Linked List: The Fall of Angry Birds

App developer Trey Smith writing over at his blog:

After digging deeper in these top grossing apps, you can see they consist of nearly every free to play genre there is… Social games, click games, gambling games, turn based games, card games, etc but all of these have TWO things in common:  They each have lots of in app purchases and they encourage the user to buy stuff (a call to action).

Trey’s article is a wonderful look at how to make money with free to play games, an examination of why some free to play models fail, and he also throws out some terrifying numbers.

That said, I expect the Angry Birds platform to fall apart out of sheer weight. Angry Birds Space is actually really good, but I can’t see the feature film(s?), animated television show, and theme park being successful over time. I expect that the brand might just collapse under it’s own weight soon, although I hope it won’t.

Linked List: How to Commit Large Amounts of Two-Letter Words to Memory

Zephod, writing on his Tumblr:

The idea was to memorise all two-letter words, which I’m targeting because:

• They are vital. Games become stagnant when the board is full up and nobody can play in the tight corners without creating a string of two-letter words.
• There aren’t actually that many of them: 124 in the international rules, 101 in the US rules.

This is a super fascinating look at learning two-letter Scrabble words, which is a prerequisite for mid-to-high level play. If you want to learn the two-letter words yourself, read up. If you don’t want to learn them yourself, hit the link for a nice savable guide. 

(Via the Penny Arcade Report, which I adore for serving up such interesting articles)

Linked List: The Game is at the Bottom

Shamus Young, writing over at the fantastic TwentySided:

Compare this to an online game like SWTOR, where you could go through an entire battle with the top 90% of your screen blacked out and still have great odds of surviving.

Shamus has an uncanny ability to take what I’m thinking, what’s rolling around in the back of my mind, and articulate it, along with a bunch of other points I’ve never considered. He’s been methodically taking down SWTOR over the past couple of days, but this is the one that stood out at me.

In addition to his discussion about elites in Borderlands vs. SWTOR, I should point out that most World of Warcraft elites had names and were larger or coloured differently. It’s not as obvious as it is in Borderlands, but it is done much better than in TOR, where many characters have names but aren’t elites.

Linked List: Games as the Comics That Inspired Them

1UP commissioned a series of great faux-comic book covers using video game characters in place of the original characters. The Assassin’s Creed / Spider-Man mashup is particularly enjoyable.

Linked List: Execution In Fighting Games

Master Sirlin, writing over at Sirlin.net:

The more a game is about the difficulty of making your character do what you want to do, the necessarily less it is about strategy (that is, making good decisions).

This is why it’s not a good idea to make special moves really hard to do.

I agree with him 100%. Special moves can have timing and movements that can give them away, but making them arbitarily difficult to do makes it a fighting game about dexerity rather than a fighting game about strategy. This is why I enjoy Sirlin’s game Yomi so much - there’s almost zero dexterity required (you need to be able to hold a deck of cards), so it’s all strategy.

Linked List: It's the Age Thing

Kairi / Catherine, writing over at her site Indie Gamer Chick:

I don’t even like Modern Warfare 3, but I would rather play that today over Perfect Dark, which was probably the definitive game of my childhood.  Despite that, saying that I have no interest in playing it anymore in no way tarnishes my memories of Perfect Dark.

An interesting look at nostalgia. Sometimes, it’s best to leave on the rose-coloured glasses and not look too close.

Linked List: How Fan Servers Are Ruining DICE's Game [BF3]

Jon Denton, writing for Eurogamer: 

Worst of all, though, are the multitude of servers run by petty, mini tyrants; people who will kick and then ban anybody in breach of their rules. Or indeed, anyone who happens to not fit into the exact model of game these administrators want. In other words: anyone who happens to be half-decent at Battlefield.

Yes, yes, yes, a thousand times yes. It’s nearly impossible to play Battlefield 3 now without running into tons of idiotic server rules (“BAN IF YOU ARE BETTER THAN HOST” “BAN IF YOU USE SHOTGUN” “BAN IF YOU USE ASSAULT KIT”). And the 400% ticket matches aren’t just brutal on the defending team, but they suck for anybody who doesn’t have infinite time to burn.

Even worse, you can’t fix this with the server browser filters. You can’t filter for default settings, and half of the servers describe themselves as “OFFICIAL DICE”, when they are anything but. DICE should add a default setting filter into the server browser, posthaste.

I think that Battlefield 3 should support fan servers, but when I hit Quick Match, I want to quickly be matched into a default settings game where I don’t have to put up with custom bullshit like this. I’m glad Jon Denton brought this article to light on a big site like Eurogamer - hopefully DICE will take notice.

Linked List: Jim Sterling Trolls Diablo III

Jim Sterling recently wrote a rather typical Jim Sterling “satire” article for Destructoid comparing Diablo 3 to Torchlight 2. In his standard style,he makes outlandishly sarcastic statements in an attempt to be funny. Sometimes this really nails the mark. Sometimes he sort of careens into the river. I feel that this article falls into the second camp, and it also highlights one of the flaws with modern game criticism & journalism - writers rarely distinguish between different avenues of criticism. Jim brought Torchlight 2 into the article, but poorly - there are certainly very good comparisons to make between the two games, but this isn’t one of them.

Sterling opens by mocking Blizzard’s laughable “72 hour review process” and always on-DRM that I’ve mocked as well. Then he starts to complain about General Chat (I wasn’t even aware that General Chat was  considered a problem). Nothing too interesting, nothing I cared to write about.

Then he wrote a paragraph titled “Diablo III Does Choice Correctly”. Oh dear. (Remember, this is Sterling satire, so he is being sarcastic with his title).

With Diablo III, you don’t have to worry about allocating skill points, creating your own characters, or tailoring a play style to suit your talents. All of that has been taken care of for you, allowing you more time to actually play the game rather than slave over talent trees and menus.

I think this is a terrible point, and it really sets a poor tone for his article, because he’s wrong. Listen to this part: “allowing you more time to actually play the game rather than slave over talent trees and menus”. How is this a bad thing? Torchlight 2’s developers also wants you to spend more time playing than slaving over menus. More choice is not inherently a good thing - it’s more important to offer good choices.

It’s a streamlined and elegant approach to gaming. First of all, leveling up works out all those fiddly stats for you, upgrading your character as it sees fit. Secondly, you only ever need to find loot with your character’s primary stat and/or Vitality, allowing you to quickly select the right tools for the job and play eBay with the rest of it. Thirdly, the game’s higher difficulty levels bottleneck you into one particular playstyle so you eventually stop wasting time experimenting with garbage. The game even hides the option to fully customize your character’s abilities in a sub-menu, removing the easy temptation to do anything other than just have fun!

I agree - it is streamlined and elegant. I think that’s a good thing, but Jim does not. Now I’ll address Jim’s four points in order. First, levelling up does work out the fiddly stats for you. I’m fine with that - the fiddly stats are terrible. In Jim’s own words, they’re fiddly. They’re no fun. You can customize your character through stats on armour - there’s no need to do it through ability scores too. Ability score choices only offer avenues to screw up your character. You either know what choices you will make in advance, or you sort of pick ‘em randomly - but they only offer an avenue to either screw up or follow what someone else has theory crafted. Ability scores stink.

His second point is untrue. The character’s primary stat is important, yes, but there are certainly other important stats - increased attack speed, magic find, resistances, armour … In his attempt to be blasé and sarcastic, Jim isn’t being funny - he just sounds uninformed.

Third, yes, the higher levels bottleneck you into one of several play styles or builds based on your class. Is Jim suggesting that in Torchlight 2’s highest difficulty, a Wizard-style class who holds an axe and put all his ability points into Dexterity and put his skill points into abilities he doesn’t have the mana to use will be successful? Of course not!

Builds will naturally emerge from any game that offers customizable options. Diablo 2, WoW, League of Legends - these games all have builds. Builds aren’t predefined for you by Blizzard - they emerge from abilities that synchronize well together. You could make a Demon Hunter with a jack-of-all-trades build, with a few close ranges and a few long range powers. You could make a stealthy Demon Hunter, who focuses on using Smoke Screen to stay alive. A super-long-range Demon Hunter who slows & snares foes. And more. Abilities that work well in tandem naturally fall into builds, and players will find these builds both on their own, and by following guides online. The beauty of Diablo 3’s skill system is that you can experiment to find a build that works for you without having “fiddly stats” or by recreating a character every time you make a bad choice. That’s why Diablo 3 does do choice right.

Finally, I agree that hiding elective mode is idiotic. They could come up with a much better interface for that. I understand that Blizzard is trying to guide less experienced players into making a balanced character, but there are a variety of ways this could be fixed. I saw a suggestion for a tutorial tooltip to appear when a player begins Nightmare mode alerting them to Elective Mode. This wouldn’t really fix the problem, but it would help.

It [Torchlight 2] takes its overwhelmingly exhausting choices so far that you even have to choose a hair color for your character! Hair colors! Sorry, but in the real world, we’re stuck with the hair color we’re born with and we have to all live with it! We neither get to, nor want to, start messing around with what The Lord Jesus Christ in Heaven gave us at birth. 

What … ?

Torchlight II Has Too Many Colors 

What … ? I thought Diablo 3 was too colourful? Both games have wildly different art styles. Torchlight the gaming equivalent of infinite amounts of candy, while Diablo 3 is more grim (but still colourful!). Not really sure what point Jim is trying to make here, other than the fact that two different games are different. Such insight!

Again, Jim sometimes really hits the mark with these articles. But I feel in his attempt to get hits from the controversy surrounding Diablo 3, Jim’s criticism mostly fell flat. His judgments on the game design were poor, but there is a wonderful discussion to be had. Unfortunately, it was wedged in among surefire hits such as “DRM sucks” and “this other game is colourful”. I think people need to look at Diablo 3’s game design, rather than just lumping it in with other criticisms, as valid as some of them are.

Linked List: Saints Row the Third vs. The World

Seamus Young, writing over at Twenty Sided:

The point is: Saints Row The Third is better than Grand Theft Auto IV using any meaningful metric I can think of.

Absolutely true. Seamus also shows us how Saints Row makes Bioware look silly too, but despite the title of ‘The World’, this is mostly a takedown of the vastly overrated GTA4 by comparing it to the wonderfully underrated Saints Row The Third.

Linked List: Into the Lion's Den

Ken Hannahs, writing over at Nightmare Mode:

Shoryukens and double jumps; tiger kicks and chicken blocks. It’s an impenetrable language, strung together like a well-executed combo, leaving the uninitiated’s head flailing through an expanse of void, unable to glean more than the occasional word. The message it sends is evident from the moment you sit down and talk with fighters: if you want into this scene, you have to be willing to put in the time to understand it, and beyond that, you have to love it.

Continuing the fighting game community links from two weeks ago, we have another one, sitting firmly in between the camps of “the community is open” and “the community is closed”. Another really great read.