• Man sues ex-girlfriend over glue attack. I’ve heard it claimed that making a man mad is safer than making a woman mad. The man might hit you, but women do crazy stuff. I didn’t believe it then. Now, I’m starting to think maybe they were right.
• People who claim they’re not going to buy the X-box 360 because Microsoft is “evil” amuse me. Especially when they plan to buy the Playstation 3 instead. It’s a good thing that Sony’s not evil. Oh… wait.
• I am a geek. That is all.

Where’s Mr. Peabody when you need him?

While I was writing the previous post on video game sequels, I stumbled across a review of Master of Orion 2 written in 1997.

It’s always fun going back to old reviews. A few comments that amused me:

The game’s CD ROM is fairly bulky at 345 megabytes. Arguably, 345 megabytes is more space than most people want a game to take on their harddrives, or is it?

Just before City of Villains came out, City of Heroes players who weren’t buying CoV had to download 1.6 gigabytes of data. Presumably, that involved overwriting just about every file on the disk, but it seems funny to me that 345 megabytes was ever considered to be a big drain on disk space (yes, I remember the days when it was a big drain; it just seems like a very, very long time ago).

Making an excellent multiplayer game out Master of Orion requires a re-design. I did not enjoy waiting on turns. I did not like waiting for two players to resolve space or ground combat. Deadlock, Conquest of the New World, Cyberstorm and Master of Orion II are great single player games, but I did not enjoy the multiplayer gameplay for any of these games. On the other hand, C&C and Quake both were great games for multiple players.

I can’t think of a single turn-based game that does networked multiplayer any better than Master of Orion 2 did. To have compared C&C or Quake to a turn-based game seems a bit silly. I can’t help thinking that the drive to add networekd multiplayer to everything might explain the reason why the number of turn-based strategy games has dropped in recent years.

Master of Orion II already has a patch. I hope I live to see the day when publishers and developers learn customer service begins with a solid product, not a cheery voice on the telephone.

I wish I could go back in time and tell this poor guy that he may never see that day. Heck, I wish I could go back and tell him that he should appreciate the cheery (presumably English-speaking) voice while he can get it, ’cause those days didn’t last long.

Discussing an 8+ year old game review is probably an indication that I have a bit too much time on my hands, isn’t it?

I’ve been a gamer, to some degree, for as long as I can remember. One thing I’ve never understood is why some people think that having a sequel be too much like the original game (or the last game in the series) is a bad thing.

Take a look at this October 4th press release about the X-box 360 launch titles. Specifically, let’s look at the description of Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell 4:

• “Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell 4” (Ubisoft Entertainment). “Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell 4” will thrust players into a new breed of gameplay that promises to innovate and revolutionize the “Splinter Cell” franchise. Ubisoft is taking the saga of Sam Fisher into entirely new territory, expanding the story and depth of his character.

I know, I’m just a casual gamer. I don’t understand what the market wants. I understand what I want, though, and in my opinion, innovative and revolutionary gameplay doesn’t belong in the fourth installment of a game series. The people who’re fans of this series like it perfectly well the way it plays! The people who aren’t fans aren’t bloody likely to say, “Well, I hated the first three, but I’ll give this one a shot.”

Take a look at how the fourth Elder Scrolls game, Oblivion, is marketed:

• “The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion” (Bethesda Softworks LLC). “Oblivion” is the quintessential role-playing game for the next generation and another leap forward in gaming. Step inside the most richly detailed and vibrant game world ever created. “Oblivion” is the latest chapter in the epic and highly successful “Elder Scrolls” saga and utilizes the latest next-generation video game hardware to fully immerse gamers in the experience. With “Oblivion”’s powerful combination of free-form gameplay and unprecedented graphics, players can unravel the main quest at their own pace or explore the vast world and find their own challenges.

See? No mention of revolutionary gameplay. If you played Morrowind, what you see here is “more of the same style, with a different area of the world to explore, and prettier graphics!!”. I didn’t play Morrowind much, but I did enjoy what I played. I’m interested in Oblivion, and I’ve been doing reading about it. I’ve never seen anything that even hinted that they wanted to change everything. Better AI for the NPCs? An improved method of selecting and using spells? Gorgeous graphics (and Morrowind wasn’t shabby in that regard)? These things are good.

Look at the X-com games. X-com: Terror from the Deep is the perfect sequel. The graphics were improved from X-com: UFO Defense. There were new and different aliens. New technologies. New worlds to explore. Gameplay was kept mostly the same, though, and there’s nothing wrong with that. X-Com: Apocalypse tried to take this same gameplay and simply scale it down, so that you commanded a small X-com force trying to defend a single city, but

During the (excruciatingly long) design period for Master of Orion III, the developers, Quicksilver, allowed fans of the series to be extremely involved (unprecedentedly so, I believe, but I could be wrong). One of the things I remember hearing most often was that they didn’t want to make “Master of Orion 2.5″, simply adding new races, technology and graphics to the last installment. I agreed, but only because I wanted Master of Orion 1.5 — Master of Orion 2, though fun, didn’t have quite the same appeal as the original.

In not making MoO 2.5 (or even 1.5), Quicksilver succeeded. In making a fun game worthy of the name, on the other hand, they failed miserably. Supposedly, MoO3 got much more fun in the late game, but I was never able to struggle far enough into it to really enjoy it that far. It wasn’t bad, exactly, but it wasn’t what I had hoped for.

One of my favorite blogs, The Smallest Minority, focuses on the Right to Keep and Bear Arms. The author, Kevin, will periodically show examples of areas where guns were restricted (or banned outright) and the crime rate increased. The governments, invariably, will decide that more bans are needed. Kevin summarizes this attitude as “Do it again, only harder!“. He points out, quite rightly, that when what you’re trying isn’t working, then that’s a damned silly attitude.

Game designers, on the other hand, get to be silly in an altogether different direction. They see that something that they (or their predecessors) did worked very, very well. Years after the original game is released, fans still play it regularly and extol its virtues. So, the designers look at the game, and instead of appropriately saying, “do it again, only harder” (or better, more accurately), they say, “do it again, only completely different!.”

It’s enough to make a person wish that games could evolve… there’s certainly no intelligence guiding that sort of design.