Category: Greywolfe’s Lair

Why I Can’t Take E3 [Or Any Trade Convention] Seriously

It happens every year.  Every year, without fail, at around this time, "real" news [and I use the word in inverted commas, because really - game releases and hints at game releases aren't really "news" at all.  They're - at best - terrible product placement] drops right off the radar.

Why?  Because some PR drone way up on high has decided that nothing can leak out prior to E3.  And that results in what fans generally call "lots of slow news days."  While that's a problem, E3 - and shows like it - have a far bigger issue that I want to tackle.

They're pageants. Read more

Spellweaver Review: It’s Magic, Jim, But Not As We Know It

Links open in new pages

Magic:  The Gathering is a great game with a troubling digital history.  In one sense, it's really sad, because Hearthstone is immeasurably polished - a thing that Blizzard is absurdly good at.  And where Blizzard have gone, others have attempted to follow, because surely, if they can make it work to the tune of a silly number of people throwing money at imaginary cards that they're never going to really own [because the servers will go down and then you'll be left with nothing] then someone else has to be able to share the pot, right?

Probably.  But a lot of that is going to depend on lots of little factors.  And where Spellweaver comes up strong in some of those factors, it's just kind of bland and uninteresting for a lot of the rest. Read more

The Fifth Rule of Game Buyer’s Club: ALWAYS talk about Game Buyer’s Club.

This is long and ranty.  But I feel that it is important.

You guys absolutely got the industry you wanted.

We got here through slow degrees.  Like the proverbial frog in the pot - although, it didn't actually seem that way to begin with.  So, very quickly, let's talk about the divide between modern games and how they monetize and older games and how those raked in the money.

In the bad old days, a game was a once-off experience - for the most part.  You bought the game, it had absolutely all the content on the disk and off you went.  This wasn't absolutely universal, of course - even back then we had what were known as "Scenario Disks" and added content through content builders - Things like the Forgotten Realms Unlimited Adventures construction kit.

But if you bought a game you would be assured of ALL the content.  At least until a scenario disk/expansion pack rolled around.  There was no messing around with day one DLC [a misnomer, but we'll get there] or very many "added content exclusives."  The game you took home was - generally - the same game your European friends took home on the day of release.

Then, Bethesda cracked open the door through Horse Armor and everything changed.

But it's important to realize an important thing about this whole fiasco:  we can't go back.  We can't stuff the genie back into the bottle.  But we can maybe make executives think twice about fleecing us.

Read more

Gateway Review: The Subtle Art Of Waiting For Things To Happen

I quite like reading.  I quite like adventure gaming.  So the best of both of those worlds has got to be text adventures, right?  Well.  Sort of.  If the writing is smart and the characters are clever then text adventures can - absolutely - paint marvellous pictures in your mind - the kind graphics engines simply don't have the oomph to render, but the problem with text adventures is that they're sometimes obtuse.  The writing can be fantastic and the game world and characters can be completely memorable - both good reasons to start playing text adventures today [because modern text adventures tend to double down on both those things] but...

...the puzzles.  Dear God, the puzzles.

And that's why I kind of like the design intent behind Gateway.  Gateway sort of understands this problem. Read more

Farewell, Blizzard

Warning!  This is long and ranty and link heavy!  [Links will open in new tabs]

I remember Silicon and Synapse.  You might not, but I do.  They weren't big enough to work on their own projects, so they did ports of other games to various other consoles.  None of these ports were particularly big, but they established the company as detail-oriented and good at what they did.  And a key element from those days has stayed with Blizzard:  they know how to refine.

Which is at least some of what I want to talk about.  But the other thing I want to talk about is how distant Silicon and Synapse are from the Blizzard we have today and why - after almost twenty five years of playing Blizzard's games, I am going to slowly start winding down Blizzard projects I'm still pursuing. Read more

The Murky Rise Of Tabletop Simulators

I played a lot of Magic:  The Gathering when it came out.

Like.

A lot.

From 1994 onward, I attended weekly events, playtested in a group for competitions I would enter, played against the computer when the Microprose product came out and poured over lists of cards as they were released to find new strategies for old decks and to see if there were any interesting brand new plans I could utilize.

Before that, I played a lot of Dungeons and Dragons.

Like.

A lot, too.

From 1985 until I lost my gaming group to the vagaries of time commitments [Exams, jobs, families and the like] I played the Red Box, made characters under the Second Edition rules, built up a campaign for friends that ended in hilarious disaster when someone lit a torch in an underground zone that was nothing but propane gas and tended my Beast in long-standing games of Vampire:  The Masquerade.

The point is, I really like board, card and role playing games.

The problem is, of course, that these games are difficult to play without friends.  I am primarily an introvert.  I have few friends. Read more

Magic Duels: Review 2: The Bugs Strike Back

So, just about a year ago now, I wrote a completely scathing review of the tumultuous mess that Magic Duels was at launch.

Given the online nature of the game and given that it "perpetually renews" itself whenever new cards come out, I figured I would get back in and see a handful of things for myself.  Notably:  whether or not the game was more stable, whether or not the game fared better in my books if I had more cards [and a greater pool of potential deck lists to pull from] and whether or not Stainless had listened to the sheer avalanche of complaints about the game's launch state.

That last question?  That's the question that binds them all. Read more

Endgame Review: The Hunger Games. Now With More Transmedia Synergy.

This is going to be a cynical review.

Because this book is cynicism personified.

As a computer science major, years ago, I had a pair of classes that were about writing.  Very specifically, in order to become a Doctor of Science you had to write a research paper.  We had two very different classes with two very different lecturers for those classes.  The first - and most vital subject was called Research Methodology.  That guy hated us.  He didn't get tenure and he was frustrated at us and everything around him.  So he set crazy rules for every essay we ever wrote.

The second guy was way more mellow.  That particular class was Thesis Writing.  Both of these two classes combined went together to form our Thesis Project and one of the very few lessons that stuck with me came from very early in the writing cycle:  If you're writing a Thesis, you NEVER write from the conclusion backward.  Never.

You set up a working hypothesis.  You devise tests for the hypothesis.  You analyse the data.  In short, you make sure that you're surprised in the end so that your conclusion isn't a foregone thing.

But some writers don't like that approach.  It's time-consuming.  There's so much you have to do to arrive at a completely novel [or at least unexpected] result.  All those tests you have to devise?  They take time.  All that analysis?  Why bother? Read more

Greywolfe’s Games To Look Forward To In 2016.

Please note:  This article is LITTERED with links.  They will open in a new window and will take you off-site.

Now that four-in-February is behind us, I thought I'd take some time to look into games that I'm at least a little curious about for the calendar year of 2016. I have divided my choices into three broad sections:

Things that will almost definitely be with us in the near-future or before the end of 2016.

Things that might make it into 2016, but you never know.

And, finally, things that I'm totally worried about. Sometimes with good reason.

So, let's take a look and see, shall we? Read more

Space Quest IV: Roger Wilco And The Time Rippers Review: Roger’s Timey-Wimey Adventure

Please note: some of the links in this review will take you off-site. These have been set up to open in a new window.

Where do you go after you've made three games in a universe and have - rather neatly - tied the series up? When confronted with this problem, Al Lowe chose to go in a completely bizarre direction, "skipping" Larry 4 and giving us a somewhat cartoon-y, rather crass and not very pleasant New Larry. I wasn't really a fan, as you can tell from this review.

The Space Quest saga had a similar quandary to ponder.

Read more