Ziggyny's Game Emporium

Who Wants To Be A Millionaire Conclusion?

2012-02-02T19:58:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I got an email from someone at Ludia which appears to be the Quebec based company that developed the Who Wants To Be A Millionaire Facebook game. It was in response to my complaint about feeling like they tricked me into giving them 5 of my Facebook credits with sketchy button changes. In a nutshell the response said that Facebook lets an app take credits for minor purchases without confirmation. Everything in this game is a 'minor purchase' so they don't have any reason to confirm anything. It was made pretty clear that what happened to me wasn't an accident and they intentionally set things up to make it very easy to get your credits.

He then apologized if I was confused but claimed to be unable to refund credits. The claim was Facebook handles everything to do with credits and gave me a link to complain directly to Facebook. He said the only thing he can do is give me a free play, which he did. Huzzah? Having never used the limited number of daily plays as it is this doesn't really help me out at all.

I went to the Facebook link he gave me and it's solely for troubles with _buying_ credits. Once Facebook has your money they don't seem the least bit interested in helping you out. It doesn't even seem like there's a way to contact anyone at all for other reasons. I just ended up in a help file loop which was relatively unhelpful. On the plus side I did find out how to make Facebook stop caching my credit card information!

In conclusion there doesn't actually look to be any way to dispute a Facebook app taking your credits. What's to stop me from writing an app that just steals credits from people without notifying them? (Morality aside that is.) As long as it falls under the 'minor purchase' category it doesn't seem like there's anything at all requiring the app to tell you what it's doing. Even if you noticed it doesn't seem like there's any way to actually complain about it!

Part of the problem is certainly that you're required to buy Facebook credits in large numbers. You can spend $5, $10, $50, $100, or $200 at a time. So if you legitimately wanted to buy something in a game for $2 you're stuck with at least $3 of credits just sitting around. Where my evil app could siphon them off slowly... Of course Facebook wants it set up like this because they get the full $5 up front and if I never want to buy again they just get to keep the extra $3 forever without splitting it with any apps.

Now there's still a part of me that wants to keep making a stink about this. Yell at the guy from Ludia. Go up the chain to their manager. But it's only 50 cents and my outrage levels are rapidly waning. Frankly I'm not even sure the problem really lies with Ludia. They have a sketchy UI but one that seems to be completely kosher as far as Facebook is concerned. I think the real solution is to uninstall this game in particular and scale back what I may play on Facebook in the future. I'm fine with paying for games but I don't think I want to pay Facebook anything anymore which means not playing new games on there enough to like them enough to pay for them. There are certainly plenty of other games to play elsewhere!

League of Legends: Ziggs!

2012-02-01T17:43:00.000-05:00

The main menu inside the League of Legends client has a spot for them to link to youtube videos. The video that was displaying there last week was something called 'Ziggs Champion Spotlight' or something like that. I saw the name and thought they'd gotten someone named Zigg to start doing champion spotlights for them. This made me a little bitter since I have a patent on all names starting with the letters 'Zigg'. But then I went to play a game and forgot all about it.

A few days later something clicked and I realized it wasn't a champion spotlight by some guy named Zigg. It was a spotlight of the upcoming new champion named Ziggs. This instantly changed the bitterness around. Now I was very curious since I obviously have to play a champion with such an awesome name. But what was this hero going to be? I went to the preview website and was immediately greeted with the following...

"Sometimes, you want to go a little crazy. Sometimes, you want to throw caution to the wind. And sometimes, you want to blow stuff up just to watch it explode."

I _am_ a little crazy. I frequently throw caution to the wind in the game. And yes, explosions are cool. So this is sounding good so far... What does Ziggs look like?

So he's a Yordle then? (Yordles are essentially Gnomes.) And he has bombs. So essentially he's a gnome engineer named Ziggs? Did they make this champion specifically for me? Thanks Riot! But what does he do...

His passive makes him do more damage on his auto-attacks every 12 seconds. Any damage is good damage but this sort of thing probably doesn't do a whole lot. Shen has a similar ability and it's not terribly exciting.

His Q bounces a bomb along which eventually explodes. Supposedly this is a 'skill shot' and they mention that they were able to ratchet up his damage because it's hard to land this. Intriguing. I'm not terribly good at landing skill shots right now but I would certainly be willing to practice...

His W drops a bomb on the ground that explodes after 4 seconds or on command. When it explodes it does big AE damage to any nearby enemies and knocks them back. It also knocks Ziggs back (but somehow doesn't hurt him). This sounds awesome. Throw the bomb behind people to knock them forward into your team for easy kills. Throw the bomb between someone who's chasing you in order to blow the two of you apart. Disrupt people who are fighting dragon? Can you pull jungle creeps with it? It seems like a really versatile and powerful ability.

His E drops a bunch of land mines on the ground that explode on enemy contact to do damage and slow them down. Slows tend to be pretty good for killing people but how far away you can throw them will determine how good this ability is. Certainly has potential though!

His ultimate claims to be an enormous ranged AE attack that does tons of damage to people near it when it explodes. It sounds like this might be able to finish runners off similar to Graves? It really depends on the definition of enormous! Regardless, huge explosions have to be awesome.

I was trying to get enough IP in game to buy him when he launched but he came out today and I don't have enough. So I think it's time to pony up some bucks and reward Riot for building a champion just for me. This is how a 'free to play' game can get money out of me without scams!

Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?

2012-01-31T19:02:00.000-05:00

Short answer: this guy!

Unfortunately I've not stumbled into a large amount of money. I'm instead referring to a Facebook game by the same name as the television quiz show that became popular when I was in University. The Facebook game adds some social steps (the first few questions are answered by a group of players and their values fluctuate based on how many people get it wrong) but at its very core it's a time limited trivia game with 4 multiple choice answers just like the tv show. Instead of actually winning cash (wouldn't that be nice) you accumulate a running total of cash won across all games which is treated as an experience total. Make enough money and you level up!

It's a fun little distraction if you like trivia, which I do. But as with all Facebook games you should ask yourself how they're intending to make money. Well, you're limited to how many times you can play each day. If you want to play more than that you can buy more from the store. On the surface this looks like the only way for them to make money though they do have little rewards for spamming your friends. In short, it's like pretty much all Facebook games. Spam your friends and pay if you want to play a lot...

Of course it turns out there's a second way to spend money on the game and I feel like I got scammed into using it. To explain how we'll need a little background...

The tv show had lifelines where you could get help from outside sources if you weren't confident that you knew the answer. The Facebook game has the same sort of thing. At the start of the game you get to name two of your friends to be your lifelines. Then during the course of playing the game when you need to select an answer you can click on one of those two people. You automatically get credit for the right answer in the game and your friend gets sent the question. If they get it right then both of you get some experience. If they get it wrong then both of you get substantially less experience.

One of my friends, Ike, ran a Millionaire game show for MathSoc when we were in University. I used him as my lifeline the first time I played (I think I only had 2 friends even playing at the time so I had no choice.) and he made a comment on Facebook about how someone was crazy for sending him a 'Real Housewives' question. I sent it off because there's an immediate payoff for sending it off even if the other person won't have a clue! But then I felt bad after he commented so when I played again a couple days later I kept my eye for a question he'd probably know. (By this point I had 4 friends playing which leads to the selection screen above. My other two friends were auto-chosen but I wanted to tag in Ike and send him a good question.) Lo and behold the very first question was about Steve McQueen. (My complete lack of knowledge about movie actors was the stuff of legends amongst my University crowd so I really needed the help.) Turns out Ike knew the answer (hurray!) and commented on Facebook that that was more like it.

Encouraged by the positive reinforcement I went in to play again with Ike as a lifeline to see if I could send him another good one. Here's the screen I saw when I went to change my lifelines...

Notice the difference? I didn't! For those who may not play a lot of Facebook games the little icons on the buttons there say that I can pay Facebook credits (which have to be bought with real money) in order to unlock those guys as lifelines for my second game. The layout is the same. The buttons are in the same spot. The lines start with the same words. I wanted to do the same thing I'd just done so I clicked in the same sequence I'd clicked before. Instead I clicked on a button which wanted money! I guess this is their main way to make sure you spam ALL your friends to sign up... They gave me 6 games to play today but I only have enough friends to lifeline 2 games. But for losers like me I can pay money to pretend I have more friends!

The kicker? It didn't ask for confirmation or anything that I wanted to spend money. It just made a quick cash grab and went on with its life. 5 credits amounts to about 50 cents so it isn't like they walked off with a lot of my money but it really pissed me off when it happened. Nevermind that sending Ike a trivia question isn't worth 50 cents... I feel like they didn't make it clear that's what was going to happen. Worse, I feel like they intentionally designed their UI the way they did in order to trick me. (I have reported them with the 'Dispute an item purchased while playing Who Wants To Be A Millionaire Game' link, so we'll see what happens.)

What may be the worst part of this is Facebook has apparently cached my credit card information. I had those credits on hand (left overs from when I bought some stuff in Galaxy Legion) but it bothers me that an app can snag credits without confirmation and that Facebook has stored the information needed to sell me more credits. What if that button had cost 50 credits? Would it have auto-charged my credit card to buy them?

Intel Extreme Masters

2012-01-30T20:27:00.000-05:00

There was a pretty big eSports tournament held a couple weeks ago which featured a League of Legends event. I've been slowly making my way through the replays of all the games and there have been some wacky things going on so far. Support Nunu. AP Tristana. AD Kennen. Dogs and cats living together. It's insane! And interesting to watch...

Check it out here...

Campaign Manager 2008: A Breakthrough?

2012-01-29T22:30:00.000-05:00

I had a game of Campaign Manager 2008 finish yesterday where I built an infinite deck and lost. I'll need to look into the game more to see what really went wrong but I tried to get aggressive with playing out attack cards once I went infinite and lost control of the game. I scored up several states in a row but ended up behind after that. But what is really interesting about the game is my opponent used a two card combo to pretty good effect against me and I think it might have potential to break open the stalemate...

There's one difference between the two decks that I have yet to cover. Each player has three media support cards in their card pool. Two of these three cards are the standard 'pick what happens when a new event comes up' ilk which seem ok but not overpowering. The third one for Obama makes your opponent roll twice on the 'bad stuff' chart when he goes negative. The McCain card means McCain doesn't roll at all when he goes negative.

This is interesting but I rarely see anyone go negative. The problem is 3 of the 4 'go negative' cards actually require you to discard 2 extra cards to play them. I do this every now and then to win a powerful state but the problem is it sets you back a lot in card quantity. The 4th card doesn't require a discard but doesn't really coordinate well with itself. It gives you 1 defense and 1 economy in a single state.

So what my opponent did was he set up the no roll card and then kept cycling through his very small deck to play that card over and over. The support gains might be unrelated but Obama can't counter both of them. Eventually you'll get into a position to just overwhelm him in one category or the other and he doesn't have a counter. Even if he plays the same card he has to roll for bad stuff and 1 time in 6 McCain will net a support so Obama just loses in this situation...

But is it sustainable? Pretend we hit a 2 card deck with 2 cantrips in the discard. Open with the negative. Then play Oprah into a cantrip. Then play a cantrip. Then play a cantrip. We're back in the same gamestate as at the start except we've gained 5 support over 4 actions. This is certainly sustainable!

Now that I look at it a little more this seems decent even without the right media support card in play. Assuming it's an infinite vs infinite game the extra card draws won't help your opponent and the key demographic swap does nothing so 4 of the 6 outcomes have no game effect. And even when the negative roll hurts you the best it can do is give your opponent back the support you'd gained. Tempo might work out poorly for you but by and large this seems like it should allow you to break out of the stalemate! Time to put a higher focus on drafting that card!

WBC 2012 Trials

2012-01-28T20:40:00.000-05:00

Voting recently finished for the trial events at the World Boardgaming Championships this coming year. Personally I didn't get around to voting (I signed up at the event last year and wasn't really sure how to vote without signing up again. I didn't care enough to figure it out so I just let other people decide my destiny.) 22 of the 25 trial events were events at last year's WBC so there isn't really a lot of turnover going on. 2 of the remaining 3 events are returning from minor absences. Goa is back after taking last year off and Diplomacy returns after taking 3 years off.

Diplomacy in particular is an interesting choice since how do you determine the winner? Some games will finish with one clear winner but often a Diplomacy game ends in some sort of stalemate. Apparently the last time it was an event they played 3 rounds and you scored points based on your finish in those rounds based on number of countries alive in the draw and number of supply centers each of those countries owned. I would imagine such a scoring system is rife with people backstabbing each other trying to whittle down the number of survivors in a draw... Then they add up your best 2 scores and advance 7 people to a final? I doubt I'll be willing to set aside time to play in 2 or 3 full Diplomacy games but I think it's a good event to have. Diplomacy is one of the truly iconic board games in my mind and it just feels right to have it at WBC.

Especially since the one truly iconic game they'd been running, Risk, has fallen out this year. I recently read through all of the event reports for last year's WBC and Risk didn't have one. The GM apparently didn't submit a report which killed the event off entirely for next year. If Risk wants back in then it'll have to get voted in as a trial for 2013. I normally read all the event reports each year and I don't really remember ever seeing a non-submitted report. I don't know if they purge them from the system eventually or get write-ups way after the fact or what. But there were FIVE of them this year. Egizia, Macao, Risk, Storm Over Stalingrad, and Stronghold. Egizia would have been a century event so it got bumped to trial status (it did get voted back in) and the other four were just killed off. It's sad. I like reading the event reports even for games I don't play and have no intention of playing so it's unfortunate that there were 5 no-shows this time.

At any rate, this year's trials... 24 have been events before. What's the 25th? Well, it turns out it received the most votes of any game which is pretty amazing. The game? A Few Acres of Snow. This game has quickly become my favourite game on Yucata. My record in the game is pretty good so far as well... 46-2. The two losses were both tied games where I lost the tiebreaker. (Apparently the French win a tie game.) Both times I didn't realize the game was even going to end, sadly, or I probably could have found an extra point somewhere on my last turn. Having it as an event at WBC has made me even more excited for WBC this year if that's even possible. I have a new goal... Win this event!

Final Fantasy IV: Bugs

2012-01-27T22:34:00.000-05:00

One of the interesting things I've been learning as I've been playing through the Final Fantasy games is just how many weird bugs exist in the games. Final Fantasy had a lot of bad pointer related bugs. It had some local variable bugs. Final Fantasy II had a pretty brutal cancel bug. Final Fantasy III had a dupe bug for sure (though I played on the DS which seemed pretty decent). Did they get any better for Final Fantasy IV? Of course not!

Perhaps my favourite of the FFIV bugs has more to do with not enough edge case testing... Here's the situation:

In combat you can change which weapon/shield you have equipped in each hand. You go into your item menu, select a hand, and then choose what you want to put in that hand. But how are you, the player, to know what you could equip? Well, the system iterates over all items in your inventory when you pick a hand to swap. Anything you could equip gets highlighted. Anything you can't equip gets faded out. Then when you go to select a faded out item you get an error. This seems like a reasonable system, right?

When you select a highlighted item should it recheck if the item is a legal option? If you're coding robustly it probably should but then you're adding an extra check in which seems unnecessary. You already validated every item in your inventory seconds earlier. Why bother revalidating? We're talking about a game that had to have plot cut out to fit it onto the cartridge! Any extra checks are probably unwise...

Now, what if you wanted to unequip an item? Well, you'd 'equip' a blank slot in your inventory. This seems like a reasonable case to build in. Let's just flag the empty slots as valid equips. No sense treating them any differently, right?

How about when we derive our current stats? Should we validate our gear then? Seems wasteful. As long as we're robust in only allowing valid gear to be equipped in the first place this should never come up.

So, what's the bug? Well, it's a timing bug. Get into a fight with a monster which drops a weapon or a shield as its common drop. Have Edge input the steal command (which will steal the weapon or shield). Then quickly get to the person who can't legally equip that item. Have them go into the item menu and start switching items. This will cause a validation of your inventory as it stands when you start. While doing this the steal command will resolve and you'll get a new item. It will go into a blank slot in your inventory. A blank slot that has already been validated as a legal equip. Pick the new item! Huzzah! Rydia can put on a shield! Rosa can use a spear.

There's a similar timing bug which lets you use berserk while unequipping arrows which results in duplicating any item you can legally equip. You end up with 255 copies which is great for making cash or for throwing with Edge.

Berserk is also buggy with Edward and his auto-hide ability. Apparently you can set it up so he can't be attacked but is berserked and beating down.

A final timing bug revolves around the spell stop. It takes out all other timers on the person, completely. Have a temporary paralyze? If you get stopped it will never wear off. A virus? There forever. Unless you reapply it then the timer will get fixed. And if you screw with the timers on monsters with stop? The game will often freeze. (I'm glad I never used that spell!)

In the inexplicably weird category... The sylph spell is free if you put it in one spot (upper right hand corner) in the spell list.

In the mad cheats category... At one point you're in a fight in the dwarven castle underground. You fight some dolls and then you fight Golbez. He almost kills you when Rydia shows up and saves the day. Golbez still manages to run off with the crystal. A future plot point is to go get the last dark crystal from the sealed cave... If the first thing you do after Rydia joins your party is cast warp you'll get warped back to the dwarven crystal room. Complete with dark crystal for the taking. Which counts as the dark crystal from the sealed cave! So you can skip that dungeon!

Now for a bug I think I was hit by... The moon is circular and you can find a path to do a complete circuit. But your spaceship only exists exactly where you landed it. So if you do a full circle around the moon? You lose your spaceship. You need to go back the other way the exact number of times to get back to the precise spot you left your spaceship.

There are a bunch of fights with conditional triggers to do things. The biggest example of this is when you fight the 4 fiends in one fight. You beat up Milon for a while and then when he dies Rubicant steps up. They coded these triggers as counter attacks. So if you kill Milon off with attacks that don't trigger a counter attack, he won't tag in Rubicant. You'll just win. One way to do this is to cast wall on your team and then bounce attack spells off the wall and onto him. Cheats!

Finally there's a bug that certainly afflicted me on probably every playthrough but which I didn't really notice. Thinking about it in retrospect I can see it happening but I didn't notice at the time... Weapons have flags on them. Metallic, so they paralyze you in the magnetic cave. Back row, so you do full damage from the back row. And, for some reason, no-crit. These weapons simply can't get a critical strike. The metallic flag works fine but the other two are buggy. If they ever get set on your character they are never removed. So if you ever put on a whip, for example, you can never get a crit again for the rest of the game. And you do full damage from the back row with any weapon. Axes, whips, and the best paladin sword all have the no-crit flag.

That's not the only way to lose the ability to crit. Apparently if you ever start a fight dead you lose the ability to crit. And sometimes the game has battles which run without player input. Tellah vs Edward in the 'YOU SPOONY BARD!' scene. Tellah vs Golbez. FuSoYa and Golbez against Zemus. If in one of those fights the team on the left dies then everyone in your party which occupies an 'empty' slot for the right hand team loses the ability to crit. So after the FuSoYa and Golbez vs Zemus fight at most two of your characters can still crit. The other 3 will permanently lose their ability to crit if they somehow kept it up to that point!

How... Dumb.

League of Legends: Better?

2012-01-26T22:32:00.000-05:00

A couple months ago I posted about trying to get better at League of Legends by focusing on properly farming minions in the early game. At the time I was running at about 60% of a top player in terms of creeps killed in 20 minutes and in termed of how much damage Nasus' Q ability did. (That ability permanently gains 3 damage for every unit killed by the ability itself.)

I've been playing a fair bit with Robb recently and we pulled my rating up about 400 points from its low point which is a pretty substantial amount. Was that just avoiding the terrible match-ups in 'Elo Hell' or are we actually getting better? I've been noticing my minion kills have really gone up in the last little while since I bought the hero Graves but maybe that's just the hero (compared to Vayne and Tristana)?

I haven't actually played Nasus at all recently but last night I made a point to play him in a game so I could have some numbers for comparison. I was probably a little rusty but a lot of the basics are the same...

After 20 minutes
Nov - 94 creep kills, +189 on Q
Jan - 123 creep kills, +237 on Q
pro - ~150 creep kills, +~300 on Q

This is obviously a really small sample size (one game each time) but that's a pretty reasonable boost. Up from 60% of the pro to 80%. Now, I'm also not playing against pro quality opponents so it's not as good as it may sound but I think it's showing improvement from caring enough to focus on it the last two months.

An a not even comparable data point, here's what I had on Graves in a recent game where I laned with Robb as my pocket healer...

124 creep kills after 20 minutes which is about the same as Nasus, but up 70 at the 39 minute mark (when the Nasus game ended). I certainly did a better job of finding anything to kill during downtime when I was playing as Graves. I think part of that might be team role though... People stand back and let Graves kill stuff. No one lets Nasus screw around killing things when they could have them instead!

Band Hero: American Pie

2012-01-25T19:53:00.000-05:00

One of the things I really like about various rhythm games is when a truly awesome song is available. Often, especially in the earlier days of the genre, it would just be a bad cover of the song. Or it wouldn't be the whole thing for various reasons. Walk Like An Egyptian was in Dance Dance Revolution Universe 2 (and is by far my favourite song in that game both in terms of the steps and the original song) but it was cut down to about 1:38 from the original 3:24. That's great and all, but it would be better if it was the whole thing! (Well, except I can barely stay on my feet for 1:38... I'd probably die if it was a full 3:24!)

I finished off the story mode of Band Hero last night. The reward for beating it was the credits scrolling across a new song... American Pie by Don McLean.

American Pie is my favourite song. And they seem to have the original version in the game. The whole original version. All 8 minutes and 36 seconds of it. A full 1427 notes! It's glorious!

Final Fantasy IV: Kainazzo Shocked!

2012-01-24T12:18:00.000-05:00

I can remember playing Final Fantasy IV as a kid and having real troubles with the boss fights in Castle Baron. After you break in via the sewers you have to fight Baigan (and his respawing arms) and then immediately afterwards fight Kainazzo (the water fiend). I remember Kainazzo having these brutal AE water spells and having to try him over and over to kill him...

Here's how my fight last night went.

Cecil - attack
Yang - attack
Porom - cure2
Palom - lit2
Tellah - lit3
Cecil - attack
Yang - attack
Porom - cure2

At this point Tellah finally got around to resolving lit3 which killed Kainazzo. He put his water shield thing up once, immediately before Palom resolved lit2 which brought it down. He never got around to withdrawing into his shell. He never cast an AE spell. He didn't heal himself. Lit3 took him from probably around 60% life to dead in one attack. How was this ever hard? Did I not want to cast my best spells as a kid? Maybe I was using Tellah to heal and the twins to use their stupid twin attacks? I likely didn't know I could heal up between the fights and might have spent all Tellah's mana on Baigan? (To be fair it doesn't make a lot of sense that I can go to my old room in the castle and sleep between fights...)

At any rate Baigan is dead and I got to see one of the silliest cutscenes in any game. Kainazzo (like Milan before him) wants a second crack at killing the party. In this case he causes the walls of the hallway to move inward in order to crush the party like some sort of medieval trash compactor. Palom and Porom get the bright idea to turn themselves into stone in order to stop the walls from moving in any further. After the walls stop Tellah tries to remove the petrification but gets an error message. It can't be removed because it was inflicted of their own will.

There are all sorts of problems here! For one thing, neither of them can actually cast stone. Palom learns it at level 36 and we're not nearly that high. Next, why would stone statues of two little kids stop walls which are presumably able to crush human bones? It doesn't even get to the point of trying to crush them. The walls stop independently as if they're simply unable to push stone children. Finally, what sort of magical universe has the rule that a spell can't be undone if it was self inflicted? There's always absurdities revolving around death in games like this (why can I bring Rydia back to life over and over but Anna takes a couple arrows and is just dead) but this one really takes the cake. Under the logic used here if Tellah had turned them to stone (a spell he can actually cast) he could have then healed them of it after the doors open. But since they wanted to get stoned it can't be undone? Bah! Nevermind the fact it actually does get undone, later, by the head honcho of Mysidia...

Campaign Manager 2008: Fair Deck Options

2012-01-23T17:26:00.000-05:00

I mentioned the other day that I thought the infinite deck in Campaign Manager 2008 was relatively easy to build and very powerful when built. I fear it may even be unstoppable. Today I'm going to look at all the options available to a fair deck to see if it can possibly have a shot at beating an infinite deck.

As a reminder an infinite deck is a deck which has reached the point where it can play a cantrip card every turn for the rest of the game. It can chose between gaining an economy, or gaining a defense, or shifting the issue track. It can choose the same one over and over again if it wants. Essentially it is a deck which is giving up tempo (it only gets one effect each turn) in order to have complete flexibility.

A fair deck has to spend time drawing cards with the default 'draw a card' action. This means it is taking a few turns off (during which the infinite deck is just churning out economy or defense) in order to build up a string of good turns in the future. In order for the fair deck to have a chance that string of good turns has to be really good. It has to make up for giving the infinite deck free turns. What cards can the fair deck hope to draw in order to pull this off?

The first class of cards are the cantrips which make up the infinite deck's gameplan. I hope it is obvious that these cards can't help the fair deck win. In the best case scenario for the fair deck the infinite deck merely plays the same cantrip and undoes the fair deck's turn. In the worst case the cantrip from the fair deck isn't optimally useful in which case the infinite deck can play a different cantrip for a better effect. To be fair cantrips will help cycle the fair deck into better cards which could help deal with the selection issue of a 5 card hand but as far as power goes they can't help.

Next up are the double effect cards. These cards let you do two unrelated things in a given turn. The potential options are to gain an economy, a defense, shift the issue track, or alter the key demographic. Note that there is a card to shift the issue track two spaces but there is not a card in this class which adds both an economy and a defense. As such your best case scenario is to build up a hand with the right 5 of these and then get 10 effects over 5 turns while your opponent only gets 5 effects. This seems like it should be pretty good but there is one fatal flaw... You can only gain 5 actual support by doing this. The infinite deck has an easy counter... Ignore any issue shifts and just deal with the support you gain. If they spend their 5 turns undoing just your support in economy or defense then what have you got to show for your build-up? 5 demographic swaps or issue track movements. Then you have to spend 5 turns filling your hand back up while they get 5 free support anywhere they want. It doesn't matter how you set up the issue tracks. Because they can take either defense or economy for any number of turns in a row they just get to score up two states while you refill your hand. The end result of playing a bunch of double effect cards? They win two states and you win nothing. Not good.

How about the card drawing spells? Ancestral lets them build up a 7 card hand for a really big sequence of plays but that doesn't help with any of the cards we've seen so far. Same with Oprah. The regrowth style effects are even worse for the fair deck since they cost extra cards to play. Every extra card is an extra turn spent on 'draw a card' and giving your opponent a free support somewhere so what you get out of those extra cards has to be pretty powerful. Just getting to play a card a second time doesn't count since we don't have any cards that help us at all as it is.

There's an interesting set of cards that allow you to get a bunch of effects all at once. Each side has two of them with the Obama set only impacting economy and the McCain set only impacting defense. How they work is you play the card which does nothing on its own. Then you can discard any number of cards to get a support of your type or to shift the issue track towards your type. There's one card for support and one for shifting and you can't mix and match the two. And, as an added drawback, you can only hit each state once. The shifting really isn't very relevant (we saw earlier that the infinite deck will gladly ignore shifts in order to just deal with any support you gain) but getting 4 support from one action seems like it might be what we need to out-tempo the infinite deck. At the most powerful case we've spent 6 turns (5 draws and a turn to play the card) in order to get 4 support. 6 turns for 4 support is actually pretty bad. The infinite deck got 6 support over those 6 turns and they can even put them all into a single state if they want to! In terms of actually helping the fair deck win a state it seems like the best case scenario is actually one where two states exist and you're two support away from winning either one of them. By then gaining a support in each one you put pressure on your opponent. He can only counter one of the moves and then you can play another card to finish off the other state! Yes, we've won a state! On the downside it cost us 6 turns to do so (draw 2 cards and the super-support card, draw the finisher card, play super-support and finisher) and they spent 1 turn countering the secondary effect of the super-support card. They then get 5 more support to do as they will. That's certainly enough to win at least one state. And since they got to choose which state they defended off the hop you're guaranteed to have won the least valuable state of the two while they turned around and won the better one. And that's assuming there are even two states where you're that close to winning in the first place!

What about media support? I haven't mentioned these cards before but they can be decently powerful. The basic idea is every time someone wins a state they get to pick a new state to put into play. Then you flip a random event card form a big deck of them and it does crazy things. Sometimes to the new state, sometimes to all states, sometimes to individual players. (Make Obama discard 2 cards, for example.) If you have a media support card in play then you get to make choices for the event card. Instead of it working on the new state you can choose any of the 4 states in play. One of the events lets whoever controls the media draw 2 cards. Getting one of these into play as the fair deck might give you a little advantage here and there to try to combat the infinite deck. The problem is you simply can't keep one in play against an infinite deck. If they only have 1 card in their discard pile and you play a media support it will kill theirs, putting it in the discard pile. Then they play Oprah and put it right back into play. They still have 1 card in their discard. They still have media support in play. They spent 1 turn. You spent 2 since you have to manually draw the card and then play it. Even if they have 2 cards in their discard and Oprah doesn't hit the media support it will hit a cantrip which gets them the media support to play next turn. Best case you have a 1 turn window to win a state. After they played a cantrip and gained a support. I think you were better off winning the state before they got to cantrip if you actually had any way to make that happen!

What about key demographic cards? These give you a way to get multiple support in a state in one action. This has some potential but it has two major drawbacks. The first is that you only replace neutral dots and can't actually remove anything your opponent owns so they're pretty useless against an established state where the infinite deck has already played some cards. The second is that they're very narrow. Each demographic card works on only a small handful of the states. Often they need the key demographic swapped with another card before they can work at all.

That said, there is some potential here for sure. If your opponent puts a state into play and you have the demographic card in your hand you can often set yourself up to win the state for sure on your next action. If you end up with n-1 support in both economy and defense there's nothing that can stop you. Assuming you have the right cards in hand to follow up you can play a shift + support card in order to win the state no matter what your opponent does to react. Sweet! Unfortunately there are still downsides. For one, you then have to put a state into play and your opponent can guarantee you can't end up in a position to win that state with another demographic card. Also the infinite deck is going to put states into play starting at the bottom value-wise. So even if you can win the state they put out they get to win the next one and it will be worth more. Nevermind the fact that while it's _possible_ to have the right demographic card in hand and the right follow-ups in hand it's nowhere near guaranteed. If you fill your deck up with demographics then you'll be able to win a few states by surprise but then sometimes you'll have a hand full of cards which actually can't impact the board at all. Then you have to waste two turns (one playing it for no impact and one drawing a replacement) while your opponent gets to score up lots of free support.

There's one last type of card. The negative campaign card. These cards let you grab multiple support in a single state in a single action but come with some potential drawbacks. Each side has 4 of them available. One of the cards lets you gain 1 defense and 1 economy in a single state. The other three make you discard two cards in order to gain 2 defense or 2 economy in a single state. If it is defense or economy is determined by the card. Obama has 2 economy cards and 1 defense card. McCain has 2 defense cards and 1 economy card. Every negative attack card has the drawback that you have to roll a die at the end of your turn if you play one of them and your opponent gets a benefit. The potential outcomes are {draw a card, draw 2 cards, do nothing, gain 1 support anywhere, shift a state anywhere, alter a key demographic anywhere}. If your opponent is already infinite then most of these actually do nothing. The only really scary one is giving them a free support since if you didn't win a state straight up with the card they just get to completely undo it with that roll.

Now we're starting to see a framework. Imagine the following set-up... You use ancestral to get up to a 7 card hand. Then you use the super-support to gain an economy in two different states. Then whichever one he doesn't defend against you go negative on for an extra 2 economy. This only requires two states where you're within 3 of winning which doesn't seem unreasonable at all. Downside? You spent 6 cards over 2 turns to do it. You went negative so he gets a bonus. You can only do it when you draw ancestral. And you still only get the worst state of the two.

What about combining the negative card with a demographic card? This costs you fewer cards and wins you whatever state you want for sure. If the state you want happens to match your demographic card...

Also once your opponent sees the negative card once they can work against it. They can start shifting out of the support you can double up on. They can start trading states since it does take 4 turns to pull off a single double card...

Nevermind the true trump they have up their sleeve... They're only dedicating 8 cards to going infinite. They can have 7 more cards in their deck that do things. Often they'll have a negative double card too which they can use to counter yours or to just blow you out on a big state. And while it costs you 4 turns to pull it off it doesn't really cost them anything at all to do it. They lose some of their flexibility from having a full hand to be sure but they're one ancestral or a couple Oprahs from going back to infinite again...

The other negative card (which gives you a defense and an economy but doesn't cost extra discards) just seems bad. It can combo decently with the shift+support cards as you can try to keep your opponent guessing. But generally speaking every time my opponent plays it against me I cheer since it doesn't hurt me at all and I get a free die roll bonus.

Put it all together and what do you get? Well, most of the cards available to a fair deck are completely useless. There are a couple situationally powerful cards that can work together to win an individual state but you end up giving your opponent too many free turns in the process. You're not going to get shut out if you can put together a couple combos but there's no way you're going to actually be able to win the game. I think building a fair deck is basically guaranteeing a loss against an opponent who knows how to build an infinite deck.

Final Fantasy: Incoming Damage

2012-01-22T22:57:00.001-05:00

{Found this post in my draft folder and figured better really late than never, right?}

Monsters follow very precise rules for how they act in combat. The first thing they do is check to see if they're going to run away. To find out they roll a number between 0 and 50 and add it to a monster intrinsic stat called morale. If that result is less than 80 plus twice your character's level they run away. The key here is they only check the guy in slot 1's level, so theoretically if I moved one of my friendly corpses into the first slot monsters would stop being scared of me.

Assuming they don't run they then check to see if they cast a spell. Every monster that can cast spells has a set chance to cast a spell. If this check succeeds they cast the next spell on their list of spells to cast. There's nothing random about which spell they cast. The first time they cast a spell they always cast the first spell in line. The second time they cast a spell they always cast the second spell in line. If they cast all their spells they start again at the start.

Assuming they don't cast a spell they check to see if they use an enemy skill which works they same way as casting a spell does. They have a list of skills and use the first one in line first and so on.

Assuming they don't use a skill they melee attack.

Astos has 255 morale which means he can't run away. (Max character level is 50 so the highest my side of the equation could be is 180. 255 plus a random number is always bigger than 180.)

Astos in particular has a 97 in 129 chance to cast a spell, or practically 75%. The spells he casts, in order, are Rub, Slow2, Fast, Fir2, Lit2, Slow, Dark, Sleep.

Astos has no skills.

If he attacks he attacks once per round with at attack value of 26. His hit is 42. His crit is 1. At level 28 my thief will have around 68 evade and 6 absorb. So he hits me for an average of 33 a swing, 39 on a crit. Out of 201 swings he'll crit me 2 times and hit me 140 times. Overall, that's a little over 23 damage each time he attacks. So his attacks are not scary at all.

In general spells make the same attack roll as melee attacks do, a number between 0 and 200. The base hit chance for a spell is 148 instead of 168 and there is no hit stat. The targets magic defense is used as an evade modifier. At level 28 a thief has 69 magic defense. (15 base + 2 per level)

What do his spells do?

Rub - instantly kills the target - Roll a number between 0 and 200 and compare against 148+24-69. So about 51% of the time I'm instantly killed.
Slow2 - forces the target to attack exactly once when they autoattack. 148+64-69, or 71% of the time I essentially can't win.
Fast - doubles the number of attacks Astos gets when he melees. This makes his attack average 46 instead of 23.
Fir2 - hit for between 30 and 60 damage. Roll to see if it hits. If it hits, do double damage. If it misses do normal damage. 148+24-69. So 51% of the time I take 90 damage, 49% of the time I take 45 damage. 68 damage on average.
Lit2 - exactly the same as fire but a different element. 68 damage on average.
Slow - the same as Slow2 except for some reason this hits all targets. So 71% of the time I essentially can't win. It is possible since this is cast so late in his rotation that I can still win after it gets cast.
Dark - Blinds the target. When blind a target has 40 knocked off their attack rolls made and 40 added to incoming attack rolls. Lands 51% of the time.
Sleep - Being asleep increasing incoming melee damage by 25% and reduces your evade to 0. You can't take an action but sleep is removed on your next action if a roll between 0 and 80 is less than your maximum health. Lands 51% of the time.

The question of how many rounds I get to live is therefore very complicated. I'll have close to 600 maximum health at level 28 and fudging the numbers some in terms of incoming damage modified by dark and sleep and such I probably take around 65 damage per 'attack' be it a spell or a melee swing. So I get to live until his 10th attack or until he successfully lands any of rub, slow2, or slow. Abstract things and say he attacks every 3 spells. Then after 18 spell casts he'll have meleed 6 times and cast 4 damage spells which is my dying point. So from damage I probably get 18ish swings. But to make it that far I have to avoid 3 rubs, 3 slow2s, and 2 slows. I do that .02% of the time. So, uh, not happening.

Fortunately I found that I only need 9 rounds to win. (Well, 26 swings at 3 swings per round.) That's barely once through his cast bar, so I have nothing to worry about in terms of damage taken and just need to avoid 3 death attacks. The last one isn't even that bad, since I'll already have most of my 26 swings in. Really, I have a 14% chance of avoiding the initial rub and slow2 and beyond that I probably win at level 28. But I'm less convinced I can get lucky and win at level 26.

Band Hero: YMCA

2012-01-21T21:47:00.000-05:00

I turned my xBox 360 on last night in order to rock out a little in Band Hero. I don't have a band (or any instruments beyond a guitar) but it at least has a new selection of songs to play on the guitar. Unfortunately I find the band type games tend to be easier than the straight guitar games. I play on the hardest difficulty and still most songs are completely trivial. That bothers me from a challenge standpoint but just having new songs to play once is a worthwhile trade-off.

One of those songs is the old disco classic, YMCA by The Village People. The song itself (on guitar at least) is pretty easy, but it there was an added twist that made it hard to get a really good score. At one point in the song the band yells out Y - M - C - A and as a human being I've been conditioned to make those letters with my arms. There were no guitar notes to hit at the time so there's nothing wrong with jumping around in letters, is there? Well, it turns out that making jerky motions is enough to trigger the star power multiplier. Which was wasted since it was a guitar note light area. Boo!

One nice thing about Band Hero is that they're able to add in songs mostly known for their lyrics instead of just the guitar track. I've never seen an Evanescence song in a straight guitar game, for example, but there is one on Band Hero!

Campaign Manager 2008: Infinite Decks

2012-01-20T23:08:00.000-05:00

I've completed 11 games of Campaign Manager 2008 on Yucata with two more in progress with what seems to be an insurmountable lead. Assuming I do win those games my record will be 9-2-2. I'd say one of those games was close and that was the game I played with the default decks. Every other game was either a dominating blowout or ended in a draw. It has me really wondering about the balance of the game and if it's actually worth playing. There are a few questions that need to be answered to work that out...

What is an 'infinite' deck?
How hard is it to assemble one?
Is there anything at all a 'fair' deck could do to compete?
In the infinite on infinite match is there any way to get an edge and break a stalemate?

I'm going to define an infinite deck as one that reaches a point where it can take the same basic action every turn for the rest of the game. It should be able to use any of the three core actions (gain an economy, gain a defense, shift the issue track) on any turn. In order to set this up you need to have two copies of the economy cantrip (cantrip meaning it also draws a card in addition to the first effect), two copies of the defense cantrip, and two copies of the shift cantrip. Then you get up to n-1 cards in your hand. It then doesn't matter what card is in your graveyard as you'll always have at least one of the core cantrip cards in your hand. When you play one of them you get to draw the card in your graveyard putting you in essentially the same game state. You may have a different card in the graveyard but you still have at least one of the core cantrips in your hand.

How hard is it to set up? Well, it turns out that it's pretty trivial if you focus entirely on doing it in the draft and practically impossible otherwise. The key lies in the fact you can't take the default 'draw 1 card' action when you have 5 or more cards in your hand. This means that most people with a fair deck have a maximum hand size of 5. Then you have to play a card which will reduce your hand size down to 4. There are a bunch of cards which are cantrips which maintain your current hand size and 2 cards which might increase it beyond 5. The first is the ancestral type card which lets you draw 3 cards. This takes you from 5 cards in hand to 7 cards in hand. The second is the Oprah type card which lets you draw 2 cards and play one of them. This keeps your hand size even unless the card you play is a cantrip which puts you at +1 hand size.

Assume you drafted both ancestral and Oprah. You can, with a little effort, build a 5 card hand containing both of them. (Just keep playing anything and taking the basic draw a card action until you reach 5 cards with both of them.) Play ancestral putting you up to 7 cards including Oprah. At this point your goal is to chain cantrips back to back to back until you reshuffle and draw your ancestral. If you could run that cycle with a 7 card hand you can definitely run it with your new 9 card hand!

How do you guarantee that you can cycle to the ancestral? By having at most 7 cards in your deck that aren't cantrips. When your hand is 6 cards and Oprah you play a cantrip if you have one. Otherwise Oprah is guaranteed to hit a cantrip putting you up to 8 cards in hand. With at most 7 non-cantrips in your deck you're now guaranteed to always be able to at least maintain your hand size. And each time you draw ancestral or Oprah it gets bigger! You'll get to an infinite size in no time at all...

On top of those both McCain and Obama have an additional card which can work to draw ancestral more often. McCain's guarantees the ancestral at the cost of 2 cards (so if you pick up ancestral you spend 2 actions to gain a maximum hand size). Obama's is a discard X cards to draw X cards. It's much riskier but if you've already managed a reshuffle you can cycle into it for plus one card as well.

So how hard is it to draft ancestral, Oprah, and at least 6 cantrips/regrowths? Well, both decks have 10 cantrips in them. So you essentially need to be able to grab 8 of 13 cards. Even with the worst luck possible you're guaranteed 5 of them. I don't know the exact odds but in my experience it's not hard at all. In the two games I have running at the moment I have 10 and 8. In the finished games I won I had 10, 9, 8, 11, 11, and 10.

8 isn't actually a full requirement either. One of the players gets to keep a card in play permanently. If you're that person your deck is only 14 cards so you only need 7 (and to not have your permanent removed) to pull it off. Obama also has the ability to remove one card from each player's deck. If he plays that card he then only needs 7 to eventually guarantee an infinite deck. 6 with a permanent in play!

It feels like the real danger is to have both ancestral and Oprah in the same draft pack. In that case you should take ancestral and just hope you can pound enough cantrips. (At this point you need 8 cantrips on top of ancestral.)

I'll try to answer the remaining two questions in a future post.

TrueSkill

2012-01-19T19:16:00.000-05:00

I mentioned earlier that Yucata has two rating systems. The rating system they use for each individual game is something called TrueSkill that broke down into 3 numbers but I didn't really know what they meant. I've had games where I won but both players had their rating go up. I've won games without an increase in my rating while my opponent lost rating. I come from worlds (Magic, League of Legends) that use an Elo system and neither of those things could happen there. I turned to my trusty companion Google to see if I could find out more...

It turns out TrueSkill is a rating system developed by Microsoft Research for use with xBox Live. It's a Bayesian system that had the same basic idea of the Elo system. The system has an idea of what the players have as current ratings. It predicts the likely outcome of the match. Then it looks at what actually happened and uses that information to update the ratings of the players. Win and it goes up. How much it goes up depends on how likely you were to win. Lose and it goes down.

But wait... I've seen losers gain. I've won and stayed even. That doesn't line up... Or does it? I read their paper on the topic to learn more. Part of me is now wishing I've done more to keep my math skills sharp but I managed to fight my way through it. The basic idea is you don't actually have one number associated with your rating, you have two. The first number is what the system thinks your rating might be right now. The second number is how confident the system is that your 'real' rating matches the first number. Then when the system reports a single number as your rating it is actually reporting a number representing a low bound of what your rating might be. (It subtracts three times the uncertainty from your rating. These numbers are a close approximation to a Gaussian distribution with the uncertainty as the standard deviation. Knocking three standard deviations off gives you a number you can be confident with 99.7% certainty to be at least your 'real' rating.

Elo is also only used for 2 player games. Microsoft's whole goal was to make a system that worked for multi-player games and team games (Halo and all the different game types there for example) and this one does. It also converges to your 'real' rating much faster than Elo does.

When it comes to Yucata in particular they set all initial ratings with a value of 1200 and an uncertainty of 400. This means your reported rating for every game on Yucata is 0 before you play a game. (The system has _no_ confidence in your rating of 1200 since you've done nothing to indicate you can play at all.) Apparently they've also set a parameter individually on each game to indicate how much randomness they think is in the game. The more randomness in the game the slower it takes to converge on your 'real' rating. (Maybe you won because you're better than me at Can't Stop. Maybe you won because you rolled better than I did. But when I beat you at Six that's all skill, baby!)

The more games you play the lower and lower your uncertainty number becomes. I've played 441 games of Roll Through The Ages, for example, and my uncertainty has come down from that initial 400 to a mere 19. On the other hand I've played only one game of Pompeii and my uncertainty there is 344. I guess beating Andrew doesn't say all that much about my skill, huh? My estimated rating is actually around the same in both games (1413 vs 1411) but the uncertainty difference (thanks to playing 440 more games) is huge. My listed rating in RTTA is 1356 which is good for 5th of 2710. Pompeii? A mere 378 rating. Good for 709th of 1055. As for Andrew his one loss puts him at -44. (It floors to 0 but a little math gets the real number.) But with only the one data point there's not any real certainty there either. As far as the system knows I might be the second worst Pompeii player in the world! Andrew might be the second best! Or maybe I just got lucky!

It does explain how both players can gain rating from a game. The loser just needs to have his uncertainty number shrink by more than 1/3rd the amount of rating he lost. I do wish it would actually list the change in all the numbers instead of just the lower bound.

Stop SOPA

2012-01-18T01:25:00.000-05:00

Normally I don't pay much attention to foreign politics. Or domestic politics. Or the weather for that matter! In general I'm content to come home from work, play some games, write a blog post, and go to sleep. The Daily Show is the closest I ever get to the news. I'm a pretty oblivious guy with some really unconventional ideas so politics mostly just serves to make me bitter. There's nothing I can do to change anything and realistically I'm not going to be impacted by any changes anyway. I needed to renew my passport so I can go to WBC next year which was a minor inconvenience but that's pretty much as impactful as things get.

SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) is a rather drastic departure from that norm. I've been seeing a lot of games and sites talking about trying to stop it from being passed and decided to read a bit about it. It turns out that SOPA would have a pretty substantial impact on this blog! I'll get to how in a second, but first let's go over how I came to this information...

I follow Major League Gaming on Facebook (I have a membership on their website so I can watch League of Legends and StarCraft II events and wanted to get reminded when they were running) and saw what seemed to be a pretty crazy post the other day. They'd changed hosting services for all of their websites. Why? Because GoDaddy supported SOPA. Then they announced they were going to blackout their website on January 18th. I've since learned that Reddit and Wikipedia are also shutting down today.

League of Legends had a link in their client talking about how they were against SOPA. I clicked on it on Friday to read about it. One of the Riot lawyers had a Q&A on Reddit talking about SOPA and what it would mean to the community. The game itself would be fine if SOPA passed, he said, but it would probably obliterate eSports. Buried deep in that chat was a link to this thread on their forums where one of the US Congressmen (Rep Jared Polis, Colorado) posted speaking out against SOPA. (It would seem Polis made a lot of money in the eCard/flower delivery website businesses and doesn't think that would have been possible if SOPA had existed.)

Ok, so there's a lot of people making a big stink about it... But how would SOPA actually impact this blog? Well, I post pictures sometimes. I write about potentially copyrighted information like game plots. I've linked to a music video or two. Over at Ziggyny's Star Trek Trek I have a lot of pictures! But for now let's pretend Square has a problem with me posting a picture of my Final Fantasy solo-ninja game. It doesn't matter why they might have a problem with it. Just pretend they do.

As things stand right now they'd need to send me a cease and desist order. If I care I'll take the offending content down. If not they'll have to sue me. They'd need to build a case for court showing that my post violated the law and that they'd been harmed by it. I'd get a chance to defend myself in court. If it turned out they were right and I was wrong then I'd suffer the appropriate consequences.

Realistically that wouldn't happen. Even if Square has a legitimate beef with my picture it wouldn't really be worth their while to come after me. This site is worth nothing. Personally I'm worth practically nothing. If my post was causing their brand real harm they might still come after me but they'd only come after me to try to rectify that damage and not for any monetary gain.

What about under SOPA? Well, the first thing Square would do is send Google notice that they were going to be filing a complaint against me under SOPA. (I'm a foreign website allegedly violating copyright laws and Google owns Blogger which hosts this blog.) Google then has two choices.

Shut my blog down. Doing so immediately would grant them immunity from being prosecuted for my transgressions.
Side with me. They'd keep my site running and would become co-defendants in the pending lawsuit under SOPA.

Remember above when I said I'm not worth suing? I can barely afford pockets! Google has some pretty deep ones. If they were found guilty there could be a pretty hefty payout. Even if it turns out I'm not breaking any laws Google still has to pay a legal team to build my defense.

Ask yourself this... Why would Google pay some lawyers to defend me? Why would they even bother looking at my site? I know if I was in their shoes I wouldn't bother. Square tells Google that Ziggyny is a bad man and getting sued under SOPA? Google just flips the switch and kills me.

Ok, but why would Square take offense to my picture of a max level ninja? Here's the thing... It doesn't matter why. It could be some legal intern was having a bad day. Maybe they're going to take offense when I don't choose Final Fantasy VII as the best of the series. All they have to do is tell Google they're going to come after me and I get shut down. Square has no burden of proof at all. I don't get my day in court to defend myself. They just need to look at me funny and I'm dead. The burden of proof is on Google's shoulders now and they need to make their decision before really investigating. Side with me and find out I'm bad? They're screwed.

I know some of you are going to say I'm overreacting. Would a content provider really come up with a flimsy excuse to shut down some guy they don't like? I should point out one of the entities really pushing for SOPA to come into law is the Recording Industry Association of America which has a history of doing just that. How about the Universal Music Group which apparently had a deal with Youtube allowing it to pull down any videos it wants for no reason at all. Youtube eventually got involved and put the 'offending' video back up but the fact UMG could just take anything down when it felt like it is disturbing. They were somehow given power and were more than happy to abuse it while they could.

SOPA would give them so much power it's insane. I linked to a Youtube music video for the song La Luna after playing that game in Niagara last year. To Walking Like an Egyptian after playing the song in Dance Dance Revolution. I linked to an awesome zombie song a year and a half ago. The artist even came by and commented! But under SOPA that post would be quite the hanging chad. The artist was happy to have the word spread about a pretty cool song, but is the RIAA happy about it? If they were happy about it last year will they still be happy about it in 5 years? If not... I'm toast! (If Blogger even exists at all in a post-SOPA world...) I broke down a strategy for beating a fight in World of Warcraft. Is Blizzard happy about that? They could really dial down how tuned fights have to be if they shut down strategy sites...

When it comes right down to it there's nothing I can actually do as a foreigner to stop SOPA. But some of you might live in the US. Look into the issue for yourself and then get in touch with your local congressman and voice your concerns if you have any!

Torchlight

2012-01-17T19:03:00.000-05:00

Diablo III seems to be a pretty popular topic recently. Blogs I read on the internet are posting about it. People I only tangentially know at work are coming up to me to talk about it. Blizzard still hasn't given a release date so it's just a lot of things getting me excited about nothing at all.

I saw an article title somewhere (in an IGN spam email I think) mentioning something about how Torchlight 2 had missed the boat. It needed to get out before Diablo III or completely lose its market and was recently pushed back for additional testing. It reminded me that I haven't played Torchlight but that my brother gave me a copy of it over Steam for Christmas in 2010. My computer with Steam on it was dead at the time and I was too lazy to install it on my laptop. I was going to fix my computer, honest. And then it slipped my mind completely...

I did eventually get my computer fixed and use Steam to play Civ V. Unfortunately there's nothing in the Steam client to indicate I had an incoming gift so I continued to forget about it... Until the Torchlight 2 article! I tracked down the email with the link and installed the game.

It's most definitely just a Diablo clone, but it's a pretty good one. (Potions, identify scrolls, and town portal scrolls all look the same, for example.) There are some definite improvements over Diablo II (shared stash in town so I can easily trade items between characters in particular) and it's been fun so far. I started as the gun using character but have found it to be a little frustrating. The same button is for walking and for shooting so I frequently find myself walking up beside a monster when I really wanted to shoot it from a distance. Having to accurately click to target things isn't really my thing in a game like this. I pretty much exclusively played the sorceress in Diablo II. Who needs to target a chain lightning? Just fire it off in the general direction of the enemies! If it hits any of them it hits them all! Frozen orb? It hits everything! INFERNO?!? Just run in circles!

That said, I think I'm going to start a different character up. There's a melee dude and a caster as other options. Presumably the melee dude doesn't mind accidentally walking up beside the monsters!

Campaign Manager 2008: Mad Cheats!

2012-01-16T20:14:00.000-05:00

Let's say you're playing a card game. In particular I'm talking about Campaign Manager 2008 but it could be any game. It could be Fluxx. It could be Magic: the Gathering. Whatever. It's a card game. One of the cards you can play in this game says 'Draw two cards and play one of them immediately, adding the other to your hand.' How would you assume the following interactions work? (For simplicity's sake I'm going to call this effect an Oprah after the Obama card in Campaign Manager 2008.)

- The only card in your hand is Oprah and you play it. The two cards you draw both require you to discard two cards in order to play them. Can you play either one? If not, what happens?

- The only card in your hand is Oprah and you play it. The two cards you draw both require you to discard a card in order to play them. Can you play either one? If not, what happens?

- You have only one card left in your deck and 5 cards in your discard pile. You play Oprah. Do you get a card from your discard pile? If so, could you get Oprah?

- You have only one card left in your deck and no cards in your discard pile. You play Oprah. The one card you draw also has, as part of its effect, draw a card. Do you draw Oprah?

In the first scenario I'd say there's no way to actually get the effect out of a card. You can't discard two cards to pay the cost for either one. Depending on how the cards are worded you'd either get to keep both (probably having to reveal them to prove you couldn't play them) or you'd have to play one with no effect.

In the second scenario it's tricky. When exactly do you add the second card to your hand? The wording of the card says you play one immediately and tells you to add the other to your hand later in the text. I could see it being ruled either way.

The third scenario is pretty clear I think. You draw the one card in your deck, shuffle the discard, and draw another card. Then you put Oprah in the discard. I can see other ways it might work though. Maybe you should get a shot at Oprah? Maybe you don't reshuffle. (A Few Acres of Snow change their rules such that you don't reshuffle in the middle of a turn, for example.) But in general I'd assume you reshuffle right away and can't draw the card currently drawing you cards.

What about the fourth option? When, exactly, do you end up discarding Oprah. I think Oprah can't draw Oprah because it's 'being played' while you're drawing those cards but is it still 'being played' when you play the second card? Does the answer to the second scenario matter? I'd say if you can't discard the second card then you either can't draw Oprah here (we haven't added the second card to our hand so Oprah has to still be 'being played') or you can draw it off of Oprah itself. If you can discard the second card then I'd say you should probably be able to cycle into Oprah off the second card but I could see it going the other way.

Well, how is it implemented online? You're forced to discard without getting the effect in scenario 1. You can discard the card to get the effect in scenario 2. You do reshuffle in the middle of the turn in scenario 3 (but get no shot at Oprah). Scenario 4? It works both ways depending on how you click...

If you play it out normally you don't get the card. Oprah is in the discard pile when you resolve the second card but the reshuffle doesn't happen. Here's where things get tricky... I didn't put any thought into it and just assumed I should get the card. I thought I must have done something wrong (why didn't I get my card?) so I clicked the 'Reset Move' button to do it again to make sure. It resets back to after drawing the cards off Oprah (and rightly so, after I see what they are I shouldn't be able to undo playing Oprah) and lets me pick which one to play. This time around it forces me to draw a card which has to be Oprah.

Something's wrong here, right? The implementation has to be buggy one way or the other. I did this once in a game last week and didn't even give it a second thought. Maybe I'd screwed up clicking the first time or something but I managed to make it work the way I instinctively thought it should so all is well.

Today I got into a stalemate in a game. We both had all of our cards but one in our hands and were able to cycle the same game state forever. I was wondering about what should happen. Could I have built my deck differently to beat his infinite combo? Did he have anything up his sleeve to stop mine? Did the rules have a chess style draw rule? I opened up the rules and browsed a bit to find the following...

"If a player wishes to draw a card but has no cards remaining in his Campaign Deck, his discard pile is first reshuffled to form a new deck. If this occurs in the midst of a player’s turn, any cards played earlier on that turn should not be shuffled into the new deck."

Hmm.

So the way I thought it worked was wrong. And by finding a way to make it happen I've been cheating...

I reported it as a bug. My opponent also noticed and asked how I did it. I told him I'd reported it and offered a draw since I'd been cheating. Also since the game was unlikely to progress even if I stopped cheating. The odd thing there is we both gained TrueSkill rating for the draw.

League of Legends: Turrets

2012-01-15T16:53:00.000-05:00

One of the new masteries added to League of Legends in season 2 is called Siege Commander. It reduces the armour of nearby enemy turrets by 10. I was wondering about how good this actually was (I have it in my Warwick spec) and tried to take a look at the armour of the enemy turrets in a game as I was walking up to them. The turret went from 250 armour to 50 armour as I walked up to it which was really confusing. It says it knocks 10 armour off! Why did it lose 200? Clearly some further investigation is required...

I did some searching and found that turrets actually have all kinds of weird rules surrounding them. I'd always just assumed they had static stats (possibly that scale as time progressed) and just shot for sensible damage. It turns out there are weird rules for how much damage they do and how much damage they take.

In terms of how much damage they do it seems that every consecutive shot on a single target does an extra 22.5% damage. So getting hit once will hurt but getting hit for a bunch of shots in a row is going to destroy you. Turrets also have 20% armor penetration and do only 94% damage to champions.

Defensively if there are no enemy minions within range of the turret it gets x3.88 ac and x2.47 mr. Presumably this is to make it harder to 'back door' without a creep wave present and is almost certainly why the tower lost 200 ac in my test.

And perhaps most interestingly... The damage a champion does to a turret is either her attack damage (the same as with every single other thing you can auto-attack) or 40% of her ability power. This blew my mind. I've always operated under the assumption that casters are terrible at burning down turrets! I popped in a quick replay from a game yesterday where I was Veigar. I had 109 ad and 690 ap. I was cracking a turret, post ac, for almost 200. Assuming the 40% number is right that means I do 2.5 times as much damage to a turret as I was expecting I would. Not bad! A true physical attacker is still going to do more since they're apt to build some sort of attack speed items and I'm really not with Veigar. (Or am I...)

Final Fantasy IV: Super Rare Drops

2012-01-14T19:16:00.000-05:00

My brother commented on yesterday's post about the 'infinite' victory Game Genie code and said that the thing he most remembered about it was getting a large number of rolls on the enemy loot table. There are some stupidly rare drops in the game and this was the first time we'd ever seen one of them. (Mage, I think.)

I mentioned that Rydia learned almost all of her spells via leveling but that's only true of white and black magic spells. Her call spells are learned in a wide variety of ways. She starts the game with one. She learns five more when she rejoins the party after growing up in the land of the summoned monsters. Most of the rest she learns by having the party defeat a legendary monster. Find Odin at the bottom of Castle Baron and beat him up to learn the spell. Brave Bahamut's Cave on the moon to learn that spell. Hit Yang on the head with a frying pan to learn Sylph. There are a couple spells that you can only learn by getting a rare drop from a random encounter. I don't think I've ever had Mage myself. I got Imp once from a monster in the final dungeon on the moon. Are there any other super rare drops? Lets see what gamefaqs has to say on the topic...

First of all it looks like every monster has a 5 in 96 chance to drop an item at all after you kill them. (Dr Lugae's second form has a 100% chance to drop an item as the only exception.) After determining that they'll drop an item there are 4 things they could drop. The first item has a 32 in 64 chance. The next has a 20 in 64 chance. Then an 11 in 64 chance. Then a 1 in 64 chance. The mage monster, for example, has a cure2 potion as the first three items on the loot table and the mage spell for Rydia as the last item. Which means that if you kill a single mage your odds of each outcome are...

5824 in 6144 (~95%) - no drop
319 in 6144 (~5%) - cure2 potion
1 in 6144 (~.016%) - mage spell

What?!?

How is that a sensible game mechanic? You fight mages in one dungeon. (The magnetic cave.) I can't find random encounter tables but it's a pretty short dungeon and you're probably only fighting like 5 of these guys in a given game. With 5 shots at the item you're at a mere .081% chance to get the item. How many times would you have to play the game to have even a 50% chance at getting it? 852. If you played the game 852 times and killed 5 mages each time then you're barely more likely to see the mage spell than not. How can this make sense? Is it really worth spending developer time on something that will come up that rarely?

This isn't the only item in the game with this kind of rarity, either... Here's a list of all the items that only come up in the 1/64 slot of a loot table...

Bomb spell
Medusa sword
Dragoon spear

RuneAxe axe
Artemis bow
Lilith rod
Cursed ring (I didn't know there was a cursed ring in this game!)
Crystal ring
Zeus gloves

Glass helmet
Imp spell
Mage spell
Pink tail

I've tried to get the pink tail before but now that I actually see the numbers behind it I'm pretty sure it's off the charts crazy to try for it. Estimates placed getting into a fight with the monsters that drop it at 1 in 64. I think you get to fight 5 of them at a time but that's still in the neighbourhood of 54528 fights before you reach a 50% chance of getting a pink tail. Holy crazy drop rates Batman!

Game Genie: Final Fantasy IV

2012-01-13T21:06:00.000-05:00

My brother had a Gamie Genie for the SNES when we were kids. It came with a book of codes you could enter to modify how games worked. Infinite lives, access to all the guns at the start of the game... Things like that. I don't know how it worked (I am curious though) and I don't remember ever actually using it on any game. Any game, that is, except for Final Fantasy IV!

I remember there were codes you could enter to change how much experience you earned at the end of a fight. Make each monster worth 1 xp. Or 10 xp. Or 100 xp. And so on. There was an obvious pattern to the codes and we toyed around with making things bigger and bigger. Eventually we stumble on a code which seemed to break the game. A fight would end and your characters would stand around doing the victory dance but it wouldn't list how much experience/gold you'd earned for the fight. Eventually we turned off the Game Genie (it had an on/off switch) and suddenly earned a ludicrous amount of experience. It was like the game was stuck in an infinite loop while it was turned on and it was constantly adding on the experience for the monsters over and over. Hello tons of levels!

We figured this out in the antlion cave near the start of the game when your party is Cecil, Rydia, and Edward. Gaining a ton of levels at once had two interesting consequences...

First, Edward has an auto-hide ability where if he's at low health he runs away from the fight. In the Japanese version he has a healing ability which he can use while hidden (in order to get enough health to actually stick around and fight) but in the NA version he just screws around hidden. Gaining 80 some odd levels raised his maximum health a lot. So high, in fact, that I couldn't heal him out of low health. It might have been a problem if I didn't have a super high level dark knight!

Secondly, Rydia learns spells as she gains levels so when she gains a ton of levels she learns all the spells. All the spells, that is, except fir1. She learns that spell as a plot point at the start of the next dungeon (you need Rosa to convince her to get over her fear of fire and burn down the ice blocking the party from walking to Fabul) so it makes sense that she wouldn't learn it from just gaining levels. What doesn't make sense is she does learn fir2. And fir3. So the scene where she's too afraid to melt some ice with a fire spell doesn't real gel with the fact I've been exploding enemies with fir3!

I don't remember actually playing very long with the stupid amount of experience. Cheating just isn't very fun it turns out.

Hunger Games: Training Days

2012-01-12T20:44:00.000-05:00

At the end of 2010 I was at a local book store trying to spend a gift certificate when a board game caught my eye. It was a board game based off of a book trilogy (the third book had just come out) and was marked down 75% off. A quick look at the game didn't get my hopes up that it was going to be very good and I'd never heard of the book series. I decided to get the first book and then later pick up the other two books and the game if I liked the first one.

It turned out that the first book, Hunger Games, is awesome. Possibly my favourite book of all-time, though we know how hard it can be to compare things across years and years. At any rate, it's really good. I eventually went back for the second two books (sadly only in hardcover when I got them) and the game. The game was gone, however. Oh well...

I was out at 401 last month and saw they actually had a copy of it. I snapped it up and gave it to my sister for Christmas since I knew she liked the books as well. The board game, sadly, was a bit of a disappointment.

Now, without spoiling the book too much (seriously, go read it if you haven't) the basic idea is every year they hold a 'hunger games' where 12 districts each appoint a teenage boy and a teenage girl to enter the games. The 24 kids get put into an arena of sorts and battle to the death. Last kid alive wins food and stuff for their district. There's all sorts of crazy things that can go on in a death arena...

A board game based on that premise seems like it could have a lot of potential. I envision a dungeon that gets built as you're playing the game with players linking up randomly to fight. It would be an elimination game, of course, with different characters and stats. I'm thinking it could have a Scotland Yard style mechanic so you don't really know if you're following along behind someone else or not... There may be some clever way to have the game track that sort of stuff but it could work with a GM character who oversees the arena while the players compete to see who will win. (Maybe give the GM some 'cylon leader' style goals?)

Unfortunately the board game doesn't have anything at all to do with the arena. There is no battle to the death. The key is in the last part of the name... 'Training Days'. The game simulates being one of the kids and training to get ready for the arena instead of the arena itself. So you do weight lifting and archery and junk like that instead of actually fighting each other. The theme was rather disappointing after the expectations I had.

As far as the gameplay goes it's a hidden auction system. Each round you flip up a card for every player and then you bid face down tiles to try to win the cards. You have a 1, a 3, and a 6 to spend each round. On top of your tiles you have a character with stats that you get to add to the card check. So someone with a high agility would be better at the archery challenge and someone with high strength would be better at lifting weights. The challenges are all vaguely related to the book and all of the characters are from the book too so it is still flavourful... Just no killing.

It has some interesting gameplay as you try to figure out who cares about which card and how much you need to invest in a specific card in order to win it. But it has a random game end condition and there's not really any long term planning. There are obviously correct plays every turn and you just need to figure out who is going to deviate from the script to try to steal a card cheaply.

Overall I'm happy I played the game once but I don't have any real desire to play it again. I am intrigued by the prospect of working out a system to play out the actual arena deathmatch though...

Campaign Manager 2008

2012-01-11T21:09:00.000-05:00

Campaign Manager 2008 is an interesting little game on Yucata simulating the 2008 US presidential election between Obama and McCain. The game is essentially a card driven wargame (you play one card each turn to impact the voting in a given state) but it has a couple twists. It's non-symmetrical in that each player has their own distinct deck of cards. It also has aspects of Dominion in that you build your deck at the start of the game instead of always having the same cards available each time.

As an aside, here's roughly how the game works... There are 4 states in play. Every state has two issue tracks. It's a tug-of-war style mechanic so if red gains a defense on this card he takes over the blue one. There's also a little meter on the left showing what the state actually cares about. If a state ever cares about an issue completely dominated by one of the players they immediately win the state. The demographics on the left are used on some cards to take all the white dots in one fell swoop. Score points for the state and then add a new state to the board. Keep going until someone has a majority of the votes. Each turn you get one action which can either be to play a card or to draw a card. You can only choose to draw a card if you have fewer than 5 cards in your hand.

The first twist isn't actually much of a twist. Each player has 45 potential cards to include in their deck and most of them are mirror images of the cards in the other player's deck. Gain support in economy and draw a card. Gain support in defense and shift the issue track towards defense. Get control of the media. Draw 3 cards. Draw 2 cards and play 1 of them. Campaign targeting women... McCain has a slight bias in his cards towards defense and Obama towards economy but by and large most of their cards are the same things. They let you do two unrelated things. Gain one support and shift the left track. Switch the key demographic and draw a card. But there are a couple cards with powerful and unique effects for each side...

Obama's first such card is essentially windfall. Play it as your action and then discard any number of cards. Draw a card for each card discarded. This can let you take some situationally powerful cards and discard them if they aren't useful to turn them into something else. It can also let you dig for specific cards if you need them. McCain's comparable card is a regrowth effect. Play is and discard one card to pick up a card from your discard pile. This does similar things but lets you double use your best card each time through your deck. It wastes two cards and an action though so it had better be a really powerful effect!

Obama's second unique card lets you discard a card to remove the last card McCain played from the game along with the unique card. He still gets the impact when he played it but it won't get reshuffled into his deck. When I first saw this it seemed overpowered. Killing off your opponent's best card is pretty sweet when you go through your deck over and over. Unfortunately McCain's second unique card trumps it. It also requires you to remove it from the game and discard a card to play it. It lets you take any card from out of the game and add it to your hand. Including the card Obama removed from the game. And since it puts the card in your hand you get to play it again next turn! If there exists a card which is really powerful then McCain gets to use it twice. If all cards are about the same power level then neither of these cards matter...

The second twist is that you build your deck before the game starts. Each player has 45 potential cards and builds a deck by drawing 3 cards and keeping 1 of them. Repeat this until you have chosen 15 cards and play with those cards. Want to build a deck focused on the economy? Draft a bunch of economy cards. Want a bunch of powerful but situational cards? You can do that too. It's a really interesting mechanic and one I think has a lot of potential. You build your deck in a vacuum without seeing anything your opponent does which I think hurts the strategic depth. I'm wondering if it would be better to show your opponent what you're taking? Or to maybe do a solomon style draft!

At any rate, I've played the game 4 times. Once we used the default 15 card decks and the game made sense. It was back and forth the whole way and I won by like 1 vote in the end. The other three games were complete blow-outs. McCain got into a situation where he seemed to be unbeatable. In the game I played against Andrew today I ended up with 14 of my 15 cards in my hand. Then every turn I was able to play a card which gave me a defense support in a state and drew a card. (My deck had 3 or 4 cards with the effect in it.) If he ever did anything that forced me to do more than that I could play one of my other cards and cycle back into it in two turns!

The problem is almost every card does 2 things. If one of those things isn't draw a card then you need to spend a full turn drawing a card. So over 2 turns you can draw a card and get 2 abilities. Alternatively if you play two cards which do a thing and draw a card then over 2 turns you can draw 2 cards and get 2 abilities. If you can afford to wait the second turn for the second ability you're up a full card. Even worse, the cards which do 2 things do unrelated things. If you don't need both abilities then you're behind a card and an ability over two turns!

But how do you build up a 14 card hand? If you could always draw a card as your action on a turn you'd just spend the first 10 turns drawing cards. Unfortunately you can only use the draw a card action when you have fewer than 5 cards in hand. So instead you need to make use of the "draw 3 cards" card and the "draw 2 and play 1" cards. This will slowly increase your hand size as long as every time you play a card it draws a card. This is yet another reason why you want your cards to replace themselves. On top of it just gaining a card every 2 turns you're setting up a bigger hand which provides more options each turn.

Why is it always McCain that pulled this off? I'm not sure. The "draw 3 cards" card seems to be the best card in either deck by a pretty large margin. The two times I played as Obama I nailed it with my exile a card card but they always just brought it back and got to play it again immediately. Coupled with the regrowth it seems pretty easy to build up a big hand. Possibly the windfall card from Obama can set up the same thing if you get proper discard tempo? I want to play again as Obama to see if I can put the deck together... But even then, if you just have two brutal decks going against each other is the game going to be interesting? It feels like it should just end up in a draw?

"Elo Hell" Revisited

2012-01-10T20:58:00.000-05:00

Two months ago I posted about the rating system in League of Legends and how my rating at the time was making the game unfun. I've been asked since then by several people about if I ever got out of "Elo Hell". I figured I should revisit the topic to see if two months of play has changed anything.

The first thing to mention is I still often see people in games complaining about being stuck in Elo Hell. It doesn't seem to matter what rating you're at; there's always people who are stuck at that rating and think they should be higher. I'm pretty sure this can just be explained by Illusory Superiority. Most people think they're above average. Pretty much by definition some of them aren't. Those people are going to reach their rating equilibrium point, believe it should be higher, but get stuck. And then since this is the internet they're going to whine about it. That people complain about Elo Hell in this manner doesn't mean it exists at all.

The second thing is that games have gotten better recently. There are still people who whine. People who make mistakes and play badly. Blame gets thrown around. But by and large everyone is still trying to win. I had one game recently where someone stated point blank that we had to give him solo top or he'd feed. (We gave him solo top and then he was bad and fed anyway...) Beyond that one game though I haven't had anyone threaten to play badly at the start. I haven't had people who intentionally join a game just to lose. Or who don't really join at all. Games, by and large, are fun.

As far as rating goes I had fallen as low as 1001. I started playing games almost exclusively with Robb and focused on playing a couple of champions well. In particular I stopped playing Vayne (8-16 record) and switched to Tristana (13-11 record) as my ranged physical attacker. I'm up to an overall winning record (120-111) and my rating is 1294.

Apparently Riot also implemented an automated banning tool which suspends accounts of people who routinely go AFK. Maybe that would help the matches down at the 1000 rating zone? I have my doubts. The Tribunal thing getting some press for actually banning people might be helping too. I posted about people flat out not caring about the threat of being reported and that may have changed? I kinda doubt that too.

But yes, I am out of "Elo Hell". Games are, by and large, fun. I'm sure my rating should be higher than it is since I'm obviously above average at the game but I'm sure that will come in time...

League of Legends Tribunal

2012-01-09T21:33:00.000-05:00

8 months ago League of Legends brought in their tribunal system as a method to try to foster good behaviour amongst the player base. The basic idea is players can report people in their games and then a jury of their peers would vote on in the player behaved in a way that broke the rules and should be punished or not. I'd heard about it when it first came out but didn't pay much attention to it. I report people all the time but I never really cared about what went on after submitting a report.

A couple weeks ago I finally got around to signing in as a jurist to punish some bad players. It was interesting to see what actually gets submitted when a player gets reported. The jury gets to see the entire chat log from the game (but not the champion selection or game recap screens) with the offender's chat in a different colour to make it easier to find what they said. It also lists their final items, their kills/deaths/assists in the game, their incoming and outgoing DPS, and what level they finished the game at. It also lists every reason they were reported after the game and differentiates if it was a teammate or an opponent who reported them. It doesn't say which player specifically made which complaint.

The great part is it lists all the games they played where they got a complaint. You can browse all complaints to see if there's a pattern of bad behaviour or if people are just being really oversensitive or bitter when reporting.

I did a few and got an email on Friday saying that I got 8 cases right and they were giving me 40 IP for my help. I don't remember how many I did. It doesn't seem there's any way to see how many I did, so I don't know what my winning percentage is. I do know I pardoned more people than I was expecting...

I did some poking around today to see if I can work out what's exactly going on behind the scenes here. They posted some interesting stats last month... Apparently only 1.4% of players have been punished by the tribunal. But of people who get presented at the tribunal 94% get a punish vote. Half of those people get sent to the tribunal a second time and get another punish vote. Apparently most people who get reported are on the losing team and get reported by their teammates. (That makes sense since you're more likely to get angry and start raging at someone who you think is making you lose a game.)

I also dug into the forums and found some facts about how the system works. They refuse to give out specifics since they think offenders will be able to abuse the system if they know details. I guess that could be true but as the saying goes... Security through obfuscation isn't security at all. I'd rather they have a system that couldn't be abused but I guess they don't feel like they got that far. What they have said, however...

One report won't get your case presented at the tribunal. It takes several games with reports to get presented for voting. The percentage of games played compared to games with reports matters.
Long term or permanent bans have to get approved by a Riot employee but everything else is automated.
Your first time found guilty you get a warning email that doesn't tell you what you did wrong, just links to the code of conduct.
The second time you get a short term ban (1-3 days or so) but still don't get told specifically what you did wrong.
Even if you get permanently banned you don't get told what you did wrong.
Riot employees who spot check random cases think the voters are too lenient. With a 94% conviction rate. Sounds to me like they need to start sending more borderline cases to the tribunal since if the conviction rate should be more than 94% I can't imagine it makes sense to actually review the cases. Punish everyone and move on!
You can get reported for unskilled play but those reports don't get added to tribunal cases. The idea is to give people a way to vent without actually hurting anyone since people being bad isn't an offense. (With the rating system they should eventually fall out of your play range if they're actually worse than you!)
The system had a lot more oversight built in at launch but they're pretty happy with how things are working so it's almost all automated now. The computer picks who gets put on trial. The computer tabulates the votes and decides when someone should be punished. The computer punishes them.

So it is entirely possible that, through no fault of my own, I could get banned. If enough of the people I play against randomly report me and enough of the jurists blindly vote to punish I'll get hit without any oversight. On the other hand it would have to happen in a lot of games. And since I really don't do anything bad and the jury does pardon 6% of people... I really have nothing to worry about. It's theoretically possible for the universe to align and screw me but it's really not plausible.

It seems sketchy that they don't tell people what they did wrong, but I've been a moderator for an online game. People who are apt to misbehave are also apt to whine and argue and try to rules-lawyer their way out of their punishment. I didn't really have all that much going on so I'd typically indulge them but it almost never went anywhere productive. They'd want to be able to swear. Or trade in the play areas. I'd always tell them specifically what they did wrong but the vast majority of the time they already knew what they did. They knew we didn't allow it. But they thought we should allow it so they were going to do it anyway.

The real key is they would gladly debate the facts for hours on end. They'd try to convince me I was wrong. And from their point of view it was just them wasting a couple hours. But from my point of view, when you get several of these people every day... Suddenly my whole day is wasted. (In reality I'm very good at multi-tasking chat and my side of the 'conversation' was pretty limited so I'd mostly just let them chat themselves out.) Even then, we had more chat moderators than Riot does. And fewer players. We provided better customer support for sure, but I don't know that Riot is doing things wrong. It doesn't make financial sense for them to hire a bunch of people to debate with people who are almost certainly going to get banned soon.

I do think it would make sense for them to provide a list of the reasons on their tribunal case. Add in a disclaimer about how they were reported for some of these reasons and be done with it. At least then people can rest assured that they weren't banned for unskilled play, for example. Getting an email warning saying you've been bad and to read the code of conduct is great and all but getting an email warning saying you were reported for 'AFK, AFK, AFK, AFK, AFK, Negative Attitude, AFK' gives you a pretty good idea what your problem is!

Super Adventures In Gaming

2012-01-08T21:51:00.000-05:00

When I was writing up the pre-NES favourite games post I did a lot of searching for game pictures on the internet. I found one site which has been a really great read. It's Super Adventures In Gaming which seems to be a site updated daily where a guy plays an old game from the past, posts screenshots, and makes snarky comments if the game is bad. And most games didn't age well... The entry I linked above is for The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker which apparently did age well!

At any rate, I've found the site to be very entertaining and thought some other people might like it, so there you go!

Final Fantasy IV: Golbez So Dumb

2012-01-07T18:31:00.000-05:00

Often in a console RPG the bad guys will have a chance to finish off the player characters. Obviously they never do (or the game would end) but the justification for letting them go changes. Our first introduction to the character Golbez in Final Fantasy IV immediately marks him as an idiot for not killing off the players. Here's the scene...

Cecil, Edward, and Yang are desperately trying to defend Fabul's crystal which the Red Wings are here to steal. The party is running out of steam (the party had two healers but they were both girls and therefore hid during the assault) and has fallen back to the crystal itself. In walks Kain who become evil. He trivially takes out Cecil. Golbez then walks in and trivially takes out Edward and Yang. Kain wants to finish the party off but Golbez tells him to just get the crystal and leave. One solid blow to Cecil's head and the bad guys win! They also kidnap Rosa to advance the plot.

A little while later Cecil is climbing Mount Ordeals to become a paladin. Golbez suddenly decides that Cecil is a problem and sends one of his fiends (Milon) to take him out. Kain gets antsy and wants to go too. After all, he was able to take Cecil out with ease in Fabul. Golbez calls Kain incompetent and tells him to sit down and shut up. I'm calling Golbez incompetent. Milon and his zombies are all chumps. Kain alone would probably be a decent fight. Kain and Milon likely take the party out. Kain, Milon, and Golbez certainly do.

I wonder if this is a spot where the drastically reduced plot in the US version is hurting the story. We eventually learn that Golbez is actually a good guy being mind controlled so I could believe he went easy on Cecil in a passive-aggressive outburst against the true evil guy. But we're given no indication that this could be the case. As far as we know at this point in time Golbez is just stupid.

Final Fantasy IV: Namingway

2012-01-06T22:53:00.000-05:00

One of the NPCs in Final Fantasy IV is a fellow with a jaunty hat named Namingway. He's a bit of a stalker in that he appears in pretty much every town your party visits. He even shows up on the moon! His purpose in the game? He lets you change the names of your characters. Most games with variable character names would have you set the name when you first meet the character. Here they join your party with their 'real' name and you have to find Namingway to make the change.

I've always changed the names of characters in games like this when given the chance. For years I didn't really even know the real names for the characters in Final Fantasy IV and Final Fantasy VI. It wasn't until I went to University and started living in Comfy Prime and needed to be able to talk to Sthenno and Byung about the games that I cared enough to really learn them. Even then, for most of the characters I don't initially think of them with their real names. It's not Cecil, it's Nick. It's not Rydia, it's Jo. It's really not Cid. That's definitely Barfy. No, I don't remember why I possibly used that name when I was 11. Freud would be happy to hear I used to name Rosa "Mom" until I played the game enough to actually figure out what was going on there with Cecil. Getting cozy indeed. Now Rosa gets to stay Rosa...

As far as the game goes I've done a few major plot points. I completed Mount Ordeals which turned Nick into a Paladin and taught Drew the Meteo spell. It's time to find Golbez and drop a meteor on his head!

Huge World: Immersive or Boring?

2012-01-05T19:56:00.000-05:00

I'm pretty sure this is me just being old and crotchety but I've been finding the amount of excessive walking around in Star Wars: The Old Republic to be a little annoying. To explain what I mean, here's what my current planet has been like...

You arrive by starship at the spaceport on the edge of the planet. In order to get to the main town on the planet (where my Sith master and main quest giver lives) I have to walk through the jungle. There's a quest or two to pick up along the way and monsters to kill as you go so it's really not very bad at all. (If walking around killing monsters for quests isn't your cup of tea then you should probably avoid playing a modern MMO.) When you get to the main town there's a speeder taxi you can talk to who will fly you back to the starport and from now on you can essentially teleport between the two spots. (It does take some time to fly but you're not in control or in any danger.) Ok, great!

Head into the town and discover it's huge! There are some vendors spread out, a cantina with profession trainers, and an auction house. There are also a couple quests you can pick up. Finally get to the back of the town and find another speeder taxi which will take you to your maser's estate. Get there, do some cutscenes, get a quest, head out. Get to the speeder taxi and discover it doesn't link up to the first two you found. Instead you need to taxi to the back of the town and then walk out of the huge town.

Repeat over and over as your Sith master sends you on quests to every corner of the planet. Finish quest. Speeder. Walk. Speeder. Cash quest. Get next quest. Speeder. Walk. Lots of walking. It really makes me pine for a flying mount...

But even if I had one, would it matter? I think back to playing World of Warcraft and with a flying mount that went anywhere I certainly got between places faster but there was still a lot of time spent flying around between places while doing _nothing_.

Is it really any different than flying around in an airship in Final Fantasy IV though? Final Fantasy X-2 abstracted away the airship and you just chose your destination and it took you there instead of needing to find it on the map. (The idea being you told the pilot where to go. Yuna had better things to do than learn how to fly an airship!) What about the run button?

Walking around in a big city is immersive. People certainly complain about the dungeon finder in WoW because it instantly teleports to a dungeon no matter where you are in the world. Having to actually travel to a dungeon before you can go in and beat up the monsters makes sense in terms of living in a virtual world. In terms of having fun playing a game? It sucked to wait 15 minutes or more while the slowest person in your group meandered their way to the dungeon. (I can remember leveling my warrior in Maraudon back in vanilla WoW... It was quite the trek from Ironforge!) Waiting around for the slacker in your group before you can start playing is a fact of real life. If an online world is going to simulate that properly it should have that aspect too. It is immersive. But it is also boring. I want to pretend to be an awesome Sith lord with a snarky blue companion. I don't want to jog around a big boring city. I just don't see why the two speeder taxi systems on the planet don't connect! It seems to be set up just to waste my time. Maybe they're trying to delay finishing the story so I keep paying monthly fees...?

Revisiting Monthly Fees

2012-01-04T21:36:00.000-05:00

A couple things have been running through my mind recently which have prompted a relook at my stance on monthly fees from 2010. The first is the whole favourite game of all time project I've been working on and the second is starting to play Star Wars: The Old Republic. I'd planned out much of this post on the bus back from work today and then discovered I'd actually written a lot of the same stuff in a first relook at that post. Have things changed in the last year and a half?

I have yet to write posts beyond the pre-NES era but I spend a fair amount of thinking downtime (bus to work, lying in bed trying to get to sleep, showering, etc...) trying to remember games played in different eras. The SNES era, for example, has hundreds and hundreds of games played. My brother and I would rent a game pretty much every weekend for years on end and several a week each summer. Sometimes we'd get a game we'd previously played (Pacific Theatre of Operations, Romance of the Three Kingdoms III, Final Fantasy IV, Final Fantasy VI, and King Arthur's World were all rented multiple times) but for the most part it was a new game every week. At $4 per game and split two ways it was like paying an $8 per month entry fee for a constant stream of new games to play.

Then I think about the xBox 360 era. Other than various rhythm games there's pretty much nothing here. When I lived with Mark I'd play some of his games every now and then (Oblivion and Dead Rising primarily) but compared with the SNES there's pretty much nothing there. And if I think about it I was spending more time per day playing video games during the 360 era than the SNES era! The difference? World of Warcraft. It was a huge winner in my hours of entertainment per dollar spent analysis but the other side of that is it was pretty much all I did. I wasn't making much money at the time so having a really cost efficient game that I loved was great but I'm sure I missed out on some great games.

How about now, with Star Wars: The Old Republic? I'm not looking at it as a long term game (Diablo III is going to trump everything when it comes out) so it's more like a single player game with a good plot/voice acting/cutscenes. I have some friends who are using a different game to bridge the time until Diablo III... Diablo II! They asked if I'd want to play with them and I turned them down. Why? Because I feel obligated to play SWTOR. If I want to play Diablo II it's going to be there later. If I want to see the stuff in SWTOR it has to be now unless I want to shell out a monthly fee sometime later.

Right now I'm actively playing many games. Final Fantasy IV, League of Legends, Civilization V, SWTOR, The Everything Game, and a plethora of board games on Yucata.de. There's not enough time in the day to play them all as much as I'd like. Something's gotta give. Right now it's been Final Fantasy IV that's been put on the back burner. I know that I can hold off on playing it and come back at any time and pick up right where I left off. I can play today, or next month, or next year. It'll be there waiting for me. SWTOR won't be.

I'm really feeling the obligation Jeff talked about that prompted my second post on the subject. And I'm not liking it!

Yucata Rating Systems

2012-01-03T20:51:00.000-05:00

Yucata is a turn based board gaming site with 70 different board games. They have two different types of rating systems which seem pretty arbitrary. I remember when I first showed the site to Robb I commented on how I cared about raising my overall level but that the individual game skill number didn't matter. He responded by saying the individual game skill number was relevant and the metagame level didn't matter...

In a way I think we were both right. Neither of the ratings really do anything at all. They're numbers which go up and down and which may have some positive correlation to skill but they aren't used in any real way. Every now and then you'll run into someone who started a public game with a note asking for only people of a certain level/rating to join but it isn't enforced by the system. (Personally I think it would be rude to go against those requests but I don't care enough to make any myself.) On rare occasions people might even send a private game challenge to someone with a high rating in a game. (I helped test Torres and the test games seemed to have counted for rating so when that game launched I was #2 on the ranking and got a couple random challenges from people I'd never heard of before.)

The idea of a number that represents how good you are at something is a very appealing one but the existence of such a number means some people will behave differently in an attempt to make their number higher. Not by getting better at the games but by being very careful who they play against and what games they play. A particularly recent example is with A Few Acres of Snow where you could create a game and guarantee you'd play a specific side. With the game being unbalanced and one side being practically guaranteed to win it's an easy way to inflate your rating numbers. I imagine the people at the very top of that leaderboard had never even played each other since they were all playing as Britain and only playing against the suckers who joined their public invites as France. (Personally I only played games with random sides except against Andrew where we played one game as each side.)

At the end of the day the 'trueskill' number for each game doesn't so much show how good you are at a game so much as it shows how good you are at making that number bigger. The metagame level doesn't really show how good you are at games in general so much as it shows how dedicated you are to playing games you're good at... Or that are fast! Let's just say there's a reason why I've played 980 games total on the site and 370 of them were Roll Through The Ages!

GNU Backgammon

2012-01-02T13:17:00.001-05:00

Yesterday, prompted by playing a few games while visiting my mother, I decided to install gnubg on this computer. Gnubg is a backgammon program which uses neural networking to work out the optimal move from every position in a backgammon game. It has a brutally good AI and has the ability to analyze a played match and tell you every single thing you did imperfectly over the course of the entire game. It's pretty cool! I remember playing it a few years ago on my laptop and having to wait around a bit after each match for it to analyze the game. There are a lot of moves to be me made at each step of the game, after all. On this computer? Practically instant. I'm wondering if I've got the settings set up differently than I used to or if this computer is just that much faster.

At any rate I went something like 2-8 in best of 7 matches against the computer last night. I'm pretty sure I got lucky when I won! I'm certainly making a lot of mistakes (like the wrong opening moves which I used to know) so I need a lot more practice if I'm going to be ok at the game again. Makes me wish I hadn't lost my introductory strategy book... I wonder if I can find one on the Kobo!

More Civ V

2012-01-01T19:18:00.000-05:00

Civ V has a number of difficulty settings which basically serve to make the computer cheat more to provide more of a challenge. My first game after fixing my computer was played at the 5th of 8 levels as it was the setting chosen from last time I played. Everything else I did randomly (map size, island type, which civ I would play...) and was surprised by how passive the computer played. I gather a lot of changes went into the AI since I last played but I didn't build a military unit beyond warriors (1 per city as a garrison) and no one ever declared war on me for being weak. Normally in Civ I get beat up on when I ignore military but it seemed not to be happening in that game. I ended up getting into a position where I could win under any of the victory conditions (military came up when I built every building in my cities and then just built tanks and bombers with the lack of anything else to do).

So I ramped up to level 6 and ended up in a 2 player game. I figured the best way to win a 2 player game would be to ninja their capital so I made a military plan. The map was all tiny islands which kept him off me at the start while I built up. Eventually I got to the point where I had 4 frigates which could shoot 3 spaces. This let me burn down his capital without taking any damage back. It took about 30 turns or so (I had to shoot a bunch to earn experience to get the extra range) but eventually I wore it down to nothing and landed a random military dork for the win.

Clearly the next step is level 7. My random race spawn was Egypt which gets a bonus to building wonders. So I figured I'd go for a culture victory with lots of wonders... Until it turned out the AI researched everything way faster than I could so they built all the wonders before I could. They were also more willing to attack me for having no military at all. Eventually I just got overwhelmed and quit. I can't just bumble around and hope to win at level 7 it seems. I may need to actually pick a civ or plan out my research or something!

A Few Acres of Snow

2011-12-31T17:10:00.000-05:00

Earlier this year one of the more popular current board game designers (Martin Wallace: Age of Steam, Brass, Automobile...) came out with an interesting game that I'd heard nothing about. It was added to Yucata earlier this month and I've played a few games of it (mostly against Andrew) and really like the game. It's a deck building game, like Dominion, except it simulates the France/Britain conflict in North America circa 1700ish. So it's a wargame where you build your deck as you play!

It's a two player game with very asymmetrical starting positions. The French start with a lot of points on board and have more immediate military power in their deck. The British start with a smaller deck, more cash, and their starting cards tend to be more powerful. The cards you can buy as the game progresses are different for the two teams, too. The British have more military power available for purchase. The French have better access to the Native American cards which allow for ambushes/raids to do damage outside of the main combat mechanic. There are cards to take to try to counter what your opponent is doing if they're singularly focused on one thing.

The game has multiple end conditions as well which can have people building different decks. The British win by conquering Quebec. The French win by conquering Boston or New York. Alternatively if either side places all of their colonies or towns the game ends and the highest score wins. Finally if one side kills/raids enough colonies or towns from their opponent the game also ends with the highest score winning.

Multiple end conditions is pretty cool but potentially degenerate. The French start out with more points on the board but if the British plan is to take Quebec that doesn't much matter. They flat out win by taking Quebec so as far as they're concerned the French could start with a billion points and it wouldn't matter. (Of course, if the French did start with a billion points they'd focus entirely on defending Quebec so it should matter, right?)

It turns out the way the game works as printed there's a brutally degenerate combo for the British. They have a path to Quebec that is, by all accounts, unstoppable. We're talking 95+% chance to win if you're playing Britain and know what you're doing. (You get down to a 5 card deck pretty easily and then get into a position to spend your turn making 6 dollars, buying a card for 7, drawing the new card immediately, and playing it into a fight. This keeps your deck at 5 cards so you're guaranteed to be able to do it again next turn. You lose a dollar per turn but you can spend a turn making 12 dollars instead of buying a card if you feel like it.) Eventually you win the fight and all those cards you bought go into your deck so your deck is no longer degenerate. Unfortunately for France you now have more strength in your deck than he can ever buy and you're one step from Quebec. Guess what's going to happen...

On Friday the designer came out with 'patch notes' for the game in an attempt to balance things out again. He made 4 rule changes which are pretty much entirely focused on stopping this one strategy. The game was a lot of fun when I didn't know about this strategy (I did something similar to Andrew but didn't get my deck to 5 cards so I was slower) but my interest in playing had waned. Now I want to give it a go again! (Yucata did an update with the new rules changes very quickly!)

The changes are:

- Remove the worst card from the French starting deck. They started with a 10 card deck while Britain started with a 7 card deck which made it easier for Britain to build a degenerate deck quickly. France can still buy the card for no money if they want it. (It will take one of their two actions for the turn to buy it, though.)
- Nerf the 'reserve' which was an area you could store cards temporarily between turns. The idea behind the reserve in the first place was you often need specific cards together and this would let you store one piece of a combo until you drew the second one. How it was actually used is people would just shunt their worst cards to it and never retrieve them (which is how Britain could get down to a 5 card deck so easily). Now you can't store the location cards in the reserve. (Location cards tend to be worse than other cards but you start with some and you get more as you get points on board. It would be like if you could island away all your victory point cards in Dominion as your first couple turns!)
- Indian raids get an extra square of movement for free. This buffs an underused strategy in general and in particular opens the door to stopping the degenerate British opening by allowing a raid of Halifax before they can use it as a springboard to Louisbourg (and then Quebec).
- Home support got nerfed. Home support is a card which lets you draw 3 cards without using either of your actions for the turn. This was how the British could buy a card, draw it, and play it all in one turn. The way it works now is home support can't trigger a reshuffle. If you don't have 3 cards in your deck then you don't get 3 cards. You can have as many as are left in your deck and then you can wait until the end of your turn to shuffle. So when you buy a card and put it in your discard pile there's no way to draw it in the same turn. This fits the theme of the game (troops from Europe take time to arrive) and makes the card really bad in a 5 card deck. It's still good in a fair deck, though!

It's a pretty great game (I will probably buy it if I see it in a game store sometime) and I'm happy with these rule changes. I'm a little worried that raids are going to end up really overpowered but since they were useless in games where people knew what they were doing it's probably good that they got buffed.

Star Wars: The Old Republic Initial Thoughts

2011-12-30T12:08:00.000-05:00

I got started on the game yesterday and played for about 6 hours after work. I'm pretty sure that's more time spent in one sitting than I played Final Fantasy XIV and Star Trek Online combined. Time will tell if it manages to keep my attention but for now my reaction to the game is positive and I think a lot of the people I played World of Warcraft with would like this game too. Here are my first few thoughts about the game...

Looting monsters in the game is done very well. Final Fantasy XI had the best looting system in an MMO that I've played (you didn't have to loot any corpses as the stuff just appeared in your inventory or in your group's loot pool for rolling) but SWTOR is a close second. The closest comparison is WoW where a monster with loot would have a little sparkle appear on its corpse. Right click on it to open the loot window and then click on the loot. Someone made a mod to remove the last stage so you just had to right click the corpse and you'd automatically take the loot. Blizzard eventually added that option to the client. SWTOR comes with that option as well, and a second one beside it in the option menu: autoloot all nearby corpses on right click! AE down a bunch of dudes? One click will loot all the corpses instead of needing to click each one individually! I think back to farming Dire Maul for librams to get the Insane in the Membrane achievement and wish so badly that this option existed in WoW.

There are a couple other good things about loot, too. In WoW you know a corpse has loot when it sparkles but the sparkle was designed to be pretty unobtrusive and therefore could sometimes be missed. SWTOR punches you in the face with the knowledge that loot exists by making a giant pillar of light shine out of any corpse containing loot. The cool part of that is the pillar of light is coloured based on the quality of loot on the corpse. There's no way you'll ever miss a magical item now! I can remember playing my hunter in WoW and having to walk up to every corpse in case it had good stuff... In SWTOR that isn't going to happen. If I don't feel like looting everyone that's fine since I'll always be able to tell when a corpse has good loot from a distance. The other great thing with loot is you can send your 'pet' on a trash run where she'll take all of your vendor trash items from your inventory and run off to vendor them for you. Talk about convenient! I again wish I had that option when farming in Dire Maul.

I like how the control system is customizable and can be made pretty much identical to WoW. One of the worst parts of playing a new game is relearning how to move around in the world. Final Fantasy XI was particularly bad for this but really any change at all takes time to overcome. (I remember playing Ocarina of Time and Dead Rising 2 at the same time and dying a lot when switching between games since they aimed differently.) At any rate in SWTOR I can walk forward by holding down both mouse buttons. I can steer with the mouse. I can strafe with A and D. Jump with the space bar. Just like I moved around in WoW! (The only downside is my character refuses to do a flip when I jump.)

A neat thing with rotating the camera is it made the sound come through different parts of my headphones depending on where I was looking. Maybe I'm just really out of touch but it made me smile when I discovered it.

The game actually feels polished. It's certainly not as smooth as a WoW expansion launch would be, for example, but it feels like this is actually a product ready for sale. (Contrasted with Star Trek Online, Final Fantasy XIV, and Magic Online v2 none of which felt like a product that had even been tested let alone ready for sale.)

The voices actually help a lot with immersion.

My character has a nice butt. This seems silly, I know, but the game is played in 3rd person view and you spend most of the time watching your character run around from behind.

I don't know if I can resolve the tension between the gamer part of me that wants to twink out my dark side points and the moral part of me which doesn't want to do evil things. At one point I was given a prisoner as a guide, and was given a shock collar control so I can shock her if she gets out of line. She was being snarky to some dude I was killing which I think is awesome. But I knew that if I was nice to her I'd probably gain light side points so I kept choosing the option to shock her which gave dark side points. She didn't understand why I was torturing her for no good reason and I don't understand it either. Maybe I'm just not cut out for being evil...

The difficulty seems a tad on the easy side so far. I wandered into a quest hub for level 7s when I was level 4 and was able to clean it out without much trouble. Well, I had to use my self-heal button after every fight... (Which in and of itself is awesome. Out of combat I can channel a heal on myself which fills me up in a few seconds. No need for bandages here!) Everything, that is, except the two group quests which murdered me. I came back and 2-manned one of them at level 8 with another level 8 and did the other one when I was level 10 with a pair of level 7s.

I still don't know anything about what the end game is going to be like. I don't know that I care. The game is certainly fun and I'm really liking the cutscenes and such so playing this as a short term game seems entirely reasonable. Diablo 3 is coming out presumably in the next month or two so I'd be switching to that anyway. So the endgame is pretty much irrelevant!

Star Wars The Old Republic: Defenestrator!

2011-12-29T13:04:00.002-05:00

Getting setup with an account and getting the software for SWTOR took a bit longer than I would have liked yesterday. I guess I shouldn't be terribly surprised with how long it took to download and patch the files after buying it online. What was annoying is how the client wouldn't let me even start downloading files until I'd finished signing up for an account. Including a bunch of stupid 'security' questions! It didn't help that Chrome was throwing a hissy fit the whole time about invalid HTTPS certificates. (It turns out my system clock was reset to Jan 2010 and Chrome was _not_ happy about people trying to provide security from the future.)

At any rate I finally got patched up and able to log in just before I went to bed. I didn't create a character or anything; I just checked to see what the server picking window looked like and then went to bed. It gave name, population, type, and time zone. I'm pretty sure I want a light, PvE, east coast server but there were a bunch of them. I found a server status page on their website with the same information and there are still plenty of servers that fit my criteria so I need to pick one based on name. And what a choice that is turning out to be! The server names in this game are insane. Final Fantasy XI used summoned monsters as the names for their servers. Final Fantasy XIV used towns from the various games as their names. World of Warcraft used all sorts of Warcraft based lore as their names. Star Wars? It seems to just be crazy words thrown together!

What is a Firaxan Shark? Who is The Fatman? (As an aside, I googled 'The Fatman' to try to find out who that might be in the Star Wars universe and ended up on a pretty neat philosophy website...) Why haven't more people signed up to play on Drooga's Pleasure Barge?

Maybe Star Wars just has crazier lore than Warcraft. I don't know. What I do know is I want to throw people out of windows so I'm going to create a character on The Defenestrator. Why not! (Unless I get home and have an email from the Old Man telling me to play somewhere else.) (EDIT: We're playing as sith. My character's name is Polemical.)

Civ V Revisited

2011-12-28T23:35:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I finally got around to trying to fix my desktop which stopped working over a year ago. (I wanted to play Star Wars: The Old Republic and didn't think my laptop would be able to handle it.) I thought it wasn't starting up at all but when I gave it a shot yesterday it spun up for a little bit before randomly cutting out. I thought I'd decided the motherboard was dead but that didn't seem to be the case after all. With it getting into the ram check and the bios before turning off I figured it was probably a power supply issue which is easy enough to fix... Buy a new power supply! So I went out in a blizzard to a nearby computer parts store, bought one, and brought it back. Hooked it up and was able to boot into Windows! Victory! And then it turned off again...

Hmm. I did a little random googling and found out this might be an overheating issue. My bios has a CPU temperature gauge so I booted into it after letting the computer sit for a bit and it came up at 90 degrees. And then slowly got bigger and bigger until the computer turned itself off at around 110. Which is really, really hot. Clearly my fan wasn't cutting it, probably because it had been disconnected for over a year and wasn't making proper contact with the CPU anymore. The store was closed by this point so I went out after work to find some thermal paste. Got some, put it on... Victory! The bios showed the temperature at a mere 60 degrees which is certainly workable.

Two problems solved... Would any more crop up? I booted into Windows and tinkered around a bit with no crashes. I went and bought SWTOR and started installing it. No crashes. I installed League of Legends at the same time. No crashes. And then I gave in to temptation and clicked on the little V on my task bar... If anything I had was going to overheat the computer it was going to be Civ V while installing two games. No crashes! Woo!

I believe Steam had auto-patched Civ V for me as it seemed a lot different than when I played it a fair bit back when it first came out. I don't know if embarking was a thing that I didn't use, or a thing I forgot, or a thing they added in but I like it! I'm kinda screwed in my current game as I didn't learn about it until all the islands were taken but what are you going to do? This is a learning game! Next game will be for keeps!

Vacation Board Games

2011-12-27T14:19:00.000-05:00

I just got back from my little trip out east and thought I'd note what games I played while I was gone...

Risk
Curling Bonspiel
Backgammon x3
Revolution!
Coloretto
Hive x6
Through The Ages
Roll Through The Ages
Hunger Games: Training Days
Le Havre
Settlers of Catan

Not a bad group of games!

League of Legends: Katarina

2011-12-26T02:56:00.000-05:00

I brought my laptop with me to New Brunswick and even brought my power cord along this time so I've been able to play some League of Legends after everyone else goes to sleep. I normally play on a fancy gamer keyboard which I didn't bring with me so I've been stuck using my laptop keyboard. I figured with that handicap I'd be better off just learning a new hero in normal games instead of tanking my rating when I hit the wrong key by mistake.

The hero I chose to learn is Katarina, a hero that has always blown me up on the rare occasion she gets played. I didn't really know what she was doing to be awesome and figured a good way to learn would be to read a bit and then just give her a spin. She plays very differently than the other heroes I typically play and preliminary results seem to indicate I like the way she plays. Now, these games were normal games so it could be that I was playing against particularly bad players, or that Kat is good against the way normal mode players tend to play. (No wards, rarely a support character, sometimes not even a jungler...) I've gone 6-0 in the last couple days with her. Kill scores have been a combined 56 kills/21 deaths/69 assists. Pretty sweet!

So, what does she do? Well, she's a melee character which doesn't want to auto-attack very much. She has a few brutally powerful spells that scale well with ability power so the basic idea for her is to make her abilities awesome and her melee attacks terrible. She also doesn't have any secondary resource. No mana, no rage, no energy... Her abilities just have cooldowns so they can be spammed at will. What are those abilities?

Q: This ability is a ranged attack that hits multiple targets. It chains to an extra target per rank of the skill (so 6 targets total when maxxed out) and does 10% less damage after each bounce. The damage on this isn't great at any level but it has a fairly short cooldown. (9 seconds at rank 1, 7 seconds at rank 5.) It's also a ranged ability that does a reasonable amount of damage so you can use it to kill creeps for gold in the early going of the game.

E: This ability is a blink-strike attack. Basically you target something within a pretty big range (the range window actually doesn't fit on my laptop screen!) and teleport to it instantly. If the target is an enemy you do a ton of damage as well. It also has a fairly short cooldown (10 seconds at rank 1, 6 seconds at rank 5) and can be used early game to kill creeps for cash. Or you can use it jump on the enemy hero for some damage, hit them with your Q, and then run away and wait for the cooldowns to come up. Repeat until they have to go heal!

W: This ability is interesting. It starts off as a passive which adds a small amount of damage to every attack Kat makes. Auto-attack or ability. Then you can also activate it to modify your next Q or E cast. If you buff your Q then it does full damage to all targets and applies a mortal strike debuff for 5 seconds. If you buff your E then you take from 15-35% less damage for 3 seconds. This is pretty great when you're blinking onto them to harass them! If they try to counter-harass back you take less damage. And they're probably burning their limited resource when they do!

R: Her ultimate is absurdly insane. When you use it you become rooted and start throwing daggers wildly. You'll throw up to 30 daggers over 3 seconds which only hit the 3 nearest enemy heroes. Each dagger does a ton of damage. It can be interrupted with pretty much every CC known to man but if they don't have something ready right away you murder people. It also has a relatively short cooldown (60/55/50 seconds).

Now, it looks like from just those abilities that she'll be really great at the start of a team fight but if she gets CCed or if the fight goes wrong she won't be very good. She's in melee range without good attacks and will probably get murdered, right? Well... Turns out sometimes yes and sometimes no. And the reason why is her passive...

Every time Kat gets a kill or an assist she gains 25 gold and the cooldown on all her abilities is lowered by 15 seconds.

This is absolutely absurd. I've run into fights where some enemies are low. Hit one of them with my two normal damage abilities and kill them. They both instantly refresh. Turn and use them both on the next guy. Kill them. Refresh the abilities. Smash! I've had situations where I jumped in and ulted, killing two people. That knocks 30 seconds off of the 50 second cooldown on my ult! Chase for a bit and you're good to go again!

So, how do you deal with Kat? Well, I've had the most trouble when people are good enough to switch to me. If I go in first and get hit with practically anything I'm dead. But if the fight gets started and then I sneak in and they don't switch to me they get obliterated. Also in smaller skirmishes it's all over. She has so much front-end damage that you can pretty much turn any 2v2 into a 2v1 in a real hurry. I had a game where I started in top lane, got level 6, and then switched to a 2v2 lane bottom. I was up against two enemies with no ability to interrupt my ult and they were still level 3/4. The game pretty much ended right there. Those two could no longer get money or experience since if they ever wandered out of their own turret they were in danger of dying. I actually rarely killed them since they'd start running as soon as I jumped in but each time I'd knock them so low they had to go heal and they didn't do enough to me to make me leave. Not having mana meant I never ran out of steam!

But if you're a hero with any interrupt ability at all and you're smart about saving it for Kat's ult she's actually pretty weak. Interrupt the brutal ult and then focus her down while she has no abilities left. (No ult tends to mean no immediate deaths which means no crazy ability spamming to get away.) In big team fights you just need to turn and kill her as soon as you see her.

So I think she is particularly well suited to beating bad players. Is she worth running in ranked games? Well, I think I'm going to give it a shot when I get home to my good keyboard and see how it ends up. (She's free this week so I may have to buy her to do this. But she's a lot of fun and I'm liking the assassin style so I think I should buy her anyway.)

Favourite Game Candidates: Pre-NES Consoles 2

2011-12-25T00:09:00.000-05:00

In this post I'm going to cover the other two systems I played in my youth. These were owned by my uncle John-Boy but he sometimes loaned them to us and I'd get to play them some when visiting my grandparents. They were the Intellivision and the Colecovision!

Run from the blue alien demon thingy!

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons - This is the first game that I ever recall generating an emotional reaction in me: fear! I believe this was the first video game to make use of the 'fog of war' concept. You'd get into a room and see the ways out of the room but you wouldn't see what was down the passageway until you went and checked it out. The game gave clues as to what you might find nearby. Those little footprints in the screenshot indicated a demon was nearby. There were cow skulls which would indicate a dragon. There were little turd droppings which if I remember correctly were from rats. On top of the visual cues there were also audio ones. Snakes hissed. Bats beat their wings. (And couldn't hurt you. They existed solely to mask other sounds!) Dragons snored or roared. I think demons were silent which was particularly scary for a 5 year old or however old I was. The game made use of the Intellivision numpad to aim your only attack: bow and arrow. You could shoot in one of 8 directions. If the arrow hit a wall it would bounce off it (which often resulted in pegging myself in the face with an arrow). A good way to scout for demons was to just shoot an arrow down an unscouted hallway and hope it didn't bounce back! (They may not make normal sounds but you'd definitely hear an arrow make contact with them!) The downside to this plan is you had a finite number of arrows. The way to tell how many arrows you had left was interesting... There was no visual display. You had to hit the 'count arrows' button on your control and then it would click at you. One click for every arrow you had in your possession. Gameplay involved moving around on an overworld map. The goal was to get from the start to the Cloudy Mountain to recover the golden crown. To get there you'd have to get through forests, rivers, and locked gates. Passing each of these obstacles would require getting the right item from a dungeon. (You can see the boat which is found in the blue dungeon. It lets you cross over lakes.) The game had 5 difficulty levels which was pretty revolutionary for the time I think. I remember beating this game but I couldn't tell you what difficulty I did it on. All in all a fantastic game! I now want to see if I have this game and play it...

Disc ho!

Tron: Deadly Discs - Like AD&D, this game had you move with the disk controller and throw your deadly disc with the numpad. So you could be moving in one direction and attack in another direction. The way the game worked is enemies would open a door in the wall and come charging out at you with their deadly discs which they would throw at you. Your goal was to hit them with your disc while avoiding their discs. One of your buttons allowed you to block if you were holding on to your disc. If you managed to block their attack their disc would shatter which would render them impotent for a period of time. On top of trying to hit the enemies with your disc you could also hit the doors they opened up which would wedge the door open. Wedge open two doors on opposite sides of the screen and you could walk through them like Pac-Man! Eventually the game would get bitter at you and send out a giant robot to repair the doors. Like with the pterodactyl in Joust you could huddle in the corner and let this guy do his job or you could risk life and limb to try to take him down for bonus points. Guess which one I'd do!

Terrorists make note: this bomb is hard to stop!

Bomb Squad - You're a member of the bomb squad and need to take specific steps in order to diffuse a bomb. You get a circuit board and need to make the right modifications in the right order or KA-BOOM! How do you know what to do? The game tells you! You needed to have the Intellivoice module which would allow the console to actually synthesize speech. This module was a commercial failure in almost every definition but I thought it was really cool. No other game could talk to you! They only made 5 games for it total. My uncle had three of them. Bomb Squad, B-17 Bomber, and Space Spartans. This was my favourite of the three. Cut this one first!

It's a sausagefest!

Burgertime - A cute little platform game. You needed to walk along the pieces of the burger to knock them down and ultimately build burgers out of them. Hit the walking fried egg with the pepper spray so you can avoid him!

What a nicely dressed dealer!

Las Vegas Poker & Blackjack - This was the game bundled with the Intellivision so it is technically the highest selling game for the system with over 2 million copies 'sold'. There were several different types of poker to play, in this screenshot I believe they're playing 5 card stud. You'll note there are three hands there. One for the dealer and two for the players. If you wanted to look at your hole cards you had to push a button on your controller. You had to get the other players to look away before you did! The best part is sometimes the dealer would get shifty eyes and if you looked at your cards while he was shifty he'd take a peek at them too!

Dolla bills, yo!

Lock 'n' Chase - This game was basically just a Pac-Man clone but I'm pretty sure my only exposure to Pac-Man was the cereal and the cartoon show so I wouldn't have known that as a kid. The twist was instead of power pellets you could build walls in the maze after you went by to block off the stupid coppers who were trying to stop you from stealing things.

Where are the mines!?!

Sea Battle - I loved this game but it had the problem of being a 2 player game and my brother didn't like it very much so we rarely actually played it. You're both in charge of a huge fleet containing 8 different types of ships. You could build mini-fleets with 1, 2, or 3 ships in it and they'd appear on the map as little blips. Your opponent had no idea what was in your fleet because you built it secretly by hitting buttons on the numpad. Is your minelayer in that fleet? Do I need to go slowly with my minesweeper if I'm going to take that path? The goal of the game was to get your aircraft carrier or troop transport into their harbor. If two fleets collided you'd switch to a tactical battle map and try to sink each other there. This is the first game I ever played with a strategic world map and a tactical sub-game to handle combat.

Tron? Is that you?

Snafu - This game was a real hit in my house. Move in one of four directions and leave a tail behind you. Try to strategically cut off a big enough chunk of the map to live in while forcing your opponents into smaller sections so they'd run into a tail and die. The really cool thing about this version of the game is there were a bunch of different settings you could choose when you started the game. Want to be able to move diagonally? Sure! Want dead people's tails to disappear? We have that too! There was even an option so your tail had a finite length and the goal was to eat the other person's snake by running your head into their tail over and over again. Maybe the best part of the game was the music. When you got down to 2 snakes the music would change into this dramatic showdown music that was really surprising for a game of this era.

It's like shooting womp rats in a barrel.

Star Strike - The thing I remember the most about this game is the awesome graphics of the planet Earth slowly moving out from behind the moon to the center of the screen. You have to destroy the green spaceship thing before it gets close enough to the Earth to destroy it. If you fail there's a little animation of the Earth blowing up which is pretty sweet. The game was fun, too!

Welcome to the S&M dungeon version of the Matrix.

Night Stalker - You start this game in your little bunker thing and need to run out and grab your gun which has a limited number of shots. You then shoot at the spider, or the bats, or the scary robot thing to score points. The more points you score the more robots spawn. Later robots even gain special abilities, like invisibility or being able to destroy your bunker. It had a really tense background music to it as well.

Duck!

B.C.'s Quest For Tires - The only Colecovision game on this list. This game was a side-scrolling obstacle course game. You have to jump over rocks, and duck under tree branches. Later on you need to time jumps onto little turtles that sink in and out of a lake.

Favourite Game Candidates: Pre-NES Consoles 1

2011-12-24T02:28:00.000-05:00

Initially my plan was to lump all the pre-NES consoles into one post. My thinking was that I'd almost certainly played more notable SNES games than all of these games combined so it might keep the post lengths at least comparable. And then this one post just kept getting bigger and bigger... Too big, in fact. So I'm splitting this one up. And when I get to the SNES, well, I'll probably have to make a bunch of different SNES game posts. We'll see!

I'm going to start with the two systems my family owned when I was a small child: Atari 2600 and Atari 600XL home computer!

Flower!

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial - This game is frequently cited as one of the worst games of all time. A lot of the blame for the 1983 video game crash is placed squarely on this game. The heavy losses from this game sunk Atari as a company. The game went from design to production in 5 weeks and was done by one programmer! It sold 1.5 million copies which is an awful lot, but 3.5 million copies went unsold which is pretty ridiculous. Atari made several critical mistakes with this game and it cost them. Despite all that, I loved this game as a kid. I didn't know about any of that stuff. I didn't know that games could be so much better. I didn't know that levitating out of a pit only to fall right back in over and over was unacceptable. It was just the way the game worked and I had to deal with it if I wanted to make a flower grow and help ET phone home.

Realistic Wartime Violence!

River Raid - This game for the Atari 600XL was played a lot in my household. I don't recall personally liking it all that much but it was definitely a family favourite. Reading a bit about it now I'm amazed at the history here. This was the first shooter ever to scroll. It was also programmed by Carol Shaw who was apparently the first female video game designer. There was no end to this game. It just got harder and harder to collect enough fuel to stay alive. The goal was just to score as many points as you could. Interestingly the game apparently had a rating discouraging minors from playing it since it promoted violence. Your plane is shooting at a helicopter, after all!


I hate you, snake!

Q*bert - I don't even remember what system I played this on. Atari 600XL maybe? I liked this game a lot. Some of the levels the cubes would toggle between hit and un-hit so you had to make a plan to hit every cube an odd number of times. I remember having the Q*bert board game, too!

Bring it on, Terry!

Joust - I think we had this for the Atari 600XL. I remember having a lot of fun with this game as a kid. Bouncing along on that left-middle platform to rocket out the crack on the right side? Sweet! I think this game more than any other game showed how I approach games differently than other people. I can remember early on at University a time when Josh and Jer were really into playing Joust. I'd watch them play a bit and ask why they weren't killing the pterodactyl. They looked at me like I was insane. And everyone else around agreed with them! They thought he existed to encourage you to finish the levels faster and was to be avoided at all costs. I thought he was a challenge that needed to die. He was worth a lot of points! I can remember spending a lot of time as a kid getting good at killing him off for points. (Good here being relative of course since he'd often kill me... But I'd get him some of the time! At least I was brave enough to try!)

4 Player Arkanoid!

Warlords - I remember this game only because it used the paddle controllers. You got two paddles per controller port so you could play this with up to 4 players. Really the game itself is nothing special. The cool part is the early multitapesque set-up from the paddles.

How much for the flute?

Raiders of the Lost Ark - This game was my introduction to adventure style games. Having to pick up the right stuff at the right time and use it in the right spot. Figuring out to avoid the dud items. Properly timing when to use the parachute to slide under that stupid branch... This game was pretty sweet. And I beat it! Woo!

Uh, say what?

Yar's Revenge - I'll be honest here. I don't remember playing this game. I recognize the name and I know we had it. I vaguely recall my brother really liking this game. It was referenced in a lot of the articles I was reading about earlier games on this list, though. Apparently it was the highest selling Atari game. It was programmed by the same guy who did Raiders of the Lost Ark and ET! Apparently he spent 7 months on Yar's Revenge. 6 months on Raiders of the Lost Ark. And 5 weeks on ET. No wonder people think it's 'unpolished'!

Forced Grinding

2011-12-23T18:07:00.000-05:00

Grinding is a fairly standard part of RPG video games. Maybe it's for levels so you can actually beat the random encounters. (Like in, say, The 7th Saga, which I finally beat a few years ago after deciding to just kill the same mobs over and over for hours on end until I was powerful enough to win.) Maybe it's for reputation so you can buy new gear. (World of Warcraft is a prime example of this one!) Maybe it's for a rare item drop. (I've still never gotten a pink tail in Final Fantasy IV, though I have certainly tried!) Final Fantasy V can have you grind AP to level up your jobs. Final Fantasy X can have you grind in an attempt to capture every monster type in a zone.

But is it fun? In some of these cases I'd say it is. In others I'd say no. In each case you're being forced to repeat some task. Running in circles spawning fights in order to capture all the monsters would at least appeal to some people. The task is related to the goal. You want to catch them all? You need to find them all! In other cases it seems a little over the top. The 7th Saga was just not balanced properly. You didn't gain nearly enough levels by just playing the game and therefore had to spend a lot of time doing nothing interesting. Reputation grinds in World of Warcraft were sometimes fun and were sometimes a real chore. It mostly depended on how interesting and varied the ways of gaining that rep were.

Lufia: Curse of the Sinistrals has a very interesting take on level grinding. It's an action-RPG and they seem to have made a real concession that some people will just be better at controlling an action fighter than others. The fights aren't super hard and I'm pretty sure just gaining a lot of levels will be good enough for most people to win. But the game is primarily about solving puzzles and a great plot. Why should some people have to run in circles grinding mobs?

Instead what they did is abstracted grinding levels away entirely. You still gain levels normally by playing the game but if you get wiped out you're presented with the following three options:

Restart game from previous checkpoint. (Basically an auto-save feature.)
Reload a previous saved game.
Restart game from previous checkpoint and gain 5 levels for free.

Did you die because you weren't used to the boss pattern and want to give it another go? Choose the first option. Did you die because you forgot to stock up on potions? Choose the second option. Do you just think you need some more levels before you'll be tough enough for the fight? Choose the third option and get those levels instantly. No need to wander around in circles doing something tangentially related to the game!

Part of me looks at that option with disdain. Gamers these days are being coddled! Cartman had to kill boars for 2 experience apiece in order to be tough enough to win his fight and you should have to do so too! Stupid easy mode! Personally I haven't chosen that option yet (I have died a few times but I've figured out how to beat the fights eventually without just powering over them.) but I think it's existence is actually a really good thing. Without that option some people would just go grind levels without enjoying it. Some people would work at getting better at the mechanics of the fight. And some people would just quit.

Personally I belong in that second camp. I want to find a way to get better and don't mind doing some pretty silly/boring stuff to pull it off. But why should everyone be forced to play games the way I do? Games in the past happened to be set up in a way I like (or do I like doing things this way because of games in the past...) but that doesn't mean they have to be set up that way forever. Perhaps most importantly I can still play my way! Especially in a game with a good story that you want people to see it just makes sense to have different paths to victory.

Lufia: Ancient Cave

2011-12-22T11:00:00.000-05:00

I've recently restarted playing Lufia: Curse of the Sinistrals for the DS. I picked this up shortly after its release last year but quickly ended up getting stuck. It's an action-RPG game with a heavy emphasis on puzzle dungeons. (I believe it's essentially a remake of Lufia II for the SNES which was a standard RPG with a heavy emphasis on puzzle dungeons.) You may think I got stuck because I couldn't figure out a puzzle or wasn't nimble enough to pull off an action combo or such. No, I was actually stuck because you needed to use a charge attack to destroy a big rock. In order to charge up an attack you had to hold down the R button and my DS had a broken R button.

I bought a 3DS earlier this year (yay functioning R button!) but never got around to getting back into Lufia. I had other games to play and I've actually done a lot of reading on the bus this year. I was randomly looking through a pile of game cases and saw Lufia and figured I'd give it another shot. It's got some interesting concepts to it but the best by far is taken pretty much directly from Lufia II: the Ancient Cave!

The Ancient Cave is a side dungeon with 100 levels. I've never actually completed Lufia II since every time I'd play I'd get to the Ancient Cave and just spend all my time in it. It's such a unique concept and I wish more games would put something like it in since it's fun and highly replayable. Each level of the dungeon has a few randomly generated rooms with monsters and treasure chests in them. One of the rooms has stairs down to the next level. There is no way to go back up to a previous level. The game doesn't have random encounters so there's a finite amount of xp you can earn as you go down the dungeon. Every now and then (once every 10 levels or so) you get the option of leaving the dungeon. Doing so will force you to restart it from the top if you come back in.

All of that seems pretty standard so far. The twist is that when you enter the dungeon your characters are reset to level 1. You lose all of your equipment and items. The levels and items are restored when you leave the dungeon but you lose everything you found inside. Doesn't seem like there's much point to doing it, eh? Well, you lose almost everything you find inside. There are some rare treasure chests which are coloured blue. Inside these chests are items with blue names and those items persist between the Ancient Cave and the real world. So you can find a few good items and leave. Save the game. Go back in from the start but with the blue items to help you out... Probably you can make it a little deeper this time since you've started with some good stuff. On this trip in you probably found some more stuff... Repeat!

I just found the Ancient Cave in my game. The first blue chest I found had an awesome sword in it. How awesome? Well, it was three times as powerful as my real world sword and five times as powerful as my Ancient Cave sword. Maxim is now a brutal killing machine! I could take that sword and go smash through the plot for a while... Or I could try to get deeper into the Ancient Cave! Yeah, I think I'll do that...

League of Legends: Tears Stacking

2011-12-21T15:56:00.000-05:00

Robb left a comment on my Facebook post about Manamune asking if it would be worth it to get the first piece of Manamune (which builds up the stacks of extra mana) and then wait a while before spending the rest of the cash upgrading it to Manamune (which turns the extra mana into damage). My gut response was no since I didn't think it would stack up fast enough on the characters I've been trying it on. But what good is a gut response if you don't justify it with some math? So, lets look at how the items gain stacks... (Throwing in Archangel's Staff as well. It also builds from tears and turns your mana into ability power instead of attack damage.)

Tears of the Goddess - costs 995g - each time you use an ability you gain 4 maximum mana - at most 2 stacks gained every 6 seconds
Manamune - costs an extra 1115g over Tears - each time you use an ability you gain 4 maximum mana - at most 1 stack gained every 3 seconds - each time you autoattack you gain 1 maximum mana - at most 1 stack gained every 3 seconds
Archangel's Staff - costs an extra 1860g over Tears - each time you use an ability you gain 4 maximum mana - at most 1 stack gained every 3 seconds

Take Tristana to start. She has 4 abilities she could use to add a stack on. Her Q has a 20 second cooldown and costs 80 mana. It increases her autoattack speed. Her W has between a 22 and 14 second cooldown depending on how many points you put into it and also costs 80 mana. It jumps her across the map and does damage when she lands. Her E has a 16 second cooldown and costs between 50 and 90 mana. It puts a dot and a mortal strike debuff on the target. Her R has a 60 second cooldown and costs 140 mana. It does big damage to a target and knocks them and all nearby enemies back a fair distance.

Some things to note... The mana costs are all substantially higher than the permanent mana gained from using the abilities, so spamming them is going to run her out of mana pretty quickly. Most of the abilities have a pretty long cooldown and will have no beneficial game effect if used at random. (Unless you're shooting an enemy champion you don't care about your attack speed. Ditto with putting up a dot or blasting them back.) In the case of the W it's actually detrimental to spam it since that's how you get away from a gank. Having it on cooldown so you could get 4 mana back is really bad when you die...

How about standard use? Well, if I engage on an enemy hero I'll generally use all 4 abilities in quick succession. Use W to get the jump on them, E to dot them, R to knock them back into my friends, and then Q to attack them faster. Even though I use 4 abilities I'll only be able to get 2 stacks because they'll all be used within the same 6 second window. (If it seems odd that I'd use my escape to engage you should note that W's cooldown refreshes immediately on killing/assisting on an enemy champion, so I can use it to get in, kill someone, and get out.)

So in standard fights I'll be getting 8 mana. And maybe doing one of these every minute or so? So it would take over 2 hours to stack up to full mana. Now once I have a reasonable amount of mana I'll start using abilities on the creep waves but even then unless I burn my W I'm only going to get 8 mana every 20 seconds. That's still more than 40 minutes until full!

What about Manamune? I lose the ability to stack up twice in 6 seconds but 3 seconds will have elapsed before I W back out of the fight so I should still get 8 mana per big fight. The difference is I gain 1 mana every 3 seconds I'm autoattacking which will be most of the time. Even when farming creeps I'll likely be attacking at least every 3 seconds. Take into account walking around the map and delays between the cooldown refreshing and I'm going to ballpark it at 1 mana every 6 second from autoattacks on top of the above 8 mana every 20 seconds from abilities. Which is still 30 minutes until full. Upgrading to Manamune shaves off about 25% of the time but it's still painfully slow.

Warwick works almost the same way. The only difference with him is his Q has a 6 second cooldown and I buy some cooldown reduction on him. It's a lot more palatable to spam it since it's a self heal along with doing good damage. He should be getting 4 mana every 5 seconds or so while engaged so probably more like 4 every 8 second accounting for running around. This is better than 8 every 20 but not by all that much... It should be noted that Warwick will hardly get hurt at all by the change from 2 every 6 seconds to 1 every 3 seconds since he doesn't spam a lot of abilities in a short window. His long cooldown ability is a self stun so I can't even spam after using it! So Warwick gets a bigger boost out of upgrading to Manamune than Tristana.

That said, I don't think it makes sense to buy it with Tristana. I simply don't want to spam her abilities in normal laning. With Warwick I actually do want to spam his abilities because I'm jungling with him and can use the healing. Looking at how I play them without Manamune I'm spamming with Warwick and not with Tristana. Warwick normally solves his mana issues by taking the massive mana regen buff but if you have Manamune you can give that away to someone else on your team who will love you for it. Tristana doesn't want to be dotting up creeps!

So I think I'm going to keep building it on Warwick and just not build anything mana related on Tristana. Her abilities are almost entirely fixed cost so while she has real mana issues at low level it's not so bad at higher levels. She can't go from big fight to big fight without a Manamune but winning a fight and then going back to base isn't the end of the world. It's certainly better than losing the fight and being dead! That puts you back to base too but with less moneys!

Star Wars: The Old Republic Launch

2011-12-20T21:26:00.000-05:00

Today is the official launch of the new Star Wars MMO: The Old Republic. I'm not currently playing this game - though I am considering starting up - and I wanted to get a feel for how the launch was going. I did a quick Google search for 'SWTOR login queues' and found a 13 page thread on their forums. That's not so bad... I read it a bit and found that it was only 13 pages long because it was closed by a moderator. The moderator directed people to post in the official 'queue complaint' thread. (It's easier to ignore whiners when they're all in one spot!)

I went to check out the official thread and it turned out they'd actually hit the forum limit on posts in a thread and had to start up a second one. Which is currently up to 415 pages. And is growing faster than I can keep up. For the most part it seems to be pretty standard MMO-launch trolling. I paid for my free month and need access now... I'm already level XX and don't want to re-roll on another server... People are botting to stay connected so they don't get stuck back in the queue... I want more PVP-RP servers... Bioware is the devil... Bioware is awesome, noobs are the devil... Etc... I'm pretty sure I've gotten involved in this sort of thread for things in the past and it makes me weep for myself. And then I find a post that I'm sure is wrong and feel a need to make an account and reply! And then I weep some more...

From what I've been able to gather a lot of the problems are arising from the way Bioware chose to help out hardcore players. They let people sign up quite a while in advance to create guilds. These guilds would then be assigned a server during the early access period and the people who signed up would then get to create characters on those servers to play with their guilds. On the surface that sounds like a good idea. Having to arrange what server to make your characters on is a real pain. Even with FFXI when we played earlier this year it was tricky making sure everyone was on the same server. If I could have just filled out a web form and sent some email invites to my friends to guarantee they join the right server and automatically join a guild? That's pretty sweet!

The problem that's arisen is Bioware didn't properly divide up those guilds. They created a bunch of servers for the early access period and sent all the guilds to those servers. That makes sense, since the people likely to sign up early for a guild are also likely to be the people who pre-ordered well in advance. So you need the guilds set up during the early access period if you're going to get any benefit from the sign-ups at all. Then the game launched for real and they needed more servers. So they put up a bunch of new servers. From what I can gather those servers don't get any guilds on them because they were all assigned to the first wave of servers. This creates two big problems...

First of all anyone joining now who signed up for a guild is locked into one of the first servers. Bioware needed to make more servers because the existing ones were filling up but they're now funneling new players onto those servers so they can play with their guild. Clearly this is a good idea for those guilds but it means already full servers are getting filled up even fuller. This is causing huge queues for anyone on those servers.

Secondly all of the hardcore people are all on that subset of servers which I imagine is going to hurt the communities on the newly created servers. They're going to be populated by people with no existing ties to anyone who got early access to the game or who were keen enough to start a guild before the game launched. This isn't necessarily going to be a bad thing but having spent the last 4 years playing World of Warcraft on a low-pop backwater server I can see why people would want to avoid getting into that situation. It's harder to find enough people whose schedules sync up and who are on equivalent skill levels to enjoy doing endgame content together. It was really hard to find pvp teams, for example, and nearly impossible to find enough people to raid with who weren't either bad or mean.

Of course, as someone with no existing ties to anyone hardcore into SW:TOR and who has no real intention on getting tied up in endgame stuff this actually seems like a good deal for me. Many people who are trying to play now have to wait 3+ hours to log in to their servers while there are servers up with no queues at all. I was on the fence last week on if I wanted to give it a shot or not but I'm definitely going to do so now. Especially since the Old Man said he'd play too!

I don't think my laptop can handle the game so I'm going to have to finally get around to fixing my desktop. I'm also going to be in New Brunswick from the 22nd to the 27th and I imagine there will be board games to play! So I'm thinking I'll probably try to buy the parts I need on the 27th when I get back to Toronto and then start playing on some low population server on the 27th or 28th.

Entertainment Top 30 Under 30

2011-12-19T22:12:00.000-05:00

Forbes just came out with their top 30 people in entertainment under 30 years of age. The name that brought this list to my attention is Sean "Day [9]" Plott. He's a webcaster who is really into Starcraft 2. He's my favourite commentator at the MLG events. He has a daily webshow about Starcraft 2. Sometimes it's silly and funny. Sometimes it really breaks down a specific part of the game in detail. One thing it always is is awesome.

I haven't actually played SC2 in many months. But I'll still turn on the Day[9] Daily every now and again because I find it highly entertaining. And when an MLG is running and I have a choice between streams to watch I'll pick the one with Day[9] doing the commentary regardless of who the players are because he's just that good.

What surprises me about his getting put on the Forbes list is it's putting eSports into a somewhat mainstream light. Movie stars, singers... Those sorts of people seem like the sort of people they'd put on the list. That a guy who talks about Starcraft 2 on the internet got onto their list is pretty sweet!

League of Legends: More on Manamune

2011-12-18T13:55:00.000-05:00

I played a bunch of games yesterday where I built the item Manamune based on yesterday's post. I built it on Tristana and Warwick with the following results:

Tristana:

Loss - 3/8/4
Loss - 1/5/2
Win - 6/1/6
Loss - 1/9/8

Warwick:

Win - 1/2/5
Loss - 5/5/16

So, not the best records with the item. One thing I noticed is I was never even close to maxxing out the mana bonus so that assumption in yesterday's analysis was quite flawed. I'm probably lucky to get 300 bonus mana out of it, not 1000, which knocks 14 damage off of it even in end game. This makes it significantly worse from a damage perspective than any of the actual damage options.

But how did it change gameplay? Well, I wasn't getting it early enough on Tristana to notice. The laning phase was generally done when I had it which meant using the extra mana for harassing was less useful. It would let me keep going if team fights were working out in my favour but it feels like they'd be more likely to work out in my favour if I had a better damage item.

On Warwick it was more useful. I pretty much never had to go home for mana and never needed to take my blue buff so I could give it away. At one point in the game I lost I was 5/0/2 and went on a run where I just ran up the map helping every lane in turn kill off all the enemies. I actually feel like the loss in that game was more because my team was terrible than that I was less effective with Manamune. Since Warwick has a couple good ways to heal himself with mana it feels like having access to infinite mana means I never have to return to base. Tristana still has to go back to heal (unless she spends a lot of money on lifesteal items and she can't do both early).

I think I need to go back to the drawing board with Tristana. Warwick on the other hand can make use of infinite mana but I might be able to get to infinite mana with a cheaper item? I think I want to try an Eleisa's Miracle on Tristana and a Soul Shroud on Warwick...Soul Shroud is actually more expensive than Manamune so I don't know how smart an idea that is but at least it adds some tanky stats instead of some damage stats that I don't need as much?

League of Legends: Mana Items

2011-12-17T17:42:00.000-05:00

I've noticed that many of the champions I've been playing recently aren't traditional spell casters but still use mana to use their abilities. A lot of mana. I'm building either strictly defensive or strictly melee attack items on these characters, therefore not increasing my mana pool or my mana regen in any way, and therefore I'm running out of mana. I find I keep running out of mana in the middle of big fights, and therefore not being able to use abilities I think I can use, and dying as a result. I need to come up with a solution to the problem, and I believe my options are...

Get better at monitoring my own mana and the cost of my spells and pull back from fights earlier.
Start buying mana potions.
Switch my runes back to mp5 runes. (I bought some tanky runes which I've been using instead.)
Change my item build to include a mana item.

The first option could well be the right one, but I think as long as I'm playing with puggers it isn't a good idea. I can't expect them to know when I'm going to pull back and I can't tell them over voice chat. So they're going to end up committing to a fight we can win if I have mana. I'm going to hang back. They're going to die and get bitter at me. Bitter I could handle, but it's also going to feed the other team and decrease my odds of winning which is bad.

So I think I'm going to have to sacrifice something for some mana. Maybe it's going to be cash and an inventory slot for potions. Maybe it'll be 'worse' items. Maybe it'll be 'worse' runes. But at least with these three I can crunch some numbers to see what exactly I'll be giving up.

Seals: I can have 13 armor or I can have .585 mp5 per level. Assuming level 10 as a baseline that would be 5.85 mp5.

Potions: A mana potion restores 100 mana over 15 seconds and costs 40 gold.

Items... (Ignoring the ones that obviously have no place on these types of heroes like an archangel's staff)

Eleisa's Miracle - 20 mp5, 25 hp5, 35 tenacity for 1300 gold

Soul Shroud - 12mp5 + 10% cooldown reduction as an aura, 520hp for 2285 gold

Nashor's Tooth - 10mp5, 50% attack speed, 55 ability power, 25% cooldown reduction for 2885 gold

Philosopher's Stone - 8mp5. 18hp5, 5 gold per 10 seconds for 800 gold

Chalice of Harmony - 7.5 mp5, 30 MR, 1% extra mana regen per 1% mana missing for 890 gold

Fiendish Codex - 7mp5, 30 ability power, 10% cooldown reduction

Manamune - 7mp5, 350 mana, 20 damage, 2% of mana becomes damage, extra 1000 mana eventually for 2210 gold

Meki Pendant - 7mp5 for 390 gold

Tiamat - 5mp5, 50 damage, 15mp5, auto-attacks become splash damage for 2070 gold

Doran's Ring - 5mp5, 15 ability power, 100 health for 475 gold

Faerie Charm - 3mp5 for 180 gold

Banshee's Veil - 375 mana, 375 health, 50 MR, counters one incoming spell every 45 seconds for 2715 gold

Frozen Heart - 500 mana, 99 ac, 20% cooldown reduction, enemies attack 20% slower for 2775 gold

Sapphire Crystal - 200 mana for 400 gold

Sheen - 250 mana, 25 ability power, after using an ability your next auto-attack does 100% extra base damage for 1260 gold

Trinity Force - 250 mana, 30 damage, 30 ability power, 30% attack speed, 15% crit chance, 12% move speed, 250 health, 25% on autoattack hit to slow the enemy for 35%, after using an ability your next auto-attack does 150% extra base damage for 4070 gold

For starters, lets compare the seals to some items. I can get 18 armor for 300 gold. The runes were 13 armor, so lets pretend that would cost 217g. Faerie charm is 3mp5 for 180 gold, so if we could spend 217g on faerie charms we'd get 3.6mp5. Which is worse than the mp5 seals at level 7 or above. So given the option of cloth armor + mp5 seals or faerie charm + armor seals we should choose the cloth armor at level 7 or above.

But what if the mp5 seals aren't enough? Then we're going to have to give up some damage for the mana by changing items. A good damage baseline is probably the BF Sword, which is 45 damage for 1650 gold which is 37 gold per damage. Manamune is probably 57 damage on top of what amounts to infinite mana for 2210 gold. Which is 38 gold per damage. Worse than the sword, barely, but not by a whole lot. Manamune actually seems pretty reasonable compared to the sword!

What about a top end damage item? Bloodthirster is, fully stacked, 100 damage and 25% life steal for 3000 gold. That's 30 gold per damage plus some added life steal which is really good. It's harder to keep fully stacked than manamune is, and it's 50 gold per damage after you die.

How about my personal obsession, Tiamat? At 50 damage for 2070 gold it's 41 gold per damage. This is worse than the other options but it does do an extra 35% damage in a big splash radius. Sadly it's only 5mp5 so it's not even good enough I don't think... Bad mana and bad damage? I should probably stop buying this. 8(

Ok, so Tiamat is out. Manamune is probably in. I'm going to try it out and see how it feels!

Star Wars: The Old Republic

2011-12-16T19:32:00.000-05:00

In somewhat recent times (the last couple years) I paid extra money for the collector's edition of a couple of new MMORPGs. In both cases (Star Trek Online, Final Fantasy IV) doing so got me early access to the servers. To the laggy and buggy servers. In both cases I stopped playing the game before they opened the doors to the general public which one would assume would only make things even laggier.

Star Wars: The Old Republic entered their pre-launch launch period in the last couple days and I am not a part of them. I've been tricked too many times to play an MMO at launch and just been frustrated by it to the point where I didn't really even consider playing the game.

I haven't read a whole lot about it, but from what I have heard the launch seems to be relatively smoothly. To be fair they have heavily restricted the number of people who got early access to the game. Instead of it being everyone who paid extra it's everyone they feel like letting have access with some murky preference given to the order people preordered the game. So it's still entirely possible that while they can handle the number of people they've let in so far that it'll all crash and burn when they let the unwashed masses in on the 20th.

That said, what I've been reading has certainly piqued my interest. People complain that it's just World of Warcraft with lightsabers, voice acting, and cutscenes. But I played WoW for 6 years so clearly I enjoy the gameplay at least somewhat. I like good voice acting and cutscenes. Lightsabers are cool. And if playing all the Final Fantasy games shows anything at all it shows that I like playing the same basic game with some flavour and mechanical differences...

I'm still wary and waiting to reserve judgment until after the game launches for real to see how the servers hold up but I'm thinking of giving the game a shot after I get back from New Brunswick. So the question is... Is anyone else I know playing the game? Planning on playing the game? Willing to give it a shot if I do? Let me know!

Final Fantasy IV

2011-12-15T18:35:00.000-05:00

I'd been debating in my head which version of Final Fantasy IV to play when the time came and had not yet made a decision. Last night I finished Final Fantasy Adventure which put FFIV on the docket. I woke up early this morning and finally made a decision... I'm going to play the NA release of the game for the Super Nintendo. I'm also going to play the DS version as well to see the differences first hand, though I am going to play it through completely on the SNES first and likely only play the DS version on the TTC.

I ran into my first problem when my SNES wouldn't acknowledge that a game was plugged into it. I tried Final Fantasy IV, Gradius 3, and Final Fantasy VI with no luck. So I resorted to the old standby... I blew into it. I vaguely recall reading that blowing is actually a bad idea since you're likely to force the dust in deeper to the connectors but whatever. In retrospect I probably should have used the can of compressed air that was sitting on a nearby counter... At any rate, it loaded up a game after that, though nudging the cartridge sent it to a black screen. I gave it another quick blow and made sure to not bump it and it seemed to work fine. I don't have any working SNES controllers so I'm using a Super Famicom controller which ordinarily wouldn't be a problem but the cord is really short and I'm a little worried that I'll end up yanking on the console when I turn to get a drink or something and reset the game. Guess I need to save often!

I played through the game up to the end of the first dungeon before hitting the showers before work. Mist dragon died really fast and only got off one shot of her brutal counter-attack AE.

Perhaps the neatest thing is I changed the main character's name to Nick (of course) and got referred to as Nick, Captain of the Red Wings. Hmm...

Final Fantasy Adventure: Conclusions

2011-12-14T20:57:00.000-05:00

Jo, the Baby Tree of Mana!

I just beat the final boss of Final Fantasy Adventure who was sadly a bit of a joke. I don't know if it was my stat build or if I'd just figured out how to be awesome but basically I just had to stand around and mash attack in order to win. Here are my final thoughts on the game...

Keys are a real problem in the game. In two different dungeons near the end of the game I ran out of keys and was stuck with a locked door between me and the boss. Early game a lot of enemies dropped keys which got me into the habit of ignoring my key count. I even vendored some keys at one point because I was looting too many from the mobs. But dungeons went from being filled with guys who dropped keys to having maybe one enemy who might drop keys.

I certainly could have solved this problem by just going to a town and buying a lot of keys. I had limited inventory space but I ended the game with my bags full of elixirs that I didn't need to use so I could have afforded the space for a few more keys. I'd advise anyone playing this game to carry around 5 or so stacks of keys at all times. If I play again I know I will.

The puzzles were interesting the first couple times around but it felt like they ran out of ideas and just recycled the same tricks over and over. Needing to bust down a wall to make a secret passage is fine and all, but having to poke every wall of every dungeon in case it's the way I need to go got tiring. I eventually resorted to a description of the last couple dungeons on gamefaqs instead of bothering poking walls. Needing to turn enemies into snowmen to use as weights on pressure plates is the same thing. Really neat the first time. Interesting when it comes up a couple more times as they keep you on your toes. But it felt overdone by the end. I eventually put a few points into wisdom in order to have more mp to cast ice spells for these puzzles.

The blood sword is stupid. It lets you heal when you do damage with sword swings but it seemed like the numbers were off. The big scary dragons at the end of the game would hit me for 1 with their fire and maybe 6 with their claws. I had 503 health. Each time I attacked I gained 13 health. So as long as I hit the dragon once for every 2 times he hit me I'd stay at full and he'd be dying. Follow the boss around mashing attack? Doesn't seem like a very deep strategy but it worked.

Some enemies were immune to physical attacks. Others were immune to magical attacks. So I was forced to constantly switch between my thunder spear and my morning star if I wanted to keep killing enemies. This required a lot of menu interactions which was annoying. Secret of Mana improved on this game greatly with the advent of the menu ring system. Hit one button to show a ring with all your weapons on it. Use the d-pad to rotate the ring so the weapon you want is on top. Hit one button. It also has item rings and magic rings which really worked.

The music was better than the music in the Final Fantasy Legend games I've played thus far but it was still a little tinny. I'm pretty sure the blame for this is with the Game Boy's primitive sound capabilities but that doesn't make my head hurt less. Having to keep the sound on so I could find the hidden walls was annoying and is part of what led to turning to gamefaqs for help.

The plot existed and made sense. There was an obvious villain that you grew to hate as the game progressed, you had a rough idea what he was trying to do, and the stories of the main characters wrapped up in the ending.

Overall this was a pretty good action-RPG game. You can tell it was made 20 years ago for old hardware but it was fun. I don't think it was better than any of the core games in the series thus far but it beats out the Legend games thus far for sure.

Final Fantasy Adventure: Traces of Final Fantasy

2011-12-13T11:20:00.000-05:00

The Final Fantasy Legend games have pretty much nothing at all to do with the Final Fantasy franchise. They were originally released in Japan with another name and were rebranded when released in North America. They weren't designed with any features of Final Fantasy universes in mind and as a result don't really feel like Final Fantasy games. That doesn't make them bad by any stretch, don't get me wrong. It just means they are really Saga games.

Final Fantasy Adventure, on the other hand, was developed as a Final Fantasy game. An action-RPG game instead of a straight up RPG, to be fair. And one with its own very distinct world. But it was still created as a Final Fantasy game and there have been a few things I've noticed so far that make you really think you're playing a Final Fantasy game. Here's what I've noticed so far...

First and most importantly to me is the existence of chocobos in the world. One of the adventuring companions you can find in your travels is a chocobo. When you ask the chocobo for help you ride him around which lets you travel the overworld map at a fast speed while ignoring all enemies. It even plays chocobo riding music when you do!

At one point in the game your chocobo saves your life but gets seriously injured in the process. Fortunately for him you happen to be in a town with a mad scientist who uses machinery to upgrade your chocobo into a -- wait for it -- chocobot! Which lets your chocobo run across water! I guess since the Game Boy wasn't in colour they couldn't just have you find a blue chocobo like in later games...

The next thing that brings a Final Fantasy feel to the game is that some of the NPC sprites are essentially from the original Final Fantasy game. I've run into white mages and red mages thus far and there's really no mistaking them for anything else. One of your companions is even a red mage and he casts fireballs randomly in combat to help you out.

Finally the enemies can apply a wide variety of debuffs when they hit you. Most of these are standard RPG fare... Blind, poison, stun... But one of them, the most crippling of all, is to turn you into a moogle! This prevents you from attacking (though you can still move) and lowers your defense to nothing. I go from being able to take a couple hundred hits without dying to getting killed in 3 hits. It's brutal! I actually think this was the first game to have moogles in it (FFIII on the DS had moogles but I think they were added in with the port and weren't in the original game).

Pretty much all that's missing is a guy named Cid, an airship, summoned monsters, and maybe 4 elemental crystals!

Galaxy Legion: Permafrost Sub-Network

2011-12-12T13:27:00.000-05:00

I mentioned yesterday that there are currently two holiday missions available in Galaxy Legion. The second one is called Beneath the Snow and has returned from, I believe, last year. I wasn't playing the game at the time so it's new to me. It's a mission with a pretty fantastic experience ratio: 65 experience for 25 energy. There are a few missions in the game which are better but not very many so it's worth considering doing the mission just for the experience even if it had no reward.

As for a reward... It takes 50 rounds to get a reward and you can get the reward 15 times. The reward is a planetary structure which takes up 1 space and provides 1 research, 50 cloak, and 50 population. These bonuses get doubled if built on an icy planet. (Note: If you build one of these on an icy planet and then convert that planet to an oceanic with a mass surface melter it will retain the doubled bonus.)

Any building with a 1-to-1 ratio and an added bonus is pretty good. A building with a 2-to-1 ratio and a pretty substantial bonus is amazing. You really want to have one of these on every icy planet you have with a reasonable research boost on it. Beyond that there isn't a huge need to get extras to put on other planets but they're still good to have on practically anything. A little cloak can go a long way towards protecting a planet, after all.

Given the great experience return on the mission and how good the building is I think everyone has to get one of these for every research icy they have. Beyond that I think it should be a relatively high priority to finish the mission off completely. I already have!

Galaxy Legion: Scruuge X-Deflector

2011-12-11T23:34:00.000-05:00

Galaxy Legion recently added two new temporary missions. These aren't typical temporary missions which form a chain that will come into the game permanently. Instead they are special winter holiday event missions. I would guess they'll come back next year but that's going to be a pretty long delay if you want the rewards. On the plus side these missions last 3 weeks instead of 2 weeks to give people a better chance to collect them all.

The first mission is called Avarice of the Scruuge and is worth the standard 55 experience for 25 energy. It takes 90 rounds to complete it and can be completed up to 4 times. The reward is a fight with an easy NPC which drops a module. It's size 13 for 30 defense and 60 hull. Neither of those amounts are especially exciting but as a reader pointed out a couple months ago the upkeep cost on special modules is really small. For this module it's 3400 credits per day. Assign half of that value to the defense and you're paying 57 credits per defense per day. Compare that to my main defense module which has an upkeep of 107200000 per day for 626 defense. That's 171246 credits per defense per day which is more than 3000 times as much. My main modules are more space efficient but cost a ton more.

You do also get some hull. 60 hull is not a very big number. It probably doesn't even give me one more shot before I have to repair, but a bunch of small amounts do add up.

This module adds to two stats that I don't have a burning desire to max out but they are both also useful for almost everything I do. Given the small upkeep cost I think these modules are no-brainers to pick up and use. Especially given the fact that you only have 3 weeks to scoop them up before they disappear for at least a year and maybe forever and I think you should definitely get this done if at all possible.

All-Time Favourite Video Games Criteria

2011-12-10T22:31:00.000-05:00

Mark commented last week that Final Fantasy Adventure was in his top ten favourite games ever. It got me thinking... What would be my top ten? What criteria could I even use?

I looked up the definition of favourite and it wasn't a lot of help. "(prenominal) most liked; preferred above all others" Should an all-time favourite game be a game that to this day remains a favourite game? Should it mean a game that was at some point at the top? Clearly the whole thing is going to be subjective but I don't want to just pull things out of a hat. Is it based on time spent? Times completed? Can a game that was a lot of fun but has practically no replay value count? I really liked the Professor Layton game I played, for example, but I'm not going to play it again. On the other side of that coin... I play Freecell every now and then. Does that make it awesome? I mentioned that I thought Secret of Mana was one of the best games all-time... But I actually have little desire to play it again. Should that lower it on the favourite-game-o-meter compared to something like Actraiser which I'd probably plug in and play right now if I owned it? What about innovation? I thought Portal was really cool! But I've only spent a few hours playing it. Compare that with the time spent on World of Warcraft...

I think what I want to do is go over each generation of video games and think about what games I preferred above all others at that time. A game may not have aged well, but it can still have a place as an all-time favourite. And then come up with some way to rank them after I've identified them all. The biggest problem I foresee is identifying all the potential candidates so taking some time and methodically going over things in small time periods should help with that problem.

Final Fantasy Trading Card Game

2011-12-09T22:44:00.000-05:00

Did you know there is a CCG using characters and summons from the Final Fantasy games? I sure didn't, until very recently! It appears to be a Japan only CCG that came out early in 2011 and has already released an expansion set. I don't know why I'm surprised that new CCGs are still coming out or that they made one for Final Fantasy but I really wasn't expecting to find one.

I did a rudimentary search for information and it doesn't look like it's really for sale in Canada. And by really I mean at all. I found one guy out of California selling some opened packs on eBay but that looks to be it. I did a search of a couple generic 'import from Japan' sites with no luck. And wow... There are some really creepy things available from Japan. Like this lap pillow...

At any rate... If anyone happens to know of a way to get some cards for this game or sees them in a store somewhere please let me know. It doesn't look like a terribly good game but I figure since I love CCGs and I love Final Fantasy that I should at least give it a try!

Final Fantasy IV: Different Versions

2011-12-08T23:21:00.000-05:00

Looking ahead to the next step in the marathon we have my all time favourite game: Final Fantasy IV. There have been many different versions of the game released and I need to decide which version I want to play this time around. I currently own 3 different versions of the game and would consider tracking down another one if it suited my fancy. So I thought it would be interesting to take a look at what actually changed between versions.

Original Game - This version is only available in Japanese for the Super Famicom. I'll use it as the base version and compare the other ones to it.

North American Release - This is the version that was released in English for the Super Nintendo under the title Final Fantasy II. (Actual II and III weren't released over here so in order to reduce confusion they renumbered this game. And now it creates confusion!) Many things were changed from the original version. A bunch of spells and abilities were removed to simplify combat somewhat. Most of the consumables in the game were removed. The status removers were consolidated into one item and the damage items were just taken out. Items were cheaper in stores. Weapons did more damage. A lot of violent/religious imagery was toned down or removed. A lot of the story was cut out due to space limitations on the cartridge. Also: YOU SPOONY BARD!

EasyType - The NA version was easier than the original and Square made another Japanese version based off of the easier NA one. It has almost all of the NA changes except the censorship. A lot of the gear got buffed which made the game even easier.

Playstation - This release was essentially the original with a couple minor tweaks like a run button and a memo save. The English versions of this release got a completely new and more complete translation.

WonderSwan Color - This was a Japanese only hand held system which got ports of the first few Final Fantasy games. The graphics were changed to account for the worse hardware and some bugs were fixed/added.

Game Boy Advance - This version is a remake of the WSC version. It got another new translated script but the big changes are the ability to change who's in your party and a couple of challenge dungeons.

Nintendo DS - Yet another new translated script. Cutscenes with voice overs. The airships can move in 8 directions instead of 4! Removal of limited inventory space. Some mini-games were added to buff a new summon added for Rydia. An augment system to make all your characters better was added. The difficulty was really ramped up by giving enemies more health, better abilities, and better AI. The loot changed. You can't change character names and Namingway is a sidequest instead of just a dude who changes names. There's a mini-map for dungeons. A lot of the abilities which were removed in the NA version are back but with different affects than in the original. Spells were rebalanced to be more useful. Two challenge bosses were added. And a New Game Plus, whatever that is.

Mobile Phone - This version sounds like the DS one except only in Japanese and on the phone. It readded the ability to swap party members and a bonus dungeon.

PlayStation Portable - Comes packaged with the sequel to the game and a mini-game to bridge the two. It went back to the script from the GBA. It keeps the party swapping and bonus dungeons from the GBA as well. Apparently it lets you choose to play the SNES or the DS versions of the music.

I currently have the original version, the SNES version, and the DS version. The reason I need to decide this now before I've even finished Final Fantasy Adventure is the PSP version is very tempting. I need to get a copy of the sequel at some point and this would come bundled with it. But I don't have a PSP and I have a feeling they'll drop in price when the Vita comes out... I'm leaning towards playing the SNES version since it's the one I grew up playing but I'm not sure...

Help With Correlations

2011-12-07T21:49:00.000-05:00

I've been playing a lot of Roll Through The Ages on Yucata recently. It's a short dice game with a few reasonable paths to victory. I've cycled through some different plans as I've played games with reasonable success but I don't know what the optimal plan is. When I get beat I try to figure out what I did wrong and adapt my play in the future but I'm not sure what really works.

One of the neat things with Yucata is you can replay any game you've played in the past. I was thinking it would be useful to build a spreadsheet or database with the key parts of every game I've played and then crunch some numbers to figure out which choices correlate with winning.

One of the things you do in the game is spend turns building infrastructure for better future turns, but the game is really short. When is it right to shift from building more cities into scoring points? At 5 cities? 6? 7? Does it depend on what your opponent is doing?

If you had the choice should you choose to go first or second? There are definite advantages to both. Personally I like going second but I can't justify that stance. (Some aspects of the game are first come, first served so going first is good. But the end of the game is variable and the person who goes second can often end the game if they'll win or extend it one more turn if they won't.)

How about techs? Quarrying into engineering seems good. Quarrying into empire seems good. Agriculture and masonry seem good. But which wins more often? Does it matter what the opponent is doing?

If your opener is 4 goods and 3 food should you buy a 10 cost tech or save up? What if your opener is 2 goods, 3 food, and a coin?

I know from my sports nerdery that this sort of analysis is possible. (Did you know in the NFL that defensive penalties have no correlation with winning percentage? Offensive penalties on the other hand are negatively correlated, especially false start penalties.) But I don't know how to do it. I'm sure I could have taken some third or fourth year stats course that would have taught this sort of thing but I didn't take enough stats courses it seems...

So, my question to anyone reading this... Anyone know of any books I could buy that would help out?

Final Fantasy Adventure: Leveling System

2011-12-06T19:59:00.000-05:00

When I think of the action-adventure genre I tend to think of the Zelda series of games. You wander around with a variety of weapons beating up a variety of monsters and solving some puzzles. Maybe you can get better by getting better gear or some extra health but that's about it. So I was a little surprised when, after killing a bunch of monsters, I leveled up.

I did some reading (on Wikipedia, mind) and it claims there's a different genre entirely called action-RPG. Which is basically the same thing as action-adventure with a leveling system. I guess in retrospect I shouldn't have been surprised at all. What is Dead Rising, after all? Or Devil May Cry, which I even mentioned a couple days ago!

At any rate when I leveled up in Final Fantasy Adventure I had a choice to make when I leveled up. There are apparently four stats in the game (stamina, power, wisdom, and will) and you get to choose a focus stat each time you level up. You gain 4 stats each level - always a fixed 2-1-1-0 split with the 2 and 0 determined by the stat you choose.

Stamina - 2 stamina, 1 power, 1 will, 0 wisdom
Power - 2 power, 1 stamina, 1 will, 0 wisdom
Wisdom - 2 wisdom, 1 stamina, 1 will, 0 power
Will - 2 will, 1 stamina, 1 will, 0 power

So you're guaranteed to gain stamina and will every level. You can only get one of power or wisdom each level. I found all this out with some trial and error in game, but the question then was what do these stats actually do? There didn't seem to be anything in game that would tell me, but I did my first 14 levels without looking things up. My best guesses for what the stats do:

Stamina - increases maximum health. I knew this for sure since my max health got bigger when I took a stamina level.
Power - increases physical damage done. I knew this was pretty likely since I could start killing mobs in 1 hit instead of 2 after leveling up. That could have been a function of just level but it seems more likely to be based on power.
Wisdom - I never took a level in wisdom and my maximum mana never went up. I'd guess the two are linked.
Will - I have no idea here. My guess would be it makes your spells more powerful.

I also definitely took less damage as I leveled up so some stat likely impacts damage taken. Which one? Stamina seems likely but I could see will doing it too. And maybe even power!

At any rate, after 10 power levels and 4 stamina levels I decided to turn to the internet and find out what the stats do. Power does exactly what I thought it did. Stamina too, except it also impacts damage taken. Wisdom increases maximum mana and the potency of spells. Will impacts how fast that silly little bar on the bottom of the screen fills up.

What does that bar do? I didn't really know before looking that up either. From Secret of Mana I remembered that you could charge up a weapon to do a special attack with it. This bar fills constantly and is depleted when you hit the attack button so it seemed likely to be powering up my attacks. Once I even threw my axe across the screen which came as a bit of a shock. (And meant I couldn't attack until it fell off the edge of the screen which sucked!) It turns out that's precisely what the bar does. Attacking with a weapon is different based on weapon type and how much charge you have. None of the abilities seemed terribly interesting and the axe one actually seemed detrimental! The sword one looked like it could have uses if only because the default sword attack is so abysmally bad. Part of me wants to experiment with the sword attacks but I actually vendored my starting sword already. (I hope this game isn't like the Manders RPG!)

At any rate, now that I know what the stats do, I'm quite happy with my stat up choices. Will seems like it actively hurts the way I play so I don't want to pick it. Picking wisdom means I don't get power (and vice versa) so it feels like I should focus on one or the other but not both. I haven't seen a reason to cast a spell that wasn't cure and even then I'm selling off consumable healing items so I don't need more mana to cast more heals. So I mostly just want stamina to survive more and power to beat down harder!

Warwick Level 1 Skill

2011-12-05T19:01:00.000-05:00

For the longest time I would take Warwick's Q ability first when heading into the jungle. It does some damage and provides some healing so it seems pretty sweet. I saw a guide that said to take his W first but didn't explain why. I decided to try it out and liked it, though I want to math it out to see if it's actually better or not.

What exactly do they do?

Q: Hungering Strike: Does 75 damage. Heals for 60. Has a 10 second cooldown.

W: Hunter's Call: 40% attack speed boost for 10 seconds. Has a 30 second cooldown.

By default at level 1 Warwick will attack .665 times per second. With the attack speed buff up he'll attack .931 times per second. Over the course of the 10 second buff this will be a gain of 2.66 attacks. Each attack hits for 80 damage and heals for 18.

On the surface that seems worse. You get to Q 3 times before the W comes off cooldown so you're comparing 225 damage and 180 healing with 213 damage and 48 healing. But that assumes you're constantly in combat the entire time. If you spend some time fighting and some time running between fights then things change. You're still going to gain on healing with the Q but the W is probably going to do more damage.

Now, to be fair, the replay I looked at where I did this I started with a long sword as my first item which adds 10 damage to each attack. I find I don't have any trouble with dying since the last patch (I don't even drink a healing potion anymore) so trading some healing for some damage seems strong. I'm going to stick with W as my first skill for now on!

Final Fantasy Adventure: First Thoughts

2011-12-04T19:31:00.000-05:00

I've put a few hours into Final Fantasy Adventure so far and I'm enjoying the game to this point. It definitely feels like Secret of Mana. I've found a wide variety of weapons which are used to overcome different world obstacles. The axe chops down trees. The sickle cuts tall grass. There's a grappling hook style thing which can be used to fly across pits assuming you find a post to latch onto. There have also been AI controlled helpers. Not to nearly the extent as in SoM (where they were actually fully formed characters who could be controlled by other people) but they're still hanging around and helping out. The game even starts in a similar matter with a fall from the waterfall near the mana tree.

It's not all roses, however. You get to equip two items. One of your many weapons and a miscellaneous item of some kind. Candy to restore health. A rock chopping item to chop rocks. A key to open a locked door. Or you can equip a spell in that slot. In order to change which item you're using you have to open the main menu, select item, find the item you want in the list, and select it twice. Then if I want to use the item I need to hit another button in the main game. So if I want to heal myself with a candy I need to hit at least 5 buttons and some directional presses on the item menu. If I want to open a locked door I need to do the same thing. For keys in particular it feels like the game should just know I have keys in my inventory and automatically use one when I walk into a locked door.

Items don't stack and I only have 16 item slots in my inventory. Right now 6 of my 16 slots are holding cure potions that I will likely never use. In the last dungeon I had to discard probably a dozen things in order to open treasure chests filled with stuff I then threw away so I could open more chests.

Finally the game only allows character movement in a cardinal direction. The monsters can move diagonally but I cannot. I think this is mostly a problem because I've never really played adventure games with this movement restriction so I keep wanting to react in ways that can't happen. I noticed that same thing when I tried to play the original Zelda recently. It frustrates my mind a little to think I can do something and then fail to do so due to the controls.

In all it feels like the interface for the game isn't up to snuff but that shouldn't actually be too surprising when dealing with a 20 year old hand held game. I'm pretty sure I can block the annoyances out and enjoy the game. But I must say... I now have a real craving to play Devil May Cry!

On Sportsmanship

2011-12-03T18:22:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I got an email from the BPA (the people who run WBC) which had, among other things, this year's nominees for the WBC Sportsmanship award. I took a look to see what sorts of things get nominated and one name really caught my eye. He got nominated for doing pretty much the exact opposite of something he advocated happening 3 years ago. I went on a bit of a rant on here at the time so I figured it would only be fair to point out the change now.

The background is the game Star Wars: The Queen's Gambit. This is a card driven wargame with unbalanced sides. The dark side basically wins by killing everything in site. The light side wins by keep at least 3 people alive while winning a side-game with Anakin. You get to take 4 actions each turn and actions taken with Anakin basically have no game effect. Using actions on Anakin is, I think, very bad. It gives up board position for no real advantage. Eventually you get enough successes and win the game but I think you should establish a strong board position and then work on Anakin.

This means if a game goes long it is almost certainly the light side's fault. Pretty much every action the dark side takes is a direct progression towards winning the game, but if the light side wants the game to last a long time it probably will. In order to make sure games finish in 2 hours they added a rule that if time runs out the light side just loses. If people are playing at a good pace this will never come up but there are a lot of people out there who don't play at a good pace so it does happen.

Three years ago in the semi-finals of the tournament I was playing as the light side. I had completely ignored Anakin in favour of getting good board position and it had worked out. In fact, I was guaranteed to win. I killed every single dark side unit that could attack my guys. I blocked the way in so he couldn't get more reinforcements. Now all I needed to do was advance Anakin and the game was over. I had over an hour to go and it was pretty much impossible that I'd fail enough dice rolls in a row. Unless my opponent started stalling in a way that is incomprehensible.

At any rate my opponent conceded when I established the board lock. A spectator who it turned out had something to gain if my opponent won made a big deal about it. I hadn't actually won yet, he claimed, and I should be forced to roll out those dice because it's possible I'd fail to win 5 coin flips out of the likely 100 I'd be making. He went so far as to call the GM over and the two of them combined managed to convince my opponent to unconcede. And set the game back up. And keep playing in the hopes I'd fail my coin flips. My opponent didn't take any actions and just let me win. (He could have thought about what cards to play. He could have taken actions that wouldn't impact the game in any way but which would involve rolling dice and eating up time.) I won in about 5 minutes.

Here's the nomination for the 2011 WBC Sportsmanship award:

"STAR WARS; QUEEN'S GAMBIT: Three-time champion Larry Lingle had his elimination round game all but won by merely playing out his hand normally, but he didn't want to win by time limits so he passed his own moves, allowing his opponent to beat the clock and win the game as Anakin brought down the death star - knocking Larry out of the tournament."

Larry was the spectator to my game 3 years ago. He's the one who wanted my opponent to abuse the clock in order to win an un-winnable game. He's the one who wanted my opponent to take worthless actions to waste time. And yet here he is, nominated for doing the exact opposite! And by the same GM that forced an undo of a concession and a re-setup of a game! (Though, to be fair, I'm pretty sure he knew that if we just played it out I'd win anyway and was likely just trying to appease Larry.)

Now, maybe things have changed in the last 3 years for Larry. Maybe he's realized what a jerky thing he was advocating 3 years ago and changed the way to approaches the time limit. What I think is a lot more likely is he holds himself to a higher standard than he does other people. He wants to win the right way, within the rules, and doesn't want to win by cheesing his opponent out. But he knows that cheesing people out is possible and wanted to make sure my young opponent was aware of his options. Maybe he thought I'd badgered my opponent into an early concession and was trying to undo my imagined bad sportsmanship? I can respect that!

I know he's a good guy in general. He's a popular GM of multiple events and I had heard a story of him conceding in a different Queen's Gambit game after realizing he'd been inadvertently cheating by moving guys too far after the real Queen died. But I'd painted him in a bad light 3 years ago and I don't think that was very fair in retrospect. I'll never know his motivations at the time and I'm glad to hear he didn't cheese out a win last year!

Final Fantasy Adventure

2011-12-02T11:25:00.000-05:00

I was doing a little preliminary reading on this game (mostly to see where it fit in the timeline) and discovered something very interesting about this franchise. The Final Fantasy Legend franchise was actually first released in Japan as the Saga franchise and was rebranded when it was released over here but actually had nothing to do with Final Fantasy. Final Fantasy Adventure is the first game in the Mana franchise but was actually originally produced with the Final Fantasy name in Japan.

The first sequel to Final Fantasy Adventure? Secret of Mana. One of the best games of all time! Secret of Mana was a Zelda style adventure game with 3 characters. Normally the second two would be AI controlled (with very limited programming available from a menu) but you could actually use the Super Multitap to hook 3 controllers up to the SNES and have all 3 characters controlled by players. I can still remember my brother playing as the little red haired dude and wanting the axe. (You had one copy of each weapon type so only one person could use a given weapon.)

I had actually played a game in the Saga series: Romancing Saga. I only played it for a brief period of time before turning it off and not going back. I don't remember why I soured on it but I just couldn't get into it for some reason. Maybe that explains why I haven't been a huge fan of the FFL games. They just aren't my style of game? On the other hand I really loved Secret of Mana so I now have high hopes for Final Fantasy Adventure.

I must say I didn't know that Secret of Mana actually is descended from the original Final Fantasy. From the same company, sure, but not that it had such direct ties. Cool!

Final Fantasy Legend II: Conclusions

2011-12-01T12:16:00.000-05:00

I finished playing FFLII last night. I have a bunch of random thoughts about the game and I'm not going to hold anything back with regards to the plot so bewarned. If you've been holding off playing a 20 year old game and don't want the ending to be spoiled you should look away!

The character 'Dad' is odd. My main character was a robot but NPCs on different worlds kept commenting on how much I looked like him. He's obviously a human with a pretty cool hat. I'm a giant metal box with random stuff glued on to me for stats. Maybe the box shape is just how my sprite is represented and really I'm an android? But then how can I put on 7 pairs of gloves? 'Dad' is also living at least three lives. He has families on two worlds and a job high up in the military on a third. And can apparently pass through the magi-restricted gates without having enough magi.

At the end of the game I manage to convince him to come home to mother. And then in the ending sequence he gets bored and wakes me up in the middle of the night to say goodbye before he jumps out the window again. He's going to look for the Lost Ark. (I'm also pretty sure he was equipped with a whip when he first joined my party...) My character decides to go with him and then so does the mother. And they all jump out the window instead of using the door despite there being no one to sneak away from anymore!

In all it seems like 'Dad' is a crazy mix of Dr. Soong, James Bond, and Indiana Jones.

Item balance in the game is way out of whack. Near the end of the game I was able to buy dragon armor from the store. It gave immunity to the 4 elements! I'd started encountering monsters that would hit everyone in my party for elemental damage. Each attack would do about 70% of my max health. I'd run into groups with like 10 guys who could cast these spells. Surviving those fights was practically impossible without dragon armor. And completely trivial with dragon armor since I took no damage at all from them. It really feels like the enemies should be scaled down a little so they can't just insta-gib you. And then the gear should be scaled down too so it doesn't make you completely invincible.

In one of the last dungeons I found the weapon Excalibur. In most Final Fantasys this weapon is pretty sweet. In the original FF, for example, it had 13 more and 5 more hit than the sun sword. It was a pretty reasonable damage boost, especially if that 5 hit gave you an extra swing. But since a lot of your damage came from stats and level it wasn't really unreasonable. (Masamune was a much bigger boost in that game, especially since any character could use it.) In FFLII, however, Excalibur is really over the top. Most weapons in the game require you to have high agility in order to hit and high strength in order to do damage. A couple weapons did damage based on agility and is what my human was using. The best one in the game does damage equal to agi*13. Xcalibur does damage equal to str*15. Ok, not such a big jump. Very reasonable even, especially since it uses a new stat and you still need agility to hit with it, right? Turns out no. Xcalibur is guaranteed to hit when you attack with it. So even with 1 agility you'd be hitting every time. Oh, and if your strength stat is less than 70 it's actually treated as being 70. The max stat for a human is 99. My human didn't even have 70 agility and had spent the entire game attacking with an agility weapon! On top of the weapon not being able to miss, it also can't be blocked. And if that wasn't good enough it also does AE damage and hits all enemies in a group! Oh yeah, and it has infinite uses. The only such item in the game.

My human used to do around 300 damage to one monster, sometimes missing, and sometimes being blocked if they used a defensive ability. Each time I did that it cost me 220 gold. And I had to spend inventory space lugging around extra weapons for when the current one broke. With Xcalibur she started doing around 800 damage to a group of monsters. Every attack. No way for them to avoid the damage. She pointed at one group of monsters and they died.

I'd say a 14-fold damage increase from one weapon on top of quality of life increases from unlimited uses is a bit of a problem. Certainly not balanced!

The final boss was really random. He has three phases. The first two essentially do nothing. The third casts an AE spell on your party that hits for anything from 70-700 with no way to mitigate the damage. That's a damage range that is way too big! My characters had between 600 and 900 max health so the weakest one could just get killed from full if the boss got lucky.

I ended up being sketchy in order to win. I made excessive use of save states in order to play the fight through using my very limited amount of healing at opportune times. I felt like this wasn't really cheating since I could have just gone back to town, bought more healing staves, and won with ease. (I filled my inventory with them but the second last boss had me use up almost all of them. I should have gone back and bought more but I was lazy.)

If I play again I'm going to drop the human from my party. She seemed to gain stats faster than the mutant but not having any non-consumable actions until I got Xcalibur was really annoying. Robots were definitely cool.

Japan Only Games

2011-11-30T15:10:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I discovered that Theatrhythm is currently only slated for release in Japan. I want to include it in my marathon but it isn't available in my language or continent. It got me thinking... Are there other games on my list which were only ever released in Japan? It turns out the answer is yes. A surprising number of games (mostly from the Chocobo series) were only sold in Japan. Many of those were put out for mobile phones and weren't even on any console at all. While I can hold out hope that Theatrhythm will still get ported to the NA region there's no chance that any of those older games are going to make it.

The first time I did a Final Fantasy marathon I played just the core games in the series, but at that time FFIII had only ever been released in Japan. I played it by finding a fan translated rom for the game and playing it in an emulator. Not exactly on the up and up, I know, but I didn't really see a viable other choice. If they'd released the game over here I would have bought it for sure. (And once they did release it on the DS I did just that!)

I'm still several games away from needing to make a decision but I'm wondering if I can do the same thing with some of these more obscure games. Are there emulators for Japanese mobile phones? Did someone bother to translate Choco-Mate? How about "Dragon Quest & Final Fantasy in Itadaki Street Special" which is apparently a Monopoly spin-off! What about the 3DS? Do emulators for it exist? Can my computer run them if they do? All things to look into as I move forward!

If it turns out they aren't available I won't be too disappointed. I'm unlikely to 'finish' Final Fantasy XI, for example. I probably won't even play FFXIV at all. The Chocobo game on Facebook is not great (though I may try it again in a few months to see if they've made any improvements) so I'll probably skip it. If I end up not playing the Chocobo Dice game it really won't be the end of the world.

Theatrhythm Final Fantasy

2011-11-29T21:06:00.000-05:00

I was updating my list of all Final Fantasy related games yesterday and noticed a new game that's coming out in February of 2012: Theatrhythm! The name is a portmanteau of theatre and rhythm and the game appears to be a 'tap the touch screen' game in the style of Elite Beat Agents or Beatmania.

The interesting twist? All the music in the game is from the Final Fantasy series. 50+ songs, apparently! Each of the 13 core games will have at least three songs. One for battle, one for an event (like the dance scene in FFVIII), and one for the field. The following trailer shows a bunch of clips of each of the three types. Including One Winged Angel!

Now for the bad news... It's currently only slated for release in Japan. Square-Enix did trademark the name in the US so there is some hope that they'll announce an English version of the game in the future but for now my hopes were merely raised and then dashed on the rocks.

I entertained the idea of importing a copy of the game from Japan. It's a music game so I can't imagine the language of the game really mattering all that much. Unfortunately it turns out Nintendo put region locks on the 3DS. Even if I had a copy of the Japanese game I wouldn't be able to play it unless I also had a 3DS from Japan. I really want to play this game but I don't know that I want to play it so badly that buying a second 3DS makes sense. Probably I'm just going to have to be patient and hope they release it over here since it seems awesome.

Popeing

2011-11-28T21:27:00.000-05:00

I went through my drafted posts list today and found this from last November. I guess I never found a conclusion but I found it interesting upon rereading it so I'm going to try to finish it off... For reference it's talking about a day of board games that took place at Duncan's right after his kitten got spayed.

An interesting situation came up in a game of Puerto Rico on the weekend that I wanted to talk about to go over decision making in general and my dislike for Puerto Rico as a game in particular but the more I thought over the ideas in my head (I have a hard time falling asleep...) the more I decided the whole situation was just a symptom of an entirely different issue worth discussing. I turned to Google to do some background research but couldn't find anyone saying anything about it. I'm thinking it's likely I just don't know what to search for but maybe there's a void here.

What am I talking about? The term I've heard used to describe it is 'Popeing', but Google's definition of that term is not what I'm talking about. (While intriguing it is not the sort of thing I want to see happen with the Puerto Rico players...) It's the act of saying things while playing a game in an attempt to convince your opponents that someone else is winning. The goal is to convince the other players to take actions to restrict that opponent instead of actions to restrict you thereby increasing the odds you'll win the game.

The primary example, to me, is Settlers of Catan.Watch a game of Settlers and wait for someone to roll a 7. If you play with people who are anything like the people I play games with you should immediately hear three people point out the 'obvious' hex on which to place the robber. You'll also notice that none of those three people pointed to a hex adjacent to their own settlements. (And, as a result, the three 'obvious' hexes are at least two and sometimes three distinct hexes.) If you're playing with really aggressive people here they'll even bribe you to take their suggestion. "I'll give you a sheep if you don't hit me." "I won't use my soldier to put it back on your land if you hit Sky." etc...

Why did people pick the hexes they did?

Well, some people just want to increase their own position in an absolute sense and therefore just want you to hit anybody that isn't them. Maybe they're trying to protect the only brick card in their hand and bribing you with extra sheep will further their position. Maybe they desperately need wheat and don't want the robber on their wheat square. Maybe they just don't like getting attacked.

Others will try to work out who's currently leading and want you to hit them to bring them back to the pack. Deny them a card from hand and a good production square and maybe there's time for the rest of you to catch up.

Some will try to figure who's their biggest competition and campaign to hurt them. This is similar to above in terms of the actual pitch but the reasoning behind them is different and it can be hard to distinguish between the two at the table. (Do I want you to hit Sky because if you don't he's going to win or do I want you to hit Sky because if you do I will win... My pitch is the same either way but in the first case you actually may want to hit Sky and in the second you actually probably should hit me.)

Some just bring outside grudges into the game. (Sky drank the last Coke so I want to punish him.)

Maybe someone in your group just wins a lot so you want to hit them so they don't win this time. (Robb is winning! Let's get him!)

Sometimes people even try to look at things objectively from your point of view. Yeah, I'm winning, you really should hit me. More likely if we're preparing for a tournament of some kind but sometimes just the beauty of a perfectly played game is more important than winning by any means.

Personally I like to talk a fair bit during games because I like to learn how to play games better and part of that is finding out why other people are doing what they're doing. If I make a suggestion that I think is right and it gets justifiably shot down then I can use that information to potentially revise what I think is right in the future. I want to win too, and mostly I want to win against optimal opponent play and not because they threw me the game, but I do get sucked into Popeing for the sake of winning sometimes. (Which, admittedly, can make it hard for people to work out my motivations at any given time.) When I make helpful suggestions I do try to point out if it's also very good for me to do it, though with destructive suggestions that's less likely. (For example, at the start of our Le Havre game I mentioned a plan I saw used at WBC that seemed to work ok, but I mentioned it after I had already set up to take advantage of it myself if someone did it. Aidan took that plan but I did point out it was good for me too if he did it, as I got to build the marketplace with wood since he took bucks and didn't buy it.)

The important thing to consider though is what does Popeing actually accomplish? If you're playing with new or impressionable players then often a game will come down to who Popes more. Stay silent in a game of Settlers with 2 new players and a shark and you'll lose practically every time. They'll get lopsided trades and you won't since they'll butt in with helpful advice to torpedo your scams but will succeed in their own scams if you're silent. The robber will live on your land. They'll build to the hexes you want. You'll need some pretty good dice to overcome those sorts of handicaps.

If you're playing a game with experts then it mostly just adds noise and length to the game. Assuming everyone is Popeing non-stop then chances are the optimal move will get iterated over and you just need to find brain time to spend on finding it and filtering out the other comments.

But if you're playing a game with experts and some people Pope and some don't the Popers still get an advantage. Now on your turn you have as options to consider all moves you thought up yourself and all moves that hurt Sky. If Sky isn't Popeing back then sometimes you'll fail to consider the move that hurts me but you'll never fail to consider the move that hurts Sky. This has to put Sky at a disadvantage compared to me unless you're perfect at iterating all your possible moves or vindictively attack the Poper. (And if your goal is winning you're not likely to do that!)

Now, I don't remember all the details of the games last year but I distinctly remember we played a 4 player game of Puerto Rico. Sky and I both got off to an early lead (maybe we bought the harbors?) and immediately started pointing fingers at each other. Duncan looked like he had a decent building strategy going on and Pounder was saying he'd already lost. His position certainly looked pretty bad. But then as the game progressed we stopped considering how our moves would affect Pounder. One particular example involved the trading house having 3 goods in it. Either Sky or myself could have solo-sold something cheap but doing so wasn't going to hurt the other one. So Pounder got to solo-sell coffee. Needless to say, Pounder ended up winning the game handily.

Which is why I don't like playing Puerto Rico very much. The game is all about benefiting from the actions other people take. When Popeing plays a major role in the game everything changes. It turns into a game of convincing the other players to vote you the winner.

Three years ago I won the WBC Puerto Rico tournament. There wasn't any Popeing in any of the games except for the final. All of my elimination games were very close and all came down to one of the players choosing who was going to win on the final turn. My opponents in the quarterfinals and semifinals didn't try to sway the play in their favour, and neither did I. In both cases I remember looking at the opponent and shrugging as we waited for another player to pick the winner. The finals was a little different. There was one instance of Popeing, and it was actually from a player directed at himself. He managed to convince himself that I was winning and that he should take a move that was really bad for himself in order to hurt me. It turns out if he just takes his best play he wins the game! But denying me my best move (and letting me take my second best move) was enough for me to make up the gap.

Two years ago I also played in the PR tournament and came (tied for) last in all my games. I don't think I played particularly worse in those games but the opponents sat down with the advance knowledge that I'd won the year before. I really dislike Popeing with strangers so I once again didn't take part but the other players were all over making sure I couldn't do anything. One game I started off well with an early coffee and the other players conspired to give another player the money to build coffee, called settler so he could get a coffee plantation, mayored to turn it on, and crafted a second time so he could have coffee to sell before I could.

I liked the game when it was about finding the best action to take for your self. I liked it when it was about setting up to take advantage of other people's best actions. I hate it when it's all about convincing other people to do what you want with words.

Dissidia: Final Fantasy Intro

2011-11-27T02:21:00.000-05:00

One of interesting aspects of running Final Fantasy music playlists is I sometimes come across music I haven't heard before because it's from a game I haven't played. This clip started with some speech which got me curious enough to alt-tab over to Chrome and check out the video in Youtube. Apparently it's the intro to the Dissidia Final Fantasy game that came out in 2009. I don't know much about it except it pits one hero from each of the main Final Fantasy games against the end bosses of the games. It's a PSP game and this video is the first thing that has ever made me want to own a PSP...

Check this video out. I love the little onion knight dude from FFIII. My favourite part though is probably Squall dueling with Sephiroth. I was actually yelling at the screen when it looked like Terra was going into a morph animation but I think it was just spells landing near her.

Innistrad Draft 2

2011-11-26T20:26:00.000-05:00

Typically when I'm going to do a draft write-up I decide before the draft that I'm going to do one. I don't draft any differently than I normally would but the idea is to not cherry pick drafts that make me look good or which seem interesting. Sometimes drafts are just normal things where I lose in the first round and I want to show them too.

This draft is not one of those. Matt commented on yesterday's draft that he thought the deck was fun and full of powerful cards. At the time he made that comment I was in the middle of another draft that had a deck that was even more fun and had way more powerful cards. It had some really crazy plays so I figured I'd write it up for today. At one point my opponent complained that my first 3 spells were rares and told me to stop playing rares. I told him I still had more to come. (I had 2 more in hand at the time and topdecked another the next turn.)

Buckle up and enjoy the wild ride!

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My deck:

1 Murder of Crows
2 Mountain
1 Fortress Crab
3 Swamp
1 Mindshrieker
1 Creepy Doll
1 Snapcaster Mage
1 Selhoff Occultist
11 Island
1 Back from the Brink
1 Blazing Torch
1 Silent Departure
1 Demonmail Hauberk
1 Skirsdag High Priest
1 Sever the Bloodline
1 Skaab Goliath
2 Civilized Scholar
2 Armored Skaab
1 Undead Alchemist
1 Blasphemous Act
1 Deranged Assistant
1 Stitched Drake
1 Shimmering Grotto
1 Think Twice
1 Stitcher's Apprentice

Sideboard
1 Typhoid Rats
1 Forest
1 Darkthicket Wolf
1 Fortress Crab
1 Grave Bramble
1 Ranger's Guile
1 Island
1 Island
1 Vampire Interloper
1 Village Bell-Ringer
1 Geistflame
2 Naturalize
1 Travel Preparations
1 Rotting Fensnake
1 Morkrut Banshee
1 Orchard Spirit
1 Dream Twist
1 Burning Vengeance
1 Memory's Journey
1 Purify the Grave

P1P6 travel preparations? What? I figured I could play an aggressive blue/green deck with it. I may not be able to flash it back the real way, but I have a snapcaster! Of course when I open high priest in pack 2 everything changes. I had a good black card already and didn't really want to first pick an elf so I went with the bomb. I could have had another travel preparations in P2P4! No one is playing GW beatdown!

Match 1 - Game 1 (160457808)

My opponent wins the flip and chooses to go first. My hand is I, I, skirsdag high priest, stitched drake, civilized scholar, demonmail hauberk, blasphemous act. I have two of my splash cards but I figure any land in 3 turns gives me some game so I keep. He plays a swamp and says go. I draw mountain and play an island. He plays a mountain and says go. I draw skaab goliath and play mountain. He plays mountain and hits me with a night terrors, removing my stitched drake. I draw island and play scholar. He plays swamp and rotting fensnake. I draw another island. I loot into blazing torch, pitch my goliath to untap my looter, and use torch to kill snake. Looter unflips. He plays a mountain and says go. I draw shimmering grotto. I loot into an armored skaab and pitch an island. I bust out my high priest and say go. He plays a stensia bloodhall and dead weights the high priest. I draw island, loot into an island and pitch it. I play skaab milling off think twice, deranged alchemist, and selhoff occultist. Now that I have something to do with 3 mana I play the last land from my hand. He plays another land and a typhoid rats.

I flash back think twice into snapcaster mage and draw swamp on my turn. I swing for 1, loot into a murder of crows (pitching swamp) and play murder. He domes me with his hall. He buffs up his rats with a furor of the bitten, plays a land, and says go. I draw back from the brink and loot into creepy doll. I pitch snapcaster to power up my looter and smash for 10 down to 9. Creepy doll comes down to hold the fort. He domes me with his land down to 13. He draws and concedes.

Match 1 - Game 2 (160458744)

He elects to play again. My hand is I, I, I, I, S, think twice, creepy doll. Maybe a little slow but I'm going to draw a ton of cards so I'm good. He plays mountain and says go. I draw stitcher's apprentice and play an island. He plays swamp, bloodcrazed neonate. I draw selhoff occultist and play land, apprentice with every intention of trading. He plays mountain, crossway vampire (no-block on apprentice) and swings for 2 and a counter. I draw fortress crab, play land and occultist and say go. He plays land, crossway vampire (no block on occultist) and swings in for 6. I elect to not chump block which might have been wrong? I draw demonmail hauberk and play fortress crab. He has land, nightbird's clutches on my crab and occultist and swings for 10. This time I do chump. But I'm at 6, he has clutches in the bin, and I have no possible way to win after drawing an island. Killed on turn 6 with ground creatures despite having creature drops on turns 2 through 5. Yikes!

Match 1 - Game 3 (160459124)

I elect to play first. My opener is I, S, snapcaster mage, undead alchemist, murder of crows, back from the brink, blasphemous act. I might be in trouble if he has a draw like last game but if I draw a red source I'll be fine. I keep and play an island. He plays a mountain and says go. I draw mountain (ting!) and play it. He plays swamp and bloodcrazed neonate. I elect to hold snapcaster back at end of turn with the plan of casting it in combat when he can't keep it from blocking. I draw island, play it, and say go. He swings, I snapcaster and trade. He plays land and hits me with night terrors, taking the murder. I draw skirsdag high priest and play undead alchemist. He plays land and rotting fensnake. I draw civilized scholar and decide I would probably block if he attacked so I swung in to force the trade while he's tapped out. Surprisingly he doesn't block and I get a zombie token. I follow up with scholar. He plays crossway vampire keeping my token from blocking, kills my alchemist with dead weight, and says go. I draw island. I could sweep the board here but decide to delay a bit more. I play land and say go. He cracks me with another night terrors. He doesn't mind if I'm going to wrath I guess as he takes my high priest. He swings and I looter into a shimmering grotto. I decide I'm not actually going to wrath and pitch my act. I trade token for snake and take 3 down to 12.

I draw island, play grotto, and back from the brink. He plays night revelers which have haste thanks to the scholar. He swings for 7. I loot before blockers, find an armored skaab, pitch it and trade with revelers. I fall to 9. On my turn I draw mindshrieker. I brink back the armored skaab which mills another scholar, another armored skaab, demonmail hauberk, and island. I play my island from hand and my mindshrieker and say go. He swings and I activate mindshrieker before blockers. I mill my blazing torch and opt not to trade. I just block with skaab. He plays pitchburn devils and says go.

I draw island which I keep in hand. I brink back alchemist and a scholar and swing for 1 with mindshrieker. He bashes with both. I trade alchemist for vampire and block devils with skaab. He plays tormented pariah, harvest pyres my skaab to finish it off, and says go. (Why he didn't pyre precombat I don't know.) He is now out of cards in hand.

I draw island. I start by brinking back the armored skaab. He mills off island, mountain, skaab goliath, and fortress crab. I brink back the other civilized scholar and say go. His guy transforms since I didn't actually cast any spells. He swings with both dudes. I looter into think twice which I discard. I use mindshrieker before blockers and manage to hit stitched drake. This make him 4/4 so I trade with his 6/4 and block the devils with skaab. He says go.

I draw swamp, which I play. I then brink back skaab goliath and mindshrieker and say go. He has crossway vampire but doesn't attack. I looter into island which I discard, and then looter into creepy doll which I discard. I was thinking my guy would flip but it turns out tokens don't have a second side. Huh.

I draw swamp and no longer have a plan for dealing damage. Well, except for the 9 lands in play and the mindshrieker. I play a 10th land and swing with goliath and mindshrieker. He double blocks the goliath and I assign all the damage to the vampire. (I don't want to kill the devils.) I mindshrieker him 3 times (I'm down to 7 cards in my deck) and hit an abattoir ghoul and 2 lands so he takes 5 down to 14. I brink back fortress crab for even more big butts on defense. He draws a card and concedes.

Match 2 - Game 1 (160462282)

He wins the toss and chooses to play. He mulligans to 6. My opener is I, I, S, S, armored skaab, fortress crab, demonmail hauberk which is a clear keeper. He plays swamp and traveler's amulet. On my turn I draw stitched drake and play an island. He plays moorland haunt and walking corpse. I draw stitcher's apprentice which I play along with a swamp. He cracks for 2, fetches a plains, and plays a silverchase fox. I draw murder of crows. I play armored skaab which mills island, silent departure, skirsdag high priest, and undead alchemist. He plays a 4th land and swings. I decide to that my mana is going to be busy for a few turns and double block the fox with my two dudes. Apprentice trades for fox and I take 2. He follows up with markov patrician and champion of the pariah.

I draw civilized scholar and play my last land out. I can now play demonmail huaberk, fortress crab, civiilized scholar, or stitched drake. I opt for the drake and remove the apprentice. He plays doomed traveler and says go. I draw shimmering grotto, swing with drake, and play murder. He plays a 5th land and does nothing. I draw think twice. I swing with just the murder and then main phase think twice. It gets me an island which I play along with fortress crab. He plays a land and says go. I draw blasphemous act, swing for 7 in the air, and play civilized scholar. He draws a card and concedes.

Match 2 - Game 2 (160463048)

He chooses to play. My opener is I, M, mindshrieker, skirsdag high priest, blasphemous act, undead alchemist, think twice. What a beating! If he has an aggressive start I get to wrath. If he doesn't I have bombs galore. He plays swamp and says go. I draw snapcaster mage and play island. He plays plains and says go. I draw a swamp and bust out the mindshrieker. He plays a plains and kills mindshrieker with dead weight. I draw island and play high priest. He has no more land and just has walking corpse. I draw island and play undead alchemist. He plays swamp and abattoir ghoul. I draw island, play it, and say go.

My opponent now comments "stop playing rares". He then cracks me for 3 with the ghoul and plays a rare of his own: bloodgift demon. That could get out of hand in a hurry!. At end of his turn I think twice into sever the bloodline (I guess he's going to disappointed with my rares again) and flash it back for an island. I then draw a swamp. I sever the bloodline his demon (sadly it gets exiled and not killed or else I would play snapcaster and make a death star with the high priest) and say go. he hits me for 3 more and plays a high priest of his own.

I draw silent departure on my turn. The board is his 3 dudes (including high priest) against my high priest and alchemist. I can't sever his priest without getting my own. So I decide that my priest is expendable. I cast silent departure on my undead alchemist and then cast blasphemous act to wipe the board. I figure if worse comes to worse I can still use snapcaster to wrath again. He plays makeshift mauler on his turn.

I draw armored skaab and bust it out. It mills island, shimmering grotto, civilized scholar, and creepy doll. I also play out undead alchemist and my 8th land. He plays skaab goliath. I think he was hoping I'd waste my bounce on the 1-creature skaab instead of the 2-creature skaab. He doesn't swing and says go. I draw swamp and sever his goliath. He plays vampire interloper and says go.

I draw stitched drake. It's time to get my zombie on so I bounce his mauler and swing for 5 points of zombie damage. This mills off 3 dudes so I get 3 zombies. It also gives my opponent a forbidden alchemy to flash back if he finds time. I finish off with stitched drake removing civilized scholar. He swings in with his vampire and I kill it for him. This lets him replay the mauler. He also plays markov patrician and says go.

I draw armored skaab. I decide it's worth trading 2 of my tokens for his patrician and an extra 2 mills so I swing with 3 tokens and the drake. The 7 mills net me 3 more zombies and him nothing of note. I hold back the skaab. Not sure why, I think it was because I only had 16 cards in my deck and didn't want to risk milling back from the brink which is my out if he can somehow deal with my tremendous board advantage. All he has is another makeshift mauler.

I draw island. I decide it's really worth losing 2 tokens to get in for 4 more zombie damage and swing with my 4 tokens and the drake. Maybe the armored skaab should have gotten in too? I think he was staying back to chump block. This 7 card mill nets a mere 1 zombie. No flashbacks for him though, and he's down to 5 cards in his deck. I say go. He swings so I chump with skaab and zombie token.

I draw mountain. I start to swing with everything and then think he may have attacked with all in an attempt to trick me into throwing my alchemist into a rebuke. So I unattack with him and just crack with my tokens and my drake. He then asks if I'm sure. He'll let me take it back if I want to swing with the alchemist! I don't know if he had it or not but he certainly died when I didn't attack.

Match 3 - Game 1 (160465290)

He wins the toss and chooses to play. My opener is I, I, I, S, armored skaab, demonmail hauberk, back from the brink. Stupid demonmail hauberk! I have yet to cast it and I've always hated drawing it. I even sided it out in game 2 of the last round. At any rate, I do keep since I have one of my bomb rares and an early blocker. He starts with island, delver of secrets. I draw island and play it. He doesn't flip his guy, plays island, and swings for 1. I draw island and play it. He doesn't flip his guy, plays island, and swings for 1. I draw swamp and bust out my armored skaab which mills shimmering grotto, deranged assistant, civilized scholar, and selhoff occultist. He doesn't flip, doesn't play a land, and doesn't swing. Instead he just plays butcher's cleaver.

I draw undead alchmist. I bust him out and swing with the skaab in the hopes of making a token. I mill off claustrophobia instead. He doesn't flip. He plays an island, equips, and doesn't swing. I draw mountain and swing with skaab. He trades! Yes! If delver flips he'd be getting in for 7 lifelink in the air and I don't know that I could handle that. I play demonmail hauberk post combat and say go. He has a 5th island and a moon heron. I draw island. I decide to offer the trade of alchemist for heron since I'm really worried about 6 points of flying damage. He accepts. Yes! I follow up with back from the brink. I'm pretty sure I'm in a dominant position now. He has just a lantern spirit and says go.

I draw fortress crab. I decide the best start is to get more options and brink back the armored skaab. It mills swamp, blazing torch, stitcher's apprentice, and skaab goliath. I brink back the alchemist as well. He finally has his second colour and plays plains and voiceless spirit. He equips it with cleaver and swings for 2 with lantern spirit.

I draw island. I brink back my stitcher's apprentice and sac him to the demonmail hauberk. Armored skaab is now a 5/6 and can get through the 5/1 first striker on the other side of the table. He gets in for 5 and makes 1 zombie token. I then play a land and brink back the skaab goliath. He hits me for 7 and plays gallows warden. I'm down to 9 and he has 10 power of flyers in play.

I draw snapcaster mage which has no target. I try to think of a way to survive. My first plan is that he'll chump block with his warden so I try attacking with armored skaab and skaab goliath. No dice. Instead he takes 11 zombie damage which gives me a mere 2 zombies. Ok, now what? I have snapcaster mage in hand so if I could get a spell into the graveyard I could flash it back. I have back from the brink in play with deranged assistant, civilized scholar, and selhoff occultist in the bin. Aha! I can brink back the occultist and then kill some creatures to mill cards into my graveyard! I can use the demonmail hauberk to sac a couple dudes and mill myself a couple times and hope. Seems like a plan!

I brink back my occultist and sac one of my new zombie tokens to move the hauberk over. And then it asks me who I want to target with the occultist trigger. RIGHT! It can target any player, not just yourself. How many cards are left in his library? 8? And I have 6 creatures left in play, a trigger to put on the stack, and the mana to cast 2 more cretaures? Giddy-up! I target him with the trigger. It mills a creature which actually procs the alchemist. He checks for any creatures being milled not just from zombie damage! I now have enough dudes in play to mill him out without spending any more mana. I do so. He lets me see his entire deck (except the 3 cards left in his hand) by forcing me to go through the motions. It does chew 2 minutes off of my clock but I still have 19 left so no worries there.

He appears to only be playing 11 creatures. He has three rebukes, a midnight haunting, and a dissipate as instants of note.

I guess that's why demonmail hauberk is in my deck... It let me swing through a 5/1 first striker and it let me combo off at the end of the game. You get to stay in the deck!

Match 3 - Game 2 (160466832)

He's on the play. My opener is I, I, think twice, skirsdag high priest, civilized scholar, undead alchemist, skaab goliath. He starts with delver of secrets. I draw mindshrieker and play a land. He doesn't flip, plays plains, inquisitor's flail, and swings for 1. I draw mountain and play my mindshrieker. He doesn't flip, swings for 1 (I don't trade but I think I should have in retrospect) and plays island and butcher's cleaver. I draw island and play it and scholar. I don't swing because I want to trade if he equips flail. Why didn't I trade last turn? Gah! He doesn't flip and swings for 1. I don't trade again. Why!?! He follows up with island and moon heron.

I draw island. I play it and say go. I now have two activations of mindshrieker up so maybe that was my plan all along. He doesn't flip but does equip cleaver to delver, flail to heron, and swings. I mindshrieker myself and hit swamp. I do it again and hit armored skaab. Now I'm 4/4 and the best I can do is still trade. I loot into island, pitching high priest, and flip. I trade both my dudes for both his dudes. There are no creatures left in play and I have 5 cards to his 2. He does have two brutally powerful equipments in play though.

I draw stitched drake and play it exiling armored skaab. He has skaab goliath on his turn. I think twice at end of turn into creepy doll. I draw snapcaster mage. I play my own skaab goliath exiling the scholar and the high priest. He equips the cleaver and says go.

I draw silent departure. Huzzah! I bounce his goliath. He dissipates it. Frown. I have nothing better to do now than cast creepy doll and say go. He plays a second delver of secrets, a deranged assistant, and equips flail to delver.

I draw demonmail hauberk. I play undead alchemist and decide to swing with my drake to start getting my mill on. This is a really scary idea since if he happens to have an instant on top I'm going to eat 12 and fall to 5. especially since one of his instants puts a pair of 1/1s in play and pretty much guarantees him the win if that's the card. I get no zombies off of my 3 damage. I say go. He reveals midnight haunting. Well, I deserve to lose. He knocks me to 5 and says go with 3 mana up. I draw armored skaab and play it. I mill island, shimmering grotto, civilized scholar, blasphemous act. If I could get him to cast haunting while I can still play a sorcery I can wrath and not lose. (Snapcaster it!) I can't think of a way to do that though so I say go. He casts haunting at end of turn.

Now all he has to do is spread out his equipment. I can only block one flyer and only have 5 life. He can make it so he has a 4/1, a 3/2, and a 1/1 that does double damage. I can't win. I remember thinking about making a snide comment about how he was lucky to get that one card on top of his deck. Nevermind the fact I gave him that out. I decided I didn't want to be snarky though since I hate people who are.

As it turns out there's another reason to not be snarky... He didn't notice that he had the game won. Or rather he didn't know the rules well enough and thought he did have the game won in a different way. (To be fair I thought the same thing when I was drafting at Matt's last month and had to be corrected...)

He equips the goliath with both pieces of equipment and swings with everything. Now you might think that it's a 9 power trampler that does double damage so I'd need 18 toughness to absorb it all, right? It turns out no. You have to assign at least damage equal to toughness to each creature BEFORE the doubling happens. So I can just trade goliaths and take no trample damage. I also block the 3/2 flyer with my 3/4 flyer and eat his assistant with my armored skaab. Creepy doll blocked the goliath too just in case. I take 2, fall to 3, and kill everything but his 2 1/1 flyers. All I lose is my own goliath.

I draw murder of crows, swing with doll, alchemist, and skaab. I get a zombie. I play murder and say go. he plays voiceless spirit and equips with cleaver so it's a 5/1 first striker. I draw sever the bloodline but have no black sources. Instead I cast demonmail hauberk and equip my armored skaab by saccing the zombie token. Murder lets me cycle a card and I draw blazing torch. Alright! I ditch the sever, play blazing torch, equip creepy doll, and swing. He chump my 5/6 with a 1/1 token. I opt not to looter because I seem to love snapcaster mage in my deck with no non-flashback spells. Probably I was holding on to it in case I needed to wrath. he plays a lantern spirit and says go.

I draw back from the brink. I swing with my 5/6 and he rebukes it. I loot with murder into an island which I discard. I cast back from the brink and say go. He equips lantern spirit with flail and swings with lantern spirirt and voiceless spirit. Creepy doll throws a torch at the voiceless spirit. Murder block the lantern spirit. My opponent then concedes.