Manuals, as I’ve mentioned before, have been in steep decline for many years.  Now, as manuals generally serve the purpose to telling the player how to play the game, it’s pretty clear that something needed to take their place.  By and large, the in-game tutorial has stepped up to the plate to fill this void.

In-game tutorials have taken many forms in my experience – some are as plain as a big ol’ “Tutorial” button ala Civilization IV, where a guide takes you step by step through the various concepts you need to understand to play the game.  Some take the form of introductory levels that aren’t called tutorials per se, but introduce game concepts one step at a time, such as in the Advance Wars series.  Sometimes the tutorials are even more ingrained in the game, popping up only when needed to introduce a new mechanic to the player (Shadow Complex takes this approach).

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Bioshock 2’s lead level designer JP LeBreton, in conjunction with his release of Arcadia Demake, takes a fascinating look at how the design of Doom contrasts with more modern design of FPSes.

When you play Doom today, it doesn’t feel much like you’re controlling a human or moving through real spaces. Try this though: press the TAB key, type IDDT twice and pretend you’re playing Geometry Wars, and the moving triangles are your enemies. This is what Doom’s designers were working from in 1993 – back then, the idea of a first person shooter was barely established, and their closest models for many mechanics were from 2D shooters like Robotron, Berserk and Tempest. This approach echoes throughout Doom’s design.

I’d suggest giving it a read.

“Go to Hell.”

I’ll say one thing for EA, they’ve got a lot of balls to make this game.  Balls to make it, balls to put as much effort into the advertising as they did, and balls to keep the game as uncensored from the original “vision” as possible.  They’ve got balls for miles.  When I saw the initial press for Dante’s Inferno, all I could think was that it was a God of War clone, and that this was a completely absurd amount of pre-marketing for a coming game.  Press kits with free money to reviewers, evil looking letters, and paraphernalia in the mail… EA was going all out on this one.  Unfortunately, this made my “danger sense” kick in; an old vestige from being disappointed by one summer “blockbuster” movie after another.

If the game has this much advertising behind it, it’s almost guaranteed not to be good.

So does Dante’s Inferno live up to the hype?  Or is it another overhyped game that will end up gathering dust on the back of your gaming shelf? 

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Mention the concept of “grinding” in a room full of gamers, and you are liable to get one of two reactions: either some titters of excitement, or a cacophonous mix of sighs and groans.  There are, in my experience, very few people who respond to the idea of the grind with simple ambivalence.

Grinding, in traditional gaming terms, stems from RPGs where the player has to fight battle after battle in order to gain experience and level up before being able to proceed further in the game (think of the original Final Fantasy and the huge jump in difficulty when moving from one area into the next). In more general terms, grinding is any time the player engages in a repetitive activity for the purpose of gaining some sort of reward (think brewing hundreds of potions in Oblivion to become a better alchemist). 

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Over the past few weeks, I’ve been on a throwback gaming binge. After finishing up The Ur-Quan Masters, I found the entire X-Com series on sale on Steam for a mere $2, which was impossible to pass up.  The original X-Com has always been near the top of my list of favorite games of all time, and being able to get the whole series in an easily-playable format was a golden opportunity.  In fact, I was so happy about it, I decided to make a gift of it to a friend who had never played any of them, explaining that it was vitally important that he play the original right away.

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After wrapping up with A Boy and His Blob, and deciding that I’d had just about enough of Dragon Age, I found myself in a bit of a game lull for the past few weeks.  My DS still had a stack of games waiting to be played from over the holidays, but my PC and consoles were sitting relatively dry.  Torchlight was still there for some time-wasting, but I was looking for something a little meatier.

And so, as I sat staring at my desktop, trying to decide what to do, I spotted a long forgotten icon tucked away in the corner: The Ur-Quan Masters.

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For the past few months, fellow writer Chris and I have been boldly taking our first steps towards actually producing our own honest-to-goodness video game.  This is a long road that began for us back in college, with many projects started, and all ending the same way: lost to the mists of time.

This time, however, was different.  Thanks to Chris’s embracing and rapid comprehension of Flixel, as well as some less lofty goals for our first project (no 3d survival horror time travel games right off the bat…), we’ve actually been able to see an entire project through to (almost) completion.

So, with that, I humbly offer Where We Remain for your consideration.  To quote Chris:

It’s a mostly-adventure, a-little-action top-down game written in Flixel. It’s closest in design to Adventure for the 2600, but it’s not a remake or anything like that. The island is quasi-procedurally generated each time you play — the algorithm isn’t that sophisticated, but there’s more to it than just a random shuffle.

Give it a try, and I certainly hope you enjoy it!

Darksiders wasn’t the game I expected it to be.

Admittedly, I didn’t pay too much attention to this game when it was originally making the press rounds.  I had initially dismissed it as another game featuring beefy dudes swinging swords and firing guns at other beefy dudes; a game that I had played numerous times before.  As the game neared release, however, I learned that the lion’s share of the writing and art had been helmed by Joe Madureira, who had written one of my favorite comics from my high school years, Battle Chasers.  A comic that featured….beefy dudes swinging swords and shooting guns at other beefy dudes.

What I expected was a straight up action game, and what I got was an adventure game with a lot of elements borrowed heavily from The Legend of Zelda.  This is not a bad thing.

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Charming is not a word that usually enters my vocabulary in the milieu of discussing games, being a word better served in terms of describing handsome rogues and quiet country inns. Yet, as I played through A Boy and His Blob for the Nintendo Wii over the last several weeks, that was the word that I found popping into my head more than any other.

The original Boy and his Blob, back on the NES, was not a game I personally played all that much. I didn’t own it, and none of my friends owned it, and this was prior to me discovering the joys of renting games from the local video store. I did, however, have a strong image of the game in my head for an entirely different reason: Nintendo Power. The very first issue of Nintendo Power I received had a large article about the game, including sweeping maps of the early levels. I remember being enthralled with the artwork going over the different flavors of jelly bean and what the blob would turn into when fed them, and I remember the images of the first level, with it’s city skyline at night glowing in the background as the boy and his friend set out on their grand adventure.

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Andrew Doull over at ASCII Dreams, a developer of roguelikes, spurs an interesting discussion revolving around the decision to implement monster surrender in their upcoming games.

Now this AI could also be used to allow a monster to surrender to you if you have sufficiently injured it. Unfortunately, this is directly contrary to a lot of the design and game play for a roguelike – you basically want to be able to kill stuff – so I’m interested in whether having monsters surrender could ever be an interesting choice. Do you know of any games where the surrender mechanic does work successfully?

As you know I am a fan of choice in games, I can honestly say that this intrigues me.  I can’t think of a single game I’ve played that has allowed me to accept the surrender of any enemy (outside of a plot-driven sequence), and it’s interesting to imagine how it would work in practice. How would gamers react when suddenly given an option beyond the simple kill or be killed we’ve almost always known?