Posts Tagged ‘pc gaming’
Minecraft: It’s the Journey, Not the Destination
October 3rd, 2010 •
Tags: exploration, Minecraft, pc gaming
Minecraft is less a game and more an impressive toolset that throws players into a world and allows them to build (or destroy) wonderful things. This is, perhaps, the most discussed aspect of the game. However, the yin to Minecraft’s yang of digital Legos gets decidedly less attention: exploring a mysterious world. If you, like me, look at the fantastic structures built by other players with awe but also with the feeling, “I will never have the time to build something that ridiculous,” you may find the more appealing draw of Minecraft is getting to explore a random and unknown world.
Years ago, games were often not documented well-enough, and, before the Internet, this was a serious problem. Now, we have the opposite problem: games are often too well documented sometimes forcing you, the player, to suffer through hours of banal tutorials before letting you actually play the game. Minecraft is the antithesis of this approach. But, unlike its counterparts of yore, Minecrafthas the giant network of documentation we know as the Internet on which to rely.
It’s sometimes a bit cumbersome for the modern gamer to have to search for documentation online rather than having it in-game. Despite this, the approach does have its advantages. When you first generate your world in Minecraft, you have no idea what to do or what is possible within the confines of the game world. Everything waiting for you in this vast random world is a mystery waiting to be discovered. In fact, many of the best tutorials available (like this one) are written sparsely enough to show you the basics while preserving much of the mystique.
The minimal documentation lends itself to a succession of startling discoveries, the first being that the game allows you to craft certain tools and objects using the resources you find in the world. This knowledge along with the specific recipes for a couple of basic items were the extent of the preparation I made going into my own first play session.
The “game” for me is setting some goal for crafting a particular item and then doing whatever necessary to attain it. One of my typical early goals when I start a new game is to make torches so that I may light the way as I dig deep and discover some of the hard-to-find minerals in the game. For this, you need coal.
I found some coal but not enough to produce the torches necessary to really get deep to where the good stuff is. This led to my digging a shallow mine into the side of a mountain. As you can see, even the crafting goals I set for myself tend to devolve into more exploration than actual crafting. I wasn’t finding much over the standard stone until I made a very literal breakthrough.
As I dug further into the mountain, I found myself falling. To what, I didn’t know, but I ended up in a cavern already hollowed out below the mine I myself was digging. This is a single-player game, mind you, so it was surprising to find a seemingly deliberate network of caves below my own handiwork. I started to explore.
The caverns were, for the most part, very much like the hallways of rock I had hollowed out above. That’s when I came across a room surrounded by a different type of stone than I was accustomed to seeing. There was a small opening from this room into the main corridor. I peaked inside to find the undead welcoming committee firing at me with abandon. The opening was quite small (only a single block wide and a couple of blocks tall). The skeletons had great difficulty getting even an arrow out to me let alone they themselves escaping to bring me to my doom.
My character was, at this time, ill-prepared for any sort of battle scenario. I was much more interested in — that’s right — the exploration aspects of the game. I had a plethora of picks but only a single sword. Luckily, I found the skeletons at the back of the room were content to continue firing their arrows despite the obstructive positionining of their cohorts. Most of the skeletons were eliminated by friendly fire leaving me only one or two to clean up.
I finished them off and placed a torch on the wall to find quite a bounty. Much to my surprise, the wall was lined with chests loaded with items I didn’t even know were possible. It was at this moment I realized the monsters must be crafting too. (Although they may not actually be crafting in-game, this seems to be the only logical explanation for the existence of such items in my otherwise unpopulated world.) I looted as much as I could before I found myself being fired on yet again. Another skeleton was behind me and struck his killing blow before I could make the necessary adjustment (i.e. my sword prying apart his ribs).
After respawning, I returned to my little slice of Hell-on-virtual-Earth, killed a couple of skeletons, and took another look around. In the center of the room, a small odd-looking cube cried out that it could be the source of the enemies. I tried to destroy it but failed.
In a few seconds, more enemies had spawned and put a fatal stop to my investigation. Sure, this didn’t end with any sort of climactic battle or even a single Earth-shattering discovery, but the entire event was a cascading series of discoveries that each changed my view of what Minecraft is.
The whole thing was a humbling experience. There I was, thinking I had this game figured (“It’s about crafting. Duh!”) when the game rose up and dumped a cup of undead ice water in my face. I had only scratched the surface.
Even veteran players are constantly discovering new facets as the developer pushes out updates automatically through the client. Rather than breaking all the additions down in plain view as is often the way of developers, Notch, as he is lovingly called by his throngs of adoring fans, simply pushes out the update and lets the community organically discover their shiny new cubes of wonder.
Exploration and discovery are such highly sought-after human experiences, it’s no wonder many thousands of players have signed on to bash cubes and rip apart trees with their bare hands. Notch has created an engine that builds interesting worlds and hands them over to the player. We have a vast expanse, little guidance, and no pesky tutorials telling us to go here or to click this button to make stuff.
Maybe after I’ve played a bit more, I will tire of exploring and get down to just building, but I think there will always be a part of me that wants to see what’s out there. Given a new world and the tools to make it ours, who can blame us for first taking a look around?
Games you missed: The Witcher
August 3rd, 2010 •
Tags: deals, games, pc gaming, RPGs, The Witcher
The Witcher is a PC RPG. It was developed in Eastern Europe. Those two traits taken together have a pronounced stigma. Games developed in this part of the world (particularly PC games) are thought to be buggy, unfinished, or broken despite some inevitable interesting ideas. Spoken dialog will, most likely, be awkward and poorly done. Crashes are expected. The Witcher is often lumped with other games and scoffed at by most gamers. There are always players willing to put up with the problems of any game to find the deeply buried redeeming qualities. Developers of these types of games have their own band of cheerleaders willing to overlook or downplay almost any faults. Therefore, it’s easy for the average gamer to write off the praise The Witcher has garnered as the same sort of sentiment some players feel for other seriously flawed games. The Witcher needs none of that. The Witcher is a gem of a game combining the polish of big-budget US developed RPGs (I’m looking at you, BioWare.) while presenting a slightly darker, more mature story than those counterparts.
Geralt is a witcher, a phenomenon described best by someone else (I don’t recall who.) as a dark medieval version of a Jedi. He has the strength of many mortal men and commands magical powers. Geralt is a very nuanced character and much of that nuance is up to the player with a refreshing lack of contrivance like the prescribed morality of recent games like inFAMOUS, and, to a lesser extent, Mass Effect 2. What I mean is this: those games give you choices, but the game already knows which choice is the good choice and which is the bad choice. This allows the game to shape outcomes of events based on whether you are basically good or basically evil. It makes sense in the context of a game. The Witcher, however, emulates the Dragon Age approach giving you multiple choices, each with consequences, none being clearly “good” or “evil.” In fact, the word “emulates” is a terrible choice here as the game pre-dates BioWare’s epic by more than two years.
Just as I claim this game doesn’t have the caveats of those other wacky PC games, I must say the game does have its own caveats although they are few and minor. The edition you will be buying if you should buy today is the enhanced edition which includes additional animation and corrected translations. This edition fixed some problems people had with the dialog in the original version. In its current incarnation, the dialog is not up to the standard of something like Uncharted 2, but it is more than serviceable. The voice actor playing the part of Geralt is excellent and has an appropriate soft-spoken gravelly quality befitting to his appearance. The biggest problem I have had with the game is the opening sequence. It is something of a tutorial in a confined area which is a very poor representation of the game which lies ahead. After an hour or two of being stuck in this small area, having your hand held everywhere you go leading you from one quest into another, the game sets you free into a much larger play area. The entire world is not open a la the Bethesda games, but describing the area as “open” is not inaccurate. You will receive both story quests and side-quests which you may complete at your leisure while within that area. Later, the game will move you into another large area. The game has proceeded like that through the first three chapters and appears to be continuing along that path. I am currently about to move on and have been told by an NPC that I should finish anything I want in this area before moving on as I may be unable to return.
Having played Dragon Age, the game is quite refreshing. It doesn’t need to maintain a strict battle/story rhythm. It’s content to let me spend half an hour talking with town bigwigs trying to feel my way through the political climate of the area. The story is excellent making this approach very successful. When combat does occur, it feels gimmicky early. The physical attacks are based on a rhythm. If you initiate each attack in the sequence with proper timing, you will continue the combo allowing you to perform the bigger hits later in the combo. Later, you’ll start picking up new “signs” (the game’s spells) and recipes to make the battles a bit more interesting. For the most part, combat is quick and doesn’t get in the way of the real meat of the game.
I have logged 30 hours in the game right now and have no plans of slowing down. The game is paced perfectly for a working person like myself. I can sit down with the game for 30 minutes to an hour a couple of nights a week and have an intensely satisfying experience in which I have advanced my character and some sub-plots by doing a couple of side missions in addition to advancing the main story of the game slightly. The pacing complements that nicely.
What can I write about The Witcher which hasn’t been written, and why would I write it now? This is simply stale, right? That might be true if not for a fantastic sale at GamersGate where the game is on offer for $6.78! This is no sponsored post nor am I earning any sort of commission. I picked the game back up a couple of months back after two false starts where I quit before finishing the tutorial and thought this the perfect opportunity to pass this gem on to you, dear reader. If you buy the game and enjoy it, please keep your eyes peeled because information has been trickling out about The Witcher 2 since the big reveal at E3. The developer has coded their own engine rather than repurposing an old BioWare engine as they did for the first game. Even though the repurposing worked remarkably well, this should allow them to edge closer to their vision.
Abstracting hardware: obsolescence obsolete (with OnLive)
March 25th, 2009 • 1 comment
Tags: cloud, cloud computing, digital distribution, Gaming, mac, OnLive, pc, pc games, pc gaming, Windows
Most everyone has heard the news of OnLive, the new cloud-based computer gaming platform. I’m not here to regurgitate that for you. Instead, I intend to give it some context.
Cloud computing is all the rage right now. With netbooks growing in popularity, all sorts of Internet-based services are popping up to make the experience of owning a netbook more rich. OnLive applies this model to PC gaming while broadening its appeal way beyond the netbook crowd. Where an app like Google Documents might outsource a little processor load and some data storage, OnLive’s system will send all of the intense load to your CPU and graphics card associated with PC gaming to a monstrous computer hundreds of miles away. The benefits are clear. While existing web apps have sold themselves to the typical PC user on convenience (e.g. the ability to access documents anywhere), this is the only service I can think of that has a chance to sell itself by saving gamers significant money on the hardware that is typically necessary to run these intensive games… not to mention the dedication to keep up with frequent upgrades just to maintain the performance status-quo. An entry-level gaming PC is going to cost around $800. This system enables a $300 netbook to do the same thing by relegating every task associated with the game other than actual display of the resulting video stream.
There are also implications here for the established modes of game distribution. In my most recent post, I discussed a possibility for a new model of game distribution that does away with the physical product altogether, but that proposition did not suggest any fundamental shifts in the way gaming works—only the way they are distributed. Digital distribution platforms have gained significant popularity over the past year. OnLive’s distribution model is digital, but it seems to be something of a hybrid between GameTap and Steam. I honestly don’t understand the model entirely, but Steve Perlman claimed in an interview there will be tiers of service which suggests a subscription model while the interface’s options for either buying or renting any given title suggests a more traditional model of paying per title. This is serious competition on either front. Steam will have difficulty as games that are available for both services will have significantly lower requirements through OnLive. Subscription services like GameTap typically serve so-called “casual” gamers better and contain few if any new release hardcore games. OnLive is coming into this with major partnerships with huge publishers (and committments for simultaneous release with retail) to give it some more muscle.
For the numerous advantages, this service already has a few small disadvantages I can see. First, the max resolution being quoted right now is 720p which is a bit behind the times. I understand there are now Internet bandwidth considerations as the resolution increases, and I’m sure that is the reason for this choice. It doesn’t make it any better for gamers that crave high fidelity experience with their PC gaming and are accustomed to running 1920×1200 or higher resolutions on their PCs. Second, with any digital distribution model comes concerns about consumer issues. As with other similar platforms, many consumers will likely not be comfortable with the license they are actually purchasing. Every software purchase is merely a license whether or not you receive a physical product, but, frankly, it is much easier for software publishers to enforce unreasonable demands in a license while they still control the software. If I have a disc, I can always resell it whereas a digital software purchase may be impossible to transfer.
For all my excitement, I am sceptical. It sounds much to good to be true. The only way we’ll know (before an actual launch, that is) is by getting in on the beta which should start this summer. If OnLive launches at an attractive price, good performance, and reasonable licensing agreements, this may be the Trojan horse that brings PC gaming back to the forefront.
Weekend PC gaming deals 1/31/09
January 31st, 2009 •
Tags: deals, FPS, Max Payne, pc gaming, Rockstar, shooters, Unreal Tournament 3
Photo by TW Collins of flickr
This weekend has brought with it a couple of cool deals on PC games. The first is GoGamer.com‘s 48-hour Madness Sale that brings a buttload of first-person shooter deals. My pick is Unreal Tournament 3 for $9.90, but there are a number of other great titles like F.E.A.R., S.T.A.L.K.E.R., and P.A.I.N.K.I.L.L.E.R. Hmm. Maybe that last one isn’t an acronym after all…
The next deal comes to us via Steam. This weekend, the Rockstar library is 30%. If you haven’t tried GTA IV, this is your chance to get it for $35. It’s also a great opportunity to go back a few years and get both of the Max Payne games (which are fantastic) for $10.50.