Inspired by the comments for the last post on shelf moments, I’ll give save-induced shelving its due.

Jennifer brought up New Super Mario as an example: you can only save after beating certain types of levels (the harder ones), or you can hackily “purchase” a save by spending coins to unlock an area. The result is that the more expert NSMB players never have to replay an area– but the people already struggling with the game get to repeat the same areas over and over again, just to reach the boss and die again.

(As an aside, NSMB is a great counterexample to the popular opinion that Nintendo is going for casual gamers and non-gamers. Super Mario Galaxy will be another: its intricate control scheme is about as hard core as console games get nowadays.)

Modern save system failures, for the most part, can’t hold a candle to the fantastically punishing systems of old (excluding Steel Battalion, which deletes your saves if you die). The original system, of course, was no save at all: run out of lives on the last boss, and you get to replay the whole game from the beginning. Beating a game was an accomplishment, a testament to your mad gaming skillz. Everyone was happier this way– except maybe they weren’t.

One of my very first shelf moments was playing Wasteland. Its flaw: a single save, which automatically saves whenever you change zones. The moment: my party, about 20 hours in, slips crossing a river while in a sewer. The rushing waters take them away, right out of the zone– saving the game– and outdoors, where they’re dashed against rocks and killed. Load game: dashed against rocks, killed. No escape, restart from scratch. I learned my lesson, and when I replayed the game years later, I frequently made backup copies of my save. My friend Erik (well, one of them) even automated the process to do it for him every 15 minutes.

Why do I still remember this? Because Wasteland was one of my favorite games, truly amazing in many other respects. And because the same thing happened to me again with a newer game: Escape Velocity Nova, which saves over your single game every time you land (gigantic army waiting to kill you or no).

Let’s assume that those egregious cases are errors. Let’s assume that it’s only the less pathological cases like New Super Mario that designers will consciously subject us to. Cases like Metroid Prime: Hunters, which allows you to replay from frequent checkpoints, but doesn’t actually allow you to save at them (don’t run out of power for your Nintendo DS!). Or like Final Fantasy, which sprinkles its save points with great reserve: the better to force multiple pre-boss cutscene viewings.

Why do they do it? Why do designers force us to re-defeat levels we’ve already completed? Why do they force us to see dialog we’ve already seen? Why do they force us to play for longer than we’d like, in order to reach the next save point? What are the reasons, justifiable or not, for these sometimes shelf-moment inducing save systems?

I’ve got a couple ideas of my own, but I don’t think I really get it. So please, help me out in the comments!

Short post: I’m heading to PAX tomorrow. Time to frantically throw together some Magic: the Gathering and Warhammer Dark Millenium decks, charge the DS, and locate my bag of many dice. I’m so excited.

All hail King Torg!

It’s the total sweet spot: a bunch of great, old game design ideas, streamlined and made user-friendly; a healthy amount of genre-mixing; and just enough totally new ideas to pull the whole thing together.

Moment-to-moment gameplay is a top-down 360 degree space shooter, complete with boss battles and things exploding wherever there’s room. In a neat twist, your mother ship is also in the battles, and you can instruct it to follow you to different locations to help with the shooting. Beyond that, they’ve managed to work in the Star Control 2 space station: collect enough minerals to make and research more stuff, like new ships, guns, turrets, and engines. (Be unafraid: the mineral collection is done while shooting stuff, saving you the dreaded trip to the surface.) Finally, this is all tied together with a galactic map, which lets you choose from a few strategic objectives: destroy the aliens’ mining operations; do some mining of your own; or take on the big, bad alien boss. This last element is what kept me up way too late last night with its “just one more turn” compulsion.

You can read GameTunnel’s glowing review, or just go download the free demo. It was released in 2003, but many of the innovations struck me as quite fresh.

I’ve been trying out a lot of games recently, so I’ve hit a few shelf moments.  First, let’s define a shelf moment.

A player encounters a shelf moment when they still want to experience more of the game content, but are unable or unwilling to.  A shelf moment is not any time you shelve the game: if you just run out of new content and get bored, you’re done with the game.  A shelf moment is a “premature shelving”.

I’m open to alternatives, but that definition fits the cases I’ve been encountering recently.

It should be obvious why game developers want to avoid shelf moments: you’ve put all that content in there for a reason!  If you’re discouraging players from experiencing a huge chunk of your content, why is it there?  From a sales standpoint, a player who’s hit a shelf moment isn’t likely to recommend the game to his friends (and is likely to sell it used to EB).  A reviewer forced to overcome one may be unkind in the final review.

Why do shelf moments occur?  I’ll put some examples in future posts, and try to diagnose the issue (in many cases, it’s quite obvious– and easily avoidable!).  If you feel like venting about any frustrating shelf moments of your own, please share your story here or in any other shelf moment post!

GMail really does know what I’m looking for: today it popped up an ad for Starport: Galactic Empires.  It’s a free, 2D, massively multiplayer space trading game.

Is it good?  I can’t tell yet.  It appears that the primary way to make money is by lugging equipment around space.  There aren’t a ton of players logged on at any time, so your chances of getting jacked while running the cargo are pretty low.  That part of the game looks like mindless FedExing.

I’d dismiss it out of hand, but there are also player corporations and colonies, which look like the heart of the game.  There’s a bit of a SimPlanet game with the colonies, and they can be attacked by other corporations.  My next step is to join a corporation, and see what people do for fun in this game.

If it turns out I do like the game, I can get a head start (and skip some of the FedExing) by handing over my credit card: you can buy a pretty good ship, extra fuel, and character respecs with real cash.

Recently, a client decided to consolidate all of his e-mail into one GMail account. I’ve done the same thing: I enjoy labels and searchability far more than even corporate Outlook.

As long as you’re switching over to GMail for all the benefits, why not convert your old e-mails as well? This particular client needed his old e-mail moved for other reasons, but it was so easy, I decided to go and do it for my old mail as well.

In most cases, all you need is Mark Lyon’s GMail Loader. It’s super simple. You plug in a working GMail SMTP server from this list (or your ISP’s, if it blocks outgoing SMTP traffic), point it at your existing e-mail file or files, give it a target GMail address, and tell it to go to work. It then merrily chugs away, sending one at a time to your GMail account, leaving the old from/to intact (only the date gets clobbered). Beautiful!

In this case, the e-mail was already in a giant Outlook Express file, which isn’t supported by GMail Loader. No problem: just pop it into DbxConv and you’re good to go.

Awesome mech movie alert!

Now that Neill Blomkamp has been announced as the director of the first Halo movie, some pretty awesome short films of his have found their way onto the web. His cinéma vérité takes on near-future sci-fi answer a couple questions we’ve all had: what would it look like if we really did have heavily armed police robots? And what if aliens ran out of gas for their giant UFOs right above our planet, and were forced to stay here as refugees? Both films are very much worth a viewing or three.

Speaking of realism, apparently I missed this video game about a coup against the United States. In order to foil it, the President and Vice President– both young, rock-star-cowboy type guys– jump into super-advanced power armor and take on the combined forces of the U.S. military. With catch-phrases like “I’ll make you just like perforated cheese” and “You guys are roast chicken”, it’s amazing that Metal Wolf Chaos is only available in Japan.

I’m normally not a big fan of webcomics that have really primitive visuals– I don’t feel like they really get much out of the medium, and they’d be better served with just text.

Or maybe I just hadn’t found one I liked.

Someone turned me on to xkcd with this fantastic reminder. Seems pretty good, right? Don’t worry: the comic rescues itself from pretention with stupid geek jokes.  Awesome.

I’m going to cut straight to it: this footage is a disaster.

I was going to offer an analysis discussing the endless Clone and Conquer games that followed C&C and *Craft (and which flopped), or the strikingly premature stagnation of the MMO genre, or the proper amount to innovate on a commercial title. I was going to wonder if maybe they weren’t treating this like Just Another License Title.

But let’s be honest. It should be clear to anyone in the MMO sector that you can’t expect to sell gamers on 5 minutes of autoattack footage. If I want to watch two guys occasionally smack each other in between bouts of standing around, I’ll go play my Paladin. Is there something deeper going on? Are they setting up Heroic Opportunities? Would someone at Turbine please try to sell us this game?

With two freelancers in one house, I think about my backup system a lot more than when I was just gaming. With my computer meltdown Friday (intermittently bad power supply), I’ve been thinking about it quite a bit.

The basic requirements for a backup system are:

1. Recent backup. When your hard drive explodes, you want the most recent data you were working on.
2. Incremental backup. For accidental deletions, file corruption, viruses, and so on. I’ve been tossing out versions older than a month.
3. Hard drive image backup. If you’re serious about getting up and running without a day or so spent installing Windows, then the latest updates, then Visual Studio, vim, SharpReader, preferences, and on and on, you want to be able to just turn a new hard drive into an identical copy of the one that just exploded.
4. Expandable. As you generate more and more data, you need more and more safe storage. This doesn’t necessarily mean it all has to be instantly accessible, if you can come up with a safe way to archive older projects. I haven’t found an offline archival solution that’s both inexpensive and reliable. The rate at which we’ve been generating content hasn’t exceeded the rate at which hard drives become larger, so we’ve just added storage to our backup system.
5. Remote location. Fire, quake, flood, thieves, whatever: if your data’s critical, you need a copy far, far away.
6. Validated. You want to know that the data has been backed up, and that the backup is correct.

When I last took a serious look at backup solutions about two years ago, there weren’t a lot of inexpensive options that fulfilled the above requirements. Tape backup was (and still is) far too costly. At the time, Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices were either prohibitively expensive, or too flimsy for business data.

I ended up with a basic home-grown system: inexpensive PC, plus a few giant drives. It’s NAS on a budget. The backup drives are RAID 1, for a little bit of extra reliability. Software does nightly backups and keeps diffs for 30 days. I didn’t actually get enough storage to back up images of both main computers, so it fulfills requirements 1, 2, and 4. It completely falls down on #5. I haven’t configured it to send me e-mail every time it backs up, so it also falls down on #6– if it were to stop running backups, I wouldn’t know until a few days later when I checked on it.

I’ve been doing some research on upgrading the system, and it looks like personal NAS has become a lot better and a lot cheaper. These reviews from 2005 suggest that the Buffalo TeraStation and Infrant ReadyNAS are solid entries. I particularly like the strategy of buying an empty NAS and adding my own SATA drives.

On the other hand, what will the NAS do for me? I’ll probably get better performance, and lower power usage. They handle printer and USB drive sharing as well, though I’m happy with my printer sharing solution for now. I’ll probably gain in the validation department (automated e-mails about backup activity, RAID drive failure, etc.), but I could probably just reconfigure my current software for the same gain. I still won’t have a remote location, so that remains a large point of failure.

The remote location front doesn’t look too promising. Tapes are out of the question. Online backups are rather pricey, even if only used for my most critical data.

For now, I think I’m just going to reconfigure my current “budget NAS”, and maybe add a couple larger drives so I can get hard drive images going. It’s the cheapest solution that comes close to my goals, as long as I accept that I’m screwed when my house burns down. At least I’ll still have all my gmail.