This past weekend, my wife and I packed up all of our belongings into a series of increasingly heavy boxes, paid some dudes to carry it all down the four flights of stairs from our current apartment and load it into a truck, and unload it all into our new home.  As I sat on the floor of our new living room, surrounded by half-unpacked boxes, trying to figure out where to a particular lamp was, I looked around at the strange new walls that surrounded me and realized, “This is my home now.”

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Aquifers are one of those things that, in general, I have not had to think about much as a gamer.  Whether this is a shortcoming of game design or a personal failing, I am not entirely sure.  What I have learned about them recently, though, is that unless you know what you’re doing, you don’t want to fuck with them.

I was introduced to Dwarf Fortress a little over a month ago, and in the weeks that followed, I have sunk an awful lot of time into the consideration of aquifers, irrigation control, and the proper gutting and boning of fish.

For those of you unfamiliar, Dwarf Fortress, by Bay 12 Games, is a free game in which you take control of a brave party of dwarf settlers, set out into the wilderness to carve a new home from the very earth itself.  As you will soon see, that simple explanation belies the incredibly complexity of this game.

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Today is the 20th birthday of the Gameboy, the little Tetris-playing machine that swept the world and showed that portable game consoles could actually be popular.

I never owned an original Gameboy when I was younger, but I did spend many a bus ride home from school swapping turns with a friend who had one, making our way through Super Mario Land.  The first one I actually owned was when I was older, picking up a Gameboy Color before leaving for my semester abroad in Japan.  I really only used it to play Pokemon at the time, but that was more than enough to keep me occupied.

In the years since, the Gameboy family moved on to become the Gameboy Advance, and then onward to the DS (which does not share the Gameboy name, but we all know is a direct decendant).  I use my DS daily on the trainride to work, and I think at this point I own more games for it than I have for any other console.

So, let’s raise a toast today to the original giant gray brick that started everything, and if you’ve still got one laying around, fire it up and play some Dr. Mario or something.  Happy Birthday, little friend!

I have left a trail of dead behind me from the forests of Ivalice to the farmlands of North America.

In my defense, I only killed a few of them on purpose.

Characters die in games all the time, but when I am the one responsible for getting them killed, it tends to resonate with me a little more deeply.  I’m not talking about when someone gets dropped in battle and I have to throw a Mythic Bird Feather on them; I’m talking about when a character is dead and gone and not coming back. RPGs and story-driven FPSes can strike down a beloved character to try and tug at the player’s heartstrings, but these deaths are ultimately just stepping-stones in the storytelling process; no matter what choices I may make in the game, Aeris is still going to end up with a sword through her sternum.    

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I remember the day Master of Orion III came out. After heading off to the mall during lunch, I returned to work, bag in hand, and ripped open the package in the car. Tucking the game itself safely under the seat, I stealthily smuggled the manual into my office where I proceeded to read it, a few pages at a time, as soon as the opportunity arose.

While I would eventually learn that the game itself left a lot to be desired, the manual was, on its own, a delight:  Long passages about the history of the Master of Orion universe, plenty of shots of all of the game’s interfaces, and discussions of strategy as you made your way through the game. I read the manual twice that afternoon, and as soon as I got home, it found a place on my bookshelf, among a collection of others.

For a lot of people, the moment they get a new game in their possession, they race home, tear off the shrink wrap, and pop it into their systems to get playing.  For me, however, there is always that one critical step in between: reading the manual.

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“Role-playing is when you make poor gameplay decisions on purpose,” Dan Bruno writes over at Cruise Elroy. It’s not a bad definition, though it could be refined into “when you make decisions regardless of gameplay implications.” I certainly know what he’s talking about. Every time I finished a plot segment of Mother 3, I returned to the graveyard and checked my father’s cabin — not because I expected anything to happen or new content to necessarily appear in either place, but because it felt right.

“If you love RPGs, as I do, you’ve likely played quite a few of them in your time. Even fans of the genre know that it suffers from a lot of cliche and repetition — finding one with a decent story, characters that you haven’t seen a hundred times before and a truly fun experience to offer can seem really daunting sometimes. For some reason, it didn’t seem that way ten years ago to me. Has the RPG truly evolved thanks to technological advancements, or is it actually just stagnating?”

Colette Bennett at Destructoid takes a quick look at some of the most common problems that seem to crop up with modern JRPGs.  As someone who just purchased Suikoden Tierkreis over the weekend, #4 is painfully relevant.   One very pertinent item she touches on is the over-complication of battle systems in recent JRPGs, and that is something I think deserves some more critical analysis.

“Dear Sega:

I understand that you seem to be on a one-company crusade to shed the Wii’s “family friendly”  image.  I just finished House of the Dead:  Overkill, and thought that you accomplished just that.  The game is a lot of fun, but is definitely not for kids.  It still seems kind of tame, however – What I’m really looking for is a game that’s about the same length as a rail shooter,  but really takes the arbitrary violence to the next level.

Love and kisses,

Jeff Feeser
Spectaclerock.com”

Shortly after writing this letter to Sega (in my head), I picked up MadWorld, Sega’s latest foray into the world of ultra-violence.  Did it fulfill my wishes and sate my thirst for blood?

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As the internet grew to prominence, user-generated content suddenly found a brave new world.  Instead of simply creating content and passing it around to friends on 3.5″ floppies or uploading it to your local BBS and hoping someone found it and passed it along, now there was a global network for distributing custom content – this was the big time.  This finally answered the ultimate promise of user-generated content: entire communities of people creating and sharing content for the games they loved.

The goal of UGC is to let players extend and share their experience with a game with others. Having players enjoy a game so much that they are willing to invest their own time and energy into building more of it is an incredible thing, but it’s a pretty unfufilling thing if they can’t get it to those who would appreciate it. I can sit and make as many new modules in Neverwinter Nights as I want, but until I share my creation with someone else, it’s probably not going to be particularly fufilling.  The internet solved this problem, and the volume of UGC available has blossomed ever since.

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There has been a lot of talk lately from developers about User Generated Content. They speak of it in the way all buzzwords are spoken: in excited tones flush with possibility. This worries me in some ways, for reasons you might expect: The danger I see with this sudden new focus on UGC is that some developers may be looking at it as a nice easy way to cut their development costs – put out a bare-bones experience and include with it the tools to let users build their own levels/maps/etc, and just let them handle the rest.  The problem here is that making users do all the work is not the point of user-generated content.  Though developers now may talk about it as if it is something entirely new, UGC has been around for a long time, and in many forms.

The first real introduction I had to UGC came way back in 1990 on my family’s Apple IIe. Sure, our Apple had long since been supplanted by the PC and relocated to a dusty corner of the basement, but that didn’t stop me from turning it on and taking a spin on Marble Madness or Maniac Mansion every once in a while.  One day, a friend of mine brought over a new program: The Adventure Construction Set.  Well, it was new to me, anyway; at this point it was already 5 years old.

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