Starcraft 2

I don't like to lose.

It's kind of a thing for me in video games. If I do lose in a video game I will either:

a) Quit playing said video game.

b) Play said video game every spare moment of my day until I win.

Whether I choose to go with option A or option B really depends on the quality of the game. Do I want to commit that much spare time to defeating the obstacle that the game presents? Or would I rather just skip it and devote the time to some other game?

Every game presents a challenge, large or small. Some aren't very challenging at all. Bejeweled for example. Sure, there is SOME skill involved, but mostly how far you get tends to be more a function of the Random Number Generator (RNG).

At the other end of the spectrum... games like Starcraft 2 and World of Warcraft, RNG is still (sometimes) a factor, but by and large, skill determines your success or failure.

Starcraft and WoW are fairly simple to pick up, but there are challenges in it that you are not going to easily achieve.

In WoW, you will have bosses / PVP challenges that you are not going to be able to overcome until you work through it and get better.

With Starcraft, and specifically in the multiplayer ladder matches, you are not going to achieve a good ladder ranking until you master the game. And…as I mentioned:

I don't like to lose.

It is the quality of the Starcraft gameplay that makes me continue and put in the time to avoid losing. Thus, I've been in training. Multiplayer training. (Queue 'Rocky' theme. Incoming training montage.)

I've done a lot of 'easy' mode 1v1 matches with the computer, working on various build orders. I think I've settled on two that I really like.

I've done a few 'hard' mode 1v1's versus Terran (computer) working on various counters. I'm getting pretty good at it and I win 90% of the matches there.

I've done a few of the 'challenges' to work on various skills that I'm going to need in the coming fights.

Over the next week, I plan on doing many more 1v1 'hard' mode battles versus randoms to work on my anti-protoss/anti-zerg counters.

Depending on the outcome of those hard mode adventures, I plan to start my multiplayer 'placement' matches sometime next week. My initial goal is to stay out of the 'bronze' ladder. My ultimate goal of course is to rank up to platinum/diamond, but it will be a while on that.

But enough about that…I was going to review Starcraft 2. Lets just say this: If you like RTS games, you will like SC2. Buy it. You will not be sorry.

If you don't like RTS games: You might not like SC2…but then again….you might. It is probably the best RTS game of all time, so I don't think you'd go wrong checking it out. If ANY game in this genre has a chance of pulling someone in who doesn't like the genre, it is SC2.

But I have heard a lot of people say 'I don't like RTS games, and I don't like SC2.', so it certainly isn't going to be universally praised by folks outside of it's niche. I can see where they are coming from.

As for me, you will find me knee deep in zerg for the next few months until something else comes along that grabs my attention away. Until then, I will be honing my skills until I win every game. Because…

I don't like to lose.

Are video games art?

The gamer blogosphere is up in arms about Roger Ebert's article stating that video games are not art. You can read the opinion piece here. I honestly don't understand why there is an argument at all.

Dictionary.com defines art as: "the quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance"

I'll buy that. I can certainly think of many video games that meet this criteria. (Or, at the very least, components of games that would meet the criteria)

But I think there is a different definition that many have in mind. I think a truer definition of art would be "any creative work that invokes an artist-intended emotional response in those that experience it."

Could that mean that a horror movie that scares the bajeezus out of you is art? Absolutely. If an artist can use the medium to illicit an emotional response from it's audience (in this case, fear/shock/horror), I think it deserves to be called 'art'. I'd give the same respect and consideration to comedy performances, poetry, literature, mime performances (the emotional response is KILL), paintings, architecture, musicians, and even dancers.

But of course...Mr. Ebert is also absolutely correct when he says that video games are not art.

"What? Didn't you just say that 'any creative work that invokes an intended emotional response' is art?" Yup. Sure did.

"Are video games creative?" Absolutely.

"Are video games capable of illiciting an emotional response?" No question. They can and do.

"You are confusing me now, and I hate you. I'm never reading your blog again!"

Ah, but let me explain young grasshopper. While the fictitious horror movie above is certainly capable of illiciting fear, horror, disgust, or shock...it doesn't do so to everyone. Some people (like me in fact) can come out of the 'scariest' horror movie ever and not be afraid at all. Others though, will not be able to sleep for a week.

My point is that an individual film or even a medium, can be artistic to many people, and not at all artistic to others.

For example, I absolutely love "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" by Mark Twain. I read it as a teenager and it is unquestionably a great literary work and absolutely a piece of art. It has themes that stay with me long after I've read it and it absolutely triggers emotional responses within.

Likewise, "Rudy" is one of the few movies I choke up on, and one of my favorites of all time. It tells the story of a kid who has one dream: To play football for Notre Dame. When he steps out on the football field at the end of the movie... yeah, I don't watch that movie with Shana around. (*sniff*)

But is Huck Finn a piece of art to someone who doesn't enjoy reading? Or to someone who hates the stylized prose of Mark Twain?

Is Rudy a piece of art to someone who doesn't like movies? Or to someone who hates Sean Astin?

Probably not. Art is one of the few things in life that is completely and totally subjective and personal. It is 100% based on opinion...not fact.

So Mr. Ebert is convinced video games are not art. That is fine. My opinion of Rudy doesn't change because some dude doesn't like Sean Astin. My opinion of Huck Finn doesn't change because some dude hates reading.

To me, these things are art and that is all that matters. I have seen some video games that have been able to generate some emotional response in me. Thus, they are art...to me. That opinion isn't altered by Roger Ebert. He may never get an emotional response out of a video game, thus the idea that someone else would perceive it as art is ludicrous to him.

A better question is: Is there a video game out there that has triggered as powerful of an emotional response as Rudy or Huck Finn? Nope... I haven't seen it yet, but I hope to eventually find one that does. That is going to be a sweet game. I can't wait to play it.

PAX 2009

This weekend was the Penny Arcade Expo, and I had been looking forward to it for some time. It was the first 'Con' I have ever gone to, and it was all about gaming. For those that don't know, I'm a gamer. Have been for pretty much my entire life.

Most people toss me into the category of 'geek', and that is the title I run with. While it is in fact quite true...I am a geek, the engineer in me looks for the root cause, and the root cause of my geekdom is gaming.

Story time! Back when I was probably 6 years old, my mom purchased our first computer, an Atari 800. As part of that system, we got a few games with it (or soon thereafter)...Dig Dug, Star Raiders, Caverns Of Mars, and of course, Pac-Man.

God I loved Star Raiders...but that is another story.

Anyway...what we also got was a tape storage device (yes, cassette tape) and a BASIC programming cartridge. She also had a subscription to a magazine that contained, in the centerfold, a computer program, written in BASIC.

The first program I ever 'wrote' was copied meticulously, line by line, from that centerfold insert in my Mom's programming magazine (my first in a long career of cut & paste coding). Why did I do it? Because the program was a racing game I wanted to play. After I played the game I found I could 'tweak' the program and get different results. I could make the car go faster. I could put more obstacles in the road. In short...I could make the game do whatever I wanted it to do.

I was hooked.

Later, my mom got a computer from a mail-order computer class she was taking. A Kaypro 8086. It wasn't state of the art. The tech was a year old even when she bought it. But I fell in love with that computer, eventually using it far more than she did and I'm telling you, I made that computer sing. It ran successfully from the time I was 11-12 years old all the way through high school. I hosted a BBS on it. I programmed it to call every number in my local calling area trying to find computer modems.

If there was a game out that I couldn't play on my machine, I tinkered with that computer until it could. "System Requirements" just didn't apply to me.

This of course set me up for what I do today. Today I write programs and administer systems that deal in large transactions and boring financial reports. But the principles I learned in trying to tune that tiny little system for the games I was trying to play still completely apply.

If you manage the memory an application uses, it is a far more efficient application. If you throw away all the crap stuff you don't need on a system, the program you are trying to run doesn't have to compete for resources. These are all concepts that apply to absolutely everything I do today in my job, and I learned it because I was trying to make a video game work when it wasn't supposed to.

I said all that so you understand that PAX was my kind of convention. It is all about catering to the gamer, and I is a gamer. My wife, the kind soul that she is, politely allowed herself to be dragged along. She was pretty lost.

She is a gamer, in that she plays video games, but only to a point. She does play video games quite a bit...don't let her fool you with her protestations to the contrary.

But, she doesn't focus in too much on it. She doesn't get too excited about upcoming games. She will get excited about a new Zelda title, or some Harvest Moon something or other, but that is about the depth she gives it. But... despite all that she stood in line with me for 2 hours to watch a presentation about Star Wars: The Old Republic. An MMO that Shana cares nothing about. So she is a hell of a trooper and I've got to give her props.

Anyway, on to the games:
Aion:
Played it for a few minutes....combat system is annoying. The GCD is weird, and not at all like WoW...it will take some getting used to. But the most glaring thing I found is that it seems on a caster, you are constantly interrupted by EVERYTHING. Annoying, frustrating, and MADDENING are the only words I can thing of to describe it. I'm definitely passing on this game for a while.

Champions Online:
Played it for a few minutes, watched it for a while afterward. Really fun. Moreso than I thought it would be. The graphics look straight out of a comic book, and it certainly has a style all it's own. I had a guy with Rocket Boots that shot lasers out of his eyes. I'd swoop out of the sky on my rocket boots, fire lasers at the bad guys, and land and slash them with my sword. It was campy and it was like it was right out of some silly cartoon. But it was FUN. I think I'm going to give it a few months (it just launched recently), but I'm going to give this MMO a look.

Star Wars: The Old Republic
The demo we stood in line for was pretty disappointing, particularly if you had been watching this game's development on the internet. They ran through a few areas that we had seen before, on classes we had seen before, doing missions that...we had seen before. Oh, and they announced Coruscant would be a playable area. Which would have been sorta cool if they had shown anything about the planet in the demo. But no...just a couple screenshots. /yawn

That being said, I'm still probably looking forward to this game more than any other at the con. I played a very bad Star Wars MMO for 1.5 years. An MMO that is actually GOOD, will probably wind up sucking me in so much that I will need to be extracted from my computer via the jaws of life.

World of Warcraft: Cataclysm / Diablo 3 / Starcraft 2
I got a chance to play the new WoW expansion and D3. Not too much to say about them since with Blizzcon being only a week or two earlier, it was kind of moot. There was nothing new there. I played the Worgen, which had a pretty awesome animation for switching between human/wolf forms...so that was cool. Diablo 3 was fun, and was very Diablo-esque. I really loved the original Diablo and D2, so D3 will definitely be purchased.

I didn't get a chance to play Starcraft 2 actually, but I'll probably pick it up as well. It looked interesting. I'm not generally an RTS kind of guy, but I did play the original Starcraft through the single player campaign and I had a ton of fun with it. And a few years ago, I even got some multiplayer action in with a Carpool buddy during our Ferry commute each day.

DeathSpank
I had never heard of this game before PAX. You can see the trailer here. This game looks WICKED. It has an art style that is unmistakably....DeathSpank. It is described as 'Diablo meets Monkey Island', and I have to say...I really want to play it. Here is the website. If you haven't seen it, check it out. (Side note, as an example of the humor in the game, there is an ability called 'Flock of Chickens' that you apparently get by killing enough chickens that the chickens perceive you as their god).

Some others
I also saw a little bit of some other games, but didn't get anything too deep with them, so I'll just do one liners:

Star Trek Online
Didn't get to play, but saw a demo somebody was playing; graphics looked awesome.

Brutal Legend
Looked neat, but didn't get to play.

Hello Kitty Online
Got a free disk to play this. Really. Janel will be happy.

Lord of the Rings Online
Got a free full copy of Mines of Moria. I think I may load it up and do a month's subscription just to check it out.

Warhammer Online
Tried to find them. Failed. Seriously, they must have been hiding somewhere.

TruBlood
They had an energy drink at the con. Seriously. Looked like the bottles on the show.

Totally Rad Show
Not a game. It's a show. Went to their panel. Met the dudes briefly. I'm a big fan of the show, so I was in nerd heaven.

Pirates of the Burning Sea
Still haven't tried this MMO, but walked by their booth briefly. I really might check it out with a demo or something. Who doesn't want to be a Pirate?