» Computer and Console Games
Tuesday, December 7, 2004
From the “whittling away at RPGers’ mule-like resistance to online play” desk
So, another tool for tabletop roleplaying via the Internet. This one looks fairly comprehensive and really gorgeous - I like the attention to details like GM control of screen tinting for ambience (sweeeet), and support for pressure-sensitive tablets, which a GM with a real yen for paper’s flexibility will want to invest in.
Whiiiiich brings up that, like GRiP before it, Fantasy Grounds is a monetary investment. Gamers have thus far seemed unwilling to spend twenty to forty bucks on anything that’s pure infrastructure and no content… at least, not if they can’t fondle it. There’s also the lack of a Mac version, which gamers always make disproportionate noise about (the tendency of Mac users to be disproportionately noisy being multiplied in this case by the larger-than-normal percentage of Mac users among gamers).
I don’t think we’re quite at the tipping point yet where doing tabletop-style RPGs online just seems like the obvious thing to do, but I think it’s coming. Maybe by the time it does, we’ll have free tools that cut the mustard. What do you think?
(P.S. First guy who starts a Mac-vs.-PC flame war in the comments gets some alone time in our holding cell with Bjorn the half-minotaur)
Wednesday, November 17, 2004
City of Heroes tells Marvel to step off
The smallest dog in the brewing legal fight over the future of the City of Heroes MMORPG has spoken out. Marvel Comics has threatened legal action against NCsoft and Cryptic Studios, the companies behind CoH, and now Cryptic has a reply posted on its website:
As reported by The Associated Press, Marvel Enterprises Inc. and Marvel Characters, Inc. have sued NCsoft Corporation and Cryptic Studios. The complaint is meritless. Cryptic Studios is confident that the District Court will reject all of Marvel’s claims and fully vindicate Cryptic Studios in all respects.
Guess it’s time to lawyer up or shut up. Considering Marvel’s monetary power, some may see this as a brave stance by Cryptic. Others will just agree that Marvel needs to go have a seat in the time-out chair.
Saturday, November 13, 2004
Marvel sues over City of Heroes
Comic book company Marvel has brought suit against NCSoft and Cryptic Studios Inc. over their MMORPG City of Heroes. Essssssentially, Marvel is claiming that City of Heroes provides players the tools needed to nearly duplicate certain Marvel characters, such as the Hulk or Wolverine. Extending the logic of the complaint, tabletop RPGs could theoretically be affected, as they too provide the tools. As does a #2 pencil.
Friday, November 5, 2004
HeroClix: Still licensable
NCsoft is using the power of HeroClix to make its City of Heroes Collectors DVD Edition even more attractive to gamers. An exclusive Statesman HeroClix figure is part of the package, which also includes a fold-out Paragon City map, a novel excerpt, a unique in-game item, and trailers of the upcoming City of Villains expansion. All announced on the day The Incredibles comes out. Hey, a superheroes fan is a superheroes fan, I guess.
Read More…
Friday, October 1, 2004
Your executive decision to kill time
I guess that if I spend the bulk of three days playing a web game, I should probably post about it. Nothing special about it, it’s just addictive like whoa. Or woe.
Thursday, September 30, 2004
ARG: another acronym to embrace before it destroys you
Many of you likely know all about I Love Bees, the mysterious site the URL for which was flashed briefly at the end of an online trailer for Microsoft’s upcoming first-person shooter Halo 2. You may also remember the promotional online puzzle games that tied in with Steven Spielberg’s A.I., which games came to be known collectively as “The Beast” and whose community of players called themselves the Cloudmakers. Rich with game-world detail, convincing characters and sometimes-fiendish puzzles, these alternate reality games, or ARGs, are… well… basically just LARPs. I Love Bees recently took another step closer to LARPhood when it not only challenged players to find and answer pay phones being called by an in-game AI, but anointed the answerers of certain calls with membership in the “crew” of the AI’s lost spaceship.
One player is not happy. Eric Burns laments that the collaboration with strangers in real time that made his experience in the Cloudmakers so compelling will be weakened and eventually destroyed by this singling out of a few lucky players. But collective-detection to unlock a story is basically How to Host a Murder - you can keep fiddling with the puzzles and the means of revelation, but you can’t disguise the fact that, after all the fire and motion, you are still just waiting for the next piece of story to consume. A story is not a game. ARGs are now making the leap from that model to the model of Mind’s Eye Theater - by adding actual gameplay. So far, it’s just the game of Prisoner’s Dilemma; do you, the individual, stick with the group, or do you defect? Other games are possible in ARGs, and we will no doubt see more than a few of those possibilities soon. The question is whether going from the How to Host a Murder model to the model of today’s LARPs will come with the same loss of accessibility - and popularity.
Saturday, August 28, 2004
Maybe Catanians just can’t tell crap real estate when they see it
That would explain why they keep moving next to fields that only produce sheep on a 2. It would also help explain why Capcom is bringing Settlers of Catan to the N-Gage in 2005. Although the embattled portable game deck is famously also a phone, the N-Gage version, simply titled Catan, will only support multiplayer via Bluetooth, like most of the N-Gage’s titles. I guess Mr. Costikyan is still having trouble making himself heard over in Finland.
Friday, August 13, 2004
The eternal struggle continues online!! Because that’s what eternal things do!! They continue!!
Back when we first posted about CCG Workshop, I wasn’t sure things looked good for them, and announcements of subsequent additions to their roster frankly didn’t make them look much more like they had a promising future. Well, that’s all changed. White Wolf has announced that Vampire: The Eternal Struggle will be playable online, using CCGW’s engine, both in the existing CCG Workshop setting and through WW’s own servers. Development has already started on the online version, and something will be in beta sometime this year. It’s good to see this. Press release below.
Read More…
Wednesday, August 11, 2004
Brigands, bazaars, and the king of the old school
A replication of the germinal proto-electronic board game Dark Tower, executed entirely in Flash, playable in your browser by one to four players. Featuring original box art and sounds. I’m going to go ahead and say it: it is perfect. You owe us a drink for finding you this one.
Tuesday, August 10, 2004
Dungeons & Dragons Online details
Here’s the World War I flying ace with a summary of some devs from Turbine pimping their MMPORPG in progress. The game will be set in the Eberron setting and feature heavy character customization. It sounds as if these folks have a sincere desire to get the feel of this game right; they’re really focusing on combat, and on making it involve a little more skill and interest than other fantasy online games have done. It’s not gonna be twitch, but it’s not gonna be EverQuest-style sit-there-and-click. I am still unconvinced that D&D Online can find a market niche once World of WarCraft is out there, but I no longer think it’s going to suck. Then again, the hard-fought efforts of smart people have sucked before.
Thursday, July 29, 2004
The corpse of Twonky rises to feast on the flesh of its enemies
I just keep findin’ em! (Confession: here’s where - found via GGA.) RoboTournament is a cross-platform, networkable near-clone of RoboRally. The changes are improvements, in my view; at least they’re improvements for the online domain. For one, I very much like that the default mode is Deathmatch - Rally was never the best game to be mapped onto RoboRally’s system, in my view - but Capture the Flag is a lot more fun. I killed a good hour yesterday playing against the computer. The instructions are not as clear on how to get going as they could be, but be sure to download the server, client and maps appropriate for your OS and you’ll do okay. Who wants to fire up some of this action?
Thursday, July 22, 2004
The kimono finally lifts on Doom board game
This interview with FFG’s Kevin Wilson over at one o’ them video-game sites reveals that, no, Doom: the Boardgame will not in fact be much like Frag. He describes it as “a cross between Heroquest and Space Hulk.” Not only will play be scenario-based like the WarCraft board game, but one player will play the baddies, which will actually involve reading out “short bits of descriptive text … at key moments.” That’s the closest I’ve seen a board game of the one-player-against-the-rest type hew to the D&D model in a while. Also, the cyberdemon figures are 3 inches tall. Think spawning one of those will get their attention? Yeah, maybe! This is still scheduled to hit in late fall.
Wednesday, July 21, 2004
When the time limit expires, a giant sneaker fills the screen
So, while I’m thinking about virtual CCGs that cross card gaming with established computer-gaming genres: Magnant is a real-time strategy game driven by card play. The CCG haters among you will be happy to know that any and all actual trading is not implemented yet. The geeks among you might be interested to hear that the engine driving the RTS portion of the game is open source - the Mac users will note that the above means the game is cross-platform. Plus, it’s got ants. You like ants, don’t you? [Update: there is not, in point of fact, a Mac version yet. The engine is portable, so it should happen, in theory.]
Tuesday, July 20, 2004
Cue the Odd Couple theme: Palladium Books and Nokia share presence at Gen Con
Now this is just weird: Palladium will be sharing their Gen Con booth with Nokia - yes, the Finnish cell phone empire and makers of the thus-far lackluster game deck N-Gage. The form-factor problems with the N-Gage have been at least partially solved, but the bigger problem was a games selection so utterly mundane as to interest no one. Nokia appears to have swung to the other extreme - they’ll be previewing a Rifts RPG for N-Gage. I think it’s fair to call Rifts fans a niche market within a niche market - but I suppose if Nokia hits enough niches, and finally fires up the online play that the N-Gage cries out for, they might have something. (As an aside, I bet their new hire had something to do with this booth-share.) I think it’s unlikely we’ll see online play out of this game, or indeed anything other than a demo video, but one thing’s for sure: Rifts for N-Gage will have characters that’d snap your neck like a toothpick if you so much as say “side-talkin’.”
Wednesday, July 14, 2004
My God… it’s full of… well, you know
I don’t think I ever mentioned that the Star Chamber folks had a booth at Origins, pimping the first expansion (at least I’m pretty sure the other title they toss around - which is “Origins,” confusingly enough - refers to their starting card set) to their CCG/4X masterpiece. The new card set, “Incursions,” even features two cards by Gabe of Penny Arcade. I had a great time playing this one back in the day and plan to peep out this new set. I remember back when those poor bastards who were trying to revive the old online-CCG Sanctum always had a presence at Origins… sorry, boys, but it does help when you have a coherent game to begin with. Star Chamber’s first-play experience is so much better it’s not funny.
Tuesday, June 22, 2004
Warhammer Online pulls the plug
Games Workshop might have read the latest post on Greg Costikyan’s site, or maybe reality finally set in. Either way, as ICv2 reports, the Warhammer MMORPG has been called off. The website has the following announcement:
Read More…
Thursday, June 17, 2004
Game that is still not Pokemon resembles it slightly more
Those of you with GBAs already know that it’s the only device resembling a contemporary “game console” that the busy, thinking adult needs to own. Thanks to its portability and plentiful array of high-caliber turn-based games, it’s one of the best things a gamer can do with time that’s otherwise unusable. But you might not know that all 120 cards in the first set of WotC’s Magic-lite-done-right CCG Duel Masters (plus another 60 or so from the first expansion) are available to be played with in Duel Masters: Sempai Legends, a GBA version of the game (with “RPG elements,” meaning you control a guy that walks around). If you hate the expense and randomness of CCGs but still fiend for the days when Magic was simple, give a shot to the, um, lower expense and randomness, and competent single-player AI, of this version.
Thursday, June 10, 2004
Quick! Disassemble the duck!
We have noted before the tendency of LEGO to put really astoundingly good time-sucking games on their website. This one is the best balance between a turn-based puzzle game and “real time” strategy I have ever experienced. Give it some time, you’ll be surprised how deep it can be. In a similar, but more action-y vein is this.
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