23:11
A teacher
Why have I played the lowbrow games more often over the past month than the highbrow ones? This article offers some food for thought:
http://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/10/27/procrastination/#more-922
Saturday, 11 June 2011
Why do I play some games more than others?
Why have I played the lowbrow games more often over the past month than the highbrow ones? This article offers some food for thought:
http://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/10/27/procrastination/#more-922
Why do I play some games more than others?
Why have I played the lowbrow games more often over the past month than the highbrow ones? This article offers some food for thought:
http://youarenotsosmart.com/2010/10/27/procrastination/#more-922
Friday, 3 June 2011
Mount and Blade Warband - An Update
When I last wrote about Mount and Blade, I spoke about how I hadn’t made any progress with the diplomacy. In fact, I had managed to alienate all the factions (due to not realising that attacking them would make them dislike me...) This time round, though, I was on my best behaviour and ingratiated myself as much as possible.
As I have read before, each promotion changed the game. After pumping an extraordinary amount of time into the game (I won’t reveal how much... ok, around 70 hours in total...) I gained several in-game promotions.
Firstly I was granted the position of Marshall. This meant that I began to try to decimate the other factions. My stupid king, though, didn’t sue for peace with the other factions, meaning that I was fighting on three fronts at once. While somewhat frustrating, it felt manageable. A bit like a promotion would be in real-life, I imagine.
One of the things about this sandbox game that I don’t think I emphasised enough last time is that it should be treated like high-brow literature in the sense that to get the most out of it, you should really read some study guides. Yes, there is an element of fun in killing thousands of enemies. But there’s a certain entropy that sets in rather quickly.
As it was, I used this to my advantage and rebelled against the King. To my surprise, I was allowed to set up my own kingdom aptly (if ridiculously) named The Andersonians. If I had a chance again, I would choose something more like The Gregorians or even The Empire. Or Scarbados. Still, the game continues to hold my interest. Even if I don’t have any diplomacy mods installed, and I don’t quite understand what the hell is going on.
One important update to my original review to note is that the game plays extremely well with Medieval Total War 2. Both involve conquest, and both play with the idea of controlling large armies. The chaos of the Mount and Blade battlefield is more evocative, although the trait system of Medieval TW 2 more immersive;; I image that something that combines both games into a developed system would be highly successful...
As I have read before, each promotion changed the game. After pumping an extraordinary amount of time into the game (I won’t reveal how much... ok, around 70 hours in total...) I gained several in-game promotions.
Firstly I was granted the position of Marshall. This meant that I began to try to decimate the other factions. My stupid king, though, didn’t sue for peace with the other factions, meaning that I was fighting on three fronts at once. While somewhat frustrating, it felt manageable. A bit like a promotion would be in real-life, I imagine.
One of the things about this sandbox game that I don’t think I emphasised enough last time is that it should be treated like high-brow literature in the sense that to get the most out of it, you should really read some study guides. Yes, there is an element of fun in killing thousands of enemies. But there’s a certain entropy that sets in rather quickly.
As it was, I used this to my advantage and rebelled against the King. To my surprise, I was allowed to set up my own kingdom aptly (if ridiculously) named The Andersonians. If I had a chance again, I would choose something more like The Gregorians or even The Empire. Or Scarbados. Still, the game continues to hold my interest. Even if I don’t have any diplomacy mods installed, and I don’t quite understand what the hell is going on.
One important update to my original review to note is that the game plays extremely well with Medieval Total War 2. Both involve conquest, and both play with the idea of controlling large armies. The chaos of the Mount and Blade battlefield is more evocative, although the trait system of Medieval TW 2 more immersive;; I image that something that combines both games into a developed system would be highly successful...
Medieval Total War 2 - An experience of the Grand Campaign
Playing an aptly named Grand Campaign on Medieval Total War 2 for the past two years has given me a new found appreciation for the RTS genre. If you read my review of the original shogun experience, you would have thought I’d be more of a fan of that era. In fact, the darkness of the medieval atmosphere appeals to me much more.
In the Grand Campaign I am playing as the English. After striking north and conquering Scotland and, rather easily, Ireland, I turned my attention south. After several months of slowing rolling over the French, I found myself in a situation where I was defending myself on several fronts against the Germans, the French, the Milanese, and (rather uninspiringly) the Danes.
Like with all campaigns in the Total War series, there isn’t much in the way of an overarching tutorial in which improvements to build in your empire. As such, I leave the AI to decide for me. They tend, like all true councils left in charge of things, to build everything and anything. Do I need to train diplomats in all my cities? Why not... Do I need to specialise in different elite units in my main cities? Why bother. Presumably this is to ensure that players like me don’t simply benefit from leaving the AI to handle my economy.
In order to progress, like in all TW games, it is essential at some point to take on larger armies with fewer troops. For a game that purports to follow the principles of Sun Tzu, this perhaps isn’t the case of how things should be. Or perhaps I am simply poor at diplomacy and fight on too many fronts at once. I must admit, I have never felt bad for fighting a battle where the odds are stacked heavily in my favour.
Where the game does excel, though, is in the ability for a small, highly-trained army to destroy much larger hordes through simple out maneuvering and superior morale.
Take, for example, my progress this last half-term. I had a true stalement in the middle of Europe. Most of lands were being taken, and retaken, by the combined forces of the angry Germanic-Franco-Milanese empires. I decided, as somewhat of a break from the incessant sieges, to expand into Spain.
Like all good Spainards, they rolled over. Having spent the past 50 years doing very little, my unmounted knights were able to smash their militia time and time again. In the space of 10 turns, I had conquering all of Spain, leaving me with, effectively, only one front to fight on. Memories of the original Shogun, where I rolled from left to right across the map, began to return.
It was in this time, though, that the Danes had made a surprisingly successful foray into my empire. Whereas they had small armies they were universally comprised of elite troops. One army of 500, in particular, managed to decimate three standing armies of 800 troops, including one in a siege. The usually excellent auto-battle option let me down here.
The sign of a great game, of great story-telling theatre, is that the Dane’s march across my northern front was a more engaging experience than me conquering Spain. Watching, with increasing trepidation, one general growing up to eight stars (whilst controlling far better troops than I), I took great pleasure in converging on him with three times the size of an army. He went down fighting.
Graphically, I think the game is the smoothest of the series. The music is evocative and the mass control of an army is still extraordinarily easy. The charge function, though, is somewhat broken. Sometimes knights will charge; sometimes they won’t. In addition, some soldiers simply won’t path-find correctly to chase down enemies. This is a shame, as utterly annihilating an army was one of the most enjoyable aspects of the the original TW - here it’s simply a pain.
A recommended edition to the series. However, if you are more of a fan of the other eras, I’d recommend those TWs to this.
In the Grand Campaign I am playing as the English. After striking north and conquering Scotland and, rather easily, Ireland, I turned my attention south. After several months of slowing rolling over the French, I found myself in a situation where I was defending myself on several fronts against the Germans, the French, the Milanese, and (rather uninspiringly) the Danes.
Like with all campaigns in the Total War series, there isn’t much in the way of an overarching tutorial in which improvements to build in your empire. As such, I leave the AI to decide for me. They tend, like all true councils left in charge of things, to build everything and anything. Do I need to train diplomats in all my cities? Why not... Do I need to specialise in different elite units in my main cities? Why bother. Presumably this is to ensure that players like me don’t simply benefit from leaving the AI to handle my economy.
In order to progress, like in all TW games, it is essential at some point to take on larger armies with fewer troops. For a game that purports to follow the principles of Sun Tzu, this perhaps isn’t the case of how things should be. Or perhaps I am simply poor at diplomacy and fight on too many fronts at once. I must admit, I have never felt bad for fighting a battle where the odds are stacked heavily in my favour.
Where the game does excel, though, is in the ability for a small, highly-trained army to destroy much larger hordes through simple out maneuvering and superior morale.
Take, for example, my progress this last half-term. I had a true stalement in the middle of Europe. Most of lands were being taken, and retaken, by the combined forces of the angry Germanic-Franco-Milanese empires. I decided, as somewhat of a break from the incessant sieges, to expand into Spain.
Like all good Spainards, they rolled over. Having spent the past 50 years doing very little, my unmounted knights were able to smash their militia time and time again. In the space of 10 turns, I had conquering all of Spain, leaving me with, effectively, only one front to fight on. Memories of the original Shogun, where I rolled from left to right across the map, began to return.
It was in this time, though, that the Danes had made a surprisingly successful foray into my empire. Whereas they had small armies they were universally comprised of elite troops. One army of 500, in particular, managed to decimate three standing armies of 800 troops, including one in a siege. The usually excellent auto-battle option let me down here.
The sign of a great game, of great story-telling theatre, is that the Dane’s march across my northern front was a more engaging experience than me conquering Spain. Watching, with increasing trepidation, one general growing up to eight stars (whilst controlling far better troops than I), I took great pleasure in converging on him with three times the size of an army. He went down fighting.
Graphically, I think the game is the smoothest of the series. The music is evocative and the mass control of an army is still extraordinarily easy. The charge function, though, is somewhat broken. Sometimes knights will charge; sometimes they won’t. In addition, some soldiers simply won’t path-find correctly to chase down enemies. This is a shame, as utterly annihilating an army was one of the most enjoyable aspects of the the original TW - here it’s simply a pain.
A recommended edition to the series. However, if you are more of a fan of the other eras, I’d recommend those TWs to this.
Wednesday, 1 June 2011
Gaming as a social habit?
Well worth a read about gaming habits amongst professionals:
http://www.pcgamer.com/forum/showthread.php?t=9223
http://www.pcgamer.com/forum/showthread.php?t=9223
Saturday, 14 May 2011
Ways to play a game
Today is the crunch week of the year. Terminal exams are arriving and, for me, the Edinburgh marathon looms next week. This weekend I need to finalise my coursework folders (a somewhat arduous, yet consequential, administration task that involves cross-referencing several documents) as well as the usual domestic chores.
It is in that I have enjoyed playing an extraordinary amount of Total War, Mount and Blade, and Supreme Commander 2. Not to mention PES 2009.
While I play these games, I wonder of the different ways of playing them. I rarely play a Total War game on a weekday. And I am yet to play Men of War for any length of time, not surprisingly seeing as I have encountered an especially complex mission and the game lacks anything like a decent tutorial (or voice-overs for that matter.)
So, with this finite time with which I have to play and live, how do I play?
That is something for an extended blog post. In the meantime, I'm on the lookout for anyone else who has similar thoughts. In the same way that I perceive (for whatever reason) that most people who read do so at night before I bed, I perceive that most people who game do so extensively after work in the evenings (rather then at the weekends.)
I wonder.
Friday, 6 May 2011
Memories of Champ Man '93
Memories of my A-level exams bring back memories of Championship Manager. How can what is essentially an interactive spreadsheet create such theatre? Have such memories? Be so brilliant?
Right now I (as most teachers are across our fair and pleasant land) am focussed on the defining point of the young people I manage - their exams. It is a time that requires skills similar to that of a swotting student: perseverance, planning and plenty of pizza.
However, my GCSEs were not taken at the time of the most recent (and well-designed) Football Manager franchise, but rather of the original quality spreadsheet gaming that was the glorious Championship Manager 1993. Like many things of the time, it was not polished; it must have taken between two and three hours to load a season (something that would fairly often crash.) In addition, I would only manage something nearing 8 seasons before the complexity of the data would result in hideous corruptions of the league data (such as Liverpool securing the services of a player with maximum stats, for example.) Despite these misgivings (of which a TeacherGamer would simply expect back in the day) I still managed to play through at least two full campaigns in the epic stretch of free-time between my exams and the next stage of my educational career.
Despite its age, the game held many facets of gameplay universal across all the versions. Well, save for the fact that I would always sub a player after 20 minutes and find their replacement was better. Curiously, the subbed player would never be unduly affected by what would have undoubtedly been an embarrassing experience.
The best experiences, though, involving purchasing players before they were stars, watching them develop, and then selling them just as they passed their peak. Many PC games involve this concept - get bigger numbers than anyone else. The theatre of it plays out in your imagination. The players didn’t have the dozens of stats they do these days; they had five. And it didn’t even give a finishing stat. However, value did dictate which were the good players, and it was fixed to age. Purchase a player under 21 who was a million pounds or more and he would be a star. Conversely, if a player hit 29, they would strangely dip in form (or by a few other circumstances that my distant memory can’t quite currently muster.) Suffice to say, I remember selling a utility midfielder for £7 million (which made him one of the most expensive players in the game) and revelled in checking on his hideous sub-7 (out of 10) performances. Another player who I still remember was a generated player who had maximum stats for all but one of his statistics, but was only ever worth half a million throughout his entire career. He occasionally had decent games as a sub, but he was more of a progedy that never quite developed (my Joe Cole, perhaps.)
Unlike my current experience as a TeacherGamer (where I only give myself time enough to manage teams in the top-flight of the Premiership), I would start with Wolves in the bottom league of a regenerated player list. I would promote them in successive seasons, and win the Premiership after either one, or two, years constantly. I wouldn’t always win the cups (as even then I couldn’t see the point of resetting a lost game or an inconvenient injury.) While I felt that winning six league titles in a row was somewhat unrealistic, I would always lose a league game or three. Watching Barcelona this season (2011) and Arsenal’s invincible season in the early 2000s though made me realise that my league wasn’t too far off the realms of reality.
What was a great touch for such an early management game was that the playing style of your team evolved as your team progressed. Although you only had options for five playing styles or so (long ball, direct, short passing, mixed, and continental) you would find that only ‘direct’ would enable your team to win promotion strongly.
To win the European Cup (which was still in a purely knockout form save for a final one-game league) required a continental style. And that required at least a season of transition as your selected this style. Even with this transition, to win the European Cup was an incredible hard feat I achieved only once. The game had a perculiar way of making your best players transfer to foreign teams, thereby making them unsignable for a few seasons. When they returned, they were never the same player. Too many pizzas, perhaps?
Like with all truly difficult (yet achievable) feats in gaming history, winning the European Cup was theatre that I will never forget. Paul Simpson was my decent £5m left winger. He was the best winger available to me, but not my best player. Normally I simply failed to score against European opposition; he scored the winning goal in the last ten minutes of the final. The game itself only presented text when a team scored. I often thought that the difficulty of scoring a goal was was reflected in the tone of the text: I remember even now the text saying: Simpson has scored one of the best goals you’ll ever see!
As an English teacher I appreciate a life in books and imagination. Seeing that text in the theatre I had created in the space either side of my GCSEs and A-Levels is something that has motivated me to share even now, over a decade later. The game itself is utterly indicative of that time in my life, and of my exams. While I don’t think that I would play it again (I’d rather try to immerse myself in the current FM) it is a piece of gaming history that I welcome as I would an old, if rather difficult, friend.
Right now I (as most teachers are across our fair and pleasant land) am focussed on the defining point of the young people I manage - their exams. It is a time that requires skills similar to that of a swotting student: perseverance, planning and plenty of pizza.
However, my GCSEs were not taken at the time of the most recent (and well-designed) Football Manager franchise, but rather of the original quality spreadsheet gaming that was the glorious Championship Manager 1993. Like many things of the time, it was not polished; it must have taken between two and three hours to load a season (something that would fairly often crash.) In addition, I would only manage something nearing 8 seasons before the complexity of the data would result in hideous corruptions of the league data (such as Liverpool securing the services of a player with maximum stats, for example.) Despite these misgivings (of which a TeacherGamer would simply expect back in the day) I still managed to play through at least two full campaigns in the epic stretch of free-time between my exams and the next stage of my educational career.
Despite its age, the game held many facets of gameplay universal across all the versions. Well, save for the fact that I would always sub a player after 20 minutes and find their replacement was better. Curiously, the subbed player would never be unduly affected by what would have undoubtedly been an embarrassing experience.
The best experiences, though, involving purchasing players before they were stars, watching them develop, and then selling them just as they passed their peak. Many PC games involve this concept - get bigger numbers than anyone else. The theatre of it plays out in your imagination. The players didn’t have the dozens of stats they do these days; they had five. And it didn’t even give a finishing stat. However, value did dictate which were the good players, and it was fixed to age. Purchase a player under 21 who was a million pounds or more and he would be a star. Conversely, if a player hit 29, they would strangely dip in form (or by a few other circumstances that my distant memory can’t quite currently muster.) Suffice to say, I remember selling a utility midfielder for £7 million (which made him one of the most expensive players in the game) and revelled in checking on his hideous sub-7 (out of 10) performances. Another player who I still remember was a generated player who had maximum stats for all but one of his statistics, but was only ever worth half a million throughout his entire career. He occasionally had decent games as a sub, but he was more of a progedy that never quite developed (my Joe Cole, perhaps.)
Unlike my current experience as a TeacherGamer (where I only give myself time enough to manage teams in the top-flight of the Premiership), I would start with Wolves in the bottom league of a regenerated player list. I would promote them in successive seasons, and win the Premiership after either one, or two, years constantly. I wouldn’t always win the cups (as even then I couldn’t see the point of resetting a lost game or an inconvenient injury.) While I felt that winning six league titles in a row was somewhat unrealistic, I would always lose a league game or three. Watching Barcelona this season (2011) and Arsenal’s invincible season in the early 2000s though made me realise that my league wasn’t too far off the realms of reality.
What was a great touch for such an early management game was that the playing style of your team evolved as your team progressed. Although you only had options for five playing styles or so (long ball, direct, short passing, mixed, and continental) you would find that only ‘direct’ would enable your team to win promotion strongly.
To win the European Cup (which was still in a purely knockout form save for a final one-game league) required a continental style. And that required at least a season of transition as your selected this style. Even with this transition, to win the European Cup was an incredible hard feat I achieved only once. The game had a perculiar way of making your best players transfer to foreign teams, thereby making them unsignable for a few seasons. When they returned, they were never the same player. Too many pizzas, perhaps?
Like with all truly difficult (yet achievable) feats in gaming history, winning the European Cup was theatre that I will never forget. Paul Simpson was my decent £5m left winger. He was the best winger available to me, but not my best player. Normally I simply failed to score against European opposition; he scored the winning goal in the last ten minutes of the final. The game itself only presented text when a team scored. I often thought that the difficulty of scoring a goal was was reflected in the tone of the text: I remember even now the text saying: Simpson has scored one of the best goals you’ll ever see!
As an English teacher I appreciate a life in books and imagination. Seeing that text in the theatre I had created in the space either side of my GCSEs and A-Levels is something that has motivated me to share even now, over a decade later. The game itself is utterly indicative of that time in my life, and of my exams. While I don’t think that I would play it again (I’d rather try to immerse myself in the current FM) it is a piece of gaming history that I welcome as I would an old, if rather difficult, friend.
