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.
Sweet Agatha is an ambitious product in many ways. It's a two-player, limited scope, narrativist RPG; it's a literarily ambitious attempt to marry themes of love and loss to an interactive product; it's a beautifully designed (from a graphic perspective) product that gets destroyed in play.
The story behind Pathfinder is so convoluted and indeed silly that it's worth noting.
Once upon a time there was Dungeons & Dragons. It was a little game published in a small box in three booklets, and it was, actually, kind of a bad game -- very poorly written and rather clunky. But it was the first RPG, and at the time the idea of a roleplaying game was so novel and exciting that it became a huge best-seller.
Turn-Based Battle isn't as satirically perfect as Upgrade Complete or Achievement Unlocked, two games from the same developer with the same snarky metacommentary on common game tropes. But it's still pretty amusing.
Voices & Visions is a Lovecraftian RPG Maker game. As "The Wanderer," you investigate a village where Evil Things are happening, finding bits of prose left here and there by The Prophet and ultimately fighting a final boss battle, getting either the Good or Bad ending.
It has the main flaw of RPG Maker games -- tedious Final Fantasy-esque combat -- but many virtues as well. Indeed, except in rare cases, combat is entirely optional; you don't level up through combat, and there are only a few occasions in which it's required.
The game takes place over ten "days," but time does not pass autonomously; rather, when you choose to go to sleep at the inn, the next day begins. Each day, new things appear in the village, so even if you explore every last area (and some are purely optional dungeons or wilderness areas), you will eventually run out of things to do and want to sleep to see the new content.
The characters who join you are well portrayed, and each have individual personalities as well as "feats" that can benefit you -- abilities that let you (a limited number of times per day) overcome obstacles without using items.
The game becomes somewhat surreal in later days, with the protagonist hearing voices and subject to visions that play an important part in unravelling the game's mystery. This is, to be sure, an unusual aspect to an RPG. In some ways, Visions & Voices plays out more like a graphic adventure than an RPG.
In short, while the game is subject to the limitations of RPG Maker, Karsuman and Craze are pushing the tool in experimental and interesting directions.
The basic problem with this idea is, of course, the insistence that a "game" is a 3D high-poly-count app created for tens of millions of dollars by wageslaves in an EA/Activision/Ubisoft sweatshop.
A Bitter Aftertaste is a jeepform roleplaying game for four players that premiered at Ropecon, the Finnish national roleplaying games convention, in 2007. It is about two lovers who have just had the best sex of their lives, sitting on a balcony overlooking their city, and talking. Something games supposedly can't do, to be sure.
Why does a game about two people talking require four players? Because, of course, the game is a jeepform, and uses several of the techniques common to this game style: inner monologues, "insides & outsides," and imaginary scenes.
Harviainen imposes a narrative arc: by the end of the game, the insecurities of both members of the couple will lead to the loss of their love. Many narrativist "indie" RPGs also impose a narrative arc, but unlike those games, jeepforms have no die-rolls or other external mechanics for either action or scene resolution. They are pure roleplaying -- with a set of rules that allow players to seize and usurp the nature of the roleplaying, complicating the situation. Jeepforms have rules and mechanics, but they are rules and mechanics that control who roleplays what, and when and how. They are, in many ways, closer to "acting games" than traditional tabletop RPGs -- and yet, derive ultimately from the tabletop roleplaying tradition.
At game start, the lovers are chatting on their balcony. Two players represent them, and roleplay freely. At any moment, any of the players -- the lovers, or other two -- may interrupt, and act out an imaginary scene: A scene depicting what is going through the head of one of the lovers. For the purposes of this scene, any of the players may be chosen to represent either the lovers or other characters. As an example, let us say that one of the lovers is Robert, and the other is Sara (A Bitter Aftertaste is gender-neutral, and the game provides for both same sex and heterosexual couples). Something Robert said may have suddenly triggered, for Sara, the fantasy that he might betray her by having an affair with a co-worker. The player theoretically playing Sara on the balcony may not be aware of this fact, until another player seizes the action and grabs other players to act out the scene, one of the players (not necessarily the "balcony Robert") representing Robert, and another the coworker.
One rule of the game is that all such scenes must create doubt. None are permitted to end in happy resolution. And any return to the scenario in a later scene must escalate -- a greater fear, a greater consequence. During such a scene, the "dreamer" -- the person proposing that this scenario is running through one of the lover's head -- may request a monolog. S/he speaks this, facing away from the other players; the other characters do not hear it, but the players do.
Another rule is that imaginary scenes may not establish facts -- only doubts. And a third is that the game must end in a break up.
Like other jeepforms, A Bitter Aftertaste blurs the boundaries between theatrical improv and tabletop roleplaying; indeed, you could see it being performed before a theater audience, and perhaps one day games of this type shall be.
Cute Knight Kingdom is an elaboration of Hanako's older game, Cute Knight, with more places to go, more quests, and vastly improved graphics. This being an indie game, "vastly improved graphics" does not, in this case, mean high-poly 3D virtual worlds, but actual full-color illustrations and 8-bit sprites, instead of the black-and-white line drawings of the original.
Hanako is an American developer, but this is a dojin-style game, with anime-inspired art, mild interaction, and with story and romance at least as important as actual gameplay. As with the original, you are a girl of 18 who, in three years, must find her destiny and happiness -- but that can mean taking almost any path, from becoming a dressmaker to becoming a warrior. Yes, there's combat, of a sort, but you can avoid it entirely if you wish.
As I said reviewing the original game, "somehow you find yourself drawn into her story--and want to drive it to something like a happy ending. In other words, Cute Knight quickly creates a sense of emotional engagement that's lacking in far more expensively-developed and commercial titles."
Submitted by JohnEvans on Fri, 11/06/2009 - 23:33.
In honor of Halloween...Urban Dead is a web-based persistent world game; your character is either a "zombie" or a "survivor", two factions eternally trapped in an urban warzone. You gain experience by fighting, you buy skills when you level up, you have "action points" that accumulate over time.
That much is easy to say, but there are surprising depths to Urban Dead. It's worth playing for a while, and it's even more worth seeing how other people play. There are some interesting aspects of the game when you start out, like: Which skill should I buy first? How do I survive as a newbie zombie? But many players have all their skills bought, and that's where you start getting into the really interesting strategies.
If you read about game design at all, you'll eventually come across something about "second order design". The idea is that game designers create experiences indirectly; they create rules, the rules delineate the players' actions, and those actions lead to experiences that are engaging in some way. The designer attempts to create rules that lead to the kind of experience they're trying to engender. A related concept is "emergent behavior", which arises when rules interact to encourage new actions.
The designer of Urban Dead, Kevan Davis, has set down a number of simple rules delineating what someone could do during a zombie apocalypse. The persistent nature of the game implies that there have to be some times when you're logged off, but your character is still around. Zombies roam the city searching for survivors, so if you're a survivor, you want somewhere to hide. Therefore, survivors hole up in buildings and barricade them. If a building is at all barricaded, a zombie cannot enter it; they can attack the barricade, but success is dependent on a die roll and tends to take a lot of AP. Survivors can enter buildings unless they're "heavily barricaded" or above. Therefore, newbie survivors roam about looking for buildings that are barricaded well but not completely.
From the other point of view, a zombie wants to find a likely building, tear down the barricades and feast on the brains of those inside. However, if you're one zombie against a building with 10 survivors, they're likely to blast you with a shotgun and repair the barricades as soon as they log in again. You could get a dozen friends together and coordinate in real time to break into a survivor safehouse; players certainly do that. But there's another, more interesting way...
When a zombie is face to face with one or more survivors (which usually means they've broken into a building), they can use the skill Feeding Groan. Everyone within a radius of several blocks will hear the groan and its position. Zombies that hear this groan know that someone broke through a barricade--that the survivors are, for that moment, vulnerable, and that a fellow zombie is asking for help.
The result is decentralized organization. Like ants or slime molds, the zombies swarm in where there's a vulnerability. Nobody said "Attack this building"; even throwing 10 zombies at a building might not work if it's heavily barricaded, or if there aren't any survivors inside! But Feeding Groans allow the zombie hordes to organize themselves without a central authority. Each zombie is acting on its own initiative, but for the greater good (in a zombiecentric sense).
From a survivor's perspective, one zombie breaks through and starts groaning--and suddenly a huge fucking zombie horde bursts into the room and totally tears shit up.
Sounds kind of like a zombie movie, doesn't it?
(And hey--those 10 friends coordinating their invasions through IRC or messenger? If they start groaning, they can attract huge numbers of zombies into their little crusade.)
There's more to the game I haven't even touched on. For example, if survivors are killed, they rise as zombies...and some skills let survivors resurrect zombies into survivors. This has fascinating implications for how you play your character; Do you like being a survivor, or a zombie? If you die as a survivor, do you try to be the best brain-eating zombie you can, or do you try to get resurrected? If you're a zombie and someone revives you without your consent, do you just jump off a building to "die" and become a zombie again?
If you're at all interested, you don't even have to play the game, you can poke around the Urban Dead Wiki. It's filled with strategy suggestions, roleplaying tips, humor and all sorts of crazy stuff produced by the (extremely passionate) UD community. Just skimming through will show you what can grow out of a few simple rules.
Justin Hall's company, GameLayers has apparently giving up on its "passive MMO" and jumped on the social network game bandwagon. Dictator Wars is the result. While there's nothing particularly original from a design perspective idea here -- it's a classic social network RPG, like all the Mafia and Vampire-like games you've undoubtedly been spammed on Facebook or MySpace about -- the theme is amusing and interesting.
Misspent Youth is a game of youthful rebellion against authority. As with some other indie RPGs, like My Life with Master, almost everything about the game's setting and conflict is produced through collaborative negotiation among the players and GM. The givens are these: There is an Authority against which the players are rebelling. The players are all friends, between the ages of 12 and 17. And there is some science fictional aspect to the setting. Other than these, almost everything is up for grabs.
You'll find Virtual Villagers 2 on the casual game sites--but don't let that mislead you. This isn't the usual match-three game, but an extremely unusual--and remarkably compelling--game, in which you help an island of primitives survive and thrive. Unusually, the "world" continues when you're not playing--so, Tamagotchi-like, you need to check in every few days to see what's happening and adjust your strategy.
...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.
