2011 was a lively year for computer gaming, with several brilliant surprises. Multiple roguelike games saw relative commercial success: The Binding of Isaac, Dungeons of Dreadmor, and Realm of the Mad God. Bioware managed to disappoint with Dragon Age II, while announcing Mass Effect 3 will have a few more RPG elements than it's immediate predecessor. But there are two surprises in particular I want to talk about here. Two things I honestly though I would die without seeing: a good Deus Ex sequel, and Duke Nukem Forever.
Sunday, December 25, 2011
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
Enviro-Bear 2000
I maintain an eagle-like vigilance over all of PC gaming, as a matter of principle, so that no game might slip my notice unappraised. Why do I not extend this watchfulness for console games, you might ask? Perhaps you ask this while expelling half-chewed Chex Mix across the room in fanboy rage while you heap ill-formed profanities upon my name and call into question my parents' virtue. Well you unwashed console peasant, it is because PC is, was, and always will be home to the greatest innovation and uniqueness in video games. Case in point? Enviro-Bear 2000.
Sunday, November 6, 2011
Thunderstone!
I remember when I was, oh, about 11 or 12, my dad bought me a huge binder of Magic: the Gathering cards. I held it with a strange reverence, this giant block of unspeakably rare and valuable pieces of a brilliant game. What made Magic so brilliant, apart from it's elegant, crisp rules, was that playing the game was only really half of the game; the other half was DECK BUILDING. Assembling my 60-card machine, from which I would draw my cards and make a giant mess of it. Seriously, I was trash at playing Magic; I couldn't even manage when I made a card-for-card remake of a champion deck. But the deck building, that's what enthralled me.
Flash forward to the futuristic gaming-paradise of 2011 and deck building has become a genre in it's own right. What happens when Magic's meta game gets its "meta" appendix removed, the fantasy gets more grimdark, and all of a sudden it's a race to see who can stop the end of the world? Thunderstone!
Flash forward to the futuristic gaming-paradise of 2011 and deck building has become a genre in it's own right. What happens when Magic's meta game gets its "meta" appendix removed, the fantasy gets more grimdark, and all of a sudden it's a race to see who can stop the end of the world? Thunderstone!
Monday, October 31, 2011
Stories
People tell stories. This is because our brains are too big for our eyes. We evolved big brains because having smarts let us survive, and the pre-historic ladies found survival very sexy. Our brains got so big, we could start seeing things without using our eyes: things that did not exist at all. These things were not real, but they were like the things that are real, and we can talk about them as if they were real. Today we call this imagination, and we evolved to do this because it let us do neat things. We could draw maps, give instructions, use words, and tell stories.
Stories are useful, just like maps, because stories grab our attention better than bare truths. "If you punch a hippo, the hippo might eat you" just doesn't stick in your head the way "Rich punched a hippo and it ripped his fucking head off. His wife cried for a week straight, and his only son, still a boy, had the strength to dig only a shallow grave. Wind blew the dirt right off." You don't even care if there ever was a Rich, or if you knew him personally; you just know not to fuck with a hippo. Not saying that's good, (in a lot of ways it isn't) but that's how people are wired up. Narratives just spark something in us.
Now, the old stories, those primal stories, were never told the same way twice. Names changed, details were altered with every telling, with every audience. Good storytellers would change the story to fit the audience, even change the ending or the plot, sometimes at the explicit word of an audience member. As we became sophisticated, we wrote the stories down. Made them permanent. Unmutable. Inscriptions, which became scrolls. Scrolls then became books. Now we have an explosion of media: printed books, movies, songs, TV shows, magazines, all preserved for eternity. But what happened to the old stories? The changeable ephemeral stories? Games.
Games, whether they be computer games, board games, or just rock, paper, scissors, are story-creating engines. We are the audience and protagonists simultaneously, and they are the storyteller; each game is a story, but one that never goes the same way twice. The Street Fighter match where you, with a pixel of life left, come back from the brink of death to experience victory? Odyssey. The game-deciding armor save in Warhammer 40,000, to see if you finally killed your enemy's most valuable unit? Rear Window. The gut-wrenching feeling when you realize you and your crewmen are doomed in Space Alert? All Quiet On the Western Front.
That's gaming. The story that is never the same. That's why I love it, and that's why I wrote about it.
Stories are useful, just like maps, because stories grab our attention better than bare truths. "If you punch a hippo, the hippo might eat you" just doesn't stick in your head the way "Rich punched a hippo and it ripped his fucking head off. His wife cried for a week straight, and his only son, still a boy, had the strength to dig only a shallow grave. Wind blew the dirt right off." You don't even care if there ever was a Rich, or if you knew him personally; you just know not to fuck with a hippo. Not saying that's good, (in a lot of ways it isn't) but that's how people are wired up. Narratives just spark something in us.
Now, the old stories, those primal stories, were never told the same way twice. Names changed, details were altered with every telling, with every audience. Good storytellers would change the story to fit the audience, even change the ending or the plot, sometimes at the explicit word of an audience member. As we became sophisticated, we wrote the stories down. Made them permanent. Unmutable. Inscriptions, which became scrolls. Scrolls then became books. Now we have an explosion of media: printed books, movies, songs, TV shows, magazines, all preserved for eternity. But what happened to the old stories? The changeable ephemeral stories? Games.
Games, whether they be computer games, board games, or just rock, paper, scissors, are story-creating engines. We are the audience and protagonists simultaneously, and they are the storyteller; each game is a story, but one that never goes the same way twice. The Street Fighter match where you, with a pixel of life left, come back from the brink of death to experience victory? Odyssey. The game-deciding armor save in Warhammer 40,000, to see if you finally killed your enemy's most valuable unit? Rear Window. The gut-wrenching feeling when you realize you and your crewmen are doomed in Space Alert? All Quiet On the Western Front.
That's gaming. The story that is never the same. That's why I love it, and that's why I wrote about it.
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