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.
Submitted by TheDustin on Mon, 12/07/2009 - 17:55.
My brother sits not two inches away from me, our elbows brushing and occasionally jabbing each other. With my laptop appropriately nestled in my lap we lean forward and stare at an abstraction of two grizzled swordsmen locking blades, hunting for an opening. After a quick exchange of blows, all blocked, we retreat to our respective corners. For a moment we wait. Rushing towards the center, I blast an attack his way. With my sword about to connect my brother raises his weapon in defense, only to realize (too late) that I threw a feint. I seize this opportunity and deal the killing blow, splattering copious red stuff across the screen. And my score count just went up one.
Submitted by TheDustin on Fri, 11/13/2009 - 21:30.
Suggested By:
v21
When I say the phrase "online multiplayer" visions of tea-bagging and PvP probably fill your head. They don't apply here though, as you are playing against opponents across a temporal divide -- not just a physical one. This is indeed a multiplayer game, but instead of duking it out in real-time you face an echo of their playthrough. You know, their ghost. This asynchronous multiplayer brings out some interesting playstyles, and is fun to see in action. The game's tagline is awesome enough that I'll reproduce it here: "So the guy I'm fighting is actually a recording - a recording of a fight against a recording of a fight, all the way back to the beginning of time?"
Mario Zechner took the basic ideas behind Dyson and developed a multiplayer version in Java, along with a series of maps that are much larger than the ones in Dyson. (With the approval of the Dyson developers.)
Go Cross Campus is a team-based world conquest game that updates once per day. It started as a student project, and the original version of the game (and many current instances) pitted teams from different universities against each other -- e.g., at the moment, there's an Ivy League game and an ACC Championship game running.
Once each day, you log on and "energize" -- the number of points of energy starts at 5, but increases for certain things (if your team conquers at least one territory on the last turn, if you log on for 5 turns in a row, etc.). You then issue orders -- moving and/or attacking, which consumes some energy. The ultimate goal of the game is to conquer the entire map.
The key difference between Go Cross Campus and other world conquest games is that production isn't based on control of territory -- basically, the more players you have on your side energizing each turn, the more power you have in the game. So there's a strong incentive to recruit others, which is why the game was an initial hit; as many as 60% of the student body of some universities enrolled.
But the developers have also opened up some games that are open to anyone, not just folks with the right .edu address; the screenshot is of a game that started yesterday, "Political Bash 08," played on a map of the U.S., with teams representing different issues (e.g., Environment, Economic Stimulus -- the idea is pick which one you think is most important). So if you go to the site now, you can join and play the game.
Personally, I find games where you logon for a short period each day congenial; it's a way to get a daily game fix without devoting a lot of time. Not everyone likes the pace, of course. And the game does have one notable flaw; people sometimes sign up for multiple teams, meaning they have access to the private chat channels of more than one, and can "spy" for a different team. Easier to prevent this when only someone with a brown.edu email addy can join the Brown University team, impossible to police in an open game. There's a system for kicking spies out, but it's far from robust.
Still, the team-based nature of the game, the daily update, and the dependence on recruiting make Go Cross Campus both unique and original.
Full disclosure: I did some game design consulting to the developers.
My problem with most cooperative FPS games is that they are not, well, cooperative. The mechanics of your average coop FPS are in fact setup to encourage players to act competitively. Infinite respawns and high-score lists mean most players are just charging ahead, trying to pick up all the ammo and shoot more monsters than everyone else, so that their name appears at the top of a list.
My idea of coop is taking your time before entering a room, communicating, and making sure no one on your team dies. I like to feel like I'm on an adventure with my buddies, overcoming challenges together. So imagine my joy when I stumbled upon a game that delivers just that, and gave me an excuse to play through Quake 2 again.
No, wait! Come back! I know its old, but Quake 2 is still a damn solid shooter from the good old days when a reload key was considered a bit flash. I'm not talking nostalgia here... go and dust off your old copy if you don't believe me. Thanks to freely available modern versions of the engine such as Quake2Max it's still pretty easy on the eyes too.
Vanilla Quake 2 coop has always been a blast. Back in 1998 I sat down with four other guys on a LAN and we tore through the entire game together in one five-hour sitting. Great stuff. We still look back on that Sunday afternoon with fond memories. Coop or Die is not whole new game. It just takes the same core gameplay and adds a bunch of new features that really tighten up the cooperative mode. Gone are infinite respawns, but that doesn’t mean you have to sit and wait until the next map if you screw up. If any player dies, you must restart the level. So suddenly there is a reason to protect your teammates and share resources. Gone too is the scoreboard. You get no extra recognition for storming ahead and getting all the kills. You succeed or fail as a team. Other neat features include the HUD upgrade that shows you the location and health of your teammates and a central server that stores a team's inventory and progress. Also worth mentioning is the death tracking, which creates corpses where players died in other sessions. Walk over them, and you get the players name and how they perished.
However, the feature that really sold me on this mod is challenge mode. As a masochistic gamer who likes to be, quite frankly, abused by Rogue-like games, I am always looking for new games to torture myself with. Put your Coop or Die profile into challenge mode and suddenly you have only one life, for the whole game. That’s right, Coop or Die doesn’t care if you and a friend have spent the last four hours playing; step on a grenade or fall off the wrong platform, and its back to Mission 1. N00b. Suddenly, this shit gets serious. Everyone is focused, even on the easy opening stages. As someone who worshiped at the altar of Quake in the nineties, doing Quake 2 without dying was something I knew I had to do before I could look myself in the mirror and call myself a gamer. And what would be the point of doing it without bragging rights? Thanks to the central server, players who prove themselves will be rewarded with recognition on the website and a number of shiny gold stars on their profile, depending on how many players they completed the game with.
I've watched the community grow steadily over the last year. Though the forums may seem quiet, there are plenty of active players. I've never had a problem finding a good team, and at least two Steam groups exist to help people organize sessions.
So, you think you are a Quake ninja? Think quicksave is what is making this great nation weak? Join me on Stroggos, I still have stars to collect.
N.B.: I have heard people having problems getting Coop or Die to work with the Steam version of Quake 2. So before you run off and purchase a Steam copy just to play this, check if it is going to work first!
Playing Zombie Master I experienced an emotion I’d never felt before in a multiplayer game: Fear. Normally found exclusively in single-player games, fear requires a build up of atmosphere and level of immersion not normally found in the online FPS world. The game in question started like any other, a bunch of guys merrily laying into a horde of zombies with assorted firearms in a shooting gallery affair common to just about any online zombie game of the last ten years. There was even laughter as zombie ragdolls flew through the air. But slowly the humans went down, surrounded and outnumbered. Imperceptibly at first, things started getting claustrophobic. Ammunition became scarce. Finally, only two of us remained. We were surrounded. Then the guttural scream from the next room signified the death of my comrade who had 'just gone to look for ammo'. Suddenly I found myself alone in the darkness. A malignant intelligence was watching my every move, plotting my demise.... I felt scared.
When I was playing the original Command and Conquer, back in 1995, I remember thinking "wouldn't it be cool if all those tanks and soldiers that I'm controlling were real people, running round a 3D battlefield, playing in first person?" I wasn't the only one to think of this. Over the years a few other games have attempted to mix FPS with RTS, but they all seemed to be lacking something. None were on quite a big enough scale for me. Nobody tried to grab the idea and really run with it. But with Empires, after years of disappointment, I'm finally playing the game I dreamt of as a teenager.
Mel Brooks once said, "It´s good to be The King," but when he said that perhaps he was not taking into account the long history of abuse, excess, and belligerence that accompanies that title. It took a game to highlight the nuance. Queens is a brief platform game that, in the history of all the other dozens and dozens of genre-bending platform games we review here, uses one of the assumptions of the genre along with a clever coat. In this case, it's replay: every platform game has you trod along until some new thing or a timing issue kills you off, so you start the level over with a slightly refined neural map and maybe get a bit further. Then the next thing pops out and kills you and you keep at it until you get to the next checkpoint. In this game there are no checkpoints and every time you die you´re killing another innocent woman.
...when you Log In or Register. Gives you the ability to post to the forums and your own blog; to rate games and receive recommendations based on your ratings; and to bookmark games for later reference.
