Tribes Ascend - up your speed with a gravcycle

Free to play and cheap to play (iOS) continues to dominate my free time, with Skyrim being the only big full price game I’ve put any significant time into all this year. Latest “I can’t believe it’s free” treat is Hi-Rez Studios (Global Agenda) Tribes Ascend. It’s just like I remember Tribes 2 being like, a decade ago, except prettier – and less smooth on my aging PC.

It’s really good. If you were ever at all into capture the flag (“CTF”) gameplay, Tribes Ascend is the ultimate form of the sport.

It’s class based, so there’s a lot to sink your teeth into, getting to know the various classes, and finding out what you’re good at. Even if your reflexes aren’t up to capturing flags, you can still be of use in a more tactical role, building and repairing base defenses, or providing  artillery support.

The one thing that sets Tribes apart from other class based team online shooters is movement. It is difficult and very satisfying to get around in Tribes. You should almost never walk. Instead, you’re skiing and flying with jetpacks, looking for optimal hills to gain momentum from towards your target. There’s also a variety of vehicles to mix things up. The joy of a good, flowing attack and escape vector with the flag in hand, reaching a speed so high the defenders have no chance of targeting you, is something I haven’t got out of any other game. It’s kinetic in a way only Tribes delivers. Mount & Blade has some of the same qualities in a successful cavalry attack.

The other thing that’s different from the compeition is the shooting. Few guns hit their targets immediately, requiring the operator to estimate lead time and projectile dropoff over long distances, against airborne targets in ridiculous speeds. The 150 kph airborne joust is a very enticing proposition once you get your head around it. It can resemble trying to hit flying, hostile targets with thrown frisbees. Immensely satisfying when you manage to land a direct hit.

There’s nothing like it.

My favorite screenshot. I knew we had nailed the look at this point.

I’ve been working in the games industry for four years now at Bugbear and on the last day of March, my first game was released for the PlayStation 3, the Xbox 360 and the Windows PC. It’s a re-imagination of the fabled Ridge Racer series called Ridge Racer Unbounded.

Having finished the final product a couple of times now, I can breath easy and say I’m happy with it. I’m certainly happy with the critical reception – basically all of the media I care for liked it, which is so much better than I was hoping for, years ago, thinking about the critical reception of my first commercial game. Although there’s always a lot of things you want to do better, I have no regrets. And in creating entertainment, that’s really the standard we should go for.

I worked as a lead producer, among other things responsible for giving the game and the team a face and a voice. I thoroughly enjoyed the touring, meeting the fans and the doubters and hopefully converting quite a few of them to our side.

When we first set on creating the game, I had this image in my mind of how I’d like the final product to play and feel, and it’s just like I imagined. I did not work in a creative director role, but a game is more than any single person. Everyone who puts their heart into it does mold it in their image. I feel like it’s my game. So there’s those hard to master, larger than life drifts with blazing light trails, there’s a flaming wreck flying just over you in every single race, there’s more gas explosions than you can wish for. And if it all brings to mind Burnout 3: Takedown? Being the best car game ever published, I’m just fine with it.

Making games is awesome. Releasing them is better.

Legend Of Grimrock. Skeletons and dungeons is where it's at.

Almost Human is a new game studio from Finland who just released their first game, Legend Of Grimrock. I’d be a fan even if they weren’t from around here. They’ve done well on Steam and further adventures are all but guaranteed. I do urge you to buy direct from them, though!

Legend Of Grimrock is so faithful to dungeon crawlers circa 1987-1993, it could be called a remake of Dungeon Master. I was a more Eye Of The Beholder kinda guy, being a huge AD&D geek, but it’s the same drill: you have a party of four adventurers in a dungeon. They move by ten-foot steps in four directions and turn by ninety-degree angles. It’s real-time, but movement is grid-based. Very archaic by today’s standards, although Grimrock is rendered in real-time 3D graphics. When I first heard about the game, I wasn’t sure if it could do well, but looks like there’s enough old school guys around who are after that kind of experience even in these post-Skyrim days.

This kind of game hasn’t been around in decades, and there isn’t really anything else like it available. I guess the closest relative is roguelikes and that’s as niche as genres get. It would be interesting to be able to experience Grimrock as someone who never saw the original games. As someone who knew what to expect, it’s so good it makes me wonder if my memory is working correctly – generally the stuff from two decades ago isn’t quite as sweet by today’s standards as we recall. The combination of very clear-cut game rules, exploration and discovery, and really rather tricky puzzles and honestly bloody hard battles is simply fresh.

Someone might scoff at the seemingly arbitrary limitations on movement and weird portrayal of real-time, but Grimrock manages to be so intense, I can’t play it too late into the night if I want to be able to sleep. Survival is always at question and you better be saving after every single room if you don’t like retracing your steps.

Much like Dark Souls, this is a game best enjoyed with company. There’s no way you’re going to find out and notice everything that’s going on in its seemingly simple trappings. It makes me hope that maybe these hard to approach, curiosity required games will be around again.

One thing that Grimrock does better than any other recent game I can think of is storytelling. There isn’t much of it, but it’s expertly handled. The opening cutscene delivers everything you need, and after that the game shuts up, letting the interaction and setting deliver. When I realized how short the cinematic was and how strong a mood it set, I was stunned. Music is very good, but only present in the menus, allowing the dungeon’s oppressive and informative soundscape to overtake your audio space. I’m actually very interested to see what lies in the bottom of the dungeon and if the prisoners ever do get out. It takes guts to be that economical in delivery.

The one game of this lineage I never got to play but was the most intrigued about was Captive. Its scifi trappings and meta-game themes really intrigue me. Maybe someone remakes that, too?

Infinity Blade II screenshot

I’ve started using an iPhone some months ago. I’m not surprised that there’s twenty-six games on my phone right now, plus a bunch I’ve deleted, but that they hold my attention better than the PlayStation Vita games I got my hands on at the same time is surprising. This is a look at what I consider must-play titles.

Death Rally: Remedy’s remake of their old-school PC original (1996) is mobile action gaming at its finest. The one problem I have is due to constant contact with the screen, your driving finger develops nasty friction within a race or two, necessitating finger switching on the fly. Everything else is completely as it should be. The structure of never knowing exactly which races and tracks are going to be playable on the next round keeps you interested, and grinding to max out all the cars and guns keeps you going. The multiplayer is lots of fun.

Triple Town: Triple Town is the best new puzzle game in years. It’s not fully developed yet and the iOS version is not quite as far along as the browser version, but this is casual, engaging, deep puzzling at its best. Cutesy graphics meet hardcore challenge as you get a little bit further into the campaign. It’s essentially match three (think Bejeweled), except you’re building a town, and there’s multiple levels of matching that you need to take into account. Add hostile bears to the mix and you’ve got just the right combination of luck and skill.

Drop7: Drop7 is the other big new puzzler. So well tuned it approaches Tetris levels of “casual” addiction, perfect for killing a minute while waiting for something.

Hero Academy: This was the first iOS game that changed the way I play games. The now very much in vogue asynchronous multiplayer (I play, you play – just like play by mail used to be) works very well in this team-based fantasy sports title. It’s kind of like Blood Bowl meets League Of Legends, with teams of fantasy characters trying to destroy each other’s crystals. Played on a single-screen grid, the scope is just right to allow for varied tactics while remaining easy to grasp. The different teams add the right amount of variety.

Ascension: I thought you couldn’t possibly squeeze a card game into the iPhone screen. You can, at least on the 4S screen it works just fine. The same game is available as a physical card game, too, and I’ve had so much fun with the iOS version I wouldn’t object to picking it up for face to face play. This also sports asynchronous multiplayer, but it’s not a great fit here, as Ascension plays very fast. It would be better with same-time lobbies, turns taking a couple of minutes at most.

Infinity Blade II: I started with the sequel and haven’t yet played the original. This is a gorgeous game with super high production values and unusually strong visual design. It’s a bold take on swords and sworcery fantasy fiction, completely embracing the nature of the platform. The heroic journey is condensed to choosing from a couple of possible routes by clicking on a hotspot, checkpointed by glorious duels. The journey is completed in 15-30 minutes. Then you start again, retaining your experience and gear. The twist is, the journey changes a little bit every time you play. New paths open up, new chests appear, the monsters change, the sparse dialogue changes… a little. The grinding of experience is addictive, the amount of gear lures you in, and the timing and direction based dueling is always tense, always rewarding. Different weapon styles make sure there’s always something different you can try. The addition of “Clashmobs” recently is reason enough to log in daily to see what prizes you could get by participating in global challenges where all the players combine their efforts to meet a goal (kill 65 000 demons in 12 hours, that sort of thing). The gameplay and world remind me of the sublime Vagrant Story and the more recent Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls. It is a glorious game, every bit the mobile game I would’ve loved to make.

So there’s plenty to play and it costs next to nothing. Controls are the one thing that can be a problem, but with all the games above, they’re not. Many of the games plain wouldn’t work without a touch screen (Infinity Blade, Hero Academy) and cases where you genuinely miss a controller are typically bad fits for the platform anyway. All of the games above work as a couple of minutes of play, or hours spent on the small screen. That a game can be so adaptive to whatever time and space you can give it is revolutionary – not because of the portability as we’ve had portable games for a while now, but because of them feeling like viable alternatives to turning on the Xbox. Mobile gaming has grown up and to me, it’s as proper a gaming platform as anything else.

Kung Fu Master (C64) has probably the first videogame woman I ever saw. Couldn't find a picture of her to use here. Just to break the norm on stories about females in games, this is the only image in this story.

I can’t believe I haven’t written about women as characters in games before, certainly I’ve talked about them quite a bit. Inspiration to finally do a piece on this was this article, where the Bitmob community attempted to collectively write about good female characters in games, ones not created just as damsels in distress or there to titillate men. The turnover was really poor. This is what I might have submitted.

I don’t think it’s important to focus on female characters that kick ass. I think it’s important to focus on characters period. As an industry we do horrible things to characters and arguably females get the worst of it. So here as an inspiration is a bunch of characters done correctly.

Uncharted series: Elena Fisher and Chloe Frazer

The Uncharted character drama and love interests have been really interesting just because of a couple of basic things they do. For one thing, every character (except for the lame bad guys… doing bad guys right is difficult, granted) feels like they’re standing on their own feet. They are not there just for the protagonist Nathan Drake to reflect off. You can imagine them going about their own business and having their own ambitions. You can’t predict what’s going to come out of their mouths.

But in terms of drama, the one key thing is that there’s tension in Uncharted. The way Nathan and Elena meet is that Nathan leaves her standing on a pier, intentionally screwing her over. Not a typical video game set up for a love story! In the second game, Nathan can’t make up his mind between Elena and Chloe. Much like Indiana Jones, Nathan Drake is not a perfect nice guy hero – he’s flawed, and all the better for it.

In addition to the character drama written correctly, both Elena and Chloe kick all kinds of ass during the games. They’re very much on the same level in terms of script importance and role activity level as Nathan’s mentor Victor Sullivan – except as females, they’re suitable for heterosexual Nathan’s romantic interests. Also, crucially, it feels like the romance flows both ways. Again, there’s tension. Tension’s good.

Heavenly Sword: Nariko

Nariko’s strength comes from the story – her fate is sealed the moment she decides to pick up the Heavenly Sword, a god-like weapon which sucks the life out of its wielder. Tragedy is something games don’t do enough. She does not have much in the way of character and there is next to no character drama going on, the individuals lost in the grand sweep of epic (literal sense) events. Just being the strong-willed, doomed star of this powerful, simple story is enough. Her visual design is very strong without being hyper-sexual about it.

There’s also a minor character in the game called Kai, who’s just a really cool rogue type girl who could’ve had more screen time in the game.

Portal: Chell and GLaDOS

While being unremarkable is rarely the sign of a strong character, the protagonist of Portal is just that for a long while in the game. Silent like her stablemate Gordon Freeman, her face and body remain unseen, save for fleeting glimpses. You get curious about her. Who are you? Why are you there? Chell’s circumstances and capabilities define her, as they more often should in videogames.

Then there’s the conflict with GladOS. She starts out as another insane rogue AI, but quickly develops more personality. The conflict adds to Chell’s signifigance, too, adding dramatic weight to her plight, and emotional consequences to player agency. At its climax the confrontation brings to mind Ripley vs Alien Queen, a touch of the far too little used motherhood theme creeping in.

Mirror’s Edge: Faith

Faith doesn’t have a lot of personality and her story isn’t very interesting, but the visual design alone is arresting. One of the most striking visual themes of past years is here carried effortlessly over to the protagonist. The other characters have none of the same flair, making Faith stand out even more. Plus she’s just a nice guy, of course you want to hang out with her on the sun-soaked roofs. It bothers me that likely most players made her pick up a gun at some point. I love it that I was given a choice not to.

Adorable picture of Japanese kids playing RPGs. I tried to find the artist so I could link, but couldn't

I have a background in running and playing (mostly running) tabletop roleplaying games for over twenty years. I consider myself highly skilled in gamemastering. My library of games covers pretty much everything in terms of style, mechanics and subject matter. Some of my biggest loves are Call of Cthulhu, Vampire and Dungeons & Dragons.

D&D 4E

In this post I’m talking about Dungeons & Dragons and especially its fourth edition. It can be tricky to run, but done right, it’s the fastest “crunchy” game – something with very tangible, satisfying mechanics – around.

I know there’s the fifth edition being talked about right now, but still a year or two out, so let’s concentrate on what we have right now. And besides, most of this is going to apply to a new edition, too.

In order to get a new D&D 4E campaign off the ground I knew I had to be able to do it with as little time invested as possible. My schedule at work is very hectic right now. I was lucky because I have a good pool of potential players available. To get things going, I just bought the core Essentials books and agreed to have the first game next week. I had no idea what I was going to do.

I’m going to assume you have players available. D&D has been designed for five players. You can go with four, but I wouldn’t recommend going below that as you want some extra numbers against players dropping out of sessions on short notice.

What I do is keep track of potential players and bring them along as guests if need be. If you haven’t been vocal about your love for D&D, you might be surprised by how many players – veterans and lapsed and curious – there are around.

1. Go Essentials

Unless you’re really good in 4E already, you want to go Essentials. This saves up on (money and especially) time spent reading. You can get the basics covered in a weekend. Get the Rules Compendium, Heroes of the Fallen Lands and the Monster Vault box.

The second and third character books are optional, you don’t need them for now. If you’re really familiar with D&D monsters from previous editions, you don’t strictly speaking need the monster box, either, but it’s good for background and pictures – and you shouldn’t underestimate the value of those in a game about the imagination.

What Essentials does is streamlining character creation. The D&D books outside of the Essentials line have a ton of character options available, and making characters becomes a very involved process. Additionally it takes money and a lot of reading.

Read through the Monster Vault book and make a list of monsters you want the players to fight. This saves time later on when you need to come up with monster of the week.

2. Subscribe to DDI and sign up for Power2ool

Get out your credit card and subscribe to Dungeons & Dragons Insider on the Wizards website. It opens up a suite of tools and resources to you, but only one thing is really of value and indispensable when running the game: the Character Builder. You will want to use this to create and upkeep all of the main characters in your game.

The other thing you get out of the DDI subscription is access to a ton of magical items and traps, which is something you miss when only using the Essentials line of books.

You need a printer, too, or else you’re spending lots of time writing out character sheets.

Power2ool is a free web app that frees you from paper and saves time otherwise spent writing notes by hand. Sign up and link it with your DDI account. When planning and running your sessions, you can just drag and drop monsters, traps and magical loot from DDI Compendium into your Power2ool notes. This is extremely useful and key to running the game efficiently.

The monster scaling tool gives you more variety with the monster levels.

3. Get a battlemat and pens (and dice and miniatures)

Any on the fly notes you need when running the game go on the battlemat. Using wet-erase pens, keep track of initiative, monster HP, any ongoing effects, Skill Challenges and of course combat terrain. The visible information helps players focus and fosters team effort.

If you don’t have dice, get multiple full sets (D4, D6, D8, D10, D12, D20). They’re inexpensive. If you don’t have miniatures, you can play without – the Monster Vault comes with a lot of cardboard counters you can use, and really any object can be a stand-in for a character or a monster. I use mostly miniatures from the Descent boardgame.

Encourage your players to look for a miniature they’d like to use to represent their character. It doesn’t matter what series it’s from, as long as it’s roughly the same scale with the others. Warhammer Fantasy Battle and Pathfinder have lots of good options. If they find something they like, that binds them more strongly to the game, making dropouts and cancellations less likely, saving your time.

3. Agree on a rhythm

In order to take away pressure from getting the games organized, always try to agree on the next two sessions when you’re wrapping up for the night. This way even if you have to cancel the next session for whatever reason, there’s already the next game planned.

It helps everyone plan their schedules if you have a steady rhythm agreed with everyone. Every other week should fit most people’s schedules. If you have one player who just can’t commit, find someone else or agree that it’s okay if people drop-in and drop-out.

4. Plan and communicate campaign goals

To maintain player interest with minimal fuss, be clear about the campaign goals. When starting out the game, it would be a good idea to plan the entire first tier of play (“Heroic”). Make a rough outline of what should happen over the campaign up to level 10 and provide your players with goals that cover ground that far.

The goals help the players concentrate and they drive the game. With the goals outlined, you only need to hint towards ways of making progress on them and your players will jump at the opportunity. This makes your job as the gamemaster much easier. Don’t be afraid of feeding the players party motivations that may not be 100% in-character in every player’s mind. It helps everyone.

Make sure the players write down the goals.

Example: the players’ ultimate goal for the Heroic tier is to return to their homeland. There is a series of goals they need to meet to be able to start their journey – gather allies, raise an army, raise funds. These three are major quests.

Another expectation to manage is the style of play. Explain what sort of D&D game you’re going to be running and what your players should expect when they turn up for a game. Talk about themes and rules and roleplaying. This is especially important if your players are not all old buddies at the game table – there are a lot of ways to play tabletop RPGs and you shouldn’t suppose yours is the one familiar to new players.

Make a list of any house rules.

I made a presentation of the campaign goals for the players (PowerPoint). That way any new players can be easily given the same introduction with minimal fuss.

5. Make a campaign outline behind the scenes

Coming up with session ideas can be time-consuming. So do it all in advance when you have time. Over a single afternoon, you can plan your entire first tier. It’s like grocery shopping: doing it in bulk is economic, doing it while hungry is expensive and stressful.

Things to consider are adventures, treasure and encounters.

Planning adventures is easy using the 5×5 method: come up with five plotlines (quests). Divide them into five steps, each one a single adventure, concluding with an epic event. Drop each adventure into a place in your campaign world.

There’s more to it, but just doing this, you can play in a sandbox fashion, not worrying about where your players are going to go – there’s always stuff to do, and it all ties together. Just make sure they’re aware of the ultimate goals of all five quests… and things should pretty much run themselves.

I’ve added a five-step arc to all major characters, too, including the players. It helps keep a campaign running when you can think in arcs.

Pre-plan treasure to minimize between sessions book-keeping. I go for complete sets of magical equipment for all the characters, pre-choosing the loot.

Figure out your encounter budget and pacing. Remember to include skill challenges. You should build a rhythm to it – easy fights followed by tough fights, strings of skill challenges topped off with a tough fight, easy fights if you’re planning a roleplaying heavy session, optional fights if you want your players to have more say in the session’s direction, gauntlets where the players don’t get a rest between fights. I find it convenient to do this for the whole tier at once – that way you can build up thematically to cool boss fights and have a good idea of how many monster types are required.

Done correctly, when you’re coming up to a new session, you already know what the players are going to do, who they’re going to fight and what loot they should get, and how it advances the overall campaign, with no preparation between sessions.

6. Stick to the session plan

Players coming over and you have no idead of what needs to happen in the game? Just look at your map and plot grid (the 5×5 method). Where are they? That alone should tell you what happens next. Once that is sorted, make a note of what scenes and NPCs should feature and jot them down in Power2ool.

If the players are done with the current location and you want them to get a move on to advance another plot, just cut to them arriving to a new location. You don’t have to explain everything in-character or go over the tedium of choosing where to go next, unless there’s drama there.

Then figure out an enemy. You should vary your fights, but D&D lives and breathes through its combat. Thus for every session you should have an opponent in mind the players can fight. Once you have something chosen from your list of cool monsters to fight, locate its card in Power2ool. Pick one or two supporting monsters to round out the encounter.

Pick a place for the fight. There should always be an interesting thing about the set the fight is placed in. You should draft a list in advance of things you could use – movement limitation, dangerous areas, traps, timed obstacles, risky advantages, opportunities.

Then figure out a twist to the encounter. Is there a time limit? What is the objective – it should rarely be just defeating the opponents?

Finally, decide when to stage the fight. Sometimes you should open with it, with characters already in the thick of it, sometimes you should let the players plan for it, sometimes you should surprise the players in the middle of roleplaying.

Avoid concluding the session with the fight unless you’re good in time management. Even a great fight can be ruined by players getting antsy about catching the last bus home.

Skyrim. Hot damn they've improved from Oblivion's tasteless fantasy tropes

My wife got me Ready Player One for Christmas. It’s pretty good for a kid born in the 70s, and its themes of virtual worlds and their relation to the real world gels really well with a science fiction thing I’ve been working on. Then I started playing Skyrim and any of my doubts about where we’re going were swept away.

Forget virtual and real.

When I started walking in Skyrim, immediately after exiting the introductory dungeon, instinctually knowing where to look for specific plants, how to fight, and what kind of moons to look for in the night sky – it’s a (real) place I’d stepped into. This is the third game I’ve played in this world, having spent hundreds of hours in Morrowind and Oblivion, and that’s really the thing for me: it’s not so much a game series as a world, a place, to me. The world in Skyrim is just as I remember it from my previous adventures, only prettier, up to today’s standards. In the case of many other games, I would say lack of progress and feeling of familiarity are negatives, but in this case it’s a major pull for me.

There will be ever more of these virtual worlds with so much personal and cultural relevance – be it through Minecraft or World of Warcraft or Elder Scrolls – that they really do transcend being “games”. When it feels like you’re logging on or booting up to be somewhere else, to meet people and go about your own ambitions instead of a traditional single player storyline, that’s a place, a world we’re talking about.

I don’t think it needs to be an MMO to do this. Guys talking about Skyrim never talk about the storyline – they talk about their own ideas of how to play the game. I’ve spent hours crafting jewelry and armor, really proud of my work and figuring out stuff on my own.

I think the key is giving the player enough freedom to find their own way and view the world from their own perspective.

I’m still trying to get around my general distaste for sandbox experiences. The thing about the Elder Scrolls series may be that they go to an awful lot of trouble to make it feel like a cohesive place instead of a virtual playground (think GTA, Saint’s Row, Mercenaries).

T-shirt design by Penny Arcade

I’ve been running a lot of D&D Essentials lately. I think it’s interesting to see how my initial expectations have fared against nine games into a campaign and a couple of off-shoots.

I’ve ended up with a lot of stuff I have no use for.

The characters are created using the online Dungeons & Dragons Insider (“DDI”) subscription service. You might want to flip through Heroes of the Fallen Lands if you’re a player looking for inspiration, but honestly, I haven’t had a need to open it since subscribing. The computer assisted creation removes a lot of guessing and confusion from the process. We are now also using some characters from the second Essentials player book (Heroes of the Forgotten Kingdoms), but have no real need to get the book.

The Rules Compendium I do use… a bit, even though looking up the rules from the DDI Compendium is often quicker. Mainly the Compendium’s user interface is a bit shit, so when you know where to look for something in the book, the book is preferred. All told I’d want to have it around when running a game, but I rarely open it.

I use the Monster Vault book, but just for pictures and fluff text for inspiration. It has great fluff text! It’s full of adventure ideas and atmosphere. The box and the cardboard cutouts are useless, as we’re using whatever miniatures we have lying around to represent the monsters. The adventure is of no interest, I haven’t even read it. I get the stats and rules from the Compendium, straight into Power2ool.

The Red Box is only useful as a beautiful thing to have on the shelf. The contents I can’t use, although they’re valuable just because they set me down this path. If someone is interested in the game, I could give them the box to go through and they’d have a good idea of how it works.

I’ve ended up with a lot of stuff I do have use for.

Chessex Battlemat and wet-erase pens. Any notes I’m taking, they go on the Battlemat – mostly how the players are doing in a skill challenge, initiative order and monster hit points. All combat encounters are of course drawn on the Battlemat, too. I love the concept so much I think it’s going to be used in also my miniature-less games from now on – it brings an air of open challenge to the table which I really like. My players are totally into it, too, often suggesting ways to draw stuff better and talking about the stats they can see.

Descent: Journeys In The Dark miniatures. I’ve got a big bag full of white and red plastic figures from Descent. So far I haven’t really needed anything else, and when I do, there’s usually a suitable Games Workshop Warhammer miniature lying around. I also think I’ll at some point put a dungeon together just using the Descent modular board pieces. Should be fun.

Dungeons & Dragons Insider subscription. Invaluable when running a 4E game. I have very little use for anything besides the Character Builder, but that alone is worth it. I wouldn’t mind them adding more in the way of managing your campaign (I have complex Google Docs spreadsheets for everything).

Colour printer. You want to be able to print those character sheets and especially power cards.

Deluxe Dungeon Master’s Screen I’m referencing all the time. Plus it’s big, sturdy and beautiful, giving you loads of confidence at the table! Seriously, it’s the best GM screen ever, four panels full of useful stuff.

Power2ool. I believe I’ve spoken of it’s merits at enough length already, but I wouldn’t want to plan and run a game without it. It’s that good.

Essentials really works for me and my group.

If the aim of Essentials was to lower the barrier to entry for new players, they’ve succeeded. We’re having a lot of fun with D&D and spending money, which would likely not have happened without Essentials. While I can now read and understand powers with ease, the “vanilla” flavor of D&D still feels a bit ridiculous to me. The Essentials streamlining is just about perfect.

There are some things that could be even more straightforward. They could’ve done a much better job streamlining the magic users into something more newbie friendly – as it is, I’d never give a wizard to a new player. They’ll be swamped and paralyzed by options.

Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days

I found the first Kane & Lynch an important game. It was not very good as an action title – although by no means bad, either – but it was very interesting.

Games should generally be more interesting.

What made it interesting was its sad bastards of protagonists. These guys are the same in the sequel. They’re bad guys, but human. They’re trying to do right by their own, skewed perspective. They’re trying to meet their own gaze in the mirror, no matter all the shit they’ve gone down with.

What made it interesting was the setting. They used that Michael Mann cool, hard criminal urban aesthetic really effectively. Despite sometimes lackluster graphical technical quality, that game had atmosphere and cool more than it knew what to do with. The sequel does the same thing, only this time with Shanghai’s exotic underground, and nobody can fault their technical execution. It’s a gorgeous game.

But its ultimate triumph was the narrative. Riding as Kane, a morally bankrupt gangster trying to do right by his family, but only knowing his criminal ways and violence, makes a sad mess of his already messed up life, and every attempt he makes, he just draws himself and everyone he loves deeper into a hopeless situation. It was intense. Games are rarely intense on a narrative level.

It is this last point IO Interactive fumbles in the sequel. It is still an interesting title and well worth the ride, but the narrative just doesn’t have the same gravitas.

The problem is that the protagonists are mostly reacting to stuff happening to them. They don’t take action. They don’t plan. Run and gun can never replace intent. When you decide that you are going to do a Bad Thing and then you carry it out, that’s powerful stuff. When dudes show up to shoot you up, shooting them up isn’t very interesting.

They do still know how to use their setup for very effective scenes. There are multiple memorable moments in the game. But the shocks are never as effective as in the first game, and that’s because you don’t have a similar emotional bond to these absolutely flawed protagonists. You don’t care.

I felt very conflicted about playing the first game, because on a level I did sympathize with Kane’s plight, but goddamn, he made a lot of very bad calls and did a lot of very bad things. This was not an easy man to like. In the sequel, mostly because the guys are constantly under fire and on the run, it’s easy to side with them. Of course it’s okay to shoot at guys who are shooting at you. Of course it’s okay to blast some guys who have just tortured you and killed your girlfriend.

While the central conflict is not as engaging, the gloriously improved, stylized presentation makes up for it. This is a journey well worth taking, if not living up to its full potential. Kane & Lynch titles are some of this medium’s bravest writing and for that alone they’re worth your time.

Dark Souls

I had to have Dark Souls on the PlayStation 3 instead of Xbox 360 because of the free multiplayer. (I gave up on Xbox Live Gold due to over a year of not using it.) This is surprising considering that there is little direct playing together with other people going on. I’ve played for over 30 hours and had one invasion where another player enters your game with intent to kill. Aside from that, I’ve had other people helping out with boss encounters a couple of times.

Dark Souls is an oppressive game, but don’t believe the marketing: it’s not as difficult to approach as Demon’s Souls.

Part of it is due to the world structure. It is a big open world without loading, and from the beginning, you can go in so many places. Many of them are insurmountable until you’ve gained a lot more experience. As you find how places relate to each other and find shortcuts, you gain a mastery over the virtual world that you never reached in the previous game. It feels like drawing back curtains to reveal new sets.

The other thing is that the game is just not as difficult as Demon’s Souls. The checkpoint system (bonfires) give you a fair bit of freedom to control what happens when you die. The health system with the health potions which refill automatically upon death makes things a lot less grind-y.

Still, the atmosphere is one of being alone against a very hostile world and its hellish denizes. Even if you’re not playing with the other people all that much – aside from being invaded sometimes and summoning help with the bosses at times – you really appreciate the knowledge of being connected, sometimes seeing ghosts of other players resting at the same bonfires you are. The otherworldly messages can be very helpful, too. It’s dangerous to go alone.

I would have perhaps expected From to make playing together between friends easier in the sequel. No such development is evident and although I sympathize with the internet crowd’s frustration over this, I get it: being able to effectively co-op would destroy the game’s mood.

But the reason Dark Souls is the most social game in years for me is that its lack of hand-holding and instructions, even with key game mechanics, forces you to talk to other players. You go on the forums and you talk to your colleagues, figuring out how to proceed, because you don’t really have an alternative. Conquering this game alone, back before the internet, would’ve been a Herculean task. I don’t feel like I’m cheating when I go on a Dark Souls wiki – to me it feels like the way the game was meant to be played. It’s a gauntlet thrown down (lovingly) by From, and we take it up as a community.