It looks like all that speculation about the enhanced edition of Baldur’s Gate coming to the iPad was true!
Boo can now squeak freely on your ipad
I was super excited reading this, until I noticed that the URL ended in “baldurs-gate-enhanced-edition-for-ipad-3/”. Hmm. I have an iPad 2. That’s kind of a bummer. Still, those of you with the most modern iteration of the iPad can enjoy this game! Until Baldur’s Gate 3 is released for the iPad 4 only.
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Shamelessly stolen from the Project 1999 Facebook page
A few weeks ago, I became aware through my Technical Vizier of a project called EQEmu. Not a strange, flightless bird, but rather a reverse-engineered emulator of the popular MMORPG EverQuest.
I have to admit, on hearing this and then visiting the EQEmu site, it was love. Why? Let me delve a bit into the past.
Back in 1999, I was a fresh-faced office drone, just out of college and looking for the kind of distraction we’ve come to know as massive multiplayer online roleplaying games. A friend had been playing this new game called EverQuest and talked me into giving it a try. And I was hooked! Not in a “forget the outside world” kind of way, but I enjoyed the game very, very much. After Masters of Orion 2, this was only the second time I’d every gone head over heels for a video game.
I loved the interaction with other people, the ability to do quests, the social aspects that existed before most of the social web did, the fact that it was like Rogue but with graphics and many, many other people. Some of my best gaming experiences were had in this game. Sadly, I got a bit burned out, especially when expansion after expansion started coming out and gave the game up for good around 2001.
Now my friend and I stood up our own EQEmu server, and after digging out our old EverQuest Titanium installs, were able to get up and running! Everything was there again! There it was! The world of EQ as we remembered it… almost. What was missing was the interaction.
That’s when we discovered Project 1999 – the largest EQEmu servers available to the public, with the mission to keep things as they were in Everquest classic. This really hit our sweet spot -back in the game we loved as it was when we loved it most, and doing this with a thousand other folks at the same time. Surely not as busy as the EQ servers were back in ’99 but still more than enough to have people in every zone, characters of every level and class.
I’m loving it! For the first time in a long time, I eagerly await the time I’ve been able to set aside to play video games. In fact, I’m now eagerly setting aside time rather than doing something else. Everything that I enjoyed about the original game is right here, in all it’s 1999 glory.
The folks at Project 1999 have a great getting started guide that’s very easy to follow. Probably the hardest thing you’ll have to do is dig up an older copy of the client software from somewhere. Once you’ve gotten that though, the rest is a breeze. I was up and running on Project1999 in 20 minutes, and that’s including the 10 minutes it took to install the client software.
If you’re even slightly nostalgic for the experience that was Everquest in its early glory, I can’t recommend doing this highly enough! I’ve started several characters so far and am still fairly low level, due to the limited time I can play. I can tell you that everyone I’ve bumped into in the game has been very friendly and helpful! If you get yourself into this, keep a lookout for my Druid, Toetagger and my buddy’s Monk, Elthar.
Special thanks to Slave – it’s never easy being the one who knows all the right words.
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I’m very excited to announce that Troll in the Corner will be partnering with Deniath to bring our readers all kinds of great deals on games and geek collectibles.
Deniath features private sales on all things that appeal to folks like you and me. Board games, art, collectibles, toys – just about anything if it’s got a geek interest built into it. Their mission is “To invigorate the lives of our members by feeding their geek obsessions and helping them discover new ones”.
They are an invite only site which features private sales that are always good deals. I’ve personally used them long before we began to talk of this partnership and have nothing but good things to say about them. How does it work? In their own words:
We offer invitation-only access to exclusive, 72-hour deals just for those who share the love and passion for all things geek. Whether you geek out on toys, board games, comics, art, movies, or other pop-culture collectibles, we know there are more products and services out there that you would love. Daily deal and flash sale sites have flooded many inboxes over the last couple years. For nerds and geeks in particular, there are seldom deals that particularly relate to their interests. Instead of fashion, décor, luxury travel, and spa deals, Deniath wants to fill every geek’s inbox with deals on toys, games, gadgets, art, and pop-culture collectibles!
Membership can only be had by requesting an invite code, or by being invited directly by a current member. Until now that is….
Through our partnership, we have a limited time membership promotion as well! Simply email the Deniath folks at community@deniath.com and include “Troll in the Corner” in the subject line. Do that and Deniath will send you an invite code almost immediately. Take advantage of this now, because this promotion only runs until February 29th!
From time to time we’ll be featuring exclusive sneak peeks at upcoming Deniath sales. Get your Deniath membership set up now and you’ll be able to take advantage of these sneak peeks! You’ll be able to see some specific details about forthcoming sales. Details that aren’t normally released until the sale itself starts. We’ll feature our first sneak peek in the very near future!
Even better, invite your friends and family to join as well. When someone you’ve invited to Deniath has their first order shipped, you get a $10 credit towards your next purchase.
We’ll also be offering invite promotions like the one we’re running right now – near instant access to the Deniath community and sales, without have to wait for your invitation request to be fulfilled!
We’ve got some other very cool ideas in the pipeline as well. Keep your eyes on Troll in the Corner for more!
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This past week I downloaded Red Dead Redemption for my Xbox 360. Each hour spent tapping X, Y, A, and B taught lessons, which great wargames should emulate.
In my brief time with riding through the wild west gathering flowers, killing outlaws, and playing poker I glimpsed behind the game design curtain. Some of the valuable tenets, which make Read Dead Redemption a success translate to the table top.
Any good game should have a great story that seduces the gamer to pick the game over anything else. The background to the game needs to draw you to it like that proverbial moth to the flame. You need to crave it like a box of Swiss chocolate, a cup of Earl Grey tea, and a plate of homemade lasagna. Maybe I’ve been hanging out with fictional characters too much. But, you get the picture. The game’s world has to sustain your interest through the many weeks of assembling, researching, and painting the multitude of models necessary to war game.
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The press release speaks for itself:
Paizo Licenses Pathfinder MMO Rights
Goblinworks to Produce Next-Generation Fantasy Sandbox MMO
November 21, 2011 (REDMOND, Wash.) – Paizo Publishing, LLC has licensed the MMORPG electronic gaming rights to its smash-hit Pathfinder Roleplaying Game intellectual property to Goblinworks, a Redmond, Washington game developer and publisher that will create Pathfinder Online, a next-generation fantasy sandbox massively multiplayer online game. Founded by Paizo co-owner Lisa Stevens (Pathfinder RPG, Vampire: The Masquerade, Magic: The Gathering), game industry veteran Ryan S. Dancey (Dungeons & Dragons Third Edition, EVE Online), and experienced MMO developer Mark Kalmes (Microsoft, Cryptic Studios, CCP), Goblinworks is an independent company that will work with Paizo Publishing to bring the award-winning world and adventures of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game to the online gaming market. The process has only just begun, and there is plenty of opportunity for gamers to get in on the ground floor of this exciting new project. Paizo and Goblinworks are committed to soliciting player feedback about the Pathfinder Online project, and more information can be found at goblinworks.com.
Pathfinder Online will cast players as heroes in a unique online fantasy world filled with sword & sorcery adventures and kingdoms inhabited and controlled by thousands of competing players. Players can explore, develop, adventure, and dominate by playing fighters, rogues, clerics, or any of Pathfinder’s many character classes, or they can go beyond the standard options to create nearly any type of character imaginable. Find lairs, ruins, and caverns filled with monstrous creatures and incredible treasure. Build glittering cities of castles and bustling markets. Take to the battlefield with vast armies to seize and hold territory. Players change the world and create new stories as they compete for resources, land, and military might. The possibilities are endless.
“I’ve been hoping for a chance to work with Lisa and the Paizo team on a Pathfinder project for years, and now that we’re joining forces to produce Pathfinder Online, I couldn’t be happier or more excited,” said Goblinworks CEO Ryan S. Dancey. “My goal is to bring the high-quality experience Paizo has delivered for Pathfinder to the MMO platform, and to give players another fantastic way to experience the world of Golarion.”
Learn more about Pathfinder Online at goblinworks.com.
ABOUT PAIZO PUBLISHING
Paizo Publishing®, LLC is a leading publisher of fantasy roleplaying games, accessories, board games, and novels. Paizo’s Pathfinder®
ABOUT GOBLINWORKS
Goblinworks is the developer and publisher of Pathfinder Online, a next-generation fantasy sandbox MMO. The company is located in the Seattle suburb of Redmond. It was founded in 2011 by a dedicated group of creative professionals with backgrounds in tabletop hobby gaming and online videogame development. Goblinworks is dedicated to creating a fun, immersive online gaming experience for the fantasy roleplaying enthusiast. Its goal is to deliver the best sword & sorcery massively multiplayer game on the market by starting with a carefully designed core of features and iterating on the content continuously after launch, with the input and feedback of the player community.
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No word on release date, format, pricing, or anything else along those lines. I’m sure that more information will be forthcoming. My hope is that they make a good game, and do so along the free-to-play lines, rather than a monthly subscription. There’s only one fantasy MMO who can get away with monthly fees, and its name is WoW.
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I’ve been in something of a daze since about 12:01am early Friday morning. You see, that’s when Steam let me play The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. I usually write about tabletop RPGs here on TitC, but my interests are varied, and a good computer role-playing game can get its hooks into me easily if I let it. Suffice it to say, Skyrim has its hooks in me, and it has them in deep. Skyrim is, quite possibly, the best video game I have ever played. And, for me, that’s saying a lot.
To give that “best ever” statement some context, I have to give you some history. I discovered computer role-playing games when Icewind Dale came out in 2000. One of my roommates at the time had purchased it, and I spent hours watching him play it, then hours playing it myself on his computer. From there, I discovered Baldur’s Gate, and Baldur’s Gate II. The original Baldur’s Gate got its hook into me. A combination of great story, great gameplay, and the ability to master the system (to game the game, if you will), won me over. I’ve played BG1 more than any other game that I can think of, to date. It held the crown for best game I have ever played.
In 2006, when Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion came out, it was again roommates that saw me get sucked in. I had looked at no media about the game, but both of my roommates were going nuts for it. On their suggestion alone, I bought it. Much like BG1, the combination of story (often a story I made up, since the world was so open), gameplay, and game mastery pulled me in. To date, I have put in somewhere well over the 300 hours mark into Oblivion. Suffice it to say that when Skyrim was announced, I was a bit giddy.
Friday, during the afternoon, I went to my friend’s apartment, the same apartment in which I played Oblivion for the first time, and played Skyrim for hours. Other friends were over as well, and we all did the same: played Skyrim. We did the same on Saturday, and the same on Sunday. Since then, I have found as much time as I reasonably could to play the game. It has its hooks into me, deeper than any game ever has before. Why? What makes Skyrim such a great game for me?
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Every time I go to a Con there’s one thing I want to do more than anything else, I really want to experience some role playing games that I’ve never played before. It’s a top priority. Pax is such a large con and so video game oriented that I struggled to find RPG groups ready to roll out an adventure, but I did happen to fjord through an ocean of board games and get to a few good RPGs.
When I did find great tabletop gaming, it was in one place…
The Indie Games Room
In my time between panels and queuing up for other things I tried to hit the Indie Games room as much as possible, if only to just look at the books they had on the table for browsing. Of all the tabletop areas, this was the most inviting room. With someone cheery and eager to help explain the setup and what games will be available and when as soon as I walked in each time, they really did a great job of making me want to play there. It’s nice, as a gamer, to get that sort of welcome. Particularly from other gamers, since we have an unfortunate tendency to close ourselves off and stick to our cliques. Game Masters, many of which were designers of their own games and featured on the GMing panel I first went to, were running games on every even numbered hour throughout the weekend, giving two hour demos that told some surprisingly complete stories. I only managed to play two game in this room, but I was very pleased with both.
Mouseguard Boxed Set
Based on the on the comic series of the same name and a variation of the Burning Wheel system, Mouseguard is a role playing game that captures the low-fantasy world of a medieval society of anthropomorphic mice. I’ve heard a lot of criticism of the system, particularly in regard to the Player phase of the game, which admittedly we didn’t test, but I had a great time with the conflict resolution system in it’s odd sort of “Rock, Paper, Scissors” way. Our Game Master did a great job of letting us state our goals and then had us narratively justify each action type in how it moves us toward that goal, then we used the game’s pretty simple system of opposed dice rolls (where applicable) and he described the action. The end result of this sort of attempt/description interaction allows for some great conflict sequences, whether they be against environmental or combatant challenges, and makes for a very cinematic visualization of the scene. Immediately after the game I discussed it with my friends and girlfriend, each of us expressed a desire to play again, and soon. My only struggle was whether or not to purchase the boxed set, which I did ultimately go ahead and order. The box comes with the original Mouseguard RPG book, a supplement, action cards for players and Game Master, specially marked dice, a map of the lands the Guard Mice protect, and lastly something I find to just sort of be out of place, a few brightly colored, plastic chesspiece style mouse tokens for tracking map movements. The tokens did feature in the first Mouseguard book, Fall 1152, but looked much more naturally colored as if with dull dyes on clay as opposed to what I can only describe as “Fisher Price” style vibrancy in the box. It just jarred with the rest of the character of the game, and I found them a little disappointing. I have some plans to maybe repaint or at least do a wash on the pieces to make them look just a bit grittier.
Polaris
The other game I was lucky enough to spend a few hours playing gave me an entirely new perspective on role playing. Far more a structured system of improvisation than traditional games, Polaris is designed for four players, each of which takes turns rotating through roles as both their own individual character, bit part NPCs, and antagonist to another player. Each rotation of these responsibilities brings with it a change of scene, which may pick up from mere moments after the previous scene or years later depending on the storytelling. Players have a conversational barter system, bolstered by abilities on their sheet, and conflicts of stats can be brought down to a single die roll. The system supports role play and combat almost entirely via shared by tale-telling and blocking “phrases”. I was absolutely amazed with how much story, and the level of depth we explored in our characters, in only two hours of play. Ben Lehman, the game’s writer, facilitated the game for the four of us, but it took no time to learn and roll with, and he was mostly there so the group didn’t have to read through his rule booklet to know how to play. I picked up a copy and can’t wait to gather some of my other Game Master friends to run this. I’m a bit ashamed to admit that I sometimes exclude those folks from games because there tends to be an undertone of tension, that silent power struggle or a “that’s not how I’d do it but…” comment that can come from a GM-player, that is to say someone who is accustomed more to being an GM than a player, but this is the perfect game to remedy that problem.
Other Games
I think with a convention the size of Pax and with so much to do at all times sort of hinders the ability to sit down and play a full session. I got in a few other games during the con that averaged about an hour, including the Dungeon Delves run by Wizards of the Coast. I looked in on some short Pathfinder Society games, and got in someone’s homebrew airship battle system to be implemented with their 3.5 campaign, but all of these things were more or less demos rather than full sessions with limited to no role play. I even participated in the Wizards of the Coast booth Live-Action Role Playing experience, which consisted of no role play and about 2 dice rolls per person, granted it was more of an attention grabbing gimmick than anything, but I was hoping for something more somehow. With panel lines filling up two hours before hand for some of the major guests, and the huge sprawl of the gaming area, I just don’t think Pax is a good home for tabletop role playing necessarily, but that isn’t to say I didn’t have a great trip as a Role Player between other nerdly interests and even the tabletop oriented panels I wrote about last week.
As a conclusion to my awesome trip (in spite of what it may seem based on that previous paragraph) I’ve decided to host my gallery o’ Pax pictures over on the Game Hermit Facebook page. Pop over, give a “Like”, and take a look.
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Little more than a week ago, 70,000 eager gamers descended on Seattle for Pax Prime. In a dizzying rush they climbed several stories (well, rode the escalator) to the convention’s main expo floor to play test hundreds of popular PC and console games. And though I took my initial peek into the busy hall filled with vendors displaying their latest and greatest, I set about an immediate mission to scout the tabletop gaming areas, hoping to try out some new stuff and really sink my teeth into a weekend of role playing. Once I had a good note of where everything was, it was off to get in line for my first panel, and I learned that lines were just something I’d have to get used to at Pax (though I’m not sure I ever did). The following is a list of panels and the like that I attended which were specifically tabletop role playing related.
The Art of the Table: GMing Beyond the Basics
After about an hour or so in line, probably the shortest wait I’d have during the whole convention, I kicked off my Pax experience with an excellent panel on game mastering. Sage LaTorra of the recently released Dungeon World RPG joined Apocalypse World creator Vincent Baker as well as Polaris author Ben Lehman. Rounding out the group were Jeff Fasenfast of GoDaddy and moderator Ben Mandall, who did an excellent job keeping the conversation moving and entertaining. The panel offered several perspectives and some great advice to use behind the screen, most of which boiled down to the following: know your players and communicate with them. No advice can be better than that, and yet it is often what is missed by so many game masters. If I had to pick one secondary piece of advice, it would be this quote:
“Maybe what your game needs, is child endangerment.” - Vincent Baker
What Vincent was speaking to actually goes in hand directly with the previous statement. As GMs we need to know what our players want, we need to know what they are comfortable with, and sometimes we need to know what makes them a little uneasy, to push them to new greater heights. Perhaps putting children’s lives in danger isn’t quite right for your table, that’s not really what Vincent meant, but if your table is mature enough to handle that sort of content even though it might be outside of their comfort zone, it could make for quite the heroic scene to save those kids, or quite the emotional moment if they don’t make it.
Acquisitions Inc: The Last Will and Testament of James Darkmagic I
More of a show than a panel, this was something I knew I had to see. Timing being what it was, I was forced to skip over the the Ask the Dungeon Master panel offering more tips and tricks on running a great game, to instead wait in line a few hours dancing with nervous anticipation (or maybe that was just because I needed to go to the bathroom) getting ready for the live game run by Wizards of the Coast Dungeon Master extraordinaire Chris Perkins for an all-star team comprised of Star Trek and The Guild‘s Wil Wheaton, PVP Online author/artist Scott Kurtz, and the Penny Arcade boys themselves, Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik. In the most over-produced game of D&D ever, the minstrels Paul and Storm played an opening homage not just to Acquisitions Incorporated (the name of the collected group above), but to adult tabletop gamers everywhere. The adventurers arrived with grand announcements, stage lighting, and smoke machines, dressed in full costume… well, mostly… and ready to roll. I could go on telling you how much I enjoyed this latest foray into live gaming, or how clever the writing was, or how impressed I was that they fit such a story into 2 hours of play, or I could just link this unofficial video I found via the /r/rpg subreddit. Be sure to skip ahead to 3:30 seconds for when the intro song and game play begin, then catch part two which is in the playlist below the video.
Watching this game was one of the most incredibly fun experiences of the convention. I’ve watched the whole thing over again since coming home from my trip, picking up on a few jokes that the crowd’s laughter overpowered and I missed the first time through. I can’t believe that there isn’t a television show putting celebrities into a role playing game like this, or at least a more frequent web series. I was a little disappointed that Perkins wasted a lot of time at the beginning of the night with “dragon mounting” rolls, leaving combat to not more than a few rounds, but I understand that this was a story driven, presentation experience and that honestly, the combats didn’t really matter. I implore you to take the time to enjoy it, the last line by the Dungeon Master still makes me grin.
D&D Through the Ages
An expert team was pooled together for this panel which included creative minds such as Mike Mearls, one of the members of the team responsible for much of 4th Edition Dungeons and Dragons, also Mike Selinker, who did the same for the transition to 3rd Edition, and Keith Baker, creator of the Eberron Campaign Setting for D&D 3.5 and 4th Edition. The panelists discussed the history of changes from edition to edition, and the trend of modern rules lite games and recreations/rules hacks of older editions. The discussion was rife with stories from the round table discussions at Wizards during the last two edition changes, and it was great to hear some of the first hand accounts of how certain decisions were made. The best story had to be Mike Selinker’s with regard to the Open Game License, how that concept was borrowed from open source software programming, and how nervous the designers were to agree to the idea knowing that it could easily make or destroy their ownership of Dungeons and Dragons.
I will also say I was impressed with the candid nature of the panel’s responses with regard to comparisons of 4th Edition and Massive Multiplayer Online games (MMOs), or even comparisons of 3rd Edition to Collectible Card Games (CCGs) such as Magic the Gathering. There was an air of honesty in the given responses, openly stating to the audience that of course those games played an influential role in the development of the relevant versions of the game. The way it was stated, Wizards wasn’t so much looking for piggybacking the existing fanbases for CCGs or MMOs (although they did admit some level of that), but instead they were looking for new ways to handle game mechanics that simply didn’t exist at the time previous editions were created. I enjoyed the fact that nobody tried to dodge any questions or deflect, and I gained a new level of respect for Mike Mearls for how he and the others handled the crowd.
Next Week!
Although I didn’t play too many games during the con (to my surprise), I did have a chance to try out a couple of games that were new to me and to dive head first into a D&D 4e Dungeon Delve and the Wizards of the Coast booth’s live action D&D experience. Also, be on the look out for my picture gallery, I only had a crappy cell phone camera with me this trip, but I came away with a few cool shots to check out, here’s a few samples…
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…try, try again. And again. And again. And again.
Look, I have video game chops. I’m not some n00b that just started playing video games. I cut my teeth on an Atari 2600, and I’ve personally experienced why “Nintendo hard” is a phrase that means something. I’ve gotten more headshots than I care to remember, and I’ve died probably millions of times in video games. I’ve owned at one point or another almost every America-released console out there and I’ve logged over 160 hours on Oblivion without hardly even touching the main quest in the game. I’m good at video games. Really good.
You kids today have it easy, with your save points and your checkpoints and your respawning without much in the way of consequences and your one-hit-and-you-win end-game bosses (ahem, Fable III). I now throw down the gauntlet if you own a PS3 and I challenge you. The challenge? Play Demon’s Souls.
I know, I know, I’m a bit late to the party with the game. But it’s hard. It’s not quite Nintendo Hard, but it’s difficult. I just picked it up last Sunday. Just yesterday, I got through the first boss fight in the first section of the game, not because I’m not good at the game but because it’s that danged hard.
But it’s supposed to be. That’s one of the selling points of the game.
I’ve probably played through the first section of that darned castle 150 times. As you play the game and defeat demons, you collect souls, which are the only in-game currency. You use those souls to power up your weapons, repair your equipment and buy new stuff. If you die, you keep all of your equipment but you lose all the souls you’ve accumulated and not spent to that point.
Then you respawn at the beginning of the level..but so do all the foes. If you can get to where you died, you can regain the souls that you had previously collected but if you die again before getting there, those are gone forever. Of course, stuff doesn’t come cheap, so you have to try to collect as many souls as you can and not die.
And that’s the hard part, the not dying. Even if, like me, you’ve memorized where all the monsters are in a section because you’ve gone over it again and again and again and even if you think you know the patterns of the creatures you’re fighting, you’re still going to die, then it’s back to the beginning of the level so you can do it all over again.
I’ve learned that, as soon as I get the souls and ores I need to buy whatever hunk o’ gear I want, I head back to the nearest merchant and spend those souls. Often this means returning to Nexus, the game’s central hub, to talk to the blacksmith there to upgrade my gear and then return back to the level. At the start of the level. With all the monsters back and in all the familiar places.
Is the game harsh? Yes. Is it unforgiving? Yes. Is it just plain hard? Yes. However, unlike many modern games, when you accomplish something, you actually feel like you’ve really accomplished it. It wasn’t handed to you. You don’t one-shot-kill the boss, it’s a nasty and brutal battle. The risk-reward setup of the game makes you want to push on, makes you want to succeed if for nothing else than the ability to say “I did it.”
The online component of the game is very, very neat. Essentially the game is a single-player affair, however, you can see and hear other players online as translucent spirits running around that fade in and out of existence depending on how close they are to you. Supposedly, and I haven’t figured out how to do this yet, you can summon another person into your world. Also, you can apparently enter another character’s world as a “black phantom” and hunt them down. There’s no way to pick whose world you pop into, though.
Also, there’s a player-driven hint system. You can leave messages for other players and read messages they left. If you like a person’s message, you can recommend it. If you recommend a person’s message, they gain a little health..a reward for helping you out. Likewise, if someone recommends your message, you gain a little health. You can also touch the bloodstains that are littered throughout the game (and there are lots and lots of them). When a character dies, they leave a bloodstain and, when you touch it you get to see the last few seconds of that character’s life. This can actually be quite helpful, and can give you clues to hidden threats. I know it’s saved my bacon a couple of times.
While Demon’s Souls is only for the Playstation 3, fellow Xbox 360 gamers don’t feel too bad. The spiritual successor to Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls, is coming out in October and is going to be on both platforms. Dark Souls is supposed to be even harder than Demon’s Souls so I look forward to the challenge.
Bring it on!
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That’s right, it’s time to take on video games. Don’t expect it often, I lack the time to be a serious video gamer anymore, but I have been. Yeah, I went to college…I was even a substitute teacher for a few years. Do you know how much free time that leaves you for playing games? Then I did silly things like becoming a full time teacher and having a child and *whoosh* there goes all that gaming time.
In any case, that’s not the point, the point is, I’m going to tell you what is the greatest ever genre of video games.
Role-Playing Games.
Okay, so I guess this shouldn’t be of much surprise to anyone who knows anything about me. I’m a table top gamer…a D&D player primarily. So I’m clearly biased, but that’s not the point here, either. It would be unjust of me to declare something the GREATEST EVER of anything if I only took my own biased opinions into consideration. The fact of the matter is, that all evidence says RPGs are the best genre of video game out there. You can disagree…I mean, your wrong if you do, but I won’t take away your right to believe wrong things. There are whole political parties based on such things.
Now some of you are going to disagree and then give me your video game genre of preference. So let’s just head that off at the pass and I can explain to you right now why RPGs are better.
Let’s start with what I would expect to be the first contender, FPS games (that’s First Person Shooters for you “noobs” [that’s someone new to the community/culture]). FPSes have their greatest successes when they emulate RPGs. They try to copy an RPG’s story-telling format, choice mechanics, and whatnot. At the end of it all, though, those FPSes are also RPGs, aren’t they? They’re just RPGs that use a different perspective…and let’s face it, an inferior one.
Why would I ever want to only see a small portion of what’s going on when I could see all of it? I mean, that’s just stupid. I sort of get where this came from, I guess. I can put myself in the frame of mind to think, “hey wouldn’t it be cool if the video game was just like I was there looking out of the eyes of the character?” Yeah, that would be…except you’re looking at a screen. So it’s not like you were really there, it’s like your looking through a camera attached to the head of the person who is really there. And having a camera attached to your head would just make you look dumb…so FPSes fail.
Next, I suspect people will espouse that RTSes are the greatest (that’s Real-Time Strategy games…*sigh*…noobs). I admit, I like RTSes sometimes, but there are some fundamental differences that make them inferior, as a type, to RPGs. First, if you’re controlling an army it’s harder to connect to the characters and thus the story of the thing. Story is important, if you don’t agree, you’re wrong…again. More on your wrongneess in a moment.
That actually takes me to the next game type, the MMO (look it up yourself noobs). Many games of many types have multi-player functionality that many people pretend to enjoy. This is a fallacy. Only the people who spend all of their free time playing the game so that they can become so good that they destroy all that come before them are really enjoying things…and think of all the things in life they AREN’T enjoying while they perfect their string of opening gambit hotkey combinations.
Be it in the FPS, RTS, or even RPGs, MMO, by the nature of what it is, makes a game inferior. It becomes less about the story of the world your gaming in and more about creating the perfect mechanical situation so that all the numbers add up and the end of an encounter to show that you’ve won so you can get the whatever that will give you +something in future calculations…and at that point, who the Hell cares? Just go do some calculus and quit wasting your money on a monthly subscription to the game you paid $60 for at the counter (yeah, that’s another HUGE problem with MMOs).
No, games, even video games, are about a few things. Escaping into another world where you can pretend to do remarkable things. Immersing yourself into a story in a way that a novel or movie can’t. Or helping to facilitate social situations where you can have fun with your friends.
RPGs are clearly the most story immersing type of video game and as such they also then help one escape into another world more easily. As for social situations I’m sure some of you will go back and point to multiplayer gaming. Stop it. That is not a real social situation. You know it’s not. I know it’s not. The guy at the other end of that hot night elf chick knows it’s not. If you were looking for a game in order to scratch a social itch, you’d get away from the damn screen and invite someone over to play a game in person (thats “irl” for those of you who have lost touch with human-English and who this message is falling on the deaf ears of).
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Drive Thru RPG
