Tag Archives: Video Games

Random thought: I prefer real-time-with-paused to turn-based in my party RPGs

It feels like the world has passed me by on this one.  I have always held Baldur’s Gate up as being basically exactly what I want in the feel of a party-based RPG, and yet every discussion online I’ve seen has been the opposite.  When Pillars of Eternity 2 came out, it sold terribly.  I have my own opinions on that but one explanation that was making the rounds was “turn based is a far more tactical feel for an RPG, real time with pause is outdated, that’s why Divinity 2 sold so well and Pillars 2 sold so poorly.”  The devs even seemed to believe this, as after I left Pillars 2, they patched in a turn-based mode for the game.  Well I played some of Divinity 2 and I have to say I truly truly wish this were real-time with pause.

Divinity’s system relies a lot on the minute positioning of spells.  One pixel off can mean the difference between incinerating your enemies vs your allies.  The maps contain plenty of pillars and Line-of-sight blockers to force you to consider positioning, and yet I feel like the positioning is just not fun to engage with.  There are two archers and a warrior at the end of the hall,I want to hide my mage so they can hit the warrior but not get hit by the archers.  How far behind the pillar do I need to be?  I sit in a spot that looks good and… nope.  A little off, I cannot hit the warrior.  Well now I have to spend more AP in order to finagle my positioning just right.  In Real time (Pillars), this would take about a second, which is nothing in the timescale of the battle.  I unpause, move a bit, check, and yep it’s fine.  But here that 1 AP is 25% or 20% of my total for this turn, which can easily mean the difference between getting the spell off or not.  The worst is how intuitive it can sometimes be, a lot of iron stuff lying around has big gaping holes in it (think like the iron bars of a cell).  Can I fire stuff through or does this count as solid so I should instead hide behind it?  Infuriatingly it depends.

So while position matters a whole lot, I generally ignore it because it’s not fun to engage with.  When you’re trying to get something just right, the difference between success and failure is very minuscule, and the AP system means those minute adjustments cost action points, so while a mistake in positioning in Pillars costs me a couple of seconds to fix, a mistake in positioning in Divinity can cost me my entire turn.  And because the mistakes are so punishing, the system is opaque, and I’m not yet feeling any situations where a perfectly executed fireball won the battle, I feel no compulsion to “get good” at this system, and I don’t have much fun trying.

Faulkner is disappointing in Pokémon HeartGold

I’m playing through Pokémon HeartGold and I have to say I’m kind of disappointed with Gym Leader Faulkner. 

So I played Pokémon Gold on a gameboy color back in the 90s, and I remember thinking Faulkner was a kind of clever gym leader.  He used flying type Pokémon, which are weak against both rock-types and electric-types.  Funnily enough Pokémon of those types are available within a short walk of his gym, so it seems like he should be easy to beat, right?  Just catch a rock-type (geodude) or electric-type (mareep) Pokémon and you can waltz in and beat him.  But Faulkner had a trick up his sleeve, his Pokémon knew mud-slap, a ground-type move that was super effective against both rock-type and electric-type Pokémon.  So you’d walk in with a geodude and a mareep and he’d completely demolish you.  In-universe I’m sure a lot of 10-year-olds ran out of his gym crying.

It was cool to me because it makes sense why he would have that move.  He wants to win but has to use flying-types which are weak to rock and electric moves.  So he devises a way to turn the tables on anyone using those types against him.  But apparently the move mud-slap wasn’t actually any good, because in HeartGold he no longer uses it.  Now you *can* beat Faulkner easily with a nearby mareep or geodude, and it just makes him seem less clever to me, even if the move that replaced mud-slap is probably a better move overall.

Capitalism 2: A game that makes you appreciate loans

I’ve played a lot of video games in my time, and let me tell you Capitalism 2 is a doozy.  You can get it on the Steam store for about 10 dollars and that’s about what it’s worth because it’s decades old and the UI is painful.  Still, I’ve played a lot of it and it does help you appreciate some nifty real-world concepts.

For those of you who have never played it (ie everyone), Capitalism 2 is a game in which you take control of a large corporation with nothing more than a few million dollars and a dream of riches.  You then use that money to try to turn a profit by manufacturing and selling one or more of the games 50 or so unique goods.  There’s food items, furniture, electronics, cars, and they all have their own production chains and sales strategies for you to manage.  Food items are all about quality and price so you just need to invest a lot into your farms and try to outcompete your competitors.  Designer clothes are all about branding, so you need to spend millions of dollars on advertising to gain market share.  While electronics require investment into R&D before you can even begin to try making them.  It’s kind of fun to throw down with a few AI companies and compete to turn $1 million into $1 billion, but if the game has taught me one thing it’s that loans are overpowered.

A loan, both in game and in real life, is a way to get money now in exchange for money later.  While the total amount you’d have to pay back is greater than the face value of the money you get loaned to you, you can do a lot of things with money now to make that be a net gain.  You can invest it, start a company, build a factory (if you’re a corporation), and all those things can net you a bigger gain than the interest and principle you will need to pay back.  The difficulty is of course that the real world is a world of uncertainty, you don’t know for sure if your investments will pan out or your factory will work, you’re taking a risk and that risk includes a downside.

In Capitalism 2 however there is near perfect information so most of the risk doesn’t exist.  You know instantly what the price of every good on the market is and how they will change in the future.  You know exactly who your competitors are and usually you know what they’re building.  With perfect information there is almost zero risk, and with zero risk there is never a reason not to max out your available loans to build new factories to make new profits.  The AIs in this game by the way don’t seem to be programmed to ever take loans, they wait until they have the cash in hand before ever buying something, so this is a technique only available to the player.  But as I said pretty much any investment is a certain success, so loans are just free capital for the player.  And that’s why they’re so OP in Capitalism 2.

Can you gamify science?

Let’s start with one of the oldest and most popular games: Super Mario Bros for the NES.  In it, the player controls Mario past a number of hazards, through a number of levels to rescue the princess.  Young children in the 80s and 90s would spend hours upon hours playing, beating and (important for today’s topic) *learning* this game.  See, beating a video game is a learning process.  As kids play, they learn to play better and better until they play well enough to beat it.  Then they keep playing and learn to play better and better to beat it faster, more consistently, more stylishly or what have you.  Some of this learning is physical, you can train your reflexes to work faster, but a lot of it is actually learning how the game works and what you need to do to complete it.

On the surface, learning how the game works seems kind of basic, but is it?  The game has a large number of enemies with their own patterns, and those enemy patterns can combine in a large number of ways to challenge the player.  The player has to learn how to approach each situation, and how to adapt to a situation that isn’t going how they expected it to.  They may even plan ahead and devise multiple strategies before testing each one out in turn and going with whichever is best.  The player might also be memorizing the map layouts of the levels, the locations of secrets, and all sorts of other things.  It’s safe to say that a lot of real learning is taking place, even if it isn’t “school learning” like what we’re used to.  

Kids do a lot of work learning to play video games, and thus since the very dawn of video games parents and teachers have wondered if that energy could be more productively transferred towards academic learning.  This eventually morphed into a “gamification” push, where many modern schools will put at least some effort into having gamification elements in their teaching in order to motivate students to work as hard at academic learning as they do at gaming learning.  Now, gamification is an INCREDIBLY broad topic and it doesn’t just cover video games that try to teach you things.  I can personally remember playing cheesy point-and-click video games that tried to teach me the parts of the body or the planets of the solar system, but video games themselves are only a small facet.  Gamification can also be as simple as having class leaderboards to encourage students to do well and get good grades, badges or points for completing certain tasks, there are all sorts of ways to gamify a learning task.

But this brings me to today’s question: can you gamify science education?  Now first off it’s very clear that you can gamify *early* science education (thinks like elementary or middle school) since we’ve had those sorts of things for years.  Teaching a student about the human body, or the planets, or the teacher creating a whole Jeopardy! setup to help them learn the parts of a cell, these are all gamification aspects that were used to teach me and many others about science over the past few decades.  But post-secondary education is a different beast and often entails learning things on the cutting edge that aren’t always fully accepted by the entire community.  Science does have its internal struggles, and if a student learns by reading papers (which is necessary to study topics on the cutting edge) they will by necessity be learning about at least some ideas which will later be proven false.  That’s ok, science isn’t a set of facts, it’s a process for discovering the truth, but that does make it harder to “gamify” since you can’t just program a game with right and wrong answers, because on the cutting edge *we don’t have all the right and wrong answers* and we’re learning new things every day.

I thought long and hard about this question: can you make a video game (or something like it) that would allow students to study a cutting edge topic like proteomics?  I pick this topic because it’s one I know a lot about, and I came away thinking the answer is “no.”  A proteomics game would either be highly simplistic and thus not very useful for cutting edge studies (high school studies perhaps), or would be so complex that you were really studying someone’s protein simulation and not proteomics itself.  Let me explain.

A video game for proteomics would have to have certain limitations.  The first limitation is the pre-defined actions that the programmers allow.  Mario can’t climb walls in Super Mario Bros because the programmers didn’t program that, they only programmed certain actions.  As far as I know, all proteins are biologically synthesized in an N-to-C direction.  So presumably the program would only allow synthesis in this direction, but what if we discover some organism that can synthesize C-to-N?  What if we discover organisms that synthesize or modify their proteins in ways we did not expect, and what if those proteins become scientifically or economically relevant?  A programmer can’t exactly predict every possible action that biological proteins could take, and so can hardly program every possibility.  

OK, so they can’t program every possibility, but what about creating an open-ended system that would allow the “players” to create their own actions?  That brings limitation number two: the approximations used.  An open ended proteomics game would by necessity need to employ certain approximations in the code to allow for proteins to be synthesized and moved around at will, it isn’t feasible to create a perfect simulation that can calculate the effects of every atom and bond in a protein.  So a game would have to use a number of approximations to allow for this open endedness, but then you end up with the problem where students may not be studying anything real but studying only an approximate model that doesn’t work in the real world.  My most notable reminder of this is the game Kerbal Space Program which is a fun little astronaut simulator that, due to computer limitations, has to use a set of heavy approximations for gravity that make it very inaccurate with the real world.  This leads to some fun but physically impossible creations such as perpetual motion machines and giant mecha.  

It’s not just the scope but the scale.  You can do so many things with proteins, there are 20^10 combinations of 10 amino acids.  All those possibilities can’t be programmed in.  The best molecular dynamics currently has is the ability for super computers to roughly approximate the actions of proteins by simulating all the atoms and bonds, but even those simulations require heavy approximations.  So if you try to make more and more approximations, you end up with a program where students aren’t studying proteomics but rather studying the approximations that are built into it.  

The final, most important piece of this is: how would you make such a thing fun?  Science, as in actual science, is fun to me because I get to learn and discover new things.  As said before, a video game would necessitate such approximations that nothing “new” could really be discovered.  Games like Kerbal Space Program are fun because they give you the means to perform some of humanity’s greatest feats for yourself like going to the moon or launching a robot to Mars, but what are the equivalent actions that could be done in a proteomics video game?  I honestly can’t think of anything proteomic that makes me think “man I’d like to do that for myself!”

So yeah sorry to be a debbie downer but I think the idea is unworkable for now.  Stick with fun little games for early childhood education and then read papers when you go to college.

I just need to get out of my system how weird Pokémon Conquest is

You all know Pokémon, right?  That game about cute animals battling each other that’s so popular with kids and young adults.  I’ve been a fan all my life and recently got into the DS game Pokémon Conquest because it was described to me as Pokémon meets Fire Emblem.  So far so good.  The game is set during an alt-history warring states period in which all the warriors of Japan use Pokémon to fight each other.  The “Kingdoms” of Pokémon Conquest are all elementally-aligned and so take the place of the traditional Pokémon gyms.  There’s the fire kingdom, the water kingdom, the grass kingdom, and our heroes have to defeat them all to reunite Japan.  

The moderate amounts of insanity begin early on, however when we find out that Nobunaga is also a Pokémon trainer and is trying to conquer Japan himself.  In Japanese culture Nobunaga was once described to me as “George Washington Hitler” due to the complex and often contradictory role he is seen in.  On the one hand he was the Great Unifier who’s successes in uniting Japan lead to the direct predecessor of the modern Japanese state and the end of the Sengoku period.  This characterization can lead to positive portrayals.  On the other hand he is often viewed as needlessly, even gleefully cruel and portrayed in some media as a diabolical schemer taking pleasure in the pain of others.  So when I saw him in a Pokémon game I did not know what to expect.

Insanity ramps up when the game reveals that your assistant, an unconfident girl with a Jigglypuff named Oichi, is also the secret sister of Nobunaga.  Nobunaga reveals that his signature Pokémon is the Gen V legendary Zekrom, so I guess that’s how he conquered Japan, by using a legendary Pokémon.  But I couldn’t get over my laughter at how the game decided that the shy assistant girl would be the sister of the main antagonist, like sure that’s storytelling plot twist #1: have a secret relationship.  But it seemed so out of the blue and didn’t really add much to how I saw either character.  It didn’t add dimensions to Nobunaga because we barely see him, and it didn’t add dimensions to Oichi because she barely has character and neither she nor anyone else acts differently because of this revelation.  It felt like a twist for twist’s sake.

The highlight of this game’s weird and wacky insanity was when your main character evolves.  Yes that’s right, in this game Pokémon aren’t the only ones who evolve.  After a bunch of events happen the main character evolves into a cooler version of themselves, with all the evolution sound effects and music that you’d expect from a Pokémon evolution, and they aren’t the only ones that can do that.  Oichi herself can evolve too, as can some of the other main characters if certain conditions are met.  I wonder if this power will ever carry over to the main games?  I should ask my friends if anyone ever evolved in Pokémon Legends, Arceus.

The finally hilarity for me was the finale where you reveal that the continent you’re on bears more relation to Arceus (the Poké-God) then to historical Japan, and Arceus itself comes down and basically says that your main character should be the one to defeat/catch it.  OK sure, whatever, catch ‘em all.  But God himself coming down and saying “catch me bro” just put the final pin in the corkboard for me, I think this game is a comedy and I wish it had gone all out on it.  Maybe it’s because I’m not 10 anymore, maybe this would feel like a stirring epic if I’d played it as a kid, but I couldn’t keep a straight face through any of it.  There are some things that are just instantly hilarious to me, and mixing Pokémon with history is one of them.  I still giggle at how Lt. Surge apparently fought in wars with his Raichu, and now we can add him to the long list of war-fighting trainers from this game.

Pokémon Conquest: how Eevee and Jigglypuff reunited Japan.

Random thoughts about Dyson Sphere Program

So Dyson Sphere Program (DSP for short) is a video game I’ve put way too much time into, and I decided to write down some random thoughts I had on it

I now know why Factorio was helped by having biters: they give you something to do and work on.  I spend a lot of time in DSP just waiting for the next research to finish. I had nothing to lose but time, and no idea of what to do next. Biters in Factorio at least gave you a goal and a thing to work on whenever you were stuck. “I don’t know what to do, well the biters to the west are giving me trouble, I’ll reinforce the defenses or destroy the nests, maybe both.”

It feels like there’s too much research and also it’s a mistake to let you queue it all immediately.  I end up researching a lot of things that I don’t know what they do or why they help. I just queue up everything I can currently research and I end up wondering what the hell any of it did because I wasn’t really thinking about my decisions. The research queue is a QOL feature, but its absence does at least force the player to kind of go back to the tech tree and glance over the techs every few minutes instead of every few hours.

Also I think the research tree could use some UI help.  There are certain techs that require other techs… but those techs don’t directly precede them.  If I MUST research Tech A before Tech B, then Tech A should be linked to Tech B and immediately precede it.  OR AT LEAST if I click on Tech B because I want to research it, then Tech A should get queued automatically before Tech B.  As it stands I found myself wanting to research certain techs and having to hunt around the tech tree to find the required pre-reqs (logistics/interplanetary logistics were where I had the most trouble)

Other times I research a tech only to find that although I can craft New Item B, that item relies on Other Item A which I do NOT have the tech for.  So again I have to hunt through the tech tree to find Other Item A so I can finally craft New Item B like I wanted to.  Again, if B requires A then A should immediately precede B and I shouldn’t be allowed to research B until I have A.

I feel like this game doesn’t really ramp up in scope and scale as much as Factorio did, and because of this I found myself not really needing or caring to expand all that much.  After making an initial spaghetti base I moved on the starting planet to two new spots to set up research lines, and that basically carried me through half or more of the tech tree.  My starting resources never/barely ran out and I didn’t need to go to new planets for more iron or copper, just for the titanium and silicon that didn’t spawn on my starting planet.  Having certain resources only spawn on specific planets is certainly one way to incentivize moving off-world, but I’d also like it more if higher levels of science required massively increased amounts of resources, forcing you to colonize more and more planets to meet the resource requirements much like how Factorio forces you to expand further and further outwards to meet the higher requirements for Blue/Purple/Yellow science.

Blueprints were the opposite of intuitive.  I understood Factorio blueprints pretty quickly, but I could not possibly figure out how to create a blueprint here without going online.

I really like the multiple levels for transport belts, really makes the spaghetti come alive and does at least mitigate my disappointment in not having double sided belts like Factorio. Double sided belts were where you could create a T-intersection with belts with say Iron Gears from the left and Green Circuits from the right, and the result would be a belt with Gears on its left half and Circuits on its right half. DSP doesn’t have that, but at least with multiple layers of belts all on top of each other it isn’t *too* much trouble to get everything where I want it, possibly even easier.

Having liquids exist as little cubes on belts took some getting used to, but since pipes in Factorio were always a little opaque and had strange fail conditions, I really like this system

Why does every single planet have coal?  Is it just to give a player something to mine for energy when they first land on a planet, to make sure they can always get the energy to get back home?  Because coal being dead plant matter on earth makes it seem like ALL these planets were once life-bearing.