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In Space No One Can Hear You “Like”

July 18, 2013September 1, 2022 Brandon 2 Comments

This probably makes me sound old, but I don’t get Facebook. The entire notion of using a publicly available software platform to reconnect with people I have made no effort to contact in the past two decades doesn’t make much sense to me. Sure, I’m on it, who isn’t, but I don’t use it to do more than occasionally chat with old fraternity brothers and other folks here and there. Let me put it this way, my sister is on Facebook and I had no idea up until I got an email reminding me about her birthday.

After playing Redshirt, the upcoming social sim in space from one woman developer shop The Tiniest Shark, I understand Facebook. I have seen the face of evil and I “Liked” it.

Redshirt is a social media/career climbing sim in which you take the place of a lowly transporter tube maintenance worker who spends as much time on Spacebook, the future’s version of Facebook, as you do cleaning up after errant transporter tube mishaps. Frankly, I don’t know which is worse, the fact that there regularly are transporter tube mishaps or that we still have Facebook thousands of years into the future. The goal of the game is simple, get as many people on Spacebook to like you as much as possible while at the same time climb the career ladder to the ultimate position of assistant to the commander of the space station. Oh, there’s also a strong possibility that some major calamity is going to befall the station.

I may not spend a lot of time on Facebook, but I’ve spent enough time on it to recognize how well Spacebook mimics the banal mixture of friend shout-outs, pithy inspirational quotes and “here’s what I’m doing every second” updates that permeate most people’s Facebook feeds. Every time you start up a new game an entire space station of different aliens is randomly generated, and all of these aliens have different interests. They’re all also already carved up into different social circles. You’re no different and after selecting an alien race, name and gender (if applicable) you’ll have your own circle of friends.

Every day you have a certain number of actions you can spend to raise your social standings. You can Like comments, create group events, engage in simulated holo-events to raise your statistics in various areas of interest as well as spend quiet time alone reading a book or wandering the halls in a desperate attempt to meet up with other people. On weekdays you go to work, with your job performance related to how happy and healthy you are. On weekends you have more free time and more actions to try and get everyone in the universe to love you. Occasionally you go on away missions. They rarely end well for the other members of your party.

Not being a Facebook user, I’ll admit that I got off to a rough start. I organized events without seeing if the people I was inviting were interested in the event or Spacebook friends with me. They weren’t, on both counts, and their rejection stung deeply. My happiness stat plummeted as those I invited rejected me and those I didn’t invite got pissed about being rejected. As a result of lowered happiness my focus at work wavered and I started screwing up my job causing my coworkers to hate me which in turn added to my unhappiness. I also wasn’t eating which made me unhealthy. In a brilliant move, the game makes you eat every day, rather than handle it automatically, forcing you to tear yourself away from your Spacebook feed to tend to basic bodily functions. Sadly, I did not do so every day and I paid the price for it.

It’s a vicious cycle and it underscores the truth of social media platforms, namely that social media isn’t about connecting with people, it’s about validation. People care about having friends so that they have the highest possible chance of having something they said or wrote commented on in a positive manner. There’s a radio station here in Atlanta that has a commercial talking about how your day was great because three people ReTweeted something you said and the same combination of ego validation and happiness is on full display here. If people like you, you’re happy. If they don’t, you’re not. Eventually I was able to turn my shame spiral around and got some friends and started doing well enough at work to get a new job with an entirely new circle of friends. I also bought a robocat which gave me a daily boost of happiness, no doubt via LOLrobocat pictures.

As you go about your social climbing you’ll have three tasks at a time to complete. Maybe it’s to get a new job, maybe it’s to become friends with someone. One I had was to get mentioned by a certain alien. I wasn’t friends with him so I had to see who he was friends with to see if maybe there was an in there. No dice, so I started liking his responses in hopes that I could get a high enough standing with him to get him to accept a friend request. If I could get him on my friends list, I could invite him to an event, one specifically chosen with his likes in mind, likes I was able to see via his profile on Spacebook. Once I had him in an event, getting a mention was all but wrapped up.

As I was working through the social hoops to make this happen it struck me just how goddamned creepy the whole thing was. I mean, I was basically cyber-stalking this dude, trying to become friends with him not out of a genuine need to connect with another alien, or because we shared interests but because I wanted him talking about me. It also underscored how easy it is for people on these sites who aren’t friends with you to see who you know and don’t know and what you like and don’t like. Sure, the real Facebook has privacy settings, but from what I’ve seen of Facebook, either people don’t know about them or don’t care.

As my social climbing continued the game took an unfortunate turn and crashed on me (it’s an alpha so this isn’t entirely unexpected) and while I was irritated that I had lost so much social progress, I was ultimate relieved because once I started playing this thing I couldn’t stop. When I told my wife about the game she said that it didn’t sound like something I’d like and I didn’t think I’d be as interested as I was, but I was hooked. I had to keep checking to see what people were saying about me, I had to try and figure out who I could get to go to dinner with me, who I could get to add me to their friends list, how I could become more interesting to get people to like me.

The game is set to release on PC, and MAC initially with an iPad release to follow. I think I’d be best served by the iPad version as being able to pop in throughout the day and sim a few days of actions is preferable to a multi-hour session of social climbing and impending doom hinted at by the game’s story. Also, I can’t handle rejection in such large doses.

Redshirt will be released in the coming months but in the meantime you can check out the game’s site, as well Redshirt’s Facebook page, irony be damned.

The Occult Chronicles Preview

July 5, 2013September 1, 2022 Matt Thrower 3 Comments

Haunted house type horror board games like Mansions of Madness and Betrayal at House on the Hill tend to suffer from one overriding problem which is that they’re pulled in all sorts of different directions by their requirements. How do you create a game that’s full of both mystery and well-informed decisions? How do you give it variety and replayability with limited tile stock and table space? How do you make it competitive and exciting without giving one player too much power?

The answer, obviously, is to make it into a computer game instead, and have the CPU handle all the fiddly bits for you. Enter upcoming game The Occult Chronicles, currently available to purchase as a playable beta-test. But in a twist worthy of the dark and disgusting gods that inspired the game, developer Cryptic Comet (also responsible for indie strategy titles Armageddon Empires and Solis Infernum) has seen fit to breed in elements of a Rogue-like as well.

In some respects the result is no more than what you might expect. After creating a character with a points-based system and choosing from a number of loose scenario templates, you’re unleashed into a large mansion populated which in turn unleashes eldritch horrors upon you. As you’d expect from a title inspired by Rogue and board games, it’s a turn based affair where you move from room to room on a geometric grid, trying to reach the bottom cellar of the house and defeat the ancient evil lurking therein.

That simple framework could have been a disaster. It could have been a re-run of the most laughable elements of ZAngband where your overpowered paladin squared up against Cthulhu, triumphed and looted gold pieces from his stinking cephalopod remains. It isn’t a disaster. It’s a game where you’ll gnaw frantically at tender fingernails as you wait to die horribly for merely trying to open a door.

A big part of what makes it work is the writing and presentation which are absolutely top-drawer. The game has a wonderfully self-aware line in dry parodies of Lovecraft and other popular horror tropes, and balances perfectly between the yawning pits of becoming ludicrous and becoming comedy. There’s a lot of text, and you’ll learn to read almost all of it, because it’s excellent.

The words are well supported with comic-strip style pictures which walk a similarly fine line between humour and horror. And the designer has crammed in not just every Lovecraft reference you can imagine, but sucked in everything from the realms of literary and televisual terror too. I spotted sly and often amusing homages to a number of popular horror memes, and I probably missed many more.

There are an astonishing number of different things to stumble over in the dark, which translates as an astonishing number of different ways to die. I’ve been killed by doors, ghostly ballerinas, zombies, rats, fire demons and talking pediments. But together with the random mansion layout and choice of scenarios, it helps ensure that no two games are the same.

Mechanically, it’s currently a mixed bag although I suspect that’s more down to bad documentation and minor usability niggles than it is to actual problems with the system. Most challenges are resolved with a trick-taking game using, slightly predictably, tarot cards. The number of cards in your hand, the number of tricks you can attempt to take and the number you need to win are determined by your stats and what you’re trying to do.

You get choices. So, if some nightmare denizen of the outer planes comes slithering in to view you might be given a choice to fight it with sorcery or flee. Mentally capable characters will get more promising numbers for the former, while dexterous ones will have an easier time with the latter. But success is never guaranteed, and as the available tricks tick down without a win the sense of tension that builds up is palpable.

The problems start right afterwards. Following a challenge you pick a number of cards to find out how good or bad the results are, depending on if you won or lost. This seems a slightly pointless extravagance, eating up play time for no real benefit.

You can earn experience tokens when you win, and spend them on improving your character, but they’re not tracked on the central screen and it’s easy to forget about the ones you’ve collected. Likewise with the item and trait cards you character can start with or acquire: you need to frequently check your personnel file on a separate screen to properly track your character.

Various other tabs and screens hold other important pieces of information like traits, heroic feats and “bones” (dice). This is where the current documentation and the game interface get confusing. It’s not always clear when and how to use these things. Many of them require dice rolls, but you have to have the right kind of dice before you can roll. It’s all as mysterious as the plot of the average horror novel.

In that respect I guess it’s not that different to a lot of Roguelike games, but it seems a little basic by modern standards. You can’t even use the arrow keys to move: instead they scroll the map and you have to click around like a lumbering elephant.

This is, remember, a beta, so there’s plenty of time to sort some of this stuff out before the final product goes live. And I hope some of it does get smoothed over, because playing this you really get a sense of how a haunted house game really ought to be done, and why none of the current crop of board game contenders have never quite lived up to the billing.

For starters, it’s a Roguelike, and that means permanent death, which is far more terrifying in and of itself than any plastic miniature of a tentacled horror from outer space. The huge variety and random room tiles means each game is a true mystery and creates believable layouts without heavy-handed preparation. Your character can gain and track the progress of quests as you creep through the house, without shuffling new cards into decks or worrying about the right item being in the right place.

Speaking of quests, they’re mere sideshows to the main event, Banishing Elder Gods Back From Whence They Came. But as if the game wasn’t mean enough already, you can’t just build up your character and plunge down. Instead there’s a timer ticking down on each and every move. Every so often these trips a story event based on your choice of scenario which adds a nice sense of metagame to the proceedings. But tick off too many and time runs out, ending your game in ignominious defeat.

The Occult Chronicles suffers from some very rough edges at the moment, but it’s an inventive and addictive take on an old genre, which has the potential to please board and video gamers alike. If you’re interested, get in there now and starting sending feedback to help the developer sandpaper down the splintery bits

Rayman Legends Demo Impressions

December 17, 2012August 26, 2022 Michael Barnes 8 Comments

Last night, I had my first “wow” experience with Nintendo’s new Wii U console. It wasn’t with any of the late-to-the-party ports or even a first-party offering. It was with the demo for Ubisoft’s upcoming Rayman Legends, now available for download. It’s just three levels, but it’s one of the most exciting, refreshing, and innovative gaming experiences I’ve had all year. It’s heartfelt, beautiful, and genuinely whimsical in a way that no cheapjack indie clone coasting along on fake 8-bit chic or even Nintendo’s own nostalgic Super Mario Bros. Wii U is. It’s joyful, full of love for video gaming and without a trace of the kinds of commercial cynicism or insulting lowest-common-denominator condescension that have become endemic in the industry.

It’s a 2D platformer with 3D elements, much like last year’s terrific Rayman Origins. Ancel’s trademark comics style is rendered in an all-new engine, and it looks amazing in 60FPS, native 1080P. Maybe it’s just the shock of the new talking, but I think it looks better than just about anything on either the 360 or PS3. Gameplay is classic platforming, at its root not really all that far removed from the original Rayman- or the original Super Mario Bros. for that matter.

But the key here is that Rayman Legends feels like a very now, very current game. This is the platformer of today. It’s not an aw-shucks genuflection to the good old days. This is a game designed with innovation in mind, drawing on recent game design elements to create a new- and original experience that really, really should have been a Wii U launch title. I haven’t seen anything yet that makes a better case for the console.

Rather than trotting out Mario in another animal costume, Rayman Legends gives platformer fans something new by bringing in brilliant use of recent concepts such as touchscreen gameplay and motion control. There are elements of auto-runners like Canabalt. There are hints of IOS games like Cut the Rope. And in one astonishing segment, “Castle Rock”, the rolling lane of a game like Rock Band or Guitar Hero is subversively hidden in the rhythm-based level design. The result is a glorious symphony of sound, vision, and movement. I don’t think I’ve played any video game this year or even in the past few years that felt so vibrant, alive, and crackling with celebratory energy.

I’m excited about this game because it feels like something new yet it remains a firm example of a classic but somewhat old fashioned video game genre. Most refreshingly, there isn’t a lick of tiresome irony, bullshit hipster intellectualism, or even postmodern revisionism. I’m not going to describe anything that goes on in it, or any of the many happy surprises that happen in just the three levels of this demo. You need to discover those for yourself. From what I understand, the demo is on the in-store display kiosks and I can’t recommend enough that you go check it out if you don’t have a Wii U.

Dishonored- First Impressions of Dunwall

October 10, 2012July 29, 2022 Michael Barnes 11 Comments

If you’re like anything like I am, with each passing year you think “it sure would be nice if someone would develop adventure-based FPS games again like they did in the late 1990s and early 2000s.” I’m thinking great games like Thief, System Shock 2, and No One Lives Forever- classic titles that were much more than just rote shooters despite the behind-the-eyes perspective. These were games that had a sense of focused narrative occurring in meticulous, handcrafted settings paired with a great deal of player agency, allowing for a specific story to be told with the detail filled in by core gameplay. Games like this are rare, but when we get a really great one it turns out to be a Bioshock. Or even a Metro 2033.

With this is in mind and with only a couple of hours of play to back up my claim, I’m already prepared to induct Dishonored into this esteemed fraternity of Really Great Narrative FPS Games.

It’s been quite a while since I’ve played a big budget, high profile game that really floored me and made me feel like I was playing the next great video game. The long spring and summer drought this year very nearly broke my spirit. I was beginning to think this generation didn’t have another truly great game left in it, especially not one with a new IP and without a 3 or a 4 appended to the title.

But from the very beginning of Dishonored, which sets up a simple plot without Michael Bay-class cutscenes, QTEs, or a bunch of bombastic AAA hullaballoo, I could feel that not-familiar-enough feeling of falling in love with a game and in particular its visuals, informed largely by a painterly illustration style evocative of artists like Maxfield Parrish. Then there are the slightly grotesque, almost caricature-like faces that evoke European comic artists. And there are moments both grand and subtle even in the first 20 minutes of the game that develop Dunwall as a new game setting to be reckoned with- the sad majesty of a whale suspended in one of this world’s whaling vessels, the bits of ephemera scattered across a desk. The blubberpunk (don’t call it steampunk, please) fashion and architecture of an impossible world.

As for the gameplay, I was shocked that there weren’t the usual array of gauges and visual indicators that most stealth games depend on. At least for the first couple of segments of the game, which include a great prison breakout, you’ve got to rely on instinct and observation to stay unnoticed rather than on line of sight cones, super-camouflage, or a magic color-changing gem. It’s only later on that you unlock a power that gives you some of these observational abilities.

I made it out of the jail without killing anybody. There were moments of great tension, of feeling like a total badass because I dipped between columns right under the noses of two guards. A couple of times I failed and wound up in combat, which is pretty tough on the Hard setting. Checkpoints are generous. The game wants you to try different things to see what works, it doesn’t want you to get frustrated by experimentation.

There were some clever moments as well, like throwing a dead body to lure rats away from a door-controlling crank. There was a blast of excitement as I blew open the doors, alerted the guards, and made a break for the sewers. I wound up escorted by a boatman to a pub run by loyalists opposed to the attempted coup d’etat that sets the story into motion. There I met the game’s crafter, who made me that wicked metal skull mask and sold me some sleep bolts for the crossbow. I’m playing nonlethal as far as I can.

Then, sleep. In dreams I meet the Outsider, who gives me the Blink ability, a short range teleport that is a master assassin’s dream. He also gives me a magic heart, that whispers secrets and beats feverishly in the presence of upgrade-granting runes. In the real world, it’s 4am and I’ve really got to go to bed. But I haven’t even thrown rats at anybody yet!

I can’t wait to play this game again tonight, and even though I hear that it’s short I think it’s a game that I can imagine revisiting on the hardest difficulty. It’s such a confident, assured design that pretty much says “fuck you” to many of the things the second half of this console generation has done so wrong. There is no bullshit multiplayer with multiple Corvos running around trying to headshot each other with a crossbow. There is no bullshit co-op, where Corvo’s bro has to be boosted up to a fire escape or revived when he’s down. There is just you, this rich setting, this brilliant art design, and this devotion to classic gameplay. No blubber. This is a focused game that does something very specific and it doesn’t burden you down with silly filler or needless bulletpoints to appease stakeholders.

Most importantly, these guys knew better than to just mimic the successes of Call of Duty, Gears of War, and other AAA titans. They drank from a deeper, older well of inspiration. We are blessed that they chose to do so.

Fingers crossed that the remainder is as awesome as the first night.

Battle Beyond Space Out Now, You Should Buy It

September 17, 2012July 19, 2022 Michael Barnes 5 Comments

Some six or seven years ago, my good friend (and Christ look-a-like) Frank Branham showed me a prototype for a board game that he designed called Battle Beyond Space. It was inspired by The Last Starfighter and Starcrash, and it had bits salvaged from the old TSR Buck Rogers game as well as lava rock asteroids. The game was awesome, a fun space shoot ’em up with a cool squadron movement mechanic and plenty of total mayhem. We’ve played it off and on over the years, and now it’s finally been released to the general public by none other than Z-Man Games. I tell ya, that Zev Shlasinger is a man of impeccable taste. Looks like the discounters are selling it for about $32.

It’s a great beer-and-pretzels style dogfight game and the production looks outstanding- the illustrations are right on the money in terms of capturing the tone and atmosphere of it. Also, my name is in the thanks section…printed in Comic Sans. It’s the only Comic Sans in the whole game. I really should demand a complementary copy as reparations.

Anyway, I am totally shilling for this game and for my pal. Don’t be like old Bill Abner, who failed to buy a copy at Gen Con. Right after meeting Frank. How rude!