Category: Games

I am currently playing the crap out of Grand Theft Auto IV. To get this out of the way immediately — it is not a 10/10 game, it isn’t perfect. It isn’t even close. That said, the middle third of the game is pretty excellent, and the game every now and then does something quite technically impressive (before doing something stupid and immersion-breaking). The dialogue is generally well-written, even if some of the plot elements are rather cliché.

My current goal is to try and get as many of the achievements as possible. The "game progress" percentage reported in-game is a bit misleading — I saw that it was around ~60%, so I figured that I would try to get 100% completion in the game (which is a 100 point achievement in and of itself). After a bit of reading online, I discovered that in order to get 100% completion, you need to grind through some really sub-standard, time-consuming content in the game.

• You have to win 20 race missions. There are only about 10 tracks, so you’re guaranteed to run duplicates. Each race takes about 5-6 minutes to run, so you’re going to kill a couple of hours on this one. The race AI for your opponents is pretty dumb — what usually winds up happening is that I’ll wind up lapping three or four cars that are stuck, ramming each other at low speeds and never making any progress.

  Also, you can’t shoot your opponents (if they die, you lose the race), and you can’t even do things like race a police car or garbage truck. The bottom line is that the racing missions are not very fun.

• There are something like 30 "most wanted" missions, 20 "vigilante" missions, and 9 "assassin" missions.

  Don’t let the names fool you — they’re all essentially the same thing. Drive to waypoint, engage and destroy all targets. You would think that the "assassin" missions might involve some kind of Hitman-style gameplay, but they do not.

  Oh, and you need to have a police car to start the "most wanted" and "vigilante" missions — just another meaningless hassle on the road to full completion.

• There are two completely different sets of "steal car" missions — one for your friend Brucie, and then one for his friend Stevie. You need to steal 10 cars for Brucie, and 30 for Stevie. To make matters worse, the cars ordered by text message from Stevie don’t show up on your map — you just get a description of where they are, and a small picture. You are supposed to hunt them down by driving around the neighborhood and figuring out where it is based on landmarks — needless to say, I just used GameFAQs.

  I optimized my gameplay for getting Stevie’s cars such that each mission took between 5 and 7 minutes (to get to the car, return it to his garage, and then go to my safehouse and sleep to trigger the next text message). I don’t remember how long Brucie’s cars took to get, but overall, let’s say there was probably 4 to 5 hours spent on these missions combined.

  (One side benefit to doing Stevie’s missions is that you can pile up a ridiculous amount of cash doing so, and thereby get the "Half Million" achievement as well. I totaled up the possible reward money for his cars and it comes up to about $400,000.)

• There are, I believe, 50 unique stunt jumps to perform. I haven’t started on these so I’m not sure how long it will take — my guess is that it will take less time than some of the other grindy stuff, because there’s no setup for these. You can just take your best car out somewhere and jump it.
• There are no less than 200 "flying rats" scattered around the map that need to be exterminated. Fortunately, they are anchored and don’t move, but still…that’s a lot of pigeons. This is what I’ve started working on — I printed out a list of them and am checking them off one-by-one as they are taken care of.

These sorts of activities really highlight the typical one-note mission design in the game — there simply isn’t much to do apart from shooting things, driving things, and "exploration."

Why am I doing this, you ask? I think there’s a combination of a feeling of commitment for having already gotten ~60-70% progress, plus a desire to simply play through everything now and never have to play it again.

This is not the first time that I’ve played games just to get them over with. There was a phase, after I graduated college, sent off résumés for jobs and was essentially just waiting for the phone to ring. I occupied myself by playing Neo-Geo games on an emulator. I played pretty much any game I could find, including really execrable or unremarkable ones like Cyber Lip, Burning Fight, Legend of Success Joe, and Mutation Nation. (I also played the good Neo-Geo games, don’t worry.) With the benefits of emulation (namely, unlimited "money" for continues), there wasn’t much challenge in many of these games, but I still felt compelled to play them, even the awful ones, just so I would never have to play them ever again. Sounds strange, but it made sense to me.

I feel like that is my current mindset with regards to finishing GTA4 — I want to do everything that can reasonably be accomplished, just so I never have to put the disc in the drive ever again. Whether the creators would consider that a good or bad thing, I don’t know.

A former coworker of mine passed along a link to a pretty good read — a "Let’s Play" thread going through Knights of the Old Republic II (a game produced by my former employer, Obsidian Entertainment). If you’re not familiar with the "Let’s Play" concept, it is essentially a running commentary (with screenshots or video) of a game playthrough. Good LPs are well-written, involve the audience in making key game decisions, and provide insight on aspects of a game that readers may not have experienced. The KOTOR2 thread mentioned has tons of detail about alternate paths through the game, content that was cut from the game, and story explanation. It’s extremely long, but worth reading if you’re interested in the game. There’s also a site, letsplayarchive.com, which reposts these sorts of threads.

This kind of discussion, along with the general popularity of gaming message boards, is something of a counterexample to a popular view of gamers, one which I most recently saw in a commercial. (I believe it was some sort of insurance commercial, but I could be mistaken.) The commercial’s message had something to do with making lifestyle changes — one scene showed a lone child, playing a videogame, in a nearly monochromatic home. The next shot showed the same kid outside playing basketball in the driveway with another kid, the frame being much more lively and colorful. There are two messages here: 1) exercise is better than sitting on the couch, and 2) playing videogames is a solitary, anti-social activity. I have absolutely no problems at all with the first message — however, the second is more than a bit misleading.

Why? Well, the act of playing a single-player game may be a solitary experience, but everybody loves to talk about games too. Whether it be discussing their exploits (AARs, or "after action reports"), talking strategy, aesthetics, or preferences, or just seeing what other people think about games, there’s no shortage of discussion out there. With that in mind, it seems to me that playing games is no less social than reading a book or listening to music, from a standpoint of encouraging interaction and sociability with others. Of course, nobody would insinuate those other activities were "poor lifestyle choices." Games just happen to be a convenient whipping boy for those looking for an easy way to communicate the idea of "wasted time."

Last night, I finally plowed through to the end of Culdcept Saga. I discovered, via GameFaqs, the concept of the “symbol deck” — one that has absolutely no items or creatures in it, and instead focuses on spending as much money as possible through the symbol system, and controlling the board and pace of the game via spells. The computer AI is typically not prepared to handle this style of play — the items in the AI’s deck will be completely useless (because you don’t spend any time in combat), and AI-deployed creatures tend to help you by pumping up symbol values. The lack of combat also results in a nice benefit — the pace of the game is sped up quite a bit, which is nice because it can drag in some of the later 4 cepter battles.

Cards such as Refuge (sacrifice a card to get 80 magic and Refuge back in your hand), Fairy Light (you get magic every turn based on the number of cards in your hand), Aurora (boost symbol value 20%), and Pressure (drop symbol values 30% — good when you want to “buy in”) are key for this strategy, since they generate money and control symbol value. In addition to these, I stock tons of dice-control spells and mass/direct damage spells in case I need to take out a menacing creature. Battles against the AI using this deck tend to snowball fairly quickly into routs — on the last level, at one point I lapped the AI opponent even though I spent a couple of turns bouncing back and forth between a fort and a temple (to buy symbols).

The story payoff at the end of the game, like the story itself, is poor. Furthermore, you don’t really get anything special (in terms of bonus cards, etc.) for winning the game — instead, you have to replay certain levels to get additional “E” cards. I am still missing a lot of cards, although hopefully I can pick up some of those by playing against the AI. I may go back and try and clean up some of the achievements in the game — in particular, the ones that involve using decks with particular creature types should be easy to get using a symbols deck. Some of the other ones might be too difficult to get, though. Note for all achievement fanatics out there: this game is pretty stingy with Gamerscore. You could conceivably beat the game and only get 115 Gamerscore — I barely passed the 500 card mark for the Worldly Scholar achievement by the end of the game (and that’s with a fair amount of versus play), and the other achievements I have are not necessary to complete the game. The game is also super-long — it could easily take you over 40 hours to finish the 30 levels of the game, and while that’s a great value from a “cost-per-hour” perspective, it’s not a great time investment for achievement hunters. 🙂

Amongst the pirates, that is, with 1,893 people leeching it at the time of the survey. Not sure how to take that…

It’s a really great game, in my opinion, held back a little bit by some technical and usability issues. To get those out of the way first:

• There’s some slowdown on certain maps when a lot of creatures are deployed, which doesn’t seem justified given the perceived GPU load. There’s also some visible tearing at different times during the game, which is ugly.
• There are some silly usability things like not being able to pan/examine the map when you reach a map junction (so you need to plan where you want to move in advance), and areas where it’s difficult to determine who/what a card will affect. (Typically these are cases that depend on the number/type of land owned by a cepter — as far as I can tell, there’s no easy way to get that information apart from examining the map and counting manually.)

The upside of the game, in my opinion, is still pretty high. I’m struck by how differently the game plays for me versus Sandy, just based on the compositions of our decks. I have built most of my decks around turtling strategies, with creatures like Leshy (who improves his land every time he survives a battle…before tolls are taken, which is awesome), Poseidon (who gives +20 HP to defenders), Rahab (+10 HP for blue/yellow creatures), Borgess (+20 HP for neutral creatures), Fontaciel (who can keep boosting the HP of all of your creatures), and a few of the Wall creatures. I try and avoid going on the offensive by using spells like Fog (and the Burnacle’s territory ability, which is the same thing) and Peace to reduce the tolls I have to pay, and fighting only when necessary. The Telegnosis and Find spells allow me to manipulate my territories at my leisure, and zip through my deck to find the cards that I need. When I have to fight, I try and muster the best items and penetrating attacks that I can, which are usually enough to do the trick. I can sit tight, zip around the board, and wait for the computer cepters to inevitably land on some of my high-toll lands, and it’s over.

Sandy, so far, has had to use more of a mixed deck and play more offensively than I have. She used offensive spells to take care of powerful enemies and take their land — I don’t believe I have very many (good) spells like that, so it’s interesting to me to see a different style in play. I have no idea how many cards I’m still missing (I suspect there’s still quite a few that I haven’t seen or obtained), but between that, my still hazy understanding of the symbol system in the game, and the fact that I haven’t yet played online, I think there’s still a lot more gameplay for me to experience.

We recently bought Culdcept Saga for the Xbox 360, and have been having a lot of fun with it. It’s essentially a cross between Monopoly and Magic: The Gathering — you roll a die and move your piece around the board, claiming (or contesting) territory with monsters that you cast out of your hand of cards. Like Monopoly, you can improve your land (raising the tolls you gather), and there’s also a “color affinity” mechanic where creatures gain combat bonuses when they are on land of the same element as the creature. You can use different items and different spells to affect the “strategic board” as well as individual combats. At the end of each match, you earn new cards with which to build your deck. Both skill and luck come into play in the game.

I can easily recommend this to anyone with an interest in collectible card games. There’s actually a demo available on Xbox Live, although it doesn’t show any of the deck-building mechanics — you have to use one of four prebuilt decks in the demo. We played the demo quite a bit before the game’s release earlier this month — thankfully, the full game is just as engrossing.

Through a rather convoluted (but interesting) path, I came upon an Escapist article from earlier this year which trashes one of the whipping boys of game design, the escort mission. While I certainly wouldn’t disagree that there are tons of terrible escort missions in games, I think that escort missions don’t have to be terrible. Dare I suggest that they could actually be fun?

I wanted to expand a little bit on the article’s reasoning about why a lot of escort missions are unpleasant experiences, and what I think can be done to make them less dreadful.

• The article mentions AI deficiencies with the convoy being escorted (along with some…uh, unusual similes by Red Storm/Ubisoft designer Richard Dansky), which can certainly be the case. This tends to be at its worst when the AI is trying to follow the player — if the AI gets hung up while following the player up a ramp, or through a tricky area, the player justifiably feels that the mission failure was unfair. These types of escort missions have problems similar to that of squad command systems — it’s difficult for the AI to understand what the player is really trying to do (and coordinate their actions accordingly), and the sort of second-to-second guidance and chatter that makes real-life escort missions possible isn’t practical with current control schemes.

  While missions that involve self-guided convoys still have issues, I think they are preferable to convoys that follow the player. It’s far easier to ensure that the convoy AI works correctly in this situation than in the case where it’s trying to follow an unpredictable player. Additionally, it helps to ensure a certain minimum pace to a mission, which might be another way to change up the feel of gameplay.

• There’s also some discussion about attempting to create a sense of drama or sacrifice through escort missions. I agree that pretty much every attempt I’ve seen at this has fallen flat. Without being able to fail the escort and still continue with the game, all drama is removed. I have many more memories of “noble sacrifices” by my X-COM soldiers or lone catapults in Civ than I do from any sort of game featuring a pre-scripted sacrifice.
  
• Escort missions that focus on a single AI tend to be more unforgiving and more prone to AI sketchiness than ones that feature larger convoys. Ensuring the safety of 4 of 6 AIs is probably going to be easier and possibly less stressful for the player than protecting a single AI which will get dog-piled by enemies, caught on a wall, or otherwise waylaid.
  
• The article talks a bit about an EverQuest 2 mission which involves escorting an invincible dog — a clever way to mine a bit of drama from players who don’t pay too much attention to what’s going on. However, the article doesn’t really talk about what I believe is a primary reason for why most escort missions are dire — completely helpless “convoys.” If the convoy can shoot back at enemies (or can assist the player by taking out certain kinds of enemies), the group being escorted feels less like a complete ball and chain. I personally felt that escorting survivors in Dead Rising was way more palatable than typical escort missions because you could arm them, they could help each other out to a limited extent, and, once you discovered the benefits of the “go to the reticule” command, were fairly capable at defending themselves.
  
• Another idea would be to reverse the usual difficulty ramp of a mission for an escort mission — make the early part of the mission the most difficult part (particularly important for games that don’t allow saves or don’t have checkpoints). Then, the difficulty would be ramped down throughout the rest of the mission, taking advantage of this “breather” to reveal more story or otherwise change things up. While this wouldn’t necessarily make people like the escort mission more, it would make it a lot more likely that people would be able to finish it.

Okay, so maybe I was a bit optimistic in saying that escort missions could truly be fun, but I still think that they can be much less of a burden than they currently are…