The Stack

Spoilers follow the break.
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A game by Anssi Räisänen written in the Alan adventure language. Spoilers follow the break.
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Doug Egan brings us an investigation set in a restaurant in a seedy part of town. Spoilers follow the break.
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Yes, that’s actually the next game’s title. My initial reaction, before even opening it, is skepticism — I’ve seen games that extol their own badness before, and they’re never as bad as the ones that are convinced that they’re brilliant. Well, let’s find out if it lives up to its claim, shall we? Spoilers follow the break.
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Next up: a sci-fi grotesque by Mark Jones. Spoilers follow the break.
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A bit of déjà vu here: like last year, the first game on my docket is an Adrift game about the Grim Reaper. Only this time he’s the antagonist. Spoilers follow the break.

[ADDENDUM: It turns out that I’m mistaken about A Fine Day for Reaping being the first game I played for last year’s comp. It was the third.]
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So, let’s get down to it finally. There are 35 games in this year’s comp. I see a few familiar names among the authors, but, unless he’s finally decided to start writing under a pseudonym, no Panks. This is encouraging!

Last year, at comp’s end, dismayed by the excessive bugginess of too many of the entries, I made a promise to be a beta-tester for as many games as I could — I set a goal of “at least ten” games. I did not meet this goal, despite an honest effort: I only found eight authors who were looking for testers. Shamefully, I only submitted feedback to seven of them, although I played enough of the eighth that I can’t honorably vote on it. Also, with one exception (which I will not name here), the games I tested lacked the really egregious completely-broken-gameplay bugs that so irritated me last year. Maybe this is a sign that things will be better this year, but more likely it means that the authors of the really broken games never bothered looking for testers. Ah well, I’ve done what I can.

The final chapter of Magic: the Gathering — Battlegrounds consists mainly of fighting all the bosses from the previous chapters a second time, making a mockery of that “Thank you for setting me free” business from earlier. (Poor communication between the scenario designers and the cutscene animators, perhaps?) After that, the game dutifully executes the standard videogame plot twist and the player squares off against the final foe, Mishra.

Mishra uses a five-color deck and doesn’t seem to have a limited mana supply. Fortunately, he’s kind of stupid, and doesn’t take advantage of this by just casting Scorching Missile over and over until you fall down. Instead, he’s fond of summoning big powerful flying creatures, and counterspelling your own attempts to do likewise. A note about counterspell: For it to work, you have to cast it before the opponent finishes casting the spell you want to counter. Since the amount of time it takes to cast a spell seems to be proportional to its mana cost, it’s easier to counter strong spells than weaker ones. This seems kind of backward, but it does generate an interesting point of strategy: when facing an enemy with Counterspell, it makes sense to come up with a strategy that mainly uses weak spells. This generally means summoning fragile creatures in quantity, so that they do a notable amount of damage in total before they die in quantity. The problem is, Mishra also casts Liability, an enchantment that does a point of damage to either caster whenever one of their creatures dies.

After some false starts battling Mishra with Blue (hoping to counterspell the worst of his summons), I wound up using a pure White deck, containing both cheap flying Suntail Hawks (capable of nibbling Mishra’s demons to death, or at least of getting in their way) and various healing effects to help me survive Liability. It strikes me that this may be what the designers were going for here — triumphing with the power of Good. Or maybe not; there could be other effective strategies.

In some sense, I haven’t really finished the game. There’s a single-player Arcade Mode, apparently also winnable, in which you can use whatever colors you’ve unlocked by completing chapters in Quest Mode. (More support for the Quest-Mode-as-tutorial idea.) I’ve tried the beginnings of this, and may even try to win it if it proves easy enough, but as far as I’m concerned, finishing Quest Mode is enough to get this game off the Stack.

And honestly, if I decide I want more single-player M:tG-like experiences, I’ll probably go back to Etherlords. I know I said I was through with that, but a day or two later, I found myself wanting to try the final battle with a black deck. I haven’t really been thinking about Battlegrounds when not playing it or blogging about it, but Etherlords got a firmer grip on my mind, possibly because the realtime aspect of Battlegrounds gives it a chaos-and-confusion aspect that makes it hard for the mind to grasp it in return.

Or maybe it’s just the music. Usually, when I’ve been playing a game for a while, I have the music going through my head throughout the day. After playing Battlegrounds for a few days, I still had the music from Etherlords in my head. Here’s an example of the music from Battlegrounds:
Battlegrounds, blue arena 1
Compare this, from Etherlords:
Etherlords, blue arena 2
Now, I’m not saying that I’d buy a soundtrack CD for either game. But the the music in Etherlords is at least coherent, providing discernable melodic and harmonic structures, while the music in Battlegrounds is a bunch of musical sounds thrown into a blender. This may have been intentional, of course. It’s ambient music, “furniture music” as Satie called it, written with the goal of setting a mood without distracting from the action. And there’s certainly a case to be made for not trying to overlay music with strong patterns of tension and resolution on a game that isn’t gong to fit them. (I remember being strongly struck by the way that the music in Quake II kept on screaming “ACTION SCENE!” while I just stood there in an empty room.) Nonetheless, the end result is that the music in Battlegrounds is so forgettable that you’ve probably already forgotten it in the time it took you to listen to the Etherlords sample and read the rest of this paragraph.

Next post: IF Comp ’08.

With the start of Chapter 6, Magic: the Gathering — Battlegrounds finally stops leading the player by the hand. There are no more hints, and you never get a suggested (but overridable) set of spells to bring with you into each fight. Nor does the system still force you to use a particular color of magic — in fact, it finally allows the player to create mixed decks. It all feels like this is the moment when the tutorial finally ends and the game proper begins.

It may seem odd that this moment comes in the last and shortest chapter of the game. (Shorter in terms of number of fights, that is; due to the need to do more experimentation to discover an effective deck for each foe, it may well take longer to finish than the other chapters.) I’m guessing that this is because the designers regarded the entire single-player campaign as a tutorial for the two-player game. If so, it seems like they put an unusual amount of design effort into it, defining all those special gameplay constraints and trick duels that I wouldn’t expect to appear in two-player mode at all.

It all reminds me of a hypothesis I’ve held about certain games with disproportionately tough end bosses, where a major proportion of the time spent playing the game to completion is spent at the very end. (Jedi Knight comes to mind.) The hypothesis is that the designers must be approaching it from the perverse perspective that the boss fight is the real point of the game, and that the rest of the game is just a lead-up to it, to be gotten out of the way as quickly as possible so the player can focus on what’s really important.

So, from that perspective, I’m positing that the role of the end boss in Battlegrounds is taken by other human players. At least, I hope it is. Obviously there’s a real end boss to come, and I don’t know how tough it’ll be. But I’ll know for sure by the weekend.

Well, it’s that time of year again: the judging period of IFcomp 2008 is underway. But before I dive into that, I want to wrap up Magic: the Gathering — Battlegrounds, which, when I started it, I honestly expected to have finished by now. Currently, I’m up to the last fight in chapter 5.

Difficulty fluctuates wildly between levels in this game, so it’s hard to predict how long it’ll take to reach the end. The last level I finished wasn’t very hard, but the level before that was a real toughie, even after I had received all the in-game hints. The hints said to summon Carnophages ¹2/2, does 1 point of damage to caster every time it survives a fight to weaken the opponent’s Gorilla Chieftain ²3/3, regenerating, and then cast Infest ³gives -2/-2 to every creature in play to finish it off and prevent it from regenerating. Which is fine as far as it goes, but that only takes you through the very beginning of the battle, and if you try to just repeat the same tactic against subsequent gorillas, you spend mana as fast as you get it, and wind up unprepared for the stronger creatures that follow.

The required spell for that fight — the one that you have to cast at least once for victory to actually count — was Hellfire, which destroys all non-black creatures, but has a large mana cost and damages the caster. By the time your mana pool is large enough to cast it, the opponent can cast Avatar of Might ⁴8/8, trample, which more or less necessitates casting Hellfire immediately. So by that point you have to (a) have enough mana remaining to cast Hellfire, and (b) have enough health left that casting it doesn’t kill you. These requirements are in tension: conserving health means spending mana. The only way I could manage to cast Hellfire soon enough to avoid a devastating blow from the Avatar was to selectively allow the enemy’s creatures to hit me. Add in the blowback from Hellfire and I’m in a grave position from that point on.

The Avatar is the turning point of the duel. If you manage to kill it, you can last indefinitely by playing defensively, and maybe even switch to offense after a while. (But not too soon. That’s the mistake I made the first couple of times I survived past that point.) But you have to kill it right. One of the many big differences between this game and the card game that inspired it is that in Battlegrounds, slain creatures drop mana crystals, in quantities proportional to their casting cost. (Mana crystals partly replenish your mana reserve, but cannot increase it above its maximum.) In a level with lots of big strong creatures like this one, harvesting the dead like this is a more significant source of mana than just letting it regenerate over time. When the enemy summons a powerful creature and sends it toward you, he’s potentially giving you a gift. This mechanic makes the location where a creature dies significant, because the mana crystals go to whoever manages to pick them up first. If you cast Hellfire too soon, the Avatar will die in the opponent’s half of the arena, and he’ll just cast another while you’re depleted. But obviously you don’t want to wait too long and get killed either. But if you get it right, you can tilt the balance of mana toward yourself.

So, that was actually a pretty satisfying level. It actually required nontrivial strategizing, and when I failed, it was generally because I had made a poor decision, not because I had failed to perform my intentions. And, of course, it was satisfying to beat it after failing so many times — I was just about ready to give up and turn the difficulty down when I lived past the Avatar for the first time. I’ve only made a few sallies at the level I’m on, but it seems like it may be similar. This game may finally be hitting its stride. Shame it’s almost over.