Monthly Archive for November, 2008

My Dirty Little Secret: Warhammer Online

Published on November 19, 2008 in Games. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Yes, for about a month there weren’t any posts for game reviews. That happened for two reasons: 1) I don’t like posting a review mid-game, and 2) I didn’t want to admit I had fallen in the clutches of my first MMORPG.

I had always been cautious about MMOs, as I have seen many of my friends get themselves drawn deeply into the games, only to emerge months later, scarred and beaten by the speed at which the real world has passed them by during their virtual incubation. However, in giving myself a truly broad experience of the various genres available to the present day market, I couldn’t hide from MMOs forever.

So what better time then a budding new MMO released by DAoC creator Mythic Entertainment? I would be on the same starting plane as everyone else, minus the fact that I wasn’t really used to the gameplay mechanics. I had a few other friends who were interested in giving it a shot – so we took the plunge. We preordered the standard edition, so we’d get a two day start on the game, and be able to get our grips before the masses jumped into the servers. I got sucked in fast – within a few days I had brought my first character to level 20, within around 60 hours of in-game time. I then had a friend convince me to start another character on a server he was playing on, and we played all the time for the next few weeks on that server. Over the span of about a month, I had three characters: a level 31 Witch Hunter, a level 12 Iron Breaker, and a level 20 Disciple of Khaine (on a different server).

All in all I had played over 200 hours of gameplay, in an insanely short amount of time. While I wouldn’t say I had become “addicted”, I definitely wasn’t going out of my way to make other plans when I had free time to spare. The gameplay drags you in; you create your virtual likeness, and you work to improve him/her by learning new abilities, obtaining (either through fighting creatures or purchasing) new weapons and armor. One game reviewer said it best: Warhammer is a game of increasing numbers. While this is true of many MMOs, this is something that you are truly striving to do throughout the entire time that you’re within the game. You strive to increase your renown, your experience, your damage or healing stats, your guild’s rank, the amount of gold you have, etc.

Since this is my first MMO that I have gotten involved in, I can’t really compare the game to know what could be better or worse. I know that I loved playing with my friends, and when they moved on to other games, my interest and enjoyment of the game soon dwindled. MMOs (at least this one in my case) truly thrive on the “massive” part: the game itself is not mind blowing, it does not shatter gaming boundaries or introduce incredibly innovative gameplay mechanics never before seen elsewhere, but it provides a social experience that is entertaining with the company of a few like-minded friends.

If I could have changed anything to this game though, the kill-quests seem to be this recurring theme in most MMOs, and they are simply mindless, gameplay extending pieces that add very little to the game. While I would be understanding if it were simply included to acquaint a newcomer with the fighting mechanics of your character, I was constantly seeing these quests pop up along my entire trip to level 31 – and I would be willing to bet they continue to exist even past that. Taking this complaint to the next level: the majority of the quests really weren’t impressive to me- the majority boil down to kill quests, fetch quests, or meeting quests. I did enjoy some of the public quests that were available in the game (where you would usually need a few people to beat the final level of the boss), but getting people into these was not always easy.

The one thing that made this game shine for me was the Realm vs. Realm (RvR) combat, where you would either jump into a scenario and fight up to a 12v12 battle against the opposing force, or you could find characters of the opposing force simply in the world that you were in, and fight them. It was in these instances where it was truly a battle of wits, outsmarting your opponent, and being able to outperform them with the knowledge you have of yours (and their) tactics, and what you can do to defeat them. One time a friend and I came up to a few people and we were able to defeat them. Since we were near their base, they would spawn and try to chase us down again in vengeance. We ended up killing these two guys about three times before they brought a few other players with them, at which point we retreated. It was a memorable thirty minutes within the game where the mechanic truly shined.

From what I’ve read and heard from other MMO players, WAR stands out in how much emphasis it puts in RvR combat. Hopefully it is successful enough to show other developers that this is the type of gameplay we like, and are looking for.

While there aren’t any MMO’s that I’m looking to jump in anytime soon, especially not Wrath of the Lich King, a good friend has pointed me to All Points Bulletin which looks like its going to be awesome.

Review: Fable II

Published on November 14, 2008 in Games. 0 Comments Tags: , .

I have been spending a little bit of time lately playing games with some reviewers and gamers who have some very strong opinions. It’s been a great experience lately, as I’ve been able to discover some games I would have otherwise missed, and hear different takes on how these people apply their discerning angle to the games that they play.

After having “dragged” one of my friends into playing Castle Crashers with me, I felt that I owed it to him to pickup a game of his choice. Fable 2 would be the game of choice from him. Within our micro-community, a few of the people were super hyped about this game, having truly enjoyed the first iteration.  My experience with ARPG’s has still been touchy at best – I am not well played in this genre. I have also become increasingly critical about approaching video games as a story-telling mechanism rather than just a point of entertainment. Not ever game or genre need to achieve a perfect balance between story and mindless entertainment, but it is definitely something the ARPG’s hinge on.

So, I jumped into Fable II. I tried to keep myself as neutral about it as possible. I didn’t want to read into the hype online, and I tried to take everything that my peers were oogling about with a grain of salt. I read up on the story a bit on Wikipedia, and left it at that. My friend and I were incredibly interested in the multiplayer co-op that the game boasted, and we were looking forward to gunning through the game together, taking in the experience for what it was worth. I’m a sucker for cooperative play, so if anything had piqued my interest, it was going to be this.

Overview

From Wikipedia:

The game takes place in the fictional world of Albion, five hundred years after Fable’s setting, in a colonial era resembling the time of highwaymen or the Enlightenment; guns are still primitive, and large castles and cities have developed in the place of towns. Unlike the original, the player may choose to be either male or female.

Impressions

The game itself promised to be incredibly open with never just one choice for anything you did. My friend and I wanted to take that for all it was worth. We had just finished playing another game where we had taken the good side, and we wanted to turn that around on this one. I wanted to be as evil as this game would allow. Every option the game gave, we took the most sinister approach. We rescued people, then murdered them. Our first order of business was to slaughter the entire town, and kill a few dozen guards before we moved onto our first quests. We killed parents right in front of the eyes of children. Then we tried killing the children – but I guess the game has some limits – children are invulnerable. The evil continued – we massacred villages, destroyed families, relationships, and left any possible wake of dismay, despair, and destruction in our paths. One thing that struck me instantly was the cut scenes this game had: they were absolutely gorgeous! After having beaten the game, I was entertained, but not floored by the experience that I had played through.

This game was a turning point for me in how I will approach my future game purchases as well – the overall feeling of mediocrity that I was left with this game is making me consider my purchases versus rentals/trades a bit more seriously.

Issues (Spoilers Ahead)

Lack of cut scenes. With the backlash from Metal Gear Solid 4′s hour and a half of cut scenes, this game actually had a selling point that it had “less than five minutes of cut scenes”. After seeing how great they did on the small cut scenes that were available within the game, I was simply left with wanting more. The lack of cut scenes should not necessarily be a selling point of a game, the correct balance of using them with gameplay to push the storyline forward should be.

Menu system. The menu system for this game seems to come up quite a bit when I talk about my complaints about this game to other people. It’s laggy, and takes a long time to get into and use. Secondly, there are some things within the menu system that see too much use (items, clothing, weapon changes) to require you to have to deal with such a slow moving piece of crap. There are a few reports that the menu system sped up when NXE was installed, but that doesn’t do any good because the game came out before the install feature was even an option. I personally wish the controller design had be re-engineered to control some more of the features that we had to go into the menu for rather than some of the features it gave us immediate access to.

Controller Bindings. Generally, games have you aim with your right joystick, and move with your left. I’ve had this unbreakable habit of having my right stick be inverted. I tend to blame 007 on the N64, but it is probably more likely a testament to how stuck in my ways about my controller setup I am. Either way, this game has the left stick be your aiming, so neither regular nor inverted felt right for aiming. This is compounded by the fact that when you shoot, you need to hit B, rather than a trigger to shoot, making it ineffective and even worse design if you were to make the right stick be aiming, because you need to move your thumb off the joystick in order to shoot. I think that this is a case of either trying to put too much into the game, or just failed controller design.

Fashion, the big deal, but not really. RPG games are starting to put quite a bit more effort into the customization of your character. Dying, various lines of clothing, and Fable II even has tattoos that you can apply to your body. Pretty interesting stuff, as the customization allows you to really create your unique image within the virtual world that you’re immersing yourself into. Only problem, is the game doesn’t really do too much in letting you be able to see that. The camera control allows no zoom, there are no cut scenes where you get any closeups of your character, and even the character “dress-up” menu doesn’t let you zoom in to your character to look at the details of the features you are adding. It’s a few steps back from pushing the customization features.

Eating disorders. I’ll admit, I was a bit sexist in the approach to building my character. I wanted her to be an evil, magic oriented character, but I wanted her to be good looking. After I mistakenly ate a piece of cheese and saw +Fat, I never let my character eat anything again – I sold any food I came up to. I eventually learned that veggies were good to reduce fatness, and she got to eat some old celery, but it was just potions after that. The game itself lets you “let go” in terms of food, equating a few pieces of pie into about a 25-50 lb gain. And with all the damn running I do from quest to quest? Come on!

Your under annoyance! No matter how many guards I killed, I would continually be approached for arrest. This brings up a delayed menu, which chooses what you want to do: pay a fine, community service, or resist arrest. Because of the delayed menu, I once had to start killing some guards right in front of my husband. He divorced me soon thereafter – probably couldn’t stand that I was wearing the pants in the relationship. Either way, one easy way to get around this nuisance is to promise to do community service, and never do it, with no fear of repercussions. It was the personality that I wanted to be portraying in the game, but too much of a cop out of the feature.

Play a game, not a job. Yahtzee did a great job at picking fun at this part of the game, and I can’t help but agree with him. The jobs in this game, which you use to build money, buy houses, and thus continue to increase your wealth are BORING. What’s that you say? Jobs are boring in real life and thus this is just more of a realistic approach? Oh okay. Well when I want a real life simulation, I’ll step outside. For now, please focus on entertainment while I play a game which I purchased to ENTERTAIN ME. Also, another complaint about the jobs that I have, is the game seemed to be truly pushing the limits of the 360, and I was experiencing a bit of frame lag now and then. When you’ve got a minigame that suffers from framelag at fast speeds, the experience is further deteriorated for the user.

Multiplayer? As I said, multiplayer was the one thing that I was excited about for this game. Technology has come along way since the 2600, we’ve got the hardware, we’ve got the bandwidth, now give us some jaw-dropping co-op experiences. Sadly, this game didn’t deliver a good multiplayer experience. First off, anyone who joins is your “henchmen”,  any of their actions have no affect on their character whatsoever, other than that they can gain experience and use to train their character. The game, overall, seemed to move incredibly slow with this feature, and take any entertainment value out of the game that was previously there. After a few hours of this, my friend and I ended up doing something that has been called “orb-questing” online. Where we progressed through the entire game nearby while online, and we could see each other’s position, would help each other finding objects, unlocking puzzles and whatnot. This actually brought some entertainment to playing it alongside someone else.

Premature Ending. This entire game builds up for you finding these three “heroes” to get together so you can fight and oppose the evil that is overtaking your area. After you’ve amassed your trio of assistants, you merely use them to suck up their powers, and punch the bad guy off his proverbial pedestal to his death. End Game. After this happened, I realized that the last fight at the beach against that huge shard was the last boss fight, and I felt even more cheated. For an ARPG, we could have used more A. To add to this anti-climactic ending, my friend who was playing waited too long before he did anything to the enemy, and the gun hero ended up shooting the bad guy and said “Oops, were you going to do something?”. Essentially taking the game chugging along at 30MPH right into a brick wall.

The “ending”. At the end of the game, after the dream sequence where you are taken through the color changing landscape with some sound bytes that show you coming from where you were as a kid to where you are now in your life, this was an absolutely great idea. It had very similar experience to Shadow of the Colossus, Call of Duty 4′s nuke-death sequence. However, just like the game itself, the thing was over before it started. In the beginning of the game, you were not allowed to run when following the butler in the castle, and this should have had the same sort of speed control. While this did have an impact, I feel the emotional impact to the gamer would have been much stronger had the entire transition period from the dream world to the “grim reality” that is your characters life had lasted another 30-60 seconds, to really let the whole weight of everything that’s happened sink in.

In short, if I could do it again, I would have simply rented this game.

Taking an elevator pitch by storm

Published on November 9, 2008 in Entrepreneurship and Personal. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

I had the wonderful experience this weekend of participating in Syracuse University’s YES Symposium, presented by the entrepreneurship department. To say the least, the day was energizing – I was surrounded by successful alumni and local entrepreneurs, as well as over 150 bright young minds looking to tackle tomorrow’s problems. I participated in a panel discussion titled “Stupid Mistakes I Could Have Avoided” with Michael Librizzi of briz.com and Dave Mueller of AT&T Premier Technologies. For the panel, it was a pretty good mesh, Michael and I were versed in tech start-ups, and Dave had over a decade behind him of starting brick and mortar stores throughout CNY. Next time I go to one of these things, I’m definitely bringing a backup stash of business cards, it seems like my card holder wasn’t ready for all the networking that was to be done.

On top of being a panelist and talking with quite a few people, I was asked to be a judge in the $1500 elevator pitch competition. Having participated in one myself, I was thrilled to be able to be a judge in the event; knowing how exciting and fast-paced these tend to be. Out of the fourteen teams that participated, we had an incredibly varied group, both in age and ideas being presented. There was very little time for us to approach all the competitors afterward (and absolutely no time for reproach in between the pitches), and I am still bursting at the seams with tips on how some of these teams could have outdone themselves and improved their pitch.

The Presentation

Dress the part. This doesn’t mean that you are required to wear a suit of some sort, however if your business proposal is a formal business that expects that attire, then you should be in it. Nice jeans and a clean shirt work for a more informal business proposal. Two years ago, a woman wear an entire chef’s outfit for her restaurant pitch. It was memorable and played to her strength, which was perfect.

Know your lines. This goes for any business pitch, but even more so for an elevator pitch. This isn’t a speech you are reading to the judges, its a one-act play that you are putting on to entertain, inform, and amaze. Memorize your talk, and keep a set of your talking points (not your speech) handy, if you were to lose your place. I absolutely hate it when people are reading off a paper for me, it feels like a lack of preparation. Memorizing what you are going to talk about shows preparation, and confidence.

Know your limit. These competition rules that you are entering are passed out and posted much in advance. In conjunction with my last bit, you should not go over the allotted time period by more than missing your “thank you”. It’s important to get everything you have to say about your product and why the judges should give you the money above the other equally qualified competitors.

Don’t be a statue. Avoid sticking yourself behind a podium unless required to do so. Get out in front of it, be active and move around while giving your talk (but don’t pace). You should be so energetic in your talk that you need to have duct taped your shoes to your legs else you would be jumping out of them. And most importantly, smile! An average idea will seem less mediocre to the judges if you are doing back-flips in your presentation over your idea. However, there is a line in this matter, be careful not to cross it.

The Content

Attach yourself to the product. Why should you be working on this product/invention/idea? Give a one sentence kickoff some point to show that you belong doing what you’re doing. However, I absolutely do not care what degree you have, whatsoever. It does not make you better in my eyes that you have a college degree, or an MBA, or an MFA, or a PhD (unless you are the leading expert in your field). People have been incredibly successful with much much less. I get incredibly irate when people waste their breath to even throw that out in any presentation. When I would pitch UtiliTeam to people, I simply pointed out that I was a “Computer Science student and most importantly, a gamer”. There, I establish that I am a geek, and that I play video games. So of course a tech start-up focusing around video games is a legitimate place to find me. Find something that shows that you belong, that you had a connection to this idea more than a money making scheme. By relating yourself to your market, or your product, you instantly make yourself appear more knowledgeable about what you are presenting.

Paint a picture. Not literally, unless it involves your idea, but you should be giving a clear and concise picture to the judges. In the time that you have, you should be able to answer the following questions:

  • What problem are you looking to solve?
  • Who are you looking to target?
  • Why will your target market want your product, or how will you create a need?
  • How will your idea make money?
  • How will your idea grow through it’s success?
  • What makes your idea unique?

Save story time for later. A few people will tend to try to tell you a heart wrenching story about their lives and how they overcame adversity to get to the point where they are today. While it may be a great story, the judges want to hear a great idea that has the opportunity to turn a profit. If you waste your time telling the judges how tough your life has been, you will either lose their attention, annoy them, or simply waste time you could have better spent talking about what makes your idea better than the others. And since you are being timed, this is an important decision to make. Stories should be kept to ways your product or idea has or will change someone’s life.

Attack your weaknesses. There are some business ideas that are amazing, but have some outright questions that will be asked immediately after your pitch. You should be able to identify these big questions, and answer them in your pitch. For example, this young lady had a great idea for a cafe in which pets and owners alike could be eating together. The cafe would provide healthy food, and a welcoming environment to like minded people to mingle and meet. Great idea, absolutely nothing was said about the sanitary issues that come with bringing animals into a eating establishment. What happens when an untrained animal does number one or two on the floor? What about bugs (fleas/ticks/lice)? This isn’t limited to this sole situation too, but if you finish your pitch leaving the judges with more questions then you did answers, you need to rework your approach.

Get harsh criticism. Being optimistic is great, but you need to find someone who hates your idea, and can tell you why. Finding opposition to your idea lets you identify potential issues or holes your pitch may have, and you can learn what others are going to like or dislike about it. Don’t take one persons opinion for it, they might just not be in your market. The important thing is, don’t let a friend, or loved one lull you into a sense of security and perfection because they think your idea is better than sliced bread.

Be weary of your market. Judges at these competitions are incredibly weary of trends, and will avoid them at all costs. It is this reason why fashion pitches/plans tend to do poorly at these competitions. Woman no longer get a weekly perm, your hammer pants have been long since donated, and baggy pants went out of style years ago. Start ups take time, money, people, and its very risky to consider starting a business where the winds may have changed direction by the time the company opens it’s doors. You want to be careful that your idea is not focusing on a trend, or a trendy market.

Know your costs. This goes into researching your pitch, answering the questions before they are asked, but it came up a few times yesterday. People were offering to start up companies that had incredible start up costs, and the return on investment would be incredibly slow. While it wasn’t in the competition – take a gym start-up: not only could you consider something like “Curves for Women” trendy (which would be a red flag) but at the same time you need to buy a multitude of top-of-the-line very expensive gym equipment, and then you need to charge reasonable rates to get new customers in the door. One elliptical machine can be a few thousand dollars, and you want to charge $240 a year. Either you have a very small gym to start off, or you have to expect to turn an entire town into customers before you break even in a few years.

While this isn’t a surefire way to win a competition, and it isn’t nearly everything that you need to cover when considering a pitch, it should put you in the right mindset for planning for your next pitch or business plan competition. Hopefully you find this helpful – and good luck.