now what

I finished the Wings of Liberty campaign again, and it was a nice refresher, it wasn't much of a challenge, especially at normal skill level.

I wish I could just have more campaigns to run through; the same but different. I want to just go through the motions of building up a strong defense, and turtling inside my base. Its pointless, and not really gaming, but its my comfort food.

I want to play something mindless but pretty, like AOE 3, but I uninstalled it. Maybe I can give Baracco Station another try, though the means of loading are really messed up now - who knows what Blizzard was thinking.

I saved a copy of that map, and I'm glad I did because no amount of searching can find it now. I right-click, select the only option, open with Blizzard Launcher. It starts SC2, but nothing more. Where do I put the map so I can start a versus AI game? Trying \Documents\StarCraft II\map.downloads.

That doesn't work either. Try Custom, nope. Maybe I should look further into this launcher. OK, let's try Arcade mode. I found it! I have to select 4v4 mode, then Create Private Game, before I can add AI players. OK, I can play, but I can't save my game. Which means I can't keep re-rolling until I get the configuration I want, which is myself alone on one half of the map, and my allies on the other side of the map. I hate sharing a base. Once again, I feel myself worn down, and unwilling to fight this hard just to have some simple fun. Out of desperation, I go back to some old saves.

Yeah, they work, but it feels weird and pointless. At every turn, Starcraft 2 is telling me it doesn't want me to play like this. Maybe I should just forget this whole custom map thing.

ZERGGGG!!!!!!

I just happened to catch today's release of the cinematic opening of the next Starcraft expansion. I usually miss releases, because that's just part of this whole vintage gaming thing. But today, a beautiful video done as only Blizzard does it, with crazy attention to detail, emotion, and story.

First, a quick view of the dense gray capital, evocative of a future New York City, and perhaps even invoking recent real-world tragedy? A bit of a stretch, but I felt it, and its a great way to instantly raise a sense of danger.

Then, a lovely bit of detail as water droplets streak upwards on the cockpit canopy of a Viking in flight through a rain cloud, and some small charm dangling where the rear view mirror would be. Then suddenly, through the clouds, the source of this mounting dread - an alien invasion.

Other details abound, wondrous in their brevity, like the sacrifice of a Viking, rapidly transforming to ground mode to delay the enemy advance, and getting swept aside before it could even fully bring up its guns. Then the long tension builder of the enemy advancing through a great open public square; the defenders lined up and waiting. Not a single face is shown, but you can guess what's going on under those helmets.

OK, the Wilhelm scream as a Nydus Worm crushes a marine? That was goofy, and broke the mood a little. I've heard from multiple sources you need that sort of thing to keep breaking the tension, so you can build it up again. Annoying, but forgivable. Before you digest the reality and metaphor of Mengsk's statue toppling, there's a dying battlecruiser falling nose-first onto the city. A beautiful way to underline the scene, but also a little risky to the storytelling. After all, if a giant space ship is just going to crash into a city, wouldn't it leave a giant crater, rendering the whole invasion and battle moot? You need to remember that battlecruisers can fly through deep space, but they tend to also be used in close ground support (at least in Blizzard's way of use), and are usually hovering just above a battleground. So, bad times for whatever neighborhood that battlecruiser hit, but its hardly a city killer. And I know its excessively geeky to even mention it, but if you care about this sort of thing, this is what goes through your head.

After that, its just some stuff about the plot but who cares, let's just watch that battle over and over again.

FPS, RPG, RTS

I started up the Starcraft 2 campaign again. I originally wanted to play more endless variations of the "Startion" custom map, but I avoided that trap successfully with a little help. One, I just came off wasting time in a very similar manner with Age of Empires 3, and two, its much harder to play custom maps now, due to various updates of the SC2 engine. I think I could get it running, but the SC2 game setup menu is so crude and slow I lose patience enough to break free, and try and do something more useful.

So I play the campaign instead. Its been long enough, and the first expansion for SC2 is on the horizon, so why not refresh the memory, and see if its still fun. And it is, because of all the little touches that go into it, that Blizzard is well known for. My favorite is the time in-between maps  where you get to hang out, upgrade your equipment, research new technologies, interact with other characters, and learn more about the story and the setting. I like it a lot, I wish the game spent more time there, but then this would be an adventure or RPG, and not an RTS.

I wonder what that would be like to play a sim of commanding an army, instead of actually doing all the clicking yourself, and just watching it play out from above, on board the Hyperion. I liked the mechanics of the Sims games, but there's little if any consequence, and I get bored. I remember when Blizzard shoe-horned RPG elements into Warcraft 3, but it felt clumsy. I enjoy the epic feel of a good long RTS campaign, but I like this experimentation with genre cross-over, and hope to see some more of it.

when games are like crack

I uninstalled Age of Empires 3 because I was wasting bucketfuls of time on it. Its safe and mindless entertainment, but a little too much so. Its one of the closest equivalents I have yet to find to a fast forward button to life. I think I could waste many more hours trying out all the combinations and permutations of different nationalities, maps, tactics, difficulty levels, etc. It would be fine, but I am left feeling empty afterwards. I pay my time and have nothing to show for it.

I was doing this with Starcraft 2 for a while, some time ago, and I thought I learned my lesson then, but it didn't stick. This is the dark side of gaming, or any hobby, where it becomes mindless rote, instead of an experience. Something to keep watch out for, I doubt this is the last time.

retro vs vintage

Is playing old games retro or vintage?

For a long time, it was just me being too poor to afford to keep up with the latest PC hardware, and the high price of new games. Wait a few years, and it becomes affordable. Now stay there, a year or two behind the curve, and now your gaming hobby is quite affordable.

By definition, my old hardware and software are vintage, i.e. old. Some of it is old enough to be antique, at least in tech reckoning. If I actively sought to play or make games in an older style, that would be retro. But I'm not consciously choosing old styles and techniques, just for the sake of being different. I'm choosing to spend time on it now because I've always wanted to, it just took a while to get to it.

But some old games I skipped on purpose, or didn't know about them at the time. Is that retro, for me to be interested in them? I don't think so, I consider it filling gaps in my history. This distinction is of minor importance to me, because I keep seeing references to 8-bit gaming being somehow cool, and it makes me nauseous, like anything to do with fashion. We used the tools we had at the time, to do what gaming we could. If I nostalgia for anything in the past, its because its attached to some element of lost and fading youth, not because of fetishism, and certainly not because things were better in the old days.

Anyway,  I wandered off on this tangent because I am trying to listen to the "1UP.com Retronauts" podcast. Good podcasts are hard to find, and even more so good gaming podcasts. I listened to a show about Double Dragon, which was one of my favorite arcade games. Sadly, most of the podcast was devoted to console ports, so this may not be the podcast for me. And now I see in the queue an episode about Day of the Tentacle - something vaguely familiar, that I will need to research before listening to.

So I read up on Lucasfilm Games (now called LucasArts) and its like discovering an old room in my house that I never knew was there. I completely missed out on Maniac Mansion, and its successor, Day of the Tentacle. I don't think I missed it, but more avoided it. I played almost everything Infocom ever made, and I think I was about done with text parser games. I remember as they began to decline they started experimenting with graphics, and I dismissed it as an act of desperation.

Games like The Secret of Monkey Island didn't help, as it made attaching graphics to adventure games seem even more stupid. Of course, more and better graphics in games was inevitable, but I didn't get the impression there was adequate attention to story and atmosphere, or at least gameplay. I think this is why my gaming went into such dormancy during the 90s. It was a time of transition, from the experimental days of the 70s and 80s, to the commodity nature of gaming now. A lot of accepted standards and conventions weren't quite set yet, and there were a lot of evolutionary dead ends. But I can see that I missed a lot of good stuff too.

By the way, I think cultural decades don't begin and end necessarily where the calender does. What I refer to as 90s gaming actually started in the late 80s, and ended in the late 90s, probably with Half-Life. Thinking about that some more... I think Wasteland (1988) was one of the last such games of the 80s. Fallout (1997) and Fallout 2 (1998) were good games, but they belong to the quirky UI and pre-3d graphics of the 90s. Fallout 3 (2008) is what a standard 2000s game looks like. Its too soon to think of what a standard 2010s game is going to look like.

I missed out on Loom (1990), which used music in the UI. I think I actually tried one of the Indiana Jones off a demo disc (from a gaming magazine?), but it made no good impression. I still don't know what Sam & Max is. And of course I missed Grim Fandango (1998). Like System Shock, its often near the top of the list of all-time best games, and like System Shock, I will probably not be able to play it. And that was pretty much the end of Lucasfilm Games, and adventure games, for me at least.

I see an explosion of to-do items from here. I should see if I can find and play Grim Fandango, or more realistically, find a video playthrough. I should see what other adventure games I missed and add them to my list (I already bought Syberia on Steam). There's a lot more to say about the various ages of gaming, and what we thought about gaming at the time. For now, though, I have read at least the Wiki entries, and can listen to that podcast.

{days later}

I listened to the podcast and it was more and less then I expected. They got the original creators of the game on, and it was an interesting fun time, but I didn't really learn much about the game. Sometimes you don't get what you expected, but you still get something good anyway.