Penny Arcade

This is essentially how I feel about Halo.  I can probably count on one hand the number of discrete rounds I’ve played alone.  It would be like eating a pizza alone.  I’ve done that, too; not much there to be proud of.

The implication is there in the world, direct: the jeep has three seats, and you let them go fallow at your peril.

Reading over the reviews, I see it’s still important to get your kicks in on ODST, even in a review of Reach, even though ODST remains a more robust narrative effort.  Reach has segments that sing, standout hunks of gamecraft that stand astride the series as a whole - like the denouement that turns the classic jeep ending on its head, but as a coherent experience I still have to go with its predecessor.  For a Bungie game, ODST was created under some comparatively firm strictures, and they needed to make a game that would fit the vessel.  It’s not an accident that it’s the most compact, most personal, best executed story they’ve made to date.  It happened because they had an editor - the most intractable, brutal editor possible, the only editor a company like Bungie need ever tolerate, that is to say the relentless march of time.

(The Fabrication Law that Brenna taught me goes like this: good, quick, and cheap.  Pick two.  That’s from when she was a seamstress, but it’s a very compact sort of wisdom that is clearly borne of exposure to the World-As-It-Is.  But it’s not as universal as it could be, because it implies that you have direct control over all three variables.  It rarely happens that way.)

I was talking with my friend Sam Macbacawacha about the game a couple days ago, and he lamented the limited map selection.  As an exercise in raw numerics, maybe eight isn’t a lot.  Generally speaking, people want more things.  That doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ll use them, but n+1 is always the correct amount.

I listen to the album Guilt Machine a lot. Well, not the “album.”  I listen to the first track over and over again.  Maybe I would like the other tracks as well, but I’m fine with what I’ve got.  This, or the equivalent of this, happens in multiplayer games also.  When you give me the choice via a traditional browser, I’ll play the same ten percent of a game over and over again.  I don’t think this is a localized phenomenon, either.  Dust.  Facing Worlds.  E2M1.  Blood Gulch.  You know these places.  Unless there’s a new gametype that requires a specific map, it doesn’t change for most people.  If you could play TF2’s Payload on Counter-Strike’s de_dust, believe: that’s what people would do.

A million years ago, when I saw the reams of data they were collecting for Halo 2 at some Microsoft event, I overheard someone from Bungie talking about the Matchmaking having its own designer.  Not UI, or engineering, or “experience,” or anything like that: the playlists have their own designer.  I didn’t understand why that would be, but it’s perfectly clear now.  They calibrate the Great Machine - exposing every facet of the game though maps outside my comfort zone with gametypes that reveal them further.  For PC enthusiasts, the Great Machine is the face of Goldstein - tyrannical and vile - but I can tolerate a tablespoon or so of tyranny in the service of my own enjoyment, for the purpose of dissolving ancient habits.      

(CW)TB

man is a giddy thing

I have had the opportunity to play the new Castle Ravenloft board game a handful of times now and I’m very impressed. We brought it over to a friends house the other night and played it with someone who had never even touched a D20 before. She listened to us discuss all the ways that it was similar to D&D 4e and then asked why we would play this board game instead of just playing normal Dungeons and Dragons. I thought that was a really good question and coming up with an answer made me realise why I like the game so much.

Castle Ravenloft is a quick and painless way to get your D&D fix. As a DM creating a game for five people can take me hours. I spend days preparing my adventures. Even if you’re using a pre-written adventure, Dungeons and Dragons is not the sort of game that you can just decide to play one night after dinner when you have some friends over. People need to have characters ready, they all need to know the rules and have dice. The DM needs maps and prep time. You can’t just crack out Dungeons and Dragons the way you can a game like Dominion.

Castle Ravenloft fixes that. Now you can take a table of people who have never rolled a D20 and have them playing an authentic feeling D&D adventure in the time it would take you to teach them Pandemic. There is no dungeon master required and no complex multi paged character sheets to try and learn. You decide who you want to be and then you are tossed in a dungeon and it’s time to start adventuring. The game does an incredible job of condensing the D&D experience into something you can just pick up and play.

The only problems we ran into while playing were a few instances where the rules were a bit loose. Coming from 4e where movement and attacks are spelled out precisely, Ravenloft can feel a bit strange. When a card tells you to move a monster onto a tile it does not tell you which square on that tile it should go to. I’ve seen people say that they roll two dice, one for the column and one for the row and this tells them what square to place the bad guy on. In my games we just put it wherever we want and it works fine. The same thing happens when a monster must attack the closest hero but there are two heroes it could hit. Some people will roll dice or flip a coin but we just pick. It’s a fun group game and if a few of the rules require some interpretation that’s fine. D&D in my opinion is not a game about rules, it’s a game about decisions.

I highly recommend Castle Ravenloft for people new to D&D as well as veterans of the game. I’ve heard it described as a gateway drug and that may very well be. Honestly though it’s a fantastic experience on it’s own and one worth playing.

-Gabe out