The basic gameplay is still pretty much like Grand Theft Auto 3 without the pedestrians or the blood or the goofy missions. It’s a lot of fun driving around the town, finding new “secrets”, unlocking new cars, and even a race or twelve. All this stuff is awesome, but it’s secondary to the multiplayer. In most racing games, there’s a problem where player skill differences are emphasized: Players who are actually good pull so far ahead of bad players that they may as well not be playing in the same game.

Mario Kart gets around it through cheap weapons that give players in back the advantage. That’s why it’s one of the best party games, because no matter how bad you’re doing, you get to fuck over the driver in first with a blue shell. Burnout Paradise does it in a different way, by allowing the players to drive in the shared space, and to compete, but also to just play around. I think that may qualify it as the first a cooperative driving game.

How it works is, the host chooses a challenge. Then everyone tries to complete it. That’s it. It might be as simple as “Drive 300 yards against traffic”, it might be “Everybody jump off this cliff, do a barrel roll, and land on the train tracks”, or it might be “Everyone collectively get 45 near-misses”. I’ll ignore that a near-miss should technically be a hit.

Of course, once you accomplish your part of the challenge, you get to then freely mess with everyone else. Maybe go for the midair collision with the guy trying the jump. Maybe just take down the guy who got you earlier (it keeps track!). Finally, during the multiplayer game, you still get credit for secrets you find, making multiplayer the best way to find some of this stuff as the challenges tell you exactly where they are.

The game’s not exactly deep (Drive! Hit things!), but it is rich. Check it out.

Posted on January 31st, 2008 by Nathan
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It’s like Grand Theft Auto 3 with better physics, but you never get out of the car.

Posted on January 22nd, 2008 by Nathan
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“Emergent” is the buzzword: That a game will take on gameplay that is unintended by the designers. The obvious example is the wide-open MMO like EVE Online, where a few corporations have sprung up and are doing their thing mostly independent of the owning company. Usually, the way to make this happen is to make a game multiplayer, and see what happens.

A few games manage it in single player. The best ones, as hinted at previously, seem to be Japanese RPGs. Etrian Odyssey has a bizarre beginning tactic where you make a party of woodcutters, to subsidize the “regular” adventuring party. Nippon Ichi throws so many classes and items into a game that no two people are going to play quite the same game.

Phantom Brave had a system where pretty much every attribute in the game could be moved between characters. This led to the awesome technique of taking the prinny’s attribute of exploding on arrival, the hell corgi’s ability of exploding on disappearing, and put them both on a critter whose name I forget, but who leaves after exactly one turn. The effect is that you can make a character, a member of your party, into a type of grenade. It’s not a great thing to do, but you can do it. The classic X-Com had a lot of that going for it as well. And it’s the kind of thing that can make an otherwise average game into a great one.

So now I’m playing Mythos, the beta of a game by the Hellgate guys. Up front: It’s a Diablo clone, but it’s a solid one: They’ve taken the basic Diablo formula, where one character can melee, one can shoot, and one can cast crazy-ass spells. Items tend to be directed towards one of those classes. What’s clever is that it takes a similar kind of object-oriented approach, in that it looks like there’s nothing keeping you from making a mage (pyromancer) designed around bashing things with swords. Some items seem to point to that actually being a good idea. So far, I’m having fun trying different character builds.

The gameworld itself is set up as a series of data objects rather than any kind of real geography. Everyplace you can go requires a map to get there. The cool thing is that, theoretically, adding new areas later should be a snap. You find maps, and when the game goes to a pay model, I imagine you will be able to buy them. Some maps go away after one use, others strongly suggest going in with 5 or more people.

I’m hoping that this kind of “bunch of stuff thrown together” approach, combined with the already random level design, leads to a hacknslash RPG that is more replayable than just about anything else out there. The role’s currently held by Diablo II, which is a shame considering that it runs at 800×600 and looks like crap on a modern monitor.

Mythos isn’t in its final form yet, but it’s pretty damned polished now. Let’s see if they can make it work once they go “live”, where it will allegedly remain free to play. As I get more invitations to give out, I’ll try to get more of my friends in and playing as well.

Posted on January 13th, 2008 by Nathan
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