Under a Gibbous Moon

MMOs have been out for quite a long time so this is probably not very new to everyone but bear with me anyway. I have played some browser based MMOs for quite some time, notably KoL and Urban Dead. But I had never played any of the client based MMOs made popular by World of Warcraft.

The first one that I tried was Dungeon and Dragon’s Online (DDO). I tried it specifically because it was one of the “free to play” games. For the most part it is true. There is no up front cost thought accounts are limited to a total of two characters and the classes and races that you can play are restricted (though the classics are available for free). Anything fancy, like more character slots, races, cool gear, and more of the world map must be bought with points.

While you accrue points in-game in order to keep with the whole “free” mentality, you accumulate them very slowly as an incentive to get you to buy them. Eventually, I found this system annoying so I figured I’d give the free ten day World of Warcraft (WoW) trial a go.

I must say that so far I am enjoying it, much more than I thought I would. One of the first things that I noticed, coming from DDO is that, except for a few exceptions, everybody coexists in the same world. In DDO all the quests take place in their own instance (which is apparently what they call it in WoW).

There are advantages to this method. Because it is always just you or your party, DDO quests are much more tightly scripted than in WoW. Also you don’t run into the problem of everyone trying to grab onto the same quest goal and having to wait around for it to respawn.

The downside to this is that, since you only see the other players in taverns are going to and from quests, the world feels rather empty while WoW feels more alive.

My biggest complaint, so far, is tedious wholesale slaughter of the fauna of Azeroth. WoW often feels like it should be used as test for people who may have personality disorders because killing small animals is a large part of the game.

Some guy with and exclamation point over his head will tell you to run out into the woods and kill 50 squirrels and then come back. Or even worse, he’ll tell you to bring back 50 squirrel tails. This is my most hated type of quest because apparently, not all squirrels are gifted with tails and only ten percent of the damn things will have tails.

While there are many interesting quests, some of the quests make you wonder if the game designers weren’t just phoning in content. My personal favorite so far one where I earned a bunch of experience points ferrying messages between two NPCs that were standing about fifteen feet apart. It felt like one of those family get togethers where two people aren’t on speaking terms and I’m stuck in the middle.

The way the trial itself is set up is strange. They give you ten days to try it out but then limit what you can try out. Going out and adventure with other people, hell no, you can’t form your own groups. Want to chat it up, nope chat functionality is limited because since it’s a social game we might as well eliminate that from the trial. Seriously, Blizzard, it is a time limited trial so you might as well let the player try out everything so that they can make an informed decision.

Despite these complaints, it is otherwise an entertaining game. The sheer volume of are to explore and the available content is staggering. Having all of the players roaming the same world gives it a feeling of really being alive. Right now, having reached the level cap, I’m stuck trying to decide if paying Blizzard money every month is worth the experience.

As a neat ending, WoW has a character viewer that you can embed into websites, so here is Bonebox in all his glory.

Ten free interents if you can guess the character’s name reference.

Recently, I managed to dig up an old copy of Planescape: Torment. It’s a great game, if you can find it. Copies of the game are hard to come by but you can get one here for $45.

Now if you’ve never played the game you might wonder how an eleven year old game still goes for $45. The short answer is, it is one of the best (if not the best) video games ever made.

A few quick caveats. If you are the kind of person who thinks that Doom was the pinnacle of game design, then this game is not for you. It has an exceptionally well executed storyline that is populated with interesting and well fleshed out characters.

There IS a lot of mandatory reading. The script for the game weighs in at around 800,000 words, that’s enough for eight or so novels and enough to make even the late Robert Jordan jealous.

Being over a decade old, I don’t feel too bad about mentioning spoilers but, just in case:

SPOILERS AHEAD

The story follows the main character “The Nameless One”, who awakens horribly scarred and with no memory on a mortuary slab in the Hive in Sigil. For reasons unknown to him, he cannot die, at least not permanently and after escaping from the mortuary he beings a long journey to find out who is and how he came to be this way.

One of the central themes to Torment is “What can change the nature of a man?”. The question is asked by Ravel Puzzlewell, the night hag who is responsible for splitting The Nameless One from his mortality and making him effectively immortal, and an answer is demanded before she will help you.

As you play through the game, you find try to find the answer to this question and when it is finally asked you are given maybe twenty different answers to give. What comes next is probably the pinnacle of video game design and is, in my opinion, the definition of interactive fiction.

Many video games pose problems that need to be solved. There is typically one solution (or possible three: good, neutral, and evil) to any given problem. Because of this, people are used to picking up clues and attempting to come up with the correct solution.

Torment though, doesn’t adhere to the strict good, neutral, evil paths and instead opts to provide the player with more opportunities to explore the gray areas and by the time you reach Ravel you will have had the opportunity to figure out the answer to the question.

It is then that you’ll discover that Ravel is only interested in your answer to the question. Any of the given answers to the question is the right one. That’s when you’ll realize the myriad of paths through the storyline has enabled you to come to your own answer instead of being forced into a preset answer that the game authors wrote in.

By some amazing quirk of fate, I dusted off X-COM and started playing again about a week before it hit the news. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the game, Shamus Young describes it best, “X-Com was an overhead turn based game where you directed a team of extremely expendable commandos.” Of course, he was being generous. The Zerg die in fewer numbers than your commandos do.

I was first introduced to the game back in 1995 in the form of its sequel X-COM: Terror from the Deep. The two games are functionally identical as back then sequels were nothing more than the same game just with better graphics (wait a minute…). The game takes about 15 minutes to learn and then you can sit back and let the aggravation begin.

As mentioned above your commandos (or aquanauts) won’t stand up to anything more than a stiff breeze. Causality rates approaching 50% are not uncommon. Not only do you have to contend advanced alien weaponry but your newly hired “elite” troops are weak, whiny, and can’t shoot straight. That and they get paid something like forty grand a month.

In order to keep them (and your other staff paid) it is your job to keep the countries of the world happy with you. If you don’t they will reduce or eliminate your funding (because that will make it better). Because of this, just like in the real world, you spend you time and energy focusing on protecting the rich countries.

Researching new technologies scavenged from the fighting aliens is a huge part of the game. Without access to better weapons and armor your soldiers will go from being slaughtered to massacred as the game progresses.  In order to research some technologies, though, you don’t just need the weapon or an alien corpse but you need live aliens to talk to. Of a certain rank. And all ranks look alike. There’s nothing like sacrificing the lives of your men to bring one back alive to find out it doesn’t know anything.

So now your saying, “That doesn’t sound like fun, that sounds like the video game equivalent of Sisyphus.” Well, kudos to you for making that reference but it is actually a hell of a lot of fun. Actually, it’s more like an addiction. Despite the pain (hair pulling frustration), you just want to play more.

I find this to be because of the games frustration and difficulty. As you move through the game, you have to fight for every inch of it. Every mission is difficult enough that it still feels like an accomplishment even after the hundredth time.

If you’re still brave enough to give it a try, I hear there is a version available under Valve’s Steam or if you can track down and old copy it runs great in DOSbox.

A couple of weeks ago, I read about YouDunnit on Boing Boing. I went to the web site, downloaded it, and then promptly forgot about it. More recently, I found it when taking a look through my download folder. I fired it up (plays like a charm under Wine). It is a truly fascinating game.

The graphics are nothing to write home about, somewhere around Final Fantasy I level, but sepia toned. The game play is what really makes this game interesting. It is about a murder mystery, well not a mystery because you did it.

It also starts at the end of the story, when the detective has gathered everyone in the drawing room to revel the murderer. Your job, is to make sure that he doesn’t finger you.

The game is played in a series of levels that go progressively farther back in time. At each point you have to commit actions that implicate one of the other suspects. What makes this difficult is that while you do this, you have to interact with other people and things and, in order to preserve causality (your lie), you must remember what you did in the future so you can take the appropriate steps in the past.

This makes the game rather challenging (I still haven’t gotten all the way through it) and if you get caught in a lie, it’s time to start over from the beginning. Keeping a piece of paper handy to remember what you’ve done and to whom is defiantly a help here. The game can be very frustrating as it does a poor job of explaining what it is you’re supposed be doing it and how the game mechanics actually work but it doesn’t take very long to get the hang of it.

For the price of free, this game is a great find. It doesn’t rely on graphics but instead upon a unique game play style to hook you in.