1.  Replace: “I really don’t need a brake at all, just a gas pedal and mad skills” with: “I need to brake before a turn so my car doesn’t end up in a ditch somewhere“.

Most arcade racing games teach you that a brake button is merely a piece of plastic on your controller you don’t use. Trust me, if you want to try a sim racer, and not hate the game at the first corner, learn to brake in a straight line. Most new racing games have some sort of suggested driving line you can activate. Do so, and make sure you follow what it says, if it’s turning red, you probably need to brake. You also have to apply the brake like you would in real life, which brings me to point 2:

2.  Replace: “I’m activated my NOS and turbo booooooooost!” with: “I’m gradually going to apply throttle until I reach full acceleration”

Nothing makes you slower in real life than a burnout, slapping your fat fingers down on the accelerator will do the same thing that your daily driver does when you floor it on snow. Since the cars you race in these games are 5-10 times more powerful than your real life automobile it takes less slippery conditions to make the car feel like it’s on a sheet of ice. If you learn to gently press the controls you will enjoy the game much more.

3.  Replace: “I’m going to floor it and grind this outside wall like Tony Hawk to get around this turn” with: “Must touch nothing, must go faster”

Colliding with anything is a major no-no in a sim racer. It generally slows you down to a halt ruins your car’s performance and in the case of some online sim racers causes you to get additionally punished by an automatically cut throttle. While you can slam into the back of someone else to assist your car in slowing down enough to take a sharp corner. You aren’t going to get very good at the game when you’re in first, when you don’t have any cars to slam into to slow down.

4.  Replace: “I go faster when I drift around a corner!” with: “If I accidentally drift out a little everyone behind me will pass me on the inside”

Unless you’re palying a drift mode or goofing off drifting is a bad idea. It looses tons of speed and control and takes incredible skill to master in a simulation racer. Just like in real life (go figure). We’re taught by most arcade racing games that doing “cool” things like drifting not only don’t penalize us, but reward us in some cases. Which brings me to the final mindset to change, and the biggest one:

5.  Replace: “Oh man, did you see me drift around that corner while activated my slo-mo turbo mode?” with: “Oh man did you see me take the corkscrew at Laguna Seca almost perfectly, I took 2 seconds off my lap record!”

The hardest part to enjoying a simulation racer is being able to submit to learning a new skill. Most arcade racers only reward split second timing, you only have to have a fast reaction time to succeed. In a sim racer you need that and you have to know when to accelerate, when to pass, when to slow down and try again another corner. It takes a while to get good at that. And you definitely need a strange definition of fun to enjoy the experience. To me carving the perfect corner is just as much fun to me as jumping accross the hoover dam while on fire through a t-rex as he explodes. And I accept that I’m weird. Are you?

I’m fully immersed in car-topia as I get that once in a while chance to fuse my inner gamer-nerd with my inner petrol-head. In fact I managed to resist the urge to rewind when I missed a corner bad while trying to overtake in my pimped out digital Cobalt (I know the irony of driving a simulation of my own car). Why did I not rewind this bad move and brake earlier? Because I wanted a reason to take a picture that makes the game seem more action packed than it is.

I’m loving how the achievements are doled out in the new Forza Motorsport. They flow freely as “rewards” for doing “things”. Nothing like Forza 2 in which the game gave achievements only when you did things that involved the words “all” or “every”, for example “Get all the cars in the game” or “Get a gold in every race”.

I’ve been thoroughly rewarded for doing fun things and it shows with how much time I’m putting into the game. The game insidiously tracks how much time you’ve spent racing and how much time you’ve spent in the menus. Which seems like the ratio should be astronomically tilted towards the racing time, but that’s ignoring how much time I will spend laboriously pimping out my cars with various stickers and tuning setups. I’m going to hazard the ratio of time spent in the drivers seat versus fiddling with the various extraneous bits will ultimately be 1:1.

Good bye, life.

Now, assume that I understand this viewpoint bias. And let’s talk about game difficulty.

I’m inspired to talk about this by this forum post I found on reddit. It’s a relatively well thought out post saying that games have become easier, but that it’s not a bad thing.Have games become easier?

Defining Hard

Games seem easier from my perspective, but is that really an absolute truth? I suppose we would need a concrete scale on which to determine difficulty. But the problem with defining a scale for difficulty is apparent once you try and discuss it with another person.

Difficult to one person is easy to another. Some games merely require a photographic memory to avoid obstacles, something I really don’t have. Other games need split second reactions, which I only have when a mouse is involved. There are those freaks out there that possess all the skills necessary to reduce any game to a pile of pulverized bits and pixels.

To me the difficulty of a game depends on how many different skills the game requires to make them easy to you. Crossing a grid that contains unseen traps that you must memorize is one kind of difficult. Crossing that same grid but requiring the player to play a music minigame while doing so makes it more difficult. Multitasking is the true difficulty.

A platformer can be made infinitely harder when you have to think several steps ahead. Those sections where you can’t stop are always the most challenging, because you can’t take them at your own pace. If you could slow things down to a crawl imagine just how good you could be at Super Mario Bros. 3. Actually, you don’t have to imagine, people already have videos of it. (Spoilers: they cheated)

To be totally honest, I was tempted, as I’m sure many of you are, to use number of deaths or lose screens to represent difficulty. The reasoning behind this is sound, an average of deaths would produce a compelling and official sounding difficulty rating. I only avoided it because that might make the scale based on frustration more than anything.

Next: Past to Present: Has difficulty changed?

Not an error that really bothered me. After all I personally knew one of the managers of the store, they seem a responsible and knowledgeable bunch (despite the looks I got asking for Layton as a grown adult). Not that I really think that any PS3 owner will be crushed when they find out this large box is lie. Frankly, they would only pick it up to argue about polygon count compared to GT5. Not that I think anything of any significance would happen due to this common error. I worked at Best Buy I know how many errors get made in ads across the country.

But I started to think about what this told me about the corporation that is Gamestop. Despite the fact that the store is run buy passionate gamers (at least a couple a store know what’s what) the store is ultimately owned by people who don’t give two craps about games. They don’t care if Modern Warfare 2 is a big hit or if it breaks the record for sales of a game. At least not in the sense that a true gamer would.

Gamestop Global Game Sellers Incorporated (I made that up) is looking for its cut of a profitable market.

What a shame.

How could a large chain like Gamestop not catch this error? By not caring.

I know the kind of nerds that run those stores, I hung out with them in high school. I talked shop with them every time I was dragged to the mall. I guarantee one of those employees caught this box, laughed at it just like I did and told someone above them who laughed and told the person above them. And it went up and up until it got to the person that didn’t laugh, they didn’t get it, they didn’t care.

“Will it affect sales?” he would have asked.

“Well…no…but”

“Then good, no problem at all,” and he would go back to counting money and stroking a sinister looking cat in his leather clad office.

It makes me think about my other games-based passion, board games. A long time ago, normal people played board games too. But ultimately only the mass marketable ones were sold in mega-sized toy-stores and interesting ones flourished in tiny, smelly, nerd huts that cater to Magic players and comic readers.

If you go to find a board game store that specializes in tabletop war games or designer games (eurogames) you’ll likely find a small personally owned store with someone behind the desk that has an opinion about all the games on the shelf, just like the guys behind the counter at Gamestop. he’ll have played all the important ones, just like the guys at Gamestop. And when an ad of his doesn’t look right he’ll pull it down and change it and he won’t tell the guy above him because he’s the top of the line, the guys at the Gamestop won’t.

Where are the small independent game stores? They must exist somewhere. Right?

They don’t near me, as best as I can tell. If I find one I know I’ll shop there. Even if Amazon has better prices, I’ll still gladly pay extra for atmosphere. Someone give me that option.

Maybe the thing missing here is time. It’s taken a long time for competent, passionate people to make stores devoted to things like collectible card games and comics. Maybe I just have to wait.

This week was particularly random, which is somewhat reflected in the show. Some weeks we’re all business in warm up and nothing of note happens. Usually that happens when we’ve done a bad job communicating before the show. This week however, we had already been aware of what everyone wanted to talk about so pre show discussions weren’t necessary.

I started the recorder 10mins before we started the show. No I didn’t edit this, it’s raw audio, we actually slide into the show with little warning normally.

I hadn’t noticed it before but those shitty suggestions were always there. Rhythm Heaven I get, but Yu-Gi-Oh!? On what basis would someone who likes the Korg DS-10, a complex piece of software that is the equivalent of a fully fleshed out synthesizer from the 80s/90s, like a childish property like Yu-Gi-Oh?

Two Yu-Gi games to boot, apparently someone really likes trance music and card games.

Designed by: Tom Lehmann
Publisher: Rio Grande Games

Players: 2-4 (1-5 with expansion)

Play time: 30 minutes

Style: Card game, Civilization Building.

Race for the Galaxy is a card game really.

Outside of the over sized box and a fancy insert all you get is a set of cards and a couple cardboard counters to track points.So, no, it isn’t much of a board game as there is no board (unless you count the quick reference cards). So why have we been raving about this game? Easy, it’s the cheapest collectible card game (CCG) to get into.

Admittedly, I spent some portion of my misguided youth away from the Genesis and 64 fruitlessly playing such nerdery as AD&D and Magic: The Gathering. And part of me still loves the CCG style game, but no part of me fondly remembers the cost of collecting thousands of cards. Race for the Galaxy perfectly, and cost effectively, fills that void.

The number one reason it fills the void so well is the short play time. 30 minutes is not a huge time commitment. Waiting for friends to show up? Play a game of Race. Got time before the big game comes on? Play a game of Race. Podcasting? Play a game of Race…

…well, maybe not that last one.

Arrows? Numbers? Cryptic symbols?
It’s a nerd’s dream come true!!!

Partly to make the game concise and elegantly, but mostly to make translating it easy for the publisher, the abilities and actions of cards were condensed into a symbolic language unique to the game. At first it’s hard to understand what a card does, and that’s very intimidating. But ultimately the confusing symbols became clear cut, and one of my favorite aspects of the game.

About those symbols, they benefit you on one of six actions that can occur in a round. Each round every player secretly selects and action they want to happen and shows their selection at the same time. Only the actions chosen occur in that round. So if you have a sweet power in phase V (Production) you’d better select it yourself.

Actually, the real meat of the game comes once you understand the symbols and the basics of producing goods and burning them to make victory points. With that under your belt you can start determining what other people will choose and piggyback on their selections and hamper their growth by selecting phases that don’t help them. It still feels like solitaire-ish but there’s very deep interaction between players if you know where to look.

Remember this son: “Everyone from Alpha Centauri is a dick. Without exception”

So how does the game stay fresh? Randomness.

Usually random elements are the most frustrating elements of games (Settler’s of Catan) comes to mind. But with the exception of a few rare cases where someone drew the perfect cards to complement their strategy Race handles the randomness very well. In fact getting a random start world every game and drawing random cards is what has made putting in 20+ plays enjoyable, and will continue to make plays enjoyable for a long time to come.

If you are at all interested in getting into a complex CCG but don’t have the cash to drop on cards, consider getting Race for the Galaxy (and Dominion too, but I’ll talk about that some other time) to give yourself a fix. And don’t forget there’s an expansion out there to enhance the game and add a 5th player, with another expansion due out this year to add a 6th.Go ahead, put down the controller, and pick up some cards.

Photos from BoardGameGeek.com

Well.Not literally, but figurative stealing is still a crime I suppose.

Let me backtrack. I was a Genesis supporter, stalwartly so. As much as I regret it today, I never owned an SNES. Which I now surmise is the greatest crime a self-proclaimed video game enthusiast can commit. If you didn’t play SNES games back in the day your weren’t playing the best.

It’s not as if I never played on an SNES. I did partake of my friends’ systems at times. But this precluded me from playing any RPGs back in the day (with the exception of Super Mario RPG, which my closest childhood friend and I completed in a 36 hour marathon one weekend). 

This means, however, that I missed out on playing one of the classics: Chrono Trigger. An experience I was determined to obtain later in life (read: high school) through the burgeoning mass of emulators at the time.But Chrono Trigger contained a portion of gameplay that required fancy graphics interpretation the emulators of the time were incapable of, which prevented me from progressing past the early stages of the game.

Luckily in my junior year at high school I managed to borrow a friend’s PSone (he had just bought a PS2) and got to play the PS version of Trigger, choppy opening anime and all. So for about a week straight,  while my friend was enjoying GTAIII on his brand new PS2 I was enjoying the 16bit splendor of Squaresoft’s masterpiece on his now defunct PSone.

So in the end I happily chugged through the ages legally, albeit through borrowing and not purchase, but the disconnect in never having the SNES version I’ve managed to steel my will and refuse the Square-Tax on the new Chrono Trigger DS.

 For now. 

We have become boardgamers.

Which is, like, at least a couplesteps above LARPers.

For me board games have been bred into me. I’m sure my DNA resembles Backgammon more than a helical. In fact, I recall fondly finding a stash of my families old dusty board games in the hallway closet as a kid. I remember my dad teaching me how to play Stratego, Backgammon and Risk. And the few memories of my grandfather that I have almost always involved teaching me Chess (which was more of a brutal beat down than “teaching”).

 Since board gaming has become all the rage again where I live I thought I’d take some time to present the cool finds that we’ve been making here in my blog. Maybe you’ll give them a chance if you’re so inclined.

Without further adieu:

Puerto Rico (2002, Andreas Seyfarth)

I picked up this game upon the recommendation of the site: BoardGameGeek (this site also had the pictures of the game I’m using here to illustrate what it looks like). Not that it’s the hot new title out there (it is almost 6 years old) but many on that site claimed that it stands the test of time. It also was very different from the other style of games that we had been playing so the combination of the two factors made it a very easy purchase.

I’ve only played one game so far but I liked what I saw in that game. After only a couple of rounds of play everyone at the table (Tony and Tom were playing) seemed to get the basic rules and we all developed our own simple strategies. Which is the sign of a deep game; our strategies were formed as very inexperienced players, yet none of them dominated and none floundered (except when Tom kept getting screwed early in the game). It seems that the game is setup up for many plays with varying strategies.

The basic premise of the game is that you are a plantation owner on the burgeoning island of Puerto Rico, you need to out ship or trade your rivals to get the most amount of goods back to the Old World. In gameplay elements: you need to collect and manage colonists, plantations, buildings to create goods (of five different types) to ship away for victory points. The total amount of victory points you have the game end is your score, and, clearly, the person with the most wins the game.

Here’s the basic setup of the game to give you an idea of the components you get:

The main feature of the game that (at the time it was released) was incredibly innovative was the turn selection mechanic. There are 8 roles (in a 5 player game) that players choose to take different actions, choosing starts with the player who has the governor card (determined by die roll at game start) and goes around the table, until all players have a role at which point the three leftover roles get a doubloon (the game’s currency) which the next player to choose them gets, the roles are returned to the central pot and the governor cards moves to the next player in clockwise order and the turn starts again. When a role is selected all players get to take the action associated with it, but the player that selected the role gets a bonus for doing so. In effect, each round lets you take 5 actions total, one of which has a bonus since you picked it.

The roles let you build buildings or expand your plantation or get more colonists and so on. Each round is a balance of guessing what your opponents will select and determining which role advances your position relative to your opponents. The best part of the game and the most strategic is that when you select a role you must consider that everyone benefits from the choice, everyone gets the action, you have to choose when to take roles that help you the most.

Here’s what your board will look like in the middle of the game:

So we all went about making our little empires of goods. And everyone had a different strategy going. Tom started the game and took a quarry; which provides discounts to building so he immediately set out to fill his city with buildings. Jard ended up with a hybrid strategy of building and trading the most expensive good: Coffee. Tony, as when we play Settlers of Catan, went for a monopoly. In this case a sugar monopoly, or sug-opoly. I set out to maximize the goods I could send back to the Old World, focusing on three goods (corn, sugar and tobacco) and producing them in bulk. My girlfriend tried to obtain a way to make one of each good providing variety for trading and shipping.

Each strategy had clear benefits but at least for me I noticed flaws. I felt cash starved through the early game, and in the late game both my girlfriend and Tony had a cash surplus. Ultimate my girlfriend tied in victory points with me but won based on the tiebreaker of cash and goods. But the best part of the game was the varied strategies and tactics made the game very close. The total point spread was 49 for last place and 53s for first and second. A tight game indeed.

Based on the fact that I can’t wait to play again (maybe I can con people into it tonight) in the face of an overwhelming amount of video games I want to get to makes me assuredly recommend this game to anyone interested in getting a board game. If you don’t think board games are your cup of tea, then I’d recommend lighter fair. My only pre-game recommendation is to read the rulebook’s description of each building, the tiles that you get don’t have a full enough description to go by. In fact, this fact made Tom’s buy buildings till you drop strategy very difficult and confusing.

Otherwise:

I give Puerto Rico a 5-full-trading-ships out of 5…uh…not full trading ships?

 Oh, just get the game already!