess. I charged through their compound – one insultingly forged out of the ruins of an old elementary school – and wiped their filthy souls from the planet with minimal injury. Then I slept off my wounds in their own beds, dragged their bodies into a central heap, peed on their dead leader’s corpse, and set them all ablaze with their own flamethrower before leaving the next morning.

I fucking hate Raiders.

What’s next for Shrike? Word is there’s some “family” of villains terrorizing the poor nearby settlement of Arefu. An easy-on-the-eyes dame named Lucy ain’t seen or heard from her folks up there in quite some time. As the new sheriff of these parts, I reckon it’s ’bout time I let these cheeky bastards know who’s now in charge ’round here. Time to go give this family a taste of the Baseball Bat o’ Justice. Pablo’s a close talker, a real social type.

This past Monday night saw another session of my weekly Savage Worlds game. I’ve become a bit slack with this game, owing in no small part to the increasing difficulty of me running games on Monday nights. This campaign’s days are acknowledgedly numbered, but thankfully this most recent session really got my blood pumping again. I eagerly await the ending few sessions of the series, in part because gaming on Mondays is takings its toll on me, but mostly because I really want to know what happens next. The beauty of running this game largely from the seat of my pants is that when it gets me, it really gets me, and I’m as eager to know the future as the players are. I’ll wait a few more sessions before I post things in detail, though.

I’ll end this post with a little idea: Iron Kingdoms, done with Warhammer FRP 3rd Edition. I think it would rock.

Footnotes

¹ PS: thanks for the bitchin’ coat and hat, Luke. RIP
² Tunnel Snakes rule! *shove*

I know I’ve mentioned this game a few times before, but I’d like to take some time out right now to put some spotlight on one of my small handful of ongoing projects. The campaign I call “Timiro Nights” started as an extended playtest for my now-abandoned KnownWorld Palladium RPG rules hack. After only three sessions, I had grown tired of the cumbersome mentality of the mechanical source material – no matter how you package or rearrange its numbers, the Palladium RPG system is just a sad sack of unbalanced hackneyed crap.

But damn me if I can’t shrug off my love for the core fantasy setting! It’s straight-up old school fantasy excitement, and my love for it is nigh boundless. The lands are rich with adventure, the gods come down and fuck with mortal pawns like it ain’t no thang, social conflict and strife are everywhere, and ancient beings of infinite malignant power lie slumbering beneath the world’s surface. It’s just plain rad, if you ask me. Of course it also helps that this was the setting I first ever “officially” tabletopp’d in, way back in my middle school years.

Anyway, long story short: KnownWorld was getting old, Palladium’s core system blows hobos, and we switched to Burning Wheel. We’ve had a much better time since then. So allow me to introduce our heroes! Read more