(Note: I wrote this entry months ago, but neglected to post it.  It still seems relevant and not widely known, though.)

The description of why it works (post 10) makes it sound like it’s more applicable to demo discs, which are more likely to warp during shipping, but there are anecdotal comments about it working for retail game discs as well. I may give it a try on my dead Final Fantasy XII disc.

A game isn’t any good if nobody rips it off, and so I present the inevitable Puzzle Quest clones! Spandex Force is the first high production value clone I’ve seen. It’s your standard try/buy model, but I wonder if anyone will go for another model– buy new levels, incorporate it into an existing world with micropayments, and so on.

I haven’t played Spandex Force, but the game’s creator blogs about its design, including many of the ways in which it differs from Puzzle Quest. It’s still clearly Bejeweled + spells, but I do wonder if it has some successful innovations.  (I wonder unjustifiably, since there is a free demo available.)

You’ve undoubtedly seen some of the garbage from the recent “Mass Effect is an interactive porn game” meme invading conservative media.  I saw one commentator perplexed that such a full-on sex simulator didn’t get an AO rating (having just been told that the game did not, in fact, feature graphic sex scenes).

I think the entire flap is firmly within the realm of harmless amusement.  The outlets involved aren’t known for being reality-based, and they tend to flit from one phantom threat to another.  This may reinforce the fears of some uninformed, anti-game parents, but let’s be clear: it’s not Mass Effect that’s the whipping boy here, it’s games.  These outlets will manufacture a scandal out of any video game content fed to them, no matter how wholesome or enriching.  Can you blame them?  Games are a perfect fear-mongering target: the viewers have almost no knowledge of the subject, and yet tons of people (even their own kids!) are playing them.

High Dynamic Time Range, or “big stack of images from different points in time, which you selectively project into a 2-D image”, is a fun way to get a new perspective on time and space.

Gordon’s got the skinny on this intuitive time-lapse image, along with some much more mind-bending approaches.

This dialog sequence at SomethingAwful does a surprisingly good job of summing up both the positives and negatives of Bioware’s dialog innovation. Yahtzee, of course, does a good job of summing up all the negative aspects of Mass Effect.

Mass Effect does schizophrenically alternate between aimless wandering with lots of dialog, and long stretches of tense combat. It also saves its chewy goodness until you get all the way to the center of the tootsie pop, but it does finally deliver its epic tastiness. If your brain tends to snack on new RPG systems and content, that should be enough to pull you through to the finish.

While other publications are busy jettisoning their unprofitable journalistic integrity as quickly as possible, Dan Hsu (of EGM) is back in the news, and this time he’s naming names. Apparently Ubisoft is unhappy with the treatment Assassin’s Creed received, and has banned EGM from future coverage of all their games. While they can’t actually prevent EGM from reporting on anything, they can stop inviting them to play preview builds, providing voluntary interviews, and of course sending them money to run advertisements. Additionally, Sony’s sports team (do they actually make anything?) and the Mortal Kombat team have similarly blacklisted EGM for negative coverage.

It’s unclear to me who this hurts more. Theoretically, could several large publishers band together to starve a gaming magazine of coverage and ad revenue, driving them out of business? Or is it more likely that Ubisoft will get the short end of the stick, losing out on cover stories for their biggest games?

My (completely uninformed) opinion is that EGM should treat this as an opportunity to step up in the investigative journalism area. Aside from upcoming Apple products, when does geek journalism uncover things the designers, developers, and publishers don’t want the public to know? However, the entire field is filled with young, naive, underpaid people perfectly willing to spout off all their company’s most closely-held secrets.

EGM’s been pretty good about being critical of what’s presented to them: their previews of Assassin’s Creed were rare in their restraint, and their foresight of the final game’s flaws. It seems to me that Ubisoft’s just given them free reign to step their critical coverage up to the next level.

I don’t normally post video game centric art or craft– there are plenty of sources for that already– but this creation is just so over the top obsessive that I can’t help myself.  Interchangeable plush cartridges, each with their own screenshots?  Wow.

I saw this pic on an article at Joystiq mentioning NATAS (which I guess is not just Satan backwards?) giving an award to the original Neverwinter Nights CRPG, an MMO that ran on AOL from 1991 to 1997– making it the first graphical MMO.

While I didn’t play this NWN, the screenshot instantly triggered memories of the feel of the Gold Box games.  More than the characters, gear, spells, or equipment, I could still sense what it was like to move a character through the square spaces, to line up a 2×2 stinking cloud or 3×3 fireball, to aim a lightning bolt, or even just to move to an adjacent tile and attack.  The graphics, as primitive as they were, still did an excellent job of instantly communicating all the important gameplay data, and delivering clear feedback.

I have no illusions about going back and playing Pool of Radiance, which even for the time had some horrendous flaws.  This screenshot is a reminder, though, that as we add more detail and fidelity to our simulations and graphics, it becomes that much harder to communicate that core gameplay signal through all the noise.

Want to resolve the “games as art” debate in 15 minutes? Play Passage.

It’s difficult to define art, but Passage refutes every objection I’ve heard to the status of games as art. While I’ve never doubted the potential of games in this respect– and I believe them to actually be superior for art, at least in terms of sheer power– Passage is the clearest and most concise argument I’ve ever seen. Passage uses the unique properties of the medium to convey its insights in a manner that could not be done in another medium.

You can read the artist’s statement (linked from the Passage download page), but as with most creative works, I found that the artist’s explanation of the work to be unsatisfying and limiting. Read the statement if you must, but play the game first. Games take only five minutes, and you may want to play a few times.

I’m doing a bit of a survey of tile placement games, and asking: how do they restrict tile placement? What purpose or interactivity do those tiles have after they’re placed? Here are a few, though there are many more:

• Dominoes: very simple. Placement is restricted by requiring matching numbers on each tile. Only end dominoes are interactive; pieces in the middle are unimportant for placement restrictions or scoring.
• Scrabble: placement is restricted by a grid, as well as the English language (or, more accurately, a giant Scrabble dictionary). Most tiles remain in play throughout the game, though scoring is fixed at the time the tiles are placed. The game board itself adds bonus scoring to some placement positions.
• Go: placement is fairly unrestricted, limited to uninhabited locations on a game grid. Because adjacent tiles work together to chain, much of the board remains interactive throughout the game. Many non-interactive situations actually cause the game pieces to be removed from the board, resulting in a highly complex and dynamic game.
• Tangrams: tile placement is technically not restricted aside from the board’s boundaries. The pieces have no purpose beyond their shape, resulting in a fairly simple geometric puzzle game.
• Zombies!!!: tiles must be adjacent, and essentially within a grid. Furthermore, roads may not be blocked by tile placement. Placing a tile causes a certain number of zombie, bullet, and life tokens to come into existence on the tile. Players and zombies roll dice and move about this player-created board. The tile placement portion of the game is fairly simple, but since it defines the geography for the rest of the game’s action, most tiles remain interactive throughout the game.  Players use event cards to further spice up gameplay.
• Carcassonne: Tile placement is somewhat similar to Zombies!!!, in that terrain types must be respected. Carcassonne has more types, with grass, road, and city edges.  When a player places a tile, the player may choose to place another type of game piece (a follower) onto the tile, sometimes with multiple options as to where.  Some areas of the board become completed as the game progresses, though some adjacency chaining (fields) causes large amounts of the board to remain in play for the duration.  Unlike Zombies!!!, pieces do not move around the game board, and tile information is only used to restrict placement of tiles and followers, and for scoring.

Wikipedia has some more (such as the tile placement version of Diceland), though it lists tile-based games, not just tile placement games.

I find tile placement games exciting for several reasons.  Their rules tend to be intuitive, but lend themselves to depth.  Tiles can provide layers of gameplay: their edges, shapes, or other characteristics can restrict placement; their attributes (such as color, terrain type, printed rules, etc.) can influence gameplay or scoring in other ways.  On a visceral level, the simple action of placing a tile is satisfying.

Do you have any tile placement games you’ve enjoyed?  What is it you like about them?  Do you like the difficult process of deciding which tiles to place and where, such as Go or Scrabble?  Do you prefer playing on a game board of your own construction, such as Zombies!!!?  What about the loose diplomacy and planning behind a game of Carcassonne?