#oneaday Day 725: The Godslayer is Still a Bit Peeved

I'm a big fan of Ascension: Wrath of the Godslayer on iOS. It introduced me to an excellent deck-building card game and provides some excellent transatlantic asynchronous multiplayer fun. Always a bonus.

I'd been intending to check out the physical version for some time but hadn't seen a copy of it anywhere. Until today, that is, when I found not only the original Wrath of the Godslayer set, but also a new package known as Storm of Souls.

I shan't get into the nitty-gritty of Ascension's mechanics here as those of you reading this will either already know what it's all about or have the good sense to look it up for yourself. Suffice to say its a deck-building game with some superficial similarities to Dominion, but a much faster pace of play and a greater focus on "combat" of sorts, though not specifically against another player. Rather, all participants in the game compete against the game itself, and whoever does the best is declared the winner and the Lord of All Awesomeness, or something. There is a plot, but as tends to happen with many board and card games, it has little to no importance on how the game actually pans out.

For those already familiar with Ascension, Storm of Souls adds a few new bits and pieces. Firstly, it adds a bunch of new cards. These can be combined with Wrath of the Godslayer's cards to have games for up to six people at once. I haven't tried this yet, but I can imagine it's a very different dynamic to two-player games.

Secondly, a new Event mechanic allows cards to enter play that have ongoing effects. For example, one Event strengthens the Cultist "cannon fodder" enemies, making them more difficult to defeat but also making them worth more points. Others add modifiers to certain cards, some of which require you to think about the order in which you play your cards much more than in Wrath of the Godslayer.

Then there's the Trophy mechanic. Rather than Banishing certain monsters, putting them out of the game forever, certain monsters can be kept as trophies and banished at a later time for various benefits. This adds an extra layer of strategy which is very welcome.

As with many deckbuilding games, the joy of Ascension comes in building good synergies of cards and then unleashing them in a vast combo attack that looks suitably impressive. While it takes time to build up to this point in Dominion, in Ascension you're there within a turn or two, particularly if you pay careful attention to Events and the type of cards you're playing.

So is the new version any good? Most definitely. Tonight has been an all-nighter of play, hence the lateness of this entry — haven't been to bed yet! I hasten to add that it hasn't been Ascension that we've been playing all night — we also took on Dominion and Last Night on Earth. Ascension was the clear favourite though, particularly as its setup is straightforward enough to make three games in a row a very practical prospect.

So, I shall certainly look forward to playing it more in the future, and if you're a fan of the deckbuilding subgenre of card games, I suggest you check it out. And if you don't want to splurge on the physical edition, be sure to check out the excellent iOS version — a faithful adaptation that is very well designed for the small screen and the mobile platform.

Now if you'll excuse me, I better get some sleep…

#oneaday Day 723: The Escapist

Escapism is cool, and an important and valid method of keeping yourself sane.

There are, of course, many means of escapism, and different ones are more or less effective for different people.

There's the escapism of a child giving life to the inanimate lumps of plastic they own. Without a child, they're just potential, models, things to be looked at, without life. Add a child (or, more specifically, someone still in possession of their childish imagination) and something magical happens — those objects come alive, engaging in battles to save the galaxy; heroic adventures; or even just a normal day in a normal street.

Then there's the escapism of a good book. Good readers also have one of the most important qualities of a good creative writer: that active imagination again. But it's partly also down to the writer to create a convincing world, compelling characters and a reason for the reader to commit part of their life to staring at tiny print on paper, e-ink or an LCD display. You know a writer's done their job properly if you can hear the characters' voices, see the places they're in, picture the things they're doing. And as a reader, your interpretation and mental imagery might not be the same as the writer (or indeed the person who designed the book's cover) — but that doesn't make it any less valid.

There's the escapism of interactive entertainment. Instead of passively observing an unfolding story, you become a part of it. It doesn't have to be an explicit narrative as such — a long game of Civilization tells a story just as much as a chapter of Heavy Rain. The meaning the player chooses to assign to the experience is what makes interactive entertainment special.

There's the escapism of film. Increasingly designed as memorable spectacles these days, a good movie plunges its audience into darkness before casting them into a whole new world. It could be a world of giant robots; of CIA agents; of lads on a pulling holiday. For those couple of hours, though, the outside world ceases to matter.

There's the escapism of a good TV show. When you find a show that resonates with you, you want to stick with those characters, to find out what makes them tick, what they want, what they find challenging. You cheer for their successes, feel bad when they encounter adversity. And given the amount of time you spend with the cast of a TV show over an average run of a moderately successful show these days, it's not beyond the realm of possibility that the cast might feel like "friends" by the time you're through.

And there's the escapism of music. Music is a powerful imaginative stimulus, but again it means different things to different people. For one person it might stir up dormant memories. For another it might encourage them to close their eyes and picture themselves in a whole new situation. For yet another it might have an emotional impact that reflects the things that are weighing on their mind at that moment in time. And for others still it might inspire them to push forward, to do their best, to power on through and do that extra set at the gym, or put in that extra bit of effort at homework.

All this isn't even getting into what it means to be a creator as opposed to a consumer of all the above media, either.

The fact is, the world can be, at times, a bit of a sucky place. Having something comforting to escape into, whatever form that escapism might take, is important. No-one likes to feel trapped, so even if it's only for a short while, escape into something awesome and return to the real world refreshed, invigorated and ready to tackle any challenges it might want to throw at you.

And if you don't have anything like that? Then you need to have more fun.

#oneaday Day 717: Just One More Turn

I've been playing Civilization V. It's now 3AM. The two facts may be somewhat related.

I've only been playing the Civ series since its fourth instalment, and while I've found it entertaining and fun, like many heavily strategic board games, I find it difficult to actually succeed at it. It's a challenging series of games, for sure, and there are lots of things for you to focus on all at once — thankfully with the infinite time offered by turn-based games.

Civilization Revolution on consoles provided a different experience which I liked a whole lot. What we had in that game was a simplified (but not dumbed-down) Civ experience which could be played in relatively short sessions, and which was set up to encourage players to be at each others' throats almost constantly.

And now we have Civ V. I know we've had Civ V for a while now, but I've only just started playing it thanks to a generous Christmas gift. (Thanks, Paul!) Civ V, for me, is resonating nicely, offering a pleasing middle ground somewhere between the simplicity of CivRev and the depth of Civ IV. It's certainly a different beast from Civ IV, and those who have grown accustomed to the functions of the various buildings in IV will have to relearn everything for V. Thankfully, the game does a pretty good job of explaining what each building does, and offering enough suggestions to help you out without feeling like you're being shunted down a specific path or letting the game "play itself".

There seems to be a nice balance between number of players and game time, too. In Civ IV, I often found that playing a game with any more than two or three players total often meant it would stretch on into the "days long" territory, making it all the more disheartening when something went disastrously wrong in 850BC and you then spent the rest of the game playing catch-up, with no hope of winning. The game of Civ V I played tonight, however, went on for about three and a half hours. That's not short by any means, but it's certainly doable. A tabletop game of Arkham Horror takes three hours. And, of course, with Civ you can always save and come back to it later.

Except you can't. Because there's something in that game that means you can't just leave it alone. Something deep within the coding that taps into the pleasure centres of your brain and wants you to keep playing — yes, for "just one more turn". It's difficult to pin down what it is — certainly it doesn't resort to Skinner Box tricks like social games, but there's definitely something in there giving it a particularly addictive quality. Perhaps it's the fact that you have to come up with a long-term strategy and aim for a specific type of victory. (Cultural in the case of the game I just played, meaning my empire focused almost entirely on developing culture, and I spent the entire game hoping my neighbour to the North wouldn't feel the need to attack me. Fortunately, he was more interested in subjugating the city-state of Singapore to pay too much attention to me.) Perhaps it's the little countdowns showing how many turns until you complete that piece of research or build that cool building. Perhaps it's the little mini-rewards — famous quotes when you research a tech, short movies when you build a Wonder. Or perhaps it's just the satisfaction of seeing your empire grow and grow and grow and thinking "I made that."

Whatever it is, I say simply DAMN YOU, SID MEIER.

#oneaday Day 716: Games Media Shakeup

Interesting news out of the game journalism industry today, as luminaries from Joystiq, Kotaku, The Escapist and MTV news come together to form the Voltron of writing about games, Vox Games (final name TBD).

The "dream team" assembled for the new venture has the potential to provide a serious shakeup to video game news and journalism if handled correctly. All hail from some of the most popular, well-known sites in the oversaturated field of games writing, and all will have their own take on how to push the medium forward. Hopefully Vox Games, or whatever it ends up being called, will prove to be a site that dares to be different.

But what does that mean? What could a "different" games site look like? Let's brainstorm.

For starters, the idea of "consensus" among the media needs to go out of the window. Jeff Rivera wrote a good piece on this subject over at Gamer Theory recently, and he's on the money. All too often we see outlets appearing to predetermine which games are going to be the hotness of the season, sometimes offering review scores which don't necessarily match up with the words being written. Battlefield 3, for example, was almost universally lambasted for its (apparently — I haven't played it) woeful single player campaign, but that didn't stop it picking up a ton of perfect scores and awards. In some cases, this is likely something of a hangover from Gerstmanngate, as outlets don't want to piss off their advertisers by rating the game that is on the background of every single page of the site less than a 9 out of 10.

Alongside this, the audience needs to be re-educated away from thinking that anything under a 9 isn't worth bothering with. Eurogamer ran afoul of commenters on several occasions last year by daring to rate big releases with an 8. They weren't wrong to do so, but commenters were wrong to assume that 8 meant "bad". This is a hole we've dug for ourselves over the years, and it's going to be very difficult to get away from. It's tied in to the "consensus" thinking, though — it's entirely possible that those reviewing a game for a particular outlet might feel the desire to see what other places have rated it, and, whether consciously or subconsciously, seeing these other scores can colour the writer's judgement.

Which is ridiculous, of course, because scores are completely arbitrary and borderline meaningless. There's no way to quantify "how good" a game is. There's no universal measure of "quality" because everyone's tastes are so different. Some people might think Modern Warfare 3 is game of the year, while I might think it's the most insulting game I've ever played. (I do, incidentally.)

But the review scores debate is well-worn, so I'll step away from it at this point and consider some other ways in which game journalism can evolve and develop.

Chief among one of the things which needs to adapt is the relationship between developer, publisher, PR and press. At present, publishers and PR hold all the power. Developers are muzzled from talking about their game if it doesn't fit into the publisher and PR teams' tightly-controlled marketing plan. We get press releases announcing when trailers will be released. We get countdowns to countdowns to exclusive reveals of some stupid thing on YouTube which they hope will go viral but won't because it's trying too hard. Many newshounds in the industry get reduced to little more than PR mouthpieces, frantically rewriting the press releases that flood their inboxes on a daily basis rather than going in search of the "real story". And why? Because uncovering a "real story" might compromise a relationship between an outlet and a publisher/PR team.

This isn't an anti-PR rant, of course. Many PR types do a fantastic job of facilitating communication between different branches of the industry, acting as a "gobetween" or "messenger" rather than an impenetrable wall through which information cannot pass. Aubrey "Chupacaubrey" Norris (Deep Silver), Tom "Evolve PR" Ohle (CD Projekt, Larian Studios and numerous others) and Jeff Green (PopCap) spring immediately to mind here, and are certainly a far cry from the PR teams from certain large publishers who take days to reply — and don't even bother at all sometimes. For the industry as a whole to evolve, we need more people like this who are willing to work with the press rather than, as sometimes seems, against them.

And what can the writers in this brave new world do, besides not feeling obliged to fit in with the consensus of the rest of the industry? Branch out. Explore. Raise the profile of small-scale projects and the underdogs of the industry. Review the crap games as well as the awesome ones. Provide something unique — truly unique, rather than the press release meaning of "unique" — as opposed to what many other sites offer, which is an interchangeable retread of the exact same story also posted on all of the other outlets. Different sites should have their own "voice" — and this doesn't necessarily mean being snarky, which is a somewhat overused form of humor in the industry today. What I mean, rather, is that different outlets should have their own take on events that are transpiring — editorials, comments, analysis, rather than the same dry old press release facts and improbable quotes from CEOs and VPs of Five Different Capitalised Titles.

Will Vox Games be the outlet to give the industry a good shakeup? I certainly hope so, and should the opportunity ever arise to become a part of it, I'll be sure to do my bit, too.

#oneaday Day 711: The Ancient Craft of Mining

Andie and I may have inadvertently spent pretty much the whole day playing Minecraft. I've spoken at length on the virtues of this game on several occasions on this blog, but every time I play it I find something new to appreciate, a new way to play or a new way to look at the game.

This, of course, is the central beauty of Minecraft as a game. No-one is telling you how to play it. The Achievements which were added a few updates ago give you a nudge in several possible directions — enough to get you started, anyway — but beyond that, it's entirely up to you what to do.

On the Squadron of Shame SquadCast, we've had a number of discussions on the subject of games that plonk you down into the game world and simply invite you to "get on with it". Traditional RPGs followed this format, though often had a questline to follow. Bethesda RPGs, too, follow this approach after a linear introductory sequence. But none do it quite like Minecraft, which is refreshingly old-school in its approach.

Minecraft doesn't have a story. At least, not an explicit one. Nowhere is it made clear exactly why you've been thrown into this blocky landscape with nothing to your name but your wits. Nowhere is there an introduction describing how and why the monsters that plague the landscape after dark came to be. And not once are you told what your "goal" is.

In some senses, this is a return to gaming's roots, when all the information you needed to know about the game's plot and setting could be fit on the back of the box. Minecraft's retro aesthetic would certainly seem to fit with that theory, but the complexity, depth and freedom that the game offers is something that simply wouldn't have been possible with older systems.

I do most of my playing on a small private multiplayer server which is in "survival" mode. This is fundamentally identical to the single player mode, where you're tasked with surviving against the elements (or, indeed, monsters) with only your wits and what you can scavenge. You start playing in a very small area, gathering resources and building materials near where you started in an attempt to create a convincing shelter before the sun sets and the monsters come out to play. As time goes on, however, you spread your wings and start to explore the randomly-generated landscape. In single player, you'll find yourself discovering a variety of different natural biomes — forests, swamps, mountains — but it's in multiplayer that the world of Minecraft truly comes alive.

Round a corner of a mountain, you might find a mysterious door set into the hillside. Entering, you might find some chests containing tools, food and building materials — along with a sternly-worded sign informing you that this stuff is not yours.

The beauty of it, though, is that if you want to be a complete git about it, you could just take all that stuff and run. The facility to leave signs with your own custom wording on them, too, means that it's not beyond the realm of possibility to, say, nick someone's hoard of diamonds, bury them in a chest somewhere in the depths of the desert and leave them a trail of clues to reclaim them. I hasten to add that I haven't done this, but it is enormously tempting to do so.

A multiplayer Minecraft server becomes something of a community. How active that community is depends largely on how many other players there are and how often they play. On a big, busy server, you'll find impressive structures all over the place as players attempt to outdo each other with outlandish construction projects. On a small, private server such as ours, the world will change gradually, evolving piece by piece as each player stakes out their claim to their own piece of territory. It's fascinating to watch — the fact that the world is persistent so can be changed by other players when you're not online means that there's often something new and player-made to take a look at when you next log in. It also means that eventually you'll have to start either competing for the finite resources that there are, or travelling further afield to locate the items you'll need to survive and/or complete your latest building project.

There are so many ways to play Minecraft, and the situations I've described here barely scratch the surface. It's whatever you want it to be, and it's for that reason that I believe that outlets "reviewing" the game when it finally reached Version 1.0 is an utterly futile gesture. For one, everyone's experience with the game is somewhat different — some are switched off by the lack of direction and give up in frustration; some "powergame" by building the bare minimum they need to survive and progress, attempting to reach the newly-added endgame; some take their time to build impressive structures; some roleplay in their mind, casting themselves in the role of a town planner, laying out buildings and imagining what each might be used for; some do everything they can to make life hell for other players. Not one of those ways to play is "wrong" — even the griefer — and that's why the game is such a work of genius, despite its glitches and flaws, of which there are still many.

Minecraft will continue to develop over time, though now it's emerged from beta and its creators are working on other projects, new versions will be released at a slower rate. There's still an enormous amount of potential there, though, and it's exciting to imagine what might come next. By putting the creation of the game world and its character in the players' hands, the team at Mojang have created one (or indeed many) of the most compelling game worlds ever seen in interactive entertainment. There really is nothing like strolling down a street you've built yourself, defending it from monsters who want nothing more to 1) kill you and 2) blast big holes in your hard work.

If you're yet to try Minecraft, then get yourself over here and join the 4.3 million people — yes, wow — that have bought the game to date.

#oneaday Day 710: On the Brink

I got a copy of Pandemic and its expansion On The Brink for Christmas. I've played Pandemic a few times with my semi-regular board game buddies, but I've never owned my own copy until now. (Obviously. Otherwise it'd be a fairly poor choice of gift.) As such, I've been taking advantage of actually owning it by playing it a good few times. We had a three player game on Christmas Day, I tried a solo game (me controlling two characters) last night, and Andie and I played (and won!) a two player game this evening.

"But whoa there, hold up, soldier," I hear you say. "What the hell is this game and why should I care?"

Well, I believe I've mentioned it before on this very blog, but I don't expect you to go digging back through over 700 posts to find it, so allow me to explain. Those of you who already know the game, shush for a minute.

Pandemic is a cooperative game based on, as you may have gathered from the title, attempting to cure a series of particularly nasty diseases which are attacking the world. (The game never gives the diseases names beyond "blue", "red", "black" and "yellow" but players inevitably come up with their own interpretation of what each colour represents.) There are four diseases which players must cure in the base game, and the expansion adds a couple of optional scenarios which can introduce a fifth "purple" disease into the mix via various means.

Players win if they cure all four (or five) diseases. This is achieved by collecting cards — the base mechanic is that collecting five cards of the same colour and using them at a research centre allows you to discover a cure of that colour. Cards are acquired either by trading with other players — a somewhat difficult process due to the requirement for both traders to be in the city depicted on the card which is being traded — or drawn at the end of each turn.

Simple enough so far. A twist is added by the fact that each player has a "role" which gives them some form of special ability. The Scientist player, for example, only has to collect four cards of a colour to discover a cure, while the Researcher is able to give any card to a player they share a space with, not just the card depicting the city they're in.

Alongside this, each turn the diseases spread. The board starts with nine different cities being infected to varying degrees, represented by coloured cubes. Each turn, a number of different cards, also depicting cities, are drawn, and a cube is added to each pictured location. Should a location "overflow" by adding a cube beyond the maximum of three, an "Outbreak" occurs, spreading the disease to all surrounding cities, adding a cube to all of these as well. This can cause chain reactions if players are not careful, so an important part of the game's strategy is knowing when to focus on getting cards to whoever is working on the cures, and when to travel around the globe treating the most pestilent areas. When players are drawing cards to take into their hands, there's also the possibility of an Epidemic occurring, meaning one city immediately gets blasted with three cubes' worth of infection (potentially causing an Outbreak if it's already infected) as well as reshuffling all of the previously-used Infection cards back together and placing them on top of the unused cards — meaning that previously-infected areas will see the disease spreading again, rapidly spiralling out of control if steps aren't taken to contain the contagion.

The Outbreaks are an important factor to consider, since if eight of them occur in a game, everyone immediately loses. Everyone also immediately loses if there aren't enough cubes of a particular colour left in the supply to put on the board (representing the fact that the disease is so out of control it will never be cured) or if the "draw deck", from which players pull two cards each turn, runs out of cards (representing the team taking too long over their objective). Conversely, the only way to win is to discover all four (or five) cures, though it's not also necessary to wipe the board clean of cubes. That said, curing then wiping out (or "eradicating") a disease has a big benefit for players — an eradicated disease never comes back, not even in an Epidemic. (There's a variant in the On The Brink expansion which allows a disease to come back after being eradicated if it's been selected as the Virulent Strain, but I haven't tried this yet.)

If all this sounds complicated, don't fear. The people I've played this with to date have all picked up the mechanics very quickly. It's actually very straightforward to play and features a nice blend of theme, strategy and luck. There are times when the deck is stacked against you, leading to seemingly unwinnable situations, but the lovely thing about the game is that everything can turn at a moment's notice. Victory can be snatched from the jaws of defeat — and vice versa. And because everyone's in it together — this is a cooperative game — it's a wonderful moment when victory finally comes.

In short, then, if you're getting in to the world of board games beyond Monopoly, Pandemic is one you should definitely check out. From what I've seen so far, the expansion adds a significant amount of good content to the game — the base game can simply be enhanced by the addition of a number of new roles if you're not feeling confident enough to take on the Virulent Strain, Mutation or Bio-Terrorist challenges — but the basic package will provide you with many hours of fun, whether you're playing with friends or solo. (Don't be fooled by that "2-4 players" on the box — you most certainly can play with one or five people, especially with the expansion, but be warned; adding more players to the mix actually makes the game somewhat more difficult.)

Want to know more? The ever-helpful BoardGameGeek has more information than you could ever want.

#oneaday Day 707: Holy Balls, How Did It Get to 3AM?

Okay. I think we can say with some certainty that The Old Republic is A Bit Good, judging by the fact that I uttered that very statement above while playing with my good buddy Jeff "Feenwager" Parsons tonight. This morning. Whatever.

As I said the other day, while the game does suffer from a few of the genre's perpetual annoyances (having to traipse all the way back to a trainer to learn new skills is something MMOs should really move beyond, for one thing) it does a lot of things right. It's balanced nicely for those players who want to play solo and just happen to "live" in the same world as other players. There are specifically-designed areas known as "Heroic Areas" which are light on story and heavy on fighting, ideal for pick-up groups. There are more lengthy multiplayer story-heavy missions known as Flashpoints. There is PvP. And pretty much everything can be played cooperatively if you so desire.

Some have argued that the writing perhaps isn't up to BioWare's usual tip-top standards, but when you consider the amount of content in this game even at launch, it's perhaps not surprising. That said, the "dark side" options in dialogue (which can usually be interpreted as "snarky") are often amusing. I'll be interested to see if playing a dark-inclined Jedi will have any significant effect on the plot. It's provoked some NPC comments so far, but I'm very early into my playthrough with said dark-inclined Jedi, so a lot remains to be seen.

Perhaps the most notable thing about the game is the fact that it's encouraging people who aren't huge fans of MMOs to give it a shot. Jeff, whom I mentioned above, is one. My buddy Edd, aka Roth, whom I used to play Final Fantasy XI with for a short period, is another. A good indicator of The Old Republic getting things "right" for me will be if these two stick around beyond the free month — and if other friends who typically shy away from the genre sign up, too. I hope they do, as these games are always more fun with friends.

The community I've encountered so far has been very friendly. With my "main" character on the European servers, I plumped for an RP (Roleplaying) server as this generally is populated with more pleasant types. I haven't been disappointed so far — when asking for advice, people are usually happy to give it rather than inviting you to "Google it". This is nice. Quite how long it will last, I don't know — the game is still new, after all — but for now I'll enjoy it.

The only thing I can see putting people off trying The Old Republic is the price. With so many free MMOs out there now, it's hard to justify spending "full price" on a new one, plus a monthly subscription after the first month. But it's effectively several BioWare games in one, along with a potential WoW-beater. And if that isn't value for money, I'm not sure what is.

#oneaday Day 704: Old Republican

I caved and picked up the new Star Wars MMO The Old Republic this week. This despite never having really been that into Star Wars (certainly nowhere near as much as my brother and his kids, anyway) and rarely having the patience to see MMOs through to their endgame.

You know what, though? The Old Republic does one hell of a lot of things right, and might just be the big shakeup that the stale, overcrowded genre needs.

By far the best addition to the whole experience is the fact that plot is delivered with some degree of effort, rather than through static text boxes. One of the things which always bugged me about World of Warcraft was that there was this huge, epic storyline going on, but you wouldn't have known it. Text boxes do not make for good interactive storytelling. Interactive cutscenes with dialogue choices, however, do — particularly given the innovative implementation of "multiplayer conversations", where each "response" is rolled on by all party members to see who gets the chance to say their piece. It sounds odd, but works really well in practice, and is certainly a far more elegant solution than what Guild Wars did by only having the party leader visible in cutscenes.

It helps that it looks like being an interesting story (or, indeed, stories) too — I've only played as a Jedi Knight so far, but already the things I've been doing could have been straight out of a new single player Knights of the Old Republic game. This is very much a Good Thing, and the fact that you can have a completely different experience and story by playing with one of the other classes is also a Very Good Thing.

The game doesn't break completely with established MMO conventions, however. We still have a hotbar filled with abilities with cooldowns. We still have clearly defined party roles. We still have vendor trash, skill trainers, flight paths, rested XP, Elite mobs and all the other shenanigans we've come to associate with the genre. And while it would be nice to see a little more originality in some of these aspects, what we haven't seen before is the combination of these game mechanics with strong storytelling. And, unlike most MMOs, where the mechanics are very much at the forefront, here — at least early in the game — the story is very much front and centre, making you feel, as the marketing says, like you're in the middle of your own personal Star Wars saga.

It's ironic, really, that out of all the recent "new" Star Wars material, it's not the movies that were the most worthwhile things. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that the Episode I-III movies were some of the worst things to happen to the franchise. Conversely, the Old Republic series has been one of the best things to happen to the saga, plot holes relating to the fact that the galaxy has been using the exact same technology for thousands of years notwithstanding. And the new game certainly has the potential to create an enormous expanded universe over the course of its lifetime. Will it ever eclipse the movies themselves, though? Probably not; the movies have a considerable head start on the game, after all. But there's so much potential here for BioWare and LucasArts to explore, and I for one am actually quite excited to see how it all develops. It's a very strong game now — where will it be in ten years' time? You only have to look at how far World of Warcraft has come since its 2004 release to see how much one game can evolve. And if The Old Republic is starting from such a strong beginning, I can't wait to see what the future holds.

This likely isn't any consolation to players of Star Wars Galaxies, which shut down earlier this week. But despite the fact that The Old Republic is far more focused on the heroic side of things rather than, say, being a dancer in a cantina, it's an authentic-feeling Star Wars experience that makes good use of both its multiplayer mechanics and BioWare's considerable chops in the storytelling department.

In short, if you've been considering trying it for yourself, then don't hesitate. Give it a try; you won't be disappointed.

#oneaday Day 700: Imaginary Play

I often wonder, with all the video games and DVDs and Blu-Rays and smartphones and augmented reality and assorted other whatnots available today: how do kids cope with play that is purely imaginative?

I don't have an answer to that question, but it occurs to me upon contemplating the impending festive season. Some of my most fondly-remembered toys were, I think, the ones which encouraged imaginative play. I mean, obviously the Super NES was frickin' awesome, but besides that, I mean.

One of my favourites of all time was a line of toys called Manta Force. There were three sets: the titular Manta Force, who were made up of a huge mothership containing air, sea and land vehicles; their rivals Red Venom who had an equivalent, more angular, spiky mothership; and the Manta Force Battle Fortress, which was by far the best bit.

These toys didn't come with anything battery-powered — no lights, no motors, no nothing. Any "life" they were to have had to be provided by you. Without you, they were just inanimate lumps of plastic. But add one or more humans with a good imagination and no sense of shame, and suddenly Manta and Venom's conflict came to life.

The battle escalated with the addition of the Battle Fortress to the lineup, which was a large mountainside base with several landing pads for aerial vehicles, several working guns and, rather inconveniently, some targets painted on the front which, if hit with a plastic disc launched from the conveniently-provided plastic disc launcher, would cause the spring-loaded launch pads to catapult anything standing on them up into the air. I only remember playing with it a few times as it was meant to be — with a friend attacking, and you defending with the Fortress' working guns, all of which fired plastic pellets of variable sizes. But I remember it being a lot of fun.

I'm sure kids still do have "imaginative play" toys these days. It's something you kind of lose focus on as an adult, since you're supposed to be concentrating on grown-up things like savings accounts, tax returns and grocery shopping. But I'm pretty sure that in most of us exists the potential to play with our imaginations — sometimes with a little help from something like Minecraft.

The imagination is indeed a great and powerful thing. Have you used yours lately?

#oneaday Day 697: The Sims FreePlay

I was harsh on EA the other day, and I stand by most of my comments. Theme Park is a disgrace to the memory of Bullfrog's classic, the handling of Tetris was ridiculous, Origin is still a load of old wank and the company's insistence on using it rather than established networks like Game Center and OpenFeint is just plain arrogant.

However, they have got one thing right recently, and that's their latest iOS release: newest entry in the The Sims family The Sims FreePlay.

The Sims has been undergoing quite a few changes over recent years. First The Sims 3 brought open-world gameplay to the series. Then the World Adventures expansion gave the game a (very light) sense of narrative and some dungeon-crawling, puzzle-solving gameplay. Then Ambitions allowed us to follow our Sims to work for the first time in quite a while. Late Night brought new social interactions, Generations fleshed out the gameplay of various underused life stages and Pets brought, err, pets.

Meanwhile The Sims Social launched on Facebook and proved enormously popular despite not actually being that good. The Farmville-esque mechanics of "get your friends to help" seemed somehow more appropriate in the setting of The Sims, however, and there was a very, very mild hint of asynchronous multiplayer as you occasionally saw what your friends had done while they visited you the last time they were playing. I saw many people who didn't typically try Facebook games giving The Sims Social more of a chance than they would normally. Ultimately, though, it was an exercise in extracting as much money from you as possible, with a wide variety of in-game items only purchasable through the premium hard currency of SimCash. It also uses the immensely irritating (but profitable) "pay to play" system of slowly-recharging "Energy", only allowing you to perform a certain number of actions in a set time period.

Yesterday, The Sims FreePlay launched for iOS devices. There have been several previous The Sims 3-branded iOS games, but none of them have been that good, somehow missing out on the magic of the PC originals, much like The Sims Social. The Sims FreePlay takes a radically different approach to the whole series, however, and one which fits ideally with an iOS player's lifestyle.

There's one simple, fundamental change which has occurred to make this possible: make it real-time.

The Sims has typically operated with vastly accelerated time, so we can witness their birth, growth, life and death over the course of a few days rather than a lifetime. And in gameplay terms, this has fit the series well — part of the appeal of The Sims 3 in particular is building a dynasty of Sims who have grown to dominate the town in which they live. If you had to live out their lives in real-time, this would lead to a lot of downtime.

However, think about when you pick up your phone. You do it during a lull in conversation, when you're on the toilet, when you're bored, while you're watching a TV programme that you're not really interested in but your significant other wants to watch. The Sims FreePlay is designed for these situations. Pick it up and there'll be something to do for a few minutes, whether that's collecting money from your Sims, sending them to work, forcing them into a party situation or gathering them all together for a collaborative gardening effort. Once they're busy doing whatever you've told them to, you can leave them to it — for hours at a time, in many cases.

The game experience is tied to a social game-style levelling system, but this isn't a social game. There's no visiting neighbours, no helping friends with quests (which begs the question why it requires an Internet connection to play, but we'll leave that aside for the moment), no Energy system — just you and your Sims. Or, specifically, when you start, your Sim. Singular.

When you start the game, your town will be empty aside from the Sim you created. As you complete tasks and get your little person to engage in activities, however, you gain XP. The longer an action takes, the more XP you get. As you level up, you unlock the right to have more Sims in your town — though bringing them in either costs Simoleons (money) to build the house, or Lifestyle Points (earned through completing goals, reaching "relationship milestones" and numerous other criteria) to build a prefabricated "theme" home. Both of these currencies can be purchased with real money if you desire, but, crucially, you're not nagged to do so (unlike in Theme Park, which gives you a quest teaching you how to purchase premium currency — shameless much?) and you can earn both through normal play if you're patient enough. If you're determined to play for free, you're going to have to think carefully about your time management and what you want your slowly-expanding army of Sims to accomplish, because once they start a task, it can't be stopped except by expending your finite supply of Lifestyle Points to "rush" finishing it.

This actually adds an interesting degree of light strategy to the gameplay. If one of your Sims has a large variety of garden plots that could potentially prove profitable, you're going to need to enlist the other Sims in the neighbourhood to help out, because one Sim can only plant and tend one plot at a time, and needs to be present for the entire period of the seed's growth — up to 24 real hours in some cases. This means if you have a garden with, say, five plots, you'll need five Sims to be able to take full advantage of it — and while they're doing that, they can't be doing anything else. It becomes an exercise in weighing up whether it's worth committing a Sim to a lengthy and potentially profitable project, or whether you'd rather take a more active role in their life and guide them through a number of smaller tasks. Do you send them to work for six hours, thereby guaranteeing a nice paycheck, prospects for promotion (leading to more money in the future) and the ever-important XP? Or do you leave them behind looking after their house?

This shift in focus away from managing the needs of an individual Sim (or family) to overseeing the entire community works well for the series. It's a markedly different experience from, say, The Sims 3 — but we already have The Sims 3 so why reinvent the wheel? What we have in The Sims FreePlay is a game you can pick up for a couple of minutes at a time, set your little people off doing something and then safely forget about until a Push notification pops up reminding you that Pete Davison has finished his bath. In this sense, it's a bit like Nimblebit's Tiny Tower, a simple but effective game which has proven enormously popular, even among those who typically decry this style of simplified sim (no pun intended) as being "rubbish" — myself included.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about The Sims FreePlay in the context of EA's recent actions is that the company appears to be experimenting. It's undergone a considerable period of expansion in recent years, gobbling up a large variety of studios from all sectors of the "games industry" at large — ranging from triple-A developers to social game specialists. The different approaches taken by its most recent titles make it very clear that the company is trying to find the "best" (i.e. most profitable) approach to move forward. We have the subscription model (Tetris — not the first game I would have picked to try that model on), the "gouging whales" model (Theme Park and its $70+ rides) and the "patient people play for free" approach of The Sims FreePlay.

It's fair to say the publisher pissed off a lot of people — including me — with Tetris and Theme Park in particular. But, as they say, we learn from our mistakes — if there's any justice, The Sims FreePlay will prove the most popular of EA's recent titles and show them that this is the way to treat iOS and casual players: with respect, not expecting them to pay to play, but offering them the chance to if they do happen to appreciate the game in question.

EA's still got a long way to go to prove to me that they're not money-grubbing bastards who care more about their bottom line than the goodwill of their player base(s). But The Sims FreePlay is a good start.