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(this is a boardgame post — if these aren’t your thing you might want to scroll to the next post)

During my day at (d)orccon, I managed to acquire a copy of Battle Line, designed by the guest of honour, Reiner Knizia. GMT Games, the publisher of Battle Line, had a booth there, which is perhaps unsurprising given that it’s a Central California based company.

(I could go on and on about how I kept returning to their booth throughout the day to mess up their stock by drooling over it and practicing emergency discipline mantras to keep myself from spending money I didn’t have to buy everything they had on offer, but I won’t. Move along. This isn’t the parenthetical ramble you’re looking for.)

It’s slightly unusual that a Knizia game would be published by a wargame-based company like GMT, and someday I’d love to learn the story behind how they acquired it, but it’s a little less surprising when you learn that Battle Line is a new version of a German game called Schotten Totten, a card game about Scottish Highlanders competing against one another in a rock throwing contest (or something), which has silly cartoony graphics and is, all things considered, one of the last games I would ever consider buying.

Enter GMT and their wonderful artist (and co-Big Kahuna) Roger MacGowan, who took a very elegant game with simple mechanics but complex strategy (a Knizia trademark), chucked the silly stuff and gave it the signature GMT look, complete with ancient culture setting, warriors, a combat flavor, and MacGowan’s graceful and clean art. All of a sudden, I’m totally there. And for fifteen bucks, it’s not like it’s something you have to fret over justifying buying.

Battle Line is a simple two-player card game that takes less than ten minutes to learn. It includes seventy cards, sixty of which are called Troop Cards, and ten of which Tactics Cards. On top of that, there are nine wooden “flags” which resemble the playing pieces in Sorry! (incorrectly called plastic playing pieces on the game box — they’re wooden). These are lined up in a row in the middle of the playing space, and form the imaginary battle line of a pitched combat between two ancient forces (hence the game’s prosaic name).

As for the forces for each player’s army, these are represented by the sixty Troop Cards, seven of which are given to each player at the beginning of the game, forming their hand. Each troop card is numbered from one to ten, and is in one of six colors. Each number represents a different kind of troop type found in battles between Alexander and the Persians in the ancient world; for example, the cards numbered 10 are War Elephant cards, and they all have the same excellent style of artwork found on the box cover.

Each round, the player plays (must play — you can’t pass, which creates important strategic decisions) one card from her hand in front of any of the available nine flags representing the line of battle (flags can become unavailable, which I’ll sketch out in a mo). Your opponent meanwhile is taking turns doing the same thing on the opposite side of the flags, trying to outmatch the forces you are building up on your own side of each of these flags.

Once you’ve played three cards on each flag, that’s it. The flag is tied up and no more cards can be added. As you may well have guessed by this point, you win a particular flag by having a stronger suit than the cards played by your opponent, and suits are ranked vaguely like a highly-simplified version of Poker, with three consecutive numbers all of the same color being the highest ranked suit (a kind of straight flush), after which come three cards of one number, then three cards of one color, a “straight” of three consecutive numbers (of any color), and finally the crap set, which is three cards that bear absolutely no relation to each other and induce finger-pointing and sneering in all those who behold it.

(As an aside, these hands are called “formations” in the game, and the different ranked hands have war-related names, like “Wedge” instead of straight flush, but I always call them by the poker term they are based on.)

When both sides have completed their three card set, the player who has won (or who can prove she will win, if for example her opponent has not yet played all three cards at that flag but the two which have been played cannot possibly form a hand as highly ranked as her own) moves that flag from the center, battle line over to her side of the table, scoring for it. The first player to win three adjacent flags (or five non-adjacent flags) in this manner wins the game. Simple as that.

Well, not quite. If that were all that happened the game might tire quickly, but there’s a permutation that, while adding flavor and spice, also adds a bit more violence and nastiness to the game, and these are the Tactics Cards. On every turn, after playing one card from your hand, you draw a new card either from the Troop Card deck (set at one end of the line of flags) or from the considerably smaller Tactics Card deck (over at the opposite end of the battle line). There are only ten of these, and you can never put more Tactics Cards into play than one more than your opponent has played, but when you can play them, they often blow the game wide open by turning the tables on apparently hopeless flags.

Here’s why: Tactics Cards represent special events and variables in war, like the charisma and rallying cries of a leader (like Alexander himself), or environmental factors, like mud or fog. On your turn, you can choose to play a Tactics Card instead of a Troop Card, and the effects printed on these cards often serve to turn the tables on flags which a moment before seemed all but lost. For example, the fog card disables the ranks on both sides of a flag — instead, the sum total of the numbers only are used to determine who wins (the guy with the higher number). So if a player on one side has all but locked in that flag by creating a hand with, say, the numbers 1, 2, and 3 all of the same number, while his opponent has put down a 10 card and a 6 card that are not of the same color (meaning that any hand she completes could never be as high ranking), if she whipped out the fog card on her turn and played it on this flag, she would suddenly be the winner of that flag, because even with just two cards played, 10+6 is better than 1+2+3. Take that, asshole!

In many of the games I’ve played, the sudden appearance of one of these cards turned the tide of the game and wrested victory from the jaws of defeat. Not only do they shake up what might otherwise be just too linear a game, but that element of surprise adds a tremendous dimension to the strategy of playing.

And remember what I said earlier: you must play a card on your turn, whether you want to or not. Because of this, you’ve got to be very careful about how you start filling up those slots on each of the nine flags, because if you don’t receive cards of a particular number and/or color that you were anticipating, you could find yourself forced into completing three-card sets that have much lower value than you originally hoped, just because you were forced on a particular turn to unload a card somewhere, anywhere.

I hesitate to call this a thematic game (especially because it’s a re-themed game anyway), but a lot of the fun of Battle Line comes from the push and pull and back and forth of slowly building your own sets on your side while you watch your opponent build his on his side, and this wary confrontationalism does have a whiff of war about it. Trying to storm in on certain flags while you hedge your bets and wait on others to see what your opponent is going to play is where much of the strategy of the game comes into play. Since there are only sixty cards in the Troops deck, resources are scarce, and during the course of the game you will often see — to your dismay — cards you were hoping to get suddenly appear on your opponent’s side of the battlefield, shattering the chances of completing an all-important set at a crucial flag. And because the game can be won by scoring three adjacent flags, players can find themselves rushing to shore up areas of the battlefield that come under assault much like a real pitched combat ebbs and flows as weaknesses in the line or tactical holding areas suddenly come under fire.

The game plays in less than a half hour, and it only takes the flash of an eye to set up, so it might almost qualify as a really nice filler game if it wasn’t for the startling level of strategy and tactical decisions hidden beneath the surface of its very simple rules. Instead, it lies somewhere in between a nice filler game and a full-blown strategy game, in something of a relatively rare sweet spot.

To me, with its mixture of excellent and strategic gameplay, and kick-ass graphics and theme, Battle Line is a bigtime winner. The guy at the GMT booth told me that GMT’s warehouse is clean out of stock of this baby, and it may be some time before they go to reprint. Now, I don’t know if this was a sales line or not, but I’ve noticed that some online retailers are out of stock of it, so if you find it at your local games shop or wherever, you might be better off getting it now than later. Plus, it’s only fifteen bucks so it’s not as if the purchase will put you in the red.

(image via boardgamegeek.com)

Technorati tags: boardgames, Reiner Knizia, Battle Line.

Oh, you know what?

In my recent report on Orccon, an entire section was mysteriously excised from the final product, rather like accidentally leaving your supporting actor’s Oscar moment on the cutting room floor.

So here it is (it goes just after the paragraph in which I recount meeting Liz):

So it’s obvious that Liz beats me hand’s down in a geek contest (I can still feel the burn of her sneer when she told me she had games scheduled for 10pm that night, long after my departure — the shame, the shame), crushing my feebleness between her endless scheduled games days and trips to the comics shop to read indie comics (while I pathetically nerd over superheroes in tights). What I didn’t mention was her obvious powers over all the men who surrounded her. I shall relate:

So I walk up to this table at which are sat four perspiring fellas and one goddess. Now, I’m not one of those people who feels surprise when beholding a female at a gaming convention anymore — I think we’ve all gotten used to the pleasing fact that more and more women are brave enough to endure man-odor and attend. But you just don’t expect to meet such a sublime paragon of the sex over a game of Game of Thrones. You just don’t. I remarked thusly (while completely distracting her from her game): “You’ve thrown the hormone balance completely off at this table.” And she had. The other players will no doubt try to deny it, but the beads of perspiration and nervous hands were not because their little wooden pieces were being trounced by other little wooden pieces. Can I put this delicately? This is the first game I’ve observed where five males were uncomfortably crossing their legs, in unison. And it’s not because they needed to pee…

‘S funny — on the way back to my car I could have sworn that I kept seeing dragonflies at the edge of my vision. Strangest thing.

I only managed to get to over to the Westin hotel at LAX on Saturday for the revamped Strategicon’s Orccon (then spent Sunday working in a distracted haze imagining all the awesomeness I was undoubtedly missing out on).

In fact, there are probably a lucky few still there as I type this, holding on for dear life for the last half-day of the con. For most of us, President’s Day is one of those holidays “celebrated” only by the post offices and the banks of the country, which just makes our normal daily routine that much more inconvenient because all of a sudden you can’t send letters or deposit money … but you still have to do all the rest of what amounts to a regular old workday.

Anyway, flash back forty-eight hours to Saturday, a day entirely devoted to gaming and geekery, which is just fine by me.

And here’s one thing I noticed: as the day wore on there was this very powerful increase in energy, such that as the sun vanished into the Pacific, the buzz at the event — and the crowds — were many times greater than it had been when I arrived. The gaming rooms were literally teeming with people, and what had been a quiet and sedate open gaming room (mostly empty) at noontime was suddenly way, way too small for the purpose by six in the evening. And the din — man, it was noisy in there.

Rather bizarrely, considering the point of the whole enterprise, I got very little gaming in, but I did participate in a Space Dealer tournament. Now, Space Dealer has generated a lot of buzz since it took so many people by surprise at last year’s Essen Game Fair in Germany, and the sheer novelty factor of a European board game with a space theme (try to fill a hand counting the number of Eurogames with space themes — I dare you) is enough in itself to cause a certain stir.

But the real element that grabs people’s attention — I’ll call it a gimmick; more on that in a sec — is the fact that this game is entirely played in realtime, using little sandglasses which are, at least in theory, one-minute timepieces. The game itself is timed to last exactly thirty minutes (a cd with “space music” and a robot voice warning you of the remaining time is included in the box, but we just used a stopwatch at the con) at the end of which, that’s it, game over.

Succinctly put, Space Dealer is a game of building commodities and then sending them out in a little space ship to your opponents’ star systems to fulfill commodity “needs” that they have. In the middle of the table is this octagonal track which doubles as a kind of track of the star system (four corners of which represent the star system of each player) and also the scoring track. On the table in front of each player is a rather interesting card strip where you place cards from your hand first to develop technologies or commodity production centers, and then to deploy those cards, from whence they are used to manufacture commodities that you send off in your little spaceship. The cards are arrayed in a row in front of you once they are activated, and most of these cards — in addition to being your manufactories — also show the “needs” of your own solar system, which the other players can see and will try to fulfill by bringing their own spaceship round and dumping off the commodities for those cards that haven’t been filled.

Once a card’s needs have been met, the player who’s done so places a scoring block in that player’s color on the card and scores a certain number of points for herself, and then a certain number of points for the player whose card’s needs have just been met (which is generally proportionately less than the player who’s brought the commodities: for example, 3 points for the commodity-bringer, 1 point for the player who’s card was just fulfilled). In this way, every time a score is made from a supply run, usually two players are receiving scores. Once that need is met, it’s out of the game and no one else can score for it, which turns Space Dealer into something of a race. The guy who won the second game (hands down I might add) beat me cleanly to nearly every need that I was on my way to fulfill, so there’s strong competition to get your commodities to those needs before someone else does, and snag those points.

For every action in this sequence you want to fulfill, one of your sandglasses is placed on the spot and, when the sand runs out, that activity can be performed. It’s very linear: you build a technology/production card with one sandglass, then you manufacture the commodity that card provides with another sandglass, then you travel one star system with one sandglass, until you finally reach the star system of the player who has a need your equipped to fulfill. Then you use another sandglass to get your empty spaceship back, and so on. Thus the realtime nature of the game.

In quintessential Germanic fashion, all the commodities are just little colored wooden cubes, and the needs printed on each card that you’re sending your spaceship out to fulfill are printed with a row of squares. You have to deliver all of the needed colors simultaneously in order to score for that particular need, and the more colors printed on that particular card, the higher the score when you fulfill that need.

It’s a rather simple game mechanic, and it’s the realtime nature with those crazy sandglasses that makes the game stand out (other than the very rare sci-fi theme). But after two plays I have very mixed opinions of the whole realtime mechanic. I found for one thing that it severely cut down on player interaction — I don’t think I’ve ever played a game that was so quiet. I don’t think I actually ever heard the player to my right speak even once during the entire 30 minutes of my second game, and from my point of view that just can’t be right. And because each player is so concerned with performing a task as quickly as possible, and racing to get those needs fulfilled soonest, it’s very hard to really stay all that aware of what the other players are doing, so I feel that there’s an enormous chance for rules to be misinterpreted or mistakes to be made (not necessarily intentionally) and go unnoticed. I would definitely say that Space Dealer needs to be played only by people who very firmly understand the rules, because once the clock is ticking, it’s just not that easy to get questions answered or to have other players even notice if you’re doing something wrong.

At the end of the day, most of Space Dealer’s unique appeal comes from the realtime aspect, and it’s this very aspect which I think is something more akin to a gimmick than a real strong mechanic. By the end of my second game, I’d kind of had my fill of the thing. Some of the other mechanics are nice in the game — I like the way each player’s table area is set up, and the way these cards are both commodity manufactories and needs at the same time, but ironically enough these other mechanics are sort of marginalized by those damned sandglasses, and I think that ultimately I just got tired of sitting and staring at the sands run through and then rush like mad to move my little cardboard spaceship around.

Some freeform thoughts from the rest of the day:

I bought a mostly unpunched copy of the legendary Magic Realm from a dealer who was — wait for this — dressed entirely and convincingly in cowboy attire. I’m not talking about Roy Rogers glitter-girl attire, I’m talking Snake Plissken in Tombstone attire. He was also a really nice guy and gave me a kick-ass deal on a game I’ve wanted for a long time. His six-shooters in his holster may have helped me to be a real nice guy too.

GMT Games is fucking awesome. They had a booth — right next to the cowboy dude — and I was drooling and reaching for various types of plastic and bills to buy, well, everything when a little voice screeched in my head that, No, begging on street corners is not an acceptable and totally justifiable price to pay for some frickin’ awesome games. I walked away having spent just 16 bucks on a now-out-of-print copy of Knizia’s Battle Line a smugger, more self-righteous geek.

My friend Tewhill and I sat at the hotel bar for over half an hour after getting fair-piss weak beer while the bartender did a runner. I swear, the bar was unattended for almost an hour while we sat there and, you know, got kinda pissed off. (I walked by there two hours later and it was still empty.) Some guys just really push their luck. I hope he chokes on a moldy peanut.

There was a way-cool homemade schematic/map of the Serenity ship with each level (printed in color and embedded in Plexiglas) stacked on the level below with struts. It was really sweet, but I couldn’t fawn all over the creator because he was GMing the crew planetside while they delivered some stolen ore or something, doubtless on their way to having River run off and the Preacher get shot and nearly die so Jayne could riffle through everyone’s luggage while Mal found himself in the unfortunate situation of having to be a penniless hero, rather than a wealthy bad guy. Or something.

I discovered the Pulp Gamer podcast (http://www.pulpgamer.com, natch) purely as a result of seeing the dude happily plugging away on his portable rig in the open gaming room. Looks like a good podcast and I’ve downloaded a couple of episodes.

Liz Rizzo was nerding it away in a huge session of Game Of Thrones, and I happily forced my way into the table, distracted her, and probably ensured that she lost soundly. Now, here’s the thing: if you go to her blog you’ll hear her speak with the most profound frankness about things like her purple friends, socially-conscious Hollywood schmooze fests, filmmaking, and, uh, a little more about her purple friend. But the open secret here is that she’s just a total geek like the rest of us. Don’t be fooled — she’s played Magic Realm more than I have. Don’t tell her I said this because I need to be really nice to her since she now has a job at a post-production house in Hollywood, and I’ll never know when I’ll need to pull a favor to get some post work done….

Finally, in the bathroom for a last whizz just before heading for home, I overheard this remark from a guy with long hair shaving at the sink: “Dude, have you ever noticed, Lars Ulrich is kind of a douchebag? But that’s okay, because he kicks ass.” Ah, the pleasures of gaming cons!

Technorati tags: Orccon, Space Dealer

Orccon, one of the four annual game dork love-ins put on by the Strategicon people, is approaching this weekend, a chance for tons of gamers to get together, throw insults at one another, declare their love/hate of American style games, and share the body odor.

Actually, I have to say that I’m really looking forward to this, because it’s the first shot out of the gate for the newly-managed and newly-energized Strategicon group, a kind of gaming institution here in the land of smog and sand. His Majesty Lord Knizia will be presiding over events, lending his distinctive German analytical fame to the proceedings, and giving Strategicon a certain amount of international lustre. So it’s kind of all eyes on La-La Land as a hopefully better and brighter era is ushered in for gaming cons in this corner of the hemisphere.

As the first of a new chapter in gaming con history for Los Angeles, it couldn’t come at a more opportune moment, right on the heels as it is of the announcement by those jerks at Gencon that last Autumn’s Gencon SoCal was to be the last. I took this announcement with more or less the dignity of a toddler who’s tipped his milk off the high chair, because a concatenation of stellar incidents and a general alignment of the planets all designed to screw me over made sure that I was forced to miss out on GenCon SoCal. This was bad enough when I just thought I’d missed it for a year, but the last ever? That was pretty bloody crushing.

With GenCon SoCal fast fading into a nostalgic memory, and the sting of missing out on the last ever still smarting, I’ve set my sights squarely on the Strategicon chaps to replace that huge aching cavern of sorrow in my chest with a brimming pool of joy and gaming euphoria. And Reiner.

For those who don’t know, the reason this Strategicon is the first of a new era is that Strategicon is under new management. Gaming management. And like college-bound computer nerds at math camp, they’re desperate for the approval of their peers. Which is why there’s a sort of extra buzz surrounding this event, and why it seems to jammed with activity and gamingness. And Reiner.

For a little background on the Strategicon tale, check out Eric Burgess’ very nice boardgame podcast Boardgame Babylon for the tale. Eric will be a kind of major player in the convention proceedings, emceeing lots of the Reiner events (and perhaps holding Reiner’s sceptre and crown when he gets weary), and he’s in thick with all these Southern Californian boardgaming types, so he’s got the lowdown (besides, he’s a good podcaster).

Also, as any self-respecting nerdy enterprise does, Strategicon has its own website (duh): here.

Maybe I’ll see some of you there. I’ll probably be the one begging in the lobby for food money after spending my worldly all in the dealer’s room…

Technorati tags: Orccon, Strategicon, boardgaming.

I’m getting back into the swing of blogging after a kinda-mandatory hiatus which wasn’t really my intent (there’s a handful of half-finished posts in my drafts which probably will never see the light of day). To make it simple, I’ll start with one of those lame, hey-I-just-saw-this-so-check-it-out kind of posts.

Of late I’ve found myself doing a variety of jobs on this remodel project of mine which are very quiet and lonely, like painting for hours on end. Usually I stick some music on and listen with headphones, but lately I’ve been really enjoying exploring a variety of podcasts out there in the interocean.

Podcasts are somewhat new for me, at least as a regular experience. It can be tricky to find uninterrupted blocks of time long enough to focus my attention fully on what’s being said. And unlike music, it doesn’t work terribly well as background sound when I’ve got to have my mental focus — such as it is — directed at a task, like web design.

But lots of my remodeling work is the perfect opportunity to listen, because jobs like painting and so forth don’t require much mental concentration. It’s kind of like my personal version of the morning commute.

Anyway. Most of the podcasts I’ve been listening to lately have been of the gaming and geeking variety. I’ve always been a fan of games, and it’s been really enjoyable to hear what others have been playing, or seeing, or discovering. And I’m always game for geek. These include:

Kick Ass Mystic Ninjas — this show seems quite popular, and I’ve heard quite a few of them by this point. Each show, Summer, Joe, and David pick a relatively vintage book or movie of the sci-fi/fantasy ilk and basically just blab about it. The show takes on the format of a review and essay, like old Siskel and Ebert. The shows I’ve heard recently cover Logan’s Run, Dune, Flash Gordon, and Ladyhawke. And while generally I’m not a huge fan of having to endure a half-hour of someone else’s critical opinion (I don’t really read reviews or even necessarily condone the whole critics industry), the fact that KAMN takes on more of the tone of a discussion makes it interesting, and generally pretty enjoyable. It doesn’t hurt that I tend to agree with at least one of them most of the time.

Boardgame Speak (aka Geek Speak) — seemingly on hiatus, this show by Derk and Aldie of boardgamegeek.com interviews the really big names in the board game world. And they’re monstrous, both in terms of size and detail. The episode in which they interviewed über-designer Reiner Knizia weighed in at over two hours, and the interview with Fantasy Flight Games founder Christian T. Peterson was so immense that they divided it into three episodes. Derk and Aldie make for odd interviewers, with their very loose, off-the-cuff style; Derk’s laconic, occasionally nasty delivery, and Aldie’s sort of wandering, half-there interjections. For such a strange duo, it comes as something of a surprise that the interviews are so meaty and rewarding, and that — even more bizarrely — the show comes across as a kind of professional leading podcast in its field. If you have any interest in board games, this podcast is almost required listening.

The Vintage Gamer — I like the concept behind this one, in which modern computer game designer Jim Van Verth picks a classic board, computer, or video game from the rosy past to discuss in detail. Obviously pre-scripted, Jim sort of drones on in this monotone that comes across as listless, but it’s fun to be reminded of these oft-forgotten classics from the past.

Slice of Sci-Fi — Michael and Evo seem to be everywhere, with about four hundred thirty three trillion different podcast series to their credit. I would suppose this is their flagship, an attempt at a more full-rounded radio show, with news, interviews, and so on. Summer from KAMN usually joins them as well, and … I don’t know. Something about the format doesn’t really grab me. The interview, for example, with Wil Wheaton back in February felt rushed and thin, like a distracted Jay Leno. There’s some great names who participate, though, including Shawn Piller in the most recent installment.

Radio Free Burrito — maddeningly sporadic, Wil Wheaton has been really just doing RFB as an experiment, feeling his way into a format. He spent an inordinate amount of time worrying about show length, but really, the longer episodes were his best. He probably found his best structure when he lay back and did a straight question-and-answer episode, creating a sort of virtual dialogue with his listeners. Very entertaining. And those episodes (#4 and #5 I believe) in which he took his iRiver out on the road to his auditions, roving reporter style, were also great fun. Regrettably, technical problems killed his most recent attempt at an episode, the one I probably was looking forward to the most: an all-geek q&a. If Wil can get into a routine of regularly producing episodes, and just toss aside all his worry and concern over a format and length and all that nonsense, RFB could really grow into something fun.

Does My Geek Look Big In This — a very silly title for a show I just discovered a couple days ago. Sarah and Nev, from Blighty, discuss three of the most important things in life: beer, gaming, and movies. This one came as a hugely pleasant surprise, and after just one episode has become something of a favourite. Sarah and Nev have a great rapport, their dialogue rolling smoothly together, and they’re terribly relaxed and cheerful (starting the show by cracking open a pub ale can’t hurt). They really seem to enjoy making their podcasts, and that enjoyment rubs off onto the listener. I feel cheerful after listening.

There have been others as well, such as the Official Lost Podcast, Roll 2D6, Have Games Will Travel …. there’s a huge world of stuff out there. Way too many to ever get to. But I’ve found the exploration very rewarding.

Every once in a while I stumble on something that produces a swell of long-forgotten memory inside me. It’s like a long laid-aside bit of my past is brought back into sharp focus by whatever it is I’ve stumbled upon.

It was this sensation that assailed me when I visited Demian’s Gamebooks site (go here) yesterday.

For those of you unfamiliar with the term, “gamebooks” refers loosely to any book which has interactive or roleplaying elements in it (as opposed to a normal novel, which you simply read from beginning to end, noninteractively). The most famous example of these types of books is probably the childrens’ Choose Your Own Adventure series, where the reader has to make decisions at different points in the narrative, causing the plot to branch. These books were rudimentary versions of gamebooks — others, such as the Fighting Fantasy series, were much more complicated and involved, requiring the use of dice and numerical statistics, much like Dungeons & Dragons. They were also known as solitaire adventures, since the player didn’t need other players in order to enjoy the game. The book itself became the opponent.

I had completely forgotten about these gamebooks, or the fact that they had been greatly enjoyable to me during their heyday in the mid-80s. Stumbling on Gamebooks.org, which is a database of all known interactive books complete with photos, powerfully reminded me of days long gone, holed up in my room, rolling dice while I struggled through one grand adventure or another. And, because the game is played alone, the experience is much like that of reading: the quiet, the stillness, the insularity of experiencing something that lives only inside your imagination.

Steve Jackson’s Car Wars series of books: “Oh my god, I played those!” The Fighting Fantasy series from the other (UK-based) Steve Jackson: “That book was awesome!” Stumbling onto the lists and pictures of these old series brought back fabulous memories: Be An Interplanetary Spy, others.

Of course, remembering one aspect of that era brought a flood of other memories from the time back; those were my skater years, when finding a new bank parking lot with a cool concrete curb where I could perfect my ollie-180 grinds was a momentous event. A time when I must have watched The Search for Animal Chin like a hundred and fifty times.

And in between the skating were the games: Car Wars, Dungeons & Dragons, Warhammer. Trips to the gaming store to drool over all those metal miniatures arrayed like so many commemorative statues beneath the glass counters, which were always warm and a little greasy. And those weekend games of Shogun (later renamed Samurai Swords), from the Milton-Bradley Gamesmaster series, with my brothers, which sometimes lasted six hours, but were worth every minute. I still remember the thrill of a successful ninja assassination strike, crippling my opponent by robbing him of his daimyo.

Then weekend family trips to Carmel, or Mendocino, or Point Reyes. The smell of restaurant grills mixed with the ocean air, and then devouring awesome science fiction and fantasy in the motel rooms — The Foundation Series, the Han Solo Adventures, Eddings. Walking the forest trails along the coastline, imagining I was in one of those wondrous fantasy settings.

It can be dangerous to live in the past. But every once in a while, letting a wave of memories overwhelm you, to just let go and allow yourself to be transported back to another time, with its own cornucopia of scents and experiences, and places.

All of this triggered by a little, low-res photo of an old and forgotten gamebook at a site accidentally discovered. How amazing is that?

Lately, in my rather pathetically narrow windows of free time, I sometimes try to get a few moments in with Oblivion, or X-Men Legends II. But because of the scope of these games, snatching a few minutes here and there is neither particularly rewarding or fruitful. Especially with Oblivion, it takes time to sync up with the alternate world and become productive with your alter-ego, the whole point of the game. Playing for just fifteen minutes is more frustrating than fun.

So you know what I find myself constantly returning to? One of the simplest computer games ever created, and still one of the best: Asteroids.

Asteroids is one of the great pillars of video games, one of the archetypes on which all subsequent games must build their own strengths. Released in 1979, with sequels in 1980, Asteroids showed how addictively fun a game with the most apparently simplistic of concepts could be. For me, Asteroids is one of the “perfect few”.

Take a look at the screenshot above for a second (and yes, it’s actually Asteroids Deluxe — more on that in a sec). Look at how almost pathetically simplistic it is. While Oblivion threatens to overheat my GPU chip with millions of texels, live lighting effects, complex physics calculations, and butterflies, Asteroids is nothing more than a handful of vector lines arranged into simplistic geometric shapes. So simplistic, in fact, as to be abstract. I mean, look at that screenshot: your spacecraft, composed of about eight straight lines, is being menaced by a handful of hollow arrowheads. Ooh. I’m wetting myself with terror.

How can a twenty-seven year old game with monochromatic graphics and extremely limited gameplay compete for my attention with a modern, cutting-edge game like Oblivion, where I can explore a whole virtual world? That’s the question I pondered this morning as I sat down to write this. And the answer, I think, lies in the deceptive promise of technology.

Some years ago, I was browsing in a bookstore when I overheard two of the store’s employees discussing e-books, which at the time were a fresh new buzzword. Essentially they assumed that the advent of e-books meant the death of the printed book. In a matter of years, they assumed, the printed book would be dead, bookstores would be a relic of the past, and we would all be reading on our computer screens.

Flash-forward to now, and, while e-books — or downloadable books — are still in existence (I’ve never used them) they’ve hardly outmoded the printed book world.

I’ve heard similar proclamations about video games wiping out the traditional board game or pen-and-paper role-playing game. While video games are certainly a vastly more lucrative industry, I’m happy to report that the printed game world is alive and well.

The answer these examples reveal is that greater technology does not necessarily produce a greater quality experience. A super-duper high-tech 3D game which sucks to play is still a shitty game. A game with rudimentary sounds and graphics which is a delight to play is still a kick-ass game.

Don’t get me wrong: Oblivion fucking rules. It’s the best CRPG since Baldur’s Gate II and perhaps my favorite CRPG since Ultima 7. And comparing Oblivion to Asteroids is like comparing a Dodge Charger to a Ferrari Enzo. They’re just different beasts. It’s the very fact that Oblivion is so fabulous that makes Asteroids’ enduring interest so intriguing.

Full disclosure: most of the time I prefer playing the much less-successful sequel to Asteroids, Asteroids Deluxe, which altered a handful of features from the original, including replacing the “teleport” button with the more-useful “shield” button. And those arrowhead villains (new to the sequel) in the screenshot are known as Killer Saucers, which start as a clump, and then break off into fragments which attempt to ram into your ship. The asteroids also spin as they career across the screen, which somehow renders them more impressive.

And while we’re on the subject of cool effects, who doesn’t love the totally awesome zero-gravity movement of your ship, as you hit thrusters and then drift? It’s surprisingly realistic, and surprisingly effective in telegraphing a sense of floating in the cold, inky void of space.

To turn full-circle, and try to lend this post some kind of coherency, the reason I often wind up with Asteroids rather than Oblivion is that, suitable to its original destiny as a quarter-chomper in laundromats and pizza parlors the world over, Asteroids is just as entertaining if you play it for 30 seconds as 30 minutes. In this respect, it’s like high-concept screenwriting: it’s gotta have a compelling enough premise that the concept can be sold — and told — in a flash. Asteroids is incredibly simple to grasp — you just spin around and pulverize asteroids, trying to stay alive — and it sucks you in immediately to your role, and your goals. Arcade games of the Golden Age lived and died on how arresting were the simplest of gameplay concepts, and thanks to its insta-concept, Asteroids not just lived but flourished.

In the end, games work because of how compellingly they use the technology at hand to craft the best possible experience. Whether that’s with the gobsmacking complexity of Olbivion’s 3D virtual world or Asteroid’s simple-but-silky-smooth vectors, these games took what they had and delivered something awesome. It’s just that, with Asteroids, it fits very nicely indeed into a fifteen-minute coffee break. Oblivion demands more the scheduling of a seven-course meal.

Nearly thirty years on, it’s still just as satisfying to pound spinning hunks of rock into non-existence.

As a final note, according to Wikipedia, in November 1982 one Scott Safran achieved the still unbroken world record score in Asteroids, a staggering 41 million points.

My high score? I set it last week. 26 thousand points. I wrok.

Technorati Tags: Asteroids, arcade games

Time for the second of my world-famous pinball games of the week posts, read by a force of like three people.

Swords of Fury (1988) Williams Electronics

Williams Electronics always was a market leader in pinball, and indeed in video games, but the late Eighties seem a particularly prolific period for the producer, a period in which they produced a flurry of some of their most famous, beloved tables. Right in the eye of this quality storm stood one of my personal favorites, Swords of Fury.

The first thing that strikes you about the table is the magnificently artful, detailed graphics, depicting a series of crumbling stone staircases descending down, down, ever down. Runes etched in stone line the borders of the playfield, and the hilt of an opulent sword pushes its way past the flippers. It’s all very traditional heroic fantasy fare, but it’s the execution of the art which makes the table so unique to look at, like if Winsor McCay has been commissioned to draw DAW science-fiction book covers in the Seventies. It just might be the finest art ever produced for a pinball playfield. I’d argue it.

Play begins by launching the ball into a 5-bank drop target area with a mini-flipper at the upper left of the playfield. Each drop target represents some slathering foe against whom you are pitted in battle, all of whom die in the most satisfyingly noisy way as you knock the targets down (there are more screams of agony and despair in this game than when the roller-coaster derails at the state fair). There’s also a tight loop called Ogres Alley in the upper middle of the playfield which is activated by looping one direction and then scored by looping the other direction.

Unusually, Swords of Fury doesn’t actually have that most generic of all playfield elements: the bumper. There is, however, the second-most generic element, the spelling game element. A vairety of targets around the field beckon you to spell A-V-E-N-G-E-R for booby prizes and ever-increasing fame and fortune.

There’s also a hair-raising tiny little loop on the lower-left through which you rack up your bonus multiplier, a loop which savagely tosses the ball right back at the flippers, if you’re lucky, and down the hatch, if you aren’t.

It’s all great fun, well-balanced, challenging. But it’s the evocativeness of the game which makes it such a winner, the sense of involvement in the setting and the story, a story which, by the way, seems well-developed and complex and epic, pregnant with backstory — none of it ever revealed to the player so far as I know, yet resting behind all the plays and graphics, lending depth, frustratingly nebulous.

Oh, and the music. A noteworthy score plays along to your game, movie-quality stuff that sounds like it was written by Hans Zimmer’s cousin perhaps, building in steam as you initiate various modes, and really launching into high-gear during multiball. It’s layered over with almost constant shouting, taunting, screaming, and the great booming voice of Lionman (whoever he is) … and the voice of a woman who could so easily have been Ferris Bueller’s sister (you’d get it if you played it).

A true classic, a work of art, and the best bloodcurdling screams in any pinball game. Do you even need more of a reason to play?

Technorati Tags: pinball, games, fantasy, Swords of Fury, Williams

When I was a kid, one of my favorite comic books was the short-lived but, to me, fabulous Atari Force, published by DC Comics.

Atari Force first appeared as a series of mini-comics bundled with a number of Atari 2600 cartridges, including Defender, Berzerk, Galaxian, and a few other space-related games, one issue in each of the different titles. In 1983, co-creator Gerry Conway teamed with penciler José Luis García Lopez to release an overhauled new full-length series set a generation after events in the mini-comics.

I don’t recall the mini-comics but I sure as hell remember the full series, which made a huge impact on my impressionable, video game-addled mind, and the few issues I managed to find were read probably near to the point of destruction.

A few months ago, probably with nothing more constructive to do, I poked around and found a complete set of the series in near-mint for less than ten bucks from some dealer selling through ebay. And, like a fine wine, I’ve been savoring them slowly, an issue here, an issue there, letting both the wonderful memories of reading them as a kid — and the intrinsic fun of the stories for their own sake — sink in.

The series really doesn’t have anything specifically to do with Atari, the game company. Instead, what the creators did was invent a science fiction setting that was inspired by the whole sort of science fiction vibe surrounding those classic video games of the early Eighties, one they probably hoped would appeal to the people pumping quarters into, yeah, Berzerk, Galaxian, or Defender (or buying the cartridges). Once the science fiction setting was whipped together, they simply cross-pollinated two big brands in two media companies both owned by the same conglomerate (Warner). Presto.

Regardless of the motives, the result is very classic adventurish sci-fi, like something C.J. Cherryh or David Brin might write, with more than a passing reference to films like Star Wars.

Anyone for whom the name “Atari” conjures up a swooning mystique would probably have as much fun with these funny, forgotten old comics as I have.

Now to trawl through those old 25-cent bins for Rocket Raccoon …

This being the first of the famous “Pinball table of the week” posts, I thought it important to carefully choose a pinball table that captures everything that I love about pinball, and everything that makes pinball a unique, valid and complimentary companion to other kinds of gaming.

So I got on Wikipedia and typed in a few pinball tables I enjoy. Big, classic tables. They didn’t come up. I went to the Williams page, and none of the pinball tables mentioned in the article had an associated link, whereas all the video games Williams produced did. Wikipedia has failed me? Impossible. As a test, I typed in some of my favorite classic arcade video games. Every single one I typed in had an associated article.

Before we get on to discussing pinball game of the week, then, let me put a plea out to pinbally people: Please start writing articles about these great pinball games for Wikipedia? Not just for those of use who enjoy them to read up on them, but also for new fans and the simply idly curious to learn about them. Of course, there are many other pinball-related resources out there, but these tables deserve to be recognized in broad sites like Wikipedia just like arcade games do.

Now, before I move on to Sorcerer itself, I think I need to point something out, that kinda sucks: I don’t have the actual real physical manufactured table to play. Nor have I ever done so. Nor is it likely that any of my tables of the week will. Yes, it’s depressing, but all of my pinball pleasure comes from Visual Pinball / VPinMame, which is supported by an amazing community of these insane geniuses who craft 3D replicas of these things, complete with lots of reference photos pasted as textures over the model, and then port the solid state stuff in using vPinMame. The brains of the machine thinks it’s running a real physical table, but it’s running a simulation of that real table. Since I discovered Visual Pinball nearly two years ago, I’ve been hooked.

Table of the week: Sorcerer

The Eighties was a great decade for pinball, with tons of great tables released. The Seventies had seen a great deal of technological innovation, at the end of which something really special began to occur: tables began to talk. The advent of speech brought a whole new level of immersion to the experience, and never is that more evident than with 1985’s Sorcerer.

Ported to Visual Pinball with tremendous artistry by superhero PacDude, replete with flashing lights and tons of eye candy, Sorcerer instantly propelled itself into my all-time favorite list, and judging from the ratings score at the Internet Pinball Database, others think so too.

The player does a sort of battle against a taunting, supercilious Sorcerer, and playwise the game features all the staples of pinball at the time, including an eye-catching elevated bridge running across the top of the playfield from a ramp on the left to a holding area on the right where balls get racked up to trigger the completely frantic multiball.

The bulk of play, and of scoring, lies in attempting to hit a number of targets arrayed through the middle of the board to spell — you guessed it — S-O-R-C-E-R-E-R. There’s also a little nook with a triple drop-targets and an associated extra flipper — get all three drop targets before the timer runs out (about five seconds I think) and bonuses start to light up on the inlanes.

The table is actually quite straightforward, in terms of design and features. It’s also one of the hardest pinball games to play, at least for me. The ball will very, very often skip out down the outlanes while I sit and watch, powerless to intervene. Such is pinball. I’m pretty much the worst player in the world at pinball, but I would rank the difficulty of this one pretty high.

What really makes this table special is the pair of amazing, intimidating eyes just above and behind the playfield, which flash and light in response to the action going on, and the awesome voice which goes with it. The Sorcerer basically taunts you and mocks you the entire time, in this deep, booming voice, replete with zappy, thunderous sound effects. The whole package deal is tremendously memorable, and I often play the damned thing just to hear the zippy sound effects (also, this table, like other Williams tables of the era, uses sound effects that any fan of Eighties arcade games will recognize, like Joust).

How can anything be bad which, when your game ends with a particularly pitiful score, taunts you with “You are done, mortal!”