The Stack

Well, I’ve solved my earlier problems with the Trial of Shadow. It turns out that a simple edit to the config file tells the launcher to download all of the content for the expansions, including the graphics for the missing altar. This works because the launcher starts its downloading before it even gives you an opportunity to log into an account, so it can’t make decisions about what to download on the basis of your account permissions. It’s all quite legitimate, though. Even with all the assets on my hard drive, I can still only access the things that Blizzard wants me to.

That’s about all I have to say today. I had a longer post prepared about the merits of the Shaman’s “Ghost Wolf” spell, but WordPress keeps logging me out and devouring anything unsaved. Maybe tomorrow.

This week (and I think next week as well), Azeroth celebrates its equivalent of Valentine’s Day. It’s also still celebrating the Lunar Festival, with the result that the capital cities have two sets of decorations up at once, but what are you going to do? Overlap seems almost inevitable, because the calendar is lousy with special events of this sort. They bring with them time-limited content, which seems to be an effective way to get people to play more: I’m more likely to neglect a game if I think I can play it any time and get the same experience.

One part of the special content for this holiday is an extremely easy daily quest: a goblin merchant has set up a booth in every capital city, and wants you to share samples of his merchandise. One day it’s perfume, another day it’s chocolates, but the effect seems to be the same regardless: the people you foist it on wind up with a heart-shaped indicator over their heads for a period of time, meaning that they can’t be given another sample until it wears off. In the area immediately around the stall in Orgrimmar, where the player density is at its highest, it’s a veritable sea of hearts, and finding an uninfected subject can take a little doing. I think I prefer to do this quest in the less-populated Thunder Bluff, the Tauren capital. (NPCs are eligible victims, so the lower player count doesn’t make it harder at all.) There, it takes just a minute or so to complete the quest, which makes it the quickest way I know to get a daily under your belt. There’s an Achievement for completing daily quests on five consecutive days, and I’m definitely trying for that while there’s so little effort involved.

While I’m throwing around terms like “daily quest”, I should take a moment to describe the questing mechanics a little. Most quests can only be done once per character; daily quests can be done arbitrarily many times, but each can only be done at most once per day. There are particular NPCs who hand out daily quests every day, but not always the same one — they seem to choose one at random each day. Aside from the holiday folks, the only ones I’ve encountered are related to the Professions. There’s one fellow in Orgrimmar who gives a daily Fishing-related quest, rewarding you with an increase in Fishing skill and a grab-bag of stuff pulled from under a lake, and another who does the same for Cooking (with quests like slaughtering swine and protecting provisions from thieves), rewarding you with increased Cooking skill and tokens redeemable for advanced recipes. Notably, none of the daily quests seem to yield cash or experience, the usual questing rewards. Instead, they give you things difficult or impossible to gain any other way. (Past a certain point, it must be exceedingly difficult to raise your Cooking or Fishing skill through practice alone.)

You can always tell a daily quest by its color. Available non-daily quests that are of an appropriate level for your character are signaled by a yellow exclamation mark, both marked on your mini-map and floating above the quest-giver’s head, just to make sure you notice them. Dailies use a blue exclamation mark. There are also green ones, indicating flightmasters that you haven’t spoken to yet. Flightmasters let you rent flying mounts to take you on pre-set routes, but they can generally only send you to other flightmasters you’ve already spoken to. So, they’re an important enough part of the game infrastructure that the designers want to call special attention to them, but they’re not really quests. Normal quests that are too high-level for you to attempt, but otherwise available, are designated by a grey exclamation mark, which shows up over the giver’s head, but not on the map, presumably because there’s no reason to seek them out.

Quests that are below your level, now: they’re not marked on the map or above the head. But you can still do them if you want, and I’ve been doing enough low-level quests just to see the content that I’ve learned how to find them. Unlike most NPCs, questgivers with available quests have their names in green above their heads even when not selected. Also, anything you can interact with changes the cursor on rollover, and NPCs that you can talk to change it in a manner specific to the kind of conversation you can have with them: one cursor for mere talking, one for vendors you can buy stuff from, another for innkeepers, etc. Questgivers have a cursor containing an image of an exclamation mark — yes, the exclamation mark is more or less officially the ideogram for quest in this game. Even the quest log icon in the toolbar is an exclamation mark. Finding low-level quests thus takes a little more effort than level-appropriate ones, which the game eagerly points out. The game doesn’t really want you wasting your time on them; low-level quests give diminished experience, and usually no experience from combat at all. And yet, the game also rewards you for doing so with additional content, faction reputation, and, eventually, achievements. Just not with challenge. In theory, you could probably play entirely with low-level quests — there are enough of them that if you did them all, the reduced XP might not matter. And you’d have a very easy time of it. And that’s nearly what I’ve been doing myself, just out of a sense of completism.

Maybe you’ve been thinking “It’s been a while since Baf played a DOS-era game. I miss those posts, with all their descriptions of encountering bugs and looking for ways around them.” If so, you’re in luck! I just encountered my first major, quest-blocking bug in WoW.

My story starts in Azshara, the region containing those goblin settlements I was talking about before. There’s a nice little suite of self-contained variety quests there on mountaintops inaccessible by normal means, a wizard’s Trials for testing his apprentices. These are essentially action mini-games. In the Trial of Fire, you have to dash around on a grid, avoiding the tiles that are about to erupt in magical flame. In the Trial of Frost, you have to collect scattered tokens while dodging the icy plumes emanating from rotating spheres. The Trial of Shadow is ringed with portals which emit shadow-creatures that you have to lure onto banishment runes set into the ground. Each of the trials not only gets you closer to completing the quest chain, it also has an Achievement for passing it perfectly, without taking any damage at all. I have two of those Achievements now — they’re not too hard once you spot the tricks. But the Trial of Shadow, I haven’t been able to pass. I haven’t even been able to start it.

The instructions at the beginning of the trial tell you to touch an altar to power up the shadow-emitting portals. There was no altar. I searched the area throughly, including looking down the mountainside. I tried leaving and coming back. Nothing. I spent some time doing dungeons — using the Dungeon Finder lets you teleport to the dungeons and back, so I could do this without leaving the mountaintop. I was kind of hoping that it was a temporary glitch and that if I spent a half an hour in a different zone, it would be fixed when I got back. When I got back, another player was just in the process of finishing the trial, but the altar was nowhere to be found.

When he was done, I asked him where the altar was, and he laughed. He led me to a patch of bare ground and said “This altar?” I protested that there was nothing there. I even tried clicking all around the spot, in the hope that I could interact with it even though I couldn’t see it, but no dice. He then stood on top of the alter and jumped up and down. Or so he says — it didn’t look like it to me. He didn’t even float in the air, like you’d expect if he were standing on an altar I couldn’t see, which has interesting implications for the underlying model.

Hitting up the web for answers, I found a lot of other people with the same problem, and a lot of spurious advice for fixing it. Abandon the quest, log out, log back in again, and start the quest again! No, that simply doesn’t work. The Blizzard support forums produced what I assume is the truth: for some players, the altar is replaced with a placeholder object. I’ve seen these objects around before: they appear as little cubes with a blue-and-white checkerboard pattern. In fact, the tokens I was supposed to collect back in the Trial of Frost appeared as placeholders. I think that the first time I saw them was in Silverpine Forest, where there’s a quest to gather blue-and-white cubical herbs. So you see that merely being placeholders isn’t a problem; you can click on a placeholder object as easily as anything else. But in this particular case, the placeholder, being much smaller than the object it’s replacing, apparently wound up concealed by the ground.

So, why are there placeholders in the released game? When I encountered them for the first time, I assumed that it was a matter of progressive download, like images in a web page: WoW lets you play while you’re still downloading content, and my earliest sessions came with an explicit warning that my experience may not be optimal yet. But apparently that’s not it. The altar object is missing because it’s not even included in the game I bought. It’s a mesh that was only introduced in the Wrath of the Lich King expansion. The fact that the core game now relies in some ways on content only found in expansions is obviously a mistake, but it’s the sort of mistake that would easily go unnoticed by the developers, the testers, and the vast majority of the players.

Fortunately, there is a workaround: you can install the WotLK content on your machine even if you don’t have a license to play it. In fact, Blizzard offers a ten-day free trial for it, just like with the main game. Unfortunately, Blizzard doesn’t let you download the Wrath of the Lich King trial unless you’re already a registered owner of the previous expansion, The Burning Crusade. I may need to enlist the help of a more advanced WoW player here.

I’ve been spending some time in goblin lands. I’ve been doing this because goblin NPCs are the most entertaining company of all the playable races. They’re also one of the newest playable races, having come in with Cataclysm. I suspect that these two things are connected — that, now that WoW is such a proven money-maker, the team behind it is granted whatever resources they need to polish the new content to a glossy sheen. (Not that you’ll find a glossy sheen anywhere in goblin territory.) Now, I haven’t bought Cataclysm, and therefore I can’t actually play a goblin character. But the expansion has effects in the core game, probably in part as a way of advertising the expansion.

I don’t really know what role goblins played in the game before Cataclysm, but I assume it’s greatly expanded since then. I was kind of wondering how they would be plausibly powerful here: the D&D goblin, after all, is basically just one of the lower steps on the Evil Humanoid ladder, right above kobolds and below orcs. But in fact, Blizzard had established a precedent for goblins back in Warcraft II, where they drew less from D&D and more from Magic: the Gathering, which gave them access to crude explosives and balloons and similar unreliable, prone-to-backfire technologies. WoW takes that further, making them not just figures of slapstick violence with lots of explosions, but also Azeroth’s masters of industrial technology.

Note that WoW already had a diminutive, technologically-oriented race on the Alliance side: gnomes. Adding goblins as a player race is something of a step towards symmetry. Just how much symmetry there should be between Horde and Alliance seems to be something that Blizzard has seesawed about for a long time. (In the original Warcraft, the two sides were exactly equivalent modulo graphics until you reached the point where the more powerful spellcasters were available.) Gnomes and goblins are very different in style, though. Gnomes are portrayed as craftsmen who create marvelous clockwork devices. Goblins are more into fossil fuels, explosions, and despoiling the environment. Gnomish devices tick and whirr; goblin contraptions shudder and belch fumes. Every playable race has a special type of mount that characters of at least level 20 can buy and ride: the humans’ horses, the skeletal steeds of the undead, the wolves of the orcs. Gnomes get gleaming mechanical chocobos. Goblins get little three-wheeled go-karts with exposed engines. One of the first things you see when you exit Orgrimmar in the direction of goblin territory is a bunch of ungainly goblin-piloted mechs with buzzsaws for hands, busily clear-cutting the forest so they can strip mine the hills it’s on. Their disregard for nature is rivaled only by their disregard for personal safety. If you bring a goblin an unknown device as part of a quest, chances are that they’re going to poke and prod it until until it explodes in their face. There’s one quest where a lab accident set a bunch of goblins on fire, and they just run around on fire indefinitely.

The really important thing to understand about goblins, though, is that they speak with New York accents and Pesci-esque verbiage. This underscores the despoiling-of-nature part again — just as New Yorkers are content to live on an island that’s been almost completely paved over, so too would goblins pave the world if there’s a buck in it for them, or if they thought it would look neat. But more importantly, the mode of speech suggests an attitude, even an ethos. Goblins aren’t just ravening maniacs, they’re beings who do what they do because it fits their sense of cool. It’s just that their sense of cool involves heedlessness of consequences. This is probably also why they generally have the most aggressive style of communication, all “Whaddaya want?” and “You want a piece of me?”, even when addressing being three times their height.

As industrialists, the goblins are naturally also the Horde’s masters of commerce, and their various faction names all have words like “company” or “cartel” where other races would have “order” or “kingdom”. Looking over the special features of player-controlled goblins, I see the connection is made even more strongly there: goblins get discounts at stores and can access the bank from anywhere. Taken in combination with the accent, and given the treatment given to Tauren and Trolls, my first reaction is that they’re drawing from Jewish stereotypes. I’m certainly not the first to suggest this, either. But a quick google suggests that not everyone sees it: on forums where someone suggests it, it’s generally followed by vociferous denials and accusations of trolling (which are probably accurate). Let’s just say that nothing in WoW is just a racial stereotype, and that goblins definitely have stereotypical attributes all their own, apart from any real-world inspirations. It does, however, strike me as particularly problematic in this context that the goblins as seen in Warcraft II were suicide bombers. That was all very abstract at the time, but throw in identifiably ethnic attributes, and it retroactively starts smelling political. If I ever design a CRPG, I think I’ll leave out an explicit “race” mechanic just to avoid this kind of thing.

So, yeah. I played some more of this. It’s not the most sophisticated or compelling of games, but it’s easy to slip into and out of, and doesn’t require a lot of attention and doesn’t demand that you keep track of context between sessions, and these attributes make it well-suited for slipping in between other things. And I do intend to finish it eventually. Let’s take a look at what that involves.

The game is divided into 40 levels, grouped arbitrarily into eight “stages” of five. (There’s a set of five extra-hard “Challenge” levels as well, external to story mode and accessible from the main menu.) Each level consists of nine hands. So, that’s 360 hands in the main game (plus 45 in the challenge levels).

The hands themselves don’t seem to get significantly more difficult over the course of the game. There may have been some variation in difficulty in the very earliest ones, when it was acting as a tutorial, but that was a long way back. Instead, the game increases the difficulty through increasing the criteria for passing levels. At first, all you have to do to pass is meet a certain minimal score (filling a progress bar) in each of the nine hands in a level to pass. Then it starts making extra demands, like “fill the progress bar within two minutes of starting a hand” or “win at least two levels perfectly” (that is, clear all the cards) or “earn at least $7000 over the course of the level”, and after that, it starts combining them, making multiple demands. Failure to meet all of a level’s demands means you have to restart it from the beginning, even if you passed each hand.

Even with these criteria, things don’t really get more difficult. Remember, you get to use your earned riches to buy power-ups, in the form of structures in Fairyland, that give you cheat-like special abilities. This easily offsets the increased demands of the levels — in fact, I have yet to lose a level in the main game. I have, however, tried and lost the Challenge levels. That’s how I know that the game is actually capable of making things difficult, and also how I know that the power-ups are effective. I just purchased the most expensive one, a “tree of life” that makes 1/4 of the cards that would start face-down start face-up instead. Lack of information is your chief enemy in this game, so this was clearly worth saving up for, even if I had to ignore some lesser power-ups to reach it. And now that I have it, I’ve managed to pass a Challenge level for the first time.

Azeroth is big. It’s not as big as space, but it’s still pretty big, and needs creatures of various sorts to populate it. There are something like thirty regions per continent, each with a couple dozen named sub-regions, and each of these sub-regions has at least three or four distinct types of native monster. And that’s not even getting into the dungeons.

But, of course, a lot of those monster types aren’t very distinct. Where an old 2D game would do a palette swap, WoW does a texture swap, and frequently a rescale as well, making the more powerful versions of a monster physically larger. (To some extent, it does this for PC races as well. Powerful NPC orc generals tower over the regular player orcs.) Sometimes the level is the only difference between two forms of a creature. Sometimes the different forms display tangibly different behavior, as when a humanoid monster race has members that cast spells. Either way, the game always tacks some sort of modifier onto the name to keep things clear. Thus, you have Quilboar Hunters and Quilboar Thornweavers, Plainstriders and Adult Plainstriders and Elder Plainstriders and Ornery Plainstriders, Swamp Crocolisks and Snapjaw Crocolisks and Frenzied Crocolisks. There doesn’t seem to be any general pattern to the choice of modifier.

There are also a great many types of equipment. A large proportion of the quests offer as a reward a special item that you can’t get any other way, or even a choice of two or three such items. These always have names that reflect the quest in some way: if you have a quest to find and kill a traitor, say, you might wind up with something like a Hammer of Treason, or Disloyal Greaves, or a Turn Coat. (Yes, they use these names as an opportunity for jokes.) Obviously there’s no pattern to these names either, but there do seem to be modifiers with consistent meaning among the items you find at random. For example, I’ve found several items named “Bard’s [something] of [something]”, like “Bard’s Gloves of the Monkey”. Apparently these are all leather items with a required character level somewhere between 11 and 15, providing a minor stat enhancement encoded by the “of” clause. It’s not surprising that Blizzard uses this sort of scheme, because the randomly-generated magic items in Diablo followed a similar pattern.

There’s a modifier “Fel” that I’ve seen a lot while playing as a warlock. I assume it’s a fantasy-world-spellingification of the English adjective “fell”, but it has a more specific meaning: it’s the WoW word for demonic energy. I suppose they didn’t want to actually use the word “demonic” lest it worry the parents, although I don’t really know why they’d bother, considering that this is a game that actually lets players summon imps and succubi. And, for that matter, “felguards” (demonic warriors available to warlocks specializing in demonology) and “felsteeds” (the coal-black demon horse with flaming hooves I mentioned once before). “Fel” is also used in the names of equipment I’m not powerful enough to use yet, as well as one region: the Felwood. It’s the one most wide-ranging made-up linguistic element I’ve noticed so far, although it’s possible that there are others.

In Mulgore, there’s a type of bird of prey called a Swoop. There are Wiry Swoops, Dread Swoops, and Defiant Swoops. I wonder if there are any swoops characterized by demonic energy? I suppose that if there is, I’d be unlikely to see it. There’s bound to be only one of them.

Posting really late this time: I managed to breeze through the remainder of Eufloria on Sunday afternoon and evening. Some days, writing is just hard.

I said before that there was never a good reason to zoom in in Eufloria. This isn’t quite true. There are two reasons do to is. First, taking a closer look at enemy seedlings can give you information about their stats. The stats — Energy, Strength, and Speed, all determined by the properties of the asteroid where they sprouted — determine a seedling’s shape and size. This isn’t very useful, though; although having better stats doubtless helps, battles are generally won through overwhelming numbers, and you don’t need to zoom in to see those.

The other reason is that you have to zoom in order to reposition your view. There’s no way to just scroll around the battlefield directly; all you can do is zoom into a spot near the edge and then zoom out from there. A peculiar UI choice, and not the only one — to some degree, this game is a showcase for experiments. Consider the way you send seedlings from one asteroid to another. You can send the asteroid’s entire population by left-dragging from source to destination, or you can right-click the source repeatedly to increment a counter of how many you want to send, one seedling per click. Neither of these options is ideal when you want to split up your hundred-strong armada into two groups to pursue different routes. The solution here is to left-drag out only a little way — the targeting interface that shows the limits of where you can travel to also shows a circle around the asteroid you started at, and within the bound of that circle, your mouse-dragging acts like a radial slider for selecting anything up to 100% of the seedlings there. It was only well into the game that I started taking advantage of this, partly because I didn’t really understand it. The game could stand better documentation (or any at all), but then, I probably wouldn’t have read it anyway.

It turns out that there was only one more game element to be introduced after my last post: the flowers that I planted to let my defensive trees grow orbital defenses could alternately, past a certain level, be used to enhance seedling production. Beyond that, the remaining levels produce variety through the scenarios. One level plays with scarcity, in the form of asteroids that could only support one tree, or none at all. One is a timed survival challenge, one is an escort mission. Several of them have plot triggers when you explore particular asteroids — for example, one level has a particularly large one in the opposite corner from where you start, obviously serving as the enemy home base, until you actually reach it and discover that it’s just the beginning of a larger empire, which immediately attacks you. (This is where the limitations on scrolling around become important: they prevent you from knowing the true extents of the level.) Occasionally, the triggers are outmoded by the time you reach them: I recall getting a pop-up describing how the planet I had just explored had fallen victim to the “gray plague” (a side consisting of senselessly aggressive zombie seedlings), when in fact another computer-controlled enemy had already driven it out.

In short, most of the game is spent on the sort of thing I can imagine happening in any other RTS. But in a way, I think that’s the point: that your basic RTS tactics don’t have to be coupled to conventional military imagery. You can put them in a world of pastel colors and gentle ambient music and it works just as well.

I’m writing this a day late. Saturday, I pretty much spent all day taking Oleari through quests and dungeons. I respecced her a bit, changing her Shaman specialization from Enhancement to Restoration, for the specific purpose of making her more party-oriented — I had chosen Enhancement for the same reason initially, thinking that specializing in buffs would be similarly useful to others, but it turns out that Enhancement mainly means enhancing yourself. Self-buffs are always a troubling bit of design. If a spellcaster can spell himself up into a more powerful fighter than a warrior-type, why bother having warrior-types? And if he can’t, why not just roll up a warrior instead of bothering with the self-buffs? There has to be some kind of tradeoff for it to make sense. Well, the WoW Enhancement Shaman has at least the disadvantage that you have to take the time to cast your enhancement spells, and most likely drop a totem or two as well, which I suppose means a dedicated warrior would be able to respond to a sneak attack better. But this is all speculation from someone who hasn’t even hit level 30 yet.

I’ve been through all of the dungeons that were initially available in the Dungeon Finder (more are added as you level up), and while the experience has been mostly more pleasant than my first stupid dungeon, there’s one aspect of that first attempt that I haven’t been able to shake: doing a dungeon properly usually takes me two tries. Usually there’s some in-dungeon quest goal that I miss the first time through — some gathering-quest that I don’t pursue adequately until it’s too late, or some quest-giver who I didn’t notice until after the boss he wants me to beat is already beaten. Everyone else seems to already know the basic dungeons by heart, which means that they’re off and away before I get a chance to read the quest descriptions fully — particularly when the tank (who takes point, and thus sets the pace) is a Warrior, because they have a motivation to rush from one encounter to the next before their Rage meter empties. Maybe next time I should research the dungeons in advance.

The only dungeon that I completed in only one sally was the Wailing Caverns. There was some kind of dream-god in the form of a giant snake in there, or something like that. I couldn’t tell you the details. I’m sure it was all very important to the quest-givers, but again, I was too busy trying to keep up with the party. It went pretty smoothly: I managed to keep people healed, and everyone agreed in the end that it had been a good team. But after the last boss, when people started leaving, I still needed to pick flowers. That was a side-quest within the dungeon: some herbalist or something wants samples of a rare flower called Serpentblossom that only grows in that dungeon. For most of the run, I kept seeing it reported in the message window that various other people had found them, but I wasn’t seeing any myself, mainly because I didn’t know what to look for. So after the end, I was faced with the task of scouring the dungeon for flowers alone. Except that I wasn’t alone: one other member of the party was in the same situation, and we helped each other search, chatting a bit as we did so — he gave me some help with the less-obvious parts of the interface. This was a lot more like the kind of party experience I had come to Azeroth expecting than the frantic slaughter-race that’s turning out to be the norm.

I did take Oleari through Shadowfang Keep, even though I had already conquered it with Pleasance. I didn’t finish it this time. The end boss, one Lord Godfrey, seems to be particularly tough. Pleasance’s team had difficulties with him as well, I recall. Every once in a while, he performs an attack called Pistol Barrage that can easily take out most of the party, if they haven’t taken cover. Fortunately, you get warning when he’s about to use it, but as the party healer, taking cover means losing my line of sight on the tank, and thus, for a little while, my ability to cast healing spells on him. Perhaps the tank should have sought cover as well? Does Godfrey stand still or something when he’s preparing a Pistol Barrage to give you that opportunity? Regardless, I was blamed. Keeping the tank alive is the healer’s job, so if the tank dies, it’s the healer’s fault. There were exasperated cries of “wtf shammy” and intelligence-belittling exhortations to just stand there and heal him, as if I had been doing anything else. Before quitting the party, the tank instructed me to delete the character and start over with a new one. So, yeah, not as pleasant an experience as Wailing Caverns. I wonder how much this is due to the party, and how much due to Shadowfang Keep being a morale-breaker?

One thing about the Godfrey debacle worthy of special note: at one point, someone asked something about the healbot I was using, and /facepalmed when I revealed that I wasn’t using one. Are bots simply expected in WoW? It would explain a thing or two about everyone else’s behavior. It probably doesn’t seem like you’re taking things particularly fast when the computer is performing most of your actions for you. But if this is the case, it’s a big change from my Everquest days. Bots were considered a form of cheating back then; they might even have been a bannable offense. Cheating or not, I can’t say I see much point in playing a game without, y’know, playing it. But then, a lot of people clearly feel otherwise — otherwise, the infamous Chinese gold farms would never see a profit.

So, I’ve played a bit more of Eufloria. My progress through the campaign mode has slowed. There are 25 levels, and my first session took me through levels 1-10, but my second only took me through 11. It seems easy to get into quasi-stalemates, which surprised me a little, because you’d think that whichever side has more trees would be able to just outproduce the other. But there seems to be a population cap for each asteroid, or perhaps a production cap — a total number of seedlings beyond which it won’t produce more until some of them get killed. Probably the latter, because that’s the mechanic used for the orbital defense platforms occasionally produced by the defensive trees. It’s easier to observe with them because the limit there seems to be one per asteroid. But I’m really not sure about the rules, and I’m going to have to learn more before I play much further, either by finding info online or just by observing things more closely.

The tactics so far haven’t varied a great deal: you wait for your asteroids to build up an army of seedlings, you send them to storm enemy asteroids. Defense seems to be a lot easier than offense, at least at the stage I’m at — I’ve only recently received defense-enhancing gimmicks like aforementioned orbitals, and if there are corresponding offense-enhancers, I haven’t reached them yet. This encourages turtle-and-rush gameplay, with a substantial delay in conquering asteroids when you’re in rush mode, because it takes a while to claim them fully: even if the enemy isn’t defending an asteroid, it only changes ownership once your seedlings have worn down its “energy” by sacrificing themselves.

The one useful tactic beyond this I’ve found so far is divide-and-conquer, splitting the enemy territory into separate pockets. And it’s kind of interesting how this interacts with the movement rules. There’s a limit to how far away from the asteroids you own your seedlings can go, and there’s a limit to how far they can travel in a single jump between asteroids, but seedlings are quite capable of using an asteroid you don’t own as a stepping-stone to get to their destination more efficiently. And the enemies are no different. If you attack an enemy asteroid, the enemy will often send seedlings from other asteroids to defend it. If they have to go through an asteroid you own to get there, and if that asteroid is bristling with defensive trees and orbital platforms, you basically get to take shots at the enemy forces for free. I’ve got to try taking more advantage of this, by doing things like repeatedly sending small waves of seedlings at two separated asteroids in order to make the enemy keep shuttling back and forth through my defenses.

The background art in NyxQuest does a more advanced version of the parallax scrolling that the coin-op games of yore utilized to deliver an impression of depth. Rocks, toppled pillars, and monumental statuary in various states of disrepair dot the dunes behind the action, losing focus with distance — there’s probably a transition point where 3D rendering is replaced with bitmaps, but it’s handled so smoothly that I couldn’t tell you where that point lies. In the haze at the very back of each level lies something distant enough that it doesn’t move at all, and the implication of distance makes it easy to suggest enormous size as well.

Such objects are far enough from the action that they’re clearly just scenery. But towards the end of the game, there are two things that suddenly bring the background to the fore. First, there’s a stealth-oriented level appropriately titled “Fields of Argos”. In the extreme distance is a colossal archway supporting a gong-like circle, which, the player soon learns, bears an eye in its center, as vast as Sauron’s and potentially as destructive. It spends most of its time closed, but periodically a sound plays, warning the player that it’s about to open and you’d better find a pillar to hide behind before it spots you. It’s a bit nervous-making when this happens for the first time, because the game seems to be breaking its own rules, suddenly making the background art, formerly static, suddenly not only active but deadly.

The final two levels have a roiling oversized sun sitting on the horizon, shooting missiles at you — and by “at you”, I mean in the general direction of the camera. By this point, you’re armed with cursor-aimed lightning, and can try to shoot them down before you have to dodge them. It’s a tricky thing, though, because doing so involves paying attention to two things, first-person shooting and third-person platforming, independent and simultaneous, one with each hand. I found that most of the time I couldn’t do both effectively at the same time, and had to stop moving in order to shoot and stop shooting in order to move.

The lightning itself adds a significant sense of depth too, because it’s the only thing that suggests a space in front of the action. Lightning blasts originate at the player. This is the point that most clearly shows the game’s platform of origin. On the Wii, you’d most likely actually be pointing the physical controller at the screen, producing a sense that lightning bolts are shooting out of the controller, through the screen, and into the gameworld (albeit only manifesting as lightning bolts once they’re through the screen). Playing with a mouse, it’s much more indirect and abstract: the actual motions of my hands and mouse represent in-world action without resembling it. I kind of wonder how other people perceive this. When I play games, I don’t normally feel like the gameworld is an extension of my physical space. Being absorbed in a game is, to me, like being absorbed in a book: the real world around me is forgotten, as in a dream. But this is a geekish phenomenon, and geeks are perhaps more comfortable with thinking outside their bodies than most people. The popularity of the Wii (and now the Kinect) among people who aren’t otherwise gamers could have a lot to do with the way it lessens that abstraction, making the player into a physical part of the action.