Classic

It isn't often that we review classic games, but Nick Fortugno's, experience inspired me to give Chrono Trigger a replay. I'm glad I did, because I was one of those cliche'd individuals that this game made an impression on, and on an adult replay I've gained a lot of perspective on mastery of craft. CT is perhaps the genre king of Japanese Role-playing Games (the queen was not so much a game as a moment: Celes' attempted suicide in Final Fantasy VI). It gains this title for three reasons: first it capture the supreme essence of jRPG aesthetics with Akira Toriyama's character designs combined with Square's then budding sense of interface polish, secondly its narrative made use of archtypes in a way that perhaps seems cliche at first (as Nick pointed out skeptically when starting the game) but then deepens to a psychodrama of cuasation that would make Carl Jung want to write an analysis, and three it took the trite grind of jRPG combat and made it interesting through a handful of simple variations that in combination yield distinct boss fights all the way to the Lavos Core.

Dani Bunten Berry was, along with Chris Crawford and Will Wright, one of the giants of the early days of computer games in the United States. Her work was, throughout his (later her) career, motivated by the idea that games should be social activities; as she put it, "No one ever said on their deathbed, 'I wish I had spent more time alone with my computer.'" This despite the fact that she worked in an era when multiplayer games were hard; her Modem Wars was the first commercially released head-to-head computer games to support online play, published at a time when only a small portion of PC owners had modems.

Rich Carlson has, using The Game Crafter, been recreating classic boardgames, one a week. So far, he's got Hex, Surakarta, a Fox & Geese variant, Three Musketeers and George Parker's Camelot (which is in the public domain). The image to the left is from "Space Ludo", basically Ludo with a space-y board designed by Rich.

If Greg can dedicate an entire entry to Candyland, then surely he can greenlight an article on Roshambo (better known to Westerners as Rock-Paper-Scissors).

The story of Rithmomachy is extraordinary; once considered the most intellectually compelling game of all, even more so than Chess, played by men of learning across central Europe, and rivalling Chess for popularity, it gradually lost appeal, and by the eighteenth century, had entirely disappeared, except as described in moldering tomes.

I don't know why I enjoy adventure games. Why do you enjoy them? Maybe it has something to do with the fluffy hippie-talk that Michael Samyn keeps publishing about people wanting stories over gameplay. That's probably not true, but good storytelling can definitely amplify weakly interactive gameplay into a meaningful experience, and the King's Quest series is according-to-Hoyle proof of that.

The game is remade with voice acting, relatively lush graphics (compared to the 1986 original), and a streamlined interface using the AGS engine. Purists are going to recall the exploratory joys of the text parser, but if you're a new-skool design geek like me, you're going to prefer mouse-driven context-sensitivity. Use an item, right-click to cycle over the the walking icon, and then mosey right along, pretty smooth.

First published in 1959 by Games Research, and continuously in print since then--now in a handsome edition from the Avalon Hill division of the Wizards of the Coast division of Hasbro--Diplomacy is both a superb game worth experiencing today, and a design of considerable historical importance.

Most boardgames published prior to Diplomacy were multiplayer, but in most cases, players interacted with each other in rather minor ways. As illustration, consider Monopoly; there's very little you can do to hurt or assist another player, even though you are playing in the same universe.

On this particular Tabletop Tuesday, it is our honour and privilege to direct your attention to the seminal game Little Wars, designed by the late Herbert George Wells. (Since last week we pointed to a game published in 1904, we thought we'd do something more modern; Little Wars was published in 1913.) And lest some of our readers of the gentler sex take objection to our subtitle, we will note that this is indeed the subtitle Mr. Wells (that advocate of the female suffrage, and proponent of Free Love) chose for his own ouevre.

Little Wars is a game of enormous importance, at least for those of us interested in the historical evolution of games as a medium; the first commercially published rules for gaming with military miniatures, it leads directly to the modern miniatures wargaming industry (including such offshoots as Warhammer)--and indirectly to the board wargame, the tabletop roleplaying game; and to all of the digital game styles influenced thereby, including computer wargames, the RTS, digital RPGs, and (of course) massively multiplayer games.