Podcast! The Easy Button Episode 7

Amazing! Another podcast, just one week after the previous one..... We'll just ignore the fact that it was over a month since it was recorded. ;)

This episode we talk around the water cooler as usual; Fable 2, Master of Magic et al. but we also chat about remakes and reboots and why they're good or bad.

Enjoy!!

The Easy Button Episode 7

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Regenerating health and infinite bad guys: A recipe for boredom?

In the years since Halo was first released regenerating health has become very popular in many first person and third person games - we've even discussed it on the podcast - but the last few games i've played that included this mechanic began to bore me pretty quickly. I think that i identified the problem: infinitely respawning enemies combined with a lack of AI challenge.

When you're given a game you want to be challenged at least slightly by the enemies at all points of the game. You want to be able to beat down enemies because of your skill (especially the enemies you faced at the start of the game during the latter part of the game) not because they're easy at all points in the game. At some point it becomes a shooting gallery and your god-like character has virtually no resistance with the exception of certain insta-kill situations.

Take the most recent example i played of this type of game, Wolfenstein (2009). The game was pretty good. There were weapon upgrades as well as power upgrades all set within a hub world that allowed limited exploration and collection of items. I really enjoyed it to begin with but after a few hours i'd grown bored due to the 4 types of enemies acting very predictably. They never did anything except advance on me and take cover so they died pretty easily. This meant that my character had infinite health and infinite ammo on at least two weapons as you could just travel around the hub world exterminating the zombie Nazis* and collecting their dropped weaponry. The fact that you get really cool-looking super weapons was lost on me because apart from one or two notable instances there just was no reason to use them and, since the ammo for those was scarce, i tended to save them until those particular instances occurred (there's three i can think of).

This is not to say i didn't die. The game itself has a difficulty though i would call some of the developer's tactics a little cheap or underhanded.

• The way i'd fix this** would be to have limited enemies like there are when you're actually on a mission. Killing a thousand Nazis in the city made no sense. I'm a good soldier but not that good... and eventually tactics and strategy would result in the Nazis pulling out of the city and just bombarding it into ashes and rubble. That's what logic would say - rather than just sending legions of peons to their inevitable deaths. To help with this new mechanic i'd make it more difficult to have a head-on approach. Your allies in the two factions of the game would become very important then: do a mission to curry favour and then ask them for a diversion or for safe passage through espionage into enemy territory.
  
  
• I'd design the levels to allow flanking by having the linear path dotted with arenas (something that this game lacked) as was previously seen in Halo itself. Allow movement within a space so that the player and the enemies can use it to their advantage.
  
  One particularly underused feature in Wolfenstein (or at least i thought) was the being able to walk through certain walls that had a black sun icon stencilled onto them. There was no reason for the stencil to be there in modern achitecture that i could think of and the mechanic tended to be used very sparingly to tackle obvious obstacles such as reaching a document in a locked room etc. I would have preferred this ability to be more universal in its application to the battlefield arenas whereby the player could use it to disappear and then reappear elsewhere. A real beneficial ability rather than what i ended up using it for: spotting enemy targets when they were poorly outlined against the background.
  
  
• I'd make some of the AI enemies have the same powers as me but not better than me. Especially if they're supposed to have "equal" amulets or suits or whatever. Give them improved AI routines to allow smarter thinking by assessing the situation (e.g. their and my health, their and my ammo and the surrounding allies on both their and my sides) than their dumb but cannon fodder-esque minions. There's nothing worse than having your super-powered guy only able to use his powers for 4 seconds when the enemy are able to use them indefinitely. Allow room for players to invent their own tactics on the fly by making the enemies use their powers and then have to recharge and then taking advantage of that.
  

So what do you think? Does this type of gameplay bore you? What would do or want to fix in a game like that?

*There are no zombies in the game, just bog-standard AI.
** I enjoyed Wolfenstein for what it was - which was certainly not a bad game.

Futurism and the negative Nancy's of today's future thinkers...

I realise that it's late in the night and that, possibly, my self-induced drunken stupor is writing this response reflexively instead of my intellectual self writing this in an engaged manner but i was spell-bound by Jim Rossignol's musings on post-apocalyptica.

The thing i found most interesting was the paragraph where school children were found to have become more melancholy in their visions for the future. This resonated with me because, well, for a number of years now i've been quite melancholy in my visions of the future as well. I think that while Iain MacLeod's observations probably ring true in general, they are an indication of a much larger trend in human behaviour. Jim mentions the rosy past of futurism but, again, that was purely a reflection of the social feeling of the time. You look at the period from the end of WW2 towards 1960/70 and you see an unprecedented economic recovery AND expansion of knowledge which, coupled together, led the way forward to where we are today. It's not surprising that this period sparked fantastic imaginings for the world of tomorrow.

However, look a few years earlier (before and during WW1/WW2) and you quickly find that futurism was so much more darker.... indeed, even those works drawn up on the eastern horizon during the post WW2 - 1960/70s period were darker than those we are more familiar with in the west. Why? Because life was harder for those people. Let's face it, we are a collection of our experiences and art reflects and magnifies the hopes and fears of humanity.

So, while the golden age of western comics and sci-fi dealt with unlimited expansion in technology and zeal (while reminding us of the terrors of tyranny/bigotry/racism coming from the world wars), recent times reflect the more realistic imaginings of science and technology as depicted through the eyes of a sensationalistic and morbidly-focused press. We know so much more now..... we know what can be possible and what is more likely to be improbable. Where once our pages were graced with flying cars for everyone, we now realise that clean fuel technology is more likely to be present in the transportation of the future. Spin that image around in the politicalised news-reporting machine and you end up with an energy deficient future where only the privileged can afford to travel. Send it back through the poltical reporting machine of the 1950s/60s and you would instead end up with the Mr Fusion's of the Back to the Future franchise - a car that runs on rubbish and which has no emissions.

I guess what i'm trying to say is that the attraction of the golden age of sci-fi/imagination isn't that it was all positive and amazing... but how naive we were to believe what we thought it was okay to believe. I think, in this regard, Fallout 3 has this sentiment nailed perfectly; a place where each car has its own nuclear power supply and radiation disperses within a few minutes or years..... where unbound optimism has lead to a land devoid of hope. The new age is a place of reality and is where we strive for more realistic goals and in doing so we achieve hope through our efforts. Humans have survived as long as we have done because of our foresight: we can predict outcomes and though they're not always 100% right, knowing that something can happen means that you can be prepared for it. This means that we can be hopeful for the future despite naysaying that same future.... we must just be mindful in order to preserve our kind.


This isn't neccessarily bad, it just IS. It prepares us for the inevitable in such a way as to keep us motivated to do better. The old us would have made the expensive and hugely inefficient Concorde, the new us is going to make planes that can fly around the world non-stop on half the fuel load of a normal long-distance flight.

Isn't that amazing?

Podcast! The Easy Button Episode 6

Amazing! We hit a bank holiday weekend and I managed to get something done! I know it's a bit unconventional but I should be getting episode 7 up in the next day or so too.

Of course, all news is seldom good news and this post is no different. I managed to botch up the recording of this particular show which has meant that you're only getting the last two thirds of what we did originally. Ah well.... you win some you lose some.

This week we talked around the water cooler about the games we were playing and also some talk about how developers, publishers and communities interact.

The Easy Button Episode 6

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Podcast: The Easy Button Episode 5

Okay....

Dear Readers... er, listeners... or whatever you prefer,

I'm writing in regards to the discussion we had last time about the podcast and am forwarding this on to you as per your request. Please find attached a copy of Episode 5


The Easy Button Episode 5

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