tegan

I Had a Random Thought (About Video Games)

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I really liked Phantom Hourglass. There were complaints about revisiting the main dungeon multiple times, but every time you go back you have new abilities that let you breeze through the previous levels. I think it's worth checking out.

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Yeah the main dungeon in PH was nowhere near as bad as people made it out to be. I'd argue it was actually fun, but then I enjoy racing through levels and mastering them bit by bit, so you know.

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Strange, I feel like everyone has something negative to say about those two games. I haven't played them yet, really behind on my Zelda, so that kind of helps me look more forward to them.

 

Personally, i have a very strong dislike of the DS games. It's been much too long since i played those games to drop some articulate argument about why i think they're shit, but it definitely starts with the control scheme not really being able to do the things it's tasked with. I'm sure my argument would also go out into a lot of complaints with how the quests and environments in those games are designed.

 

A Link Between Worlds on the 3DS though? That's a terrific game, one of the best 2D Zelda's, especially if the player is familiar with A Link to the Past and is in on how it's cleverly subverting said game's design. It so easily could have just been a nostalgia play, but Nintendo does some really, really cool stuff with ALBW.

 

 

I am trying to play again Morrowind.... I had first played Daggerfall, but I skipped to Oblivion and Skyrim, since Morrowind wasn´t distribuited in Brazil on the time of launch, so I could only pick it up with Steam.

 

But the your character moves so slow (and keep in mind, even in running speed you still go very slow), that I find myself in this strange conflict, part of me want to explore the world, but the other hand part of my refuse to do it, because of how slow moving is and the risk of wasting a good time for nothing (like one time I by accident find a wraith in a tomb and got killed). I don´t mean the character should move at light speed, but only slight faster because right now I feel like this is almost counter intuitive to the exploration. Right now I got a quest to find some thiefs inside a salt mine and the perspective of going very slow inside isn´t encouraging.

 

But despite this and the vague quests, I am enjoying it a lot.

 

We both started TES games with Daggerfall, i guess, and Morrowind is a bit of an odd man out in how it is the only one that lacks a player-friendly fast travel system. It's also an odd implementation of the stamina system, not in that running around everywhere bottoms out your Stamina, but that being low on stamina makes you so completely worthless in combat. (Missing all of your attacks?) If you just want to play the game straight and without mods, i'd recommend going into alchemy and keeping stamina restores on hand. Sprint everywhere, get your athletics up, and use a restore when going into a fight.

 

I do think Morrowind really wants you to sort of dwell on its environments though, and i think the game is immensely enjoyable if you take it up on that. Look at the way it guides you towards quests, you follow literal road directions instead of a hud beacon. It wants you to be intensely familiar with its world and pay attention to the details its populated with, which then eventually rewards you with an understanding of the various interlocking fast travel networks in the game.

 

Just make sure you have some intervention scrolls to get you out of nasty situations.

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It's a bit weird to call Morrowind the odd man out. Before Morrowind there was only Daggerfall and Arena and with Morrowind they were going into a different direction: completely designed world.

Daggerfall was so huge that fast travel was the only option. I'm pretty sure they wanted to keep the feeling of a large world in Morrowind even though in fact it is so tiny compared to the world of Daggerfall (0.01% in fact). Removing fast travel directly makes the world larger because it takes time to go anywhere, but also forces people to explore the world.

Being forced to walk to a specific location in order to travel faster isn't that much of a chore as there are quite a few possibilities: http://www.uesp.net/wiki/File:FullMap_TravelRoutes.png

And for the rest, learn the teleportation spells.

But for there rest, try these tips: http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Transport#Hiking

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There are those boots in Morrowind that let you run three times as fast.

 

You can also make potions that buff your spells and make spells that buff your potion making, then use that recursively to make yourself fly forever. Solves the traversal problem but also makes the game a bit boring.

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No you only need to make potions to buff your int which buffs your int potions which buffs your int etc.

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Yeah I knew I had the details wrong because it's been so long, but the basic idea is the same. You can make yourself abitrarily powerful.

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It'll also easily (10k of a stat maybe?) crash your game and cause you to clip through walls/hills if you get too much speed.

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I think the big obvious game breaking exploits kind of ruin the fun, but maybe that's just me.

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Personally, i have a very strong dislike of the DS games. It's been much too long since i played those games to drop some articulate argument about why i think they're shit, but it definitely starts with the control scheme not really being able to do the things it's tasked with. I'm sure my argument would also go out into a lot of complaints with how the quests and environments in those games are designed.

 

A Link Between Worlds on the 3DS though? That's a terrific game, one of the best 2D Zelda's, especially if the player is familiar with A Link to the Past and is in on how it's cleverly subverting said game's design. It so easily could have just been a nostalgia play, but Nintendo does some really, really cool stuff with ALBW.

 

 

 

We both started TES games with Daggerfall, i guess, and Morrowind is a bit of an odd man out in how it is the only one that lacks a player-friendly fast travel system. It's also an odd implementation of the stamina system, not in that running around everywhere bottoms out your Stamina, but that being low on stamina makes you so completely worthless in combat. (Missing all of your attacks?) If you just want to play the game straight and without mods, i'd recommend going into alchemy and keeping stamina restores on hand. Sprint everywhere, get your athletics up, and use a restore when going into a fight.

 

I do think Morrowind really wants you to sort of dwell on its environments though, and i think the game is immensely enjoyable if you take it up on that. Look at the way it guides you towards quests, you follow literal road directions instead of a hud beacon. It wants you to be intensely familiar with its world and pay attention to the details its populated with, which then eventually rewards you with an understanding of the various interlocking fast travel networks in the game.

 

Just make sure you have some intervention scrolls to get you out of nasty situations.

 

The more play the more I got in the right mindset for Morrowind and enjoying more everytime - I kind bounce it the first time, maybe because I was bit busy or something else, but no this time.

 

It's a bit weird to call Morrowind the odd man out. Before Morrowind there was only Daggerfall and Arena and with Morrowind they were going into a different direction: completely designed world.

Daggerfall was so huge that fast travel was the only option. I'm pretty sure they wanted to keep the feeling of a large world in Morrowind even though in fact it is so tiny compared to the world of Daggerfall (0.01% in fact). Removing fast travel directly makes the world larger because it takes time to go anywhere, but also forces people to explore the world.

Being forced to walk to a specific location in order to travel faster isn't that much of a chore as there are quite a few possibilities: http://www.uesp.net/wiki/File:FullMap_TravelRoutes.png

And for the rest, learn the teleportation spells.

But for there rest, try these tips: http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Transport#Hiking

 

Got of agree a lot!

 

Funny thing is that in Daggerfall the only time you are maybe expected to use normal travel was to find some of the Witch Covens, a few of them where close to a town or city.

 

Thanks for the tips!

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I think the big obvious game breaking exploits kind of ruin the fun, but maybe that's just me.

They definitely do. That's one of my struggles with Morrowind, because the game is kind of annoying to play when you're weak, but then they give you all these ways to empower yourself and eventually remove all challenge from the game and that's boring too. I was never able to find a good medium where I enjoyed the challenges presented to me. For the same reason I struggle to play Diablo II in permadeath mode (which is my preferred way) when I play offline and can easily revive my characters, I also struggle to enjoy Morrowind the way it is. Maybe the problem is more with Morrowind's mechanics than the broken spell system, because it's essentially just a way of cheating built into the game and then the issue is that the game tempts you to cheat.

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What really gets my goat is that you all refuse to call it the Mega Drive.

 

It's by no means a refusal! :)

 

I didn't know that there was something called a "SEGA Mega Drive" until I was in my late 20s, same as hearing the Super Nintendo called "Snesssss"

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Does anyone have any experience with or knowledge of Hanako Games' latest offering, Black Closet? The Steam reviews are universally positive and I figure that "quasi-procedurally generated intrigue simulator as the student council president of an all-girls school" is a slam dunk, but there's been almost no critical reaction since its release in mid-September and one of the hosts on TMA mentioned it as a charmingly crap game in their episode on Thea: The Awakening, so... I don't know.

 

Emily Short just wrote a positive piece on it, largely praising the character work and narrative structure: https://emshort.wordpress.com/2016/01/04/black-closet-hanako-games/

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I hate Twine. Or more specifically, I hate the way seemingly everyone uses Twine. Don't put a paragraph on screen, then make me click "continue" (in whatever form the only-option "continue" button takes) to get another paragraph. Just put two paragraphs on screen, there's room there, I promise. Save me a click and let me read it so much faster. Why do people do that, is just a stylistic convention thing where everyone does it because "everyone else does it"?

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Because it is a tool to be expressive within the form? Why do movies break scenes into different shots? I'm not saying all Twine games make good use of it (there sure as shit are a lot of movies and shows that don't make good use of editing) but I think saying "Don't make me click unless I'm making a choice" (which I'm assuming you mean?) is very limiting.

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I just don't like Twine games so I don't bother talking about them. I think this is the second time ever that I've said this. Probably not the second, but I definitely rarely mention it. 

 

Down with Twine!

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Yeah even if it's not a choice part, it's the digital equivalent of turning a page.

 

That is exactly what frustrates me about it. It's like if a book put one paragraph per page, then a bunch of empty space, so that you had to turn four times as many pages in the course of reading it. It makes my reading pace feel so slow, I'm convinced that I'd read most Twine games faster if they were one-choice-per-page physical Choose Your Own Adventure books, even accounting for how much longer it takes to "Turn to page 37".

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Are you a speed reader? Because switching from one Twine page to another takes .5 seconds. And sometimes nothing at all, if the writer changes the transition time. I just don't see that much of a slow down unless you are used to zipping through books as a speed reader.

 

And again "One choice per page" is a harsh limitation for a medium that isn't books and doesn't have to be. It's interactive. People like to interact. If I started a Twine game and was greeted with a huge page of text I wouldn't continue because it would say to me that the person doesn't understand the medium.

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And again "One choice per page" is a harsh limitation for a medium that isn't books and doesn't have to be. It's interactive. People like to interact. If I started a Twine game and was greeted with a huge page of text I wouldn't continue because it would say to me that the person doesn't understand the medium.

 

I've not played any Twine games but I agree with this entirely.  I find smaller chunks easier to digest and understand.  It gives me a mental pause to absorb what I just read instead of having a wall of text and trying to parse it all at once.

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Some authors have cut down the amounts of words on a page to great effect to transmit feelings like whimsy, detachment, or hopelessness. House of Leaves or The Luminaries spring to mind.

Infinite Jest did the opposite to good effect as well for things like mania.

Begrudge it's overuse maye but it's just as experimental as anything else going into Twine games right now.

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In the same way that one might say a game cutscene is a movie interspersed between two bits of interactive experience, I classify a Twine game's four linked, no-choice paragraphs as a book, interspersed between two bits of interactive experience. And in the medium of books, yes there's room to play with the formatting (see: House of Leaves or any of the others moddy mentioned), but it's done rarely, and generally to set a tone. On Twine it's done all the time, and usually it feels like a form of punctuation that interrupts my flow of reading. I dislike it because we've already got more convenient options in commas, semicolons and periods.

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"Why do films use editing? It's like it's telling me how to watch the drama unfold. I prefer theatrical productions, where I can decide what to focus on at my own pace. Movies should only have edits in between scenes, the way plays do."

 

"Why do poems have line breaks? Why can't I just read the poem as I would any other sentence?"

 

Twine uses the convenient options of commas, semicolons, and periods. AND it uses pages breaks as well. Different tools for different uses for different mediums. Twine is not literature, Twine does not benefit from a slavish devotion to the trappings of literature.

 

And again your "interrupted flow" is .5 seconds of transition time by default. Less if the author chooses.

 

EDIT: That isn't to say that all or even most Twine games use page breaks thoughtfully. But it doesn't strike me as any more thoughtless than the way most entries in any given art tend to take form for granted.

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Twine is not literature

 

I disagree. Given that the "What is Game?" thread grew to about eight pages and still barely managed to change anyone's mind, I think it would be unwise to start this argument, so I shall have to leave in disagreement.

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