-- The Prolix Wag
Okay, okay. Just this once, Ken was not totally lame. Just this once.
Okay, okay. Just this once, Ken was not totally lame. Just this once.
Showing posts with label videogames. Show all posts
Showing posts with label videogames. Show all posts
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Saturday, July 11, 2009
Griff Oberwald is a Big Fat Cheatyface
As you may or may not be aware, Cyanide Studios released their PC version of Blood Bowl a couple weeks ago. It has been consuming my life ever since.
Why? Because FUCK YES, that's why.
Blood Bowl began life as a boardgame, made by Games Workshop, the fantasy miniatures/wargames company that's best known for making games with awesome fluff and crappy mechanics that get 13-year-old boys to buy way too many pewter miniatures.
I'm sorry, I can't hear you over the sound of my own sublimated sexuality. Also, my shoulder pads block my ears.
Blood Bowl is, without a doubt, the best game Games Workshop ever designed. Awesome idea, simple, elegant mechanics, damn near bottomless replay value, and even at it's height you didn't have to drop $500 on miniatures to assure yourself a slim chance of not get your ass handed to you. The PC version is all that wrapped up in a very pretty, only slightly clunky package that lets you play game after game after game. I have not had this addictive a gaming experience since Civilization. Yes, it's THAT good. Go buy it now. You can read about why when you get back.
Look at this picture closely. If, after having examined it at length, you still haven't bought the game, congratulations! You're a replicant.
Blood Bowl, for the uninitiated, is Fantasy Football. No, REAL Fantasy Football. As in, Football with Orcs and Elves and Trolls beating each other until their intestines fall out, and then occasionally picking up a spiky football and scoring with it. If you're not thinking "Football and Orcs and Elves and Trolls? Why didn't I think of that?", you have no soul and should seriously consider the idea that yours is the unexamined life Socrates was talking about.
Why? Because FUCK YES, that's why.Blood Bowl began life as a boardgame, made by Games Workshop, the fantasy miniatures/wargames company that's best known for making games with awesome fluff and crappy mechanics that get 13-year-old boys to buy way too many pewter miniatures.
I'm sorry, I can't hear you over the sound of my own sublimated sexuality. Also, my shoulder pads block my ears.
Blood Bowl is, without a doubt, the best game Games Workshop ever designed. Awesome idea, simple, elegant mechanics, damn near bottomless replay value, and even at it's height you didn't have to drop $500 on miniatures to assure yourself a slim chance of not get your ass handed to you. The PC version is all that wrapped up in a very pretty, only slightly clunky package that lets you play game after game after game. I have not had this addictive a gaming experience since Civilization. Yes, it's THAT good. Go buy it now. You can read about why when you get back.
Look at this picture closely. If, after having examined it at length, you still haven't bought the game, congratulations! You're a replicant.Blood Bowl is the Best Damned Game Ever for the following reasons:
1) Summoning, easily gettable premise. "Football with Orcs" is just about the easiest pitch meeting anyone will ever have.
2) Constant, impactful choices during your turn. The game is like chess in that every single move is valuable, and there is not a piece you can move (or not move) that will not have some impact on the gamespace.
3) Constant, impactful choices by your opponent during their turn. Likewise, everything your opponent does during their turn has a profound impact on the state of the game, and may in fact kill one of your players. There's no time you can safely tune out.
4) Randomness that adds to dramatic tension, rather than taking away from it. I used to hate the randomness in Blood Bowl. Any given move, pretty much, you can roll two ones, and your fastest, awesomest player falls flat on his face, and your turn is over, and then you can roll two sixes, and he dies. POOF! You can never eliminate the threat that something can go horribly, horribly wrong... but you can manage it, which is what makes the game fun rather than frustrating. There is always risk, which is inherently dramatic, but there are ways to mitigate those risks, which is what makes it an exercise in strategic thinking rather than a game of War.
5) Relentless forwarding action. Each move sets up the next. Each tackle opens up a hole to run through. Each injury sets up the desire for revenge. And after each game, the skills your player gets make you want to play another game to see how well they do with their new shiny-pretty, which in turn gets them more skills, which in turn makes you want to play more. It's the leveling reward feedback loop WITH SIXTEEN DIFFERENT CHARACTERS AT ONCE.
6) Your Rat-men can grow extra heads and tentacles. Which I really think is what's held Monopoly back all these years.
Buy it. Play it. Love it.
1) Summoning, easily gettable premise. "Football with Orcs" is just about the easiest pitch meeting anyone will ever have.
2) Constant, impactful choices during your turn. The game is like chess in that every single move is valuable, and there is not a piece you can move (or not move) that will not have some impact on the gamespace.
3) Constant, impactful choices by your opponent during their turn. Likewise, everything your opponent does during their turn has a profound impact on the state of the game, and may in fact kill one of your players. There's no time you can safely tune out.
4) Randomness that adds to dramatic tension, rather than taking away from it. I used to hate the randomness in Blood Bowl. Any given move, pretty much, you can roll two ones, and your fastest, awesomest player falls flat on his face, and your turn is over, and then you can roll two sixes, and he dies. POOF! You can never eliminate the threat that something can go horribly, horribly wrong... but you can manage it, which is what makes the game fun rather than frustrating. There is always risk, which is inherently dramatic, but there are ways to mitigate those risks, which is what makes it an exercise in strategic thinking rather than a game of War.
5) Relentless forwarding action. Each move sets up the next. Each tackle opens up a hole to run through. Each injury sets up the desire for revenge. And after each game, the skills your player gets make you want to play another game to see how well they do with their new shiny-pretty, which in turn gets them more skills, which in turn makes you want to play more. It's the leveling reward feedback loop WITH SIXTEEN DIFFERENT CHARACTERS AT ONCE.
6) Your Rat-men can grow extra heads and tentacles. Which I really think is what's held Monopoly back all these years.
Buy it. Play it. Love it.
-- The Prolix Wag
Because I'm still OBVIOUSLY the Luckiest Player in the League.
Because I'm still OBVIOUSLY the Luckiest Player in the League.
Sunday, July 5, 2009
The Tao of Zangief
Street Fighter II came out in 1991, when I was 16 years old. It was a profound, formative influence on my gaming tastes, in much the way that Phoebe Cates getting out of the pool in Fast Times at Ridgemont High was to my sexuality.
You could play one of a number of different characters, each with their own unique fighting style, from the Sumo wrestler to the little Chinese girl with thighs of steel to the green-skinned Brazilian mutant with the electric skin.
Because, you know, the long tradition of green-skinned mutants with electric skin in Brazilian literature. And all.
My favorite quickly became apparent: Zangief, the hirsuite Russian wrestler pictured above. I picked him almost every time. And lost. And lost. And lost.
Why? Because if you wanted to win, you couldn't pick Zangief. You couldn't pick the fire-breathing yoga guy with the rubber limbs either. You *definitely* couldn't pick the Sumo guy, because he sucked.
No. If you wanted to win, you had to pick Ken or Ryu. Ken and Ryu were karate-fightin', fireball-throwin', dragon-punchin' douchebags who also happened to be cheesy as all hell. They could trap you in the corner with fireballs and dragon punches and hurricane kicks and cheese you to death no matter what you did. To top it all off, there was no discernible difference between the two, except that Ken was blonde and American, whereas Ryu was Japanese and straight.
Ken/Ryu was the only thing to play if you were serious about staying on that machine for more than a minute and a half. They were the cool characters, because they won.
And this is why, despite the fact that Zangief's conspicuously sculpted body hair did nothing to inspire confidence, I never, ever picked them.
Ken and Ryu were the easy choice. The popular choice. The choice of plebes. There was no possibility in them.
With Zangief, every once in a while, spinning my joystick with a mad and frenzied intensity, I would grab my opponent, do a ludicrously impossible spinning piledriver, and kill my opponent by knocking half of his health in one shot.
It almost never happened. But when it did, it was glorious.
In every game I have played since then, I always pick the Zangief. The hard to play, hinky, one-arm-tied-behind-your-back character/race/mana color/member of the Battlestar Galactica crew. If the faction/Pokemon/color of wooden blocks becomes the obviously superior choice over time, say because I have uncovered some new unbeatable strategy, I abandon them immediately, and find a new Zangief. Because I don't play games to win. I win to show how smart I am. And you can't do that with Ken or Ryu.
It bleeds over into my acting as well. Is everyone else standing? Then I, by god, shall hunker. Is looking deeply into my scene partners eyes the only choice that makes any sense in hell? Then I shall examine the samovar in great detail. Because anyone can act. It takes someone totally smart and pretty to act while making, not just interesting or creative, but totally counterintuitive choices.
In life, you will be offered many a Ken/Ryu. My advise is? Go for the Zangief, every time. Not because no one else is doing it. Not because it's a morally better choice. Because every once in a while, you will beat face, and they will know, deep in their hearts, how much better you are than them.
You could play one of a number of different characters, each with their own unique fighting style, from the Sumo wrestler to the little Chinese girl with thighs of steel to the green-skinned Brazilian mutant with the electric skin.Because, you know, the long tradition of green-skinned mutants with electric skin in Brazilian literature. And all.
My favorite quickly became apparent: Zangief, the hirsuite Russian wrestler pictured above. I picked him almost every time. And lost. And lost. And lost.
Why? Because if you wanted to win, you couldn't pick Zangief. You couldn't pick the fire-breathing yoga guy with the rubber limbs either. You *definitely* couldn't pick the Sumo guy, because he sucked.
No. If you wanted to win, you had to pick Ken or Ryu. Ken and Ryu were karate-fightin', fireball-throwin', dragon-punchin' douchebags who also happened to be cheesy as all hell. They could trap you in the corner with fireballs and dragon punches and hurricane kicks and cheese you to death no matter what you did. To top it all off, there was no discernible difference between the two, except that Ken was blonde and American, whereas Ryu was Japanese and straight.
Ken/Ryu was the only thing to play if you were serious about staying on that machine for more than a minute and a half. They were the cool characters, because they won.
And this is why, despite the fact that Zangief's conspicuously sculpted body hair did nothing to inspire confidence, I never, ever picked them.
Ken and Ryu were the easy choice. The popular choice. The choice of plebes. There was no possibility in them.
With Zangief, every once in a while, spinning my joystick with a mad and frenzied intensity, I would grab my opponent, do a ludicrously impossible spinning piledriver, and kill my opponent by knocking half of his health in one shot.
It almost never happened. But when it did, it was glorious.
In every game I have played since then, I always pick the Zangief. The hard to play, hinky, one-arm-tied-behind-your-back character/race/mana color/member of the Battlestar Galactica crew. If the faction/Pokemon/color of wooden blocks becomes the obviously superior choice over time, say because I have uncovered some new unbeatable strategy, I abandon them immediately, and find a new Zangief. Because I don't play games to win. I win to show how smart I am. And you can't do that with Ken or Ryu.
It bleeds over into my acting as well. Is everyone else standing? Then I, by god, shall hunker. Is looking deeply into my scene partners eyes the only choice that makes any sense in hell? Then I shall examine the samovar in great detail. Because anyone can act. It takes someone totally smart and pretty to act while making, not just interesting or creative, but totally counterintuitive choices.
In life, you will be offered many a Ken/Ryu. My advise is? Go for the Zangief, every time. Not because no one else is doing it. Not because it's a morally better choice. Because every once in a while, you will beat face, and they will know, deep in their hearts, how much better you are than them.
-- The Prolix Wag
You say “pretentious, condescending prick” like it’s some kind of bad thing.
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