Video Games

The light at the end of the tunnel

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Last night we spent a third of the raid time killing Ifrit which took us about 4 tries to get past all the pitfalls, and then the rest of the time was back into turn 9.

Turn 9 has taken a weird progression.  Every individual phase is this giant monumental task and when you finally get past it you hope “can we now just kill this stupid boss?”  We took about a month before we finally got the boss into phase 4, and the hope was very much “can we now just kill this stupid boss?”

Phase 4 is by far the most demanding thing I’ve ever been asked to do in a raid.  I have the job of marking dive bombs, which means in addition to doing an incredibly intricate dance around the arena to deal with boss mechanics, I am also expected to place the ground markers for dive bombs.  Dive bombs can take 3 different configurations and based on which one it is in, I have to mark different areas.

This is what we should do
This is the chart I keep on my second monitor so I can direct the raid to the safe spots

 

Last night we had one attempt where I had marked both locations in enough time and we had enough people up.  All we needed to do was get past dive bombs and everything was rinse and repeat.

We did not get past dive bombs, but what I did glimpse was the possibility of us beating this fight.  I saw the light at the end of this tunnel.

What we actually do
A diagram representing how our raid actually handles divebombs

We’ve been working on Turn 9 for almost three months now, and the fact that we are still playing this game and don’t hate each other is a testament to both the game, our leader, and our group’s resilience.

On Wednesday I get to dive right back in with a pretty green group, so I look forward to learning the fight all over again.

Wish me luck!

Tactics and Strategy: Triple Triad

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I have been playing a fair amount of Triple Triad this week, and I like to think I’m somewhat good at it.  I don’t actually know this for sure, and given the AI’s propensity to just throw games away, plus the fact that their decks are strictly better than yours, being able to declare myself as good based on wins seems dodgy at best.

All that said, here’s some of the tactics and strategies I’ve been employing to win games and get myself to 30 cards.

Opening Moves

For all of these games, I’m going to treat them as if they were all Open, meaning we know the opponents cards in hand.  In fact, even closed games we should know their card pool because it’s typically never larger than about 8 cards.  This lets us figure out what moves they can make in response to us.  I’m going to avoid talking about the Plus/Same game types because I’m still not very solid on those.

I keep going back and forth on how to recommend turn 1 plays.  I tend to play a soft card in the corner that I want play to proceed from. There is definitely an argument for playing a safe card and punting to the opponent, but I find your only safe card is your most valuable card and I want to save that for potential blowouts later.

When I say a soft card, I mean a card that has low enough numbers that I can reliably play a card on either side of it to capture it.  The plan here is let my opponent take it, and then I take it back.  This means that card can’t be turned anymore and I have a secure point on the board, and I probably haven’t spent any power cards to get there.

So the question becomes “what corner do I want to drop this card?”.  My suggestion is you pick the corner that best plays into your other cards.  If you have more high number on the top and right sides of your hand, open in the top right corner.  This is very much an “offense over defense” strategy, but you are playing against such higher card quality that aggressive trades, 2-for-1s, and being able to exploit the AI throwing a match are how you win.  Against the AI offense is much better than defense overall.

Mid Game

Mid Game really begins after the first card is played.  Hopefully you can capture that card.  If you can’t or it isn’t worth it, refer back to the previous section and try to re shift the game to a board state you can manage.  Just realize you are fighting very uphill at this point.

Other than that, moves become a matter of optimizing the difference between your turn and their turn.  Knowing their cards in hand helps quite a bit with this.

This means that you aggressively pursue moves that flip 2 cards even if it exposes you to having an easy card flipped.  If you have no available takes, you try to fill in holes on the board that would expose you to such attacks.  All you need to do in order to win a game is take one additional card over your opponent.  Once you are at that step, it becomes more important to go even than to try and aggressively pursue plays.

And as you are playing NPCs with much better decks, don’t despair.  If you are able to get an early lead, it’s entirely possible for them to just throw the game away.

Closing it out

Your second to last play is when it becomes most important to know how the opponent can respond.  In some cases, you might need to just put a card in a vulnerable spot to protect a lead.  Sometimes, you need to be able to take a card know that yours will be taken by something you can take in response.  This is when knowing what is in the opponents hand becomes most critical.

I hope this helps some folks out with the game.  I’m going to be streaming some Triple Triad today at my twitch channel, so feel free to join along and ask any questions or give any critiques.

 

Citizens of Earth: A Labor of Love

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So by now you may have listened to the AggroChat podcast on our Game Club game for February, Citizens of Earth.  If not, you I’ve embedded it below.

We were pretty harsh on this game, and I for good reason, but since recording the episode I’ve felt a vague sense of unease about it.  Anthony Burch wrote a great piece for Kotaku that puts to words some of my feelings.  Someone put an incredible amount of effort towards building this game, and tearing it down like that is disheartening.

But I think one of the things that bugs me the most is that it’s the type of game that I would probably make if I was given the resources to make a game without the experience of a career in game development.  You’ll notice we compare it to Earthbound and Pokemon quite a bit, and it definitely has that feel of someone taking these two well beloved games from their youth and trying to pay them homage.  The jokes are definitely more centered towards a cynical jaded adult, satirizing politics and modernity, but the aesthetics and gameplay feel geared more towards a game I played as a kid.

So many of the problems with this game feel like the result of love, not laziness. The people building this game were clearly deeply in love with the game they were building, and that made them attached to parts that needed to be cut.  When reality crept in they attempted to salvage what they needed to kill.

Tam and I use to chat about casual game design ideas, and one his personal disciplines he practiced was attacking his own ideas as hard as he could, and determining if there was anything worth salvaging from them before he presented it to anyone else. The concept that there is no sacred cow in game design was very important. Citizens of Earth feels like it is full of sacred concepts that the devs were too attached to do what was ultimately necessary to make a good game.

I think Citizens of Earth failed not due to laziness, or ignorance, but because of love, and personally that makes the whole affair that much more tragic.  I hope the team takes the lessons from this project with them into their next one. I look forward to playing it.

Great is the enemy of Good

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Or really anything at all.  I don’t know that I thought this blog as anything that was ever “great” or even “good” but I sure do know that part of my slump lately is that I look at my peers blogs (Belghast, Tamrielo) I see a bar set so high that I feel incapable of even failing to achieve it gracefully.

I am terrified of failure.  I am ever more terrified of failing in such an embarrassing way.  This is something I need to work to overcome, because if I’m ever going to grow as a person, the path is probably going to be through constant failure, not constant success.

Dragon Age and Racism

Boy this is a topic I’ve wanted to write about but I gotta preface it with this: I am scared.  Racism is a big topic that I feel like no one wants to talk about and generally gets angry with me when I do.  When it comes to privileged classes I am near the top: White, male, cisgendered, heterosexual, college educated, born into an upper middle class family, employed at a job that offers a salary and benefits, married.  Social justice is something I care about a great deal, because I am offended by any statement that “the world isn’t fair” that isn’t followed up with “but we should strive to make it so.”  I am acutely aware that trying to talk about any of these topics from a position of authority is foolish, so I’m not going to.

I’m going to talk about what how Dragon Age offers me a brief glimpse into the life of someone less privileged.  I have played as two characters in Dragon Age: Origins: A city elf rogue and a elf mage.  I quit my rogue around Lothering because I was frustrated with the gameplay.  I’m currently in Orzammar on my mage.  Both of these characters show you the story of two characters trapped by circumstances beyond their control.  It’s been too long since I played a city elf, so I’m going to mostly talk about my mage.

As a mage, I open the game being told that my lot in life is as an effective prisoner of a religious order of Templars.  I was likely taken from my family at a young age as soon as it was revealed I was a mage.  I start the game going through a semi-mandatory rite of passage that would have ended with me being executed had I failed.  I got a chance to strike up a conversation with my would be executioner, who expressed happiness that he didn’t have to kill me.  Everything you do in the intro reminds you that you exist at pleasure of the Templars, and they will end your life if they feel it necessary.  The sense of oppression permeates the scene, and I couldn’t help but gleefully take my leave when the Grey Warden offered it.

It’s funny, my first playthrough I remember hating Duncan, but that’s because the circumstances as a city elf are a bit less cheerful.

It is funny, as the game started I felt the oppressive weight of anti-mage sentiment.  As the game continued I realized that while the Templar were generally awful, at least they didn’t seem quite as prejudiced against elves as nearly everyone else is.

Elves are the outcasts, servants, beggars and slaves of this world.  City guards call us Knife-ears, a slur that actually hurt me when I first heard it.  My authority as a world leader is consistently questioned because of my heritage.  As a human, guards will treat you with immediate deference.  As an elf I constantly hear “I don’t really know how I’m supposed to treat you.  I mean, you are an elf.”

Even my close companions are not immune.  Leliana approached me one night to talk about my childhood, and she ended the conversation attempting to explain how elves in Orlais are so much better off as slaves than as free elves.  Morrigan, who was my one time lover, would sneeringly refer to Zevram simply as “elf” when she wanted to dismiss him.

My own rage against the world is a product of my personal upbringing.  I was never required to live the life of someone with less privilege.  My reaction to the game is that I wish I could just let the whole world burn for it’s crimes against my people.  And I also realize that if this wasn’t a fantasy game, a game where I am expected to win, the people would revolt against that.  The power structures I am unifying would unify against me, and I realize the trap that this is.  I feel hopeless, and I don’t know what to do.

I hope this ramble makes some sense.  I’m going to avoid any further line drawing to real life and just say that Dragon Age: Origins, a game I hated, has made me reconsider my own upbringing and that of my fellow humans.

I can’t wait to play an elf in DA: 2.

What’s that?  Humans only?

/sigh