Sundays are for treating hangovers with medicinal bacon and posting about your new Marvel Beta Ray Bill miniseries. No arguments. They are. They’re also for posting a list of fun and smart reading collated across the week while trying to give a plug to an amusing T-shirt advert video for a band and link to the song which we found ourselves bawling atonally last night in a terrible Angel bar.
- Game Designer Rob Hale (aka Schizoslayer from comments threads) has been giving his blog a face-lift. First big thing is his essay on Continuity Level Design, which is a phrase he’s totally made up. There’s no stopping him. In it, with reference to Mirror’s Edge, Portal and Half-life 2, he explores what game designers are up to on a fundamental level-flow way in single player games. Yes.
- Tom Chick writes about how the Turtle – as a strategy in RTS games – is in danger of dying out. Interesting primarily in terms of how he explores what the oft-discussed Rush, Boom and Turtle approaches are anyway.
- Some pretentious tyke (What kind of name is “Rossignol”?) interviews Splash Damage designer Ed Stern over at Offworld on “Blind Luck and the Problems of Originality”. Also, has the splendid title “Ragdoll Metaphysics”. Which is hard to argue with.
- Still haven’t got a name for my rogue-mechanics-but-in-non-trad-rogue-games movement, but John Harris writing about Spelunky over at Game Set Watch has. The Roguelike approach. THAT ISN’T A SILLY MOVEMENT NAME. I WANT SILLINESS> (Thanks to Benjamin_Barker)
- Oh – also at Game Set Watch, this lovely potted history of Obsidian’s use of parties. (Thanks to Dan Dixon)
- As we approach Street Fighter 4 on the PC – though not soon enough for our liking – Gamasutra writes on the problem of accessibility in the one-on-one fighting game. As in, the whole genre has been disappearing up its own anus for years, and has started to realise it’s probably got to stop, turn around, and try and crawl back out again.
- Thoughtshake – which i suspect I link to a lot due to really liking the blog name – writes about (deep breath): “Interaction Breeds Violence? A Look At Modern Popular Culture, Violence Portrayed Therein, And Overly Long Essay Titles.”. Or, in short, why the hell is everything about shooting?
- The Indelicates advertise their splendid T-shirts in style. And Jennifer Rush, the Power of Love. I AM YOUR LADY AND YOU ARE MY MAAAAAANNNNNN.
Failed. In so many ways.
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On the Indelicates – The last time I saw them they refused my request to play Valdimir on the grounds no one could remember it, I’ll still buy a T-shirt but it will be a bitter, bitter purchase.
On Street Fighter – I agree with Gwyn; You can pick up and button mash successfully in five seconds flat, specials make sense in a few minutes and you can get the basics of cancels, parries, ultras and the rest within twenty minutes, then it becomes a question of easy to pick up, hard to master. Considering most game tutorials last at least ten to fifteen minutes, I don’t think it’s fair to claim it’s crawlled up its own arse, it’s more honed it’s arse over two decades to a razor sharp weapon of balanced perfection.
@marilena: you think in multiplayer terms. And about games that have not victory conditions for turtles. Say… building a superweapon, or enough points. Also, simply building a base could be fun for some people. Don’t say “is not fun”, because seems fun for some people.
One time I had the bright idea of turtling the enemy’s base in Starcraft. We typically didn’t expand very fast, so rather than building bunkers around my own base, I built them around the enemy. He was very surprised when he sent his first SCVs out to look for new mineral patches.
Like this example, turtling can be an aggressive strategy. It’s essentially a way of gaining battlespace access – you grab land and then hold onto it, rather than rushing an amorphous enemy. The Terrans in Starcraft are an inherently turtle race, with tanks that become more powerful when they’re static, and bunkers that protect otherwise weak troops, but you still have to be dynamic to win. The walking barrage, with two lines of siege tanks moving forwards one after the other, was one of my favourite tactics against the AI.
That’s called towering, and it is a well established and hated practice in games such as Warcraft 3.