Super Adventures In Gaming

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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!