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Boycott the Diamond Dogs! (Phantom Pain Spoof)

First off, chill! I’m not insulting everyone’s current favourite game. This is only a spoof. I’ve been playing a lot of The Phantom Pain these last three weeks. I love it! I don’t think it’s flawless but certainly a 9/10 from me. It’s excellent! I thought it would be funny to look at Big Boss’ company from the point of view of a disgruntled (and oddly knowledgeable) former client, though. This company looks pretty strange from the outside. 

There’s only one extremely minor spoiler and I’ll warn of it in advance. Anything else I say is just reference to the trailer videos and general MGS V gameplay mechanics. Also bear in mind that things I say “in character” of the former client may actually be stretching the truth, or be their misinterpretation, for comedic effect. Hope you enjoy!

An Open Letter Calling For the Boycott of “Diamond Dogs” Private Forces

Date: September 21st, 1984
From: An anonymous former client

I’ve experienced first hand the shady dealings of the Diamond Dogs private forces company. I will detail my grievances in this letter and encourage you to boycott their services, as well as calling on a full international effort to bring the leaders of Diamond Dogs to justice.

Breach of Contract

In my country, a criminal was tried and sentenced to death by a court of his peers. This man subsequently escaped and went on the run, ultimately joining up with one of the private forces (PFs) operating in the Angola-Zaire border region of South-West Africa. When his whereabouts were discovered, my government entered into a contract with Diamond Dogs to fulfil the man’s execution. They informed us that this was part of their “Side Ops” package and that none other than their CEO and mascot “Big Boss” would undertake the contract. This distinction mattered little to us as long as the contract was fulfilled, but they did sell it as if we should be assured of peace of mind.

We paid half up front, as stipulated, and the remaining half when we were informed that the contract had been completed. 

Satisfied with the Diamond Dog’s services, we recommended them under their “Combat Deployment” package (does not include Big Boss’ services) as body guards to a neighbouring nation’s dignitaries whilst on a trade mission. At said trade mission, we met the dignitaries with their new escort, and I was dismayed to find that I recognised one of the Diamond Dogs guarding our counterparts. He was the very criminal sentenced to death in my country, and who the Diamond Dogs accepted payment for having killed.

At first I thought that I must be mistaken, but my companions were also convinced and we decided to approach Diamond Dogs on the matter. Diamond Dogs’ XO Kazuhira Miller himself insisted that they had fulfilled their contract to “eliminate” the target, and that the man we had observed was known only as “Killer Wombat”. They would not divulge the date his employment commenced.

I pried further into the matter, proving from our birth records that the man who we sentenced to death had no twins or other siblings. We became convinced that the Diamond Dogs were lying to us and I did some further digging. I interviewed Russian soldiers who had served in Afghanistan, US troops who had been stationed at Camp Omega in Cuba, private forces serving in Africa, and even tracked down some soldiers who had fought both for and against Militaires Sans Frontiers in Costa Rica in 1974. MSF was a military organisation run by Big Boss and Miller until 1975.
What I discovered may shock you. Diamond Dogs are guilty of several breaches of international law, nuclear treaties, human rights, children’s rights, contract law and the Geneva Convention.

Shady Recruitment Practices

It turns out that with our contract, they simply decided to retain our target’s services for their own, and accept our payment while they were at it. Diamond Dogs want to have their cake and eat it too!

This isn’t even an isolated incident. I asked other former clients (through a middle man) if they would reveal who any of their targets were. I then had a contact in the CIA research some of them, and it turns out that several of the targets have also been spotted on assignment with Diamond Dogs. My CIA contact also intimated that one or two had been captured in the past in third world conflict zones. These captives had been questioned (humanely, I’m assured) by CIA operatives. They revealed that their XO and CEO are convinced that virtually all soldiers of the world want to fight for the legendary “Big Boss”, and that they just need some ‘convincing’ that he’s the real deal.

This convincing process takes places in a brig over several days. Exactly what goes on in there is unknown (though we know that the Diamond Dogs’ Tactical Instructor, Revolver “Shalashaska” Ocelot, was an expert in torture and interrogation under the GRU). What we do know is that formerly patriotic soldiers, many of whom with families and children, emerge from that brig with a new name (typically in the form of “Adjective Animal”) and perfectly content to live out the rest of their days inventorying supplies or developing silencers on an abandoned oil platform in the Indian Ocean, which the Diamond Dogs call “Mother Base”.

Whatever the details of the ‘convincing’ process, it’s clear that these men and women suffer from severe cases of Stockholm Syndrome and/or brainwashing.

The Cult of the Leader

Any Diamond Dog you ask will praise the courageous actions and loyalty of their leader Big Boss. Fanatically, so. The man can do no wrong in their eyes. Even the CIA’s captive was convinced that Big Boss would save him, even though Big Boss is now known to have been in a coma at the time.

This cult begs comparison with the phenomena seen in Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia and Communist China, where Hitler, Stalin and Mao were worshipped unquestioningly by many of their people, ignorant of the failings and atrocities of their leaders. This is the power of propaganda and brainwashing.

While there are reportedly no statues of Big Boss (so far) on Mother Base, the similarity is an eerie one, especially when considering that many of their recruits likely undergo torture before joining the ranks. Reportedly, Boss will often assault a trooper who’s standing at attention. If they’re still conscious and haven’t been thrown off a balcony, they routinely thank him for the beat down, like some perverted version of an S&M scene!

Thank you, sir! May I have another?
Thank you, sir! May I have another?

<very minor spoiler in next paragraph concerningearly Chapter 2, Phantom Pain. Skip to the next paragraph if concerned>

The comparison goes further. Mother Base has begun a witch hunt for spies in their ranks. They have literally begun their own Purge. Each man and woman is encouraged to report on their neighbour and posters are visible wherever one looks declaring that “Big Boss is Watching You”. It seems that George Orwell’s nightmare scenario in the novel 1984 has been truly realised for those on Mother Base in this, the year 1984!
All this from a private company! If you suspect disloyalty from your employees, you fire them, not spy on them!! Who do they think they are? Fucking Konami?! <I know I’m writing this as if it’s set in 1984, but I couldn’t resist. #fuckkonami :P>

A Rogue Nuclear Power?

This gets worse! Even though the waters where Mother Base is situated belong to The Seychelles, and are only technically on loan to Diamond Dogs, they declare themselves an independent military nation. This would almost be cute, like a marketing ploy, if not for the fact that, according to multiple sources, Diamond Dogs may possess a nuclear weapon!! 

Reportedly, they possessed one in 1975 on the MSF base in the Caribbean. A nuclear inspection was to be carried out around the same time that that base was mysteriously destroyed, so the report is unsubstantiated, but multiple sources claim the same things. That A) Big Boss and Miller’s MSF did posess a nuclear weapon in 1975,
B) The US Intelligence backed an operation to eliminate this threat near their borders, 
C) The weapon was never recovered,
and D) Diamond Dogs are currently attempting to procure or create another nuclear weapon!

Are They Insane?!

Diamond Dogs are clearly a suspect organisation, but are they completely bat-shit insane? I have learned the following, which may assist you in making up your mind:

  • Big Boss has been known to enter battle wearing a novelty chicken hat and armed only with a water pistol!
  • This is an organisation, claiming to be a country, who have named themselves after a David Bowie album! This would almost be amusing if it weren’t for the scary fact that Diamond Dogs are no heroes. They are a rebel rebel organisation which, if they possess a nuclear weapon, are putting this Cold War under pressure!
  • They have their own zoo!
  • Big Boss has shrapnel implanted in his skull, impinging on his optical nerve. A medical expert has informed me that any pressure on the shrapnel would leave Big Boss prone to hallucinations. This is a man who carries around a rocket launcher habitually! He’s actually been known to shower with it still on! 
  • Former MSF soldiers, when interviewed, report having heard Big Boss describe his battles with phychics, a man who could control insects, a sniper who could survive by photosynthesis, a Russian Colonel who could harness the power of electricity through his body, giant killer robots and even a ladder! Is this all hyperbole or is Big Boss actually mental?!
  • Rather than allow their dead comrades’ ashes to be scattered (allowing them to rest in peace) the Diamond Dogs literally attempt to form diamonds from the ashes and carry them back into battle with them! Before making this policy change, in the middle of the burial ceremony, Big Boss was observed to take the ashes he was about to scatter and smear them all over his face!

 

  • Diamond Dogs frequently ride into battle blaring music from their Blackhawk helicopter’s megaphones, just like in the movie Apocalypse Now from 1979. I wonder does Big Boss share a kindred spirit with the insane Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando) from that movie.
  • They insist on being paid in GMP (Gross Military Product, apparently) which is their own completely-made-up currency with no apparent backing or physical note/coin.
  • Their budgeting department is also certifiable! They believe that it will cost them 85,000 GMP to research and manufacture a simple suppressor for one of their varieties of pistol. However, developing their proposed FAKEL grenade launcher from scratch will cost only 45,000 GMP. Most astonishingly, however, they budget only 180,000 GMP (a little over twice the amount for the silencer) for the construction of an ENTIRE BASE PLATFORM, similar in size to an oil rig, WITH a connecting bridge over a mile long!

“Non-Lethal”

If you don’t heed my advice and you decide to hire Diamond Dogs anyway, be very wary of hiring them for any non-lethal extraction mission. Operatives are known to use rubber bullets fired from shotguns or SMGs, often directly at the face of a target. This has been proven to be potentially lethal, as observed after many a soccer riot worldwide.

Hold still while I put you to sleep. Promise this tranq dart delivered at high velocity to your eye won't hurt a bit!
Hold still while I put you to sleep. Promise this tranq dart delivered at high velocity to your eye won’t hurt a bit!

Their favoured approach, though, is to fire a tranquilliser dart at the target’s face. They report that this is more effective at quickly incapacitating a target. I’ll say it would be! The shock of having a dart enter your eye socket at the high velocity given to it by a long-range rifle (or even the pistol) would likely kill a man! Diamond Dogs operatives remain convinced, apparently, that their targets are only sleeping. 

Other “non-lethal” approaches employed include dropping a crate out of a helicopter onto a target’s head, pulling them backwards out of a 20 ft high guard tower, or trampling them with a horse.

If you want to be sure to keep your target alive, DON’T HIRE DIAMOND DOGS!

Aggressive Expansion and Hostile Takeovers

While Diamond Dogs have an agreement with the Seychelles government for their base in those waters, no such agreements exist for their ‘Forward Operating Bases’ which have been discovered in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, with more likely to be hidden elsewhere.

Further, it’s been reported by other Private Forces companies (legitimate businesses, many of them, not mercenaries) that Diamond Dogs use their FOBs to raid personnel and materials from nearby competing PF bases like common pirates! I know that war is business and vice versa, but directly attacking a competitor is a morally bankrupt move in any industry! Even the war one!

Something is rotten in Diamond Dogs PF

I would urge all of Diamond Dogs’ clients to terminate their business with them immediately. I also urge the UN to carry out weapons inspections on Mother Base and to enforce the closure of Diamond Dogs’ Forward Operating Bases. I plead with the international banks to freeze their assets (unless their assets are in GMP, in which case I’d love to see how that currency goes on its own), and I ask for Amnesty International to help identify abducted soldiers, security contractors and (reportedly) even child soldiers, assist in their rehabilitation, and send them home!

Big Boss and Kazuhira Miller must answer for their crimes! Boycott this dangerous organisation immediately and help bring them to justice!

Thank you
From the pen of C̶i̶p̶h̶.. Anonymous

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Hope you enjoyed it folks! This is the first time I’ve blogged a fictional or comedy piece. Do please leave your feedback.

Until next time..

Sword Fighting in Games

Image from Chivalry: Medieval Warfare
Image from Chivalry: Medieval Warfare

Sword fighting is a big part of our popular culture. It’s almost as big as the cult of the Gun. TV shows and movies like Star Wars, Game of Thrones, Vikings,  or The Three Musketeers romanticise the sword-wielding hero or heroine and the art of melee combat.

Games have always been a great way for us to get in touch with our fantasies and role play the hero (or villain), and while they’ve done a great job of satisfying the gun-wielding hero fantasy, they’ve always (in my eyes, let’s say) fallen short in the domain of melee combat. Don’t get me wrong, there are some very fun games centred around melee combat, but I’m talking more about simulating the real life experience, and giving the player a true virtual taste of what the real thing is like!

I’ve both been to the shooting range a couple of times (rare in Ireland) and taken fencing in college (and, of course, played countless games) so I feel a can compare both of the real experiences with the virtual to some worthwhile degree.

With guns, the essential components are that you point and shoot. The physical impact and damage aren’t part of your interaction. Games can simulate this very well. The click of a button or pulling of the Right Trigger on a controller feels analogous to pulling a gun’s trigger. Going further into the realism side, games can also simulate what it’s like to have to move to cover or work with a team in a fire fight. The only parts of gun fighting in games that I think aren’t represented are the kickback (yes I know recoil is often simulated, but it can’t give you the pain and bruising in your shoulder that comes from firing a shotgun) and reloading. Usually we just hit a button and trigger a quick reloading animation. In real life, it’s actually quite difficult to load bullets into a clip  (clip into gun is easier, but I feel Gordon Freeman would have fumbled once or twice in real life), and awkward enough to chamber a round in a bolt-action rifle. The noise of firing a gun can be physically painful too, and forgetting to turn the safety off is a concern, but where’s the fun in simulating that?

Bringing sword fighting into games is an entirely different prospect, though, and it’s miles behind its counterpart. Why is this? There are several reasons.

Input

Well, holding and swinging a sword are easy enough to simulate, but not accurately. Your attack isn’t the twitch of a finger, but a flick of the wrist, or a swing of the arms, or a kick. It doesn’t feel as correct to just click to do this. We tend not to notice this too much however as we’re used to pressing a button in a game and seeing something happen, so this is fine in a way, but it is straight away a large disconnect between what you do in real life and what you can do in a game.

Virtual Reality might have something to contribute here, but it brings its own problems. The Oculus Touch or the HTC Vive’s controllers would allow you to hold and swing somewhat realistically. See the video below for Vive’s controllers being used by a Disney animator to paint in 3D. They can’t simulate the weight of your weapon, though. A claymore (sword, not mine) or broadsword will have a lot more weight and momentum than a katana blade or fencing foil, so the controls will still feel wrong.

The other problem with VR controllers would be the clash. In real life you might swing your arm all the way from upper right to lower left, but in the game your sword hits an opponent’s armour, or blade, or a wall, and it stops! So your real arms are now in a different place to your game arms. You’ve immediately got another big disconnect in the experience. This is why I don’t think VR will improve sword fighting in games at all. With that said, it could offer some neat experiences. A lightsabre or nano-blade can cut through anything supposedly, except for another blade. So if the VR game let you wield a sword like Raiden has in Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance and never fight somebody with a similar weapon, then the experience would be very fun, but it wouldn’t be a sword fighting experience, just a sword using one.

At 1:43 in the video below these input problems are summed up very well, and humorously. Sadly, even though it passed Kickstarter, Clang was later cancelled. If you watch the video look out for Gabe Newell’s cameo!

So we can’t get around input with currently available technology, but there are several other areas to improve upon to give us better sword fighting in games.

Physics

As I mentioned, the clash of blades can’t be simulated in the player’s input device (beyond a little vibration in the controller, maybe) but it’s also quite difficult to truly simulate in the computer. We use physics to bounce objects around the room after an explosion or crash or whatever. Essentially, each frame, the computer checks where an object is and what its velocity is, if it’s in collision this frame it will calculate the new positions and velocities for the colliding objects on the next frame. If not, it will continue on its trajectory (usually adjusted for gravity and air resistance in some form). This happens 50 times per second or so. To be clear, a physics check is checking where something is at a given time. The collision happens if the objects’ “colliders” are touching.

To try to use this system to detect the clash of swords is impractical. To take just one measurement I found online, in an experiment, a sword slash was found to travel 190 cm in 1/4 of a second. So 7.6 metres every second. If the physics check is done sixty times per second that means the sword moved 12.6 cm every frame. That’s a lot! The thickness of a foil is less than 1 cm, so even saying that two foils coming at each other have a combined collision-thickness of 2cm, there’s a high chance that they won’t be in the same place on any frame. One frame they’ll be 6 cm before colliding, and the next frame they’ll be 6 cm after colliding without ever having made the collision. 

So a literal physical simulation is impossible. Can we cheat? Well, yes. We have to. That same physics limitation above is why bullets aren’t physically simulated in games but are instead simulated using “raycasting”. This is shooting a line straight out from somewhere (a gun) at a given time to see what it touches. Most bullets in games work this way but even long range sniper shots have developed to the point where they still use raycasting but can also simulate bullet drop, wind resistance, and travel time. They cheat to deliver a very physically ‘real’ bullet for the player. Computer game design is all about cheating the limitations to fake realistic experiences!

So we have to cheat to make sword virtual sword fighting a “reality”. 

What’s been done before?

Titanic: Adventure Out Of Time (1996)

This was earliest game I ever played that had any degree of simulated sword fighting. I should actually do a retro review of that game but I’d have to get my hands on it again. Go to 7:19 in the video below to see the fencing scene.

There are very few lets plays of the game and the ones that are there just have the player spamming the attack button to win, sadly. Stamina wasn’t represented in this game so this was possible, but if you played it ‘properly’ there was quite a bit in there. You moved your blade around the screen with the mouse and clicked to attack from that direction. If I remember correctly, right clicking would block. The attacker (who didn’t get a chance in this video) would telegraph his moves a little before he made them. This is realistic and seen in games. You can’t just hit somebody. You have to start by swinging your arm, and the position of the arm gives a clue as to whether you’re going to attack overhead, left, right, or forward, for example. Games draw out this telegraphing longer to make it easier for the player. In real life, you try to attack as quickly as you can to not give the opponent time to successfully block. Harder enemies in games often give you less telegraphing time than easy ones.

To be clear, the Titanic game was a point and click adventure/mystery game. Not a combat game, but I saw great promise in its sword combat segment and thought that more realistic sword combat must be on its way soon. How wrong I was. About the “soon” part anyway.

Star Wars Jedi Knight: Dark Forces 2 (1997)

Long name for one game. This one let you wield a lightsabre in first or third person. Sadly, it didn’t have a block move. None of the Dark Forces games in the years since did either. I think this is the greatest failing of these games. You finally got to simulate real lightsabre battles for yourself, but none of them had any of the nuances of a sword fight. To not get hit you just ran out of the way, then started a swing and ran back in. Occasionally you would get in a ‘lock’ (a pushing battle against another blade) and have to click frantically. This mainly happened if you and an enemy were attacking at the same time. It added a token dimension to the combat, but they never tackled a real sword fight simulation and I always found the games to be disappointing on that level. Mostly you just spam the attack button and are shown a few different animations. There’s little skill or decision making involved.
This is how the majority of first person games handle sword fighting and it’s quite disappointing, especially considering how ignored some of the better examples have been. Examples such as..

Thief: The Dark Project (1998)

The first Thief game was a first person stealth game set it medieval times. This is the first game where I ever saw a block move as a useful part of the combat. You weren’t supposed to fight in this game, but if discovered by a guard you could at least defend yourself a little. It was a rudimentary sort of block. If the enemy hit you with a sword it would hurt you, unless you were holding the block button. Satisfactorily, pressing the button made you hold your sword out across your body and if you blocked there was a great sword-clash noise. Importantly, this didn’t reduce damage, as the block seems to do in a lot of games (making it pointless), but it blocked all damage. 
I though “great! We’ve arrived! All sword games should have blocking like this from now on”. They didn’t.

As Time Went On..

God of War. Great game, but in so way a sword combat simulation
God of War. Great game, but in so way a sword combat simulation

The hack n’ slash genre was where sword games went to grow up it seems. You know these. God of War, Devil May Cry, Bayonetta, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, and the newly released Onikira: Demon Killer. Maybe even the Arkham games and Shadow of Mordor have these elements. These are never first person games, and while they sell melee/sword combat and deliver great sounds and visuals and their own unique gameplay, they are far from sword fighting simulations. It’s a well established genre with its own merits and hit games, but it’s a far cry from simulating what it feels like to fight with a sword. As a sweeping generalisation, these games show you sword combat, but you don’t do it. They get away with having you perform combos like A+A+B to do a certain attack, and often press a single block button (sometimes with a direction) to block an attack, no matter what type of attack it is. The animation systems then take over to show you the pretty results, but there’s no real sword combat happening or being simulated in this genre.

Where are the games that took the ideas of Thief and ran with them? They’re few and far between. What could we have had by now if sword fighting in games had been building from 1998’s Thief all this time? It’s hard to say. We could have an entirely unique genre of game today and it’s a minor tragedy that we don’t, I think. Maybe the market was just never there, but I haven’t seen many attempts along the way either.

In Recent Years

We’ve started to see an effort in the last few years to breathe new life into sword fighting in games and evolve the gameplay that Thief hinted to us well over a decade before, but while they’re improvements, and a lot of fun, they are still quite limited.

Mount & Blade: Warband (2010)

Note that the very similar Mount & Blade came out in 2009. I played Warband, not the original, so I can’t speak to sword combat in the first game.

This game is still my favourite example of sword combat. It’s a fantastic game and what sold me on it first was the combat. Swords are far from the only weapons, and each have their own strengths, speeds and weights, but the  basics are similar across all melee weapons. The developers really went out of their way to show off something unique and not enough people know about this game. I never even heard of it until 2014 and a Free Weekend on Steam.

An attacker will telegraph their hit, say by raising their sword over their head if they’re going to attack overhead, or to the left for a slash from your side. The length of time they telegraph for is only ever a split second, but the enemy’s skill level will make this time shorter or longer. You’re not locked onto your opponent. You’re free to look and move in any direction, so after they telegraph, you could just step back out of the way, or you can block in a meaningful way. You hold the right click to block, but that’s not enough, you need to block up, down, left or right (assuming you don’t have a shield, in which case your block covers most directions at once) by moving the mouse correctly up, down, left or right to block the attack. You basically want to look towards the enemy’s weapon to block it. Then you can riposte (fencing term, meaning counter-attack) with an attack of your own in the same four directions. Move your mouse a little to the right while attacking and you’ll slash from the right, and so on.  And when I say riposte, I don’t mean that the game now allows you to attack. You can choose to attack whenever, but getting hit during your swing will stop your attack so you have to use timing wisely. You can even kick to wind your opponent to get a clear opening for a powerful attack, but the kick is short range so it’s hard to hit with. There’s a lot going on here.
One-on-one fights against the computer in this game are the closest I’ve ever come to feeling like I was fencing in UCD again, without facing a human opponent. In the options menu you can simplify the blocking to just always work, but that destroys this amazing gameplay.

The flaw is that most players, and especially in multiplayer, just spam the attack button and hope to come out on top. Players don’t necessarily engage with the amazing mechanics provided for them. Possibly because they haven’t been trained to in games in general to because this game is so unique.

Chivalry: Medieval Warfare (2012)

This came along a little later. While Mount & Blade is a strategy/RPG game, this is focussed purely on single level skirmishes (90% of them in multiplayer, though you can practice against bots). This game went further and added a feint move. For a small stamina cost, you could try to trick a player into blocking. Blocking with a blade works as a single move when you click. You click to block, and block for about a second, then have a second of recovery before you can block again. This makes the feint pretty useful to force a block then attack during the recovery time, but it’s not very realistic as a real opponent could just hold their block.
With a shield you can hold your block indefinitely unless you are kicked, but without the shield you automatically drop the block. 

Nicely, you can also use mouse wheel down to perform an overhead smash, or mouse wheel forward to stab forward. This feels pretty good to use and also does a little to remove some of the button mashing problems, but again, this game suffers in large multiplayer battles from players just charging and clicking, without using any blocking or feints in most cases. 
Also, because you can’t hold a block, if you’re outnumbered you’ve no way to block two attacks at once and will nearly always lose. This encourages swarm tactics as the main gameplay and a lot of the sword fighting nuances are lost. If players are outnumbered, you’ll usually just see them running backwards away and blocking, hoping to find some friendly players. (Perhaps these types of games should make it so if you’re running backwards and hit a low obstacle you fall over).

The part of this game I find the best for sword fighting are the one on one multiplayer duels against a human opponent. Since you can’t get bum rushed by one guy, you can actually focus on them and use feints, kicks, and parries much more effectively.

So those are two good sword games. They do a lot to “cheat” and deliver a lot of the realities and considerations of sword fighting into a virtual space, but they still don’t come close to simulating real sword fighting. Nothing I’ve seen so far has been able to balance the strategy, the mind games, the body language reading, the stamina factors, the shock to your arm of a blade impact, the stances, speed, and reactions of real sword fighting. 

If I could explain it in just one way, I’d sum the problem up thus: In real sword fighting, you could be thinking of striking, but worried that you’re becoming predictable and that your opponent might be ready to parry and riposte while you’re off balance in a lunge. You sacrifice your block for an attack, and it also costs you stamina. Real sword fighting is as much about dozens of tiny choices every moment as it is about delivering well-practised attacks. In games, while stamina is now often taken into account, most players still just attack madly because left clicking isn’t as hard as as a lunge attack. Some fighters I’ve known in real life do attack just wildly, but in real life you can beat them easily with just a little skill whereas in a game, they’ve often just chosen the winning tactic. 

The Future

There is a greater awareness coming back to the mechanics of sword games, and many different titles in the coming years will try to tackle to problem in their own unique ways. I’m excited to play all of them.

For Honor

This game looks like a lot of fun. I can’t wait to try it. I would say that its focus is on delivering large scale sword battles. This is pretty unique. We tend to see the large battle in a cutscene or the background and then just fight a couple of guys in the game. It has a new(ish?) take on sword combat where you attack or defend from one of three zones on your body: up, lower left and lower right.

You read where the opponent is aiming for by their body language, and you try to defend into your corresponding zone by moving the control stick to that area. I see this as being more of a step towards sword combat from a hack and slash game than I see it as a sword fighting simulation, but it’s still great to see. The emphasis seems to be too much on a broader battle and third person action (I think first person is important to simulate any real life action, personally) to convince me that this is the game I was always pining for, but it looks awesome for what it is and I can’t wait to try! I particularly appreciate that you have to read body language and adjust your block to succeed. This is very important.

Kingdom Come: Deliverance

Now these are the guys I think are going to come closest to delivering a good sword fighting experience any time soon. You can see from the video above that they take it very seriously.

I backed them on Kickstarter because of the promise of delivering unique sword fighting. The currently available build is Alpha 0.4, the first version where you can see their sword fighting in action. I played it today (and many of the other games I mentioned) as prep for this article.

Even at the early stages, I can see a lot of promise in the fighting. I was able to slash with the left mouse, stab with the right, or block with Q. All of this from 6 different zones. You are locked onto your opponent, something that serves to simplify your movement and direct your attention. I’m not sure if I like this, though. You only fight one enemy at a time currently, but I wonder what happens when there are multiple enemies.

You can do the normal things like feint, block, attack, but depending on your timing with your block or movement you can also sidestep or dodge a strike and then counter-attack, all through a smooth procedural animation system. It is the smoothest flowing combat I’ve seen and there’s enough going on that there is really room to improve your skills through practice (and the RPG stats level-up system in the game), but I would have preferred a non-locked camera. You need to be able to check your surroundings in a fight, even just quickly. I presume the game will have a disengage kind of command, because most of the game is free roaming anyway, but it wasn’t in what I played today. There was also no kick, though that may appear. What I didn’t love was that I seemed to sometimes be able to just hold block to defend an attack from any direction, and other times I couldn’t, so I’m not sure which way the game is going with this. See a gameplay video from the alpha below.

To wrap up, where are we lacking?

Knowing where to block is probably the single largest gap between real sword fighting and what most games do. In reality, you could hold a block, but there’s nine directions you could get attacked from (assuming the enemy is only in front of you then it’s left, right, or middle times high, low, or middle; 3×3), and then they could ‘disengage’ the attack and stab around your parry anyway (with certain weapons like a foil or epee, look it up) to nullify even that block. Most games just let you press block and you’re fine.

Games are supposed to be ‘fun’ (many say, anyway). When I shot clay pigeons in real life, the shooting wasn’t great fun. It hurt (the kickback is enormous)! The fun part was seeing a moving target down range explode into clay fragments. Shooting guns in games is fun because we’ve nailed how they sound and the environmental destruction and death animations.
When I did fencing, I found the most fun part was successfully parrying an attack (giving me the satisfaction of knowing that I was smart enough and quick enough to deflect a real physical attack) and for bonus points, landing the riposte. A bit like how in tennis the most fun part is the back and forth, not the actual scoring of a point.

I think that most people who have designed sword fighting in games must not have done fencing, or if they did then they didn’t remember what was most fun about it. Most of the time the systems seem to be designed around causing damage. I think it should be more about the clash of the blades. The back and forth. You really only need to hit a person once with a sword to end the fight. That should be the result of successfully winning the more fun part of the fight, not the whole focus of the fight, if you ask me. Certainly it would make for a more unique angle to your sword fighting game, and we definitely have the technology to fake these results well, as long as they’re well balanced and play-tested.

Food for thought.. For more, read this great (and shorter) PC Gamer article on the subject.

Until next time..

PC Gaming on a budget (Part 2/2)

This is the second half of my blog on how to play more games for less money, or completely for free! My first 8 tips were in last week’s blog here.

Before I begin I want to alert you to some current offers. Last week I mentioned demos and a great one just went up on Steam during the week. Free-running zombie-smashing game Dying Light just put out a free demo on Steam. Go here and look for the ‘Download Demo’ button on the right.

You can skip below to “9” if you’re reading after 31 August 2015.

Last week I also mentioned the Steam Free Weekends. This weekend (28-31 August 2015) Mount & Blade Warband is free to play on Steam and discounted at 66% for the duration. This is one of my favourite games in recent years and I’m not even that big an RPG guy. It’s a combination of medieval strategy game, open world trading, RPG, and first person combat. You can do things like raise an army and join a faction or conquer lands and create your own Kingdom, fighting all battles in first or third person (or auto-resolve) as an archer or horse-mounted lancer, all while manipulating nobles and markets. And that’s just the single player! The multiplayer scene is amazing! It’s incredible, and the biggest sell for me is that it has the best sword/melee combat I’ve ever seen in a game! Check it out! The discounted price is €6.79 and you can play for free until Monday to see if you like it.

I also mentioned totally free games to look out for. Humble (who I’ll mention today) are giving away Stealth Inc 2: A Game of Clones: Humble Deluxe Edition totally free until Monday (Aug 31st 2015). They’re also in their Summer Sale with up to 90% discounts and you can make your own Codemasters or Telltale Games Bundles! That’s big!

9. Origin ‘Game Time’

Click to go to the Game Time page in your browser (new Window)
Click to go to the Game Time page in your browser (new Window)

Back to Origin once more (note, this is EA’s store, and will be changing their name in the coming months away from Origin). Under their Free Games tab (pictured above) you can see “Game Time”. If they haven’t flashed this at you as soon as you launched the Origin client (then you’re probably on the web) then this is where to find it.

Again, Origin isn’t great on the amount of games on offer, and there’s only four there now, but these include Battlefield 4 and Titanfall. Definitely AAA games, by any definition. Hey, they may even work by now, it’s been long enough since their release dates (snark snark)!

Game Time is a bit like a Steam Free Weekend that you can start for yourself once, whenever you want. Once the game is installed, the first time you launch it will start a 48 hour countdown (148 hrs for Battlefield 4) in real-world time (not game time) before the game is locked again.

I haven’t done it myself yet, but if you ever find yourself with a guaranteed empty weekend, you could probably get some good mileage out of Battlefield 4, Titanfall, Plants vs Zombies, or whatever the other one is..  Unfortunately, as far as I know, there’s no discount during this period. It’s still the normal store price.

10. Betas

This is something you have to look out for, really. Multiplayer games that will require some balance testing and server stress-testing tend to run Betas before the game launches. These might be open or closed, and that defines your ability to get in.

The conditions vary wildly. They may only be open to you if you’ve already pre-ordered the game, or pre-ordered one of the company’s other games, or it might be free to everybody who signs up via email, or signing up may only enter you into a draw for a beta key. It kind of depends on the size of the multiplayer aspect and the response they’ve gotten so far. Closed betas sometimes become open in order to further stress test the servers.

If you do get into a beta bear in mind that the game isn’t technically in a finished state, but you’ll likely see enough of the game to know if it’s for you or not, all while giving the developers valuable statistics just by being there. I used to be a huge fan of the Battlefield games, but I got on the Battlefield 4 Beta (which was after Planetside 2 came out, which was way better if you ask me) and while I had planned to get it, the Beta showed me that it wasn’t for me, thus saving me €60 + DLC costs.

Call of Duty Black Ops 3 is currently in Beta but it’s been there for a while and may be ending soon and it’s only open to you if you have pre-ordered.

In the coming year I imagine we’ll see multiplayer betas for Battleborn, Overwatch, possibly Rainbow Six Siege again, and maybe the new Unreal Tournament a bit later on. You never know, so just keep an eye out. The big ones are usually well advertised.

(EDIT: Star Wars Battlefront had a Beta earlier this year so I didn’t mention it, but they’re having another in early October before release. Here’s PC Gamer’s report.)

11. Pre-Order Bonuses

Getting a free and known game is one of the better pre-order deals you can find, but you're still trusting that the new game will be good. In the Phantom Pain's case, the reviews have already gone out and are generally 10/10, so rest easy here.
Getting a free and known game is one of the better pre-order deals you can find, but you’re still trusting that the new game will be good. In the Phantom Pain’s case, the reviews have already gone out and are generally 10/10, so rest easy here.

Pre-order culture is controversial. It requires the consumer to pay up front for a game that isn’t yet finished and hasn’t been reviewed by the media. In other words, it could be crap, and you’re being asked to trust that it won’t be. In recent years that trust has been eroded with terrible buggy products coming out, and developers have been getting away with it. 

On the other hand, developers, particularly smaller ones, sometimes need that cash flow to finish or market the game, so it’s not greed driving the pre-order culture. It’s practical business: cash flow! There’s nearly always a reward for the consumer for their trust and early cash. Some of the time these are just insulting, or they’re a part of the game you should have been given anyway but are only being given if you buy in advance or pay more after. This adds to the bad name of pre-orders, but there’s plenty of good out there too.

Often, you’ll get a Season Pass for free with a pre-order, which means you’ll get more content and/or missions over time as they become available. Your mileage may vary here. 

My favourite pre-order bonus I’ve gotten so far was ALL of the X-Com games. I think it was the pre-order bonus for X-Com Enemy Unknown, which was excellent, or it might have been for The Bureau: X-Com Declassified, which was less good, but still alright by me. 

Make your own choices here. If the bonus is worth it to you, and you “just know” you’ll love the game no matter what, and you trust the developer, don’t leave money on the table, so to speak. Get that bonus!

12. Mods

Mods are modifications to existing games that, in the past, have nearly always been free additions to a game made by the community. They could be as little as a new hat, or as big as a whole new game built around the core engine. Counterstrike started life as just a multiplayer mod for Half Life and now it’s one of the biggest games in the world! If you find a good mod you can really breathe new life into a game you already own, for free! Some are very easy to install. Some can be quite tricky, and so make sure you follow the instructions very closely.

Skyrim is a hugely modded game. So are all the Grand Theft Auto games and Minecraft. Cities Skylines is getting some great mods too! You should be aware that in certain multiplayer or online games you can get your account banned if you have mods installed, as it detects that the game has been modified and thinks you’re cheating. Other games are designed around allowing mods and this isn’t a problem.

My all-time favourite mod is the excellent Brutal Doom for Doom (video above). It’s ranked #5 (at time of writing) on Mod DB’s top 100 mods (do check out that list. Very interesting). Note also that the top 3 mods on the list are currently for Mount & Blade Warband. As I said at the start of this blog, you should try that game!! Also the Long War Mod for X-Com is fantastic if you like the game.

As a rule of thumb, the older the game, the better the mods. This is because the modders are people working in their spare time to change the game, and to make big changes can take years.

There’s a lot of talk around charging for mods right now, and Steam tried unsuccessfully to kick it off earlier this year, but the backlash stopped it in its tracks. That’s a topic for another day, but since modders are game fans, not companies, you can be relatively sure that there will always be free mods available for some games, even if the better ones go paid. Still, it might be wise to get the most out of it now.

13. Let’s Plays

This may be cheating a little, but I’ve found some value in it of late. I used to think listening to Audiobooks was cheating as you’re not reading a book, but you’re still getting a story in at a time when you couldn’t be reading (like when walking or cooking dinner). Let’s Plays are a little like that for games.

YouTube Let’s Plays, and their counterpart live streams on Twitch TV (which often get uploaded to YouTube once they’re recorded anyway) are when you watch somebody else play a game. Sometimes they’re just trying it out for the first time. Sometimes they’re replaying a classic, and sometimes they’ve got an angle, like playing hard games drunk or currently, Danny O’Dwyer (Gamespot’s famous personality and Waterford-man) playing Fallout 3 ‘Naked and Gunless’.

Some personalities are silent, some are loud and really annoying, some are funny, and some only think they are (see ‘annoying’). The video and audio quality can vary as much as the personalities but there are enough streamers doing Lets Plays as their day job (yes, you can do that! We live in the future!) and enough aiming to, that you can usually find good quality videos of whatever you’re looking for, particularly if the game is newer.

The value I get out of these varies. If there’s an older game that simply isn’t available any more, or that I own but won’t run on the new Windows, I could watch somebody else play it. It’s not the same as playing yourself, but it depends what you’re after. In a linear game that’s more about the story, you may not mind letting somebody else have the controls as long as they don’t talk over the important bits. In a strategy game, you probably want the streamer to discuss what they’re thinking, as there may be a lot of information on the screen and they’re clicking too quickly for you to see what’s going on because they’re familiar with the controls and you’re not.

Recently I was interested in playing Until Dawn but it’s only on the PS4 and I don’t have one. This is a narrative-heavy horror game but one where your choices play a big part in the game. I watched Mary Kish (again of Gamespot) play the whole game in one video (I paused and came back a lot) and I got the gist of the game. I’d like to play myself and make some different choices, but I got a great experience for free either way.

In another case I didn’t want to take the time to play the Xcom Long War mod (which is free) so I watched BeagleRush do it on a second screen while I worked, and I only paid real attention when interesting things happened. Over the course of a couple of months, this saved me like 120 hours of playing it myself!

It’s also a great way of getting past a level you’re stuck on in a game you have, or of seeing what a game is like for real before you decide buy it for yourself.

In related news, YouTube launched YouTube Gaming this week. It’s a branch of YouTube totally focussed on gaming and hosts the same game videos you can get on the normal YouTube but it’s also competing with Twitch by offering live streaming services.

14. Humble Bundles

The Humble Store is another online store like Steam and GOG and Origin, but this one sells Steam Keys (so you’ll play the game in Steam ultimately) but some of your purchase goes to charity. The Store has its own occasional sales (like right now) but the remarkable aspect is the Humble Bundles.

This is a pay what you want type of sale with different tiers of games, and if you pay more than a certain amount you get all games in the next tier. You might get 4 games for anything up to $5, or 8 games if you go beyond $5. Or even less!

The games offered are generally fixed (bundled, though in special promotions like the Summer Sale you can build your own bundles to a degree) and the costs vary. Typically you won’t have heard of most of the games in the weekly bundle but occasionally there’ll be a very good deal. Again, charity is the main winner with these offers but you can get like $150 worth of games for $3! Whether you like any of them is up to you. I’ve never actually bought a bundle as I don’t want a lot of games I’ve never heard of that I feel I have to play, but that’s just me.

15. Browser Games

Part of saving money is knowing when not to spend, and recognising your moods. I know that sometimes I really want some distraction. I want to play something new, and I’ve a bad habit of just opening up Steam and looking around for something to buy, when really I just want to spend a few minutes doing something else. I could as easily go on YouTube or Reddit here but since this is about games I should also mention some of the sites that host browser games.

On sites like Kongregate, Itch.io, IndieDB, Newgrounds, Gamejolt, Y8.com, Addicting Games, AGame.com, and more you can find more free games than you could ever play! The quality will vary wildly, but without a shadow of a doubt, the best stuff on these sites is better than half the paid stuff on Steam. For your convenience, most of the sites have user ratings for the games and they’re arranged by genre, so you can quickly see if they have something you’re looking for.

These games tend to be smaller in scope than paid games, but not always. A game could last anywhere from under 1 minute up to an hour or more. You should be able to find something to interest you without digging into your wallet when the mood takes you to these sites.

Also, on sites like Itch.io and IndieDB (and some of the others) you’re probably playing early builds of games that will become full releases later on in their lives. Look for Floaty Ball on Itch.io. It’s an extremely fun party game for 1-4 players made by Irish devs GoodManLads. Its early life was on Itch.io and it’s currently looking for your vote on Steam Greenlight on its way to becoming an all-growed-up game.

Remember that some of these sites may be using the Unity Web Player which no longer works in Chrome. If the game won’t run, paste the link into Firefox or another browser and play away.

16. Your Own Games

Okay maybe I'll just replay one of you guys tonight.. PS Congratulations to the Onikira team who launched during the week!
Okay maybe I’ll just replay one of you guys tonight.. PS Congratulations to the Onikira team who launched during the week!

I can almost guarantee you that you’ve bought or been given/awarded some games that you’ve never taken a look at. Or ones that you started but didn’t give fair time to and moved on before you got the most out of them. Bioshock is a big one for me. I’ve started it I think 3 times before, liked it but not loved it and then started playing something else like a newer release and not come back to it for a long time. I know the game is great (according to critical acclaim) and I like shooters so there’s no reason I shouldn’t play this game when I want something new. It’s already paid for and I shouldn’t spend more money to get a new experience when I’ve yet to experience one of the top rated games of the last ten years!

I’m sure you’ve a few in your own library that you could go to.

The same goes for replaying games. If you just want to kill some time, don’t feel you have to buy a new game. Look back at games you used to love and try them out again for the evening, or try to go for 100% completion in some open world game where you stopped exploring after beating the main quest.

17. <Removed> (26 Sep, 2015)

I formerly recommended key reselling vendors here. I had explained that I looked into the legality of their business and found that it wasn’t illegal. At the time of this edit, that is still technically true, but I’ve learned that it’s a legally ambiguous area that has yet to have a clear-cut result in course that would give us a final answer. Also these case results may vary from territory to territory.

I’m no longer comfortable recommending something that, while beneficial for the consumer, may be illegal and does seem to harm developers. In some cases the keys being resold are unused review keys which developers were never expecting to be paid for. However, in the spirit of things, they expected each key given away to generate more sales through review, not for a third party to turn a profit from a consumer at the developer’s expense.

It might take a long time, but until there’s a clear legal stance on the issue of digital reselling (as there is with reselling physical console games), I can’t recommend this method of discounting. It appears that the consumer takes on legal risk and can have their keys deactivated at a later date (when the source of the code has been tracked down), even if it worked in the first place. I can’t recommend anything that currently leaves the purchaser at risk like this. Even if you’re willing to take that risk, know that I’ve seen discounts misquoted at times (misleading and illegal in most countries) and known of keys that didn’t work (though the vendor refunded or replaced these).

Piracy is illegal. Key reselling may be illegal. Both DO put the consumer at risk and DO harm developers, which ultimately means less great games get made, harming the consumer again.

There’s a great article on the topic here.

In Conclusion

If you’ve read this far, as well as reading last week’s blog, thank you, and I sincerely hope it was worth it for you. I tried to throw in practical general knowledge as well as psychological and habitual tricks so that there should be something there for everybody. I even learned a few things myself in researching for it.

Gaming can be a very expensive hobby if you want it to be, but you can also play games every day for the rest of your life for free if you want to, and that’s without turning to piracy, which you shouldn’t do. It hurts the industry you’re such a fan of and damages you back ultimately. Gaming is a great hobby with something in it for everyone and hopefully I’ll have helped you get a bit more out of it.

If you’ve any tips that I missed or any games you want to recommend for being worth the investment, do please share in the comments.

Stay tuned as I blog every weekend and will be continuing my series “Player Too” as well as soon doing a piece on sword fighting in games.

Until next time..

 

PC Gaming on a budget (Part 1/2)

Some of my blogs have been running a little long and this one was going the same way so I’ve decided to make this a two-parter. Read on for my tips on how to save money, or even spend no money at all, in your PC gaming life.

While top end gaming PCs to match the XB1 or PS4 can be quite expensive up-front (but totally worth it if you ask me), you can run the majority of games on laptops that are cheaper than these consoles themselves. Chances are you already have one. Another advantage is that the PC is an open platform with competition. Nobody (so far) is charging us a monthly fee to play multiplayer games. On Playstation or Xbox you’ve to pay to be on Playstation Network or Xbox Live in order to play multiplayer. Admittedly they do now give you a free older game occasionally for being a member, but it’s still a “free” game in exchange for your paid subscription, and you don’t get much choice as to what that game is.  On the PC we can just play away. 

By the way, forgive me for rarely mentioning Nintendo. I consider it its own thing really, as with many many games you can choose to play them either the PC, Xbox or Playstation. But if you want to play  what Nintendo’s got, you need to buy a Nintendo, so comparisons can be less relevant, depending on what you’re talking about.

Lastly, in Ireland you have to pay a TV license just to own a TV in the house, which you need for console gaming. Many countries probably have their equivalent licenses too. We recently got our letter that we hadn’t paid. We wrote back that we don’t have a TV (which is true; just the PC monitor and a laptop) and that was accepted. Happy days!

Of course, console owners of hard-copy games can go down to Game Stop or equivalent and trade in their old games for money off new ones, or even cash. This does reduce the ‘real’ price of each game for console owners, but considering that a new current-gen game can cost €80 even without the so-common Season Pass they try to squeeze you for, I think that’s small compensation when the same games on PC likely cost €60.

The laws for ownership of digital products has a long way to come to catch up with the physical world, but it is happening, and wheels are turning to allow us to “trade in” our own digital copies of games in a similar way. This may never actually happen, though, and if it does it could still be a long way off.

I should get on with the advice, but just to give you some context let me describe my habits and spending. I keep a budget (because I’m that kind of person). I don’t keep TO a budget per se, but I find it useful to know what I’m spending on things and to remember if I’ve paid bills, etc. In keeping my budget I observe that I spend an average of about €45 per month on games. You might guess that that’s 1 new AAA game every other month (meaning big expensive releases from big companies that sit on the Top 10 list for months). It isn’t. In fact, while I do play plenty of AAA games, I’ve only paid full price (meaning €60) for one game in the last two years, and that’s the PC release of GTA V, which was something I simply couldn’t wait any longer for (I hadn’t played it on consoles in the 18 months it had been out). I also play at least a few minutes of a game every day, if not a couple of hours. It has become my primary hobby in recent years and I’ve learned a few money-saving tricks that I’d like to share. Some may be obvious, some may just serve as reminders, and some things will hopefully be new to you.

1. Don’t Buy What You Won’t Play

This may be obvious, but thinking that you’re saving money by buying something in a sale is still wasting money if you never use it. This applies to any products or services, and whether they’re on sale or not. Don’t buy anything at any price ever if you know you’re not likely to use it. 

A staggering 37% of games sold on Steam remain unplayed. Of my own library I think I install and at least play a few minutes of everything I get, so it’s probably technically 0% of my own library, though I’ll admit I’ve bought things cheap and then only played a few minutes.

If you’re in the middle of an epic RPG like the Witcher 3 or you’re about to start The Phantom Pain next week, don’t bother picking up anything else until you’re sick of them or finished them. You know you’re not going to get to play it for weeks, or months! At that stage you’ll have forgotten about it or have bought something newer.

2. Take Advantage of Sales, namely, Steam ones

Okay, obvious again, but pair this with  #1 and only buy what you actually wanted in the first place. Don’t let fear of missing out rule you. I did a blog a few weeks ago about the damage sales could do to the games industry and the damage they do to our own perceptions of what a game is worth to us. I argued against sales a bit there, but let me be a total hypocrite… no wait, devil’s advocate. That sounds way more objective and professional. Let me play devil’s advocate now and argue for sales.

While sales may be doing negative things to the industry, they are there to be taken advantage of if you so desire. Steam are the best/worst for sales. If you ever want to buy a game that isn’t a new release, and you’re prepared to wait a few weeks, then just put the game on your Wishlist in the Steam browser, and check back every few days to see if anything you wanted to get is on sale. Steam have two several-week-long mega sales in the year (Summer and Winter) that, when added together, mean Steam is massively discounting games roughly 10% of the year, and only six months apart. Six months is the longest you need to wait to get something cheap on Steam.

That’s ignoring their “Midweek Madness” sale and their “Weekend Deals”. Midweek is about Tuesday – Thursday, and Steam’s “weekend”, I’ve noticed, starts on Thursday and runs until Monday night (Irish time). So on Thursday you’ve simultaneously got a mid-week and weekend sale happening. It’s ludicrous! There’s far less on sale at these times than at seasonal sale time, but if what you’re after comes along here then it might be  a good time to pick it up. Again, make use of the wishlist to build a list of games you’d like but can wait for, then check it every now and again, as it shows at a glance whether the price is currently discounted or not. I think it’s also meant to email you if your wishlisted game goes on sale, but I rarely get that email, personally.

Found this when I Googled for images of Steam Summer Sale. It'll do!
Found this when I Googled for images of Steam Summer Sale. It’ll do!

EA’s store (currently named Origin but soon re-branding to something else) also do the occasional sale but given that they pretty much only sell €60+ games to start with, they’re probably worth avoiding unless you want something very specific. We’ll get back to Origin later, though.

Good Old Games (GOG.com) are a fast-growing alternative to Steam who do plenty of their own sales in order to compete. They have an optional shopping/gaming platform (GOG Galaxy), whereas Steam is required in order to play, though both stores can be viewed in an ordinary browser. GOG also has a wishlist function so make use of that similarly to how I recommended with Steam.

3. The Little Differences

GOG also offer, on some titles, a small amount of store credit back just for buying a game. This isn’t unique to GOG but Steam aren’t doing it.

What Steam do is tend to give you trading cards for playing their games or buying on Steam. These go into your ‘inventory’ (it’ll flash green to notify you if you get something new in there). Supposedly you use the trading cards to trade and craft badges and increase your Steam user level (as if Steam itself were a game). It’s total bullshit, and I say that with the only caveat being that since they don’t seem to know what they’re doing with it and are always changing the rules, they may some day become worth doing, but for now, just get into your inventory, and put the trading cards up for auction on the Steam store. You can speculate here, as with stocks, but for this level of pennies it’s not worth your time. Just look at what the most recent selling price was (usually 8-12 cent) and set your desired price to that or a cent lower, and you’re pretty much guaranteed to sell in a few minutes. Do this consistently and you can easily find enough credit it your Steam “wallet” (store credit) to afford one of the cheaper on-sale games without having to drop any cash at all. Free game for the win! I admit, though, it’s more hassle than GOG’s version of just giving you the store credit.

4. Use Refunds

Steam Refunds are a new development, with you able to return any purchase for any reason within two weeks of purchase, if you’ve played less than two hours of the game. Outside of these parameters, Steam will consider the refund request also. Info here.

If you do get taken for a sucker during a sale period and know you’re not going to play the games, then take advantage of the refund. There’s no shame in it! I’ll admit I bought a couple of games in the Summer Sale because they were cheap and I’d heard of them, even though I thought they weren’t the genres I’d be interested in. Sure enough, after a few minutes of playing them, I realised I didn’t like this kind of game, and didn’t want to play more. I’d only bought because it was cheap. I returned the games and no more was said. You do only get store credit, and it doesn’t appear for a few days, but that’s fine by me.

EA (Origin), GOG, and Ubisoft all have returns policies, I believe, though the terms are all different, and Steam’s is now the most consumer-friendly. Check them out if you’re interested.

Steam don't need your reason, though they ask. Just be within the terms and you're good.
Steam don’t need your reason, though they ask. Just be within the terms and you’re good.

5. Demos

Okay, so this one is a bit of a shocker to me sometimes. We used to get PC magazines with CDs or DVDs and several free demos to play every month. They used to be common but hardly anybody does demos any more, and it’s not just just a death-of-print thing. Demos can be distributed digitally, of course. They’re just far less common than they used to be. That said, they do still exist, and some stores categories just for them. They’re a great way to try before you buy, or to just play something new and free for a half an hour with no intention of getting the game.

Where to find Steam's Demos. Did you ever see that before? It's been there the whole time! There's enough demos in there to play for months without paying a penny!
Where to find Steam’s Demos. Did you ever see that before? It’s been there the whole time! There’s enough demos in there to play for months without paying a penny!

Granted, most of the demos are ones you’ll never have heard of, but there could be some good stuff in there. I have to alert you to The Stanley Parable and The Talos Principle demos, though. Both are major games with free demos, and the content is unique to the demo. You won’t find those levels in the real game (Okay I could be wrong about Talos, not having beaten it yet, but I’m pretty sure the demo levels aren’t in the main game).

GOG don’t seem to offer demos. Origin do but with an extremely narrow selection. There’s 8 games at present and 4 of them are football. There’s some fun to be had there though.

Click to see all 8 demos!!
Click to see all 8 demos!!

6. Totally Free Games

This one’s special. Occasionally you can find entire games, for keeps, for free! They’re nearly always old, but there are fantastic older games out there so don’t discount this option. Origin typically have one on the go at a time, and it’s the same one for a few months. See the picture above. It’s the “On The House” option.

I don’t believe GOG or Ubisoft (Uplay) have this offer.

Steam’s free games are, sadly, lumped into the Free To Play category, which is a different thing that I’ll talk about next. To find it, go here:

After clicking
After clicking “Free To Play”, you’ll have four new tabs. Choose the “Most Popular” tab to display all 267 results in order of popularity. The other tabs will only give you a few games.

Unfortunately, you’ll have to really know what you’re looking at here in order to get a truly free game. Look at release dates, or even graphics for a clue. Currently, 90s shoot-em-up Shadow Warrior (Classic) can be gotten for free. In this case, there was a remaster done to make the game more palatable which is on sale, but they made the original version free. There are probably a few properly free full games to be found amongst the 267, but I haven’t gone down that rabbit hole yet.

(EDIT: I found a great list of the free games here. At a glance, it does include some that are in fact Free To Play (you can spend money) games and not “free games” (full game for free) but it’s still narrowed down from 267. Alien Swarm was fun (and includes local/online coop) and Fistful Of Frags has good review scores.)

(EDIT: GOG has also very occasionally offered a free game for a short period of time, but there’s no section for it. Just keep an eye out.)

7. Free To Play

Love it or hate it, the free to play model is here to stay. And who do we have to thank? Well you could either say “mobile” or “shareware”. I tend to avoid F2P because they tend to be designed a bit like slot machines, and suck you into an endless gameplay loop that will bleed you of time at least, if not time and money. They’re never truly free. They’re often multiplayer games that don’t end. You just keep fighting/competing/warring so that you can stay in the game and keep spending money on optional extras. At least with a single player game you usually pay once, play a story, then put it down. You’re not at risk of having your time and money bled away.

You can start the game and make your character for free, and even play a few rounds to see if it’s for you. Most of these games though will hold a significant amount of gameplay, or a significant advantage, behind a pay wall. The latter are accused of being “Pay To Win”. Avoid these.

That said, these games can be designed very fairly too, and be truly great experiences. One of my all-time favourite games is Planetside 2. You can play all parts of the game for free and paying won’t give you any major advantage.

Heroes & Generals I like, concept and gameplay-wise, but everything is very expensive and realistically, unless you have literally thousands of hours, you HAVE to spend money to be able to play as a pilot or tank driver or sniper. You can only play as infantry for free. This can be fun, but it’s quite an expensive game if you’re going to get into it for real. Even as a pilot, you can rarely use the pilot because many matches won’t have had an air force brought into them, so despite my paying €20, I can rarely even play what I paid for. Be wary of this kind of free to play.

Approach with caution, basically. If you’ve an addictive personality, or are undisciplined with your credit card, then Free To Play is not for you!!

8. Steam Free Weekends

These are great! They don’t happen every weekend, but often enough to make it worth logging on on a Thursday night or Friday to see if anything is happening. For example, this weekend (21-24 August 2015) Payday 2 and Zombie Army Trilogy were free to play. That’s the full games (multiplayer shooters, one about ultra-shootey bank heists and the other about Nazi Zombies, because we need more zombie games) available to play for about 72 hours (or longer).

Take advantage of these! Payday 2 has been featured on this multiple times. Civilization: Beyond Earth has been on once or twice also. With a game like that, you could actually complete a full campaign in the weekend and feel you’ve done the game, without having to drop €40+ on it. No matter what’s on offer, you might have a lot of fun for free and feel like you’re done with it by Monday. Good deal!

If you didn’t like it, no great loss, but if you did and want more, the game tends to be discounted at 50-75% off!!

The absolute best-case though is this: An increasingly common promotional tactic for (usually) Early-Access multiplayer games, is to increase their user base by doing a free weekend, but to be more sure of retaining it, they let you keep the full game, just for having installed it on that weekend!

My first post to this blog was on Fractured Space who were doing such a promotion back in May. I now have that game, just because I played it on that weekend. It’s still in Early Access (meaning it’s not “finished” but you can play it) but when it’s officially released, I’ve got me a full and polished game, and I can still play it whenever I want anyway, I just tend to minimise my exposure to Early Access, lest it spoil me for the real game.

Definitely one of my favourite things on this list!
Definitely one of my favourite things on this list!

I’m going to leave it here for this week, but come back next week for Origin’s equivalent of Steam’s Free Weekend and much more. I’ve saved some of the best stuff for last!

Player Too: Episode 2 – Gone Home & Race The Sun (and more)

Click for Episode 1..

Welcome to the second instalment of Player Too, where I try to turn my girlfriend Claire into a gamer by exploring games with low barriers to entry. After all, you can’t expect to play a shooter without having learned movement controls at some point, or a 4x strategy game without playing something simpler like Command & Conquer or a tower defence.

In the time since the first episode, we’ve played Race The Sun and Gone Home, as well as Irish games Darkside Detective (demo) and Curtain.

Gone Home

A few people recommended that we play Gone Home if we liked the mystery of Her Story and needed something with a low skill level. Again, I thought it was important for Claire to play herself, and not just watch. You’ll never consider yourself a gamer if you don’t actually get ‘hands on’.

I know this game is referred to by many as a “walking simulator”. I know it’s intended as a derogatory term, but that doesn’t mean a game is without merit, and in fact, since Claire has never ever controlled a first person character with a keyboard and mouse, a walking simulator actually sounded perfect. She could get used to movement in an environment where you can’t die and don’t have a time limit. I figure if she could get used to first person movement, then she might eventually be able for the extremely enjoyable Portal games, maybe by way of the Stanley Parable or Talos Principle first. If she liked Gone Home for what it was, then maybe we could stop off at The Vanishing of Ethan Carter or something like that.

howlongtobeat.com said that Gone Home takes about two hours to beat. We figured we’d beat the game in a single evening, even with the need to learn how to move first. I positioned Claire’s fingers on the WASD keys. She asked why she couldn’t use the up/down/left/right arrows. I said that she could technically but that she’d just have to treat this like a driving lesson and take my word that it’s better to have more keys in range of your fingers (like tab, q, e, f, etc) for when a game requires more controls. Plus on her laptop the arrow keys would just be horrible to try and use. Look at this!

Ewww.. Okay we're definitely going with the WASD keys, then.
Ewww.. Okay we’re definitely going with the WASD keys, then.

So the next ninety minutes for me were kind of painful. Like sitting alongside a new driver as they grind the clutch, cut out the engine, slam on the brakes, and over steer. But that’s just me. I wanted to see the story but it was really being held up by learning how to move. Claire did really well, though. She remembered to keep her fingers in place, and before long didn’t have to keep looking down for the crouch button. Using the mouse to look around was natural, and I think for a first go she did as well as could be expected. First person games aren’t ruled out, then, but it might be a while before she’s circle strafing and rocket jumping. All the same, I got exhausted watching. Claire finished the second half of the game without me and I played it myself the day after that so we could talk about it.

Because it’s such a short game, heavily based on plot, it’s hard not to discuss it without spoiling a large percentage, so I won’t. I think that’s probably a telling criticism of Gone Home. You nearly need to come at it knowing literally nothing to get the full experience (a bit like the movie Signs). If you know what does or doesn’t happen then the occasional red herring won’t add to the experience. Wondering what’s happened in the house is all you’ve got. Gameplay-wise, you wander around a fairly large family home, wondering why your family aren’t there, and examining notes, phone messages, and newspaper clippings to develop the story. Every few clues your sister will “speak” to you in your head and continue narrating the story. You don’t really need to work anything out for yourself, solve puzzles, or test theories. It’s all given to you in a logical sequence. You can choose which of the unlocked rooms to explore yourself and how deeply to explore them, so the experience isn’t ‘on the rails’, but it still feels like there’s nothing to DO! There’s very little you even have to remember or backtrack for.

Unprompted, Claire said things like “it’s not really a game” or “there’s nothing to do”. Without her being aware of the “not a game” debate that circles experiential games like this, it was interesting to hear her get there on her own. She felt like she had no input into the experience. There’s nothing to ‘beat’. There’s no element of competition. No win or lose state. It was just like watching a movie but where she had to move the plot on herself, and that that’s not really what she would call a game.

You can pick up and rotate objects to examine them, but rarely need to. A properly-opening cassette box was the best though!
You can pick up and rotate objects to examine them, but rarely need to. A properly-opening cassette box was the best though!

Legendary game designer Sid Meier said that “a game is a series of interesting choices”. That’s a great definition, but excludes interactive fiction as games. Claire and I think that’s fine. Saying something “isn’t a game” shouldn’t be offensive. Not every piece of recreational software has to be a game. Interactive fiction is probably a better way to describe ‘games’ like these. But I digress..whatever that means..

In terms of it being a worthwhile experience though, she said it was, and I think it is too. I do think games should be about more than just shooting and platforming. “Experiential games” can be a great way of telling a story. Gone home would have been a decent short story if done in print, and using technology to bring you into the story is definitely worth doing, but the word ‘game’ has definitions and expectations. Broadly speaking, there’s a player or players, an objective, and a set of rules. Gone Home, or Telltale’s games could meet this at a stretch, but they’re far better described as ‘interactive fiction’. Telltale themselves said in a panel at GDC when asked if what they made were games, that they didn’t really care! They are what they are.

Claire’s Score: 6/10. Worthwhile as an experience, but not worth the €20 asking price as it’s too short with not enough going on. Get it on sale for €10 or less.

Player Too Result: Claire and I reached a common consensus pretty easily with Gone Home. We felt that it was useful as a walking simulator to train Claire in movement in a consequence-free environment. We felt that it wasn’t really a game (how dare we use such profanity) under certain definitions. We felt that it was a worthwhile experience, and that more interactive fiction like this would be a good thing. But we felt that the story wasn’t particularly great. It was nice, different, and worthwhile, but if there were more similar games to compare alongside, Gone Home probably wouldn’t stand up all that well as, insofar as twists, red herrings, and mystery go, it could have done better. We think people only recommend it because it’s different and there isn’t yet anything better. The developers, Fullbright, are releasing another game called Takoma next year. We’re definitely interested in checking it out.

Claire is interested in a similar experience but with the ability to make decisions and affect the story. Sounds to me like it might be time to introduce an RPG on Player Too, though we still have to keep the controls simple. Any recommendations?

Bonus Mini-Review: Curtain

As I wrote this blog, I got Claire to try “Curtain”, by Dreamfeeel, winner of the Grand Prize for the Most Amazing Game at Amaze, Berlin 2015. It’s a 20-30 minute experiential game that focuses on abusive relationships. It has a very distinct art style that looks off-putting at first, but stick with it if you try the game. It uses that imagery, as well as sound and level design in great narrative ways that experiential games should take note of.

I asked Claire what she thought when she finished and she said “that was awesome! So simple, so clever” (note that after ten seconds of playing the game she said “I don’t like this, I want to quit” so do stick with it if you try it).

Click to see Curtain's page on Itch.io
Click to see Curtain’s page on Itch.io

You can name your own price  (including €0) to get the game on Itch. Click the GIF above. We downloaded for free just to see (I thought Claire may have hated it) but she liked it enough to go back and pay the asking price. You can’t say fairer than that!

Second Bonus Mini-Review: The Darkside Detective

At the end of the last Player Too I said we might try point-and-click game The Darkside Detective which, though not out yet, has a downloadable demo (scroll to bottom of that page) covering a single complete chapter.

It’s a comedy point-and-click adventure game with an X-files vibe and is divided into ‘cases’ like monster-of-the-week episodes, with a larger ‘seasonal’ plot running through them. In reference to our above “not a game” debate, I’m conscious that a point and click linear story is not that far removed from interactive fiction, but they’ve always been called games no-question. I suppose the fact that you have to think about how to advance the scene counts as input and challenge enough to use the word ‘game’. Anyway, I think I’m really making two blog posts out of one thing today so I’ll digress once more.

As I said in Episode 1, Claire has always liked puzzles, crosswords, etc and so I thought this genre might suit her. She did take things a little too literally, though. Because you’re exploring a mansion and the kitchen isn’t important, it’s not included in the game. A policeman character makes a fourth-wall-joke about it being odd that these rich folks don’t have a kitchen and so Claire started to focus her efforts on finding the hidden kitchen, so she could use a phone to ring the number on the box of matches she’d been given and verify the father’s alibi. I thought this was funny. We don’t think about certain things as gamers too much. In a point-and-click game we tend to just use the items we’ve been given on the scene to try and advance the plot, whereas Claire was approaching the given situation as a real detective and fully role playing.

She was disappointed to find that the experience was narrower than she thought, but when she had the right frame of mind she found the fun that this genre had to offer, particularly the comedic aspects. Everyone enjoys having a guess at the solution or the plot and being proven right, then rewarded with more story. It’s a great core game loop that made the genre huge in the 90s and is likely why the genre is seeing a comeback now.

Claire said she’d definitely buy the full game when it comes out so, again, I think we’re doing well at turning Claire into a gamer. 

Race The Sun

Four games in three weeks, across three genres. I’d say project Player Too is working pretty well so far. Race the Sun is an endless runner, meaning there is constant movement and your only input is to avoid obstacles. You can’t get off the rails that the game proceeds on. More can be build around that core but that’s an endless runner.

In Race The Sun you control a solar powered spaceship racing towards the setting sun. You collect time-warping powerups to make the sun climb a little in the sky, but if you stray into the long shadows cast by tall obstacles, you lose sped, and the sun sets faster, bringing you closer to death. When I played, I never saw death by sunset, I always smashed into a wall way before that.

As you can see from the images, the art style is as simple as it needs to be. It does everything you need, and the game runs at a high number of frames per second, essential to giving this game is smooth feel.

The reason I came to try this game with Claire is that it was on a Steam promotion. For one day the game was free to install, and if you installed it you could keep it. This coincided with the release of some DLC so they were quick to offer you to buy the expansion if you did get the game for free. I knew of the game before but thought it a bit simplistic for me. I’ll try anything once though (for free) so I downloaded it and found that I liked it. It’s a great little way to spend a few minutes.

This prompted me to create a Steam account for Claire and download it on her laptop. I thought that the fact that you need only steer left or right, and that there’s a fast reset time after death meant that Claire might get into it. I’d seen her enjoy Angry Birds because of its fast reset time, and even an early build of my game Sons of Sol when I had all hits cause instant death, but a quick tap of the R key reset the level. Difficulty didn’t matter if the consequences to death were minimal and you could get back into the action quickly.

Claire was soon riveted! She was jumping around in her chair (“full body steering”) as she’d swerve to avoid a large column, then wail in frustration, arms up in the air as she hit the one behind it. After one second she’d be back at the controls, eyes inches from the screen, tongue sticking out the corner of her mouth, concentrating and vowing to get further this time. “One more go” was never one more go.

She’d be intimidated and put off by the amount of controls you have to think about with a racing game, but with left or right being her only decisions, she had ‘mastered’ the controls in a minute and was all about beating the challenge. Race the Sun challenges you very well. When you’re about to pass your record distance you can see a big banner text with your old distance float up from the horizon in front of you, egging you on. There’s also several achievements that let you feel like you’re progressing even if you still can’t get past level 2 (things like “beat the first level without bumping anything”, etc). 

Riveted!
Riveted!

I played it just on the first day, but Claire has returned to it several times without me being around. She’s taken it upon herself that she wanted to play this game more. That’s encouraging. We’ve found that she can be drawn in by a game experience and look forward to playing it again. She’s said that she spent all day in work wanted to come back and try and beat that damn level.

This is extra interesting because the levels change daily. The feel of the zones and the types of obstacles encountered are consistent, but the specific layout changes daily, meaning you can never really learn the course  and improve that way. Every day it’s about your reactions versus the game, with no cheating.

Of particular interest to me was that you can get a powerup that allows you to jump once with the spacebar. This adds a button to think about while your mind is already constantly racing. It wasn’t long before Claire added this jump move to her repertoire and added finding the powerup to her mental list of objectives in a turn. Further on, there’s some sort of teleport on the shift button that she’s also mastered. She’s now much further into and better at the game than I am.

Claire’s Score: 7/10. Loads of fun!

Player Too Result: We’ve found another genre that Claire can get into.  Endless runner! We’ve proven that skill based games are totally within her grasp as long as they’re not too punishing, and indeed that they can be more fun for being difficult but with a shallow learning curve and little encouraging objectives.

Claire’s skills are increasing, but still need work if we’re to take on Portal. She’s finding that she enjoys more and more genres of games and types of games that she didn’t know existed, but that she enjoys them in small doses. Her willingness to try new suggestions is increasing because of the good games we’ve found so far, and she’s starting to think she’d like try try games with more input in to the narrative, or more games with a simple skill challenge.

I think we’re a long way from getting into an epic 20+ hour RPG, but that Telltale games are definitely where we should be heading next for a positive narrative experience.

As far as building her first person skills, the Talos Principle has a free demo and is discounted on Steam this weekend. I’m not sure if the puzzles are skill based at all, but we can learn from the demo and buy it if she think’s she could handle it. The Stanley Parable demo would also make a good low-consequence ‘walking simulator’/training game.

Next Time On Player Too: All of those possibilities aside, on the strength of her enjoyment of the detective game Her Story, we’re next trying out Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments, which is the newest and best rated of the Holmes games. Claire and I have read and both really enjoyed the Sherlock Holmes books, as well as the Benedict Cumberbatch TV show and Robert Downey Jr. movies, so this will hopefully not disappoint.

Have you any suggestions for what else we should try next? Or which is the best Telltale game to go for (she think zombies are stupid, so not Walking Dead)? Have you had a similar experience with a friend or loved one and want to suggest any games you tried together? Please comment!

Until next time..

Click for Episode 1
Click for Episode 3

Interview with Guild of Dungeoneering’s Colm Larkin

Click to see the game's Steam page

For this week’s blog, I’m happy to be conducting my very first interview! Hopefully it will be the first of many. Colm Larkin of Gambrinous, the team behind the recently released Guild of Dungeoneering, was kind enough to give up some of his precious time to answer some of my questions.

For those of you who don’t know, Guild of Dungeoneering is an extremely charming card-based dungeon crawling game with a twist! You don’t control your hero, but you lay out the dungeon before him or her, placing rooms and monsters and trying to steer your Dungeoneer towards victory. Not for their own sakes, mind you, but for the glory of the Guild, which you ultimately control. The Dungeoneers’ lives are of only a minor importance to you, though a (rapidly growing, in my case) graveyard does serve as a shrine to their efforts. 

The game has undoubtedly got a sense of humour, the gameplay stands apart from a lot of what’s out there, and if you add to that the musical odes to your heroes’ victories and inevitable deaths then you’ve got the recipe for a game that is capturing hearts and imaginations all across the digital world. Many notable YouTubers and Twitch streamers, including Total Biscuit, Felicia Day and Dodger, have even featured the game on their shows. 

I asked Colm about the game’s development process, and about what’s next for our dear dungeon diving friends.

KM:
When people think of the development cycle for an indie game, they might reasonably guess that Kickstarter and an Early Access program were part the process. Guild of Dungeoneering didn’t take this approach and remained unavailable to the general public until release. Would you like to comment on that decision and any advantages or disadvantages to the approach that you discovered during development?

Larkin:
I’d have almost certainly tried Kickstarter if it had been available in Ireland at the right time. Early in GoD’s development you could only run a Kickstarter if you were based in the US or the UK and while people did work around that by setting up shell companies and the like that’s a LOT of hassle. In October 2014 KS was made available in Ireland but at that stage I was quite far along and was already talking to publishers. In the end I went with a publisher and am very happy I did. I will probably look into Kickstarter for future projects though!

Early Access comes with a lot of player negativity, I think, and also really dilutes your launch hype by spreading it out across several months. It can definitely work for the right kind of game, but I didn’t think it was right for GoD.

KM:
The game will have add-on Adventure Packs with the first one being Pirate’s Cove. Aside from a pirate themed makeover for our Dungeoneers, dungeons and enemies, can we expect to see other new features like new dialogue or shanties?

Larkin:
We hope to invent a few new mechanics in the expansion (which we’re designing right now), but nothing really game changing. It’s really ‘a bit more of everything’ expansion for folks who enjoyed the game and want more. There’ll definitely be piratey dialogue (how could we not!?) and we’re looking into some piratey music too!

KM:
Are the adventure packs standalone or do they link back to your existing Guild in some way?

Larkin:
They aren’t standalone – they expand the basic game instead. So in the campaign there will be a new zone (for Pirate’s Cove we’re looking at it being an extension to the Jungle zone) with new quests and classes to unlock there. But for the new loot we’re looking at including it throughout the game; so simply by having this expansion you have more toys to play with at all stages of the game. To me this type of expansion expands the game horizontally (adding variety to the base game), and we’ll also be looking into bigger expansions that expand the game vertically (adding more game).

KM:
How many Adventure Packs might we expect to see in the future, how much will they cost, and what themes have you in mind?

Larkin:
Creating this first one will give us a good idea of how difficult they are to make and if people think they are worth buying. We’re pricing Adventure Packs at $4.99 with the base game costing $14.99. If people like Pirate’s Cove I could see us doing 2-3 more of this size over the next year or so before focusing on a bigger expansion. Thanks to our extremely silly world themes will NOT be a problem, I feel. I think we could make almost any theme fit in the game!

KM:
There’s been a number of articles in mainstream Irish (and international) media recently about how the Irish games industry is not yet the contender it could be worldwide, but how we’re primed to explode and really just need one big breakout hit to put us on the map. Do you agree with this appraisal of the industry? Modesty aside, could Guild of Dungeoneering be that hit? Or will it take more than one big release, do you think?

Larkin:
I really agree with that sentiment. We have a superb game dev community in Ireland, are starting to set up some fantastic events here, and we are creating very interesting games. A breakout hit doesn’t change any of that, but perhaps it helps to inspire people to go a little further with their ideas & prototypes, and perhaps it helps with stuff like government funding for creative game projects. Guild of Dungeoneering could be that hit, or it could be one of a few moderately successful games that result in a similar effect. I think we’ll see over the next year or so.

KM:
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think The Witcher III recently became the first game to sell more copies of itself on GOG.com than on Steam. Where do people seem to be going for their Guild of Dungeoneering copies?

Larkin:
Lets not forget that the company behind the Witcher series is the same company that created GOG, so it makes sense that their fans supported them on their own platform. It’s very unusual for a PC game to see a large proportion of its sales outside Steam. We released on Steam, GOG, Humble and a number of other smaller storefronts at once and Steam is our number one spot by a massive proportion. Still, it’s good to support more than one platform. What would we do if EA or Microsoft bought Valve?

KM:
In the game, as we expand our Guild we gain access to new characters with different strengths and weaknesses, but also ones on more expensive tiers. Once you unlock a Tier 2 character are you basically done with all of your Tier 1 Dungeoneers?

Larkin:
Unfortunately yes, but I’m not that happy about it. The idea with classes is that at each tier they offer different strengths and weaknesses. You might be having a hard time in a particular quest with one class, but find it possible with a different one. And the classes are very unique and interesting, I think. We’re going to make it so your lower-tier classes are still somewhat viable in harder levels by buffing their health as you reach the harder zones. This way you can still use them, but the upgraded classes are still better.

KM:
Who is your favourite class of Dungeoneer, and why?

Larkin:
I like a lot of them. The Barbarian is interesting because he changes how you play. Instead of avoiding higher level monsters he rushes straight at them (but has a big bonus when fighting harder monsters). Using this ability means playing very differently than with other classes, and that’s fun. At the starting tier I like how the Apprentice’s very simple bonus to the Fire skill means you can stack equipment with Fire bonuses to get to the super-strong Fire III and Fire IV cards quicker than usual.

KM:
There are so many games nowadays, did you ever find yourself coming up with an original mechanic all by yourself, and later somebody says “ah, just like [x-game]” that you’ve never actually heard of?

Larkin:
Of course! I don’t think there are that many original mechanics, though you can still create something that is original as a whole. People even do that when they are wrong. Recently I read a review that claimed we were simply piling onto the popularity of, and poorly copying Darkest Dungeon’s ideas. Never mind the fact that GoD had public gameplay before DD was even announced, that they haven’t fully released their game yet, or that there was only a few months between their hitting Early Access and our release. As a creator you have to learn to shrug off this kind of thing or you won’t be able to continue.

KM:
Did any games in particular influence Guild of Dungeoneering or cause you to change design decisions during development?

Larkin:
Well there’s this game called Darkest Dungeon that.. haha just kidding! I think I was most influenced by board games. The very first prototype was trying to play with the idea seen in DungeonQuest where you put down a random tile in front of your hero and then deal with how it changed the map (though I hadn’t played the game in about 25 years!). I had also been playing Carcasonne more recently which is all about building a map from random square tiles. I play a lot of games and try and learn from them, so I hope they all help influence what I make.

KM:
If you had to pick one thing, what is your favourite aspect or feature of Guild of Dungeoneering?

Larkin:
I think the classes are really superb, they feel so different to play and have such scope to build on them in different ways. For example for almost every class I’ve heard people say it’s both unplayably bad and brokenly overpowered. As a designer I think this is the holy grail, when you cause such differing opinions about balance. Particularly in this kind of game with layered systems and mechanics.

KM:
Do you have a hefty list of new games you’ve wanted to play but didn’t have the time for during development? What’s at the top of that list for once you catch your breath?

Larkin:
Probably Pillars of Eternity and The Witcher III. Both clearly games that will take a lot of time to play through!

KM:
Many people, myself included, have thought that this would make a great mobile game or that a controller might be preferable to the mouse. Are there any plans to tackle new platforms or input devices? Rift support, maybe? (jk)

Larkin:
Hey I announced Oculus support back on April 1st 😉

We’re definitely going to start on touch platforms next (tablets + mobiles) as it will be such a natural fit there. We’re also looking into consoles but we’re not sure yet how or when.

KM:
So what’s next for Gambrinous?

Larkin: 
I think we’ll be doing more content and platforms for GoD for at least the next year. That should also give us enough time to work out what’s actually next! I’d love to do a series of internal game jams where we work up a few prototypes before choosing which one to make into a ‘real’ game. Then maybe take that prototype to Kickstarter?

KM:
Is there anything you’d like to add?

Larkin:
Just my usual advice for anyone wanting to get into making games. Start with some game jams! Get used to finishing small prototypes, then try something bigger.

I’d like to thank Colm very much once again for some great insights into the game and for some great advice for any aspiring developers. I also strongly encourage you to pick up Guild of Dungeoneering if you haven’t already!

It’s available now on Steam, GOG, and Humble.

Follow Colm on Twitter @gambrinous or the game directly @dungeoneering.
The Guild of Dungeoneering website is here.
Publisher ‘Versus Evil’ are here.
An extensive development log of the game was kept here if you’re interested.
The Gambrinous website is here.

Until next time, folks..

Colm engaging in a bit of cosplay at the Dungeoneering launch party in Dublin, July 2015, twig and cooking pot at the ready!
Colm engaging in a bit of cosplay at the Dungeoneering launch party in Dublin, July 2015, twig and cooking pot at the ready!

Never Played DOOM Multiplayer against John Romero!

The enticing event poster
The enticing event poster

So an event matching the characteristics (exactly) described in the above poster occurred in Galway. I was at it. It was very entertaining so let’s talk about that.

Three weeks ago I’d never played the game Doom, and two weeks ago I wrote this blog post on the topic. It was after that that this charity deathmatch was announced in Galway, so it’s entirely a coincidence that I have a very suitable follow up to that blog so soon, but it’s a happy coincidence.

I live in Co.Wicklow, just south of Dublin on Ireland’s East Coat. Galway is Ireland’s cultural Mecca and is to be found on the West coast so going to the event would mean driving clear across the country. In Ireland that amounts to roughly a two hour drive, though. When I learned that I would be able to show my game Sons of Sol in the indie demo room next door to the tournament, I was sold. Dan (from the team making Onikira, who lives close to me) and I packed up the car and drove over on Saturday morning to Pulse College in Galway, who were kindly hosting the event and providing equipment. On the way we discussed how boned we were, in my case because I’d never played multiplayer in Doom, and in Dan’s because he hadn’t played in years. 

Indie gamers show their wares, with Onikira on the big screen, and Goblin's Grotto, Darkside Detective and Trench visible in the background.
Indie gamers show their wares, with Onikira on the big screen, and Goblin’s Grotto, Darkside Detective and Trench visible in the background.

We arrived to Pulse early to set up our own games and spent the hours before the tournament playing the games from the other developers, as organised by the Galway Game Dev group. There were also Street Fighter and Hearthstone tournaments on, as organised by Galway Gaming Tribes, but the big draw was definitely the Doom tournament, which offered a chance to take on John “The Surgeon” Romero, the game’s creator, whose deathmatch skills are legendary.

John and Brenda Romero arrived to the college in the early afternoon and while the machines were being set up, had an interview with Hit Start Now. At time of writing the interview isn’t up yet, but it will be available at that link. They also have one with the Romeros from 2014 while you’re waiting.

The excitement really started to rise as the seeds were drawn up for the tournament. It would be a 1 vs 1 deathmatch, first to 20 kills, played on Doom 2 maps, with the games running through Zandornum. To my horror, this happened..

First game of the tournament: me vs John Romero. I tweeted this photo with the caption
First game of the tournament: me vs John Romero. I tweeted this photo with the caption “I’m DOOMed”. 😛

So I’d be knocked out in the first game. Ah well. At least I’d get to play vs John. I realised I was quite lucky, really, since in a knock out tournament, not everybody would. I’d also be playing him in his first game of the day, so maybe I’d even get a couple of kills while he warmed up, I thought. That said, this game would also be the first time I had ever (EVER) played a multiplayer Doom game, and I don’t know where the secrets and weapons are on any levels, so I didn’t have much chance even of that. I haven’t even played an arena-style shooter since Unreal Tournament 1 as far as I can remember. Not even so much as Call of Duty’s multiplayer. Battlefield or Planetside 2 were more my thing for multiplayer, and if you’re a shooter fan, you’ll know that’s of no help. The only thing I had going for me was that I had at least played Doom 1 and 2 to completion in the two weeks prior, and so had a slight idea of the level layouts, even if I couldn’t find the weapons I wanted on them.

I thought some intimidation might boost my chances. Some smack talk, and false-confidence. I tweeted this after the picture of those seeds (not believing my own caption for a second).

“He looks nervous” 😛
The first map,
The first map, “Entryway” is very small, flat, easy to learn quickly, and with very few secrets or ambush points. This was to my advantage.. a bit.

We sat at our computers, John’s one hooked up to a projector so that the gathered spectators could watch the pro in action. The servers were set up, loading the first level of Doom 2, “Entryway”. While observing the setup, John made a comment “Oh, no monsters”. Seeing an opportunity to intimidate my opponent I said “Just wait John. One’s coming”. Ask me if it worked… It didn’t. But it got a couple of laughs.

We both spawned into the level and just ran around to make sure all the settings were working and that we were comfortable with how our controls were set up. The first time I ever saw John Romero in-game, so, we simply ran past each other in the corridor, almost waving genially. While he was just testing, I was frantically searching every corner, trying to mentally mark out where I’d find the best weapons and armour. In such a small level, I actually learned this fairly quickly and so wouldn’t be at as big a disadvantage when we would start the map proper. John fired the first shot in the practice run, and so I fired back. The crowd gathered, most of them unable to see my screen but watching the action through John’s eyes on the projector screen. We traded a bit of damage, and even a kill or two, before all was ready to go and it was announced that the tournament would start when we reset the level. 

The whistle was blown (edit: there was no whistle) and we both spawned into the level. I spawned right next to the BFG 9000, the best gun in the game, and smiled. Leaving the first room and heading down the corridor towards the armour I spotted John heading into the armour room too and opened fire. I believe I missed. I won’t exaggerate and pretend to remember every detail of the match, but I believe that in this first encounter, John ran and allowed me to waste my shots, then returned with a rocket launcher. We were stuck in the tight corridors where any fired rocket would, if it didn’t hit you directly, be sure to hit a wall and deal you a heavy amount of damage regardless. My tactic was, if I only had the pistol, I’d run, and if I’d anything better I’d move in close so John would risk hurting himself if he fired the rocket at me, while I chipped away with his health with a pulse rifle or shotgun.

“Romero wins”. We got used to seeing that.

I believe John got the first kill, but to my great surprise, I managed to claw back a kill or two for every few he’d get on me and the crowd would cheer (in my head they would anyway). This semblance of parity was largely thanks to the level, I think. In a corridor there’s nowhere to run from a pulse rifle, rocket, or BFG, which all deal the heaviest damage but are difficult to use well at range or in the open. This basically meant that I could deal as much damage as John could, and do it as accurately. Both of us knew where each weapon was, and if you see the other player on this map, you know he can’t get behind you as it’s so linear. I was unlucky a few times as I would die and spawn back in the very same room with only my pistol and John’s pulse rifle for company. I believe I got a bit predictable as well as I went for the pulse rifle a lot, and John’s skill allowed him to shoot a rocket into my path to deflect my jump and so I’d miss the rifle and land with an inferior weapon again. The real difference was in experience, though. Many times I’d chase John around a corner just to run into a perfectly timed rocket coming back at me. These cunning traps and near-omniscient predictions are what separate champions from the lay men. I endeavoured to be less predictable. To let him escape when he ran, or to just close the distance and keep firing when he might have expected me to run. It wasn’t enough, but I was more than happy with my performance. Final score on my first even multiplayer game of Doom: John Romero 20 – 8 Kevin. Maybe my intimidation tactics actually had an effect.

I now believed myself to have been knocked out, but we were actually playing Double Elimination Tournament as it turned out. This meant that I went into a loser’s group and would still get to play until I lost again. In the mean time, others paired off and played their first rounds. Dan (who I came with, remember?) won his first and continued in the winner’s group. This meant we wouldn’t play each other. After the first round, some people had disappeared, including my opponent for round 2. Losing their first match I think they’d thought (like me) that they were out and went home. In fairness to the organisers, they did explain the rules clearly at the start, I just didn’t quite follow because I’m a big thicko, apparently. I advanced by default. Dan won his 2nd and 3rd matches fair and square, on the other hand.

The time between my first match and my second (in the third round) was actually about three hours. I spent a lot of this time watching the projector and seeing how John played. No matter how complex for labyrinthine the level (each round had a different level) John knew exactly where to go to find the super-armour, health packs, BFG or night vision goggles. I watched. I memorised the locations as best I could. After all, I’d be playing on one of these maps next, with no idea whether my opponent would be a first timer, or a hardcore Doom guy.

The tournament proceeded
The tournament proceeded

When setting up for my second match, neither I nor my opponent could get our sound working, so we agreed to just fight deaf, in a very dark and confusing level. This game lasted a long long time since we couldn’t follow the sounds of opening and closing doors that hint at your enemy’s position. This level (the Waste Tunnels) featured a pitch-black sewer area where the rocket launcher could be found. I had memorised the route John Romero took to find the IR goggles to see in the dark, and so every time I engaged my opponent in the unlit parts of the map, I had a real advantage. Even elsewhere, I still usually had a rocket launcher and he didn’t. I didn’t know that he didn’t have the IR goggles until after the match. Because we played for so long, I also got used to where to go to find the BFG and its replacement ammo; before my opponent did it, seemed. These two things gave me the clear advantage and I won the match by a wide margin. It was hilarious though when we’d engage in long gun duels in total silence. It reminded me of interpretive dance.

If I have this right, Dan then won his 4th round and advanced to the semi-final. John Romero was, of course, winning every match, though a few guys clearly knew the maps very well and fared a lot better against him than I would have. My fourth round opponent had also left early it seemed, and so I advanced by default to the semi-final with only one actual win under my belt.

John and Dan then met in the semi-final. No offence at all to Dan, but it was a slaughter. 20-0. The map was a nightmare. “‘O’ of Destruction”. It featured a huge acid pit in the middle, and many many side rooms, dark sections, hidden areas, a lot of teleporters, a lot of long sight lines, and a LOT of verticality. This means your opponent can be above or below you, but Doom is odd in that everything is technically on the same level as far as the engine is concerned. If you shoot in front of you and your target is in front of you (no matter how high or low they are) you’ll hit them if there’s no wall in the way. Add to this the fact that the BFG can damage you through walls. Add to this the fact that John Romero knows where the BFG is and Dan didn’t (I think, anyway). Dan got a hold of the pulse rifle quite often, but its shots move slowly and in the open, John had plenty of room to run away, teleport around to flank Dan, then shoot a BFG shot at the most unlikely-looking of targets, then hit Dan twenty metres above and behind a wall. That’s hard to watch. That’s knowing a game inside out. That’s pro level gaming. This kind of level shows that you can’t play Doom like a modern shooter and expect to beat a pro, or even stand a chance. You have to know all the tricks. I was lucky in that the first level I played John in didn’t really have any of those tricks. “O’ of Destruction” has them all.

At around the same time, my semi-final was played against another guy on that same map. Having watched people play earlier, I knew where to find the BFG and pulse rifle, and while I played I also learned where to find the normal and super-heavy armours. Again, I was lucky in that my opponent didn’t. He knew where to find the pulse rifle and kept going there. This allowed me to ambush him here many times. If he’d hurt me, I knew where to find the nearby armour and he didn’t. If there’s one secret to success at Doom, it’s knowing the levels. I’ve always been competitive, and as I started the day at, in my estimation, a knowledge disadvantage, I was sure to watch the games on the projector as much as possible and study up. This paid off! Stay in school, kids! Each of us actually made the mistake of pressing the ‘use’ key on the big skull in the level. In single player this advances you to the next level. In multiplayer it kills you and gives you -1 point. This match ended 20 to -1. I actually did feel bad as without the other guy knowing what I then knew about the level, I felt unsportsmanlike, but the whole room was waiting for the match to finish to see who’d play in the final. The match lasted probably twenty five minutes and that’s with me trying my hardest so I powered through mercilessly, though still bantering and trying to explain where the BFG could be found.

Romero's screen broadcasting for all to see. This photo might have been him killing me, actually.
Romero’s screen broadcasting for all to see. This photo might have been him killing me, actually.

So, I was through to the final. It had been a long day. I’d only played three matches but I’d been standing for hours and was wrecked. John had played all his games plus a number of friendlies. I joked that maybe he was tired and that I had a chance. Since he’d already beaten me on the easiest level, and just beaten Dan 20-0 (Dan had been killing it against normal folk, by the way) everyone knew I didn’t. I decided I’d be happy with a few kills though.

I’ve explained how having a flat level with nowhere to hide levels the playing field and gives the newcomer a better chance against the pro who knows every map. John had selected “Dead Simple” for the final level, which is, once again, a flat and simple level. The choice was possibly because it was getting late and nobody wanted to watch another 30 minute game of hide and seek. Everyone had gathered to watch some fast action in the final. It’s also just a very fair and symmetrical map, though, and so this also makes it a good choice for a final match.

We shook hands, we took our seats, and the game began.

The map for the final.
The map for the final. “Dead Simple”

About three seconds in, I caught a BFG to the face and died. I then respawned next to the BFG and attempted to return the favour. John declined my generosity however but offered in return a barrage of rockets. The score quickly climbed against me. The map features a central courtyard and an outer wall section. If you’re in the back corner of the map (like where the BFG is, at the top left corner) you can see your opponent coming from a distance. This makes the pulse rifle, rockets, or BFG easier to avoid here, and favours your use of bullet weapons like the shotgun or minigun. I shied away from the central area both because you’re easier to spot, and because I knew that it wasn’t where to find the BFG. I never did find armour on the map though, and so in every engagement I dropped quickly.

When it came to banter, we were both on top form, though. I remember John said “bye bye” and fired a hail of rockets. I dodged them and closed in with a shotgun saying “don’t say goodbye if you don’t mean it”. I was going to lose, but I was going to give the best fight I could first, smack talk and all. I said that if I could get enough sick burns I might claim the moral victory. I didn’t dare cast my eyes up to the projector that the crowd were watching but several times I heard the crowd yelling for me to “chase him down”, and realised that I’d almost killed John but he was running for more health and/or armour. I’d follow but he’d have disappeared. Fearing an ambush I’d retreat back the way I came. If John fired a BFG I’d run out around the walls. He’d fire ahead of me, hoping to damage me through the wall, but unseen I’d have doubled back and fired a shotgun blast at him. So went the match, but John was on top form, and I was out of my depth. I was immensely satisfied with a final score of 20 to 2. I got him with the super shotgun and a BFG I believe, and the crowd did cheer to see Romero die, but in each case I was quickly hunted down and repaid with interest.

After a hearty handshake and a couple of photos (below) I was given some prizes. This was unexpected as I had lost, but apparently second place was considered the “non-John-Romero winner”. I’d like to thank Sub-City Comics and Logitech  very much for the prizes, in this case.

All proceeds from the event went to Cancer Care West. As I’ve been writing I was checking facts with (and getting some photos from) Paul Conway of Doomcube, who along with Chris Colston organised the event. Joe Neary from Galway Gaming Tribes was also instrumental along with volunteers Mike Gilmartin, Shane Marks, Niall O’Reilly and Eoin Butler Thornton. Many thanks to all of them for putting on a great event, and for allowing myself and other indie developers to show our own games off.

Lastly, many thanks to John Romero for his time at the event and for an education in what real Deathmatch is, was, and should always continue to be. Having now seen both the single and multiplayer sides of Doom, I can see why it became the instant phenomenon that it did back in 1993 and why that popularity has persisted to this day with a myriad pale imitations of Doom, the original and best!

Good sport was had, though this picture sums up the nature of it.
Good sport was had, though this picture sums up the nature of it.

Player Too: Episode 1 – Her Story

Click for the Her Story website.
Click for the Her Story website.

Welcome to the first instalment of Player Too, a new, semi-regular blog series about trying to make my girlfriend, Claire, a gamer too. If you’re a gamer and have a significant other, a brother, sister or best friend who isn’t, then this blog series may be for you.

Since this is the first episode, I just want to set the background before talking about Her Story (which I’ll keep spoiler free). I’m a big gamer, obviously. Claire, by her own declaration, isn’t. We share interests in travel, food, movies, TV shows, burlesque, etc but we never game together. I would like to share the magic of games with her and play some co-op or just spectator-friendly games. I don’t think we’ll ever be playing Command & Conquer or Half Life over a network, but there are all sorts of games out there designed to appeal to all sorts of people. I’m sure that if I can pick a few suitable titles, I might kick start her gaming engine. Claire is willing to try games I recommend in the interests of having new experiences, but doesn’t think she’ll ever call herself a gamer.

I’d like to define “gamer” for the purposes of this blog before continuing. Claire’s view and mine would be that the term ‘gamer’ as comparable to ‘hiker’, ‘jogger’, ‘cyclist’, or ‘reader’. If you have read a book, you’re not a reader. If you have climbed a mountain, you’re not a hiker. If you like Candy Crush and Sonic, you’re not a gamer. But if you regularly play games, purchase them, anticipate new releases, and consider them a hobby, then you’re a gamer.

My goal is to ultimately have Claire call herself a gamer. This blog will document our journey through different hand-picked titles, give a brief summary and review, and answer whether Claire would like to play more similar games or not. She’s up for the journey, and free to call it quits whenever she wants, so I’d better pick some decent titles. I’d appreciate any recommendations you fine readers may have.

“Was it 9pm or 10pm punk?! I swear I will gouge your eyes out with this pen!!” We found Cole a bit too intense..

I’ve tried to bring Claire into my gaming experiences before but without much success. A few years ago we tried playing LA Noire. Claire has quite acute detective skills, and I thought a game where you interviewed suspects and gauged their reactions might appeal to her. It sort of did but neither of us actually liked the game once we got into it. She’d get bored while I drove around the city and got into gun fights. Then I’d get bored “exploring” a crime scene by simply walking around waiting to press A when it told me to. Both of us were also a bit dissatisfied with the interrogation mechanic. If we would ‘doubt’ a statement, our character might explode and yell at the suspect, accusing them flat-out of murder.  Great poker face, dude. It wasn’t what we wanted and we stopped playing.

Claire’s willing to play my game in development, Sons of Sol: Crow’s Nest, but it’s a skill based game and she’s not a practised gamer. It’s not for her, really. And that’s fine. I’ve also tried Nidhogg and BroForce with her. They’re fun for a bit but she’s not interested enough to get used to the controls. We have a few laughs and that’s it. They don’t stick with her.

I’m not starting from scratch here though. As a kid, Claire was big into Revenge of the Mutant Camels, Puzzle Bobble, and later Mario Kart 64 and Mario 64. And others, just not much this millennium . Claire does play Candy Crush. She explains that it’s just because she’s into puzzles. Sudoku and crosswords are more to her tastes. She also liked Angry Birds as it’s a puzzle game at its core. 

She likes mysteries too, though, and she’s really sharp at connecting dots and making inferences in a TV show, book or movie. Better than me anyway. So when I saw a new mystery/detective game called Her Story, I thought this might finally be a game totally for Claire. I was interested as a game designer in the new type of gameplay. A bonus was that the controls are basically the same as using Windows so I could really involve Claire by letting her play instead of me “steering” like in LA Noire. If she’s not hands-on, I figure, she won’t ever feel like a gamer.

Her Story a new game by Sam Barlow, known for his work on Aisle and two Silent Hill Games. It’s about the player searching through archived police interview footage based on typing key words into a database search that can only display five results. You don’t know why you’re doing this but you start to piece together a story as you go along. If you’re worried about spoilers, I won’t say anything that the trailer doesn’t reveal already (which is nothing).

The game is remarkable in that it’s designed by one man, all of its content (except the search interface) is delivered through FMV (full motion video, which we haven’t seen much of since the 90s), and that there’s only a single actress for all of the scenes. Nobody else! Further, since the search results only display the first five results for a given search term (like “murder”), the designer had to be very careful with script writing so as not to overuse a word if he wanted it to be a key clue.

Claire sat down to play the game and I grabbed a pen and paper to take notes. We started by searching the term “murder” as in the trailer and watched the four results. These gave us clues as to other characters and places and we’d search them down too. The woman might say a name and we’d search for that name, finding the first five (as in, earliest chronological five) instances of the interviewee saying that name. The results might tell us that there’s 8 instances, however, and we’d have to be clever to try and find the remaining three, or even to prove to ourselves that the other three were new ones and not ones that we’d seen before while searching another term. It’s a narrative-driven game, but the real gameplay lies in using the search engine.

With each clue we’d hypothesize on what’s going on, then search new terms based on our theory, or hunch. It was quite enjoyable. Claire really got into it. We stayed up a little later than we should have for three nights together to get through the game, and if we’d talk on the phone during the day we’d each have a new theory we wanted to try out when we got back to it.

The screen glare is an option you can turn off. The game does a good job of simulating a computer interface from the 90s, but the System Clock says it's 2015. I guess the South East Constabulary are still waiting on that budget increase..
The screen glare is an option you can turn off. The game does a good job of simulating a computer interface from the 90s, but the System Clock says it’s 2015. I guess the South East Constabulary are still waiting on that budget increase..

As it stands, we’ve found the majority of the videos, and pieced together the story to our satisfaction. You don’t have to get 100% completion to trigger the ending, and if you accept the end trigger you can still log back into the police database after the credits roll to search down the remaining videos. We’ve come back to it a few times with a new idea to find a few more videos, but no fruit yet.

Claire’s Score: 7/10. Very enjoyable but a little simplistic.

Player Too Result: Claire liked the game a lot. She’d be telling me to shut up so she could search down a term, and couldn’t wait to get home to play more. If that’s not symptomatic of a gamer, I don’t know what is.

So this was a good first attempt. The problem is that the game is fairly unique and there aren’t many similar experiences. We’d both definitely play more if Sam Barlow made a similar game, and there’s sure to be a few copycats coming out in the next few years as the game is doing quite well for itself, but there’s nothing similar that I know of currently. Its €6 price tag definitely helps get it into the hand of gamers. It’s a short game but I do think it’s worth more than that, and it’s not often I’d say that about a game at full price.

Next Time on Player Too: I’m not sure what to have Claire play next. I’m definitely up for suggestions. A Telltale Games series might be a good choice. Claire’s into Game of Thrones, though I’m not myself. I’ve already played the Walking Dead and would rather a different Telltale game instead of replaying that.
Maybe a point and click adventure game. I’m looking forward to Darkside Detective, an Irish game coming out later this year. It’s a humorous point and click detective game which arranges itself into separate ‘cases’, like an X-files monster of the week. This might be ideal but so far there’s only one short demo level. I do recommend it. 

Any suggestions for us to play? Please leave a comment. Thanks for reading. Until next time..

Click for Episode 2

Never played DOOM

Hang on! This guy's never played DOOM?? What the hell's wrong with him?!.. oh I'm so sorry, is he in a coma?
Hang on! This guy’s never played DOOM?? What the hell’s wrong with him?!.. oh I’m so sorry, is he in a coma?

So this is kind of a 40 year old virgin situation. It’s 2015, I’m a 28 year old gamer and now game designer, first person shooters are probably my favourite game genre, and I’ve never played DOOM. It’s been out for 22 years now and is a piece of gaming, nay, world history. I’m also even a history fan so no excuses there! Even with the 40 year old virgin you can’t say Steve Carrel’s character had 40 years to have sex, because you’d have to reach adolescence to even be capable of it, whereas I was playing games since I was 7. So let’s say that at twenty-odd years of missing out, your life is starting to turn into comedy movie material. I had to rectify this situation, fast!

I should say that I’ve seen it played a little at friends houses as a kid (but if you haven’t gotten your hands on it, you haven’t played it, in the same way as watching porn won’t pop your cherry for you). I’ve also played Star Wars Dark Forces which was a blatant DOOM copy cat, but I haven’t played the original.

I’ve also never played the Quake series, Hexen or Daikatana. You might think I had something against id Software, John Romero, or any affiliates, but that’s not true as I did always love Wolfenstein (1992) and Commander Keen. In fact I think Keen IV was the very first video game I ever played. Anyway, I’ve decided to rectify this situation and took to Steam and GOG two weeks ago to see which games I could pick up and work my way through (mental note: add Unreal 1 to that list).

My mom would never have bought me this game anyway.
My mom would never have bought me this game anyway.

I bought “Doom Classic Complete” (because I’m a grown up and can do what I want, mom! I might just stay up all night playing it too!) and loaded up the Ultimate Doom version of the first game. I remember thinking the game was scary when I was younger, and I know that older games didn’t hold your hand at all when it came to difficulty, so even though I’d have no hesitation playing Call of Duty on the hardest setting, I loaded up the “I’m too young to die” difficulty (easiest) and hopped in. I do have to say that I never died unless crushed in a trap though, so I probably should have started higher, but it still got me for plenty of jump-scares, and I beat Alien Isolation on Hard mode. There might be something to this DOOM..

I knew how different the game was to modern, polished shooters, but marvelled immediately at how much they owed to this, the second ever FPS game (at least the second where it’s humans shooting guns, not tanks or wizards – I’m counting Wolfenstein 3D as the first). The weapon bobs as you move and recoils as you shoot. The sounds give the guns a real punchy weight. Barrels explode if shot (even chain reactions are possible and actively designed into the levels). The death animations, while already established in Wolf, are visceral, gorey and lively, with soldiers leaping and spinning, and generally surpass their predecessor. These are things that I’ve seen missing even from a small handful of games made nowadays (okay never the AAA titles but still). With twenty years to learn from the masters, none of these things should  be ignored with modern shooters, yet we can still find poor animations, static guns with lame shooting sounds, and otherwise very little attention to detail. DOOM was a benchmark game at the time, sure, but to place it alongside some shooters made today by teams larger than that of id software in 1993 DOOM could still beat them hands down. Why?

Well, all of those things I mentioned above make the game FUN to play, no matter what else you’ve played in your life. That, and the shotgun! Oh my God the shotgun is PERFECT!! I’ve never played with it before. It was like seeing the Light of God (albeit a violent, vengeful God… like the Old Testament one). I thought I’d seen a few good shotguns in games but nothing like this. I had as much fun playing with this shotgun as I did shooting clay pigeons with a real one! The game holds out on you for a few minutes, making you make do with the pistol to get you used to taking a few shots to put down an enemy, and then BAM! It grants superpowers worthy of Superman.. if Superman had a shotgun! It’s not even the best weapon in the game, but it’s one of the ones you’ll use the most.

It’s got a real weight to it, again through its sound, but also through its cocking animation, which is all it needs to be, and must have blown minds in 1993. The rate of fire is just fast enough not to be frustrating, but slow enough that you are really rewarded for lining your shot up perfectly before pulling the trigger, then seeing the weapon’s wide spread and heavy damage one-shot the game’s lower-difficulty enemies and send them spinning! It’s a perfectly tuned weapon for a game as fast paced as DOOM. You still have to check those corners and be wary of ambushes so as not to die, as the shotgun can only help you in the direction you’re facing, but it is just a thing of beauty. It made the game what it is, no doubt.

While the shiny effect is permanently on that shotgun, not due to dynamic lighting, you have to admit that it's a beautiful looking gun for a pixel-art game from 1993.
While the shiny effect is permanently on that shotgun, not due to dynamic lighting, you have to admit that it’s a beautiful looking gun for a pixel-art game from 1993.

In terms of level design, my praise has to slow down just a fraction. The levels get very clever, don’t get me wrong, and they develop a language of their own with the player as to what they might be able to expect from a given area, but let’s just say games have come a long way in this area. DOOM actually has a sliver of a story to it. Supposedly I’m on a moon base, then in hell later on, but you can barely tell the difference, and the moon base does not feel like a place where anybody could actually set up a research or military installation. There’s some computer screens around, sure, but this place is a maze, has no railings over its mandatory acid pits, is full of secret rooms, and it has no windows! Must be a moon with a Southern Californian climate, then. I spent most of the game following my personal rule for if I ever get lost in a maze. Follow the left well all around, with no breaks, and you’ll get everywhere within the maze eventually, including to the exit. It works, though teleporters, key coded doors and ledge-drops kind of mess with my rule a bit. This meant that I never finished a single level in any less than x3 the recommended ‘par time’ for the level, often more, and I’d still usually have found 0% of the secret rooms. This is an old skool game based on replayability and high-scores, for sure!

The movement speed of the game is immense also. I played with the WASD keys and the mouse. It was strange not to be able to look up, but instead moving the mouse forwards actually moved the character. Holding W, moving the mouse up, and then (when I discovered it) the Sprint key, made for some laughably fast corridor traversals. The W key on its own makes you move faster than any human possibly could run. It’s interesting though. That’s just how shooters were back then. In an upcoming blog (or series of blogs) I’ll be talking about how various limitations led to the creation of a lot of the game mechanics we’re familiar with. I posit that the lack of a cover system or other good way to get out of the way of bullets made boosting the player’s speed a necessity. It would be interesting to hear an original developer’s comments on this. There must be an interview somewhere.. The speed could also be to reduce frustration while backtracking through the impossibly labyrinthine levels, though.

Anyway, I did beat the game’s original chapters on my low difficulty (though there’s a wealth of extra levels and modded levels to play also) in just a few days of playing one or two levels per day. So I’ve popped my cherry. And it was good! I have to say I really enjoyed the game. So much so that I loaded up Doom 2 straight away (on a higher difficulty) and, upon discovering the Super Shotgun, got over-excited and… well, I’ll drop the dangerous metaphor there and just go literal, saying that I played way past my bed time (well I’m an adult, I can do what I want, but still) and I think I beat half of the game in a single sitting. It’s harder to tell because Doom 2 doesn’t give you a map of completion after each level. But that Super Shotgun… with the newer high-res pixel graphics (of 1994) are just so sweet, dude!

How crazy is it to play a new game that’s 21 years old and still get excited about its graphical improvements?!?! That’s got to be the magic of DOOM right there, or at least it’s evidence of it. Pixel art is a timeless style, I think, and I’ve chosen to use it for my own game. Incidentally, you can play the latest build of Sons of Sol (still in very early development) here.

Awww! Just! Yes! If you don't get it I won't be able to convince you unless you play it, but, phwoar! Yeah my mom would NEVER have let me buy this when I was a kid. She's probably not too happy that I've played it now, either :P
Awww! Just! Yes! If you don’t get it I won’t be able to convince you unless you play it, but, phwoar! Yeah my mom would NEVER have let me buy this when I was a kid. She’s probably not too happy that I’ve played it now, either 😛

If you’ve never played the game and you’re a shooter fan, I have to recommend DOOM. It’s nowhere near as difficult to go back to as other games I’ve tried (like Command and Conquer (1995)) and it’s a piece of gaming history! Deservedly so! Find out for yourself. After Doom 2 I think I’ll move on to Quake. I hear NIN (Nine Inch Nails, the band) did the whole soundtrack! *smiles manically*

Until next time..

PS In researching for today’s blog post, I came across a nice short documentary with id Software co-founder John Romero about id’s early games, which heavily featured DOOM. Give it a look below.

PPS [written at a later date] Less than a month later, I’d play my first ever multiplayer game of Doom… AGAINST JOHN ROMERO!! Read how that went here.

Failing Kickstarter: Learning from Starfighter Inc

Starfighter Inc. by Impeller Studios. Click for their website
Starfighter Inc. by Impeller Studios. Click for their website

So at the end of May I did a post on Starfighter Inc. It had a Kickstarter campaign in progress and was selling itself as the spiritual successor to the X-Wing games. I disputed this claim, saying that a multiplayer focussed space deathmatch with Newtonian physics can’t feel much like X-Wing’s successor. I won’t repeat myself other than that but you can read the original article here if you wish.

Since then, the game failed in its Kickstarter campaign on June 6th 2015 (it was 90% funded, which on Kickstarter means you get 0% of the pledged money) and I just want to look at some things we can learn from the failure. This isn’t a general how-to on Kickstarter. This post is more or a follow-up article on Starfighter Inc itself. I’ve never run a KS campaign myself (yet) and I’m not an expert, but I do want to learn from some mistakes that we can observe.

It’s difficult to say why something fails on Kickstarter other than to say “because they didn’t raise enough money”. Perhaps others agreed with my own assertion that this game isn’t truly a spiritual successor to X-Wing and so weren’t interested enough to support. My previous article got right into this so I won’t do so again here, but this is surely at least part of the reason. If you’ll allow me to assume that this is at least partly true here, we reveal the first lesson.

LESSON #1  : UNDERSTAND WHAT YOUR TARGET AUDIENCE WANTS, OR TARGET A DIFFERENT AUDIENCE.

Impeller’s early press for the game focussed on telling us that David Wessman was creating a new X-Wing game in all but name. Then they went on to say that the game was like “World of Tanks meets Counterstrike in space”. These are two very different things and different people play those different games. I would surmise that the people who heard about the game were largely the targeted X-Wing fans who then decided that the game wasn’t really for them, whereas if they’d taken a difference marketing approach and targeted the actual World of Tanks and Counterstrike players more, they might have found their true target audience. Instead they sort of split their attention and shot at the wrong target, at least in part.

LESSON #2 : THE GAME IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN WHO’S MAKING IT. TRADE ON YOUR NAME ONLY IN GOOD FAITH.

Again, in my previous article I said that I didn’t care if David Wessman or Jack Mamais were on the team so much, because they weren’t making X-Wing or Crysis. A good team is important, sure. We can know that the names behind this project have delivered good stuff in the past, but it can’t make someone more interested in a game if they weren’t at least curious already.

Worth noting is Bloodstained: Ritual Of The Night, the spiritual successor to Castlevania being made by Koji Igarashi. It recently raised $5.5m on Kickstarter, ten times more than it asked for, because people wanted to see another Castlevania game and one of its original chief architects was back to promise people that he’d deliver. So a name can matter, but I think more important is that people believe that that name will deliver the game that they’re after. Igarashi’s ‘interesting’ video did apparently hit all the right buttons and convince people that in trading on his name, he was also promising to deliver what people wanted, not something a little similar.

LESSON #3: SHOW GAMEPLAY! SHOW GAMEPLAY! SHOW GAMEPLAY!

This is by far the most important lesson to be learned here, and even the Impeller team admitted they neglected this to their detriment. I said before that the game looked to be very early in development and as such it was hard to visualise or get excited by. At the time when I said that they were already half way through their Kickstarter campaign and the most gameplay to be seen was the video below, with the rest of the funding video dedicated to showing us interviews, concept art, the office, and physical Star Wars spaceship models.

Does that video excite you? No, me neither. That’s not enough to get money out of me, sorry.

So very late in the campaign they released a little more gameplay. It’s still very little to go on, but it’s at least approaching the bare minimum of what we’d like to see to know that the game is making progress and to give us an idea of what to expect. Presumably the rock music pumping away was to get their on-the-fence backers pumped up and to reach for their credit cards. View the later gameplay video here.

Now that’s a bit better. But the huge problem is that most people never saw that. IF they heard about the game and checked it out early on, and if they weren’t sold on what they saw, they likely wouldn’t have come back to check it out again and therefore they’d never have seen this video. This should have been there from the start. 

Gameplay! Gameplay! Gameplay!

Typical Kickstarter funding graph.
Typical Kickstarter funding graph.

What you see here is a typical Kickstarter funding pattern. You can see that most projects get a lot of their funding on the first and last days of the campaign as people are excited when it’s new, or realise they have to get around to getting out their wallet by the end. This tends to hold true whether the project winds up successful or not.

Starfighter Inc's pledge graph
Starfighter Inc’s pledge graph

Starfighter’s graph isn’t so radically different from the norm, but you can see that the first and last days aren’t quite as high as they might have been. You can put all sorts of reasons on this. I would say that this graph supports my assertion that seeing gameplay is very important for the prospective backer. It wasn’t there at the start of the campaign and so the day 1  spike wasn’t as high as it could have been. The little gameplay later shown in the second video (shown above) wasn’t all that impressive either and so when people got their email reminders on the last day of the project (assuming they clicked ‘remind me’ on their first visit)  not enough of them were sufficiently impressed to push the campaign over the $250,000 they were seeking.

LESSON #4 : KICKSTARTER IS NOT THE BE-ALL AND END-ALL

Getting a successful Kickstarter under your belt is almost seen as a prerequisite to making an independent game these days, but it’s not. All of the traditional means of funding a product still exist; namely bank loans, publishers, angel investors and even personal savings. Also, products (like Dimension Drive) can come back to Kickstarter and pass on their second attempt. Frank n’ John by Ireland’s bitSmith Games didn’t pass their Kickstarter in 2014 but continued development and are set to release their game sometime in the second half of 2015. They had a recent blog post about their journey which you can check out here.

Indeed, there are actually benefits to not passing Kickstarter. You’ve gotten some loyal followers from the campaign, you’ve gotten public exposure, but you’re now not beholden to a public community who examine your every move and need constant updates to know that you’re working. The amount of emails I receive from projects I’ve backed telling me that they’ve made a new model or hired a new cleaner are things that take the developer’s time just to assure me that they’re still working on the game I paid them to support. Passing Kickstarter can be a real time sink and it’s often not even in exchange for enough cash to make the game. Just for enough to prove interest to other investors who pay the lion’s share.

To finish, getting back to Starfighter Inc specifically, I’d like to point out that they’re still in development and will be finishing the game. On June 6th, the same day that their Kickstarter ended, they went on Steam Greenlight which asks Steam users if they would buy the game if it were made available. There’s no monetary commitment on Greenlight. Starfighter Inc passed it a few days later.

Creative Director Jack Mamais has said “I’ve been working on it for two years and I don’t like to work on something and not finish it. So we’re going to finish it. As long as it takes”. I think this is encouraging. They had said that the meagre $250,000 they were asking for was to hire artists to finish the models and they expected the game to take 6-9 months longer to finish if they passed Kickstarter.

Given all of that. I fully expect to see the game out in mid 2016 and I look forward to playing it.