At first glance, I thought some of them were clever ways to get people to make better use of the medic class and some of the more advanced features of Steam. Offering the Family Practice achievement for uber-charging ten of your steam friends seems like a great way to get people to use the community features of Steam. Unfortunately, its also a great way to get people to badger players with friend requests that they’ll delete as soon as they get they’ve ubercharged them.

As if that weren’t bad enough, there are achievements like Placebo Effect, which is awarded when you “Kill 5 enemies in a single life, while having your Uber-Charge ready, but undeployed.” Undeployed? So that means that now, in addition to players just starting out who don’t use ubercharge because they don’t know how it works, now we’ll have experienced medics running around not using their ubercharge in order to get an award that doesn’t benefit anyone but themselves?! It seems like a great way to ensure that a certain percentage of players are basically playing a different game than all the other players. I’m not sure why Valve would want that, but my experience, and the accounts I’ve heard from other players, seem to confirm that it is the case.

Its not surprising that some medics are colluding with other players to farm achievements. When you consider the chances of earning achievements like Group Health - “Work with 2 other Medics to deploy 3 simultaneous Uber-Charges” - in the course of an ordinary game, it becomes a lot more attractive for 3 medics to sit in the spawn room and heal each other while the rest of the team tries to… you know… play the game. I guess all we can hope for is that some bright bulb creates a server specifically for farming these achievements so the rest of us don’t have to be dragged down by it. We’ll lose some skilled medics for a while, but I guess at least they’ll come back with some neat toys.

I actually think the new weapons that you can earn with these achievements are pretty cool and might make gameplay more interesting. I’m just not sure why players can’t earn them just for being a good medic. The fact that they are being awarded, instead, to players who selfishly pursue achievements at the expense of team goals is just… malpractice.

Don’t get me wrong, the game is still really fun, and there aren’tthat many people farming these achievements. It just puzzles me that the company that made this insanely great game apparently couldn’t see these problems coming.

But when I heard about it, a rather different scenario sprung into my mind:

Advisor: Mr. President, we’ve become aware of a very serious threat to the world as we know it.

Labcoat Guy: They appear to be some kind of asteroids heading toward earth, but unlike any we’ve encountered before. Each on seems to be composed of 4 cubes aligned in various 2-dimensional configurations…

President: In English, dammit! What does this mean?

Labcoat Guy: We calculate that if a sufficient number of these “tetrads” were to pile up on the surface, life as we know it could cease to exist…

Marine: GAME OVER MAN! ITS GAME OVER! Don’t you see? Its a weapon designed by the Russians!

Crazy Guy (struggling against guards): You’ve got to listen to me! They’re oscillating at synchronous frequencies!

President: Wait, let’s hear what he has too say.

Crazy Guy pushes up glasses and lays out a sheaf of ruffled pages

Crazy Guy: Th..the cubes are all vibrating in a synchronous harmony. I’ve theorized that if you lined 10 of them up side by side, the vibrations would cause all ten cubes to shatter.

Advisor: You mean…

Crazy Guy: … it would destroy the entire row!

Lab Coat Guy: Wouldn’t that cause the other cubes to just drop down?

Crazy Guy: Yes, but if we could somehow control the descent of the tetrads…

Lab Coat Guy: …we could eleminate 2, 3… maybe even 4 rows at a time! If we can keep it up long enough, we might just be able to prevent a catastrophic pileup.

President: Alright, I want all your men working on this. Son, you may have just saved the earth.

“I firmly believe that if people do [buy it] they’ll have an amazing experience they couldn’t get anywhere else.”

Well, obviously EA is banking on that. After all, if they could get it anywhere else it would be a lot cheaper! Praise Jebus for region encoding. It seems like this quote basically amounts to “we know you’re all slavering to play this game and nobody else is making anything else like it, so if you don’t like the price you lick our giant brass balls”.

As far as getting my random-dungeon fix on my Windows machines, the tile graphic version of Dungeon Crawl strikes an excellent balance, adding partial mouse control and passable graphics without sacrificing any of the gameplay depth that rogue-alikes are known for.

That left me with just one problem: how to take it with me wherever I go. You might think that the absence of keyboards on devices like PocketPCs and the Nintendo DS would force developers to strap a more modern interface to these games. Unfortunately, all of the Windows Mobile and Homebrew DS ports I’ve seen simply use a virtual keyboard that the player taps away at with the stylus. This accomplishes the seemingly impossible - it actually makes the rogue-alike interface worse.

Meanwhile, unbeknownst to me, the Nethack design philosophy had spread, “forked” if you will, in the floating cultural sponge known as Japan, in the form of the Mysterious Dungeon series. Like western rogue-a-likes, Mysterious Dungeon games feature randomized dungeons, heavy on monsters and treasure, light on plot and characters. But unlike the open-source community that’s responsible for the western rogue-alikes, these Japanese counterparts seem to be dominated mostly by a single company, Chunsoft, and feature such lucrative licensed properties as Pokemon and Dragon Warrior. This allows these games to be more accessible than their western counterparts, with more sophisticated interfaces and better graphics (though still not state-of-the art by any means). These games have been popular in Japan for some time but, like so many jewels of the orient, they have enjoyed very few english translations, but that is starting to change.

Of course it all started with that great ambassador of Japanese culture, Pokemon. Nethack fans weary of the constant barrage of Pokemon games could be forgiven for missing Pokemon Mystery Dungeon for GBA and DS, which is basically a rogue-alike with Pokemon characters slapped on. It wasn’t received well by critics, but their criticisms of the game read like a checklist of classic rogue-alike characteristics (including the kind of primitive graphics for which regular Pokemon games seem to get a free pass every year). A sequel is expected to be released in a few weeks that offers co-op play over wifi.

For those looking for a less cuddly dungeon crawling experience, Mysterious Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer just hit stores for the DS. One of the few Mysterious Dungeon games not based on a cute licensed property, Shiren promises a more hardcore experience where traps lie around every corner and death forces you to start from scratch, with none of this “going back to a previous savegame” nonsense that gamers have become accustomed to. With that kind of uncompromising gameplay, I get the feeling that if this game doesn’t win a lot of converts, it might destroy the market for Mysterious Dungeon games in North America completely!

In the meantime, I’ve been playing Izuna:Legend of the Unemployed Ninja. Not technically a Mysterious Dungeon game, Izuna is brought to us by Atlus. Always the savior of western fans of quirky Japanese games, Atlus came to the rescue of english-speaking gamers looking for a Mysterious Dungeon-like experience a year ago with this game. Not quite as harrowing as Shiren, if the titular character in Izuna dies she loses all her equipment and has to start from the ground level, but keeps all her experience. This lessens the frustration factor considerably, making it an ideal entry point for those who are looking to get into the genre but are perhaps allergic to Pokemon. Izuna doesn’t have a very wide variety of items to collect, but it does one of the things that rogue-alikes do best: it takes a small gameplay vocabulary and varies it just enough to make the experience seem fresh, even when you have to start a dungeon all over again… and again. Its starting to wear thin for me, but I’m almost finished it.

Ideally, as these games trickle into western markets, they will have a built-in audience of existing rogue-alike fans while also being accessible enough to bring some new fans to the genre. Alternatively, hardcore dungeon crawlers might see their modern accoutrements as sacrilege, while more casual gamers are turned off by their rather harsh policies regarding player death and savegames. So far, the reviews from the mainstream press don’t bode well, with reviewers’ criticisms often missing the point entirely (exits and entrances in the same room?! Madness!), but only time will tell if western audiences will find a home in the Mysterious Dungeon.

Anyway, I finally got a chance to try it out last week when my 13-year old nephew came over to visit. We basically just fired it up and came up with ideas and implemented them on the fly. I was really impressed with how easy it was to teach it to him. He caught on very quickly and after an hour or so, he was writing code and fixing bugs with little help from me. It was also easy enough that I could learn new things as we went along without disrupting the creative flow too much.

After a few hours of playing around with it, we created
this 2-player game and posted it to the Scratch community site, which offers free hosting of games made with Scratch. It is, admittedly, rather silly, but kinda fun.

I think both of the Penny Arcade guys are great, but I’ve always identified with the more intellectual, articulate Tycho, so I was a bit disturbed to find that I enjoyed Gabe’s list much more. It even featured one of my all-time favorites that explored the seemingly obvious contradiction inherent in a game where players become attached to Pinatas.

Then again, its also interesting to note that Gabe, who is often portrayed as borderline illiterate, chose as his favorites many comics that rely heavily on Tycho’s verbosity. And also poop.

I mean, parachute rolls? How do you roll in first person without completely confusing the player?

What they’re describing reminds me of the Dhaka segments from Prince of Persia: The Warrior Within. That game gave the player the benefit of slowing down and reversing time, and it still clocked in at just under maddeningly difficult at times. Trade POP’s restricted corridors for an open environment full of choices, most of which are bound to be wrong, and sounds like a recipe for frustration.

On the other hand, when they talk about things like color-coding the environment it sounds like they’ve at least given it a lot of thought. I’m just afraid that no amount of thought will make this work.

Piracy [OMG, did he just say that?]. Yeah, that’s right, I said it [oh SNAP!]. No, I don’t want to re-hash the endless “piracy spreads awareness”, “I only pirate because there’s no demo”, “people who pirate wouldn’t buy the game anyway” round-robin. Been there, done that.

Well, he goes on to say that sales of Titan Quest were crippled by pirates saying bad things about it, so I assume he at least believes that “piracy spreads awareness”. And he must have been aware of this effect ahead of time, having “been there” and “done that”.

Of course, that doesn’t excuse piracy. Its up to the copyright holder to decide if he wants that kind of awareness to be spread, and Iron Lore was clearly opting out. I’m not trying to defend piracy in this post. I don’t believe it can be compared to shoplifting, but it is clearly illegal (at least in the U.S.), and an argument certainly can be made for it being immoral and unethical. But these pirates were guilty of an even greater crime: not doing a very good job of it:

…with TQ, the game was pirated and released on the nets before it hit stores…. it missed a lot of the copy-protection that was in the game. One of the copy-protection routines was keyed off the quest system, for example. You could start the game just fine, but when the quest triggered, it would do a security check, and dump you out if you had a pirated copy…. So, it’s a couple of days before release, and I start seeing people on the forums complaining about how …. it crashes right when you come out of the first cave…. There was a security check there. [emphasis added]

The key here, as I’ve indicated, is the “dump you out” part. No indication is given that the crash is the result of using a pirated copy of the game. Very few games use this kind of security check, and most copy protection tells the user when it detects an inauthentic copy, so there’s little reason to suspect it either. On the other hand, a lot of PC games crash for no good reason at all. As a result, a lot of people who tried to pirate the game came to the reasonable conclusion that the game was just buggy.

A number of responses to Mr. Fitch’s post have pointed out what should have been obvious from the start: that this kind of copy protection serves no practical business purpose. The problem with piracy, we are told, is that it decreases sales. So anti-piracy measures are only really useful if they cause would-be pirates to actually go out and buy a legitimate copy. If pirates don’t know that their copy is failing because it is pirated, then they have every reason to believe that a legitimate copy would do the same thing. Sure, it probably occurred to a lot of them that using a pirated copy might be causing the problem, but in order to verify that, they have to spend $50 on something that cannot be returned. The incentive just isn’t there.

Of course, even if they had been more clear, only a small fraction of those pirated games probably would have been converted to sales. So it wouldn’t have made that much of a difference anyway, right? Not according to Fitch:

The research I’ve seen pegs the piracy rate at between 70-85% on PC in the US, 90%+ in Europe, off the charts in Asia.
….

So, if 90% of your audience is stealing your game, even if you got a little bit more, say 10% of that audience to change their ways and pony up, what’s the difference in income? Just about double…. Even if you cut that down to 1% …who would actually buy the game, that’s still a 10% increase in revenue….the difference between breaking even and making a profit.

So there’s actually a good chance that he could have saved Iron Lore Entertainment from its fate if he had simply been more sensible about implementing copy protection. Incidentally, a lot of people in the forum thread suggested that the copy protection middleware they used might not have allowed him to generate an error message, but that’s really not the point. He could have chosen a different middleware provider or just omitted that particular security check (and yes, it was his choice).

But, as it was implemented, all it accomplishes is to prevent pirates from properly enjoying the game. Without some financial benefit attached to this, it seems petty and vindictive to me, but that’s Mr. Fitch’s prerogative. If he feels that pirates don’t deserve to enjoy his game and wants to devote resources to prevent it, that’s certainly understandable. If it ended there - if this scheme was merely useless - I might be more likely to defend his decision to rain on the pirate parade (pictured at left) but, quite predictably, it proved to be harmful on top of it all:

So, before the game even comes out, we’ve got people bad-mouthing it because their pirated copies crash, even though a legitimate copy won’t [these would be the legitimate copies that weren’t available at the time because the game hadn’t been released].

So, for a game that doesn’t have a Madden-sized advertising budget, word of mouth is your biggest hope, and here we are, before the game even releases, getting bashed to hell and gone by people who can’t even be bothered to actually pay for the game.

Okay, criticizing the stability of a cracked game is (to borrow a phrase I heard on Boondocks) a bitch thing to do. In other words, its exactly the kind of behavior one would expect from someone who tries to get stuff without paying for it. Is it really such a surprise that some of the people who are screwing you over decided to screw you over a little more?

If you know that “word-of-mouth is your biggest hope” and you know that (whether you like it or not) you are going to get a lot of word-of-mouth from pirates, how can you not see the importance of controlling that message? It seems that in his rush to screw over the pirates, Iron Lore missed their greatest opportunity - using the piracy problem to their advantage. They didn’t even have to advocate piracy or give away free copies. Just implement sensible copy protection that doesn’t look like a crash and enjoy the free publicity. Instead, they managed to make the worst of a bad situation.

You can bitch all you want about how piracy is your god-given right, and none of it matters anyway because you can’t change how people behave… whatever. Some really good people made a seriously good game, and they might still be in business if piracy weren’t so rampant on the PC. That’s a fact.

Maybe you can’t change how people behave, but you can predict how they’ll behave and plan your strategy accordingly and that does matter. Its a lot more useful than hoping that people will act differently and then complaining when they act the way they always do.

Consider Peter Parker. Everybody knows the origin story of Spider-Man by now right? Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben was murdered by a burglar that Peter could have stopped earlier. Burglary is wrong. Murder is wrong. It can obviously be said that if burglars and murderers didn’t exist, then Uncle Ben would not have been killed. But instead of spending the rest of his life bitching about crime, Peter acknowledges how his own actions could have easily prevented the murder and focuses on what he can do to prevent it from happening again. That is why I feel sympathy for the character of Peter Parker and not for Michael Fitch.

I’m sure that the people at Iron Lore are good at what they do and I’m sure Titan Quest was a great game. But as Alex Rigopulos and Eran Egozy of Harmonix recently told Newsweek, “making a fun game just isn’t enough”. Especially for indy developers, good business sense is crucial. That means being able to see opportunities and take them, not underestimating your opponents, doing PR damage control, finding a market where you can compete and people will actually pay for your product, and taking responsibility for problems that you could have prevented. It seems to me that ILE’s downfall was as much a product of Michael Fitch’s inability to do these things as it was the result of piracy.

He goes on to blame stupid manufacturers, stupid reviewers, stupid players, and other things that have been a fact of life for everyone in the PC game industry (if not the world) for decades (if not millennia). However I thought this was his most telling comment:

There are few better examples of the “it can’t possibly be my fault” culture in the west than gaming forums.

Well, he’s certainly demonstrated that.

In all fairness, I had not found my way back to gamepolitics.com yet. When I did, I was startled at the difference in writing style from the last time that I read his work. In fact, a story on some recent comments made by Barack Obama, provided a perfect point of comparison with a similar story that he ran back when I used to read his blog.

The differences are striking. In both cases, the comments were really harmless attempts to say “Don’t let idle play get in the way of doing important work”. Back in April, gamepolitics accused Obama of playing the “Blame Game” and spreading a “virulent strain of game bashing”. Ouch.

Last week’s story, in contrast, was told objectively and gave the comments the context they needed to be properly understood. The comments section is still full of reader opinions, and well it should be. But now those opinions seem much more balanced now that their writers haven’t been whipped into a frenzy by loaded, inflammatory words.

I could not be happier with Dennis’ decision to offer more balanced, objective coverage of videogame news. There are already lots of sites that gamers can go if they want alarmist writers to tell them how to feel about off-hand comments people make about videogames. It’s about time a high-profile site offered a quality alternative to the hype-mongering of other sites. I think it is a shining example of what journalism should be and hopefully it will help elevate the quality of videogame journalism in general.