arne360

Tales of PC gaming from the DOS era

Over on GameSetWatch, John Harris is writing a bi-weekly column, called @Play, which takes a look at various games termed “Roguelike” — a term I’ve never heard of before, but it’s a genre I’m familiar with. Last week, he took a look at one of my favorite games of the DOS era, which was appropriately called Rogue.

I can’t recall how I first come across Rogue, although it most likely got passed on to me by one of my best friends in high school. I do remember how I was instantly hooked by it’s familiarity to the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons mythos where monsters were just what they were and potions, spells and armor all had simple intuitive names. I loved the challenge of finding the secret doors and heading deeper into the random dungeons generated by the game, and by never knowing what spell, wand or potion you picked up until you used it. And very often you never know what it did unless you had that “Scroll of Identify,” whose name was garbled in the first place, so you just had to use it by chance to find out what it was. I often named items whose effect I was not sure of really stupid things. One scroll, upon it’s use, says something along the lines of “You feel like you are being watched,” so I just called it “Watch.” And I still do to this day.

In his post for @Play, John Harris takes an indepth look at the gameplay mechanics of Rogue, revealing that it’s simple graphics and interface were extremely deceiving. Sure the monsters were simply chosen to represent the twenty-six letters of the alphabet, sure all you did was explore and fight, but the game is apparently extremely difficult, if not nearly impossible, to win. And John details this aspect I had never realized. I just thought I was bad at the game. I didn’t realize that what I was doing was playing the game all wrong. This game was about speed, go through the dungeon as fast as possible because everything will likely kill you because your character is so weak. And food! I never really thought about how having to eat food when you are hungry added another challenge to the game. I didn’t even remember you had to eat food. Instead, I tried to spend my time grinding for levels and equipment, exploring every hallway and every room for every bit of gold and equipment I could find. I didn’t know that the game was stacked against you, and it was exactly how Rogue was unfair, but it was exactly what made me keep going back. Just one more time into the fray, “this time I can go farther,” I would think to myself. Only to die even earlier than before, unless I was lucky.

I would have never imagined what the game was really all about if I hadn’t read this column. Nor would I have searched out to see if I could find a download of this freeware game, which turned out to be readily available at the Dos Games Archive. Now when I play it, I barely make it past the second dungeon. Have I not learned or is this game much harder than I remembered?

A weekly summary of what is being talked about quite a bit in the gaming community.

PLAYSTATION 3 worldwide launch is a no-go: Only 400,000 units in North America and 100,000 units in Japan at launch; rest of the world sees delay until March 2007

Far and away the most discussed and debated topic this week comes from Sony’s announcement late Wednesday night (for me, on PDT) that their worldwide launch plans have altered significantly. If you don’t know what the details are you must have been living under a rock! I guess the Sony Computer Entertainment Europe press release can bring you up to speed:

Sony Computer Entertainment Europe (SCEE) today announced that it would revise the launch date of its PLAYSTATION® 3 computer entertainment system in the PAL territories of Europe, Russia, Middle East, Africa and Australasia from 17th November 2006, as previously announced to March 2007.

When other news outlets such as the International Herald Tribune, who attended the press conference in Tokyo, posted their stories, everyone was treated with another shocker with the number of consoles that are projected to be available at the U.S. (400,000) and Japan (100,000) launches this November.

This news resulted in bannings, thousand post threads, message board server crashes, intense debate and trolling and at least two feature articles and twice that many news stories on Gamesindustry.biz. Joystiq even compiled a list of less than complimentary quotes from all manner of online media sites from Europe about the delay. Seriously, who in Europe and Australia (among other places) would actually be happy about this news, so it’s not surprising.

On message boards, the thread on NeoGAF exploded to over 1,000 posts in less than less than tweleve hours while Sony’s English language community forums in Europe crashed. Supporters of all three console came out in full force although nobody could refute this was bad news. It seems most people think that the low number of units at launch in Japan pretty much handed Nintendo the market over there. Europe, well, nobody was still happy there, some felt resigned to waiting yet again and others will import — no surprise. On the U.S. PlayStation forums, some posters still did not believe the launch allocations for some time and it seems like they still might not based on their interpretation of the reporting from various sites. Despite still looking forward to launch, there’s still a seed of doubt in some poster’s minds on how well launch will still turn out.

Joystiq lets their most prolific and most junior contributor go

There’s no denying that Robert Summa has driven a lot of discussion this week. He drove several threads on NeoGAF, TeamXbox and no doubt several other places stemming from a posting on Joystiq that he had some key next-generation console news coming late on Thursday night. Everybody, including other journalists, who likely thought that did not receive the embargoed news, were whipped into a frenzy as Joystiq is no small site. Nobody had any clue what big news could be released on a Friday and by whom in the next-gen console space. When 12:01 a.m. hit, the news that IBM has been shipping the CPU to Nintendo for the Wii for some time now was less than well received. Blog readers and message board posters fell for the hype they had built for themselves in the hours between the tease and the announcement. When the dust settled, Codicer at posted on the Evil Avatar forum that the comments on the post made it seem like the readers were “almost personally wronged, like Joystiq owed them something.“

An hour later, Joystiq posted an apology which perhaps even referenced NeoGAF, at least the board regulars thought so. By next afternoon, Robert was no longer at Joystiq and found a new job at Destructoid, where he posted some biting remarks while he detailed his feelings for what happened. Both the move by Joystiq and Robert’s first post on Destructoid left no small impression on the community. Notably, Evil Avatar and CMP Media’s GameSetWatch blog all provided their impressions on what happened. There is no shortage of opinions on what happened as best demonstrated by the debate-filled NeoGAF thread on it — there were people on both sides of fence and some even on the fence. However, the disappointment for falling for the hype was clear, no matter who was really responsibile for letting it get out of control.

Take a look at what Sony’s “Entitlements” could really be in the future

On the topic of NeoGAF, a new feature article got posted on their forum portal page which I encourage you to read. Written by board member Panajev, “It’s All About the Entitlements” is an in-depth look at a patent Sony has applied for titled “Incentivizing software sharing through incentive points” (US Patent and Trademark Office). I’ll let the article speak for itself, but it does paint a somewhat interesting or scary image (depending on where you stand) on where a large console maker could go with word of mouth incentives and in tracking unique instances of game discs.

Last week I wrote about Tony Hawk’s Project 8 when I had read about the “Nail the Trick” feature in the upcoming game in OXM. By the end of the week Activision and Neversoft released a video tutorial for “Nail the Trick” narrated by Rodney Mullen. I was already sold by the time I read the article, but this video made made it so I cannot cannot wait for the game to be released.

Check out the video on Gametrailers.com below.

Windows Media: Standard Definition | High Definition
QuickTime: Standard Definition | High Definition

A weekly summary of what is being talked about quite a bit in the gaming community.

(Running a little late this weekend with the holidays, shenanigans and what not. This week I will return to Saturday posting of this summary.)

Xbox 360 Backwards Compatibility Update

This week Microsoft released another sizable backwards compatibility update, which comes hot on the heels of yet another thread on NeoGAF pondering the current state and future of Xbox 360 backwards compatibility. The update was forty-eight games and now adds some other titles I just have to pick up like Fatal Frame 2: Crimson Butterfly and rare US-release of Sneakers — yeah, don’t poke fun, thanks. On top of that, this most recent update blew a long-running conspiracy theory floating around about Xbox 360 BC on NeoGAF and other message boards out of the water.

This theory was that Microsoft would not release the backwards compatibility option for either an Xbox game that hasn’t been released yet or an Xbox game that also had an Xbox 360 version or both of these. With the inclusion of Lego Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy both of these theories have been disproven. Spyhunter: Nowhere to Run and The Legend of Spyro: A New Beginning further adds weight to disproving the theory, something the Gamerscore blog also points out.

Message board poster and PS3 fanboy reveals unknown information, how much of it is true?

Hands down,the fastest growing thread on NeoGAF last week was easily this one posted by typhonsentra, where he quoted an excerpt from a thread titled “PS Questions Answered! (Bonus PSP info)” on the General [M]ayhem message board. Many think the Scrivener is an insider, possibly at a Sony first-party developer even, not only based on his information — which would be dismissed would it come from someone else — but because he proved some point by previously mentioning an upcoming PSP bundle and detailing it’s contents including UMD movie titles perfectly. Among other things, Scrivener mentioned that Resistance: Fall of Man currently stands over 20 GB in size, days before the MTV feature on that very title came out. This has made many people believe, beyond the obvious hyperbole when describing some of the games, that he is not only legit, but feeding out information which will come true in time and doing so very deliberately. He even states in the lengthly General [M]ayhem thread that he got approval before posting any information, which did bring up some questions as to what he aims to do.

Apart from all of that, there is no doubt some of what Scrivener says is true, some of it is clearly (fanboyish) enthusiasm and some of it is pure speculation (such as the possibility of a 4x Blu-ray drive instead of the announced 2x drive). No matter what anyone thought aboutt him and his information, nobody could stop talking about him and the thread saw all manner of defensive statements, damage control by the opposite side and jokes. Time will tell just how much was frenzied hyperbole and how much was wishful thinking. I have no doubt someone on NeoGAF saved that thread to bring up at a later date to compare.

Assassin’s Creed rumors end, multiplatform confirmed

This week, Ubisoft announced that Assassin’s Creed would be released on the Xbox 360, confirming it as a multi-platform title after revealing it would be PC bound earlier in the week. Since E3 2006 and based on Ubisoft’s statements that Assassin’s Creed was only announced for PLAYSTATION 3, many inferred that the title would be exclusive to Sony’s console. On top of that, Assassin’s Creed picked up a lot of hype at E3 based on the excellent trailer released at E3 (embedded below) and closed doors presentations to the press, seemingly strengthening Sony’s third-party stable.

Discussion started over on NeoGAF around 7:00 PM Pacific when Zonar spotted that IGN had updated their Xbox 360 landing page feature graphic with the Assassin’s Creed news. It was taken down within an hour and speculation ran rife on when the announcement would be official, if the different platforms would get the game at the same time and what reasons and motiviation may be behind the marketing. Luke over at 1Up posted that the October issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly would also confirm the announcement, but that the feature would not answer a lot of these very questions that the guys over at 1Up and EGM were wondering too. Seems those questions will go unanswered for now as the lists for third-party exclusives for any console dwindle by one. At least this great looking title has the chance to be played by larger group of people than if it had stayed exclusive, from what little I’ve seen, Assassin’s Creed deserves it.