Do Game Developers Actually Play Games? Shouldn’t They?
Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 20, 2010
In the forum thread about RPG Codex’s Game Developer Picks for RPG of the Decade [warning: They have been known to occasionally engage in harsh language… 😉 ] some posters rather colorfully called into question the judgment of these game developers (myself included as one of the offending responses) by asking whether we actually play any RPGs anymore.
Now, I cannot speak for all game developers. Only myself, and those I know well enough to know their game-playing habits.
I will say that some of them (fortunately, not me) engage in far too much of the recreational drug known as World of Warcraft.
But aside from that, based on my very informal, anecdotal evidence, I will actually answer the two questions posed by the title in reverse order:
Q: Should game developers play games?
A: Absolutely. I think a game developer must not lose touch with what is happening in the field. More importantly, I think that a game developer (designers, especially) need to have a passion for games… and if they aren’t playing games, they are probably losing that passion.
Q: Okay, so DO game developers actually play games?
A: Of course they do. But often not the way a hardcore gamer does. And I’d submit not nearly as much as many of them would like to. And in my case – probably more than I should.
I discovered, when I became a full-time game developer, that how I played games changed. I often found myself analyzing games critically in a way I hadn’t before. And I found myself playing games specifically for that purpose.
I found myself playing the kind of games I normally wouldn’t, trying to keep myself well-rounded or something. I found myself “browsing” games a lot more frequently, rather than seriously attempting to play a game to completion. I was more willing to play on the “easy” difficulty levels.
And yeah, sometimes when I got home at night I really didn’t feel much like playing games.
Now that I’m a part-time indie, I find that my time is far more constrained. As an indie – full-time or part-time – time is money. I can almost map my development progress as an inverse function of how much time I spend playing games. I generally have about four hours of useful development time per evening that I could apply to getting my game done. Most weeks, I end up applying only about half of that time to development. More than half of the lost time ends up going into playing games. Sure, some of it I find necessary – after all, if I want to talk about indie games, I ought to play ’em, right?
But I do find myself playing some games far more than I strictly need to.
So it’s a tough balancing act.
Filed Under: Biz, Game Development - Comments: 7 Comments to Read
Game Design: How CRPGs Warped My Brain, Part 3
Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 19, 2010
So here’s the continuation of the series about several CRPGs over the last three decades and how they did damage to my head and influenced my feelings on games and game design (you can read part 1 here, and part 2 here). So here are a bunch more games, principally from the end of the 80’s and the first half of the 1990s. I’m really skipping a bunch of games at this point – even some very fun ones – but in those cases I guess that the vulnerable part of my mind was already gone by the time I got around to playing them. But I did realize that I’d missed one significant influence from the mid-80’s. My bad. So let’s start with that one, and move forward:
The Bard’s Tale – From this game, I learned the meaning of “punitively difficult learning curve.” Okay, not really, but just surviving the first few seconds of your adventure in the streets of Skara Brae took some serious doing. However, like so many of those old games, you were allowed to mix & match adventurers from different groups. Why can’t we do that anymore? Oh, right, group-based RPGs are so Last Century. *Sigh.* If I recall, I ended up using the pre-generated characters to babysit my own characters until they got to level three or four. But the real lesson of The Bard’s Tale probably fell on deaf ears too often: Running Away can and should be an important and viable strategy. Hey, a couple of decades later, it served me well playing Wizardry 8!
Neuromancer – I never thought of this one as an RPG, but the book, “Dungeons & Desktops,” made a good enough case for it that I guess it counts. This one really did warp my brain over the course of the two or three weeks or so that I played it. I found myself reaching for the save-game toggle whenever I’d get ready to talk to someone. Of course, most gamers might assume this is a natural reaction, until I admit that I was doing this in “real life.” Talking to my future in-laws. Never found the save-game command in the real-world interface, though. Dang it.
The Pool of Radiance – The other Gold Box games were technically superior and some of ’em were probably better games overall. But this is the one that really stood out for me. From this game I discovered that massive, tactically complex battles could be really, really fun. More importantly, I learned that deep, “crunchy” mechanics and heavy-duty tactical gameplay could be married with a compelling story. The two are not mutually exclusive. This is something I fear many modern game designers have totally forgotten.
Ultima VI – From this game I learned that even the coolest of games (and game series) can be brought down by a tedious filler quest. One day, I hope to power through the whole pirate map pieces quest and finish what I hear is a pretty awesome game.
Eye of the Beholder II – From this game, it’s predecessor, and Dungeon Master (played on a friend’s Amiga), I learned that food found on ancient dungeon floors are perfectly edible.
Ultima Underworld – This marked about the second time a CRPG blew my mind. Fortunately, it was nearly a decade after the last time, so I’d had some time to recover. Back then I was always a sucker for first-person perspective games, because they’d been such a novelty before. But Ultima Underworld went far beyond the gimmick. From this game I learned that claustrophobia could be fun. I learned that intense, focused, deep but otherwise small environments can be just as awesome as full worlds. I learned that “simulated dungeons” with emergent behavior could be enthralling (something the Dwarf Fortress dudes seem to have taken to heart). And I learned that major anti-magic zones that totally screw up everything you’ve learned to do so far in the game can be infuriating.
Ultima VII- The Black Gate: Uh-oh. So my third experience of an RPG blowing my mind happened the same year as Ultima Underworld. I pretty much worshiped at the altar of Origin after this, until they went and blew it with Ultima VIII. But Ultima VII: The Black Gate (and expansion) remains to this day my all-time favorite RPG. From this game, my holy grail became this combination of open world design, extremely interactive environments, believable “simulated worlds” to explore, and beautiful storylines that were explored by the player rather than told to the player.
Twilight: 2000 – This game taught me three things:
- A solid, interesting tactical combat system and a variety of interesting activities can make a game entertaining in spite of a multitude of flaws;
- Tank combat in an RPG may sound cool in theory, but grafting on a cruddy action-based tank simulator really isn’t;
- It also taught me the incredible frustration of even a mediocre game proving unwinnable near the climax due to a major, unavoidable bug.
Ultima VII pt 2: Serpent Isle – From this game, I learned that the frustration caused by a bug blocking all future progress in a mediocre game is nothing compared to the soul-crushing vexation felt when the same thing happens in an otherwise wonderful game.
Menzoberranzan – This game made me realize that the heartbreak of drug abuse not only destroys those who fall victim to it, but can also hurt all those who play the games they design. And that sometimes a game can be so boring that it really isn’t “better than nothing.” (Okay, I guess I knew that before, but this game helped reinforce that lesson…)
The Rest of this Article Series:
How CRPGs Warped My Brain, Part 1
How CRPGs Warped My Brain, Part 2
How CRPGs Warped My Brain, Part 4
Filed Under: General - Comments: 10 Comments to Read
RPG Codex – The RPG of the Decade! Developer’s Choice!
Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 16, 2010
RPG Codex has a summary of how the last decade has treated computer RPGs. As you can probably guess, as it’s RPG Codex, it’s not a warm and fuzzy review full of hope ‘n optimism. But it’s well written and thought out. And half of it includes some developers chiming in on their choice of the RPG of the decade. Their choices (or lack thereof) might surprise you.
RPG Codex: The RPG of the Decade – Developer’s Choice.
On a side note, I always thought it was whackamole mechanics, not popamole mechanics. I guess it’s my weird dialect or something.
Filed Under: Interviews - Comments: 15 Comments to Read
Frayed Knights: Casting Hellacious Fireballs
Posted by Rampant Coyote on
Time for another development-diary update on Frayed Knights, the indie RPG that takes the “kool” out of “old skool.” Oh, wait, that’s not right…
Anyway, the last couple of updates have been a little “fluffy” talking about background info, so I wanted to get crunchy and talk about more game rules this time. That’s also because I have been knee-deep in code for a bit, and so that’s what is on my mind. This last week was better than the previous week, partly because I wasn’t spending every night adding new (and not-so-new) games to the website. Still, it was a hard slog. I mostly worked on scrolls, spellcasting, and working on dungeon levels.
Ya wanna know what nifty stuff I learned this week? I learned that I had a lot of stubbed / throwaway code in my spellcasting system and item usage system. Yep. A bunch of stuff thrown in there to get the pilot out the door way back when. And it all had to be re-written. Groovy!
But now the item-usage system has been significantly re-done. It’s now (I think) working as expected. Expect lots of items with weird activated magical abilities in the future, as I try and exploit all that work I did to its maximum potential.
Oh, and combat. The old combat system (in the demo) didn’t actually have the concept of turns. You took an action, and then had a delay (based on the action) to when you could perform the next action, in “phases”. Slower actions took more phases. That led to a nice, fluid system of actions based on character speed, action timing, and a bunch of other features. It was also pretty confusing, and made balancing kind of a pain. Especially when I had effects that lasted in terms of “turns” (which I’d defined as 10 phases… the average length of time of any action). When it became too confusing and difficult to balance for me, it was time for a change.
Combat is now broken up into distinctive turns, and most actions simply take “a turn.” However, some weapons are slightly faster, and there are spells that speed things up. So there is still something of a phase system underneath the turn-based combat, but it is mainly used to calculate whether a character gets to go twice (or three times) in a turn or not. I’m pleased with the new system. It seems to include the best of both worlds.
Next – scrolls. I wanted scrolls to be a Big Deal. And now, I think they are. Scrolls are used for two things: To learn new spells, and to cast spells directly with a minimal endurance cost. Either usage “uses up” a scroll. Not all spells need to be learned from scrolls – some spells are “common” and are immediately understood once a character with the correct spellcasting ability (Sorcery, Divine Magic, Nature Magic, or Profane Magic) and feats is of high enough level to cast the spell. But at least half of the spells in the game are only available via scrolls… so you have to hunt them down a bit. But once you memorize them from the scroll, they are yours forever.
The other nifty thing about scrolls is that they will let you cast spells that are somewhat beyond your current ability. So long as you have the needed “feat” to cast the class of spells (Sorcerers and Priests automatically got ’em!), you can cast a spell off a scroll that is a few levels higher than you’d be able to cast normally.
Now – even if you haven’t been especially enterprising hunting down all the available spells for your level, you aren’t going to have to suffer with just low-grade spells. Frayed Knights also has five “Spell Upgrade” feats that let you cast some lower-level spells with either enhanced effects (mainly for damage spells), or enhanced durations. The upgraded spells are cast at a slightly higher level, and have a significantly higher stamina cost than other spells of that level.
Damage / Effect spells can be upgraded (from least to best) to the following variants: Beefy, Massive, Mondo, Hellacious, and Uber.
Durations can be upgraded to the following variants: Extended, Durable, Prolonged, and Protracted. Yeah, only four levels for duration right now. Especially for combat spells, any longer than protracted (which will generally last longer than the combat itself, sometimes even through the next combat) was just plain silly.
And yes, I had lots of fun with a thesaurus on these names. I’m not sure they’ll be the final names, but I wanted adjectives that conveyed meaning without sounding too serious. But mainly, I just wanted to have Chloe cast Hellacious Fireballs. And Beefy Hotfoots. Or is that hotfeet?
Right now, the spell balance is such that the upgraded spells will cost more endurance and actually be slightly more effective than their “natural” cousins of the same level. But there will be other differences between the spells besides endurance cost, and many of those other spells can also be upgraded…
I hope that this will be a fun addition and make spell selection an even more interesting aspect of the game. Again, my goal with Frayed Knights is to create a game that could stand on it’s own and be entertaining and challenging even as a plain-vanilla serious fantasy RPG. The humor and silliness is really just there to make it more of a party.
Filed Under: Frayed Knights - Comments: 4 Comments to Read
More X-Com Announcement Disappointment?
Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 15, 2010
Sounds like I’m not the only one who felt a pang of disappointment when I found out the “new” X-Com isn’t going to be very… X-Com-ish.
And of course, the sense of betrayal in the comments of my blog post.
I am still, barely, holding out hope with a Fox Mulder-esque “I want to believe!” feeling. But upon learning that you are playing an FBI agent in the 1950s….
I don’t get it. At some point in the franchise, they decided that the spirit of the X-Com IP was 1950s and 1960s sci-fi schlock. Pretty much the same time I said, “stick a fork in it, it’s done.” I totally didn’t get that from the first two games. The third one – Apocalypse – was just… weird. I never played much of it. How the hell did X-Com become Plan 9 From Outer Space? And is this what 2K Games is building upon?
We won’t know for a while. I guess the best bet would be to give up hope, assume this new game is just “Some alien invasion shooter” and pretend it doesn’t bear the name “X-Com.” Then, at least, I may be pleasantly surprised…
Filed Under: Mainstream Games - Comments: 7 Comments to Read
Game Design: How CRPGs Warped My Brain, Part 2
Posted by Rampant Coyote on
So if you will indulge me a bit more on this bit of naval-gazing, I’m going to continue to cover a fairly a fairly subjective discussion about how my opinions of gaming and game design were shaped (or warped and twisted) by various CRPGs (and a couple non-CRPGs) over the decades. It’s a good thing my parents didn’t know what kind of damage was being done to me back in the 1980’s!
The Infocom Games: Okay, these were also not RPGs, but the most famous text adventure games outside of Colossal Cave Adventure. The Zork series, Starcross, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Suspended – you can play many of them here. But here is an interesting point… I only finished Zork I. Well, okay, “won” not “finished.” I died many times in all of the games, and eventually after being stumped and eaten by grues so many times one of those deaths or failures ended up being my last, and I was finished. There were a couple of things these games impressed upon me. Once again, as in Colossal Cave and Apshai, I was impressed by the power of written, descriptive text to make a world come alive, and to make it seem like anything was possible. Text isn’t used much in games anymore, and I’ve personally noticed that sometimes I love to read the text in games, and other times I grow very impatient with it. I’m not sure what accounts for the difference.
I also learned how frustrated I could get with the illusory freedom of text parsers.
But a bigger lesson I learned from these games (slowly, after much banging-of-my-head in frustration) that is quite applicable to RPG and other game design was how quickly apparent lack-of-progress saps my will to continue playing a game. This is perhaps why I like RPGs so much – if you get stymied, you can often go back to a dangerous place and do a bit of grinding for cash and experience. If nothing else, gives you something to do which provides you with SOME progress while you chew on ways to overcome your latest challenge. But an extra level and a few more healing potions and fireball scrolls acquired from some grinding may often be exactly what you need to overcome your latest challenge. So there’s less of a feeling of being up against a brick wall.
Ultima III: Exodus – Wow. Just… wow. I’m not sure where to begin on this one. I had dreams about this game even after I finished it. Talking about it is kinda like talking about one’s first kiss. It’s weird speaking about a game with this kind of seriousness, but I lived in this world part-time for many, many weeks. Origin later took on the motto, “We create worlds,” and it certainly seemed applicable.
I hadn’t played the previous games (still haven’t, for longer than about fifteen minutes, anyway), so this was my first exposure to Ultima beyond seeing really cool ads in magazines. While I enjoyed some previous CRPGs because they were “like playing D&D on the computer,” Ultima III was awesome for its own sake.
Still, time has a way of dimming memories, so it’s hard for me to be certain on all the ways Ultima III spoiled me. But here is a little bit of a laundry list:
#1 – Exploration on a massive scale is Good. You had towns to explore. You had overland travel. You had sea travel. You could experiment with moongates. You had dungeons to delve. And then there was Ambrosia. The game kept unfolding and showing you Yet More. It was Big. And there was stuff there…
#2 – Exceptions are the Rule – Fighting your umpteenth orc or finding chests of Yet More Gold is okay for making up the meat of a game, but the real fun comes from discovering something new and exceptional that violates the same-ol’ same-ol’ that you’ve become accustomed to. Like a city that only appears when both moons are in their new phase. Or seeing a giant two-tile sea serpent (silver snake) just sitting there, blocking an entrance to an island. Or taking your ship INTO one of those annoying ship-eating whirlpools. Or… uh, being attacked by floor tiles. A nice, steady flow of surprises, secrets, exceptions, strangeness, and the occasional game-changer is what keeps a game exciting. What’s more – as the player starts discovering some of these things, his mental image of the game-world is that it is chock full of ’em – more than there really are. The player’s imagination will begin to fill in gaps and holes and make the world come alive far beyond the talents of any team of game developers.
#3 – Keep the world Mysterious. Probably one of my strongest memories of the game was when I first discovered the Silver Serpent in the middle of the ocean. At that point, I had no explanation, no understanding that it was one of the end-game challenges. As the game unfolded, I eventually learned its purpose and how to get past it… but for weeks of playing, it was simply one of many unknown mysteries which enriched the world for me. The moongates were another mystery, though they were easier to tease out. Little things like this really helped make the game come alive and feel “epic” in a way the older RPGs did not.
#4 – Giving XP to the one character who landed the death-blow SUCKS. ‘Nuff said.
Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar – This one had everything the Ultima III had, and more. And better. And exceeded. It was a far more satisfying experience that Ultima III. But my mind had already been blown by its predecessor, so my expectations were already high, and I guess I was somewhat inoculated against the full brunt of its awesomeness. But besides reinforcing my experiences with the third game, Ultima IV taught me that conversations with NPCs could be an interesting part of an RPG; that progressing through the game by maxing out virtues could be almost as fun as kicking butt; and that a non-combat conclusion could be just as satisfying as offing a Foozle.
Not every CRPG I played in this time made quite an impression on me. I remember playing a couple more (like Gateway to Apshai, one of the many early action-RPGs that game reviewers and designers alike tend to forget existed prior to Diablo) that were fun and entertaining, but I don’t really think they made any kind of lasting impression on me.
And after this, I left the Commodore 64 behind. In Part 3 will continue with my training in the School of Hard Dungeons with the early 90s, and three more Ultima games that shaped how I view all RPGs now, and the appearance of “Real” Dungeons & Dragons on the PC…
The Rest of this Article Series:
How CRPGs Warped My Brain, Part 1
How CRPGs Warped My Brain, Part 3
How CRPGs Warped My Brain, Part 4
Filed Under: General - Comments: 12 Comments to Read
Game Announcement: Dreamscape
Posted by Rampant Coyote on
Dreamscape is an indie Role-Playing Game in the jRPG style from Aldorlea Games. And it’s… a little different. That’s not a bad thing!
Erin, a biology student, is invited to spend some time with her boyfriend Terry at his apartment. She thinks she is only humoring him as he tells her of magic headphones that he obtained the night before – headphones which he claims allow one to go deep within one’s own imagination while listening to the sounds. But as she watches, both she and her boyfriend are pulled into the world of dreams… and nightmares.
They are separated early on, and Terry is lost. Erin finds a person in the dream – a fragment of Terry’s consciousness – that she can escape by using the headphones herself at any time, but Terry will be lost forever, never to be seen again in the “real world.” However, she has the power to enter anybody’s dream by having them put on the headphones. Through this – and “solving” the dreams of others, she must track down Terry.
All I can figure is that the inspiration for this game must have come from somebody snoozing while wearing sound-reduction headphones. And possibly tripping on something. The game is surreal, bizarre, but pretty dang original. Sure, you have your usual fantasy RPG conventions – leveling up, equipment, bizarro monsters, bosses, and so forth. But the context is refreshingly original.
And weird.
Trying to grasp the logic, history, and order of the dream universe is a little tricky, as it’s fairly unconventional. Fortunately, the interface is straightforward, and a fairly comprehensive tutorial is there to help you on the way. There are also four levels of difficulty.
The music and art quality is – as is becoming standard with Aldorlea Games – pretty top-notch.
You can download Dreamscape from the Rampant Games store. The demo allows you to play for an hour for free.
Download Dreamscape from Rampant Games
Filed Under: Game Announcements - Comments: Read the First Comment
Government Accounting Office on Piracy: It Sucks, But We Still Don’t Know How Much
Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 14, 2010
So we know it’s a drag on the economy – our overall economic growth. But we now know that we STILL do not know how much of an impact it is. Maybe it’s insignificant (I doubt it), maybe it’s crippling (I doubt that one too). All we know is that it sucks.
Somehow, I doubt we’ll ever have a very clear understanding of the full impact of software and media piracy. Copyright violation. Douchebaggery. Whatever.
Filed Under: General - Comments: 2 Comments to Read
Game Design: How CRPGs Warped My Brain, Part 1
Posted by Rampant Coyote on
I have been reading Matt Barton’s excellent book, Dungeons and Desktops: The History of Computer Role-playing Games
And they had an impact on me. Warped my brain. I’ve written a little bit about a few of the early CRPGs that I played. Here are a few of ’em and how I think they’ve affected my mindset as a gamer, and as an indie RPG designer (wow, that kinda sounds formal and pretentious…). Some I’ve already written about before, so I’ll just sum up some of the “design lessons” that they’ve taught me:
Dungeons of Magdarr was probably the first “true” RPG I ever bought for my computer. It was bargain-priced, mail-order only. And I discovered that you get what you pay for. But more importantly, the game was written in BASIC, which meant I could look at the source code. And I realized that I could do better. So I guess the Dungeons of Magdarr deserves some gratitude for helping convince me to keep learning how to program and to write my own games.
Telengard was another early game for my C-64 (my first computer actually capable of running a “serious” game… apparently my 1K Sinclair ZX80 couldn’t cut it for some reason…). This one was also written in BASIC, and after spending many happy hours delving through its procedurally generated dungeons I printed out the entire program and spent many more happy hours delving through its source code. I learned a few tricks. But it also helped solidify in my mind some staples of very “old-school” RPG-ing. Mysterious floating cubes, teleport traps (ugh! Not my favorite), thrones with gems, lots of wild magic flung around, the occasional non-hostile creature in dungeons. And since the sheer randomness of results eliminated all concept of “right” or “wrong” decisions, it boiled everything down to a simple concept: Risk Management. You can’t know what sitting on the throne will do of the various random results, but you could know if you could afford the risk.
Colossal Cave Adventure – While not an RPG, this one preceded Dungeons & Dragons for me, and I cannot begin to understand how much this game screwed with my head. It was this game that taught me that there were worlds inside of computers ready to be explored.
Adventure (Atari) – Also not an RPG. But from this game, I was taught the basics of RPG design. See, there were these problems. And you had tools to solve them. The thing is, there was no EXACT way to solve them. You could fight the duck dragon with a sword. Or you could drop the sword on the ground and let the dragon impale itself on it. You could use the magnet to grab the key from across the river. Or use the magnet to get the bridge to cross the river and take the key. That kind of thing. This is, IMO, how RPGs should work. They should be more about problem-solving, not so much about puzzle-solving (though a dash of that is often fine, too).
Wizardry I – I never played this game very much, as it didn’t become available for the Commodore 64 until very late. But I read a great deal about it, and eventually got the chance to play this masterpiece on other systems. I don’t think I ever got past level four or five of the dungeon. But while the title of the game was “Wizardry: The Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord“, the name of the game was Exploration and Resource Management. It was a true old-school D&D-style experience. It was the opposite of today’s Diablo-style action RPG hack-and-slashers. There was no rushing down through the levels half-cocked. You planned. You mapped. You measured. You turned back while the getting was good to return to town, knowing you’d have to fight your way back. You had to take your dungeon delving seriously in this game. And for many players, that was more compelling and immersive than any cool modern 3D graphics.
The Temple of Apshai – To be honest, I think my view through dim rose-colored glasses at this game is probably much, much better than actually playing it. But – from my dim recollection – the cool thing here was that they attempted to marry the old-school “roguelike” (back before there was a Rogue to be like, I think) with the pen-and-paper RPG mentality using text in the manual. The dungeon was static, room-based, and treasure and rooms were numbered for look-up, and the prose resembled the boxed text found in (later) D&D modules. So, in a sense you were playing through a D&D module solo. The thing that stuck with me from that game is that while a picture may be worth a thousand words, sometimes those words in text descriptions can evoke thoughts, feelings, and understanding that a picture alone cannot convey – even with the best of modern graphics.
I will stop here, as the next game on my list would be Ultima III, and that game might be an entire article unto itself.
The rest of this series can be found here:
How CRPGs Warped My Brain, Part 2
How CRPGs Warped My Brain, Part 3
How CRPGs Warped My Brain, Part 4
Filed Under: Design, General - Comments: 7 Comments to Read
The Return of X-Com?
Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 13, 2010
For the XBox *AND* the PC. From 2K Games Marin. X-Com.
The Scoop is at Joystick, but be advised – it’s not exactly as we’d hope.
A strategic, suspenseful … first-person shooter?
Okay. Rather than sinking down into a funk over a sudden sense of disappointment, I’ve decided that I’m willing to roll with this one. I mean, sure… what I REALLY want is a solid tactical turn-based game with a larger strategic view and story arc that made the original – and Terror from the Deep – so freaking compelling. Back before they ruined it.
But they ain’t doin’ that.
However, I do remember playing Rainbow Six and Rogue Spear back in the day and recognizing the same ol’ thrill I’d had in the X-Com days. That whole next-step-could-be-your-last feeling as you approached a corner. Those were thinking-men’s shooters, slower-paced, tactical, and very fun. Combine that with the flavor and thrill of X-Com? Plus strategic results from victory and moving along a storyline so that the tactical maps weren’t just … random maps, but part of a bigger whole that was your responsibility and – to a degree – your own doing?
THAT would be cool.
I don’t think we’ll get that, either. But I can hope, can’t I?
Filed Under: Strategy Games - Comments: 10 Comments to Read
Pixels
Posted by Rampant Coyote on
I guess this one has been making the rounds on the Interwebs – had multiple people sending me this link. It’s another ludicrously awesome bit of amateur filmmaking:
PIXELS by PATRICK JEAN.
Uploaded by onemoreprod. – Arts and animation videos.
Be careful about throwing away those older televisions!
The one thing that bugged me about it was the same thing that bugged me about the newer Star Wars trilogy (and the “special editions” of the classic trilogy, like where they retroactively hid the fact that Han Shot First!) – nobody seems to be responding to what’s happening around them. Granted, those are just people on the street that got caught on film, not paid extras. But throwing a couple of friends into the film who did some double-takes in astonishment and confusion for a moment would have really helped.
But hey, that’s nitpicking. Fun stuff!
Filed Under: Movies - Comments: 4 Comments to Read
Game Announcement: The New Queen – Truth Be Told
Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 12, 2010
Warfare Studios’ latest RPG is now available at the Rampant Games store.
My apologies to Raphael – I promised to get this up more than two weeks ago.
The story centers around a plot by revolutionaries to overthrow the good queen Lorelei through lies and violent attacks on her people, and to install a new queen in her stead. Desperately defending her land from the violent onslaught of the usurpers, Lorelai turns to three allies in whom she can trust – her adopted daughter Victoria, the former outlaw Alkor, and the newly trained mage Celine. Will their loyalty and courage be enough?
One way in which The New Queen – Truth Be Told departs from traditional RPG Maker fare is that it uses hand-drawn environments rather than the more typical tile-based approach. The characters are more realistically proportioned, though that does make the animation seem more choppy. Still, you can see the evolution of skill in this game over Warfare Studios’ previous offerings, Dark Souls and Dark Souls II.
As always, the cool thing about indie games is that you can check ’em out before committing the contents of your wallet. Download The New Queen – Truth Be Told, and give it a test drive.
Download The New Queen – Truth Be Told
Filed Under: Game Announcements - Comments: Comments are off for this article
RPGCodex Interview with Dave Gilbert
Posted by Rampant Coyote on
Dave Gilbert – the prolific founder of Wadget Eye Games, known for their excellent indie graphic adventure games including The Shivah, The Blackwell Chronicles, and Emerald City Confidential. RPG Codex managed to corner him long enough for a pretty insightful interview.
Dave Gilbert Interview at RPG Codex
Among the more interesting tidbits discussed: Why he chose a rabbi as the main character in The Shivah, and what other kinds of games he’d like to branch out and make (three guesses what one of ’em might be…)
Filed Under: Adventure Games, Interviews - Comments: Read the First Comment
Spring Is Here!
Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 11, 2010
Whew! We’re finally getting spring weather – halfway into April. There are only about three things I like about winter in Utah:
#1 – Our could storage room actually keeps things (like soda, bottled water) cold.
#2 – Running the gas fireplace. Mmm… toasty!
#3 – Ummm…
Come to think of it, I guess there are only two things I like about winter in Utah. I guess if I was a skier, there’d be a big ol’ #3, but I already have plenty of expensive and time-consuming hobbies.
Filed Under: General - Comments: 2 Comments to Read
Coming Soon: Four Free Doctor Who Adventure Game Episodes
Posted by Rampant Coyote on April 9, 2010
Steven “Blink” Moffatt as executive director. Don’t know if that means he’s at all involved in the process personally (I’d imagine he’s kinda swamped right now), but this is nothing but Good News. They’ll be considered canon, too.
Galifree: Doctor Who, The Adventure Games
Let’s hope they rock!
Filed Under: Adventure Games - Comments: Comments are off for this article
Sure, Put ‘Em Up For Sale AFTER I Have Already Bought ‘Em
Posted by Rampant Coyote on
Ah, well. Maybe you can take advantage of this weekend’s RPG sale at GOG.Com:
GOG.COM Special RPG Promo – 50% off selected titles.
Old classics for sale cheap. New indie RPGs, regularly cheap. I’ll tell ya, if you are an RPG fan on a tight budget this is an awesome time.
Filed Under: Deals - Comments: 5 Comments to Read
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