Behold Sir Digsalot and his spawn point in the kingdom of Quarteria! From these humble beginnings, I shall dig, and build, and dig some more, and kill, and continue digging until I has achieved dominion over this procedurally-generated medium-sized world! Blonde of hair, Green of Eye, and Plain of Clothes, Sir Digsalot’s story begins as all good stories do:
With an axe.
After the jump, we get our build on. Continue reading →
As you are all no doubt aware, online multiplayer games are filled with trash talk. From Doom to Counterstrike to Halo I’ve had a host of uncreative insults hurled at me. Starcraft II, however, is surprisingly cordial. The vast majority of the matches I’ve played have started with a “gl hf” and ended with a “gg”. I mean, I don’t really wish my opponent good luck. They can have fun, though, as long as they enjoy losing. But I’ll say it anyway, because there’s something so wonderfully formal, almost ritualized about the practice. Like a duel.
I thought maybe I could explain this by the pace of the game. Who has time to make conjecture about their opponent’s sexuality when they need to be topping 100 actions per minute? But if that was the reason wouldn’t the notoriously obnoxious DOTA community be better than it is? It might have something to do with the game’s popularity and long history in South Korea.
After the jump: the proper way to bm.
I have I confession. I’m a turn based strategy gamer. Going back to The Ancient Art of War (1984) I’ve obsessively played most of the non-grognard computer turn based strategy and tactical games. Warlords, Sword of Aragorn, Master of Magic, Civilization, Master of Orion, you name it. Even more perverse, I spent an inordinate amount of time playing clunky multiplayer turn based strategy games. I used to run an online competitive ladder for Warlords 3 — not the Battlecry RTS nonsense, the real one from back in the late nineties.
Sure, I also played all the big RTS games, but the multiplayer never clicked for me. It all felt too arbitrary and chaotic, I felt hampered by not being able to carefully consider my actions. I knew I was missing something, but it wasn’t until I forced myself to play Starcraft II for a few weeks that it all fell into pace.
After the jump, what I was missing all these years.
Continue reading →
Blizzard knows exactly how bad you are at Starcraft II.
In the deepest darkest depths of Battle.net there’s a single number which says precisely how well you play the game. This number (called match making rating or MMR) goes up when you win and down when you lose and it reveals exactly how you match up against every other player in the world. MMR is the cold hard truth. Blizzard is never, ever going to let you see it.
After the jump, what Blizzard will let you see. Continue reading →
The Starcarft II ladder is the perfect home for what I’m going to call the casual hardcore gamer. Those of us who have an obsessive competitive streak but are also saddled with bothersome responsibilities like work. And children. Let me tell you, children will wreak havoc on your gaming time. That precious “single sitting” indie game is going to take you two weeks to finish at best. That 40+ hour eastern european RPG is good for a season, if you even manage to finish it. And you can forget about MMOs unless you want a visit from child services.
But Starcraft II? In an hour or so you can play all the daily Starcraft II a normal man can manage.
After the jump, a normal man tries to manage. Continue reading →
True, Portal 2 can hurt your head if you play it too much. True, the soundtracks on YouTube of people playing Portal 2 are mostly filled with silence or the occasional, “Hummm,” as players struggle to figure out the level. True, sometimes after I solve a level, I am not even sure why it worked the way it did. So why, then, should I keep playing Portal 2 multiplayer?
After the jump, I’ll come up with three good reasons. Continue reading →
The dirty little secret about Portal 2 multiplier is this: It’s dull. It’s incredibly, mind-numbingly slow.
After the jump, more dirty little secrets about Portal 2 multiplayer Continue reading →
Until we declared our major, I always thought the Canadians represented everything that was good, just, holy, superior and right. But after this, it looks like we just might be the anti-heroes, who still win. I’m sure they do. If history says otherwise, then screw history. We’ll rewrite it as a glorious epic entitled “Canadianism: How Jacques LaRock lead the Canadians to a Better Galaxy”; A required reading on every planet.
But after the jump, some vermin surrender to the monkeys. Continue reading →
My son Aaron is deep in thought on his side of the couch.
Playing Portal 2 with him is like playing any first person shooter game with God mode turned on. You really don’t have to worry much about playing the game. You simply move from level to level with impunity, unlocking the game’s secrets or collecting its rewards. This is how I like to play most first person shooters. I am a completest gamer. That means that I play first person shooters to know every secret panel, locked room, or Easter egg and, really, not much else. I think it comes from growing up in the 70s in a big family without much money. I want to wring every ounce of value that I can from the game. I do not want to be killed, blocked, or even low on health. I am perfectly willing to seek out cheats so that I can have the most powerful and devastating weapons, even on trivial training levels.
That’s just how I roll.
After the jump, R.E.S.P.E.C.T.: Find out what it means to me! Sock it to me, sock it to me. . . Continue reading →
Pirates: they got in Canadian space once so they died like the dogs they are; or maggots, which is a more realistic non-swearing term. Next time I saw them, they took out the Drath defenses and stayed there. That’s a punk move. Present agenda: genocide, pirate hunt and more genocide.
After the jump, I get smacked in the face Continue reading →
You know the old maxim about “when a butterfly flaps its wings something something something, Ashton Kutcher makes a surprisingly decent movie in Hollywood”? I had one of those happen to me in Victoria 2. My variation went something like this:
“When a battle goes badly in Tuscaloosa, the people in Java need a stiff drink.”
After the jump, this will all make sense Continue reading →
“How do I do the high-five thing again?”
“Use the D-pad,” Aaron says. He is sitting next to me on the couch, staring intently into the screen. He doesn’t look over.
I look for something D shaped on the shiny black controller in my hand. One of the most frustrating things about Xbox games is the fact that you must play them with these little handheld gadgets. They are as user unfriendly as a television remotes. I feel like I need my glasses to really get a sense for what is going on in my hand. How I long for my keyboard, the simplicity of WASD.
I am squinting in the dark of the living room, holding the controller at arm’s length.
“It only goes up to B,” I say.
After the jump, Dad gets all badass and starts quoting Old Testament. Okay, not really. If he asks you to pull his finger, pretend you didn’t hear. . . Continue reading →
Now you’re my bitch. He paid up even though I’m on the opposite end of the galaxy. That’s respect and respecting Canadians grants you a new lease on life, which expires at my whim. But he went and messed it up and thus I owe him. I owe him a beating for having a class 15 planet and for speaking up.
After the jump, it hits me like a brick wall. Continue reading →
Picking up a new game like this, it’s a good idea to shy away from powerhouses like England and France until you’ve dabbled in some smaller power for a while. I prefer Venice or Portugal as an entry point into the Europa Universalis games. A sort of appetizer, if you will, before the main course. So in Victoria, I figured the Netherlands would be a good pick for a learning game. Probably not a lot of battling, but plenty of money, a touch of colonization, some progressive politics, front row seats to whatever’s going to happen in that patchwork territory that’s going to turn into Germany at some point.
I spend the early decades watching my country grow increasingly industrial and liberal, but not in that order. The Dutch are smart, to be sure. Plenty of education, literacy, tech research. But not much manpower. I can build a few factories, but nothing to keep pace with the rate of industrialization in the bigger countries. I spend most of the 19th century hauling coffee and fruit out of Indonesia. Occasionally, some minor nation defaults on its loans and I send a small army. Victorian era muscle, showing up on some single-province monarch’s doorstep to bark, “Where my money, bitch?” That’s what passes for excitement for the Netherlands.
Before long, I’ve been passed up by the other nations and might as well be playing Madagascar. The top eight nations get to be Great Powers, with unique gameplay mechanics for setting up spheres of influence that affect trade and diplomacy. The next eight nations get to play Secondary Powers, who can take part in the race to colonize the bits of Earth that no one has called dibbs on yet. Everyone else is just kind of hanging fire.
But tomorrow, I get my own piece of America, which ends up being a bit more than I bargained for.
“Wait, crap! What happened?”
My thirteen-year-old son, Aaron, groans upon seeing his character do a virtual face plant after leaping from height in Portal 2. He is sitting next to me on the couch, Xbox controller in hand, and I glance up to his part of the split screen, just as he glances down at mine.
“Did you put your portal over mine?” he asks.
“Oh, I’m sorry, son,” I say. “My bad, my bad.”
I’m screwing around with my portal gun, trying to get a feel for the game. Aaron dismisses my mistake with a good natured chuckle. There was time when I might have had a better grasp of a game as popular as Portal 2. There was a time when, if you had come to my house, you might have found various joysticks and force feedback steering wheels clustered around my computer desk, itself piled high with the cardboard boxes of games, or plastic CD holders stacked in towers. There was a time when I was the last one up in a quiet house, my face bathed in the monitor’s soft blue glow.
Of course, that time is now no longer with us.
After the jump, the prince kills the pauper. No wait, that can’t be right . . . Continue reading →
