Oct 7
Two web-based games in a row! I’ll have to go over the list of games and figure out how many more of these there are. This one is The Binary, which is set up as kind of a Quantum Leap meets Groundhog Day thing, mixed with some of the Bourne movies and maybe a dash of Minority Report for that PKD dystopian futility.
It uses a custom Javascript engine that is pretty interesting, so let’s check it out!
Spoilers after the break…
Oct 6
Next up is The Play, an Undum piece by Deirdre Kiai, an indie game developer. This is the first CYOA-style game I’ve played this Comp, and I must say that the Undum framework — at least the way she’s got it set up — is very, very nice-looking. The Play apparently deals with a down-on-her-luck theater director trying to put together a shoestring performance of “All’s Fair in Love, War, and Art”, with a cast and crew that are going to require something more than a standard rehearsal to make the performance a success. Sounds fun!
Spoilers after the break…
Let me be frank about Professor Frank. I can’t tell whether this is a troll entry or not. It’s not a good game. This is not a spoiler, because you will know it’s going to be not good from pretty much the millisecond you load it. The game also knows it’s not good, and references that fact during gameplay. Is it being self-deprecating, being wacky-silly, or taunting the player? I suspect the latter, but… I can’t tell for sure.
I’m beginning to see the point of Emily Short’s refusal to play Comp games that are not betatested. I’m trying to give every game a shot and give all authors the benefit of the doubt, but Professor Frank is putting that resolution to the test.
Spoilers (such as they are) are after the break…
It’s nearing Christmas, you’ve got last-minute guests, and you’re trying get get the heck out of the mall and get back home. Unfortunately, the exit is somewhere beyond the commercial kinderpurgatory known as…
Santaland.
This is the first game I’ve played so far by a known veteran — in this case, Jason Ermer, author of 2006′s Moon-Shaped, a game that I have not played but which did well in the Comp and is highly-rated, so I’m looking forward to this one.
Spoilers after the break!
Oct 5
97k, written in Inform 7. That’s a really small game. And just judging from the well-written introduction I’d guess that we’re dealing with someone who’s done this before. There’s a pretty sure hand on the narrative tiller, and yes! Checking the CREDITS indicates that “Lyman Clive Charles” is a pseudonym. It will be interesting to see if it’s possible to guess who the secret author really is.
The game starts you off in a hut — you’re a farmer who’s lost his axe and thinks that the piskies have run off with it. So off you go into the woods to recover it…
Spoilers after the break!
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a straight, male, single geek in possession of a good job, must be in want of a girlfriend.
It is also a truth universally acknowledged that Elfen Maidens in the popular MMORPG Realms of Realmland are exclusively played by men, so setting up a real-world date with one isn’t likely to lead to a satisfying relationship for the aforementioned straight geek.
Unfortunately, it looks like Jason Watts, hapless exemplar of geekdom — and your owner — is in for such a date unless you, his faithful and long-suffering computer, can do something about it.
***
So next up on the randomized list is The Elfen Maiden: A Comedy of Error Messages, by Adam Le Doux. Adam is apparently another IF newbie, although a Google search turns up some interesting indie game development that would indicate he’s not starting off from ground zero. The premise of Adam’s game sounds great, and the intro text does a pretty good job of letting us know what we’re in for: a lighthearted, reference-dropping farcical piece, focused on carrot-and-stick prodding of a hapless NPC. Can’t wait!
Spoilers after the break…
Oct 3
Wow! It’s IF season again, with 38 new games to get through in six short weeks. This is going to be tough! I’m going to try to get through all of them, and post reviews as I go. We’ll see how far I get. Assuming I’ve done it right, the spoilerish parts of the reviews should be below the cut.
So without ado, let’s randomize and see what we end up with…
OK, so in IF we now have both Curses!, the seminal Inform work by Graham Nelson, and also Cursed, an ADRIFT game by Australian newcomer Nick Rogers. Based on my cursory web search, the only IF work Nick has publicly released previously was an ADRIFT conversion of the classic Adventure, so welcome to the IF world, Nick!
CREDITS is implemented and shows numerous beta testers, which is a good sign. The game also has apparently been tested under both the standard ADRIFT Runner and SCARE, which is what I’m using. That’s a pretty good early indicator that this isn’t going to be a half-baked effort. The intro text is good in that it’s immediately trying to establish a character, less good in that it’s a bit overwrought for what a person condemned to die in an hour or so would likely be thinking.
Spoilers (some pretty major ones at the end) follow…
Sep 26
The Magicians — Lev Grossman
Rating: 5/5
It’s uncommon these days that I indulge in rereading novels. It’s far more usual that I have a stack of books on my nightstand (yes, I’m still a dead tree man — for now) and as soon as I finish one book it’s off to the next one. I bought The Magicians a little over a year ago, in the late summer of 2010. I’ve read it four times since then.
The Magicians is a character-driven, modern fantasy, but one that draws heavily from the well of nostalgia, particularly from the seven-volume Narnia series by C. S. Lewis. Themes, parallels and references to everything from Harry Potter to Dungeons and Dragons are all part of the gumbo, but it’s clearly the idea of Narnia that this book both revolves around and is powered by.
Quentin Coldwater is a superintelligent, very socially awkward Brooklyn high school senior — a “type A test killer”, in the book’s own words — who is the perpetual third wheel in his tiny circle of friends. He may very well be clinically depressed; at any rate, the world seems to him a grey and banal place, his retreat into fictional author Christopher Plover’s series of children’s novels set in the fantasy world of Fillory (Narnia with the serial numbers filed off) his habitual refuge. After an abortive attempt to take an entrance exam for Princeton he is somehow diverted to Brakebills, an exclusive private college in upstate New York, to sit their entrance examination.
Of course Quentin passes, matriculates, and joins the freshman class. Over his four years there, he learns almost unimaginable magical lore, makes terrifyingly costly mistakes, grows bonds of friendship strong enough to count as family ties, and, almost by accident, falls in love. But despite all the personal growth, the cosmic wonder and emotional fulfillment, he can’t quite fully feel it, or believe it. He’s still staring at the horizon, bound up in his fantasy novel idée fixe that one day, his adventure will begin and he’ll get to be the hero.
Naturally, adventure can always be sought. But a real adventure isn’t always like the fantasy novels. Even when it takes place in Fillory.
In The Magicians, Lev Grossman has deftly unraveled the themes and threads of the juvenile “secondary world” fantasy novels, and then rewoven them into a modern, witty, urban fantasy. All the trappings of sorcery and society are in place — we have a college of magic, caged demons, decadent dinner parties, a journey to Antarctica while shapeshifted into geese, enough wine consumption to kill a dragon from alcohol poisoning, soul-burning backlash from uncontrolled wizardry, and the Beast.
So the setting is superb. But the real genius here is the characterization. The story is told in tight third person around the character of Quentin, and Grossman is adept at bringing Quentin’s friends and fellow students at Brakebills to life through Quentin’s bright, incurably romantic, and self-deprecatingly bitter perspective. These are characters that easily survive the Eight Deadly Words — they’re vivid and three-dimensional, and you can’t help but sense that Grossman knows far more about them than you’re ever allowed to see.
Dialogue is crisp and real. These are, for the most part, college-age men and women, even if they’re also brilliant magicians. So a historical or linguistic discussion followed by a sequence of dick jokes is not unexpected. Nor would a long disquisition on the virtues of the malbec grape be out of place following a catty anecdote about some unfortunate sophomore girl. These jumps are natural, though. The conversation flows, babbles, and leaps, as often happens amongst close friends, and never once did someone say anything that seemed to me forced or out of character.
The latter section of the book, somewhat after graduation from Brakebills, has been criticized by some other reviewers. I tend to agree that the Fillorian sections seemed subtly off. I attribute this to a conscious stylistic choice by Mr. Grossman, but I can’t be sure about this. At any rate, in these sections the authorial lighting shifted just enough that I was able to see some cracks in the narrative, and although the book is still compelling and the wit and dialogue continue in full force, I just didn’t feel it was quite as masterful as the first sections of the novel. Grossman still pilots the narrative with a sure hand, though, and the conclusion is at the same time satisfying, true to Quentin’s character, and an excellent teaser for the sequel.
I think it would be pretty hard to find someone who is more centered in the demographic crosshairs of this novel than me. I’m old enough to get the cultural references, an omnivorous fantasy fan from way back, and I had enough personal and social characteristics in common with Quentin at the age he first appears that stepping into his character took virtually no effort at all. But I don’t think the appeal of this book is limited to fantasy-loving geeks. Everyone has once wished his or her life to be larger and more amazing than it really is. Everyone has dreamed of having the power to work wonders. Everyone has wanted the world to be a story and to be the hero of that story, even if we don’t let ourselves understand precisely what that might truly mean. If you’ve enjoyed Harry Potter or Narnia, have a taste for the bittersweet, and want to find out what happens when a romantic runs aground on the shores of reality, I can’t recommend The Magicians highly enough.
Sep 15
Developer: Hazardous Software
Rating: 4/5
Bottom Line: Achron is a groundbreaking RTS with unique and interesting gameplay mechanics and an extensive campaign, but the lack of modern RTS conveniences hampers the experience to a significant degree. I can highly recommend this as an experiment, and as an experience, but not as a finished, polished game worth the price.
Introduction and Conceptual Overview
Back in the mid ’90s, a friend of mine and I had a number of conversations about game design. A lot of ideas got thrown around, but I had two that I thought were particularly good. The first was for an RTS-style game where you recruited troops, but didn’t actually directly control them. They would roam around, controlled by their own AI tropisms, and find things to accomplish, gaining skill all the while.
Something very similar to what I had envisioned was produced a couple of years later: Majesty.
My second idea was for an RTS that involved time travel. The player would be able to call reinforcements to them from further up the timeline. This would provide a quick burst of fresh troops, but a matching amount of troops would have to be built and positioned properly in the future in order to jump back. Failure to do so would cause “paradox storms”, which would inflict increasing amounts of damage to the player based on the magnitude of the temporal imbalance. I particularly liked this idea because (I thought) it would provide interesting counters to rush strategies — you could focus on economy, block an initial rush with up-time reinforcements, and end up with a substantial production edge over a more militaristic player.
Although it doesn’t map exactly onto my simplistic original idea, an RTS game based around time travel mechanics has just been released: Achron. And it’s a fascinating, if flawed, game.
In Achron, you, as the leader of your forces, sit outside the timestream. Through the “timeline” user interface feature (easily the best-designed portion of the UI) you have access to time periods from about 4 minutes prior to the game’s “present” to 1 minute in the future. It’s very much like a minimap, but for time rather than space. At any given time you can click at a point on the timeline and the game will instantly snap to what was happening at that time. But that’s certainly not all. You can also issue commands to units in the past or future, at the cost of “chronoenergy”, a resource that is achronal (that is, uncoupled to in-game causality) and which regenerates at a fixed rate in real time.
The upshot is that you can not only observe the past, you can change it. If you fight a battle and lose, you could jump to a period of time before the battle began and redeploy your forces, or even disengage and move elsewhere. In multiplayer games, there could be up to 3 other players also manipulating the timestream in this way, so you can see that it could get very complicated very quickly. If I jump back a minute and tell my forces to take the left fork rather than the right fork, you might jump back a minute and a half and redeploy your forces to again cut me off. As long as the chronoenergy holds out, there’s no hard limits to what can be done.
The game handles the results of this time manipulation through an ingenious, if imperfect, mechanism: time waves. The game cannot instantly propagate changes you make throughout the entire timeframe of the game in real time; that would be computationally prohibitive. Instead the game uses periodic “waves” of causality that propagate up through the timestream at a fixed rate (about 3 times the normal rate that time passes). As a time wave advances up the timeline, the game modifies history according to any changes that have been put in play.
This leads to interesting effects when a time wave catches up to whenever you happen to be observing on the timeline — if someone has made a change to the past, your units may move, shift position, or disappear as a result of the changes. It can be very disconcerting to have the rug yanked out from under you and your forces defeated somewhere in the past.
The limit to all this temporal manipulation is the fact that the farther back in time you go, the more chronoenergy you use to issue commands. At some point in the past, the energy required to issue a command is greater than the maximum chronoenergy you can accumulate. That point is the threshold of the “unplayable past”. Points previous to this may be visible, but can’t be further changed.
But the time travel mechanic isn’t limited to issuing orders in the past and future. It’s also possible (with the correct technology) to “chronoport” units through time. Send a squad of tanks three minutes into the past, and you now have additional forces earlier in the game’s timeline.
Time travel inevitably leads to time travel paradoxes, and the game’s time wave mechanic provides a means, albeit imperfect, to resolve them. The “grandfather paradox”, where a unit travels back in time to before it was created and kills the building that produced it, is pretty trivial to set up in Achron. The way this plays out in the game is that successive time waves alternate between states of the paradox. On one pass, the building will be present with no unit. On the next, the unit will be present with no building. Whichever state obtains when the event falls off the “past end” of the timeline is locked in as the permanent state. As you can no doubt imagine, all sorts of weird abuses are possible with these temporal tools.
It’s worth pausing here a moment to, well, bask in the glow of the amazing time travel mechanics Achron implements. Mostly because when I get into the details of how the game is constructed, that glow will fade quickly. So let’s take a moment to acknowledge the genius design and tremendous work behind Achron‘s temporal mechanics….
Ready? OK, on with the review.
Single-Player
The single-player campaign is extensive, consisting of four parts: one for each race and one final campaign (that I haven’t gotten to yet). Most of the early levels are devoted to teaching you basic RTS skills, followed by the temporal mechanics. There is a fairly detailed, serviceable backstory, involving a coordinated alien assault against human colonies. You are alternately playing either one of the human commanders or his suspiciously-powerful AI, while political infighting, treachery, alien slavery, and the sordid history of the human military’s relationship with AI entities provides the dramatic motivation.
The missions move pretty slowly if you’re used to a standard RTS like Starcraft 2. In addition, the missions are a bit different than RTS standard. For one thing, they’re a lot more finicky; you must almost always keep certain units alive, which can be quite difficult at times. This isn’t as bad as it could be, however, as if they die you can simply jump back in time and change history to ensure they survive. If you fail repeatedly, however, the escalating cost in chronoenergy can make it more and more difficult to retry as you are forced farther back on the timeline, and losing due to an event receding into the unplayable past after multiple failures can be incredibly frustrating.
Multiplayer and Skirmish
I’ve played very little in the way of multiplayer — a couple of skirmish games. But I’ve seen enough to show me that multiplayer Achron is a different beast than the single-player campaign. First of all, you’re always playing against an opponent who can counter your temporal maneuvering, which is very fun. Several times I started firing on an enemy unit only to watch a time wave go by and the enemy unit disappear, presumably rerouted at an earlier point. Several interesting strategies are possible in Achron that are not possible in other RTS games, such as a “race-switch”: since your faction choice is selected in-game, it’s possible to jump back in time and select a different starting race, potentially throwing off early scouting by your opponent.
There are three races in Achron, roughly analogous to the three races of Starcraft. The humans have the best firepower, the Vecgir have integrated teleportation in their vehicles, and the Grekim have an inherent chronoportation ability (albeit one that costs so much that it’s not as useful as it sounds at first). Their tech trees are somewhat different, but the units each faction has, when boiled down to essentials, are very similar.
Unfortunately, the victory conditions can be somewhat of a trial. I don’t know if it’s the only way to win in a multiplayer game, but in my skirmishes you had to completely eliminate the enemy forces and production facilities at the earliest point on the timeline. When playing the computer, this meant that I had to kill everything I could find, and then sit around for five minutes while the timeline scrolled those deaths off into the past. I started messing around with chronoportation to kill time, until finally receiving the “game won!” notification. A human opponent would likely concede, but a griefer could tie you up for quite a bit longer in Achron than in something like Starcraft 2.
The AI itself doesn’t seem too strong, even for someone of my modest skills, but I’m not sure I’m playing at it’s highest level.
Production Values
This is where Achron‘s conceptual brilliance most obviously yields to muddled execution. Sound in the game is generally good — the effects are fine, the voice acting for some characters is a bit over-the-top but not annoyingly so, and the music is quite nice. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the graphics. Units are rather generic and hard to tell apart, animation is sparse at best leading to a poor sense of responsiveness from the controls, and the cutscenes, although they do their job in terms of communicating the setting and backstory, look really crude, even for an indie game. Maps are bland and drab, and do nothing in terms of establishing a sense of place. A complete reskin would be a great fan project, and would do wonders to improve the game.
This is, of course, an indie game, but one with a split personality. Achron costs $30, well above the standard amount for an indie title. Even though you get two game keys for this price, it’s still steep for an indie impulse purchase. On the other hand, it’s got a lot of content and obviously aspires to cover all the bases of a full-fledged, major-release RTS. By indie standards the production values are acceptable, but the price is high. By the standards of major releases, the price is great but the production values are really weak. Trying to straddle this line has resulted in a game that doesn’t really fit in either world, unfortunately.
One overall mitigating factor I should mention is that the game is designed with moddability in mind. Undoubtedly, over time, mods will be released to tune up the maps and models and give Achron the graphical polish it deserves.
Mechanics
Compared to a AAA+ title like Starcraft 2, it would be unrealistic to expect that Achron would be able to compete on fluidity of mechanics. But even given a lower level of expectation, there are a number of mechanical and interface features that Achron implements really badly.
Pathfinding and unit movement is deficient on a number of levels. Although I believe the pathfinding algorithm is close to where it needs to be, there are still some spectacular failures from time to time. Exacerbating the problem is the fact that units won’t shift to let allies through their position, which causes huge pile-ups that have to be resolved manually — potentially at a high cost in chronoenergy (hint: play Vecgir. Built-in teleportation means you can avoid most of these problems). Most maps don’t have very many obstacles, and teleportation is used by two of the three races as a key movement mechanic. Both of these factors help, but wrestling individual units to get them to walk across the map is the antithesis of fun.
The other major mechanical problem is in the implementation of group command and organization in different time periods. The game assumes that when you issue an order to a unit in the past, that you mean to add that order to the unit’s existing queue, leaving later orders intact. In a few cases this might be correct — if you jump back and tell your unit to cloak, for instance, you may still want it to move, fight, etc. like you will order it to later in the timeline. But in a large — very large — subset of cases, you want to completely override previous orders (such as when you decide that attack-moving into your enemy’s base wasn’t such a good idea after all). In such cases, you either have to issue a “cancel orders” command before issuing the new command, or watch your units follow your new order for a while only to reverse and start heading back the other way when the timeline catches up to the original order.
Achron‘s system is flexible, yes. It covers all situations, but it’s clunky and adds annoying micromanagement to what should be the most fun part of the game. Similarly, chronoportation has a number of limitations that make it hard to use properly. Normally giving a command to a group leader will cause subordinate units to follow along. This is not true with chronoportation, however. To chronoport, each unit must be explicitly given the order to chronoport. This is generally not a problem, unless you forget and just order your group leader to time travel, in which case you’ll watch him head off solo, leaving his bewildered subordinates behind. Once you fire off a chronoport (regardless of the number of units involved), the ‘porter has to recharge, which means you either need to wait to send the rest of the units, or back up time, clear the original order, select all the units, and re-chronoport (if you have enough chronoenergy to pull off the retroactive command). Again, it kludges up the fun part of the game. I’m sure the reason for doing this was to close off some weird paradoxical exploit, but it’s still frustrating.
Other, more standard mechanics are implemented well. There’s unit production queuing, order queuing, a form of hierarchical grouping (actually pretty sophisticated), hotkey control groups, and pretty much all the basic RTS interface conveniences are in place and function as expected.
Gameplay
Balance seems fairly straightforward, since the three factions are very similar in terms of the capability of their units, and I didn’t notice one side feeling particularly overpowered compared to another (although Vecgir teleportation, as mentioned earlier, is very handy). Generally technology research costs way more than production facilities or units. Unfortunately, I don’t have enough of a feel at present as to whether rush tactics are viable or if the game requires a more economic opening strategy. It did seem difficult to build up a quick rush, but that might just be my ignorance of proper strategy.
The real gameplay sophistication comes from time manipulation, of course. The Achron wiki reads like a cross between a quantum mechanics textbook and a medieval grimoire, with page after page of detailed analysis on the intricacies of various time travel strategies, including one ritual designed to permanently clone units that’s effectively a NOT logic gate capable of sending information to the past.
In general units tend to move pretty slowly on the map, although you can always put the game into fast-forward to make the units move more quickly. If you get ambushed when speeding through things, you can always jump backwards and take care of the problem. And really, for a game where you control time, it does seem like you spend a lot of time just waiting for time waves to propagate and the resultant stuff to happen. Again, this could just be my low skill level….
Conclusion
Although there are a lot of aspects of the game that fall short of perfection, Achron is absolutely unique in what it does. No other game has tried anything as ambitious as a 4-way real time strategy game where any and all of the players can make changes at any point in the game’s timestream. When you think about it, it’s just amazing that Dr. Hazard (the perfect name for a mad-scientist game developer) and his team managed to pull this off as well as they did.
With the benefit of hindsight, I wish they’d have scaled back the game, focusing on a more limited set of RTS features, and doubled down on the time travel. Achron‘s hook is time travel — they would have been better served to go all in. With a game that was more of an intriguing temporal puzzler, focused on using a few units rather than building bases, the concept could have more fully explored the ramifications of time travel, and not gotten bogged down in all the details of implementing a full RTS.
All that said, however, I really recommend you check out Achron. Hazardous Software deserves kudos and support for making such an amazingly groundbreaking game, and even if Achron is not the absolute best RTS ever produced, it’s still well worth checking out to see what it’s all about.
Sep 6
The blog has been out of action for about 10 months or so, give or take a post or two. Competing in IFComp 2010 took an enormous amount of effort, and I burned out hard after the competition was over. I let pretty much all of my creative activities drop, and am just starting to put the pieces back together. This blog was the last piece of creative expression to go and will be the first to come back, but I’m going to pace myself this time. I’ll start with a post a week, and if I can sustain that I’ll try to move back to two or more posts if I have sufficient content and time to write.
It’s not that I lack for material — far from it! A lot of things have happened in the intervening time. We’ve had wild and wooly changes with Katherine’s autism — most notably, she now has diagnoses for autism and Tourette’s Syndrome, and is on medication to help with the severe tics she has as well as the anxiety those tics create.
I’ve read tons of good books, seen a lot of good (and bad) movies, and have played some of the most cinematic, richly-produced, narratively advanced PC and console games I’ve ever seen, all of which I’d like to discuss and review at more length as the weeks go by.
On the personal front, I injured my knee (again) and recovered, got back playing racquetball regularly, and started lifting weights, which puts me in probably the best overall physical shape I’ve been in for years. The kids continue to grow and develop. Thomas continues doing well in school and competing in various sports (flag football is the newest addition). Jonathan has developed into a little charmer, talking constantly and grinning at you with his winning smile — at least when he’s not throwing a full-bore terrible twos tantrum. Robin continues to do the impossible on a daily basis, keeping the kids and Katherine’s staff organized and productive. When Jonathan goes to school and she’s ready to work, she should be able to step right into a CEO or COO position without blinking an eye.
And, of course, when October rolls around, it’s going to be IFComp season once again. I don’t have a game in the Comp this year, but that means I can write reviews while it’s in progress, and I’m planning to cover every entry this year. I can’t wait to see what returning veterans and new authors alike have for us this year!
Finally, I’ve also linked the blog to Facebook, to provide folks that prefer social networking an easier portal to see content here. I hope it works properly — let me know if something seems messed up. So watch this space in the coming weeks for more updates. We’ve got a lot of catching up to do!
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Achron