SSX and distraction

SSX is a beautiful thing - SSX3 in particular is one of my favorite games to this day - the combination of insane stunts, adaptive music, and insanely long courses continues to be pleasing.

I knew that SSX on the Xbox 360 would not be the same before I even bought it. In particular, I knew that the courses were not linked together into one insane run like SSX3. But the first time I jumped out of that helicopter, and the massive beats of Foster The People's Houdini started playing, I had hope. When I failed and failed again to stick a landing and landed straight on my face, or careened off of a cliff into the abyss for the third time, I knew there was something special here. This game had me hooked.

And then it got weird. The "online" features of the game started to get mixed in with the offline features in confusing ways. Was that powerup placed by a person, or is it built into the game? Will I have enough currency to buy the boards I need, or will I need to buy some sort of DLC to finish the game in a reasonable time? Are these leaderboards local? Is it my neighborhood, or my friends, or everyone? I had no idea.

It threw me out of the zone - that sort of magical place that games inhabit when I'm not thinking about anything but the game.

I've noticed more and more games doing this - getting me into the zone before abruptly knocking me out again. Often it's things like DLC ads, or bizarre currencies that I have to buy with real money to avoid grinding. Sometimes it's just the question of "how much of this is supposed to make me spend money?"

It makes sense in a free to play game, sort of - you have to interrupt people's games so that they want to keep playing, and will pay you real money to do so. But in a game that I bought for $60, what's the point except to make sure I don't buy the sequel?

I really hate the free to play model personally, and I hate the idea that's it's leaked into games that I legitimately bought. Honestly it's one of the biggest reasons I've pretty much stopped buying AAA games - I think I bought maybe 3 last year, and none of them new.

I guess the lesson to be learned here is "don't interrupt the zone unless you want to piss people off." Or maybe just don't buy games from EA anymore.

Scoring in Stronghold

Stronghold is a game about being the highest position of authority in a castle - that means building the castle, assigning people to jobs, ordering troops about, and other things that a lord would do. In turn, it's also about making decisions on what to sacrifice - bigger rations to make people happier, or smaller rations to keep them from starving? High taxes to provide public services, or low taxes so people will come to the castle?

I've been playing through the campaign for the first time, and had to defend my people from a pack of hungry wolves. I was able to fend them off with archers, but lost a few woodcutters and hunters in the process. This made me feel bad, of course, but sometimes not everyone lives.

In the end, I was given a score, part of which was 10,000 points for not losing any troops. This surprised me, since I had lost peasants - but then I realized that even though wolves had torn apart a number of unarmed peasants, it didn't count against my score because I hadn't lost any archers.

The funny thing about scores is that they encourage certain behaviors and act as an implicit approval of those behaviors. The logical extreme of this scoring mechanism would be to never put my archers at risk, and use my peasants as fodder to stave off the attacks of the wolves. This is the opposite of what I would have thought - to use my archers and other military units to protect the innocent peasants from harm.

I suppose it's wrong to try and impose my modern morality on lords form the middle ages, but it certainly struck me as odd coming from a modern game.