I'm sure most players of Magic: The Gathering will be aware that Wizards of the Coast have announced some changes to the game's rules for the upcoming core set release, Magic: The Gathering 2010.
Inevitably, some players are predicting the death of the game. Just as they did with the Sixth Edition rules update, with Eighth Edition's new card frames, with the grand creature type update and with every other important decision made in the game's history.
Equally inevitable is the fact that many other players, particularly those who've been around throughout the course of many other changes, are pointing out how idiotic this view is. It's only two short years since the introduction of a new card type - Planeswalkers - was heralded as the 'death of Magic' in some quarters, and that didn't seem to pan out any more than any other such claims.
However, while the new rules almost certainly won't be the death of Magic, some players will quit. The question is whether the new direction will attract enough new players to have made the changes worthwhile - although even if they don't, it's unlikely to be the end. Star Wars Galaxies is still going strong despite a massive backlash from both critics and the player base, and a commensurate drop-off in subscriptions, following 2005's "New Game Enhancement" update. A game with such a strong brand as Magic would have to take a considerable hit before becoming truly dead. One can argue the ethics of trying to attract new players at the expense of alienating your current ones (as many did with the SWG update), but that's not the point of this article.
Yes, some players will quit, just as some players quit after Sixth Edition rules, after Eighth Edition card frames, after the introduction of the Planeswalker card type. Some of them will return to the game at a later date. Others will not. But that's their prerogative. Right now, the differences seem massive, but final judgement must wait until we're used to the new rules. But there's no denying that after July this year, significantly so or otherwise, Magic will be a different game. And it's only natural that some people will prefer the old rules, perhaps even continue to use the old rules.
I understand where these people will be coming from. To use a tangential example, the fourth edition of Dungeons & Dragons is an excellent game. It's simple, straightforward, and much better-tailored to the heroic fantasy genre than 3 or 3.5 edition rules were, which suffered by trying to be a generic, universal roleplaying system (reference intended). In D&D4, very much unlike D&D3, everyone in the player party has something to do, combat is as fast and smooth as an MMO, and you really feel like you're taking part in a fantasy epic. Of all the roleplaying games I have absolutely zero interest in owning myself, D&D4 is far and away the one I would recommend most strongly to other people. Personally? I don't like fantasy, I don't like MMOs, and I don't particularly care about having something to do in a party. I don't enjoy the style the game is aiming for and I don't roleplay for the same reasons D&D4 is geared towards. And that's just my thing. I can appreciate the beauty of D&D4 - I would just rather personally play D&D3.5 because it appeals more to my own sensibilities.
And so it is with Magic 2010. Some people genuinely won't like the updated rules as much as the old ones and may quit or continue to use the old rules casually. Rather than being chastised or accused of being luddites, the rest of the player base ought to accept that the new changes won't be for everyone and move on.
Those saying "This will kill Magic"? Reactionary, pessimistic and downright incorrect.
Those saying "I will quit Magic over this"? Reactionary, yes. Pessimistic, perhaps. But that's their call to make.
As a side note, it'll be interesting to note whether or not Magic Online will feature a "Pre-M10 Rules" game type...
Wednesday, 17 June 2009
Thursday, 16 October 2008
Today's Latest Developments column on the Magic: the Gathering site, by guest author Ken Nagle, raises a lot of interesting points about scaling power levels in game design. His article is a defence of a card in the new set commonly described as 'bad' as it's a functional reprint of an existing and somewhat under-played card. Much of it will be lost on those who don't play Magic, but the following excerpts convey the gist of his argument:
To put it another way, in any role-playing game you've played, you can find a sword with bonus +1 damage. I guarantee you that any game with a +1 damage sword also has a +2 damage sword. Why? Because unequipping your +1 damage Sword for a strictly better +2 damage sword feels great! It's what players want—it's absolutely the correct play, and you feel (and are) more powerful within the rules of the game.
I found the tone rather smug in its supposition of self-evidence, but he does raise a valid point - beyond the obvious one of a linear progression of power versus selecting the right tool of several for the job - of what purpose a lower-end feature serves. He argues that it's to make the better examples seem better;
"Why print it if it's bad?" is its own conundrum. Why do poker decks have 2s in them? Since deuces are the worst cards in the deck, how about not printing them? Doing that makes 3s the worst cards in the deck, etc. All this logic does is effectively decrease the power level gamut of cards.
Even now, only a few hours after it went up, discussion on it is getting heated. TeamCharleZ sums it up the counter-argument succinctly if perhaps a little unfairly:
''You will put it into your deck if you don't have anything better''
If I would have got something better instead of it (say, because it wasn't printed), I wouldn't have to bother putting it in a deck.
sammysamurai deconstructs the roleplaying analogy;
I want to point out that Ken's RPG/equipment metaphor is, although clever, flawed. When you play an RPG, you've already spent your money on the game(I'm talking about real life dollars here). To get an in-game +2 sword, you don't have to spend any more real-world money. However, with magic, you are spending real money with each and every pack you buy. It is highly discouraging when I crack 6 packs of the newest set only to find that about 1/4 of the cards "remind me" that I already own cards that are strictly better. If you're playing an RPG and own a +3 sword, don't you think it would be a little odd to go to the shop and purchase a +1 sword?
It'll be interesting to see what response Mr. Nagle has, if any - I'm sure there's a lot left to be said on this subject.
To put it another way, in any role-playing game you've played, you can find a sword with bonus +1 damage. I guarantee you that any game with a +1 damage sword also has a +2 damage sword. Why? Because unequipping your +1 damage Sword for a strictly better +2 damage sword feels great! It's what players want—it's absolutely the correct play, and you feel (and are) more powerful within the rules of the game.
Now, it is possible to design games without "strictly betters," where every player choice fits inside an intricate puzzle of "maybes" with tons of rock-paper-scissors involved. The possible choices would be closer to something like:
- Sword of +1 damage
- Shield of +2 defense, -1 speed
- Dagger of +2 speed, -1 defense
I found the tone rather smug in its supposition of self-evidence, but he does raise a valid point - beyond the obvious one of a linear progression of power versus selecting the right tool of several for the job - of what purpose a lower-end feature serves. He argues that it's to make the better examples seem better;
"Why print it if it's bad?" is its own conundrum. Why do poker decks have 2s in them? Since deuces are the worst cards in the deck, how about not printing them? Doing that makes 3s the worst cards in the deck, etc. All this logic does is effectively decrease the power level gamut of cards.
Even now, only a few hours after it went up, discussion on it is getting heated. TeamCharleZ sums it up the counter-argument succinctly if perhaps a little unfairly:
''You will put it into your deck if you don't have anything better''
If I would have got something better instead of it (say, because it wasn't printed), I wouldn't have to bother putting it in a deck.
sammysamurai deconstructs the roleplaying analogy;
I want to point out that Ken's RPG/equipment metaphor is, although clever, flawed. When you play an RPG, you've already spent your money on the game(I'm talking about real life dollars here). To get an in-game +2 sword, you don't have to spend any more real-world money. However, with magic, you are spending real money with each and every pack you buy. It is highly discouraging when I crack 6 packs of the newest set only to find that about 1/4 of the cards "remind me" that I already own cards that are strictly better. If you're playing an RPG and own a +3 sword, don't you think it would be a little odd to go to the shop and purchase a +1 sword?
It'll be interesting to see what response Mr. Nagle has, if any - I'm sure there's a lot left to be said on this subject.
Thursday, 9 October 2008
Hooray For Adventure Gaming
Dispensing of the "I have internet again... again" speech.
I've finally gotten around to playing Dreamfall, the sequel to the really-rather-excellent The Longest Journey. For the uninitiated, The Longest Journey was a point-and-click adventure game released in 2000 and set in the year 2209 which begins when university art student April Ryan is warned by a mysterious, slightly creepy drifter that her vivid, fantastical dreams and hallucinations are a lot closer to reality than she would like. I don't want to spoil too much because it just might be the single greatest narrative in gaming, and anyone interested really ought to discover for themselves just how poetic and thought-provoking it is. It's an absolutely stunning work both of storytelling in games, using the medium to do things non-interactive media can't, and of visual art, combining dirty urban chic, sleek and minimalist futurism, beautiful fantasy-novel-cover vistas, genuinely fantastical architecture and creature design, and pure abstract lunacy and crucially, made them all blend together naturally. It was also - are you listening, Broken Sword 3? - was the first game to ever make me cry, as well as being one of the earliest to recognise the importance of good acting in games.
But the game itself wasn't necessarily, always, very good. Too often it suffered from the kind of nonsensical puzzle design LucasArts and Revolution alone managed to transcend in the adventure genre's heyday. And remember that TLJ came a decade later than the genre's heyday - it's not as if developers Funcom didn't know the complaints people had against adventure gaming. Anyone who endured the clamp-and-inflatable-ring puzzles is sure to gnash their teeth at that particular memory.
Dreamfall picks up ten years later with a new character, clinically depressed bioengineering dropout Zoe Castillo, and a new location - the astonishingly beautiful Casablanca - and, seemingly, an entirely new story. Of course to the veteran there are plenty of callbacks to the first game and five simple words at one point: "Venice, Newport, The Fringe, Charlie" brought a grin to my face of a size and intensity normally reserved for hallucinogenic drugs. I do recommend playing the games in chronological order; although the opening of Dreamfall is welcoming to newcomers, the callbacks start piling up at quite a rate by the third chapter.
Even more than TLJ, Dreamfall is set in a world which is recognisably our own while remaining believably futuristic. I haven't completed it yet but neither the story nor the visual design are disappointing me thus far. The big new approach that got fans talking when it was announced was having multiple player characters - TLJ was an intensely personal story of one individual's journey of self-discovery. How could Dreamfall hope to be as intimate when you're hopping between different bodies every five minutes? Of course, it works just fine. These guys are maestros. The role of the protagonist was one of the first game's subtler themes (and the pivot point of one of its best plot twists), and in Dreamfall, it's pushed to the fore. Everyone has their own story - some may be wilder or more important on a large scale, but does that devalue those which aren't? This is why these games work far better as interactive experiences than non-interactive; by making the player directly, literally, the central character (or characters), the central character's relation to the narrative becomes more challenging and much more clearly focused.
However, there's always that tension between game and interactive story waiting to rear its ugly head. Dreamfall was widely criticised for stealth and action sequences which detract from the puzzles, and for the relative simplicity of those puzzles compared to the first game. It's certainly not the mental workout many old-school adventure fans were drawn to the genre for in the first place. There's an interesting interview with Longest Journey auteur Ragnar Tørnquist conducted by PC Gamer reviewer John Walker over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun. The whole three-part interview is fascinating, but the following excerpt was what interested me the most:
"Ragnar: I was reading on Rock, Paper, Shotgun that you’d said in your review of Dreamfall that you were overmarking it because you loved the game, but you advised people not to buy the game!"
"RPS: No! It was a caveat… Well, I’m not going to be polite. As an interactive experience, it just didn’t work. I felt uninvolved for so long, just listening to conversations. That every single one of those conversations is beautiful, and joy to listen to, is why it survives. But it didn’t form together in a coherent game for me.
"Ragnar: I respect that opinion. I don’t have a problem with critical reviews so long as they’re well argued, with at least a certain element of understanding what we were trying to do. I don’t agree with you, but what I do agree with is that the game did not succeed with all the things we tried to do. Obviously with combat, because we struggled with it, and the way it ended up was something last-minute, and not how we wanted to do it. Looking back I would have done it very differently. I would have done it in a more adventure-type way. In a way that didn’t require reflexes. How you respond is the most important thing. But I do think the game is better than some people give it credit for. Obviously the story is the key there, and that’s the thing: the story has to work, the dialogue has to work, and the characters have to work. And everything else is gravy."
Wow! There's a lot to think about there. Obviously as far as Ragnar is concerned, Dreamfall is a story first and a game second, but it seems that John was looking for a game as much as a story. It's Metal Gear Solid 2 all over again. Many reviewers and pundits argue that we want to play games rather than watch them, that endless cutscenes and conversations are detrimental to the experience. I'm not so sure I agree, at least not completely - Half-Life's all-in-game approach may have rightly been regarded as revolutionary but does that mean every game since should have followed in the same footsteps? Maybe story-led experiences such as Dreamfall and MGS2 were poorly marketed when described games, although obviously few developers would want their game to be labelled an 'interactive movie' in this day and age. Maybe a new epithet is needed. Whatever. To me, marking down these experiences for not being interactive enough is kinda like marking down a novel for not having a good enough soundtrack. It's a different experience and should be judged accordingly. Maybe Dreamfall doesn't get my blood pumping the same way a good racing game or first-person shooter does, but then, more action-led genres rarely stimulate me philosophically and politically or provoke anything but the most cursory and cheaply-induced empathy with the characters. If anything Dreamfall suffered for being too action-led where it really shouldn't have been, apparently learning little from the lessons of Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon. Compare to, say, Beyond Good & Evil or The Wind Waker for examples of mixing action with adventure smoothly, both released three years before Dreamfall, and Funcom's game does seem out of date in that regard. But we return to semantics - how many people, realistically, are going to buy anything which effectively advertises itself as a 'game without action'?
I also recently tried out the demo of Strong Bad's Cool Game For Attractive People, and it's a lot of fun. Again, the puzzles are mostly very simple but there's a lot to see and a lot of comedy, as you'd expect - the humour of the Homestar Runner website has definitely has made the transition to games intact. Nice to see it's mostly been reviewed well, except by Edge, but then I rarely agree with Edge anyway. Maybe traditional adventures and story-over-gameplay releases do have a market after all? Anyway, it's recommended for fans of LucasArts, Sam 'n' Max and the old, good Simon the Sorcerers. Speaking of which: Simon 4? Saw the review in the last PCZone, but I've never seen any mention of it in any retailer, either in-store or online. Wikipedia has only the most basic of pages for it and the official site is almost useless; apparently it was out in the UK in March and in Germany over a year ago. The best PCZ said of it was that it was better than Simon 3, as if it could be much worse, and it got 51%, which appears to be about average as far as review scores for the game go.
Final bit of adventure gaming related news: Insecticide is also a few months old and never received any attention in the UK. It has a nice Rare/Telltale looking vibe and from the screenshots seems like it could be fun in a Psychonauts kind of a way, but it doesn't seem to be available in the UK currently nor have a UK release date yet. I'm sure full a rant about region-based distribution of online games will follow at some point, but for now, I'll just say that if devs are so concerned about getting adventure games popular again that they'll crowbar in action sequences where there really ought not to be any, arbitrarily dividing the market isn't exactly going to help matters.
I've finally gotten around to playing Dreamfall, the sequel to the really-rather-excellent The Longest Journey. For the uninitiated, The Longest Journey was a point-and-click adventure game released in 2000 and set in the year 2209 which begins when university art student April Ryan is warned by a mysterious, slightly creepy drifter that her vivid, fantastical dreams and hallucinations are a lot closer to reality than she would like. I don't want to spoil too much because it just might be the single greatest narrative in gaming, and anyone interested really ought to discover for themselves just how poetic and thought-provoking it is. It's an absolutely stunning work both of storytelling in games, using the medium to do things non-interactive media can't, and of visual art, combining dirty urban chic, sleek and minimalist futurism, beautiful fantasy-novel-cover vistas, genuinely fantastical architecture and creature design, and pure abstract lunacy and crucially, made them all blend together naturally. It was also - are you listening, Broken Sword 3? - was the first game to ever make me cry, as well as being one of the earliest to recognise the importance of good acting in games.
But the game itself wasn't necessarily, always, very good. Too often it suffered from the kind of nonsensical puzzle design LucasArts and Revolution alone managed to transcend in the adventure genre's heyday. And remember that TLJ came a decade later than the genre's heyday - it's not as if developers Funcom didn't know the complaints people had against adventure gaming. Anyone who endured the clamp-and-inflatable-ring puzzles is sure to gnash their teeth at that particular memory.
Dreamfall picks up ten years later with a new character, clinically depressed bioengineering dropout Zoe Castillo, and a new location - the astonishingly beautiful Casablanca - and, seemingly, an entirely new story. Of course to the veteran there are plenty of callbacks to the first game and five simple words at one point: "Venice, Newport, The Fringe, Charlie" brought a grin to my face of a size and intensity normally reserved for hallucinogenic drugs. I do recommend playing the games in chronological order; although the opening of Dreamfall is welcoming to newcomers, the callbacks start piling up at quite a rate by the third chapter.
Even more than TLJ, Dreamfall is set in a world which is recognisably our own while remaining believably futuristic. I haven't completed it yet but neither the story nor the visual design are disappointing me thus far. The big new approach that got fans talking when it was announced was having multiple player characters - TLJ was an intensely personal story of one individual's journey of self-discovery. How could Dreamfall hope to be as intimate when you're hopping between different bodies every five minutes? Of course, it works just fine. These guys are maestros. The role of the protagonist was one of the first game's subtler themes (and the pivot point of one of its best plot twists), and in Dreamfall, it's pushed to the fore. Everyone has their own story - some may be wilder or more important on a large scale, but does that devalue those which aren't? This is why these games work far better as interactive experiences than non-interactive; by making the player directly, literally, the central character (or characters), the central character's relation to the narrative becomes more challenging and much more clearly focused.
However, there's always that tension between game and interactive story waiting to rear its ugly head. Dreamfall was widely criticised for stealth and action sequences which detract from the puzzles, and for the relative simplicity of those puzzles compared to the first game. It's certainly not the mental workout many old-school adventure fans were drawn to the genre for in the first place. There's an interesting interview with Longest Journey auteur Ragnar Tørnquist conducted by PC Gamer reviewer John Walker over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun. The whole three-part interview is fascinating, but the following excerpt was what interested me the most:
"Ragnar: I was reading on Rock, Paper, Shotgun that you’d said in your review of Dreamfall that you were overmarking it because you loved the game, but you advised people not to buy the game!"
"RPS: No! It was a caveat… Well, I’m not going to be polite. As an interactive experience, it just didn’t work. I felt uninvolved for so long, just listening to conversations. That every single one of those conversations is beautiful, and joy to listen to, is why it survives. But it didn’t form together in a coherent game for me.
"Ragnar: I respect that opinion. I don’t have a problem with critical reviews so long as they’re well argued, with at least a certain element of understanding what we were trying to do. I don’t agree with you, but what I do agree with is that the game did not succeed with all the things we tried to do. Obviously with combat, because we struggled with it, and the way it ended up was something last-minute, and not how we wanted to do it. Looking back I would have done it very differently. I would have done it in a more adventure-type way. In a way that didn’t require reflexes. How you respond is the most important thing. But I do think the game is better than some people give it credit for. Obviously the story is the key there, and that’s the thing: the story has to work, the dialogue has to work, and the characters have to work. And everything else is gravy."
Wow! There's a lot to think about there. Obviously as far as Ragnar is concerned, Dreamfall is a story first and a game second, but it seems that John was looking for a game as much as a story. It's Metal Gear Solid 2 all over again. Many reviewers and pundits argue that we want to play games rather than watch them, that endless cutscenes and conversations are detrimental to the experience. I'm not so sure I agree, at least not completely - Half-Life's all-in-game approach may have rightly been regarded as revolutionary but does that mean every game since should have followed in the same footsteps? Maybe story-led experiences such as Dreamfall and MGS2 were poorly marketed when described games, although obviously few developers would want their game to be labelled an 'interactive movie' in this day and age. Maybe a new epithet is needed. Whatever. To me, marking down these experiences for not being interactive enough is kinda like marking down a novel for not having a good enough soundtrack. It's a different experience and should be judged accordingly. Maybe Dreamfall doesn't get my blood pumping the same way a good racing game or first-person shooter does, but then, more action-led genres rarely stimulate me philosophically and politically or provoke anything but the most cursory and cheaply-induced empathy with the characters. If anything Dreamfall suffered for being too action-led where it really shouldn't have been, apparently learning little from the lessons of Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon. Compare to, say, Beyond Good & Evil or The Wind Waker for examples of mixing action with adventure smoothly, both released three years before Dreamfall, and Funcom's game does seem out of date in that regard. But we return to semantics - how many people, realistically, are going to buy anything which effectively advertises itself as a 'game without action'?
I also recently tried out the demo of Strong Bad's Cool Game For Attractive People, and it's a lot of fun. Again, the puzzles are mostly very simple but there's a lot to see and a lot of comedy, as you'd expect - the humour of the Homestar Runner website has definitely has made the transition to games intact. Nice to see it's mostly been reviewed well, except by Edge, but then I rarely agree with Edge anyway. Maybe traditional adventures and story-over-gameplay releases do have a market after all? Anyway, it's recommended for fans of LucasArts, Sam 'n' Max and the old, good Simon the Sorcerers. Speaking of which: Simon 4? Saw the review in the last PCZone, but I've never seen any mention of it in any retailer, either in-store or online. Wikipedia has only the most basic of pages for it and the official site is almost useless; apparently it was out in the UK in March and in Germany over a year ago. The best PCZ said of it was that it was better than Simon 3, as if it could be much worse, and it got 51%, which appears to be about average as far as review scores for the game go.
Final bit of adventure gaming related news: Insecticide is also a few months old and never received any attention in the UK. It has a nice Rare/Telltale looking vibe and from the screenshots seems like it could be fun in a Psychonauts kind of a way, but it doesn't seem to be available in the UK currently nor have a UK release date yet. I'm sure full a rant about region-based distribution of online games will follow at some point, but for now, I'll just say that if devs are so concerned about getting adventure games popular again that they'll crowbar in action sequences where there really ought not to be any, arbitrarily dividing the market isn't exactly going to help matters.
Wednesday, 12 September 2007
Frank Karsten's articles
Frank Karsten writes articles for wizards.com, which can be a very useful resource on game theory in Magic: The Gathering. Link to today's below.
http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=mtgcom/daily/fk56
They generate some interesting discussions on the message boards too, to which I've replied under the name stygimoloch.
http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=mtgcom/daily/fk56
They generate some interesting discussions on the message boards too, to which I've replied under the name stygimoloch.
Saturday, 25 August 2007
Returned
Yay! I finally have the internet back. Not much else to say... the only game I've been playing much recently is Vampire: Bloodlines and I can't say anything about it that hasn't already been said by everyone else who's played it unpatched. I'll have actual updates soon though.
styg
styg
Sunday, 17 June 2007
It's Only Teenage Wasteland
In preparation for Fallout 3 I recently downloaded Wasteland from www.abandonia.com. Wasteland was the precursor to the original Fallout, and a lot of the ideas from it ended up in the later series. Given that Wasteland was originally released in 1986, I obviously wasn't expecting it to be much like Fallout, but I tried to approach it with an open mind. Unfortunately I had trouble getting beyond the first hour or so.
I can quite happily read a book written two hundred years ago, watch a film from the twenties, admire paintings from the Renaissance and see a play first performed in ancient Athens. But I have trouble playing a game that's only twenty years old. I'm not sure it's just a technology issue (although that's probably part of it) since I still revisit older games a lot. What turned me off were things like the fact you're thrown in without anything to really direct your initial play, the random combat where enemies don't appear on the map as you travel, and the seeming lack of any real continuity between towns. Wasteland seems like strong evidence to me that games really have evolved in terms of both storytelling and mechanics despite what a lot of pundits say. I want to be fair to Wasteland, and to explore it properly, but I can't see it sucking vast chunks of my life away like its successors did...
While I'm on the subject of 'retro' games: I really dislike that label. In film and music,
'retro' usually refers to modern releases which evoke the medium's past. Austin Powers is a retro movie which draws on things like Our Man Flint and The Avengers, but those influences are not retro themselves. Imperial Teen have a retro sound, influenced by bubblegum pop of the sixties and new wave acts of the late seventies and early eighties like Blondie and the Pretenders, but that doesn't make the Pretenders retro from the perspective of 2007. Citizen Kane is not a retro movie, so why is Wasteland a retro game? I'd argue that a true 'retro game' is something like Darwinia, which is a modern spin on older games like Cannon Fodder and Space Invaders, or Ankh, with its plot and puzzles both heavily and openly influenced by Monkey Island. I know it's just semantics, but it seems like there is that distinction to be made.
styg
I can quite happily read a book written two hundred years ago, watch a film from the twenties, admire paintings from the Renaissance and see a play first performed in ancient Athens. But I have trouble playing a game that's only twenty years old. I'm not sure it's just a technology issue (although that's probably part of it) since I still revisit older games a lot. What turned me off were things like the fact you're thrown in without anything to really direct your initial play, the random combat where enemies don't appear on the map as you travel, and the seeming lack of any real continuity between towns. Wasteland seems like strong evidence to me that games really have evolved in terms of both storytelling and mechanics despite what a lot of pundits say. I want to be fair to Wasteland, and to explore it properly, but I can't see it sucking vast chunks of my life away like its successors did...
While I'm on the subject of 'retro' games: I really dislike that label. In film and music,
'retro' usually refers to modern releases which evoke the medium's past. Austin Powers is a retro movie which draws on things like Our Man Flint and The Avengers, but those influences are not retro themselves. Imperial Teen have a retro sound, influenced by bubblegum pop of the sixties and new wave acts of the late seventies and early eighties like Blondie and the Pretenders, but that doesn't make the Pretenders retro from the perspective of 2007. Citizen Kane is not a retro movie, so why is Wasteland a retro game? I'd argue that a true 'retro game' is something like Darwinia, which is a modern spin on older games like Cannon Fodder and Space Invaders, or Ankh, with its plot and puzzles both heavily and openly influenced by Monkey Island. I know it's just semantics, but it seems like there is that distinction to be made.
styg
Wednesday, 13 June 2007
My First Blog Post Ever
Yup.
I always thought I'd live out my life blissfully blog-free. Except recently I realised it would be the best thing for helping me do something I've always needed to do: find some way to condense all my obtuse thoughts on ludology, interactive media and game theory into short, easily grokkable segments.
Hopefully the first [i]real[/i] post will be up soon.
styg
I always thought I'd live out my life blissfully blog-free. Except recently I realised it would be the best thing for helping me do something I've always needed to do: find some way to condense all my obtuse thoughts on ludology, interactive media and game theory into short, easily grokkable segments.
Hopefully the first [i]real[/i] post will be up soon.
styg
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