04.29.08
Posted in Games at 23:17
It took us 10 or so lives to get here. 10 or more tries at completing a seemingly impossible mission. We’re playing on Realistic difficulty - 1 respawn per round (realism is relative). If you die more than once, you patiently wait for the rest of your team to die as well so you can start over. In this case, “the rest of my team” is Nick, and we’re up against 40 terrorists.
We’re in a corner of Las Vegas abandoned by civilization. A group of houses still under construction when the economy crashed and the construction was abandoned. It’s tight quarters, and the terrorists are aggressive, but we’re patient players. We keep at it, refining our strategy with each death and each subsequent resurrection.
This time, it’s looking good. There are 3 of them left, and we’re moving cautiously through the ground floor rooms. We stack up on the next door and Nick opens. Three Tangos inside. Nick throws a flashbang and we avert our eyes as it goes off, blinding and deafening our enemies. Nick moves in first, killing one of them with a perfect shot to the face, but somehow one of the terrorists has remained unaffected by the flashbang. He kills Nick with a burst of auto-fire, and I quickly take him out before he turns his gun on me. The third terrorist elects to escape through the door.
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- Game: Rainbow Six: Vegas 2
- Music: Surfact - Soulslide
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04.26.08
Posted in Game design, Games at 11:00
Reading the recent Gamasutra article The Top 20 Underutilized Licenses and clapping my hands at the prospect of a Groundhog Day adventure/RPG or a Shaun of the Dead survival horror pastiche action game, I figured I would write my own little list of licences I’d sell my left arm to work on.
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- Game: The Nameless Mod
- Music: Steve Foxon - Strange String Thing
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04.25.08
Posted in Personal, The Nameless Mod at 09:53
I generally consider myself pretty proficient at reading and writing the English language. I put this down to a heavy exposure to English TV, English games, English books (thanks, mum!), and lots of time spent on the English parts of the Internet (something about the Danish corner of the ‘net seems oddly restricted and… rural to me, I can’t quite explain it - everything Danish on the ‘net just seems a bit pedestrian). It’s gotten to the point where my vocabulary contains words that many native English-speakers do not know, and where I certainly spell better than many of them - though it may simply be due to the fact that I care.
There is, however, one area in which I am always at a disadvantage and may always remain so: Idiolects. This is a frighteningly important part of writing, especially in English, which is a language distributed across several nations. A person’s idiolect describes so much about them, things we may or may not consciously pick up on, but which at least a native speaker will almost always understand at a subconscious level. From the way a person speaks (inflection, choice of words, and other factors), we infer their area of origin, their level of education, their social standing, and often even their ethnicity, among many other things. This is indescribably difficult to manage when you’re writing in anything other than your first language.
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04.24.08
Posted in Game design, Games at 15:02
Just came across a surprisingly pretty place in Guild Wars. Although it was a part of a quest (you had to find something which turned out to be in this crypt), coming across it felt very random and surprising. It was almost like we were just running through the catacombs, and suddenly - there’s this incredible room.
This brought two thoughts into my mind. First of all, it’s really fantastic what ArenaNet have achieved with relatively limited details. Guild Wars isn’t very graphically advanced (anymore, at least), but the art is all beautiful. It’s a bit like World of Warcraft, though since I’m still in the starter area, I haven’t seen nearly as much environmental variety in GW yet as I did during my four months in WoW.
Secondly, the main attraction of MMOG’s for me, if not games in general, is exploration. These are massive worlds, taking the typical open world design of RPG’s one step further. It must be a lot of fun to design the world of an MMOG, cramming anything you can think of in there to keep the player interested. I always love just idly wandering through a virtual world and then coming across something fantastic like the crypt above. World of Warcraft has a lot of this, but it looks like Guild Wars may have even more. We’ll see how long that will keep me playing.
- Game: Guild Wars
- Music: Massive Attack - Angel
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04.21.08
Posted in Game news at 13:03
I find this extremely fascinating: Game history! An old backup of Infocom’s shared network drive from 1989 reveals interesting details about the development of the never-released sequel to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy game, which I have never played. I haven’t actually read the article itself, either, though I’ve skimmed some of the sources he’s reproduced there, but I took a look over the comments and was excited to see several of the old Infocom employees chiming in.
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04.20.08
Posted in The Nameless Mod at 20:45
There are certain advantages to having your team distributed across 4 continents. One is that somebody will almost always be working on your project at any given time of day. When you’re sleeping in America, your guy in Europe is up working, and there’s enough of an overlap to meet up in before he goes to bed and catch up.
There are a lot more disadvantages though, sadly. The chief problem is communication, of course, which is a substantial but partially surmountable problem: Wikis, forums, instant messengers, voice chat, and video conferences all exist to help alleviate communication issues, though nothing will ever beat actual physical presence.
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- Game: Rainbow Six: Vegas 2
- Music: Enemy - Pressure
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04.18.08
Posted in Game design, Games at 19:10
Ever since I first played Deus Ex in 2000, I’ve been all for the inclusion of RPG features into other game genres. The feature that seems to have made it into most other games is the trademark open-endedness of the RPG genre, but dialogue trees, character customization, and experience points are other features that have gradually made it into especially the ever popular FPS games.
When I bought Rainbow Six: Vegas for PC, I was disappointed to learn that the X-Box 360 version had an experience point system that was cut from the PC port. Happily, this feature made it into the sequel, Vegas 2, which is the best reason for PC gamers to pick up the game that’s otherwise just a glorified expansion pack with better graphics and AI.
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04.16.08
Posted in Humour, Personal at 21:24
Today is my birthday. I am now 22 years old (yes I know! I’m, like, a kid!*). In fact I was born at 10 pm, so I’ve been 22 for exactly 22 minutes! I’ve worked on TNM more than a quarter of my life, which is completely ridiculous no matter how you look at it. It’s been a great day, but unfortunately I have got no presents.
Because one of the cats took ‘em.
Clearly there’s nothing to do about that. I hope she enjoys the Edge subscription I was supposed to get.
* Alternatively if you are 21 or younger: lol old fart!
- Game: Rainbow 6: Vegas
- Music: Metallica - To Live is to Die
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04.15.08
Posted in Personal at 22:14
Just updated the blog to build 2.5 as I was warned the old version had a major security error. The upgrade went entirely smoothly and a cursory look around leaves me with a good impression of the new admin system. It seems slicker and less cluttered now.
I really ought to make a custom theme for this blog at some point, but it’s just so much work and frankly I’d rather focus on TNM. Anyway, if you notice anything wrong with the blog after the upgrade, please be so kind as to mail me about it! Or even better: Post a comment about it here 
- Game: The Nameless Mod
- Music: The Who - Teenage Wasteland
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04.14.08
Posted in Game design, The Nameless Mod at 15:12
If there’s one game design lesson I can take away from The Nameless Mod, it’s this: It’s impossible to overestimate how much help the player needs.
Among the fan community of games in the Looking Glass tradition (System Shock, Thief, Deus Ex, Bioshock, etc.), there’s a widely spread belief that games should trust their player to be intelligent and independent. Bioshock’s quest arrow and highlighting of important objects is often considered condescending and unintelligent - redeemed only by the fact that you can toggle it off in the game menu.
But the people who complain about that obviously hasn’t observed a playtest. If you make a game and let somebody else play it, it becomes painfully apparent that your player is always more stupid than you expect. If that sounds really bitter, it’s because I desperately wanted to create an intelligent game that trusts its player to be resourceful, yet ever since we started playtesting it, all I’ve been doing is to insert more hints all over the place.
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- Game: The Nameless Mod
- Music: Alice Cooper - Poison
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