An Ongoing Tribute to my own lameness.....
General random thoughts about gaming, both within and outside of the MMO genre.

So it's been almost a month. Wow.....

In case you're wondering about my attempts at making an Atari 2600 version of the first level and boss battle in God of War, it's really slow going. I've made mock-ups in MS Paint, but all the graphics have to be hard-coded into the ROM. Unfortunately, whenever I try to render anything more complex than a standard sized block to the TV, I get this weird shearing effect. As soon as I have some screens from the emulator, I'll post 'em. Now on to tonights topic...

Last weekend I entered a free Halo 3 tournament. You know... As in offline... over a LAN of XBox 360s... everybody in the same room.... face to face....<sigh> Kids today!!

At any rate, I had never played Halo 3 before. I did play a four person deathmatch of the original Halo over at a friends house one night.... Once.... Long ago..... So yeah, I was a complete n00b. But I'm generally good at first person shooters, so I thought I might be able to hold my own if I could watch a few games before competing to get an idea of how the maps are laid out. Come to find out, I was wrong.

There are several reasons why I was wrong:

1. We were playing 25 point team deathmatches.
2. I didn't come with a team so I got placed on a team of strangers who, as luck would have it, had never played Halo 3 either.
3. Halo 3 isn't so much a shooter as a first person game of "smear the Queer."

I knew that I was gonna get raped, but I didn't expect the game to be so drastically different. How? Well, you have shields that automatically recharge if you stay out of the fight long enough. This is actually time saving feature that keeps you from having to run all over the map looking for health and amour while avoiding fights. This helps keep the action going so I was all for it even if it seemed to be just a little bit "carebear." The other major difference is that a rifle but stroke is the deadliest thing in the game. That's right, Halo 3 has no "long game" so to speak.

Now if you come from the background of Quake, Counter-Strike and Battlefield 2, this transition will be totally unexpected. Actually shooting your opponent is almost completely worthless. Instead, you'll have to maneuver through incoming fire to get close enough to body check your opponent. It's a lot like tackle football, or a heavy metal mosh pit. If you are going to shoot at someone, you need to throw grenades first in order to lower their shields so that your guns can actually make the kill. Even then, it'll take three to seven shots for a player to go down. Plenty of time for them to close the distance and put you on the floor first. The exception here being the shotgun which can kill in just two close-range shots. One shot to strip the shields. One shot to finish the job. To bad I figured this out way too late.

Two small changes that totally change the emphasis of the game. interestingly enough, there's quite a bit of strategy involved in just getting close enough to jack other players. You can try to out flank them. You can jump at them like a boxing kangaroo. You can just 'nade and fire at every opponent that your teammates are firing at while watching the flank to make sure no tacklers get through. Or you can just head for the shotgun, turret gun or rocket launcher and try to rack up one shot kills with the slowest guns in the game. You have one central, overpowered element, with a selection of supporting strategies meant to get you to that goal without the opposition catching on. Hold that thought, we'll get back to it.

The rest of my game time has been eaten up by Mario Strikers: charged. For those of you that don't know, this is Soccer with all the Mario related Nintendo mascots. Well, it's kind of like soccer anyway. It's actually more like hockey....

Here's the set up, you have four players and a goalie on each team. Your team has a captain, one of the mario characters, and four "sidekicks," some of the generic cannon fodder from various Mario titles. The games take place in an enclosed arena with no offsides. Plus checking your opponent is not only allowed, but encouraged. The main features here are skill shots (sidekicks), mega strikes (captains) and charged shots (the ball gains "charge" every time it gets passed). Skill shots range from the Skeleton Koopas ability to electrify the ball and stun the goalie for a couple of seconds, to the hammer brother flinging a bunch of hammers and disabling the goalie before shotting the ball. Mega shots are the game breakers that allow  you to make multiple shots all at once, thus allowing you to score as many as six points off of one shot.

The catch? Skill shots and mega strikes take time to charge so there's a pretty good possibility that the other team will lay the hurt on your player before you can let one rip. Charged shots make it easier to make straight goals, but if the ball gets intercepted the charge you've built up will be turned on you. Therefore the best strategy is to just beat the hell out of the other team so that you can get some space to fire off mega strikes.

Again, there are a lot of ways to set up for a mega strike. You can chip the ball ahead a little bit and use the captains special abilities or power ups to disable the opposing team. You can use aggressive passing to lead the other team to the other side of the field. You can just ignore the ball and pound on the other team until its clear enough to go for the mega strike. Or you can mix and match these together.

I know I'm a little weird because I don't just enjoy this or that game, I ask myself why I like what I like. In this case I think I've found something very significant. If you look at any good multiplayer video game, you'll notice this same formula at work. Fighting games are all about stringing together long combos that will deny your opponent the ability to fight back. A match of Red Alert 2 was practically over once you destroyed your opponents construction yard. The battlefield series is all about limiting the other teams spawn options and making them easier to spawn camp. This is an integral part of making a solid and engaging multiplayer game.

Look at PvP (or RvR) in MMORPGs right now. How many actually follow this paradigm. Guild Wars and Fury? They aren't MMOs. WoW Battlegrounds? I haven't played them so I don't know. Eve? That's hard to tell since you're dealing with different types of conflict (economic and military) on varying scales.

The real question is how to bring this kind of design to the PvE aspect of the game. We have competent bots for FPS, RTS and fighting games. Why then are the mobs in most MMORPGs dumb as a bag of hammers?