The Classics Club

[davidn]

I seem to have accidentally started a classic game club of sorts. (The page isn't quite finished.) It was something that I had intended to suggest to videogame_tales for some time, but after casually mentioning the idea in someone else's thread on the Classic Games board on GameFAQs, people decided that they liked my suggestion much more than the dreadful original one and readily put their heads together to come up with how it could be run.

The idea is much like a book club conducted through a message board. A group of people play through a given classic or classic-styled game that (hopefully) they haven't played for a while, and discuss its merits, faults or anything else remotely remarkable about it - not competing against the inexorable onslaught of cacophonous bleating that characterizes much of the Internet, but amongst nice, easy-to-get-along-with people who speak using actual words in complete sentences, over a glass of wine and listening to Brahms' Third Racket. (If you want.) It was for that reason that my first thought was to put the idea to a community full of people that I knew very well, but the population of the classic games board have a much higher average age and comprehensibility than most Internet message boards, and there's already a lengthy topic about modern games that people are currently playing, that has now been running for 26 volumes, therefore nearly thirteen thousand posts.

This month, then, or whatever arbitrary time span this ends up taking place in, we're talking about The Secret of Monkey Island. It's only been up a day, but the topic will likely pick up over the next couple of weeks as more people play and gather their thoughts on it. We have a mixture of people who are coming at the game for the first time and those who are replaying it - I myself completely spoiled the game for myself the first time by reading a guide the whole way through, and it was that age where you just remember anything as long as it has no practical real-world use, so I don't know what it'll feel like for someone coming to the game with no knowledge of the puzzles. But now I'm poking around with the iOS version, which messes up a significant amount of things but has the courtesy to provide the original game as an option as well. Already, thanks to this topic one long-time player of the game has already discovered something new in it, and that's a very pleasing thing to have happened.

There's another three feet or so of snow forecast from tomorrow morning to Thursday, so at least I'll have plenty of time indoors.

Comments

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

I've heard the special edition wrecks a few things in the classic mode too! Although if you've already played it anyway, that might just put you in a good position to comment on exactly what it changed...

What exactly was different between their original idea and what you proposed? This sounds like a pretty standard way of doing it...

[davidn]

The thread that started all of this was about declaring that you'd finish a game per day, using any and all cheat codes or workarounds you needed to complete the "within a day" requirement. Then he had the audacity to go on about not getting a sense of accomplishment from this plan and thought that if enough people blitzed through enough games, it might somehow work.

The iOS version primarily suffers from controls that are... appalling - on a scale of good control from 'wonderful' down to 'Scribblenauts', these are dangerously low down, even though you'd think that adventure game controls were pretty difficult to make annoying. Touching the screen will act like a click whereever the cursor is currently resting, and you have to drag the cursor (which doesn't move at the rate of your finger) over and coerce the arrow to point at whatever you want to point at before doing anything - in addition to that, the inventory and verbs are hidden away at the bottom of the screen, behind buttons that do act like normal screen touches, but seem to only respond about half the time.

Even though they're scaled like you're looking through the bottom of a pint glass with your eyes crossed, the original graphics help the interface out slightly, because you don't have to deal with the cursor's diagonal arrow and the verbs and inventory are already on the screen - and I imagine that the new interface works rather better on the XBox and PSN versions, if they were sensible (going against currently gathered evidence). I've also noticed that the talking frames for people are missing, and that there doesn't appear to be a way to skip text.

Is it really this difficult to get something right, now?

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately, as the barrier to entry for programming drops, the amount that producers are willing to pay for it tends to drop proportionately... so the same amount of money is now being spent to make more games, each of which is less good. :P

[davidn]

Aaeergh. How distressing.

Although this is more a design issue than the actual level of skill at which it was programmed... it's difficult to imagine that nobody tried it out and realized how stupid it was. And it's worth remembering that I... completely failed to understand iPhone programming - as much as I've done of any other language, I just couldn't get my head round it, so I'm still fairly amazed that anyone can do anything at all on it. It caused something of an internal crisis as to whether I actually have any useful skill outside the experience of working on the system that my job involves.

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

You should try picking up Flash or something! I can say from my (admittedly limited) experience that I've never met a language as obtuse as Objective C.

But the fact that a design issue has gone unchecked is my point; with all of the libraries and whatnot abstracting away the actual gristle of a particular platform's peccadilloes, they have the option of just porting the damn game straight from Xbox to iPad, and they'll take that option. If you're rewriting something from the ground up, you may as well take the platform's strengths and weaknesses into account in the process; but if putting in platform-native features is an extra step, nobody's going to be able to justify the cost, especially for a platform that was probably an afterthought anyway. (Actually, that's a good way of putting it -- the ease of porting has resulted in a platform seeing a bad port instead of seeing no port... whether or not it's a step up is debatable. :P)

[davidn]

That is true (and 'peccadilloes', I must start using that!) With the focus now on making things on high-end systems as fast as possible, I definitely get the impression that a lot of people... care less about making games now compared to twenty years ago, in things like this and the slightly tatty Cave Story Wii port. It just seems smaller groups inevitably pour more soul into games - and I look forward to that continuing when big game design entirely collapses on the release of the console generation :)

I suppose a bad port is better than no port at all, when I really think about it, but it's... sort of sad that there are people getting their first impression of what the game was like from it. As much of a cliche as it is to think that everything was so much better in the old days, just about everything I see in this department makes me very glad that I grew up when I did.

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

But on the other hand, these tools are allowing people to make games who might not have had the programming skills (or the budget!) to make one from scratch... for every game the Unreal Engine ruins by allowing some team to opt for it (in a context where it's a terrible choice) instead of being forced to build a more appropriate engine themselves, there's some artist or designer who.... well, hell :) You're a MMF programmer! That program's certainly birthed its fair share of crappy games into the world, but I think it's better to live in the world where one has access to more good games, even if it means having to sift through more bad ones to get to them....

[davidn]

Yes, I said this the other day in response to an independent game journal that quite accidentally reinforced the implicit belief that the people who habitually write in C++ from scratch are somehow superior... I've always been a believer that if you don't mind working within the limitations that an environment imposes, then you should use that environment instead of reinventing everything. Besides, I would go mad if I spent my time in the same IDE at work and at home (though I have done a significant amount of Java work for CT2 as well).

The internet in general is a pretty decent filter for the good games in the independent world... the really good ones are the ones that you hear about through word of... text, whereas if you've just thrown together something and stuck it up, it's always going to just disappear without trace.

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

Unless it makes it onto the App store. ;)

[kjorteo]

You should try picking up Flash or something!

Obligatory http://www.prguitarman.com/index.php?id=184

[ravenworks.livejournal.com]

http://img.ravenworks.ca/objectivec.jpg

[davidn]

Yes... that's about right.

"First find the Objects window from wherever it's been buried and drag the outlet of the active view on to the File's Owner while it's highlighted"
"IT WON'T FUCKING HIGHLIGHT"
"Well, add an IBOutlet to the declaration of the header file of the class that's pointed to by this XIB (which is called a NIB)"

I've never encountered a language that makes me feel stupider.