I am a semi-regular at an EB Games in Portland, Oregon. I reluctantly use them to purchase new PC games on release day mainly out of convinience- it is on my drive home from work. My wife and I refer to the store as 'Rust Proofing' due to their excessive hard-sell of the extended warranty on every object in the store. There have been many times where I have had to repeatedly insist that no, I don't want to insure my DVD/CDs as I am very careful with them and have never once had a scratched disc.
I have long since abandoned trying to ask questions of the staff that stray from their script as they seem determined to veer me back into their needlesly complicated Wii pre-preorder down payment plan or DS cartridge insurance.
This blogger sounds more self-aware than the robo-teens at my local EB. I must imagine that the pressure from management to sell their high profit rust proofing is pretty intense. Couple that with the high ratio of mouth breathing junior high kids, and it has got to be a thoroughly maddening and soul crushing job.
That is fine and all, but where are official PDFs of the old school TSR series of books and modules?
I would love to get some PDFs of my old favorites like Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, Queen of the Demomweb Pits, White Plume Mountain etc. etc.
I know they have just a couple up on the site, but why not republish it all?
GW, TSR, and virtually every other 'medieval fantasy' borrows from Tolkien- who himself borrowed from the folk tradiotions of Northern Europe. The point of the statement is that Blizzard wrapped their products in settings and stories that people could easily recognize, understand and get excited about. You look at the box for Warcraft and it says Orcs vs Humans- does it really need to say anything else?
I like the idea of offloading physics processing to a speciallized card. Seems like it should up the ante for games to move beyond just ragdoll physics for characters and into more environmental sims as well. I would love to see volumetric dynamics like fog that swirls in reaction to masses moving through it. A deeper physics simulation hopefully means more to do rather than more to look at as well. Playing with gameworld physics from an emergent gameplay standpoint has real play value versus larger prettier textures.
Actually, before Magic:The Gathering and it's clones, the Pen & Paper "industry" was collapsing in on itself. The post E.T. interest in Dungeons & Dragons was long since on the wane; TSR was pretty much bankrupt due to gross mismanagement; the market was over-saturated with too many games and gaming systems and not enough real consumers to keep any of the companies afloat.
Sure, there was a decade or so of some success, but it wasn't sustainable. At least, it wasn't sustainable from a growth standpoint. Those successes totally failed to create an 'industry.' I think that, even if TSR had been well managed, the over abundance of other quality systems like GURPS and the White Wolf games, were destined to divide the market rather than grow it. Along come computer and console RPGs and the coffin of 'RPG industry growth' was all but nailed shut.
If anything, it was the collectable card games that actually saved the non-computer RPG world and brought a new generation of kids into hobby shops. Pen and Paper RPGs won't ever go away, but if the genre ever experiences any growth of interest, it will likely be due to forces outside of the industry- like, say, a scene in a blockbuster movie where kids are playing the game (sound familiar)- and the interest from that will not have a meaningful or lasting impact of the genre.
Pen and Paper RPGs have always been more niche than industry. This is a business that cannot survive on terms of growth, only in servicing the niche. TSR collapsed under the weight of their attempts to grow outside of the confines of the niche. They were producing far too many boxed games built on expensive liscences (Indiana Jones RPG?) and simple name shufflings of the D&D rulesets (Star Frontiers, Gamma World). Rather than focus on a fixed set of products that would be profitable, they kept spending to try and grab more marketshare where there wasn't any.
Hasbro/WOC were smart- they realized that the real power in D&D is the liscening, not the game itself. All of the startups and ex-TSR company people are at a huge disadvantage by not having a compelling IP to go along with the pen&paper products. Even White Wolf, arguably the most successful RPG system outside of D&D has only a sliver of the name recognition that D&D has.
I can identify with the player mentioned in teh article who dislikes playing with other people. I have been quite bored with the glut of MMO & RTS games that have come to dominate the swords and spells genre of gaming. I have been playing Oblivion for about a week and it is so wonderfully full of single player greatness I can barely stand to go to work and wait 10 hours before my next hour of exploration.
Every character I meet in the game is absolutely in-character and free of the slightest hint of l337speak of griefing behaviour that permiates the online worlds. I can come and go from the game at will and know the world has waited for me to return to it as if I hadn't gone to my job all day.
Best yet, the NPCs aren't just manequins anymore- they are completely entertaining to watch as they attempt to live their lives and deal with each other. The first time I saw a pickpocket get attacked and killed by city gaurds- I was delighted. He was someone I had met and talked to and now, due to his unscripted actions, he is dead and gone from the game. The actions of the NPCs impact the world permenantly.
I imagine that, just like in GTA, after my initial wonder of exploring the world starts to wane- there is an abundance of non-save-game fun to be had by simply messing with the locals to see how the game's AI reacts.
Also, for as much flack as Betamax still gets- people don;t seem to realize that Betamax later evolved into BetaCam and Digital BetaCam. Those 2 formats are still the standard for 95% of all profesional broadcasting (pre HD of course). Beta may have failed at the consumer level, but the technology paid back in spades in the pro market.
Only humanoid enemies 'level up' with you- all of the creature enemies are divided into rough classes which swap out enemy types within a class as you level up. For example, at low level you encounter wolves out in the forrest- as you level up, you don't encounter stronger wolves, you encounter larger more deadly animals that match that environemnt and creature class.
I appreciate that the show has had no Trek-style alien races running around. They have given themselves are terrific opportunity to introduce, at some point, an encounter with some other life form and have it actually mean something.
As these characters have been searching for Earth and encountering countless barren uninhabited worlds, finding some form of life, intelligent or otherwise, can have an actual impact on viewers who have become accustomed to the established rules of the show.
If you have a setting where anything can happen- nothing then becomes amazing or unexpected. But, by establishing rules and limits, you give yourself the chance to break them to great effect.
I wish they would just leave the entire storyline of the movies out of it. The universe he has created is so textured and interesting- why do we need to see Young Skywalker? Can't we just go to a new world and witness all new characters struggle with life under the Empire? More forced connections to the films just makes the narrative clumsy and self concious. Let's see an action series about a rebel resistance group, or the exploits of a Han Solo type anti-hero/outlaw (Oh wait, that was Firefly).
My wife and I play a lot of Mario Party together. It has some tweakable handicapping anda pretty short learning curve. We usually play against 2 other computer controlled players. That sets up a nice dynamic where we can be competitive with each other but cooperative in screwing over the computer controlled players.
Another great Japanese game is "Ribbit King"- http://www.ribbitking.com/about.htm sort of a weird golf game where you launch frogs off of a catapult to ultimately get the frog into the hole. You score points for getting teh frog to cover larger distances and interact with the dense kooky environment. It has a lot of charm goofiness and just the right amount of skill to be fun and never frustrating.
sorry for the reply to myself, but why on earth can I not figure out how to insert blank lines into my posts? And due to my inept typing skills, I deperately need an edit post option. Sorry for the dense paragraph and swapped letters.
Ebert misses a major point- Art can be bad. Art can be really, really bad. As long as we think that for Art to be "ART", it must be good, we aren't understanding wat Art actually is. All Art is interactive. Movies, paintings, plays, symphonies all require your attention and grant the depth of meaning and expression based on your experience of them- which happens in time, causes thought after the fact, asks questions, gives sensations- ALL art is interactive. With out you actively watching the movie and thinking about it (interacting with it) it is simply light flickering on a wall. Games, like any form of art, are capable of poorly executed attempts at expression, just as bad films and songs and paintings.
When Ebert says that no game can compare to the "great" dramatists, he is by definition excluding any and all art that doesn't reach the pinnacle of it's respective form as 'not art.' On that I call bullshit.
Art can be inept, poorly executed, clumsy, barely inspiring, derivitive etc. etc. But it does remain art nonetheless. Games are conjured out of the minds of their creators to be experienced by an audience- who hopefully will come away from the experience having been engaged, entertained, and challenged. That is enough for Art. Ebert is too quick to cling to an elitist idea of Art that considers the actual material to be the art, rather than the interaction bewtween the materila and an audience.
I submit that Art is in fact a VERB and not a noun. Art is something that only occurs between a work and an audience. Otherwise it is just a bunch of atoms, photons or sound waves. Art is the tree falling in the woods with people there to hear it.
I think you ment
"The Sims, on the other hand, managed to be one of the top selling games of all time by being an open-ended game with no real point."
But isn't the lack of a 'point' a point in and of itself? The beauty of the open ended nature of games like The Sims is that it is the player who determines the goals and play style that they enjoy. It puts the imagination of the player at the center of the game, rather than the imagination of the developer.
Actually, I think it is quite the opposite. It makes a very compelling case for the mechanics of evolution. Granted, the player exerts a guiding hand over mutations, but the whole point of the game is to grow organisms from single cells all the way to intelligent extra-planetary species. This is achieved by progressive mutations that, hopefully, give the newer organsim an advantage in it's environment. Intelligent design proposes that fully-formed complex creatures simply sprang forth onto the earth from a 'designers' hand. The beauty of Spore is that you cannot create your creatures with the end result in mind. You start with a single cell and intervene with it's design at intervals based on it's ability to succeed in the environment. You would never get to simply sculpt an intelligent humanoid from clay, give it a soul and toss it out into the world. Instead your end-game form is dependant on a multidue of generational mutations which were each a reaction to a gradually changing environment.
Add in the fact that the other creatures in your world can be comprised of the creations of other players and, if anything, you get polytheism- multiple creators whose 'children' compete for success in the universe.
Many arguments keep bringing up the idea of keeping 'real world' issues out of the fantasy game. So, what if the character you are playing is gay? If one were to open a gay themed guild, requiring members to stay in character, is that then still a problem? I don't see how a fantasy game precludes any sense of character's sexual identity. It is patently ridiculous to think that all characters in a fantasy game must be straight and any deivation from this means people have slipped into 'real world' identity. How many straight guys play female characters and would jump at he chance to cyber with another female player? Role-playing is about assuming a character. I can see people being upset about players talking about 'real world' things in such a way that it breaks the game's illusion- but in that context you can't pick and choose which 'real-world' topics offend- they ALL should. But, if the character is played as gay wholly within the context of the game world, how is that a problem?
Pikman is a great example. The player could have a certain amount of points, relative to their level, that they could spend on their mob. Certain zombie types would have different costs allowing the player to customize the makeup of their mob. High level players would be powerful by having larger and more diverse mobs. The zombies themselves could be relatively easy to kill as individuals, but the emphasis for zombie players is the horde.
I think the way they handle player death is really a tough nut to crack. Urban Dead does make dead players become zombies. The Necrotech skillset allows other living players to revive zombies back into living characters. I kind of see this as a bit of a cheat. Though this does lead to the fun concept of dumping the freshly dead outside before they wake up as zombies, people wanting to play as living characters don't behave as flesh hungry zombies- they simply head for the nearest advertised revive point. Player death is very tricky in this context...
Perhaps player death would lead to a temporary NPC status where for a short time, the reanimated corpse would run wild. Players could respawn but would teleport back to a hub of some sort- leaving a doppleganger NPC zombie in their place. Either way- to actually recreate the threat of the freshly dead reanimating to attack their companions, they can;t leave the zombie-behavior of the freshly dead purely in the hands of the players. Granted some hardcore roleplayers will stick to the fiction of it, most won't.
I think the key is to make the zombie portion of the game revolve around playing a mob rather than an individual zombie. Leveling up wouldn't give you more health, rather increase the size of the controlled mob. Playing a zombie character shouldn't essentially be like playing a living character who sleeps outside and can't use items.
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I am a semi-regular at an EB Games in Portland, Oregon. I reluctantly use them to purchase new PC games on release day mainly out of convinience- it is on my drive home from work. My wife and I refer to the store as 'Rust Proofing' due to their excessive hard-sell of the extended warranty on every object in the store. There have been many times where I have had to repeatedly insist that no, I don't want to insure my DVD/CDs as I am very careful with them and have never once had a scratched disc.
I have long since abandoned trying to ask questions of the staff that stray from their script as they seem determined to veer me back into their needlesly complicated Wii pre-preorder down payment plan or DS cartridge insurance.
This blogger sounds more self-aware than the robo-teens at my local EB. I must imagine that the pressure from management to sell their high profit rust proofing is pretty intense. Couple that with the high ratio of mouth breathing junior high kids, and it has got to be a thoroughly maddening and soul crushing job.
That is fine and all, but where are official PDFs of the old school TSR series of books and modules? I would love to get some PDFs of my old favorites like Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, Queen of the Demomweb Pits, White Plume Mountain etc. etc. I know they have just a couple up on the site, but why not republish it all?
Though Sony's stand-alone is being delayed until August, Samsung has a standalone Blu-Ray player coming out on June 25th.
Panasonic has one coming in September. Sony's lateness is not the sole barometer for the standard's success or failure.
GW, TSR, and virtually every other 'medieval fantasy' borrows from Tolkien- who himself borrowed from the folk tradiotions of Northern Europe. The point of the statement is that Blizzard wrapped their products in settings and stories that people could easily recognize, understand and get excited about. You look at the box for Warcraft and it says Orcs vs Humans- does it really need to say anything else?
9 months of rain a year? Hell yeah I am going to play me some games...
I like the idea of offloading physics processing to a speciallized card. Seems like it should up the ante for games to move beyond just ragdoll physics for characters and into more environmental sims as well. I would love to see volumetric dynamics like fog that swirls in reaction to masses moving through it. A deeper physics simulation hopefully means more to do rather than more to look at as well. Playing with gameworld physics from an emergent gameplay standpoint has real play value versus larger prettier textures.
Actually, before Magic:The Gathering and it's clones, the Pen & Paper "industry" was collapsing in on itself. The post E.T. interest in Dungeons & Dragons was long since on the wane; TSR was pretty much bankrupt due to gross mismanagement; the market was over-saturated with too many games and gaming systems and not enough real consumers to keep any of the companies afloat.
Sure, there was a decade or so of some success, but it wasn't sustainable. At least, it wasn't sustainable from a growth standpoint. Those successes totally failed to create an 'industry.' I think that, even if TSR had been well managed, the over abundance of other quality systems like GURPS and the White Wolf games, were destined to divide the market rather than grow it. Along come computer and console RPGs and the coffin of 'RPG industry growth' was all but nailed shut.
If anything, it was the collectable card games that actually saved the non-computer RPG world and brought a new generation of kids into hobby shops. Pen and Paper RPGs won't ever go away, but if the genre ever experiences any growth of interest, it will likely be due to forces outside of the industry- like, say, a scene in a blockbuster movie where kids are playing the game (sound familiar)- and the interest from that will not have a meaningful or lasting impact of the genre.
Pen and Paper RPGs have always been more niche than industry. This is a business that cannot survive on terms of growth, only in servicing the niche. TSR collapsed under the weight of their attempts to grow outside of the confines of the niche. They were producing far too many boxed games built on expensive liscences (Indiana Jones RPG?) and simple name shufflings of the D&D rulesets (Star Frontiers, Gamma World). Rather than focus on a fixed set of products that would be profitable, they kept spending to try and grab more marketshare where there wasn't any. Hasbro/WOC were smart- they realized that the real power in D&D is the liscening, not the game itself. All of the startups and ex-TSR company people are at a huge disadvantage by not having a compelling IP to go along with the pen&paper products. Even White Wolf, arguably the most successful RPG system outside of D&D has only a sliver of the name recognition that D&D has.
I can identify with the player mentioned in teh article who dislikes playing with other people. I have been quite bored with the glut of MMO & RTS games that have come to dominate the swords and spells genre of gaming. I have been playing Oblivion for about a week and it is so wonderfully full of single player greatness I can barely stand to go to work and wait 10 hours before my next hour of exploration. Every character I meet in the game is absolutely in-character and free of the slightest hint of l337speak of griefing behaviour that permiates the online worlds. I can come and go from the game at will and know the world has waited for me to return to it as if I hadn't gone to my job all day. Best yet, the NPCs aren't just manequins anymore- they are completely entertaining to watch as they attempt to live their lives and deal with each other. The first time I saw a pickpocket get attacked and killed by city gaurds- I was delighted. He was someone I had met and talked to and now, due to his unscripted actions, he is dead and gone from the game. The actions of the NPCs impact the world permenantly. I imagine that, just like in GTA, after my initial wonder of exploring the world starts to wane- there is an abundance of non-save-game fun to be had by simply messing with the locals to see how the game's AI reacts.
Also, for as much flack as Betamax still gets- people don;t seem to realize that Betamax later evolved into BetaCam and Digital BetaCam. Those 2 formats are still the standard for 95% of all profesional broadcasting (pre HD of course). Beta may have failed at the consumer level, but the technology paid back in spades in the pro market.
Only humanoid enemies 'level up' with you- all of the creature enemies are divided into rough classes which swap out enemy types within a class as you level up. For example, at low level you encounter wolves out in the forrest- as you level up, you don't encounter stronger wolves, you encounter larger more deadly animals that match that environemnt and creature class.
I appreciate that the show has had no Trek-style alien races running around. They have given themselves are terrific opportunity to introduce, at some point, an encounter with some other life form and have it actually mean something.
As these characters have been searching for Earth and encountering countless barren uninhabited worlds, finding some form of life, intelligent or otherwise, can have an actual impact on viewers who have become accustomed to the established rules of the show.
If you have a setting where anything can happen- nothing then becomes amazing or unexpected. But, by establishing rules and limits, you give yourself the chance to break them to great effect.
I wish they would just leave the entire storyline of the movies out of it. The universe he has created is so textured and interesting- why do we need to see Young Skywalker? Can't we just go to a new world and witness all new characters struggle with life under the Empire? More forced connections to the films just makes the narrative clumsy and self concious. Let's see an action series about a rebel resistance group, or the exploits of a Han Solo type anti-hero/outlaw (Oh wait, that was Firefly).
My wife and I play a lot of Mario Party together. It has some tweakable handicapping anda pretty short learning curve. We usually play against 2 other computer controlled players. That sets up a nice dynamic where we can be competitive with each other but cooperative in screwing over the computer controlled players.
Another great Japanese game is "Ribbit King"- http://www.ribbitking.com/about.htm sort of a weird golf game where you launch frogs off of a catapult to ultimately get the frog into the hole. You score points for getting teh frog to cover larger distances and interact with the dense kooky environment. It has a lot of charm goofiness and just the right amount of skill to be fun and never frustrating.
sorry for the reply to myself, but why on earth can I not figure out how to insert blank lines into my posts? And due to my inept typing skills, I deperately need an edit post option. Sorry for the dense paragraph and swapped letters.
Ebert misses a major point- Art can be bad. Art can be really, really bad. As long as we think that for Art to be "ART", it must be good, we aren't understanding wat Art actually is. All Art is interactive. Movies, paintings, plays, symphonies all require your attention and grant the depth of meaning and expression based on your experience of them- which happens in time, causes thought after the fact, asks questions, gives sensations- ALL art is interactive. With out you actively watching the movie and thinking about it (interacting with it) it is simply light flickering on a wall. Games, like any form of art, are capable of poorly executed attempts at expression, just as bad films and songs and paintings. When Ebert says that no game can compare to the "great" dramatists, he is by definition excluding any and all art that doesn't reach the pinnacle of it's respective form as 'not art.' On that I call bullshit. Art can be inept, poorly executed, clumsy, barely inspiring, derivitive etc. etc. But it does remain art nonetheless. Games are conjured out of the minds of their creators to be experienced by an audience- who hopefully will come away from the experience having been engaged, entertained, and challenged. That is enough for Art. Ebert is too quick to cling to an elitist idea of Art that considers the actual material to be the art, rather than the interaction bewtween the materila and an audience. I submit that Art is in fact a VERB and not a noun. Art is something that only occurs between a work and an audience. Otherwise it is just a bunch of atoms, photons or sound waves. Art is the tree falling in the woods with people there to hear it.
Actually, I think it is quite the opposite. It makes a very compelling case for the mechanics of evolution. Granted, the player exerts a guiding hand over mutations, but the whole point of the game is to grow organisms from single cells all the way to intelligent extra-planetary species. This is achieved by progressive mutations that, hopefully, give the newer organsim an advantage in it's environment. Intelligent design proposes that fully-formed complex creatures simply sprang forth onto the earth from a 'designers' hand. The beauty of Spore is that you cannot create your creatures with the end result in mind. You start with a single cell and intervene with it's design at intervals based on it's ability to succeed in the environment. You would never get to simply sculpt an intelligent humanoid from clay, give it a soul and toss it out into the world. Instead your end-game form is dependant on a multidue of generational mutations which were each a reaction to a gradually changing environment. Add in the fact that the other creatures in your world can be comprised of the creations of other players and, if anything, you get polytheism- multiple creators whose 'children' compete for success in the universe.
Many arguments keep bringing up the idea of keeping 'real world' issues out of the fantasy game. So, what if the character you are playing is gay? If one were to open a gay themed guild, requiring members to stay in character, is that then still a problem? I don't see how a fantasy game precludes any sense of character's sexual identity. It is patently ridiculous to think that all characters in a fantasy game must be straight and any deivation from this means people have slipped into 'real world' identity. How many straight guys play female characters and would jump at he chance to cyber with another female player? Role-playing is about assuming a character. I can see people being upset about players talking about 'real world' things in such a way that it breaks the game's illusion- but in that context you can't pick and choose which 'real-world' topics offend- they ALL should. But, if the character is played as gay wholly within the context of the game world, how is that a problem?
Pikman is a great example. The player could have a certain amount of points, relative to their level, that they could spend on their mob. Certain zombie types would have different costs allowing the player to customize the makeup of their mob. High level players would be powerful by having larger and more diverse mobs. The zombies themselves could be relatively easy to kill as individuals, but the emphasis for zombie players is the horde. I think the way they handle player death is really a tough nut to crack. Urban Dead does make dead players become zombies. The Necrotech skillset allows other living players to revive zombies back into living characters. I kind of see this as a bit of a cheat. Though this does lead to the fun concept of dumping the freshly dead outside before they wake up as zombies, people wanting to play as living characters don't behave as flesh hungry zombies- they simply head for the nearest advertised revive point. Player death is very tricky in this context... Perhaps player death would lead to a temporary NPC status where for a short time, the reanimated corpse would run wild. Players could respawn but would teleport back to a hub of some sort- leaving a doppleganger NPC zombie in their place. Either way- to actually recreate the threat of the freshly dead reanimating to attack their companions, they can;t leave the zombie-behavior of the freshly dead purely in the hands of the players. Granted some hardcore roleplayers will stick to the fiction of it, most won't.
I think the key is to make the zombie portion of the game revolve around playing a mob rather than an individual zombie. Leveling up wouldn't give you more health, rather increase the size of the controlled mob. Playing a zombie character shouldn't essentially be like playing a living character who sleeps outside and can't use items.