I’ve been inspired to write the following due to Alex Macris’ latest Check for Traps feature on the Escapist. You can read it here. The Cliff’s Notes is basically that a GM in a tabletop RPG should be less of a directive storyteller, and more of an emergent one. That’s a great concept in theory, but it’s possible for some GMs to consider this an excuse to do no story work whatsoever and that, my friends, is a mistake.
Characters with no story to bring them together or drive them forward is like ribs without a spine. Now, as a food, ribs without a spine are mostly what you’re looking for. Lather those ribs in a delicious sauce and cook them just right so that the meat’s nice and moist rather than tough and dry, and you have yourself a delicacy for a discerning omnivore such as myself. But even in those ideal conditions, the end result’s a bit messy.
A less food-based example of what I’m talking about is Mass Effect 2.
For most of the game, you go from one hot spot in the galaxy to another, either picking up a new member of your crew or helping them with a personal matter to earn their undying loyalty (for the most part). This series of mini-stories is bookended with the whole Reapers/Collectors business, but the nature of the game leads one to believe that they’re more of a backdrop against which the characters grow, rather than being any sort of impetus for change or tension. If the plot had been more coherent or the threat more credible, we might have had a more full-bodied experience rather than a plate of (albeit tasty) character ribs.
When you have strong characters, the story holding them together should also be strong. However, it shouldn’t overwhelm the characters. I think that’s what Alex has been driving at in his last few articles. The guy behind the screen, the man behind the curtain, the puppeteer above the stage pulling the strings – it shouldn’t be all about them and the story they want to tell to the exclusion of everything else. Role-playing games involving more than one player should be collaborative experiences, with players bringing interesting characters to the table while the GM weaves their plots together and gives them something against which to struggle. That is unless you’re running a demo at a convention or something and just want to show off how cool this dungeon is or how that class works in comparison to that other class. Then you go straight for the mechanics and rules, and leave most of your story-telling and world-building and atmosphere-creating tools at home. I learned that one the hard way.
See what I mean here? Are you catching my drift? Or am I completely off my rocker because I told those kids to get off my lawn a bit too violently? Share your thoughts, Intertubes.
The year was 1993. When it came to the childhood fantasy of space flight I still clung to with the tenacity of a baboon hanging from a branch over a cliff, two computer games had dominated most of my free time in the previous years. When I wasn’t playing a LucasArts game (back when they were interested in smart & funny adventure games and not just squeezing more life out of Star Wars), I was playing either Elite Plus, the seminal space flight & trading game that had finally made it onto DOS systems, or one of the games in the Wing Commander series, which not only let me shoot at alien invaders with lasers from a space fighter cockpit but also featured a branching storyline with winnable medals and multiple possible outcomes. Even now, to me this seems like a great way to tell a story in a video game. So back when I was fourteen, this blew my fool mind. Two years and several expansion packs after that first foray into character-driven space shooting, I learned of the release of a game called Wing Commander: Privateer. When I found out the premise behind the game, seeing it as a combination of the aforementioned games, I think blood shot out of my nose or something. I can’t clearly recall. Seriously, at the time, chocolate and peanut butter ending up in the same mixing bowl had nothing on this feat of gaming alchemy.
Cue 16-year-old me jumping up & down like I was 10 years younger.
Normally this would be where I break down my thoughts on the title into what I like and don’t like. If I loved it, I’d end with what I love, and if I hated it, I’d sharpen my verbal knives and get to stabbing in the last paragraph. But I can’t do that with Privateer. There isn’t anything I don’t like about the game.
Privateer casts players in the role of Grayson Burrows, a guy just getting his start in the somewhat untamed Gemini Sector of the galaxy thanks to his grandfather leaving him an old, beat-up scout ship. The military organization of the Wing Commander universe, the Confederation, is busy keeping the feline Kilrathi at bay but, for the most part, Grayson has nothing to do with that sort of military drama. Instead, Privateer sets you on the tracks of a pretty standard science fiction plot: “Here’s an alien artifact, go talk to nerdy scientist X on world Y about precursor species Z.” It’s not a world-shattering epic by any stretch, but the simplicity of the story keeps it from getting in the way of the game play.
Clockwise from top left: The cramped cockpit of your starting scout ship, the docking bay area of one of the game’s many ports of call, the fat cat who gives you Merchant Guild jobs and the reasonably hot secretary working for the Mercenary Guild.
Long before Grand Theft Auto brought out the kind of open-world game play mechanics that everybody and their mom would try and emulate, Privateer‘s Gemini Sector was designed to be a very particular kind of sandbox. Instead of sand, dump trucks and toy soldiers, this sandbox is full of stars, asteroids with valuable minerals and space pirates. But don’t expect to need to mine those asteroids like this was EVE Online or even Mass Effect 2. All that hard, boring work is done for you.
The most work you have to do other than not getting shot at by the aforementioned space pirates is keeping track of what sells cheap on which world, and where you can sell it at profit. This is what hearkens back to the days of Elite Plus and even Trade Wars. However, trading is not your only option for earning cash if you can’t get your head around the “buy low, sell high” rule of thumb or if you just find it boring. The Merchant Guild will pay you to act as their own personal Planet Express, and the Mercenary Guild is always looking for pilots willing to expose other pilots to hard vacuum using energy based or mass accelerated means. You can also take odd jobs from fixers in bars or public terminals, or you can just eschew the whole “missions” mechanic entirely the red-hot second you get a tractor beam, and embark upon a life of piracy. While you don’t necessarily need a tractor beam to blow things up, pulling in cargo containers left spinning in the void after you liberate them from their legitimate owners tends to pay the bills a bit more effectively.
Kilrathi blow just as good when you’re a merc as when you’re a Confed fighter jock, but the pay’s better and nobody in a uniform yells at you when you mess up.
Chances are, by reading this far into my review, you’ll know if this is the sort of game for you or not. If you think EVE Online would be improved by removing the floating rocks that require mining and replacing them with bloodthirsty cat-people and religious fanatics with laser guns, or you remember long nights of Trade Wars wondering what your ship might look like outside of ASCII art,Wing Commander: Privateer is going to deliver hours of entertainment. Playing the game without dealing with commodities is possible, as I’ve mentioned, but it’ll actually take a lot longer to get yourself a decent ship that’ll survive some of the later space battles.
The best news for fans of the game or newcomers who might be interested in Wing Commander: Privateer is that it’s not just for DOS anymore. While applications like DOS Box can help you play the old retail version if you really want, some diehard fans recompiled the game with a new graphics engine and real 3D spaceflight. And best of all, it’s free. That’s right – FREE. Gratis. You don’t pay a dime, and it’s available in Windows, Linux and Mac formats. Look up Privateer Gemini Gold for all the details. I fired it up on my middle-aged laptop running Ubuntu and it loaded and ran without any major problems. Considering the sort of experience it delivers and the fact it’s now available without any cost other than some download time and hard drive space, I think it’s very, very hard to go wrong. For both a shot of space sim nostalgia and solid space trading gameplay that works to this day, as evinced by EVE Online, Wing Commander: Privateer doesn’t just delivers the goods, it does so in a turbo-charged spacecraft bristling with ray guns. And really, what more could you ask for?
I’ve discussed Assassin’s Creed previously, though not at any significant length. I couldn’t even call what I said a ‘review’ with any fairness, since I only played a bit of the game. There were a few things I liked about the first game, such as the environments, the framing element of the story and the stealth-focused means of assassinating people pretending to be pious. However, the seemingly shameless padding of always restarting from the top of Alamut, doing a specific set of tasks to gather intelligence and the inevitable rousing of Desmond from his recollections of his time as Altair for some exposition dispensed in the somewhat bland near-future setting. The sequel of that game begins by sneaking up behind those elements, breaking their necks and tossing them from the nearest balcony.
Sam Fisher wishes he looked this good.
Assassin’s Creed II begins with Desmond being liberated from the laboratory of Abstergo Industries where Dr Breen Vidic has held him hostage. Kristen Bell Lucy orchestrates this liberation and takes him to a secret hideout where a snarky British bookworm and a relatively cute tech-inclined girl have assembled an “improved” version of the Animus device that took Desmond back in time to relive Altair’s memories. This time, they need him to enter the persona of a different ancestor, in order to actually learn assassin skills rather than just watching them happen. The ancestor in question is one Ezio Auditore de Firenze, and if I’m honest, he very quickly became one of my favorite video game protagonists of recent memory.
When we first meet Ezio as a young man, he’s a brash, carefree, womanizing and somewhat selfish rich kid. But he’s also charming, handsome, cares about his family and isn’t unintelligent or dull. The setting of the game, Italy during the Renaissance, is incredibly immersive, partially because of the painstakingly rendered cities and partially because of the voice acting. Maybe it’s the talent and maybe it’s the Italian, but the passion of these characters comes through the pixels very easily and pulls the player in almost immediately. The characters aren’t quite as realistically rendered as in, say, Dragon Age, but it’s rare to see the characters in Assassin’s Creed II come down with the “BioWare face”.
The point to this is that Ezio exhibits growth, which I really appreciated. The young man we meet when Desmond first enters the Animus is not the same man who travels to Tuscany and later Venice as he hunts down his targets. Speaking of the Animus, the scenes outside of Italy back in the near-future have been cut down significantly to a few key scenes throughout the game. The nice thing about this, other than spending most of our time with Ezio doing pretty much whatever we like, is that the near-future scenes never feel terribly superfluous, as we learn more about what the struggle between the Assassins and the Templars is like in the near-future as opposed to how it works in the Renaissance.
The story in Assassin’s Creed II also becomes infused with the kind of material that make the conspiracies of Hideo Kojima’s games seem like a badly written episode of Heroes. From his previous over-exposure to the Animus, Desmond has acquired the ‘eagle vision’ used by his ancestors, and found some messages written in blood back at Abstergo by the room’s previous occupant, ‘Subject 16’. Slightly insane thanks to Abstergo’s experiments, he managed to hack the Animus and place clues throughout the landscape for Desmond to uncover, leading him to the ‘Pieces of Eden’ that the Templars desperately want to acquire. These are ancient artifacts of unspeakable power that have been handed down through the ages, and the Assassins and Templars have each struggled to get their hands on them. No further information on Subject 16 is available, but his voice is so familiar…
Possible identities of Subject 16…
Instead of restricting the player to a specific series of tasks that need to be completed before stabbing somebody, Assassin’s Creed II allows you a lot more freedom. The free-running game-play is just as fun and intuitive as the previous title, though some players might be frustrated by sections that actually require precision platforming to do some puzzle-solving. Also, there’s a side-quest involving Ezio acquiring art and fixing up storefronts around his home villa to increase his income, but other than buying better weapons you never really need as much money as you get. While I appreciate the fact that there’s an in-game explanation for money being a non-issue for Ezio, there comes a point where you’re getting a lot more money than you know what to do with, and the best armor in the game is actually available for free if you can stand the aforementioned platform puzzle bits. You don’t even have to touch the villa if you really don’t want to, and don’t mind coming home to a termite-infested flophouse every time you have Leonardo decipher another few Codex pages, as the side missions all pay you money anyway. Of course some of the locals can smell the aroma of flesh florins on you, and wandering minstrels come out of the woodwork to ply you for some with badly-sung ballads they’ll warble at you until you shut them up, be it with coin-tossing or the back of your hand. I’m probably getting a bit nit-picky at this point, but bear with me, I’ve only got one more nit to pick, and that’s the combat.
I appreciate that the game allows us to see how badass Ezio becomes, and since he’s so impressively killative, the combat never feels terribly challenging once you master the counter and dodge moves. While this might seem a little too easy for some, and I for one never felt like Ezio was truly in mortal danger, the player has the opportunity to sit back and try different things when a fight happens. Bored with the sword? Pull out the dagger for a bit. Do you like that poleaxe a Brute is trying to shove down your throat? Grab it from him and hit him in the face. The options available to Ezio do ease the tedium of the combat a bit, and I’d even go so far as to say that the tedious nature of combat works in the game’s favor. While it isn’t hard for the most part, being tedious means a player might not want to waste time with it, opting instead to hire a few hookers as a distraction, parkour themselves into place for an optimum kill or find other creative ways to clear the path between Ezio and his unfortunate target. As an aside, try poisoning one of the guards and then throwing money at the feet of a nearby crowd. Trust me.
Stuff I Liked: The music, voice acting, story elements and controls remain some of the better points of this growing series of games. Also, the ending of the game first has Ezio do something incredibly ballsy and awesome and follows that with some of the best busting of the fourth wall I’ve seen since I read the Deadpool comic book. Stuff I Didn’t Like: I would have much rather gotten more use out of Leonardo’s flying machine or more dialog with Paola or Bartolomeo than have as much to do with the villa as we did. Stuff I Loved: There’s an incredible sense of freedom to be experienced in Assassin’s Creed II that I for one really appreciated. Provided you don’t run around hacking up innocents, you can do pretty much anything you like in the beautiful setting of Renaissance Italy, and that in and of itself is tons of fun. “Everything is permitted” indeed.
Bottom Line: I recommend that you rent the game first if you’re unsure about it. Also, playing the first game isn’t a requirement, but you might have a better understanding of the game and its setting if you do so. Either way, there’s a lot to like about this game, and I consider it worth the money of a purchase.
My wife started playing Team Fortress 2 on my X-Box live account yesterday. She said she’d gotten some things done in preparation for our move on Saturday, and wanted something ‘quick’ to fill the time. She ended up getting sucked into the epic and pitched conflict between RED and BLU.
She’s discovered that she’d probably enjoy playing the Pyro most of all. She’s continuing to experiment with classes, but that seems to fit her requirements of speed, durability and fun factor. She just likes setting folks on fire. Anyway, we took turns, and while I was sniping people she looked up some of the advantages the PC has over the X-Box, specifically some of the unlockable weapons.
“Snipers get a bow?” she asked me at one point.
“Yep, it’s called the Huntsman,” I replied. She punched it up.
“Wow. If you’re playing a Sniper and I’m a Pyro, I can set your arrows on fire.”
“Seriously?” I had to look away from the screen to confirm this. I might have gotten backstabbed in the meantime. “That’s super cool.”
She looked at me. “We totally have to do that.”
As if I needed another reason to love this woman.
Now, granted, we can’t pursue this plan right away. We’re moving, as I’ve mentioned, which means bills need to be paid on a couple of fronts, our littlest furball needs some major vet treatment (and Spark could probably use a booster shot as well) and I would need to acquire or assemble for my darling a computer that’d run TF2 smoothly. However, I know a lot more people using the PC version of the game, the controls are likely a bit better, and there are the aforementioned unlockables.
More on this as it develops, but suffice it to say my geeky heart was aglow pretty much all night last night. Other than that I’ve been doing a lot of running around getting the move arranged, keeping things somewhat sane at the dayjob and plowing forward with Citizen in the Wilds. Yes, that’s the title I’m going with for the Project unless something better comes along. I guess I could have blogged about that instead of gushing about how awesome my wife is.
In addition to doing a little writing (less than usual, I’ll admit), I thought I’d try a little experiment.
I recorded a little audio related to my Portal review while I had the room to myself this past Friday. I brought that audio into a program called Melodyne which, I understand, is the same software used by Valve for voice editing. Someone on YouTube had already played around with it to do the sort of editing required to make Ellen McLain sound like GLaDOS. Following those instructions yielded some interesting results.
Unwilling to post just another snippet of audio, and also wanting to make another attempt at doing something with AfterEffects, I started dropping in the results of Google Image searches for things like ‘Portal gun,’ ‘Chell’ and ‘Testchamber’. A few areas of text here, some interesting other images there, and suddenly I had a video presentation slightly more interesting than your typical corporate PowerPoint offering.
I added a little bit of Portal’s music as a last touch, but my hard-drive space failed me due to a bunch of old crap floating around the data section. So, while getting some Monday morning mundanity out of the way, I rendered the video from AfterEffects and then compressed it via Premiere.
Here’s the result. Let me know what you think.
As of 12:40, YouTube says it’s still rendering, so we’ll see how it looks once that process is complete.
