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.

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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!).