Wednesday, January 29, 2020

Everything Old Is New Again: Changing Expectations

I'm not a huge video gamer. Haven't been since I was much younger.

My brothers and I saved up, and - together - bought an NES. This was during the era when the system included the Zapper and the included cartridge was Super Mario Brothers / Duck Hunt. My younger brother, who has always been better at anything physical, was significantly better than I was at both games.

After a year or two, we bought Defender II. At some point, we wound up with Legend of Zelda. We had one of the Castlevania games, too.

But that was it for us. We borrowed games occasionally, and played games at friends' houses, but the NES didn't take over our lives like our parents feared it would (probably because we never had Tetris or Dr. Mario).

We never got an SNES or a Genesis. In fact, the next video game system to appear in the house was my original Playstation - more than a decade after the NES showed up.

But when I was in HS, I spent many a weekend going to friends' houses and playing Street Fighter II for hours and hours and hours. "Winner Stays" was the rule of thumb. And I was very rarely the winner.

For Christmas this year, my mother bought me a device called a "Retron 5." I'd seen it on the shelf at a record store, and then added it to my wish list (which I use as a way to keep track of things I'd like to check out later), where she saw it. It's a retro system emulator, with slots for NES, SNES, Genesis, Famicom, and Game Boy Advance cartridges. Have a game? Stick it in, and you can play it!

I thought it was pretty neat, so I spent a few bucks and got some games. And I was amazed at how well some of them had held up over the years. Dr. Mario is still super-addictive (and fun). Tetris is amazing. Super Battletank II is ... not but it was cheap. Golden Axe is alright. Altered Beast is what it's always been.

I see a lot of discussion these days about the price of games and how short they are, and I realize that these retro games are almost all shorter than most modern games.

Super Mario Brothers is all of 32 levels. People are beating it (without warps) in under 20 minutes. But I don't remember people complaining about how short it was, because it was from a completely different era of gaming.

I remember when I played Star Wars: Republic Commando on my XBox, I was disappointed at how short its single-player storyline was. It's about a nine hour game. And so (on average) is Legend of Zelda. But I don't remember any complaining about that one being super-short.

Of course, my XBox had an internal hard drive that remembered where I was, so I could turn it off and walk away. Some Nintendo games had internal memory storage, and could remember where you were, but most of them didn't. Some games gave you codes once you hit a certain level. That code would jump you to that level so you didn't have to start over every time you turned the device on.

But longer games are more viable, now, than they used to be.  Early NES games were basically arcade games - play for a few, run out of lives, and then either continue or start over. I don't know that "arcade games" are still a thing, to be honest.

Meanwhile, on the board game end of things ...

A particularly deep or complex game used to take literal days. Empires in Arms was (and continues to be) a particular favorite of mine. It takes weeks to play. Civilization with its sequels and expansions could take days. Whereas Eclipse takes only a few hours (and scratches a similar itch for me).

I don't really have a point, here.  It's just fascinating to that video games are taking longer and longer while board games are getting more and more efficient.  The two branches of the "game" hobby seem to be traveling in opposite directions.

Wednesday, January 22, 2020

Pushing To The End: The Failure Of Going Set

A few years ago, I was playing a lot of Tichu. It's a great game that pushes a lot of buttons that I like having pushed. It's (for example) a trick-taking game. And I love those. It's a partnership game, and I love those too.

I really like Pinochle and Rook, too. I suspect that, if I'd played more than a hand or two, I'd really enjoy Bridge. I sure enjoy reading about its strategy.

But all of these games have a small niggling problem: players can "go set." Although different games (and groups) use different terminology for it.

When you "go set," you fail to meet a pre-determined condition and lose points instead of gaining them for that hand. In Tichu, for example, you can call "Tichu" or "Grand Tichu."  If you then empty your hand first, you get a ton of points. If you don't, then you lose the points you would have gained. Your opponents still gain the points that they would have gained, too.

In theory - and on paper - it works. And it works in play, too. Mostly.

But losing points actually slows the game down.

Lately, I have been playing a ton of Haggis on BoardGameArena. Haggis is played very similarly to Tichu, only without the special cards (and with a few additional wrinkles). And it has a mechanism that is similar to calling "Tichu" to gain points.  In Haggis, you can place a bet.

If you place a bet and then don't go out first, then you don't lose points, though. Instead, any opponents who didn't place a bet score the points you would have made from that bet. So if I place a little bet (15 points) and fail, then my opponents each score that 15 points. If Steph and I each place little bets and Sean goes out first, then Sean will score 30 points from our best and Steph and I won't score any points.

In terms of spacing between players, it makes no difference.  If I bet 15 in Pinochle and fail, I lose 15 points and my opponents gain zero, for a total score difference of 15. If I bet 15 in Haggis and fail, my opponents all gain 15 points, for a total score differential of ... 15.

But the key difference is this:

My sliding back 15 points means that the game as a whole can potentially take 15 points longer to complete.  Whereas my failure pushing my opponents forward by 15 points means that the game is 15 points closer to a finish.

If everyone fails all the time at Tichu, it's possible to have both teams with negative points. Games like that can drag on for hours. But by flipping that on its ear, Haggis turned itself into a pretty fast-playing little game because every hand moves the game forward towards its end.

I find myself wanting to play Tichu and Pinochle with the failure condition flipped like it is in Haggis, just to see if it changes the feel of the game.

Wednesday, January 15, 2020

Let's Try This Again, Shall We?

I was planning to be back. I really was. But then things at work - which had been chaotic, but on an upswing - took several dramatic turns. In all honesty, I reached a point where I was considering deleting this blog and its archives and just doing what I could to disappear entirely from the internet.

Google Plus closed. Facebook continues to suck.

And now work is ... well, it's complicated.

But it led me to a realization:

If I don't force myself to write, I'm not going to write.

A lot has changed in my gaming life. A lot has changed in my home life, too. And it occurs to me that change isn't going to go away. Things are never going to be 100% stable. And that's not necessarily a bad thing.

The other day, a friend said to me that I need to blog more. And I realized that I really do.

I won't promise a regular schedule with my usual Wednesday updates. I may post half-formed ideas occasionally and then circle back to them in later posts.

But I'm trying to be better. I'm trying to be here more often.

We'll see how well that ends up working out.

Welcome to 2020.