Wednesday, August 4, 2010

Crafts of the starry variety

This week's Extra Punctuation article is up at the Escapist. It's related to Starcraft 2 because I thought I'd better respond on this issue fast. Main thrust of the gib as it were is that I completely don't care. Here's a sample:

"I'm not saying it's bad or an unnecessary sequel, although it could well be both of those things. I'm saying my opinion on StarCraft 2, or indeed any real time strategy game, is about as much use as Roger Ebert's opinion on gaming as a whole. Or Ug the caveman's opinion on the diesel engine. I don't play them. I've never been able to get into them. They're just not my cup of tea. Okay?"

Anyway from there I indulge a little train of thought to try to find the answer of how players of RTS and FPS could perhaps learn to live together in perfect harmony. Click here to read it.

Last night was trivia night at the Mana Bar, and I was surprised that we didn't get the usual massive turnout. Still packed, of course, but not all the way up to the walls like usual. It's probably because it's been three weeks since the last one rather than two and we lost a bit of the momentum. Still, if you've been discouraged by the crowds for these events thus far then you may be in with a better chance of getting in next time, on August 17th.

I heard a story that Guinness once decided to stop advertising. Everybody knew what Guinness was. Everyone who liked and regularly drunk Guinness wouldn't find out anything new about Guinness from TV spots and they were guaranteed sales as long as St. Patrick's Day existed. But you know what happened? Their sales plummeted. Very, very quickly. So next time you complain about adverts on TV or in the cinema or even on my online videos, remember that it wouldn't be necessary if you weren't all such flighty cunts.

27 comments:

  1. The nice thing about Starcraft 2 is your vision could be made reality. It supports over-the-shoulder 3rd person.

    If someone made this mod, I would play it.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Battlefield 2 had something like what you mentioned, and the same problems you mentioned. In each round, there was a commander that could see the entire battlefield and give orders to squad leaders, who would then pass them on to troops. Unfortunately, the commander had to rely on troops actually following their orders. Inversely, the commander position was highly abusable, with many people only taking the position for its artillery strikes, and the ability to harass your team nonstop. There was a cap on how many automated messages you could send at one time (messages like Affirmative, Negative, Enemy spotted, etc). The cap was removed for commanders, meaning they could shout the phrase "Negative" for the entire round, which got rather aggravating after a while.

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  3. Speaking of flighty cunts... Put up an RSS feed. Please. If you don't keep advertising to me, i.e. using an RSS feed, I'll forget to check back here, just like I forgot about Guinness.

    I know you don't give a flying fuck about me. Just do it.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Aw man, I get all my car advice from Ug the caveman.

    That genre-mixing idea does sound pretty sweet, but of course once you consider that it will be people responsible for playing, and internet people at that, you just know a match won't end well. Much like DeclinedDoomed said above me. If you could gather a group of people who would play "well" I think it would be one hell of a great experience though.

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  5. People need constant reminders. I run a game shop in Adelaide and if we don't advertise one week we get calls to make sure we're still open, I shit you not.

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  6. The idea of an RTS style commander character might work if the players on the ground required the efforts of a commander to help them with the battle, ie resupplying troops, directing them away from large concentrations of enemies and towards strategically beneficial points. The FPS players can still do whatever they want though it can often be helpful to pay attention to the directions of the commander. And if the players choose to ignore the orders of their commander, the commander character can simply join the battle as one of them. In effect the players come to realise the benefits of someone with a more generalized view of the scenario.

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  7. You should still play starcraft 2, nevermind reviewing it. It could surprise you.

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  8. Maybe the turn out decrease at the quiz night is because everyone is home playing SC2.

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  9. If I was part of the PC gaming master race I would probably buy Starcraft II but I'll have to make do with the Mac version of Warcraft III. You should probably propose your genre-mixing concept to some prominent modders who specialise in Blizzard games and they could potentially create a mod very similar to your idea.

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  10. I know Dungeon Keeper wasn't a straight up RTS but it did have the ability to go into a first person view of any of your units. I just ended up playing half the time as an imp because mining gold myself was more better than having an idiotic AI do it.

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  11. yahtzee I know this isn't about star craft but, what do you use to draw your people and imps (and you) and if it doesn't work on the mac do you know one that does and is easy to use (preferably free).

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  12. I know this is probably the last place you're likely to read comments, Yahtzee, but still: have you heard of Natural Selection? It was one of the original (if not the first) mildly successful RTS/FPS hybrids. It's well past its prime now, of course, being a Half-Life 1 mod, but is still an interesting game to read about.

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  13. @Turtle: Natural Selection was inspired from the Quake(?) mod Gloom, which also inspired the Quake3 mod tremulous. So yeah, certainly one of the first.

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  15. ?? It's possible I'm completely ignorant as opposed to only mostly ignorant but isn't EVE the Scandinavian MMMMMMPPOROGGG attempting to achieve this very goal?
    I found this article from October 2009 and haven't heard a word since? I've never played EVE so unsure if it counts as a RTS but they do have an interesting ideas. The players actually achieved an almost Roman Senate massacre for power.

    http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2009/08/dust-514/

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  16. I cited that old FullyRamblomatic article where you mentioned the Guinness thing in an essay about advertising once.

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  17. The idea could work just as long as before anyone actually got to play the game they had to pass an "I'm not a douche" test which in turn means that they would be considered able to sit up in that high chair and abuse all that power without the mind set of a three year old. However the notion is definitely intriguing and although I probably wouldn't play it because I hate both FPS's as well as RTS's (I'm one of those shitty gamers aka a woman) I'm sure that it being Yahtzee's brain child would give it the much needed accreditation to sell. "Oh Yahtzee criticizes games for a living so anything he makes must be the sliver of platinum piss in the pus that is every other game ever made" ... or something along those lines.

    ReplyDelete
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