Don’t have much to say this week.

I haven’t had much time to play video games this past week. I played a little bit of Diablo 3 and managed to get my new Crusader to ~level 55. After playing the Crusader class for 55 levels, I can confidently say that it is an “ez-mode” class–Crusaders deal a ton of damage AND have massive amounts of toughness (i.e. they are hard to kill and kill things really fast).

Other than that, I have played a little bit of League of Legends, specifically the April Fools joke “Ultra Rapid Fire” mode where spells have no mana cost and cooldowns are reduced by 80%. It is preeeeeeetty trolly and there are a lot of champions that are flat out broken, but if you don’t go into it expecting to win, instead just having fun it is pretty enjoyable.

But, the big news is that next week I will be attending PAX (Penny Arcade Expo) East!!!! This is the schedule of events: http://east.paxsite.com/schedule

I attended last year for 1 day only and this year decided that I MUST attend for the whole weekend! There is so much to do and so little time to see it all. There are tons of talks/mini-seminars that I want to go to as well as be able to explore the entire show-floor. The talks are usually about serious topics, but the show-floor is where you get to test out new games and meet a bunch of awesome people! (If anyone remembers from Indie Game: The Movie, Phil Fish had a booth at PAX East to debut Fez). I’m pretty damn excited about it to say the least!

That’s about it for this week. Next week I should hopefully have a bunch of cool stories from PAX!!!!!! 😀 😀 😀 😀 😀

My Spring break was spent here at Midd working on projects and playing video games :D.

I continue to play League of Legends (couple games a day usually). Nothing new to talk about here.

The big news, though, was the release of Diablo 3’s new expansion Reaper of Souls. It was pretty hyped because this Reaper of Souls was the first big news in Diablo 3 since the games launch. A couple weeks before Reaper of Souls launched, Blizzard implemented a new Loot 2.0 system that guarantees a higher percentage of your loot drops to actually be relevant to your character (in vanilla Diablo 3, loot drops were literally random. You could get great gear or absolute crap that wasn’t even for your class at any time). Also, a huuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuge change that came to Diablo 3 just before the RoS release was the REMOVAL OF THE AUCTION HOUSE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

So, to people who don’t know what the Auction House was, it was Blizzard’s in-game market for weapons, gear and gold. Players could grind for gear and then sell any gear they didn’t want on the Auction House (either for in-game gold OR if the item was really really really really good, you could sell it for REAL MONEY! :O :O :O). The Auction House was by far the worst part of vanilla Diablo 3. There was no reason to play the game because if you got stuck you could literally just pay to win the game by buying new/better gear. I, personally, hardly used the AH because I ended up quitting the game 2 months after its launch (after reaching level 60 and the end-game grind for pointless gear that you could just buy on the AH).

So, with the AH and Loot 2.0 changes just before the launch of a new expansion, Diablo 3 had gotten pretty hype again (2 years after launch…..). So, this break before the expansion dropped, I got back into the game and grinded out some gear that would make my realllllllly old character relevant in the meta again (the grind for gear now takes much less time than it did way back at launch, that’s for sure!). After beating through Act 5 (the expansion act), I’m still playing the game. Currently I’m leveling a new character called the Crusader to level 70 (the max level). I’m wondering if the game will eventually get to a grind and if I will get bored with it soon enough, because unfortunately RoS didn’t add any new content that has massive amounts of replay-ability; all you can do in-game still is replay the campaign over and over and hope to get better gear so you can do higher difficulty settings. But, the current consensus in the community is that there isn’t really a reason to play above Torment 2 or 3 (out of 6) because it takes so long to progress that, even though you are gaining more EXP and gold, your progression rate is so slow that you might as well play on a couple difficulties lower to be able to go faster (so you can kill more bosses to get more guaranteed legendary items).

Alas, we shall see if the game can keep me interested for long. I hope it does, but at the end of the day I don’t know how I’ll feel weeks/months from now. I’ve always got a excessively large Steam library to fall back on!

This documentary definitely provided the feels.

The film follows the production of 3 Indie Games and the lives of their developers: Super Meat Boy (Edmund McMillen and Tommy Refenes), Braid (Jonathon Blow), and Fez (Phil Fish). I can’t even come up with words to describe the emotions I felt while watching Indie Game. As someone who aspires to enter the game industry, it was a great experience to be able to see into the lives and minds of the creators of some of the greatest games of all time. It was unreal how much I connected with everything that each developer was saying. To some viewers, I’m sure looking at these middle-aged guys put themselves through years of stress to “express themselves” in video games seems so odd or socially unacceptable, especially when there is no guarantee for profit in the long run. But, I look at them and say, “Wow, that’s me!”.

I’m your socially atypical kid whose ideal Saturday night is spent in my room playing video games. Do I take a lot of crap for it? Certainly. But, I keep doing it anyway because it is what I enjoy. It is extremely refreshing to see 4 guys just like me make it in the gaming world.

Something I always wonder (like many college students) is what I’m going to do with my life. I could practice my programming skills and apply for a job at some large AAA studio and make a consistently large amount of money writing boring code for a game that I have little influence over. I could also put myself through the same hell as the developers in Indie Game in order to create my own game where I am in control of everything. After watching Indie Game, I’ve definitely been swayed more towards the latter, even if it means a high-probability of failure and monetary strain. I found it so interesting in the film that all of the devs lived in such similar environments and were more stressed about the quality of their game than their quality of living. But, at the same time I could see myself in the same situation. I would be totally content with a little studio apartment as long as I had a computer, electricity, internet, and water (and essentials like food, etc…). I can’t help but wonder if this is a cultural thing (i.e. would all gamers think like this?) or if people like myself and the devs in Indie Game are a small minority even within the minority of gamers? I’m not entirely sure how to get an answer to that question other than go around asking everyone if they play games and if living like that would be acceptable…xD

One thing is for sure, I’m currently debating purchasing the special edition of Indie Game in order to see all of the extra interviews and the epilogue with Phil Fish.

I highly, highly, highly recommend watching Indie Game: The Movie, even if you have absolutely no interest in gaming at all, I still think it is a valuable insight into why gamers are the way they are.

Won’t be a long post this week, I have to get back to studying for a CS exam! D:

As far as gaming goes this week, I’ve mostly only played League (with the exception of beating Portal again for our class meeting this Monday).

I’ve been trying to play at least one game a day of League, which I’ve been holding to pretty well. I usually end up playing more on weekends than during the week (this past Friday I think I played 10 or 11 games). My account right now is level 20, which is when you can buy runes (added bonuses to your champion’s stats). I’ve played enough now that I’m no longer limited by the mechanics of the game; my fingers just do what I want them to do without me having to consciously think about it (at least with champions I’m comfortable with–haven’t been able to experience all 117 yet). I expect by the end of this semester I’ll have reached 30 and will be playing ranked.

I plan to start playing Metro: 2033 this week once I have midterms out of the way. Might stream or record the playthrough. We’ll see.

That’s all for this week. Back to studying 🙁

Joystick Warriors is a pseudo-new take on the common argument that violent video games make people violent. Being a video game player for quite a long time and being involved in the gaming community at large, you could definitely say it’s an argument I’m sick of hearing.

One thing that redeemed this documentary for me was a claim by a psychologist early on who said there is absolutely no evidence that violent video games make violent people. I was glad someone someone finally acknowledged that. It’s so disheartening to hear all these snippets on the news about some kid who murders half his high school and they put the blame on video games. As someone who plays violent video games, I can definitely confirm that there is a clear distinction between killing someone in a virtual environment and killing someone in “real life”. I put “real life” in quotes because it’s not as if killing someone in a video game means you aren’t killing something, it just doesn’t happen to be a physical human.

So, after hearing the psychologist’s claim, I thought this documentary might be about defending video games. Boy, oh boy, was I sorely mistaken! The topic smoothly transitioned to the ugly twin sister argument of desensitization. Something I did agree with from the documentary was a claim that in competitive games where killing is involved, the “players” that we kill become “objectives”; we don’t really equate killing with the mechanics of the game. But, the speakers in the documentary took this as “they are killing people and don’t even realize they are doing it!”. This is totally wrong. Players just separate playing to win a game and killing “real” people. Knowing the difference and being desensitized are completely different things. For example, Minecraft has a gamemode called “Hunger Games”. It is an adaptation of the game in Suzanne Collins’ novel The Hunger Games. The Minecraft version is an enjoyable, tense experience. If you were to put me in a “real-life” version of The Hunger Games?

I’ve probably killed somewhere in the hundreds of thousands of virtual-people. I certainly still feel emotions just at the thought of having to kill someone in “real life”, though.

To be totally honest, I feel like video games are thrown under the bus by a lot of society’s problems because they are the new “in” thing. Violence? Video games. Swearing and vulgarity? Video games. Poor grades in school? Video games. ADHD? Video games. The list goes on and on. Arturo said it well in his blog post, we have to be thinking about the age kids are when they start playing these games. If you are not old enough or mature enough or don’t have the self-discipline to make the distinction between the world of a video game and “real life”, then you probably shouldn’t be playing games that could influence you. But, nobody blames the parents for not knowing their kids well enough to make a good choice for them (if they aren’t old enough to make the decision for themselves). I’m not going to say that kids who are under 17 shouldn’t play M rated games; some games that are rated M have great stories and gameplay (and I played M rated games long before I was 17). I just think there are a lot more relevant factors causing all of these “problems” that video games just take the blame for.

Over the years, I’ve collected a rather large Steam library. Unfortunately, I haven’t played most of the games because they are RPGs that I want to get invested in, and with my schedule I can play a little bit here, a little bit there, but not usually for large chunks of time. Luckily, now I have a class that is making me play some of them!!!

Over the course of the semester, we are supposed to pick a game that (in theory) is diverse and non-repetitive and offers a variety of different types of gameplay. So, after looking over my Steam library, I think the game(s) I am going to choose to play over the semester (other than League of Legends and Planetside 2) are Dragon Age: Origins and Metro 2033 (and possibly Metro: Last Light, if I complete 2033).

Dragon Age: Origins is made by Bioware (the same company that produced Mass Effect and Knights of the Old Republic), so I am sure the game will be great (it has gotten very good reviews). But, like all Bioware games, the story is said to be massive (over 150 hours). I’m unsure if I can tackle a game like this during a semester while still having time for schoolwork yet also putting enough time into the game to get a good playthrough.

Metro 2033 (and Last Light) is a FPS RPG set in post-apocalyptic Russia. Like Dragon Age, the Metro series is reviewed very well. I think I might start by tackling Metro before Dragon Age simply because of time constraints. I’ll make more posts in the future once I start my playthroughs!

Ok, so this week I’m going to try NOT to assault any readers with a 1300 word wall of text!

Our topic in class this week was sound and music and how they interact with the user-experience of video games. We played Rock Band, Rez, and Child of Eden as examples of games which use sound as the base for their gameplay. However, I decided I should give Planetside 2 some Awesome Game Blog love! Since its release in November of 2012, I’ve played ~650 hours (~30 days) of Planetside 2, so I thought it deserves an early spot in this blog.

For anyone who is reading this saying, “What the hell is this Planetside 2 you speak of?!?!?!”, fear not! LOOK! A TRAILER! CLICK ME!

Planetside 2 is an MMOFPS. What does that mean? It is a massively multiplayer online first person shooter. What does that mean?! In a nutshell, the game takes place on Auraxis, a fantasy based planet. There are 3 factions: the Vanu Sovereignty, the New Conglomerate, and the Terran Republic. Each faction has its own lore and reasons for wanting to conquer Auraxis, which is split into 3 continents: Indar, Esamir, and Amerish. It is your job as a soldier of your respective faction to wage a massive war and conquer as much territory as you can. Because the game is an MMO, the gameplay is constant. There is no matchmaking server that matches you with other players and then loads an instance of the game where you battle for a little while and then whoever wins wins. Instead, each continent is a nonstop war raging between thousands of actual players. The way I like to explain it to people is to imagine an RTS like Starcraft where each of your individual units is being controlled by a real person and instead of one demi-god player controlling the action, players coordinate together to fight as effectively as possible.

Now, because I promised this wouldn’t be a wall of text, I’m going to limit myself to talking only about sound in Planetside 2 (I could take about it for quite a while, otherwise).

First thing I am going to recommend is that you watch this brief game clip right here in order to get an idea of the scale of the game of the sounds that are going on in any given battle. The developer of Planetside 2, Sony Online Entertainment, really wanted players to become fully immersed in the game and believe that they were fighting in a real war. With immersion comes sound. In the opening seconds of the clip above, we hear explosions, tank shells firing off, rifles onloading, engines roaring, and tank treads squeaking against the ground. Every time the player spots an enemy, his character calls out the enemies position and what kind of soldier/vehicle it is. There are members of the player’s platoon talking in the in-game chat. When the player scores a kill, we hear a short “ding!” to signify that he has received EXP. Based on the player’s distance from many of these sounds, they each sound different, which adds to the immersion into the scale of the game (you can tell the difference between an explosion right next to you and a friendly tank blowing up across the bridge). Each and every sound is detailed, even minor sounds like the player’s secondary gunner in his tank reloading his turret (if you listen carefully at 2:20 you will hear his gunner’s clip empty and begin reloading a new magazine). When the player dies, a short, sad tune plays with some horns and trumpets signifying your “failure”, but soon after the respawn screen appears with a new tune with violins preparing you to reenter the battle. The sound of Planetside 2 is so detailed and immersive that there are a lot of sounds that you don’t even notice until you have played the game for hours upon hours. I can honestly say (as someone who has put quite a bit of time into this game) that the experience of Planetside 2 would be very much different and, in my opinion, inferior if sounds were removed or less detailed in any way. Planetside 2 isn’t a game with iconic soundtracks or songs that you will remember for years after you stop playing, but that doesn’t make sound any less important within its fantasy universe.

This week, I played SolForge, The Room, Candy Crush, The Simpsons: Tapped Out, Planetside 2, Hearthstone, and League of Legends. Planetside 2, Hearthstone, and League of Legends are games that I have been playing outside of this class; I won’t talk about them much other than to mention I’ve been playing them.

The first game I tried this week was SolForge, a turn-based card game where the cards are actually virtually represented. Over the past months, I have been playing Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft while it was in closed (and now open) beta. SolForge and Hearthstone are similar in many ways: each player controls a champion; each champion starts the game with a certain amount of life points; players select cards (either creatures or spells) and play them on each turn with the goal being to lower your opponent’s life to 0. SolForge is strictly a strategy game. You could make the argument that players are pretending to be their respective champions and the game is taking place outside of the real world, but that is not really the case. One could remove the collectible value from each creature card (i.e. have it be a piece of paper with an attack value and life value and a possible special ability) and the game would still function the same. Champions are really just a value between 0 and 100 (the face and name of your champion doesn’t impact the overall game). In essence, the game boils down to strategy and math. You want to place your cards in the correct lanes of the board in order to maximize each individual card’s value (i.e. the longer a card is on the board, the more damage it does/absorbs, the more value you are getting from it). Unfortunately, in comparison to Hearthstone (a game I enjoy quite a bit), the strategy in SolForge was lacking quite significantly. Each turn you draw 5 cards and are allowed to play 2 of them. The board consists of 5 “lanes” where a creature placed in a lane will battle the corresponding creature in the opposing player’s lane. If there is no creature in your opponent’s lane where you have a creature, your attack with that creature will do life damage to their champion. At the end of your turn, you discard the remaining cards that were unused. Any card that was used during your turn levels up when it reenters your deck AND gains your champion experience towards the next level. Your champion’s level decides what level of cards you can play (a more in depth tutorial is available here: http://solforgegame.com/game/how-to-play/). I played quite a few games in order to get a better grasp of the meta-game, but there wasn’t much to be found. Basically, the meta-game can be summarized as follows: look at the board, see which lanes are a threat, defend them. If no lanes are a threat, find open lanes and put a big creature in it. If you have a half-decent spell this turn, maybe use it too. Discard your hand, battle, rinse, repeat. There was no long-term strategy to produce combos of any kind because every turn you have to discard your hand. So, basically, the “strategy” of the game turned out to simply be a reaction-based game (i.e. see what your opponent did and place down cards to stop it).

Hearthstone, on the other hand, offers more strategic and immersive gameplay. Champions in Hearthstone actually impact the game (each champion has a different special ability), so players can actually become attached to one champion over another (because of preference of playstyle–Rogues play differently than Warriors play differently than Mages and so on). Also, you have a starting hand of 3 cards that you keep throughout the game (drawing 1 card each turn). I won’t go on explaining the full mechanics of Hearthstone, but for anyone who finds SolForge to be a unique experience that is lacking slightly, I highly suggest you try Hearthstone.

The next game I played was The Room. I actually enjoyed this game a lot (so much so that I played the free demo and ended up buying the $0.99 full version!!). The premise of the game was you are “you” and you are in a room with a safe. Your goal is to open the safe. Begin! The Room uses the touch/motion technology available in mobile devices very well. In order to unlock the safe, you have to work your way through many puzzles where you have to push buttons, turn keys, angle your screen to connect lines, or tilt your device to balance objects, to name a few. There is also an attached story to the safe that you work your way to unlocking after you dig deeper into the safe (SPOILER: There are more safes inside the first safe). The story was ok, but it was the gameplay that kept me playing (and eventually buying) the game. Every puzzle felt refreshing; you never had to strictly reuse a trick you learned earlier, rather adapt it in a new way to solve increasingly harder puzzles.

Candy Crush was a slight let down from how hyped up it was. I had never played Candy Crush before I tried it, although I have played games similar to it. Mostly it was a let down because the game wasn’t as difficult as people had made me believe it was. For that reason, I didn’t feel the addictive “rush” that people describe themselves getting. I beat the first 20 levels and didn’t feel challenged, so I just gave up playing it. I felt like Candy Crush was a worse version of Hexic, a similar “board removal” type game except instead of 4-direction swapping, each element on the board is a hexagon that can be rotated. Also, instead of having a set number of turns to remove jelly from the board, Hexic is an unlimited turn game that you play for a high score where the obstacle is the addition of more colors of hexagons AND bombs that blow up after a set number of turns if you don’t clear them from the board. I prefer the Hexic style of gameplay because it requires that you react to each individual bomb (and sometimes bombs are dropped in really, really bad spots), whereas in Candy Crush you know what you have to remove from the start and can plan around it. I wouldn’t say that I found Candy Crush “not fun”, instead I would say I was hoping for more.

The last game I played this week was The Simpsons: Tapped Out. It was a funny experience. The game is a unique parody of games like The Sims or Farmville where the goal is to form some kind of civilization by completing objectives. You don’t really “do” anything in the game except for tap the next thing that you are told to do. If you are out of things to do, you really do become “tapped out”. I completed all of my available tasks pretty soon after the tutorial ended and then there was nothing for me to do. Each task I had set for my characters to complete was going to take 6+ real-time hours to complete (unless I wanted to spend real money to buy donuts to speed up the process, which….no I didn’t want to do that). I can definitely see why people would keep playing it (heck, my phone just buzzed with an alert that Homer had finished lounging in the pool!!!!) because there is this “OCD-esque” feeling of needing to complete everything. I would definitely consider myself a completionist when I play games with certain objectives, so I find myself occasionally checking if I can do anything in my remade Springfield to check something off of my list even though I know I am not really accomplishing anything by tapping through a couple menus to tell Apu to raise the prices on his merchandise. Some people may hate on this game for being stupid, but I enjoyed it!

Thanks for making it through all of this and I’ll see you next week!

Hello!  Welcome to my Awesome Blog Thingy for Film 248 at Middlebury College.  This blog will consist of all things related to video games that pop into my head 😀

First things first, a little background about myself:

My name is Ruben Gilbert.  I’m a junior Computer Science major.  I’ve been playing video games for as long as I can remember.  My brother and I got our first console when I was 4–a Sega Genesis!!!  The first games we owned were a bunch of Sonic The Hedgehog titles, Power Rangers, and Paper Boy.  From our first system, I was hooked on games.  Over the years we came to own a Nintendo 64, Gamecube, Playstation 2, Xbox, Xbox 360 (multiple…thank you RRoD!), Wii, and, of course, many PCs.  I have always enjoyed gaming casually from strategy games to RPGs to sports games.  You’ll notice, though, that I titled this post “The Gaming Lifestyle”.  A long time ago, gaming became more than just a hobby for me.  It became a way of life.  With the launch of the Xbox, Microsoft and Bungie also released a first person shooter called Halo (which I’m sure most people are familiar with).  I fell in love with Halo from the first time I played it.  With the onset of Halo 2 and Xbox Live, I began to compete against players from around the world and realized that I was actually pretty good at the game.  When Halo 3 was released, I began to take competitive gaming very seriously.  By the end of Halo 3’s lifetime, I had achieved the max online ranking in every playlist and had competed in many local and regional tournaments.  I lost interest with the Halo franchise with the later titles (Halo: Reach and Halo 4) simply because they were inferior games (this could lead to its own blog post about the Halo games).  While competing in Halo, I had still been playing other games casually on the side, but I had definitely developed a proficiency with first person shooter games.  When Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 had created a large competitive scene, I tried my hand at competitive CoD, reaching an online ranking of 14th at my prime.  I didn’t pursue much CoD after that (as with Halo, the next CoD game “Ghosts” was inferior).

For the past couple of years, I have streamed gameplay to TwitchTV.  This is part of what I meant that video games have exceeded being a hobby for me.  I’m definitely a gamer at heart and hope to pursue a position in the gaming industry (or streaming!!!) for a career.

Nowadays, I still play games competitively.  Currently, I’m playing an MMOFPS on the PC called Planetside 2 as well as League of Legends (haven’t played it in years, but have started playing again).  I also have been playing Hearthstone since its early beta (it’s in open beta now, I highly recommend trying it!).