Ritalin Gamer
Gaming Commentary for the Short of Attention Span
An interesting article on Foreignpolicy.com, drawing parallels between the recent reforms and opening up of Myanmar and the path that Kim Jong Un could choose for his country. http://goo.gl/rj1u8
The short version: Myanmar has, over the past year or so, dramatically moved away from dictatorship and towards a military-managed democracy (think Singapore or Turkey in the 80s and 90s). They've changed the constitution, permitted relatively free elections, freed many political prisoners, and have recently signed a cease fire with one of the largest rebel groups. The US wisely snapped up this opportunity and now has greatly improved relations with what the article refers to as "the North Korea of Southeast Asia."
I’ve been playing a lot of Napoleon: Total War lately, and I have to say I’m pretty thrilled with the game. It has some serious flaws (oh God, the AI), but is on the whole a beautiful and satisfying strategy game, a cut above the previous entries in the Total War series (and better even than Shogun 2, in my opinion).
That’s got me thinking a lot about where the series could go from here. The problem is that Total War is running out of marketable eras to explore that would work in the confines of their engine, without rehashing previous titles. About the latest they could go in history would be the mid 19th century – after that, battles would be far too sprawling in scale to work in any engine that could be conceived in the near future. I’d desperately love to see Dixie: Total War, but even the American Civil War would be a bit of a stretch.
If they’re running out of room on the timeline, perhaps the series needs to expand outside of history. I’ve been mulling over what it would be like to have a fantasy version of Total War, and I have to say it sounds like a boatload of fun.
I think maybe the last post deserves a bit of explanation. I wanted to include this post with the original, but it was getting too long already.
What made that encounter with the bandits compelling was its unscripted, random nature. STALKER is a shooter designed around the open world of the Zone. For most of the game, you’re wandering about a living, breathing world, crisscrossed by enemies, NPCs, and animals going about their business. There are few scripted encounters. It is the anti-Call of Duty.
Scrapes and Skirmishes in Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl
Written by Matt RichardsonI was out exploring the Garbage, on my way to take care of a mission for Sidorovich. He’s a grubby bastard, but his money is good. He says he wants the road opened to a different part of the Zone, fine, seems simple enough.
It’s night and, without night-vision goggles, I couldn’t see shit. Even the trees and hills are vague shapes, so I have to rely on my hearing to make sure a boar or a pack of dogs don’t sneak up on me and take a bite out of my ass. I didn’t want to turn on my headlamp, in case someone with a gun spots the light.
Case in point, I spied a light bobbing ahead of me and off to the left a little, maybe 50 meters away. I crouched down behind a tree and trained my binoculars on the light. Ah, bandits. Maybe four or five, clustered together in a tight little military column, going to pass not 10 meters from my hiding spot. This is going to get interesting.
This week I picked up the old Panzer General II from GOG.com. It’s great retro fun, but the one element that bothers me is the victory conditions.
In PZGII, there are only two victory conditions – you must either take or hold all of the victory points on a map. In the case of attacking, you are given one of three grades – brilliant victory, victory, or tactical victory, depending on how long you take to capture those points. These conditions bother me for two closely related reasons. First, they are extremely oversimplified and easy to exploit. I’ve found myself several times being very “gamey” in my tactics, sacrificing all other considerations to make it to that last victory point. Once I captured the last point with a severely wounded infantry unit, down to its last point, with the French completely surrounding the hex on five other sides, poised for a massive counterattack. But it didn’t matter, because I instantly won as soon as I made it onto the magic hex.
Let’s take a break from the gaming talk to discuss the other half of this blog’s title.
I have a relationship with coffee that, in Facebook terms, would be labeled “It’s complicated.” On the one hand, I love the taste and aroma and coffee culture as a whole. On the other, it’s both the best and worst thing for my ADD.
Jagged Alliance 2 1.13 - Too Much is Never Enough
Written by Matt RichardsonGame design, like any other art form, can involve a lot of editing and slimming down. Budgets and timelines, of course, exert their pressure (often to the detriment of the final product). Designers, like writers, are often forced to go back and ‘kill their darlings’ in order to improve the overall experience. Modding and expansion packs or DLC are often used as a chance to play around without these constraints. This freedom can be a double-edged sword.
Three weeks ago, I ran across a great example of how to (and how not to) play around with this concept when I downloaded the fan-made “1.13” patch for Jagged Alliance 2.
The crux of good strategy is choice. Other genres can get by training players on a small set of repeatable skills until those responses become reflex, but strategy has to work differently. Strategy is not about reflexes, but about deliberately choosing between a set of different solutions to a tactical problem. The second Dawn of War game provides a clear and fun example of how to integrate strategic choice into a fast paced and intuitive game.
Just . . . one . . . more . . . turn . . .
Written by Matt RichardsonCivilization V is absorbing a frightful amount of my leisure time right now, so I'll be writing a lot about it.
Everyone knows that the Civilization series is incredibly addictive and can suck up a whole day if you let it. Players love sharing war stories of the times they played until 6 am and how they've been afflicted with the dreaded "One . . . more . . . turn . . ." syndrome. I want to share a few thoughts about the desire for "just one more turn" and how the game mechanics insidiously reinforce it.
It's really simple. Once you've completed every action for a turn (moved all your units, built everything, etc), that should be a great time to say "OK, I'm done" and leave the game. Unfortunately, Civ doesn't let you off that easily.
Hello everyone and welcome to RitalinGamer.com. My name is Matt and I am the titular Ritalin Gamer.
This will just be a little introduction to this blog and what I intend to do with it.