My June game is finished. It’s called How to Raise a Dragon, and it’s a game about dragons, humans, and eating things.
The dragon: a majestic and complex beast. How is it born? How does it live and die? Magus X. R. Quilliam’s definitive work, How to Raise a Dragon, describes all that is known about these great creatures.
Play How to Raise a Dragon on Armor Games.
GameSetWatch just posted my latest article. It’s called “Interplay in Left 4 Dead,” and it’s about how the various kinds of enemies in that game interact to become stronger than the sum of their individual strengths.
L4D is such an astonishingly complex game. So much more can be said about it, and I expect to get at least one more post out about how the weapons all work together. This is a game that, like Portal, has clearly been fine-tuned and adjusted to a glossy finish. But while Portal was cut down and simplified to make it a smooth, well-crafted ride, L4D was cut down to a tangled knot of gameplay interactions, making it this chaotic, complicated, minute-to-learn-and-lifetime-to-master enigma of a game.
This world is not as it should be. There is no truth. Reality is what we believe it to be. If you think you can fly, then that flight is real to you. Others may see you plummet and die, but you might live on, soaring above the clouds. Anyone can dream, but it takes someone special to make those dreams real.
Here is the release of my May game: LORE, the Lightweight Omnipotent Roleplaying Engine, and its first sourcebook, Belief. Together, they form my first tabletop roleplaying game system.
LORE is an attempt to address some of the common problems with tabletop RPGs. It has an interesting dice system; a quick, easy, and original character creation system; and a system that’s lightweight, because roleplaying happens beyond the rules.
Belief is a game about changing reality, about subjective viewpoints, and about the search for a better world. It owes heavy debts to other sources, but it is its own being.
Both of these books are beta releases. They have been playtested, but not enough for me to say they’re finished. Please, read them, play them, and comment with anything you think I did especially right or that I could change for the better. I’ve provided them in bookmarked PDFs slavishly laid out for optimal printing at your local print shop, and they’re released under a Creative Commons by-nc-sa 3.0 License.
These are just the initial releases; I wanted to get them out and in people’s minds so that I could start getting feedback. Expect extras like quick reference sheets and maybe an adventure or three in the coming weeks and months.
Anna “Auntie Pixelante” Anthropy recently posted about a Megazeux game, and it reminded me of a horrible embarrassment from my past. Who wants to see the earliest currently-known games publicly released by Gregory Weir?
Continue reading Smiley Quest
In this podcast episode, I present and discuss my definition of the word “game.” In short, a game is an interactive simulation that provides metrics which allow a user to track progress toward a goal. Listen on to hear why Microsoft Paint is a game and why winning and losing are really the same thing.
I’d love to hear what you think! Comment if you have any opinions on the things I discuss in this episode.
I’ve been playing a lot of Left 4 Dead lately. I got it in the recent weekend sale, and I can say with confidence that it’s the best co-op experience I’ve ever had. It’s got the typical Valve polish, it’s fun and funny, and the experience of finding, playing, and reminiscing about a play session is a complete joy. There’s an incredible amount to talk about here, from the way the setting is introduced through wall scrawlings to the way the game teaches you how to play. I’d love to see Richard Terrell do an article about the tactics and interplay of L4D. But I’m primarily a story guy, so I’m going to talk about the story.
Left 4 Dead is George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead as told by Samuel Beckett.
Continue reading Left 4 Godot
This week’s episode is a special False Narrativism piece, discussing the obscure but visionary Polish game Oszustwo, or Incongruity. I can easily envision a world in which this game never existed, but fortunately we have access to the most technologically-advanced, creepiest, and hardest-to-play game ever developed.
A fan of Exploit has put together a site that compiles maps for the game. If you go there, you can see a whole bunch of user-created puzzles, complete with titles and screenshots. You can even submit your own levels!
Check it out if you have been looking for more Exploit action.
I can finally remove No More Heroes
The gameplay is very odd. I realized during the final boss fight that it is as if the developers really liked the swordplay and treasure seeking of The Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker and decided to make a whole game about it. The swordplay has the same rhythmic feel as the GameCube Zelda, and even has a prominent timed dodge mechanic that lets you break past the defenses of vulnerable enemies. Even the way that the enemies’ corpses explode is similar. At the same time, the repetitive “do jobs while driving around an empty city searching for buried coins” sections call back to Wind Waker‘s late-game “try to find tiny treasure chests in a big, boring ocean” activity. The fighting portions are a whole lot of fun, except when the developers make the puzzling decision to subvert the character’s abilities. One late-game boss is immune to the protagonist’s very-useful wrestling moves, and other bosses regularly demand an entirely different approach than the rest of the sword fights.
And the story… it’s tough. The game is simultaneously a celebration and a condemnation of geeky, oversexed, otaku, socially awkward gamer culture. The main character, Travis Touchdown, is almost entirely unlikable; his only redeeming trait is that he is entirely honest about his goals: to be number one and to get laid. Other characters philosophize, or seek money and fame and power. Travis states, again and again, that he isn’t interested in all that. He just wants to be the best.
Sex and gender are strong motifs in the game. It bounces between wry postfeminism, with Sylvia using her body to manipulate Travis, and simple self-aware chauvinism, with Travis’s constant search for sex and his special treatment of female bosses. The phallic imagery is in-your-face the whole game: enormous swords, a bulbous motorcycle, and the need to jack off your Wiimote to “recharge your energy.” Travis takes a dump to save, has a homoerotic relationship with his sword trainer, and has a rather intense love of professional wrestling. Just about every character in the game is defined by sex and gender, from the estranged father to the effeminate pelvis-thrusting superhero fetishist to the sadistic loligoth with projectile men in gimp suits.
The whole thing really hasn’t fit together in my head yet, though. By the end of the game, it’s deconstructing itself, with characters offering ludicrous twists and explanations and openly referring to Travis as the protagonist. It’s just so silly and disjointed that I’m not really sure it has anything interesting to say. The well-read game hobbyist is familiar with the idea that gamers and game developers are “stunted adolescents.” The gameplay is fun but flawed, and doesn’t have much to do with the motifs and concepts thrown haphazardly around. I’ll think about it some more, and if I come up with any sort of synthesis from the game, I’ll post again.
I’ve gotten some requests for a way to download the Exploit soundtrack, so I got Evan Merz, the composer, to give me some new, high-quality mp3s of all the music. You can download the soundtrack in a zip file. You can also visit Merz’s site, where he discusses computer music and has some of his other compositions available for download.
