Games

Someone on Ars posted this image, and it instantly triggered an amazing flashback memory from eight hundred zillion trillion years ago, when I was in elementary school, probably around Grade 6.

My best friend Andrew Knowles brought in this exact Game and Watch one day to class. He always had the best tech toys—I played the original Sears PONG and Mattell hand-held football and a whole bunch of other cool things at his house, including the above device, which looks a lot like the Nintendo DS, no? Anyway, a bunch of us were having way too much fun playing it (at lunch, as we'd never get away with it during class time... or did we??) and it does this thing (shown in the picture) when you nudge the battery and it power-cycles, basically showing every possible character in every position.

I remember this girl, her name was Astra, tall, dirty blonde, not super-pretty but she had boobs which was a magical new thing in Grade 6, and she was kind of aloof and didn't talk to the tiny proto-men that we were back then, which was probably a good thing as we would have just teased her anyways.

Anyway, someone handed her the game and it did the reset thing, and she stared at it for a bit and then started laughing, and I remember what she said then as clear as day:

"There are.... too many men!"

Everyone laughed. It was so awesome.

Even to this day, whenever I'm watching a hockey game and they get a too many men on the ice penalty, I think of this moment.

I was levelling my paladin in the barren wastelands of Hellfire Peninsula the other day when I realized something: World of Warcraft is primarily a single-player game.

It seems odd to even consider this. The whole point of a Massively Multiplayer On-Line Role-Playing Game, or MMORPG, is the MM part. That’s why you pay the $15 per month, right? I haven’t played many single-player RPGs lately, simply because they are not online. I never finished Morrowind, Neverwinter Nights 2 sits on the shelf, and I didn’t even bother with Oblivion.

Why is this? I used to love single-player RPGs, from the moment I first moved my tiny white paragraph character through a randomly-generated dungeon on my Heathkit H-89. Ultima IV and VII were among my favourite games of all time, and I found the original Neverwinter to be completely enthralling. But once I started playing WoW, all other RPG activity ceased.

Yet here I am, levelling yet another character on my own, wondering how I can solo various “Group” quests along the way. Why is this?

It’s not like I don’t enjoy the multi-player aspect of these games. I’ve had fun in dungeons ever since I first ventured into Deadmines. I love the feeling of accomplishment when a good group downs a boss. I’ve run a character through the gamut of Player-versus-Player, having tons of fun getting my Rogue’s rank up to “Blood Guard” back when you could still get such achievements.

I’ve even raided, briefly, taking the same rogue into Karazhan and getting my first-ever dungeon purple. The group stuff is exciting, so why am I out here alone levelling yet another character instead of taking some of my 80s through exciting heroic dungeons?

Partly it is because I like to be able to pause and even quit the game at any point, when real life opportunities arise. You can’t do that in the middle of an instance, not if you want to get invited back. Raiding is an even bigger commitment, requiring dedicated evenings that may last several hours, or even well into the middle of the night. If I was still a student living on my own, I would be all over this.

But I’m not.

Unfortunately, this means that I don’t get to see a lot of the exciting content in the game. I suppose I could I get my Paladin to 80 and go bashing around some of the older Level 60 raid dungeons, but I’ll never get to beat Arthas. That’s kind of a shame, as he’s the biggest anti-hero in the whole game and part of the most exciting lore. He’s even been taunting me through the last few levels in Northrend, and sometimes in my heart I yearn to just throw everything else out the window and disappear into a “hardcore” raiding guild so that I can go kick his ass once and for all.

But I know it will never happen, nor do I really want it to. In the mean time, I’ll just grab a level here and there on my alts and keep grinding their trade skills. For some bizarre reason I enjoy this, and the unique rewards at the end make all the grinding worthwhile.

It's weird, but some of the most fun I've had is taking my pally and doing dungeons that are just a bit challenging to solo. I did Scholo when I was 65 and Stratholme at 68. I find that unlike when I did those dungeons in a group, when you solo them you really have time to appreciate the whole design and artwork and monster placement, especially in Strath.

A couple of weeks ago I took my 70 Shaman through Scholo because a low-level Shammy quest was in there to get a purple (for level 60s) hat that makes you look like Batman, which is hilarious on a troll. Anyway, I soloed all the way there, but he one-shotted me and made me sad. Dvixen came along with her 80 mage and we trashed the place together. He mind-controlled me and she reacted quickly and polymorphed me into a frog, then finished him off herself with her Water Elemental. It was SO much fun!

I guess what I'm really saying is that I love doing dungeons with people I know, but I don't want to raid. Blizzard has realized this and made heroic-mode dungeons give up emblems that you can trade in for phat purplez. I think this is a good idea, but I still have to find people I know to go into these dungeons with. It's hard, because everyone's on different servers and lots of people I know who used to play the game have moved on.

So I'm not sure what to do now.

The year was 1990. A small computer game company called Origin Systems, best known for the popular Ultima series of role-playing games, had just released a new title. When I first saw it, through a haze of alcohol and social joy, running on a friend's wicked-fast 386-33, I fell in love. I had to have it. Within weeks I had purchased my very first computer, with a Sound Blaster card, and was lost in a new universe. It felt different from any other game I had ever played. I felt like I was the star of an epic science-fiction movie.

Nearly twenty years have passed, and most games of that era simply fail to live up to their nostalgia. I find that today I struggle to play through Ultima V, or even the original Legend of Zelda on the NES. Thus it was with some trepidation that I loaded up Wing Commander under DOSBox, running on my Media Center PC, hooked up to my 42 inch LCD television. For control, I had the best joystick ever made, the Microsoft Sidewinder Force Feedback 2.

The graphics are, of course, crude. The PCs of that era couldn't quite manage fully texture-mapped 3D polygons, so Wing Commander faked it with a bunch of pre-rendered shots of each ship at various angles. (Ironically, the images were actually rendered on Amigas!) Then the game engine smoothly rotated and scaled each bitmap depending on the yaw angle and distance to the ship. Up close, the ships devolved into a mess of giant pixels.

Here's the weird thing: after a few minutes of playing the game again, none of this matters. It's all about the gameplay.
Wing Commander had a fast-paced engine that encouraged fun but risky gameplay. Using your afterburners liberally you could race around, get out of trouble quickly, and dart in with flanking attacks. You had to save up your weapon energy to get a bunch of bursts at once. Then, with your enemy's shields down, you could pop off a missile and finish the job. With practice, you became like a god, flipping around while sliding at high speeds, dealing out bursts of flaming death with perfect deflection shots. However, you had only so much afterburner fuel for each mission, and if you weren't careful you could easily afterburner right into an enemy ship, a capital ship, or even an asteroid, and blow up. In the Secret Missions expansions, running out of afterburner fuel became a real issue, as the game threw tons of enemy ships at you for each mission.

Not everything is perfect, of course--missiles seem somewhat underpowered (although this becomes a lifesaver when you are faced with enemy missiles trying to take you out) and capital ships have very weak anti-ship defence and are about as strong as tissue paper. There is one mission where you are charged with defending an enemy Ralari destroyer that has been captured by the good guys. No matter how fast you get there, it is immediately beset by five heavy Gratha fighters. Saving the Ralari requires huge strokes of luck: I have never been able to do it successfully more than one time out of every ten attempts, and this has not changed in twenty years. The only way to do it is to afterburner like a bat out of hell and hope to take one Gratha out immediately, use liberal amounts of taunting (the enemy will sometimes turn from their target towards you if you insult them, but these Gratha seem rather hell-bent on their target), fire all your missiles at separate targets, and even use your craft as a battering ram to finish off enemies without shields (this is extremely dangerous, however, as you are flying a Rapier with light armor, and if you aren't careful you will blow up instead).

The feeling of relief and pride when you successfully complete this mission and autopilot home, the giant Ralari in tow, is beyond measure. It hasn't diminished one bit with the passage of time.

Now, there were other good space games that followed in the intervening years. Wing Commander II added many more cutscenes and plot-related dialog, as well as giving the enemy a voice during flight. X-Wing and its sequels put the player into the Star Wars universe and had interesting shield management and a wide variety of missions. Wing Commander III went to high-resolution, fully texture-mapped polygons and featured real actors in full-motion video for the cutscenes, and Wing Commander IV turned those cutscenes into a movie that was far better than the cinematic abortion that was the "real" Wing Commander movie. Prophecy, the last of the Wing Commanders, added a new (if uninteresting) enemy and utilized the new generation of hardware-accelerated 3D graphics cards. And of course, many still claim that Freespace 2 was the defining moment in space combat simulations, with crazy fighter-versus-capital ship action and a modding community that extended the game to new heights after Interplay open-sourced the code.

This is all true. It's also true that none of these games ever gave me quite the feeling that Wing Commander 1 did, and apparently still does today.

Even Chris Roberts doesn't quite understand how the original game worked so well. Everything just sort of came together. Like the proverbial lightning in a bottle, it isn't something that is easily recreated.

Still, I find that I have to try. That will the subject of a future post.

It's been a long time since I've thought about text adventure games. These days my mind is usually thinking about World of Warcraft, and the old adventures from the DOS days (and the Apple ][, and even going back to mainframes!) are a long-forgotten memory.

I wanted to post this graph (from MMOGCHART.com) just because it is somewhat mind-blowing.

Look at the size and growth rate of World of Warcraft compared to all other massively multiplayer on-line games. At what point does WoW start to take over the entire planet?