The Stack

I’ve been busy these last few weeks, and look to remain busy for a few weeks yet, but I should probably write up a little something about my inaugural experience with TF2. It’s been a long time since I played an online FPS, mainly because there came a point when it was impossible to be good enough to compete without spending more hours per day practicing than I cared to, or could afford to. There was a time when I was office Quake champion, but only because I was the first to figure out the benefits of permanently turning on mouselook (wich modern FPS games don’t even let you turn off). But that was a very short time. It did, however, lead to my first taste of the original Team Fortress, back when it was a Quake mod. I understand that there have been a number of other versions of the game between this beginning and TF2, but I know little about them.

I remember thinking at the time that the whole idea of assigning gameplay-mandated roles had some potential, but that this potential was largely wasted due to the players’ general lack of interest in actually playing as a team and acting in concert. It would be surprising if this had changed for the better over the years that Generation 4chan got online, but I was pleasantly surprised that the dev team had come up with ways to compensate for it, with gameplay modes that really encourage specialization.

For example, on a Payload map (a mode that is, as far as I know, unique to TF2), one team has to push a cart full of explosives along a track to the enemy base before time runs out. The attacking team needs people to stay by the cart and push it and also needs people to scout ahead and clear out resistance. Which you can do most effectively depends on your chosen class — for example, the fast but fragile Scout will find that sticking by the slow-moving cart negates their one advantage. The defending team obviously needs to get people away from the cart, and the rocker-launcher-wielding Soldier class seems ideal for this, as the blast from their weapons can clear people out of cart-pushing range even if it doesn’t kill them. Meanwhile, their Engineers will be taking advantage of the cart’s fixed route by placing automated gun turrets well in advance of it, while their Snipers will be pressing as close to the enemy base as they dare in order to keep people from reaching the cart in the first place. Or at least that’s how it went when I played.

The game’s style is one of exaggerated, cartoony slapstick. Humor in games seems to be one of my recurring themes this year, and I’ve mentioned before how TF2 has been credited with creating a resurgence of humor in the industry. And it does it without a lot of explicit jokes — mainly it just gives the players the tools for inflicting absurd harm on each other and standing back. Much has been written about this already, but the really interesting thing about the slapstick here is that it’s even identifiable as such. I mean, the action really isn’t all that far separated from that of any other FPS. The whole genre has always been proudly over-the-top, from Wolfenstein 3D onward. So why does this game come off as more of a comedy than most? The caricatured character art and animations are of course a large part of it, but this is not sufficient in itself to leave a humorous impression. I think the pacing helps. Let’s say an enemy Heavy ambushes you, and you return fire, but you die first. This takes about the same amount of time to happen as it takes to read that sentence aloud. Which is to say, it lasts just long enough for the player to fully register that it’s happening, and doesn’t drag on beyond that moment. Obviously not everything is like this, though — in particular, two of the classes, the Sniper and the Spy, specialize in killing the enemy before the enemy knows they’re there. And apparently there’s a tradition of rivalry between these two classes.

One thing I’ve been uncertain about is how this game fits into the Oath. TF2 isn’t winnable, and it keeps adding more content — even now, nearly two years after its release, it keeps getting special bonus items as updates. This puts it into the same category as MMORPGs. Also like MMORPGs, it requires other players online, and thus won’t necessarily be easily turned back to after a delay of years. In short, it doesn’t fit within the model of the Stack. Nonetheless, I’m willing to call this game Complete once I’ve spent a nontrivial amount of time trying out each of the character classes. So far, I’ve tried the Scout, Heavy, and Soldier. Six more to go.

So, the second year of this blog ends with another unplanned month-long outage. It’s been a pretty dismal year for the blog, with only 14 games knocked off the Stack, if I count correctly. I haven’t even finished the Orange Box yet. This is in large part because of the demands of my new job. (The first month-long outage basically coincided with my the first month of employ.) Don’t get me wrong: it’s a great job, miles better than the one I left to take it. But there have been long hours and tight deadlines, on top of a killer commute. It’s nearly an hour and a half each way by bus, which, unless I switch to a portable system, doesn’t leave a lot of time for gaming. Or, to be more accurate, it leaves a certain amount of time for gaming, but not nearly enough time to both game and write about it. I’ve really got to find quarters closer to the office, but not having a lot of time also means not having a lot of time to look for a new apartment.

And so the Oath has backfired: in order to avoid the obligation of blog, I’ve been playing games that aren’t on the Stack. But I’m not giving up. Now that the most recent tight deadline has passed, I’m going to try to ease myself back into this by writing up some non-stack games.

As for what’s remaining on the Stack, I think it’s about time I made my secret files public. There are two ways to view it. First, at some point in 2008, I discovered Backloggery through a link to this blog from a comment thread. Backloggery is a site devoted to people doing exactly the same thing as me, except with less commentary. I had always assumed that when I wanted to put my list online I was going to have to find or create my own HTML interface to it. Seeing that someone else had done the work already, I entered my entire list, and have maintained it ever since.

I found this solution unsatisfying, though, because it didn’t categorize things the way I wanted them. Backloggery sorts by platform, but not by genre. Their list of game statuses includes several degrees of finishedness (“Beaten”, “Completed”, “Mastered”), but only one unfinished status; I had been tracking only one degree of completion, but had several kinds of non-completion (“untried”, “played partway”, “was unable to complete due to unresolved technical problems”).

Then Gunther Schmidl started his own game backlog blog and showed me what I should have done in the first place: just upload the spreadsheet to Google Documents and make it world-readable. So I’ve done that too. My Backloggery page is here and the Google spreadsheet is here.

You may notice that the Google document has 301 rows, while the Backloggery reports only 299 games unfinished. I always spend a moment confused when I look at them. Well, the spreadsheet has an extra row because of the column headers, while Backloggery is missing Pokémon from the “Unfinished” list: by their standards I’ve beaten it and it would be dishonest of me to list it otherwise. I should try to contact some of the other backloggers with Pokémon on their lists to try to arrange trades. It’s probably my only hope of finding any. (Craigslist was a bust.)

At any rate, that means we currently stand at exactly 300 games listed, which is a satisfyingly round number to start the new year on. Not that this number is really all that meaningful: I’ve got 8 points to spend (that’s $80 worth of new games by the terms of the Oath, which can go quite a long way these days), and there are a number of games whose stack status is iffy. Does Team Fortress 2 count? I did buy it, but only because it came with the Orange Box. I suppose I’ll write it up when I get around to trying it, but it’s not in the list right now. What about Peggle Extreme, also from the OB? I don’t think so: it’s really just a demo, not a full game. Or The Next Tetris — a puzzling thing to be on the Stack, perhaps, as it’s not the sort of game that’s finishable, but it has a finishable component, which is what I’m counting for Stack purposes. Except I can’t for the life of me remember if I ever finished it or not. So it’s on the list just in case.

I’m sure that there are other things on the list that will provoke questions, or at least raise eyebrows. That’s why I was so reluctant to publish the list. Anyway, expect another post tomorrow (I’ve already started writing it), and happy new year.

My goodness it’s been a while since I posted anything. I blame the spring weather. (In February? Yes. Apparently that’s when Spring comes in San Francisco.) But also I blame the poll experiment. One of the central things that keeps games enjoyable for me is that they’re one of the few things that no one wants me to do. There are no external obligations, just the obligation to the game itself. The Oath works against this a little, but I was careful to set that up so that I was never actually obliged to play anything — just to blog about it if I do. Letting other people choose what I play is another thing altogether, and so I don’t think I’ll repeat it.

Now, as to where we left off: By now, I’m pretty well into the swing of QfG5, having achieved about 40% of the maximum score. This is the sort of game that has an accelerated realtime day/night cycle (sped up by a factor of something like 30, or faster on the overland map), with some things refreshing themselves with new content each day. It’s important in this sort of game to get into a daily routine, something that lets you patrol all the major areas for daily developments, but still allows you some free time every day for questing.

The Quest for Glory series has varied a lot on the matter of timed plot events. QfG1 basically didn’t have any at all — you could spend as long as you wanted grinding for better stats and take care of the story when you felt you were ready. QfG2 went to the opposite extreme: most of the game, from the very beginning, consisted of a series of looming emergencies that would end the game if not handled in time. The rest of the games, as near as I can remember, try to strike some kind of balance. In QfG5, once you enter the Rite of Rulership, it imposes a certain amount of urgency on your actions. The Rite is basically a series of competitive quests, and if you don’t complete them quickly enough, one of the other candidates will beat you out. But if that happens, it’s not the end of the world — and more importantly, it’s not the end of the game. I’ve been taking care to win every event (it isn’t all that hard), but I have to wonder what happens if you just throw them all. Does the final save-Silmaria-from-ultimate-destruction event count for more than the rest of the events put together, like last-minute house points for Gryffindor? Or can you be a hero and still not become king?

It’s interesting to compare this to the last competitive quest in the series. At one point in QfG3 (the one in the pseudo-African setting), the hero has to prove his worth as a warrior by engaging in a sequence of challenges against another warrior candidate. One of the challenges is a footrace. The opponent stumbles and falls during the race, and if the player has a choice: stop to help him, or take advantage of his misfortune to win the race? The right solution is, of course, the former, which nets you more points and more Honor (key if you want to become a Paladin). If you just keep running, the opponent straightens up and overtakes you anyway. The message there is pretty clear: competition is all very well, but doing the right thing is more important.

So how does that notion fit into the present game? Here, I’m awarded extra points for putting the competition above more important concerns like finding out who poisoned the king. Arguably, the rite is more important than those mere sporting events in QfG3 — the organizers are pragmatic enough to turn the first two tests into repel-the-invading-mercenaries competitions. But that line of argument merely suggests that the hero should be participating, not necessarily that he should be playing to win. Will there be a showdown where the hero has to make the same decision as back in Pseudo-Africa, a choice between going for the win and doing the right thing? Or has that moral just been tossed to the wind? I can’t yet say.

Today is the first of January, 2008. I started this blog a year ago today. When I started, there were “just over 300” games on the Stack. Strangely, that’s still true. I removed 20 games from the Stack over the course of the year, but also purchased some new games (abiding by the terms of the Oath), not all of which I have played. Note that the point system of the Oath doesn’t necessarily shrink the stack very fast — indeed, when I buy games for $10 or less, it doesn’t shrink it at all. Purchasing an anthology can actually make the stack grow. Also, in the middle of the year, I moved from one apartment to another, and in the process of clearing out my possessions, found some discs that had escaped the initial count. Perhaps 2008 will see the Stack clearing faster — there were a couple of major interruptions in 2007, such as the aforementioned move, and I did tackle some pretty long games, such as GTA3. On the other hand, there can be interruptions anytime, and I have some pretty long games remaining (including one Elder Scrolls game), so who knows?

This blog has been the most complete record I’ve ever made of what I’ve been playing, but it’s not completely complete, as not everything I play is on the Stack. For example, I played quite a few fan-made DROD holds after completing The City Beneath. There’s a lot of really well-made DROD out there, but the best-designed ones tend to be the most difficult, probably because the people who care enough to put a lot of effort into design are the most experienced players. Other off-stack favorites of the year include Desktop Tower Defense, Trilby: The Art of Theft, Portal: The Flash Version, and Angband.

As for what’s next: I have a couple more days of Pokémon ahead of me before I head home, then I intend to finish up Final Fantasy V. After that, I have made a promise to play Portal. After that, I’m open to suggestions.