Blaugust

Games I have been playing

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So, I’ve been playing a crazy amount of Final Fantasy XIV.  Enough that I haven’t had much to really talk about on this blog on the topic of games, because I’ve been mostly just doing the grinding elements of the end game to get geared up.  I am now geared up.

STUPID FRIGGING BELLY WINDOW
Pictured: Me geared up

I’ve been playing this game for a solid two weeks, and I’ve still got content to work through, but between Hunts and Roulettes it’s felt kinda grindy.  I’ll probably dial down my play over the next week just in time for me to have my life consumed by Destiny.  That said, in an attempt to get some other games in, I purchased last weeks Humble Bundle and started to play through some of those games.

Ready, Fight

One Finger Death Punch was the game in the bundle I was the most interested in.  It looked very pretty, and is ultimately a pattern matching game.  I like the rhythm games it shares it’s DNA with so I tried it out.

That’s a video of me completing on of the standard levels.  All I do is press X or B on my controller when an enemy or object is in my reach.  This actually has more game to it than you might realize as some mobs will dodge attacks and require specific patterns to fight, and some weapons work in different ways.  In the middle you will see me kicking a ball at enemies that instakills them and keeps coming back so long as my timing is good.

It’s a great game and makes for a hell of a spectacle.

Enemy Mind

I loaded this game up and played through the first level.  It feels like an old arcade style shooter, but with the gimmick of constantly changing your ship for an enemies.

Tyrian is the only one of this genre I ever really got into, and enemy mind doesn’t really sway me either.  I had some fun, but the short duration I could keep any given ship meant I kept ending up back in ships I didn’t want.  I’ll give it another try, but this one didn’t work for me on my initial playthrough.

Home stretch

One more day of Blaugust to go.  I’ll probably post some sort of wrap-up on this whole thing tomorrow.  Thanks for reading throughout this month, and once again, check out the Nook for related posts.

Loss of identity

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So, this week has been really really weird.  We entered it in the middle of a twitter shit storm over Zoe Quinn, and then Feminist Frequency released her newest video, women as background decoration, part 2.

(Warning for anyone who might watch that, it’s full of graphic depictions of violence against women.)

Anyways, that sparked off yet another tidal wave of internet bile, leading to her staying with friends after a particularly credible rape/death threat, and then something really interesting started to happen.  Big names in video games started standing up against this trash.  The counter push was on, but the overwhelming narrative I got was that “this is what gamers are.”

That made me sad.  I’ve said a couple times on this blog in the past month that I identify as a gamer, to the point that I feel trapped by that identification.  Heck, I just realized I put the stupid label in my brand.  And I’ve been kicking around what that means for me and my identity.

Growing up

Yesterday I went on Omegle to chat with strangers about video games.  It’s a guilty pleasure of mine, but I like the random chats that sometime sprout up in that environment.  I would typically ask what games they played.  I kept getting responses of Call of Duty: Ghosts, or GTA 5.  I haven’t played a Call of Duty game since modern warfare 2, and I haven’t enjoyed a GTA game ever.  It got me thinking, maybe I’m less of a gamer than I think.

This led me to look at other media.  There may have been at one point a universal culture that existed around movie goers, but that is not the case now.  All of my friends have at least some movie they like, and some of my friends like movies enough that they want to be more invested, but those movie buffs tend to have genres, or subcultures within movies they subscribe to.

Maybe that’s the way we’re going with video games.  Gamer is too ubiquitous to be valuable now.  Heck, just today Destiny announced a newsweek magazine for the game.

newsweek

 

We’ve seen figures from the mainstream insert themselves into the gaming conversation.  Games are growing and they are becoming accepted and that’s what we should be so happy for.  But as I watch, I have to prepare my identity for the new shifts that this will bring.

Belghast talked about this in his blog today, but our identities are going to be diverging.  I might wear the label of “Games Blogger”, or “MMO Gamer”, or more likely “Indie Gamer”.  I’m probably going to find myself looking for the arthouse style games, trolling the humble bundle sites for those great little morsels.  This thought gives me new life, as I watch the old label consumed in a fire of hate, knowing that there is at least a path forward.

First Turn Advantage

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So this week’s Extra Credits did a great discussion on First Turn Advantage in turn based games.  It’s pretty solid and you should definitely check it out.

Today I’m going to talk about this issue as it presents in the My Little Pony card game.

Presenting the problem

So the win condition of the My Little Pony card game is to be the first player to reach 15 points.  There are a number of ways to do this but the most straight forward is by confronting problems.  There are at any given time two problems available on the board.  The problems require you to play friends to those problems in certain quantities in order to score points.

pony_problems

 

That card in the middle is the problem.  On my side it tells me I need 2 Orange and 2 Purple power to confront.  On the other side it tells my opponent he needs 6 total power to confront.  On our turn, when we have this power threshold met, at the end of the turn we score 1 point.  If we are the first player to confront that problem, we score additional bonus points, in this case 2 points.

You play friends to these problems by using action tokens.  Action tokens trickle in at a steady rate at the start of your turn.  This is sort of the core issue with the game.  At the start of the game, the start player gets to play with a board state where they are 2 Action tokens ahead of their opponent.  The next turn, his opponent is playing in a board state where he has the equal number of action tokens.  For the rest of this game, the start player has effectively 2 bonus resource tokens on their turn and the initiative.  This is pretty huge.

That said, at the GenCon nationals, the advantage was definitely with the second player.

Explaining the contradiction

So in ponies, for the most part you can score points in small increments.  Whenever you do a move that scores a large amount of points, it typically changes the board state to a position where your opponent is able to easily counter that large gain.  This leads to a lot of standoffs where neither player is doing much out of fear that a big play will cost them the game.

In close games like this usually come down to a single faceoff for all the marbles.  However, at a tournament if the game goes to time, the second player is granted a massive advantage.  If I am the start player and time is called, my options for gaining points is still limited, because whatever big move I make will allow my opponent to counter.  However, if I am the second player, since the game must end with my turn, I am able to act freely without concern that my opponent will be able to take advantage of the amazing board position I open up by whatever I do on the last turn.

This means that if I am a control deck, and I have locked my opponent out, I can spend my last turn clearing my villain (scoring 2 points), double confronting (scoring 2 more points) and then winning that faceoff (for another 1-3 points).  In a normal turn I would never do this, because I am score 5-7 points and opening my opponent up for a juicy 10 point turn, but in the weird ‘player 2 ends the game’ I am free to get as many points as I can.

So I guess what I’m saying is that first turn will typically have an advantage, but if a game does not always end with a decisive victory, and the second player is ensured the last word, second turn may be more valuable than one thinks.

For more on Blaugust, check out the Nook!

 

 

Rising to the Challenge

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Yesterday I talked about some of the reasons I play games, but I feel like I left out a major one: I love the feeling of overcoming an obstacle.  Often games will layout for us clear goals that we must meet in order to achieve victory.  Rarely in real life are these goals as plainly laid out as they are in video games.  Your win conditions are clear and you need to figure out how you are going to get there.

So is true with Blaugust, a month long challenge to write a blog post every day.  Before the start of this I knew I was getting into an uphill battle, with GenCon landing square in the middle of this competition, but I managed to power through (albeit with a couple barely passable posts), and now that I’m in the home stretch it feels great knowing that I can beat this challenge.

So when I see Belghast talking about how it upsets him that I seem forced into posting, I feel obligated to intercede on Blaugust’s behalf.  Yeah some days are harder than others, and this final stretch has had an unusual snag due to some con crud, but if it were so easy to do, I wouldn’t feel the sense of accomplishment for achieving it.

The journey is more rewarding than the prize

Blaugust comes to a close this Sunday, and I will likely take a week off blogging to recharge, but that’s not to say Blaugust has made me hate blogging.  In reality, it’s taught me so much about what it takes to run this, and I’ve got an idea of what content people like and what content gets a pass (apparently I’m the only one who really loves math for math’s sake).  It’s taught me about how to project my voice out there and get over the fear of not being good enough.  I spent so much time on early blog posts and now I will start typing until something comes out.

This has absolutely been a great experience from me as a blogger, but almost as important it’s been fun for me as a gamer.  Blaugust is a competition to see if I can manage for one month the level of dedication that it takes to write a post a day, and it’s been tough but it’s also been fun.  I’ve met so many awesome people like Doone, Maevrim, Blue Kae, Alternative Chat, Cannot be Tamed through this process and I look forward to keeping up with the twitter-sphere as it goes forward.

Wrapping it up

I feel like this is one of those cases where if it were easy it wouldn’t be as satisfying to complete.  It’s the type of game where I need to ramp up from the easy mode to make sure the game is pushing back at me enough that I feel the satisfaction of victory.  It’s not even the most grueling challenge I’ve ever taken in a game, though given the “match” has lasted a full month, it might be the most marathon-esque challenge I’ve ever partaken in.  Still, I’ve had a blast and I know that personally I will be right there for next year’s Blaugust when it all begins again.

For more stuff on Blaugust, check out the Nook!