::A Geek in Korea::

When looking for information about the latest Final Fantasy release on the Wiiware service, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicals: My Life as a King, I disliked the design choices that underpin the game. I started thinking about why I find some games rewarding, and others pointless.

FFCC:MLaaK is a marked departure from the typical RPG. In this game, you play a King confined to his castle. You have to rebuild your kingdom by harvesting the minerals found in the dungeons. This is a pretty cool concept. When I first heard of this, I thought, “It’s more of a resource management game. Neat. SimCity + Final Fantasy + Dungeon Crawling. Awesome.”

In SimCity, you needed to allocate resources wisely, because if you didn’t collect enough taxes, you couldn’t keep the city running for the next year. Then things started getting worse and worse, and you could only hold on so long before something came along and wiped you out. FFCC:MLaaK removed all the “risk and failure” from this model of game design, and I’m scratching my head why anyone would want to play it.

When the idea of FFCC:MLaaK was introduced, I thought that there would be a certain building you needed to build at a certain time to equip your forces with what they needed, and that if your troops were defeated, you’d lose the game. There had to be some sort of time limit driving you to work fast, otherwise you could just sending your forces to lower level dungeons to level them up, then clear out harder dungeons easily. If there is no consequence for failure, like the inability to raise taxes in SimCity, why continue?

Instead of controlling the people you send out to collect the materials (AKA, gain income on your own) in the dungeons, adventurers simply send back reports from the dungeons. If they come back with the materials by killing the boss, success. If they fail to defeat the boss, they come back wounded and need to rest for several days before returning to a dungeon. There is no time limit for when quests must be completed. There is nothing you can do to change the outcome of beating a boss to get income for the kingdom other than leveling the troops by sending them to easier dungeons. The only other way to use money is to donate it to the buildings in town to make better items to increase their chances of succeeding the first time.

Later, you can group the troops in different configurations with skills and medals to support each other. They still fight on their own without your help, but they pass or fail as a group. If you give them medals for achievement, you can manipulate statistics to further increase their rates of success. You still don’t directly control them. Your are the king in the castle. You don’t want to soil yourself with the “adventure”. You get to construct buildings that influence the townspeople. Now THAT’S exciting.

There is no danger of going too slowly. There is no benefit to going quickly either. Finish fast or slow. It doesn’t matter. Fail a quest? Try again. It doesn’t matter, you aren’t actually going to the dungeons, your adventurer proxies are fighting for you.

Beating the game opens up “New Game+”. The only difference here is that the higher level dungeons take a longer time to open up. This means that as long as you put time into the game, eventually the troops you are sending will level up and defeat the boss. Any outcome of the resource scarcity introduced by the game is handled by the game itself. There is no strategy, because all you have to do is try again and your chances will increase each time because your adventurers level up between battles.

You can make the characters in the game happier by building bakeries or parks. This might make it easier to beat the game, or not. I guessing you’ll need to build each item possible to progress through the game, because that justifies the quests into the dungeon. Each demand of residents means you need to continue with the questing portion of the game to get more resources. The resources you get are determined by the adventurers you send off into the dungeons, but don’t actually control. The game demands something, then gets it for you if you’ve played long enough.

All you do is press a button to complete the loop. It is basically masturbation in video game form.

Basically, the lack of consequence for failure or strategy mean the game is entirely pointless. I play games that have heavy consequences for failure (roguelikes= permadeath of characters), or heavy strategy (Magic the Gathering). Removing one of these elements of game design can still be fun, (card games without keeping score) but I can’t wrap my head around someone who would want to pay money to play a more active version of Progressquest.

When I asked about the gameplay for some clarifications to see if there was more of a point, the best response I got was, “All RPG games are just time sinks. It’s joy to play and looks pretty, and isn’t that enough?”

If I don’t control the outcome, and there is no strategy involved in the game, no it’s not really enough for me. It is pretty. The character art has a good design. You can even pay more to buy new costumes for your characters that do nothing. There are new dungeons to download, and different races to unlock, but you never actually fight to acquire the resources you need.

If there is no gameplay of consequence, why do I care?

I. don’t. get. it.

(EDIT) It’s been brought to my attention:

Some quests can only be defeated by certain classes, so you need SOME strategy in troop deployment (AKA, Reading a report to know why the person you sent before failed, then sending a different class.) If you fail a mission 13 times, you don’t lose the game, but there seems there is a Ranking system based on how you completed the game.

There IS a consequence, however slight, for being faster and or better at completing the game. You get graded on the happiness, speed, and other factors of how you managed the kingdom. Getting a better score MIGHT even unlock different content, but no one knows. There is a “point” to completing the task, if you play a game to get a ranking.

photo credit: Matthew Ev

The single player adventure mode Subspace Emissary has been defeated!  The final level of the adventure mode, “The Great Maze”, is somewhat infamous already. People that rushed through the game just to get the characters for their multiplayer gaming were complaining it was too long. It was something like a Metroid map, with lots of interlocking levels that required to to fight previous brawlers. I thought it was fun. I actually liked it more than the “normal” stages through the rest of the adventure mode. There was more action and it was fun to try to find all the doors to the “corrupted” characters.

I liked it all except the final boss. Fuck that guy. Giving a boss character a “One hit kill” move doesn’t make me smile. It’s cheap, and it’s not fun. Anyway, after two tries on the “normal” difficulty, I beat him. Now that it’s completed, I’ve got two more characters left to unlock. I’m not going to go back and try for harder levels or more points or anything. I’m perfectly happy to call this mode “done” once I get it finished properly.

I got kicked off the television tonight so my wife can watch her drama, so I’ll probably get all the characters in under a week of receiving the game if I am successful tomorrow. The last time around for Melee, it took weeks, and I unlocked the characters by chance going through some of the modes because I was bored. Mr. Game & Watch took a LONG time to unlock last time around.

The last 50% of the game I used the same four or five characters. Diddy Kong, Kirby, Wario, Pit, and occasionally Luigi. Luigi was who I was best at in Melee, but I’ve never considered myself “Good” at the game at all. I dropped using the Wii “classic” controller, and now play the game with the Wii Remote and Nunchuck attachment. I’m very happy being able to customize my controls. The defaults don’t work for me, but I’ve got a set up that feels pretty natural now, and I don’t even need to keep a Wavebird plugged in anymore. Now that I’ve got a handful of characters I really enjoy playing with, I’ll go through the other single player modes, try the events, then get better in the multiplayer.

However, before I am able to play online, I’ve got to have some people add my friend code. My Brawl Multiplayer Friend code is 2105-8569-3462. I haven’t been sucessful connecting to anyone in the United States (The region of my console), but if any Korean import Wii owners want to play some Brawl, add your own code in the comments below and we’ll try to work something out.

Very happy with my purchase. Highly recommend it to any Nintendo fans, or casual fighting game fans.

photo credit: Matthew Ev

Super Smash Brothers Brawl has arrived. Of course, the day after I posted about how the game was very late to arrive, it shows up. I played about 90 minutes or so of the game so far. I’ve been dabbling in the The Subspace Emissary (Adventure Mode) as well as the free-for-all modes trying to unlock characters.

I’ve already grown attached to Wario as my favorite character. He can kill people with a motorcycle, or a killer fart. How can you NOT want to play as him? I’m working to unlock Snake, who kicked my ass the first time I met him. I can consistently beat low level computer characters (Except when I choke to unlock them), and I’ve worked on my button input configurations to get a more natural feel for the controller. I’m currently playing with the “Classic” controller, but I have all four options available for me when someone else comes to play.

My wife has a drama on television she watches every night. I got kicked off the television for that, which gives me the perfect excuse to write my website about how I want to leave and go play Brawl some more. I’ll be like this for several week, then it will pass and I’ll only be playing the game in my available free time, instead of at the expense of all other things, by and large.

This is probably my favorite game series of all time, even though I’m not very good at it, and turned me into a huge Nintendo fan. Sometime next month I’ll hold a game day over at our apartment. I’ve got to get the characters unlocked in anticipation of the event. That’s the excuse I’m giving myself to stay up late to play a video game.

According to Wikipedia:

Schrödinger’s mind-game was meant to criticize the strangeness of [superposition]. Influenced by a suggestion of Albert Einstein, Schrödinger extrapolated the concept to a larger scale. He proposed a scenario with a cat in a sealed box, where the cat’s life or death was dependent on the state of a subatomic particle. According to Schrödinger, the Copenhagen interpretation implies that the cat remains both alive and dead until the box is opened.

Roughly put, and man do I only “roughly” claim to understand ANYTHING of quantum physics, Schrödinger used this as a thought experiment that, you can’t know where something is unless you measure it, but by measuring it, you fundamentally alter it. Until you measure it, the wave form state that has yet to collapse, and thus you could see one of two scenarios when you open the “box”. It’s only until you try to measure that this wave form collapses and you get an outcome.

My copy of Super Smash Brothers Brawl I ordered exists in a waveform of either “delivered” or “undelivered” every morning before I go check. I don’t know which until I go down the elevator to check. When I’m getting Yoshi ready for his walk, the chance that the game has been delivered is uncertain, but with each day it grows more certain. Every time I ride down the elevator, I try to think of the percentage chance that perhaps today, even after 14+ days since it allegedly shipped out of Hong Kong, it might have been delivered. I add 5% each day out of optimism, but every time the elevator door opens, the waveform collapses, and I end up with no game. I sigh, and then add one more day to my wait.

From now on, I’ll never skip on package tracking. This is getting ridiculous.

Toribash is a weird game. It’s free, available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. It’s a fighting game, but not like anything you’ve probably seen before. I heard about this game months ago, but at the time I’m not sure if there was a Linux release. When I finally heard I’d have a chance to play it, I downloaded it to see if the rumors about wanton violence and weird gameplay was true. It delivered on both counts.
The game is played in turns where the time in the fight is “Stopped” and each player plots their moves. Each player is represented by a blocky figure with joints and muscle groups that can be extended, contracted, relaxed, etc. The process of punching or kicking requires you to manipulate the muscle groups involved in making this action occur in your own body. For example, if you want to grab the opponents head, you have to move three or four different muscles to lift the shoulders, reach with the arm, grab with the hands, etc.

After you select a muscle to move, their is a “shadow” showing how your body will react when you start animating. If this isn’t what you intended, you can change around how you want to move. Then, when you want to end your turn, you press a button and several frames of animation will take place.

You then repeat the process of positioning your body, trying to grab the opponent and hurt them more than they hurt you. I haven’t decapitated anyone yet, but I have hurt someone’s arm. Right now, the most carnage I’ve seen was when I managed to make my own leg fall of when trying to attack someone STANDING STILL AND NOT FIGHTING BACK. How do you even DO that?

Toribash is a turn based, three dimensional, movement oriented fighting game with brutal deaths. It’s totally awesome. They’ve modeled real matial arts moves in the game. For example, you can even do Traditional Korean Taek Kyon.

That’s AWESOME.

They include lots of replays to let you see how people much better at the game fight. It’s a unique with a thriving community. It’s worth checking out, even just to play with the rag doll physics. I’ve got a few days to practice since Brawl isn’t here, but it’s very complicated. A solid hit so I could replay it would be fantastic.

Today, in regular Sunday fashion had me playing video games again with some foreigners. This time, however, I was gaming with people on two different continents.

I got word that there would be another gaming challenge going down at the Xbox room. We didn’t expect a lot of people to show up, so I got word to set up a cooperative game of something. I had chosen Gears of War, to see what it was like, but when a third player showed up, we ended up playing Halo 3 campaign. Surprisingly, this is the first time I’ve ever played Halo for an extended period of time.

Gears of War was subtitled, but Halo 3 had full Korean menus and voice acting. This meant we had NO idea what the story was the entire time we were playing. If we were required to do something, we had to figure it out, usually by destroying things or pushing buttons. This lead to a lot of backtracking, guessing, and traveling to corners of the map “just to see” if this way where to go.

I’m not sure about the Halo 3 gameplay. It’s bright and colorful, and there is no blood, but there were a LOT of weapons that seemed mediocre and useless. There were would be some awesome weapons you would win off your enemies, but they lasted a few hits and you needed to scrounge something else up.

Occasionally there would be large battles that were really fun (TANKS! WARHOGS! WRAITHS! FIGHTING!) but the rest of the levels were normally “hit a button, now BACK TRACK!” The repetitive levels DID not help when you needed to find someplace new to visit. When we were in the open areas fighting HUGE things, it was a total blast.  I like Call of Duty 4 a lot more. Nothing in Halo 3 made me care when I died, but Call of Duty makes every death seem intense.

I had to leave the Halo game (my eyes were almost bleeding because of all the light bloom anyway) because I had made a promise to play Wesnoth via the Internet. I have a new webcam that works flawlessly in Linux. We set up a Skype video chat, then went at it. I won the first game handily, then got disconnected from the next two just when they were getting interesting.

This was a problem with previous versions of Wesnoth games I played on the Internet too. While the local player and hotseat stuff works perfectly, the disconnects didn’t get resolved when I rejoined the game online. I’m not sure what was causing the problems. I hope the next time we try this sort of game it’ll work better than this.

Next weekend we’ll play a few hours of Magic the Gathering. Hopefully, my copy of Brawl will arrive in the mail sometime this week. Then I’ll play through trying to unlock as many characters as I can, and then host a series of games with foreigners at my house.

Battle for Wesnoth 1.4 got released today, and it’s a substantial improvement over the default version currently available in the Ubuntu apt repositories. I went ahead and compiled the source so I could have my own up to date copy of the game (!) because it’s such a huge improvement.
I had been playing the 1.3.15 unstable release for a few weeks. When my friends from England visited, we played a few local games which got me playing again. The new 1.4 stable release builds on all the awesome new features and even had some more surprises in store. All this in a free game? It’s hard to believe.

The new animations and portraits of the characters are so much better and more professional. I haven’t played enough of the new game to know if the balance is better, but the classes and factions seemed very balanced to begin with. If anything has been tweaked, it’s almost certainly for the better in my experience.

I’m working through one of the new campaigns that are included in the 1.4 release. I’ve moved on to playing at “Intermediate” levels. Right now this is providing a good challenge, but is in some ways less challenging than “easy” levels. Larger enemy armies means more experience, which translates into more upgrades for my characters.

I hit a wall several times in some of my previous campaign attempts, but I’m having an easier time these days. This might be due to better balancing, or that I’m learning the game rules better.

(For those of you impatient enough to download the new version, but hate compiling for whatever reason, get the Windows version and run it in WINE. It runs flawlessly.)

I’ve also learned that the core team that’s made Wesnoth is moving on to “Silver Tree” that hopes to create a 3-D RPG game. Basically the game is “Wesnoth 3D”. This is both good news because modifying 3D models and creating new ones is much easier than doing good 2D art. That means more interesting things will be produced, easily, and open up people’s creativity. While I want the Wesnoth game to continue to flourish and grow, a new groundwork being laid out in 3D will allow for more things to be done (hopefully!).

Back when Cloverfield was released in January, some foreigner friends invited me over to Rodeo Town to play some Call of Duty 4. I went from being the “noob” of the group to being able to shoot and occasionally toss a grenade when I needed to on the first game day. By the second time around, I was shooting with more precision, and I learned the perks of the different classes in the game to a better degree. By the third time we played, I had found the class I liked best, and was running around holding my own for the first time, affecting the outcome.

Today, I dominated the game for the first time. We played free for all and I’d slaughter people. I was completely surprised to be getting the drop on people the first time and shooting first. We played teams and I’d have a higher kill to killed ratio. We’d play domination games where you needed to hold certain points of the map, and even short handed (2 vs 3) my team would still win. Yay! I only got shut down on the “elimination” game mode, because I tend to never pick up sniper rifles, and have problems aiming “up” while drawing a lot of fire from everyone else trying to eliminate me.

I’ve got to keep my head about myself and not get cocky. I’ve got a terrible habit of getting a big head when I think I can win. I know I don’t like playing people like that, but I always realize something I say might come off as cocky only after I’ve said it.

I’m also going to need a speedy delivery of Super Smash Brothers Brawl now that it’s been released in America. I want to host a series of games at my house, and I’ve got to get people to come over and play. Being a bad winner is never good for encouraging future gaming sessions.

Everyone I know that teaches in Korea played a game of Scrabble with students from time to time. I haven’t played this in for a while due to our school’s “no game” policy. Whenever I did play Scrabble, I’d get my ass kicked by students.

It’s not because I am a terrible player. It’s just that when I teach I value helping other players and learning more than winning. I’ll frequently tell students long words that will hand them the game even at the expense of using tiles I need on the board. I’m there to teach them new words and spelling, so if I throw a game to help a student win, at least I’m still getting paid to play Scrabble.

I threw down the Scrabble gauntlet via email with a few of my buddies. Scrabulous is an online version of Scrabble completely free. The best part of this service is that you can play live, or by email. That way a group of friends can play a casual game at their leisure. It keeps track of all the legal moves, tiles, and everything else for you. It even uses the official Scrabble dictionaries to keep people from cheating on their words.

One of my friends is a Scrabble master, and he’s been kick my ass. We’re on the honor system NOT to use an anagram program, or google for new words. You can only check spelling. This is how I intend to keep playing. I’ve already learned a few words too. It’s dead simple to set up a game, it doesn’t require any sort of log-in, and it doesn’t spam your email account with excessive messages. I’m really very surprised at the elegance of it.

Now if I could only score a few points to WIN a game from time to time.

The game that I ordered specifically to avoid being bored during the Lunar New Year holiday later this week has arrived. Super Mario Galaxy! It came well recommended, and people were basically asking me, “What’s the deal? Why haven’t you played it yet?”

The answer is due to bad timing, Galaxy was out the week after I purchased my Wii. It’s actually the reason I ordered a Wii. I figured that once a Mario title of that magnitude was out, trying to find a Wii before Christmas was going to be impossible. I wanted to get a Wii, because if there was difficulty trying to find one before Mario, after would be much harder.

At that time, I didn’t know that Super Smash Brothers Brawl was going to be delayed until March. I figured I’d get a Wii, wait a month, get Brawl, then work to getting Super Mario Galaxy when I had the time. Mario games never go out of print, and they never go down in price. Even though I paid a premium for my Wii online, the store I bought it from pushed up the price again. So, while I might not have one game I want, I got the Wii 100 dollars cheaper than it can now be found online.

Regardless, now that Brawl was delayed, I’ve got time to work through Galaxy. The game is amazing. I’m only three hours in, but I’ve seen some amazing design elements. I haven’t done the same thing twice on any stage. There is so much to do, and it’s a lot of fun. I’m not a fan of “Ray Racing”, but other than that, the game controls like a dream. There are so many nice touches and things to do that it will keep me busy all week.

I’m lucky it arrived, as I would have been bored out of my mind this week without it. We aren’t going to the countryside to visit relatives, and our only plan so far is one night at my mother-in-law’s place. The foreigners I hang out with are all gone on vacation, so there isn’t much else to do.

Time to go collect more stars.