Same place, different weather

I have just revisited Fable II to play the Knothole Island downloadable content (a sort of mini-expack from Xbox Live) and actually finish the game, which I hadn’t quite managed when it was released (having been interrupted by the appearance of Fallout III).

The gaming press’s main complaint about Knothole Island is that it’s too small for the money (800 Microsoft Points from Xbox Live, currently ten bucks). Maybe so; it represents only a couple of hours of gameplay plus some new items (a couple of which however provide significant new options, so in that sense it can be considered a mod). That’s between each player and their pocketbook, however.

Knothole Island provides a new region with one questline in three parts. When you install the expack and start Fable you’ll be notified that a new quest is available at Bowerstone Market; go there and you’ll be taken to the island, which has a meteorological dilemma. It’s stuck in winter, and the keys to the totems necessary to change the weather are located in three shrines behind critters, traps and puzzles. There’s a series of books to find, which give you a rather thin backstory “explaining” this situation, and also explaining why there’s a set of plate armor whose pieces are scattered around the place. Naturally your job is to bring back the three totems.

The three shrines, like all of Fable’s dungeons, are highly individual and rich in detail — although Fable clearly uses a dungeon “tileset” like Morrowind and Oblivion, with recurring objects and architectural elements, great lengths have been gone to to give each one a unique character, including lots of hidden areas and surprises. The enemies are nothing special, unfortunately; no new species here. The puzzles are all variations on “hit the flit switch with the appropriate damage type” (ranged, melee or spell). The harder ones, which present the real challenge, require you to do this in a particular sequence on a timer, starting over if you fail. The most annoying “puzzle” would have been a jumping puzzle in any other game; in Fable, however, your character cannot jump at will,  but must be standing at a particular trigger point. In this particular puzzle the “you can jump here” indicator was misaligned with the actual jump points, so I spent a lot of time wondering why my character wouldn’t jump when the interface (and any idea of real-world physics) said she could.

The really novel and interesting thing about this area though is the island itself. Under the three weather conditions of snow (and ice), rain (and floods), and sun (and drought), different parts of the landscape are hidden or revealed, and you have access to different treasure chests, dive points and dig spots. While the weather-changer concept is not completely new (the same thing was featured in the first Morrowind expansion pack), the effect on terrain and hence gameplay is inventive and well-implemented. On that basis I’d recommend it to jaded RPG players who think they’ve seen everything.

As for the items: besides the the collectible armor set and book series already mentioned, the most significant is an augment remover tool which you can use to take your best augment out of your outdated weapon and put it in your shiny new one. Nice to be able to use your best augments without worrying about losing them next time you upgrade your gear. There’s an augment shop on the island with some excellent new augments, too.

The other really interesting items available on the island are purely cosmetic: potions that adjust height and weight and add or remove scars. This I find puzzling, since the whole point of the way Fable handles your character’s avatar is that your appearance should directly reflect your gameplay. I guess the inclusion of these potions represents a nod to those players who want to customize their avatar as is allowed in other RPGs; I’ve certainly seen players complaining about it in forums. In my view, however, this takes away one of the game’s most distinctive characteristics.

Besides these things, there’s a shop where you can trade mundane items like carrots, wine, or particular books for “surprise” items. You’ll know what type of item you’re buying, but not exactly what it is, and the items are all unique to the island. The shop represents a fun diversion for completionist-type players: yet another collection quest along with the demon doors, gargoyles, expresssion statues and so on, and the item design is attractive.

I encountered a couple of small glitches in the add-on. Besides the jump problem described above, the lore books are miscategorized in your inventory, appearing under “miscellaneous” instead of “books”. Mild compared to a couple of quest-breaking glitches found in the main game.

All in all, I thought this was a fun addition to the game. Though the combat and puzzles didn’t particularly impress me, I enjoyed the atmosphere and the story. And I thought the use of weather as a real gameplay mechanic rather than mere eye candy, as it is in most RPGs, was ingenious and very well implemented. I’d like to see more of that in games. Still, if you’re looking for hours or days of new gameplay, you won’t get it from this add-on.

My gamer friends are divided into two camps on popcorn. There’s the old fashioned stovetop crowd and the hot-air-popper crowd. I’m in the latter group, naturally, since it means less dishes to wash — and also a lower-calorie snack, since you don’t need oil.  But suit yourself :)

Start some popcorn popping.

In a small microwavable dish (ramekin, custard cup, teacup or the like) put a couple of tablespoons of real butter. (If you use salted, don’t add salt to the popcorn.) To this, add a tablespoon or so of powdered chili, according to taste. You can use chili powder, which has other spices mixed in, or plain ground chilis. Melt the butter in the microwave.

Put the popcorn in a bowl and drizzle over it the melted butter, which by now will be bright orange. Note: You need less butter using this method than if butter is your only topping, since it’s more flavorful.

Toss and eat :)

Variations:

• adding a little bit of cinnamon to the chili gives an interesting flavor
• sprinkle some finely-grated Parmesan over the whole thing, after you add the butter – delicious but ups the calorie count

Will it explode if I click this button?

Just a note — I’m not gonna be linking all the info about every game I talk about in here, that’s what Google’s for ;) But if I see something unusually informative I’ll post it.

This new article from a Brazilian fansite has an awesome description of the Sims 3 interface, explaining every button. There’s lots of other interesting info too, some of it new, like exactly what happens when you start up the game.

And best of all:

“Q: What will we do until The Sims 3 is released? Is it possible to release an independent CAS?

A: The idea is that you enjoy the most your Sims 2, because we will eventually abandon the game when The Sims 3 releases. But something really mentioned on Creator’s Camp was the release of an independent CAS (like on Sims 2 and Spore). The Sims 3′ team is really thinking on releasing something like this to the players. Now we can only wait to see if this is really going to happen.”

Puzzle em to death!

OK, I tried to put a brave face on it, but I was depressed by the Sims 3 delay. So I was delighted when I realized that another game I’ve been looking forward to for some time — Puzzle Quest: Galactrix — is coming out at the end of the month (look for it Feb 24, initially on PC, XBLA and Nintendo DS, though it will most likely wind up on every platform in the known universe). This one’s a space opera called “Puzzle Quest: Galactrix”, and if it’s anything like its predecessor, it could keep me distracted for a good long time. You can get the flavor of it right now: there’s a playable online combat demo and a gameplay demo available from standard download sites (I got it here).

The first Puzzle Quest game, Challenge of the Warlords, was a blend of a match-three puzzle game — think Bejeweled — with a full-fledged open-world RPG. From the RPG side, the game has it all: a class system, a long, deep main quest and lots of optional sidequests, a party system with party member specific questlines, expandable player stronghold, town sieges, mounts, crafting and more. All executed with graphics consisting mostly of still 2D paintings, and a combat engine provided by a competitive version of the puzzle game… which also, in numerous variations, serves as the crafting system, the mount taming system, the spell training system and so on.

Odd though it sounds, PQ CotW was a surprise hit. It started as a handheld game (hence the lo-tech graphics) but quickly spread to consoles and the PC. A couple of versions had an expansion, “Revenge of the Plague Lord”, which doubled the number of classes, raises the level cap and adds a large new region. Although it sounds like a “casual” title, it has very broad appeal, with my hardest-core shooter-playing, WoW-raiding gamer friends all getting sucked in by it. I suspect the secret is the combination of two different types of compelling gameplay: addictive puzzling and compelling “just one more before bed” questlines.

Galactrix takes the same formula and moves it into space… dropping the conventions of the high-fantasy RPG genre and replacing them with sci-fi conventions (think Freelancer, Mass Effect, or Spore’s space phase). As in those games, there’s a huge galactic map, with jump gates connecting dozens of star systems, which contain shops, stations, minable asteroids, and other features.  The game is classless — you develop your skills as you see fit. Instead of spells you have weapons you can equip your ship with, and you can even aquire additional ships (up to three), letting you tailor  your weapons systems for particular enemy types.

In the demo, you can get four crew members, three of whom open up minigames: mining, crafting and hacking. Mining (as well as combat) nets you resources which can be traded at space stations, and involves a minigame where you have to match resource tiles to collect a specified number of three resources. Crafting makes new weapons for your ship; the minigame has you match colored tiles to create components, and match the component tiles with each other to collect them. Hacking opens up jump gates, and is achieved by matching colored tiles in a specific color order with a timer ticking.

The puzzle combat system is similar Challenge of the Warlords, with a few differences which combine to make for more dynamic play. The tiles are now hexagonal, which means you can match in three directions instead of two. You also have some control over how tiles fill in the holes: they will “fall” in the direction of the tile you moved (in the default arrangement, there are items and locations that can change the game’s “physics”). These two features give the player significant new strategic opportunities and make it livelier. You’ll spend less time looking for a move… ANY move… and more time weighing which of your options is most advantageous.

Finally, since this is a space game, there have to be shields to destroy before you can damage a ship’s hull. The blue tile color serves to replenish shields; the rest of the tiles function like their counterparts in CotW. Red, yellow and green tiles provide various flavors of energy which are used to power your items, just like mana/spells in CotW; white and purple tiles provide two different kinds of experience, for regular and “psi power” leveling; and mines, like the original skulls, do direct damage to the enemy. Coins are gone; in Galactrix, your income derives from the mining/trading sim.

The demo gives a good feel for the game’s flavor. I played it through four or five times; my only complaint was that it’s far too short ;) It certainly heightened my anticipation for the full game. In fact at this point I’m enthused enough that I picked up the CotW expansion on XBLA, to play till Galactrix comes out; more about the expack later.

Update: The page I linked above has been taken down, at least for now. Here is the full text of the statement that was posted. (Some fans are arguing that this is not genuine,  but I see no reason not to believe that it’s the final statement, inadvertently posted a bit early — note the time — and taken down a couple of minutes later.)

EA announces New SHIP date for the Sims 3

February 03, 2009 21:20 PM

Highly-Anticipated PC Game from Best-selling PC Franchise Slated to Ship June 2, 2009

REDWOOD CITY, Calif., February 3, 2009 – Electronic Arts Inc. (NASDAQ: ERTS) today announced that The Sims™ 3, the highly-anticipated flagship game from the best-selling PC franchise, The Sims will launch across the PC, Mac, iPhone, iPod Touch and mobile devices summer 2009. The Sims 3 PC will ship to store shelves worldwide starting June 2, 2009.

“The Sims 3 is an incredible game that lets you play with life, create art and show off your creations,” said Ben Bell, Executive Producer, The Sims 3. “In the game, players are inspired by endless creative possibilities like the new Traits and Lifetime Wish features which allow players to create Sims with real personalities and destinies. Players can then take their Sim into town to interact with other Sims in the game and capture the action on video to show off online.”

“The June launch combined with the break-through game the team is building gives us the perfect runway to create awareness for The Sims 3,” said Russell Arons, Vice President of Marketing for EA. “The Sims 3 will be the original IP summer blockbuster of 2009 as we build off the success of the best-selling PC franchise of all time to create awareness with both loyal Sims fans and new players.”

Anyway, the press release makes the best of what must be a bad financial shock for EA, already in some economic trouble, by promising us an advertising blitz.

Some of us don’t need any more awareness than we’ve got, but at least we can be happy that we’ll get a more polished game. And I can absolve EA of the charge of preferring an on-time release to a functioning software product.

Looks oddly like the Sims in Spore!

My friend Jayzen messaged to clue me in on the next Spore expack, which turns out to be a quest design tool.

Spore. So full of promise. Such a disappointment to so many. What was odd about it was that the tech which players were looking forward to so eagerly was all there, and worked pretty well: the creature editor, the random worlds, and especially the ultra-long zoom from creature to planet to solar system to galaxy. The social aspect (which consists of automatic content sharing) worked well and was fun too — my friends and I enjoyed running into each others’ creations and blowing em up or cozying up and comparing notes.

But the gameplay felt patched together and shallow: a series of four quick and simple mini-games strung together, followed by Space… which was bigger and deeper, but not enough to compete with real games in the space sim/strategy/trading/combat genres.

Some of it was fun nonetheless. Creature design was entertaining, civ phase could be a blast, and I for one particularly enjoyed the terraforming aspect of space phase, where you can transform a lifeless rock into a Garden of Eden with the application of heat, moisture and life. Got a good couple weeks of enjoyable gameplay out of it, but Spore was a game we’d hoped we could play for months or years, and it came nowhere close to that.

The first expack was a disappointment as well: what the game desperately needed was more gameplay, and instead, we got decorations in the Creepy and Cute parts pack.

Expack two, however, is taking a new approach. It’s an in-game level editor that lets you transform a planet into a new minigame, something like a quest in an RPG, which will be shared via Sporepedia like your critters, buildings and vehicles. You get new goals, new obstacles and new special abilities you can use to overcome them. The quests will be available from Space Stage, apparently given by alien races you’re trying to impress. And you’ll carry them out by landing on a planet and playing your creature up close and personal, like Creature Stage all over again.

Clearly, the success of this expansion is going to depend on both the skill and creativity of the player community and on the versatility of the building blocks that EA provides them. We already know the concept is a winner — games as diverse as Half-life and Morrowind and the Sims proved how much life a mod toolset could add to a game with a devoted following, and more recently, Little Big Planet proved that a game built around its level editor could be a huge seller. The concept goes back much further than that, of course; as Jayzen said (in response to a Spore dev comment on  a video that this is “a first”):

*cough* adventureconstructionset *cough*
*cough* from the 80s *cough*

This is a first in one way, however. While lots of games have offered modding tools after the core game’s release, as far as I know they’ve always been free. Selling a level editor as an expansion is novel, and it makes you wonder whether it sets a trend for other games… especially, Sims 3 ;)

Anyway, if the quest-building tools are rich and varied enough to support players’ ideas, we may have a winner. If they’re as thin as Spore’s earlier gameplay, maybe not. Though even in that case, there’s a thriving mod scene that may be able to extend the tools; if so, the community may yet be able to rescue the title from the twin demons of thin content and repetitive gameplay.

Which makes it a good time to pick up the DLC (downloadable content, small game additions) that has come out for both Fable 2 and Fallout 3 in the last month. Fable has Knothole Island, while Fallout has Operation: Anchorage. Yes, both of these addons have received less than glowing reviews (Knothole/Anchorage), but since I never finished either of the original two games, it’s nice to have the incentive to go back. I’ll try em out and let you know what I think in the next few days, and talk a bit about the base games too.

BTW, Fable 2 is still Xbox-only, though it’s a good bet it’ll be out for PC eventually; the add-on costs 800 Microsoft Points, or ten bucks. (The Xbox is the only console I own, so don’t look for PS3 reviews here.) Fallout 3 is available on both the PC and the Xbox; I got the PC version, since knowing Bethsoft well from my intensive involvement with the Elder Scrolls series, I knew I’d want quick access to both patches and mods. The Fallout addon costs 800 points from either Xbox Live or Microsoft Live Marketplace.

Yeah, Fallout’s modding tool, the GECK, is out now too; it’s a free download. I’ll try to check out the mod scene while I’m at it.

Sims 3 learns from MySims

MySims was originally a Wii game, so even though when it first came out I thought it looked pretty cool, I wasn’t able to play it till this past Fall, when it finally came out for PC. It’s not a deep game, but I’m not always a deep person, and I enjoyed it for about a week. MySims has straightforward gameplay: you collect objects called “essences”, take them to the woodshop, and use them to craft furniture, which you use to lure gullible visitors into making your town their home. OK that sounds weird, and it is ;)

The weirdest part is the essences, which can be used as 3D objects (in which case they function as building blocks, and can be combined in the shop with boards of various shapes) or as paint (in which case each essence gives you a choice of two patterns and two solid colors that can be used to texture your furniture).

There are dozens of essences that have to be grown, mined or fished up at specific locations. For instance, in the Japanese forest there’s a grassy area where you can dig up, um, two kinds of cake, and bacon. (A fridge made out of bacon would surely attract that visiting glutton!) Ravens, textbooks and chess pieces grow on trees. Happy essences fly into the air after a cheerful conversation. Odd? Definitely! When I told my hardcore gamer friends about this, they told me it sounded “disturbing” (while they were killing ambulatory trees and skinning them for herbs in their “serious” game ;-) ).

MySims is a “kids” game, though, while the Sims series is played by all ages, so I was a bit surprised to read in the latest developer blog entry posted on the Sims 3 site about some very MySims-like features. [Update: apparently that blog has been taken off the public part of the Sims 3 site, but it can be read here.]

There are a number of different kinds of items you can collect or grow in the Sims 3, and several of them are just as surreal as anything you’d find in MySims.

Living off the land

This aspect of the game is not entirely new, mind you. Fishing and gardening for fruits and vegetables came with the Sims 2 Seasons expansion, and while the plants and seafood were mundane, the effects of juicing the produce weren’t (who knew drinking eggplant juice made you more skilled?) Bon Voyage let you dig for treasure (you could find rocks, random small sculptures, or maps to secret locations), and collect souvenirs which could have beneficial effects if shelved together. Free Time introduced bug collecting.

In Sims 3, this gameplay trend comes with the base game and is far more developed. There is fishing again, but the variety of fish you can catch is wider — including some oddball items like “the experimental robot fish” — and you can put them in an aquarium as well as eating them or mounting them on the wall. Sims 2 had exactly 6 vegetables and 3 fruits to grow, but in Sims 3 apparently there are many more, including plants that grow non-food items. The money tree was an aspiration reward object in Sims 2 but now it takes its rightful place in your garden, and the possibility of growing eggs or steak on a plant is right out of MySims.

And apparently (not mentioned in the blog entry linked above, but in several other sources): you now have to earn your garden seeds by collecting them from plants around town, rather than simply buying them from thin air. Since Sims 3 also has a much more elaborate cooking system than the previous PC games (oddly, some of the console versions fleshed this out much further), these should form the basis for some interesting dishes.

Pet bugs and rocks!

A lot of Sims players were disappointed that the Sims 3 base game would not include pets, but now we learn that the bugs you catch can be named and kept in terraria … call your cockroach “Spot” and you won’t miss your dog ;) One hopes you can take them out and pet them! And the prospect of mining for minerals and even smelting the ore will make a lot of WoW players happy. (But can you craft a longsword of doom?)

There are two aspects of this system that I’m curious about: randomization and respawning. One presumes that fish are at least somewhat random (conditioned by your skill level), since, well, they are in all games with fishing. Will that precious gem or that rare bug always appear in the same spot, though? If so, it will be a delightful find the first time, but after that, each subsequent sim you play will simply go collect it. If not, the first family you play could well scoop up all the stuff, leaving the rest of the town with nothing.

I presume some thought has gone into spawn timers and randomization, and that a happy balance has been found.

Anyway… my guess is that realism-oriented Sims players may not be too happy with this set of features; but the young, young-at-heart and just plain immature will love it :) I’ve always liked collecting, harvesting and crafting in games, so count me in… one of those categories.

Now if we could just build our own furniture with this stuff, Sims 3 would be perfect ;)

NOOOOO!

Yes, I’ve been closely following the discussion of whether the Sims 3 is delayed, on various forums and websites. And yes, this is not entirely a wholesome activity ;) One of my friends is about to stage an intervention >< Mostly I’ve refrained from posting about it here, but now we have something that looks a little more like concrete news, in the form of an article on Eurogamer, which says in part

EA issued the following statement:

“We are evaluating the launch window. The game looks great and in the near future we’ll have more information.”

Up to now, what we’ve mostly had is lots of reports of suppliers telling their customers the game is delayed, countered by lots of reports of other suppliers sticking with the original Feb. 20 release date. So it seemed that EA was putting out mixed messages. On the face of it, this latest quote just confirms EA’s ambivalence. However, personally I find it unlikely that a company like EA… famous for sticking to its release schedule regardless of bugs… would confess to ambivalence; seems more likely that it’s just “softening up” the public for a delay.

Of course, the quote above is from a European source, and in fact most of the delay responses have come from European, Canadian and Australian sources; US sources have mostly stuck with the original date. So it’s possible that the US launch will proceed on schedule, giving EA additional time for localization for other markets. This is an iffy strategy though, since it gives lots of overeager overseas simmers a strong motivation to pirate the US version once it’s released.

At this point, I think a worldwide delay is most likely. Hard to say what the new date will be, since dates from March to August have been put forward by suppliers. If the EA spokesman quoted above is to be believed, we should know soon though.

Kate at Parsimonious (a Sims mod site) has provided us with the most extensive description yet of the Sims 3, focusing on in-game design tools but covering pretty much everything. She was at the EA Creators Camp, so she had a week of gameplay experience, quite a lot more than most previewers get. Her main critiques have to do with the limitations of the in-game recoloring tools (for clothes, Sims, buildings and objects).

It is clear that people who are used to a highly modded playing environment are not going to be satisfied with those tools… so it’s up to the mod community (again) to provide the variety players want. Reassuring to know that the modding community is already ramping up for the challenge, as evidenced especially by the new Sims 3 Tools site –  a discussion forum started by Inge Jones for the hackers who develop the tools that the modders use to make the mods. I’ll be following what happens there closely ;)