Sundays are for waking up and finding a Jim in my front room. And now, while he makes his way the long, painfully hungover road to Bath, I turn to writing a short, painfully hungover Sunday Papers. That being, a weekly round-up of interesting games-related material that came to my attention in the last week presented in a list form, without a pop-song which came to mind first thing in the morning and has proved oddly soothing.
- Occasionally you hear about something which is so splendid, my only urge is to rip it off. Sincerest form of flattery and all that. Anyway – Ben Abraham started playing Far Cry 2, with one subtle change. If he dies, he’s dead and has to delete the save game in the Iron Man style. Clearly, this changes the way the game plays out, and the stories which result and using it as a source of writing rather than just increasing player difficulty strikes me as somewhat fun. Go read here. It’s inspired others to follow. Go here or here. When game over means game over, everything changes. What games do you think would make a good experiment for this kinda thing? STALKER struck me as possibly fruitful…
- IncGamers interview have a great interview with Sean Cooper about his time at Bullfrog, specifically about the ever-awesome Syndicate. Strong stuff. Also worth remembering what Mr Cooper is up now in the field of webgames. Also, him teasing of doing something Syndicate-like as a webgame is just cruel.
- Larrington pointed me in the direction of this – a Gamasutra Op-Ed from Brandon Sheffield urging developers to actually play some games occasionally. It’s one of the things about the industry which is always notable – Jim often talks about how no high-position MMO designer he’s ever met has actually played Eve to any degree. When asked, they mention someone on the team has – but it’s not surprise that the ideas don’t cross over when the people calling the shots simply don’t know about them in anything but the most abstract terms.
- Taking a break from his always entertaining mini-essays on diverse topics, Tei pointed out this little piece on the Conversion rates of Immortal Defence in a comment thread. That being, the percentage of people who play the demo who actually buy the game. For people thinking about the P-word, there’s some fascinating stuff. As the developer says, he’s no way of knowing whether the drop in conversion rate happening the same time the first actual torrent of the game appears is coincidence or something else. But it’s worth thinking about.
- Sean Sands over at the Escapist on why he’s not a journalist and why that’s actually fucking awesome.
- Greg Costikyan at Play This Thing writes about Grey Ranks, the narrativist pen-and-paper RPG where you play teenage members of the Polish resistance during the doomed 1944 Warsaw Uprising. I actually went and bought it.
- Away from games, into the world of games strictly, but I think somewhat relevant to any net-game, Danah Boyd presents the notes on a speech about the politics of class in social networks, specifically looking at which sort of students go to MySpace and which go to Facebook, and what that actually means. Great piece, in such it verbalises things which we’re already aware of, but probably not consciously.
- So, I roll over, force my disobedient eyes to open and see the copy of Ennis/Snejbjerg’s Dear Billy which I’d bought yesterday sitting on the side. In my usual highly impressionable state, I find myself singing PJ Harvey’s wonderful C’Mon Billy. Going down to make tea for Jim and I, I need to hear her actually sing it, so lob on the album it’s from, To Bring You My Love (Spotify link), which is the perfect level for the hangover – a hangover so sharp that even touching the Lady’s copy of the first Mars Volta album makes me physically wince, due to me visualising what it actually sounds like. Anyway, Peej is great, and the low-rolling gait of Meet Ze Monsta reminds me of an awesome BBC performance from back in the day. And now I’m going to sit here and play Blood Bowl until I feel human.
Failed.
Toonu: I found a site selling it enormously cheap and said fuck it. I suspect it’s a grey market thing, re-selling of codes from another, cheaper territory. Paid about 13 quid.
Andrew: It’s not an article. It says exactly what it is at the start of it. And… oh, other people are saying stuff.
KG
I used face book at first because of the superior privacy settings (i have cute childs i want to share pictures with my friends, not the internet) and them abandoned the whole spammy nonsense. Its my friends fault, too many third party plugins.
Escapist column about games journalism makes me angry. He sets up a completely strawman argument about how “journalism” is inherently boring and stodgy while “writing” is fun and yay! The last thing I think game writing needs is more fanboy-ism.
Bloodbowl for £13?! How did this escape LewieP’s attention?
I propose a more hardcore method of playing Far Cry 2.
If you die in the game, you actually have to kill yourself IRL.
I think it would take it to the next level.
@Him
What!? Where?
Iron man any wide open game is awesome. In oblivion or morrowind you’d have to ban invisibity or chameleon at 100%, and all sorts of enchantments. Stalker would be excellent, that game already hates you. I used to play bf2 mod reality mod, sometimes obscene spawn times on certain releases would lend and iron man type attitude to proceedings.
In pr helicopters can take 20 minutes to respawn, being a transport pilot was a very careful matter, ambushes were actually scary.
Guys if you ahven’t already linked to this you must check out Glum Buster:
http://www.glumbuster.com/
It’s an amazing free ware (well, charity ware, no donation required to play) game that seems to have gone under the radar. Platform/puzzle esque, can’t really be described without being played. Check it out!
Hi RPS guys, if you haven’t already seen this I highly recommend you check out Glum Buster:
http://www.glumbuster.com/
An incredible freeware (well, charity ware but no donation necessary to play)pixel art platform/puzzle game which is deeper than can be described here. It seems to have disappeared under the radar, but should definitely been given a try.
Sorry for double(triple) post, i.e. crash fail
@Bhazor
He only shows the conversion rate between demo downloaded and sales…which explains nothing really so how can piracy hurt. He should have put actual sales to piracy rate then we could have known if it hurt him enough, the percentages there are murky at best because a lot of people could have bought the game and not have downloaded the demo.
I tried a permadeath game of Deus Ex once, on normal…
Made it to the top of the Statue of Liberty, before I managed to forget about those gas mines.
Sad day.
@KG
Was buying bloodbowl from said site much hassle?
That facebook vs myspace thing is interesting, though I think seeing facebook as ‘upper class’ and myspace as ‘lower class’ is kind of anachronistic, or at least I’d like to think so. Social divides do exist of course, but they’re purely volitional; it isn’t like facebook is the rich folk’s golf club that you can’t get into if you’re black. People naturally group together with other people they are similar to – that pretty much sums up the whole of human history and I think we can agree that does tend to breed intolerance. But while this group-forming does happen even on the internet compared to the social paradigms we’ve had before it is far more inclusive; there is much more of an overlap between different social and cultural groups and thus more sharing of culture and ideals. Perhaps that happens at a slower pace than the author of that speech would like, but I think that a more gradual process is less likely to lead to rejection of different cultures wholesale and thus less major clashes between groups of different ideologies.
What interests me about it as a libertarian is that some people favor the ’safer’ but more restrictive system of facebook while others prefer the greater freedom of myspace despite the greater scope for, well, butt-ugly-dom.
You all probably know about this already but i’m not sure if anyone has heard about this so i’ll post it anyway.
Sources on wikipedia pages so i was dubious but then the escapist confirmed it.
“It has been confirmed that Starbreeze Studios is developing a new Syndicate game for EA.”
20XX – Untitled Syndicate game (a.k.a. Project RedLime).
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/90609-New-Syndicate-Game-Confirmed
Re: Facebook vs. MySpace
I talk to people with my mouth.
That is all.
Like now, ChampionHyena?
Like Peet’s is more cultured than Starbucks, and Jazz is more cultured than bubblegum pop, and like Macs are more cultured than PC’s, Facebook is of a cooler caliber than MySpace.
So a Peet drinking, mac using, jazz listening, lover of facebook? How many trendy points do you get if you do these at the same time?
I do have a guilty pleasure watching for the inevitable influx of undesirables. Yes, esteemed senior tell me all about twitter and these ‘tweets.’
Adultness, though? lol
ChampionHyena: I see you’re a fan of irony.
Heres what an Ironman game of STALKER would go like: Left the starting point, killed by a patch of air.
@Isometric
HOLY CRAP I CAME BUCKETS
Yeah, I talk to people… WITH MY MOUTH. Oh, I’m sorry, did I just BLOW YOUR MIND?
I also have an iPod IN MY MIND
Yeah, I talk to people with my mouth…and I use Facebook when I can’t.
SHOCKING.
Sean Sands must be completely oblivious to anything that’s happened in film journalism/writing/criticism/theory/piffling-semantics over the last 50 years, then. Seeking truth and new ways to look at a medium has the potential to change the medium.
On the £13 Blood Bowl thing, there’s a legally-grey system where countries where games are cheaper sell CD keys to people who live in expensive countries. It’s available on a lot of games, but I don’t know how reliable it is or whether it’s frowned upon by publishers enough to stop any CD keys sold through those sites.
Maybe a spot of investigative journalism for RPS to embark upon?
Isometric
posted on 1 Apr 2009
Hrm.
Ashurbanipal: Says March 31st on the Escapist article, Wikipedia, and the GI.biz article which is the source for both sites. So either GI.biz runs at New Zealand time (except it says 14:00 BST for me, so it might reference the viewer’s local time instead), or it’s not a joke.
I hadn’t really paid attention to it until now though, of course. I give Apr 01 a wide berth. Such a horrible day to look at the internet, because truths get mixed in with jokes due to all the timezone differences.
@Gap Gen
I just did a blog post about it, although I’ve not done it yet myself. Did by a working L4D serial from them to test the water, but I’m not really interested in Blood Bowl…
Will there be a Blood Bowl: Wot I Think article on the way soon, please? I’m tempted to get it, but I want to know if it’s worth £40/£13/whatever amount I can find it for right now.
Jesus though, £39.99, digital download only, and no boxed version for a few months? Takes the piss, that does.
I thought the MySpace v Facebook thing was really interesting.
Personally I use Facebook because my friends do. When none of my friends used either, neither did I. When a few jumped on MySpace, I got one too although the sparsity of contacts there meant I didn’t visit often. Now everyone’s on Facebook, so am I.
I’m still on MySpace, but I only really use it for bands. And everyone I know who used to be on MySpace has now migrated to Facebook…
I’ve found the choice of social networks comes down to age and geography more than anything. I have plenty of classy and not so classy ‘friends’ on all of them.
Having accounts on all the larger ones (myspace, facebook, bebo) and working in an internet cafe and breaching all sorts of privacy laws, I’ve noticed a few trends.
Bear in mind, im from australia, and these are personal, completly unscientific observations.
Bebo tends to be for the younger crown (under the age of 16 or so), and most folk from islander cultures (samoan, tongan, maori, etc)
Facebook seems to have a larger proportion of older folk on there, like some sort of e-family reunion. Which is bad because I say a lot of terrible things on there I wouldn’t want my grandmother to see, but oh well, she’s on her 6th husband already. My friends from my old backwater town seem to have migrated from bebo to here also.
Vampirefreaks is for 14 year old girls and pedophiles.
Myspace seems to be used more by the ‘alternative’ crowd, and is quite popular where I live, which is a very art and music driven type town.
Twitter is just a big media joke down here too. Im not sure I get it. Only one person I personally know has an acount on there.
Personally, I prefer using facebook, but only their mobile site which cuts out all the absolute crap spam from peoples ridiculous aplications.
“Howard: The idea isn’t an Iron Man game. It’s the writing about it”
to be honest I didn’t even know _that_ was thought to be new.
as mentioned earlier in the thread, there are some epic Dead is Dead story threads in the egosoft forums for x3:tc…
http://www.egosoft.com/download/x3tc/files/Squiddy_EN.zip
http://forum.egosoft.com/viewtopic.php?t=232789
Okay: Writing about an Iron Man game *of a game anyone gives a damn about*.
KG
PJ: Yeah – but that’s the point, and it’s also a *problem* if you’re a progressive technology-will-cure-all-sorts. I mean, Manchester formed solely of human interactions and became the prototype for all modern cities in terms of its design.
KG
LewieP: Yeah, it’s an interesting point, that some aspects of our economy are globalised but most are localised. I suspect that if prices did become normalised across all countries, you’d just see more piracy in the poorer countries. In this respect it’s not a good road to go down.
In terms of legalistic stuff, I’d be interested in a publisher’s opinion. Have they actually acted against these yet, blocking CD keys and the like? Or do they grudgingly admit that there’s little they can do about it?
wcaypahwat: There is a Firefox plugin that blocks applications from appearing in Facebook. But yeah, they are very annoying.
Facebook went down an interesting route of only opening to university students, which probably affected its style a lot. I don’t think Facebook is particularly mature per se, although I agree that by virtue of having less customisation it’s far less tacky than MySpace.
Far Cry 2 seems exactly the wrong game to be Iron Man-ing, with the buddy get out clause. I think I died maybe once during the whole game when a buddy was not around to save me (on normal difficulty, but I’m not great at shooters). A FC2 expert could surely breeze through it without permenant death at all.
I enjoy reading about in-game experiences, but Ben’s are too much ‘I had a fight, it was tense, honest.’
There’s a bunch of people who, since late 2007, have been playing Titan Quest using various self imposed challenge modes including:
- Naked Harcore (No Armour, Formulas, jewelry, scrolls, etc)
- 0 Death XmaX (one life only with XmaX difficulty mod)
- 0 Death Uber (one life only with Uber difficulty mod)
It makes for a fun way to replay a game, or in my case experience for the first time. I consequently didn’t get as far due to not knowing what’s ‘around the next corner’.
http://www.titanquest.net/forums/challenges/
Sundays are for waking up and finding a Jim in my front room.
Kieron, that made me think of Far Cry 2! Was Jim staring at you or doing press ups at the end of your bed?
@Morph since the permadeath is self imposed there’s nothing to stop people self imposing a buddy ban as well, since you have to talk to the characters to activate the buddy rescue. Though I expect since this was an experiment about writing about playing ironman, people are more interested in the experience rather than the challenge.
Even with using the buddy system Far Cry 2 seems like a perfect game for a permanent death system, since so little of it is scripted and so much is random. I couldn’t imagine playing even games like Stalker, Crysis or the first Far Cry this way, since they are still far too based on a connect the dots approach and allow only slight deviances from the preset path.
i can’t believe i’ve listened to pj for all these years and never thought to look for some live footage.
Update on blood bowl:
Looks like Cyanide intend to blacklist any serials bought from G2play. I’ve contacted both Cyanide and G2play for responses.
The “Facebook vs. Myspace” article was great until she started speculating on the data she collected in the beginning. Talk about bias. There were so many things wrong with her conclusions. After a while, you could see her thought process through the writing, “Hey, let’s take what my fellow left-field ’scientists’ believe, call it the ‘norm’, and expect everyone to go along with it!”.
And, of course, she then had to bring homosexuality into the issue, using the same tactic as described above. Shameless.
Otherwise (okay, maybe not PJ), great sunday papers.
I play Iron Man Internet. If someone leaves me a piece of negative feedback on a forum then I cancel my broadband subscription.
Azazel: You suck.
Are you allowed to re-subscribe with a different ISP, or is that it now?
Regarding a good game to write about Iron Manning (erm?): I think Deus Ex sounds pretty good.
I find when in the openworld mode of GTA IV, that you can never play for long before someone tries to gatecrash your party.
This could make an peculiar iron man article, How about a Wall-e type study in isolation in GTA IV, playing in the openworld mode. Taking in the sights and sounds of New York, uncomfortable in the knowledge that sooner or later, some frag fried stranger is going to start getting curious about you, and decide to hunt you down. The rule is you can’t communicate with any fellow playing NY city dwellers, so that you remain a mystery to them, and must survive for twelve hours.
Naturally you’ll need to stay away from them in case their intentions are hostile. Fear and panic will set in as someone picks up you scent, and they start persuing you through the convoluted metropolis… Or it could be a awkward description loneliness and solitude… actually probabaly just that, but you never know.
Valve blocked a bunch of serials sourced from Thailand two years ago, and I found a thread about g2play and Steam from January this year.
@ Kieron: Well, I’d say its actually only a real problem if you’re a technology-will-cure-all-right-this-second-like-magic-sort. Can you expand on your point about Manchester? I’m not sure I follow.
Manchester wasn’t planned, basically. It grew in a space of about 80 years as the first industrialised city in the world. Despite the lack of planning, the interactions of people lead to a classic city model – enormous poor ghettos, middle-class shop-lined streets and making it entirely possible for the two to never cross.
KG