I've Got the World on a Ring

Confession time: Up until very recently, I had never played Halo: Combat Evolved. Weird, right? Halo is one of those games that even non-gamers' grandmothers have played, but I never got around to it. There were a couple of reasons for this, the biggest being that I never owned an Xbox. By the time Halo came out for the PC, Halo 2 was almost out and I had move on to other games. The other reason I never played it (and I am embarrassed to admit this) was that Halo has a bit of a reputation for being the game that the beer-swilling, football-throwing jocks play. Not only that, it has the reputation of introducing the beer-swilling, football-throwing jocks to gaming in general, and I guess part of me resented that at the time.

Of course, what I saw as an invasion of my hobby was really just an example of the budding trend of our culture's general acceptance of geekiness. When I was a kid, we were the ones being shoved into lockers, but three Star Wars prequels, three Lord of the Rings movies, seven Harry Potter books, six Halo games, and a string of popular comic book movies later, I can have an actual conversation with someone on the street about why I'm excited about the new Thor movie. That's something to be celebrated, not looked down upon, and it was partially the acceptance of this fact that made me decide to finally sit down and play Halo.

I still had pretty low expectations. I had heard from a lot of hardcore gamers that Halo was over-simplified, derivative, and overly repetitive. Maybe it was these low expectations, maybe it was my newfound respect for mainstream geekery, or maybe Halo is just a really good game, but I really liked it. I didn't love it, but I liked it.

So here's my opinion of Halo: Combat Evolved, as someone playing it for the first time, a full decade after its release.

The first thing that struck me about Halo was the color. It's a very colorful game, all the way through. There is more color in this one screenshot of Halo than there is in the entire Call of Duty franchise.

And there aren't even enemies on the screen there. In the middle of a firefight, there are dozens of enemies with deep red and blue armor, highlighted by the lush, green, outdoor backdrops, as hundreds of multi-colored plasma bolts fly through the air. If Halo had been yet another bland, gray, visually unappealing shooter, I don't think it would have won me over like it did.

The second thing I noticed about Halo was how well grounded it was in its science fiction roots. If you pay attention, you'll notice that Halo is hardcore sci-fi, and I was surprised to see how many tropes they were able to pull in. Just within the first hour of the game, you have a ring world, strong AI, holographic interfaces, anti-gravity propulsion, plasma weapons, energy swords, alien races, and faster-than-light travel. In this day of "realistic" sci-fi, very few games are able to hit as many iconic themes as Halo. The people at Bungie are clearly fans of the genre. The fact that the pilot of the main human dropship had the callsign "Foe Hammer" made me grin from ear to ear.

In terms of gameplay, everything I had heard about Halo was true. It was simple, derivative, and repetitive. That was what made it fun. I was able to mindlessly run and gun for the vast majority of the game. I didn't have to hide behind cover very often, my finger was constantly on the trigger, and I almost never stopped moving. It made me feel powerful and awesome without shoving it down my throat by reminding me how much of a hero I was.

In fact, Master Chief is such a staple of today's gaming culture, that I just assumed that the game idolized him the way most Halo fans do, and that's not true at all. Master Chief appears to just be a high-ranking soldier in some cool armor. Nobody on the field seems to recognize him and when he does something cool, people congratulate him on a job well done instead of lauding him with unnecessary praise and affection to make the player feel good like some games do. It was well done and appropriate. I appreciate that.

Then there's The Library, Halo's seventh level. For years I have been hearing about how terribly designed The Library was, and, again, it might have been my low expectations, but I thought it was a blast. The environment was lonely, yet mystifying and reminded me quite a bit of Space Mountain in Disney World. The music provided good atmosphere, I got through it pretty quickly, and it gave me another opportunity to fight the Flood.

I really enjoyed fighting the Flood (Halo's equivalent of the headcrab zombies from Half-Life) simply because they offered a different approach to combat. There are so many of them that every time you kill one, five more take its place. They aren't that big a deal to fight individually and even fighting a dozen or so isn't that bad, but when they start to swarm and they begin to live up to their name, they start to feel like a real threat. Of course, shooters have done this before, but I think Halo does it particularly well.

However, it's certainly not the god-like messiah of first-person shooters that many claim it to be, and there were quite a few things that stuck out to me as being particularly poorly done. First, the vehicles (though varied and interesting) were so difficult to control I began to wonder if Master Chief cheated his way through Spartan Driver's Ed. Couple that with the fact that every small speed bump skyrockets ground vehicles into the air in a fascinating display of physical surrealism, and you have a  recipe for a controller-throwing headache-fest.

I also didn't understand why Master Chief's armor could withstand hundreds of bullets, plasma bolts, and attacks from parasitic bug-monsters, but one slice of an energy sword kills him on the spot. I could probably count on one hand the number of times I died from conventional enemy attacks in Halo. Nearly every time I died, it was because I was stabbed by a sword, had a grenade attached to my armor, or was blown off of a ledge by tank fire. These deaths were very difficult to avoid and were all one-hit kills. Normally, I wouldn't mind this, however the rest of the game is so easy that having to do the same section of the game over and over just because there's a guy with a sword breaks up the flow. In a really difficult game like Battletoads or Ninja Gaiden, you see the "Game Over" screen every five or six minutes, and it becomes a part of the game. Going two hours without dying and then dying five times in a row from the same thing grinds the game to a halt.

In addition, maybe my perception is skewed, but it's hard for me to see Halo as revolutionary. Halo came out in 2001, and by that time we had already had Half-Life, Unreal, Unreal Tournament, Quake II, Deus Ex, and many others, and there really wasn't much that Halo introduced that wasn't done just as well (or better) in those games. True, it popularized "Wolverine health" and introduced the idea of carrying only two weapons at a time, but while these features were well-executed (and made sense) in Halo, I really hate them in other games. It's hard for me to see those things as a positive influence.

All that being said, however, I thoroughly enjoyed it. I intend to play the sequels, however I'm a bit hesitant, since I have heard that none of them was quite as good, but maybe they will surprise me, as their predecessor did. No matter what happens, I have certainly lost my most vital asset for the next time I play "Never Have I Ever."

Huge Tracts of Land

I once knew a game called The Elder Scrolls. You may have heard of her. She really likes attention. I've heard her called a lot of things in the time I've know her: "the best-looking RPG ever," "Game of the Year", and "one of the best role-playing games ever made.

I just called her TES.

TES and I first met back in 2002. She was different then. She had just gotten out of a long relationship with the PC, and decided that in the new millennium, it was hip to be bi-platform. I played her on the Xbox. She was cute, near-sighted, and one of the most expansive games I'd ever played. Her favorite color was brown, she loved to read, and she called herself Morrowind.

Morrowind was an open-world game, the first I'd ever played. Her world was detailed, imaginative, and grandiose. She was going through a more detail-oriented phase. I had heard at the time that back when she was called Daggerfall, her world was over 300,000 squared miles of sparse, randomly-generated land. Now, she was only 10 squared miles, but her attention to detail in landscaping, lore, and atmosphere was more than apparent. Unfortunately, our flirtation lasted only a few short hours. She was directionless, hard, and wanted to take things much too slowly. I was immature, unable to recognize the value of the story she was trying to tell me, and was unwilling to put in the work to unlock the potential of our relationship. Besides, I was kind of stealing her from a friend of mine, so I cut her off. There was no animosity, no bitter feelings. We just weren't right for each other. I wanted something easy and fun, and for all of her wonderful qualities, Morrowind was not that game.

I didn't see TES for a long time after that, and to be honest, I didn't think that much about her either. It wasn't until 2006 that I saw her again, and I was floored. Gone was the pretty, brown-loving, near-sighted game I met years ago. This game was a knockout! She had clearly gone through several makeovers, changed her name again (this time to Oblivion), and she featured the voice of Patrick Stewart.


Patrick Stewart!

This game was the complete package. She was beautiful, smart, and had a lot of ideas. We had some great times together. We rode horses west to the far-off city of Anvil, fought our way through countless dark, terrifying dungeons, and searched for Nirnroot by every lake we found. We laughed at the bugs and we cried at the tragedy of The Gray Prince. We were happy. Sometimes, I was content to just walk through her world for an hour, just because. And if I happened to get a little action along the way, hey, all the better.

Then it all fell apart.

I remember our first fight. Oblivion gates (essentially portals to hell) were opening all over Cyrodil. Demons called Daedra were invading, with the intention of mass-slaughter. The allies of the resistance were gathering in a city called Bruma. TES told me to go out and find as many allies for Bruma as I could. Happily, I went all over Cyrodil, talking to the leaders of every city we had encountered in our travels together, but they all asked me to do the same thing. Somewhere nearby, there was an Oblivion gate. They wanted me to go in, close the gate from the inside, and then they would aid Bruma. This was a fairly boring, lengthy, and tedious process. I did it three times, and as I did, I was able to think about my relationship with TES. Why would she make me do this? This was her idea of a good time? Then I started think about our other experiences.

Riding for hours through a dense forest, trying to find the main gate of Anvil?

Long, drawn-out, repetitive dungeons?

Having to stop at every, single, stupid lake to look for Nirnroot?

Why was I doing this? What was the point? Oblivion had so much to do, but it was all boring.

But she was pretty.

That's when I realized what had happened. TES had taken all of the things that made her interesting when she was Morrowind and streamlined them, simplified them, and dumbed them down to make herself more accessible. All this time I had been mesmerized by her beauty and intrigued by her ideas, but her ideas were all the same. And they were bad.

As soon as I closed the third Oblivion gate, I took one last look at TES's blue sky, lush rolling hills, and snow-capped mountains, and I quit.

I didn't even save.

In my mind, Bruma is still there, waiting for reinforcements that will never arrive, as the Daedra ravish the land, and TES tearfully looks at me and asks, "Why?"

The next few years were tough. Even though I wasn't playing her anymore, Oblivion seemed to be a constant topic of conversation. Mods were released, then expansions, then DLC. When she won Game of the Year at the Spike TV Video Game Awards, I'm pretty sure I grumbled something like, "I hope it doesn't take her five hours to come up to accept." Any time anyone mentioned Oblivion, rather than tell them the truth, I told them that I hated her because the truth was just too complicated. Months went by, then years. Finally, TES fell off the radar when her sister Fallout 3 was released. Fallout 3 was a great game, but it took few risks. It became so popular that I began to think that TES was gone for good.

Then, a few months ago, at this year's Spike TV Video Game Awards,  Todd Howard from Bethesda Softworks came onstage to announce Bethesda's new game.

It was TES.

Her trailer didn't show much, but it was narrated by Max von Sydow and revealed her new name: Skyrim. I didn't know what to think about seeing TES again, but from the time I spent with her, I knew what the title referred to. In TES's world, Skyrim is a frozen wasteland where the barbaric Nords hail from. Screenshots confirmed this soon after, showcasing ruined temples, desolate snow-covered valleys, and tough, muscular monsters. It looked like TES had grown bitter in our years apart, sacrificing her roots in optimistic fantasy for gritty realism.  And I couldn't help but think it was my fault. In each of those shattered buildings, I saw the pieces of the relationship we once had.

But then she released this trailer.

And I noticed something. Behind the brutal, desolate landscapes, the dark chanting of her main theme, and grotesque monsters, TES had hidden something away. Take another look at that trailer, around the 1:44 mark. Behind the guy getting stabbed, there is a lake.

Beside that lake is a Nirnroot plant.

That one, little plant says so much. It says that despite the changes she's made, TES is still the same game I met all those years ago, full of optimism and new ideas. She lets you live in a world, not just interact with it. She gives you the opportunity to be whoever you want to be, even if it's not very interesting. She offers her players the chance to do anything they want, even if it's just look for plants. Whether it works or not, and whether it's fun or not doesn't matter. It's still a noble goal.

Congratulations on your new game, TES. I hope it goes well for you, and I look forward to hearing about it's release. May you find a better player than I.

Mightier Than the Sword

I'm almost finished with Dead Space 2, and I have to say that it has been one hell of a ride so far. I originally started the first game back when it came out in 2008, but I only played it for about twenty minutes, due to the amazingly poor quality of the PC port. I dredged it out again recently because of a friend's high recommendations and because Dead Space 2 was coming out soon and was getting a lot of hype. I played it with a controller this time (the mouse/keyboard controls really make the game unplayable), and stuck it out through the first (rather boring) chapter. I am so glad I did.

Dead Space isn't just a good game. It's a great game, and when I beat it, I immediately bought, installed, and played the sequel. As long as I have played video games, I have never beaten a game and started its sequel on the same day. It's usually just too much of the same thing for me, but Dead Space was that good. One of the things that made it so good was the characterization of the main character, Isaac Clarke, which is odd because throughout the first game, he doesn't utter a single word. Isaac is yet another example of the tired "silent protagonist" trope, a concept so inane and outdated that it makes the save points littered throughout both games look like the way of the future. Instead of speaking, Isaac's thoughts are written in his "personal journal," essentially the quest log. It's actually pretty interesting, and it got me to read to read the log for every quest, which is not something that I would normally do.

In the second game, in addition to keeping a journal, Isaac is fully voiced, which gives him an opportunity to talk about things other than which part of the ship is broken and how he needs to fix it. I still read the journal, however, and it was going great until towards the end of the game. I checked my journal, and read that Isaac was looking for a certain character that he was particularly worried about. I then moved forward a couple of feet, which triggered a cutscene in which the character that Isaac was looking for dies a horrible horrible death. After the cutscene was over, I pulled up Isaac's journal to see what he had to say about it, but according to the journal, Isaac was still looking for that character and was still very worried. That was the first time in either game that the illusion was shattered enough that it occurred to me that there was someone who actually wrote these journal entries. Someone over at Visceral Games actually took the time to put this much thought into characterizing Isaac through his mission objectives and, for the most part, did really, really well with it.

What an awesome job. I want that job.

Most quest logs are terrible. The ones that do try to take the first-person narration style usually don't work and are filled with unnecessary filler. The others are usually short, to-the-point, and boring. Borderlands did a pretty decent job, but after a couple of hours they descended into tedium. Alan Wake was interesting, but that game didn't really need mission objectives, and ended up just rehashing recent events. I think quest logs need to be spiced up a bit, and I think it would be awesome to be the guy that does it.

I went through the Dead Space credits to see if I could find out who this guy was, but there was not a single writing credit. Not one. There were a bunch of general "designers" credited, but nothing specific in terms of writing. Oh, well. I guess I'll have to go back to my old dream of being the guy that designs the "options" menu.

Resistance is Futile

A while back, a friend of mine recommended that I play an old Star Trek game from 1996 called Star Trek: Borg. It's a moderately short interactive movie which has some interesting puzzles and features John de Lancie reprising his role as Q. It sounded like fun, and I love playing old games, so I decided to give it a shot.

I say I love playing old games, but really there's more to it than that. What I really love is figuring out how to play old games. I've spent many hours tweaking settings in a Playstation emulator trying to optimize Resident Evil. I dual-boot 32-bit Windows XP and 64-bit Windows 7 so that I can play the games that run in one and not the other. One of the twelve icons I have on my desktop is a shortcut to DosBox. It's the thrill of getting something working that didn't work before that really gets me excited.

Therefore, I apologize for geeking out a bit. The rest of this post will be rather technical and boring. Spoiler alert: I got Star Trek: Borg working, and it was hard.

What made Star Trek: Borg interesting was that any attempts to get it working in a modern operating system were pointless. Upon installing the game, the installer makes three checks. The first is to ensure that the host operating system is Windows 95, the second is to ensure that the resolution is set to 640 x 480, and the third is to ensure that the color settings are set to 16-bit color. These three checks meant that none of my usual tricks were going to work. I was going to have to get a Windows 95 machine.

Of course, it didn't have to be a real Windows 95 machine. Getting Windows 95 working on modern hardware is pretty much impossible, and I was not going to buy an antique computer to play an FMV game. So I decided to set up a virtual machine running Windows 95.

That was as far as I got before I started running into problems.

The first thing that I needed to do was get some virtualization software. As a student, I have access to Microsoft's Dreamspark program, which gives out free software to people with valid student IDs. One of the programs that they offer is Virtual PC 2007.

Perfect.

So I downloaded Virtual PC, but apparently it doesn't work in 64-bit operating systems, and I wanted to do everything in Windows 7, so switching to XP wasn't an option. I happened to have an older version of VMware Workstation, so I decided to use that instead. I also had a physical copy of the Windows 95 CD-ROM that I found in a drawer when my family decided to sell their house a couple of years ago. I installed VMware Workstation, created a new Windows 95 machine, and inserted my disk.

Nothing happened.

I played with the boot order, checked the settings again, made sure that the virtual CD-ROM drive was reading properly, and tried again. Still nothing. I was a bit stumped, but I decided that it had to be the disk that wasn't working. To test this, I created a new identical machine and installed Windows 98 on it. It worked like a charm. Now I knew that there had to be something wrong with the Windows 95 disk, so I went off in search of another copy. What I found was the thirteen floppy disks for the original build of Windows 95. I hesitated to do this because I knew that the original build not only had issues that were fixed in later releases, but also that it came without a web browser. That meant that it would be tricky to do things like download drivers and patches.

Well, I did it anyway, and the installation really went off without a hitch. The problem came when I tried to install the VMware Tools that come with Workstation. Included in the VMware Tools are the virtual video drivers that would allow me to set my resolution and color scheme. Whenever I tried to install the VMware Tools, Windows would give me the all-to-familiar "illegal operation" dialog box that, honestly, I had almost forgotten about. There wasn't too much I could do. I couldn't get online to download a solution, and if I couldn't install the video drivers, I wouldn't be able to set my color scheme beyond 16 colors, and I needed to get up to 16-bit color.

So I went off in search of another copy of Windows 95. This time I found the latest release that I could, the OEM Service Release 2.5, which was released in late 1997. This version came with Internet Explorer, was released on CD-ROM so I didn't have to keep switching floppies out, and was much more stable. It also came with Hover!, a capture-the-flag style 3D hovercar game that I sunk quite a few summer afternoons into as a kid. That last one didn't really help me achieve my goal, but it was an added bonus. This time installation ran smoothly and the VMware Tools installation ran, but there were errors. Specifically, the video drivers didn't install fully. That was okay though, because they provided instructions at the end of the installer on how to install the drivers manually. I did so and rebooted. Much better.

To test things, I got out my original Fury3 disk. It installed fine, but I noticed that there was no sound.

Sigh.

The sound drivers hadn't installed properly either. This one wasn't easy. I spent several hours browsing online before I found a solution. Apparently, sometimes the sound drivers just don't work in Windows 95. Imagine that. I eventually found a patch that installed different sound drivers. I uninstalled the default sound card, manually set the default to the new one, booted up Fury3, and was treated to this. Awesome.

By the way, as a side-note, Fury3 is a really fun game. I had forgotten that too.

Anyway, with all that done, I set my resolution to 640x480 and put in the Star Trek: Borg CD, excited to finally get to play something I had worked so hard for.

But I had forgotten something. When VMware Tools installed the video drivers, it gave me tons of option for resolution, but only three for color palettes: 16 color, 256 color, and 32-bit color. Of course, when you have 32-bit color why would you ever downgrade to 16-bit color? Except I needed 16-bit color to bypass the check that Star Trek: Borg made.

I was stumped. I had no idea what to do. I did Google search after Google search, and none if it yielded anything. My friend had told me about a patch for the game that just bypassed the three checks, but at the time I told him that wanted to run the game in its native condition. Now that option was looking better and better all the time. I was depressed. I had put all of this effort into something, and I had hit a dead end. I went to bed with the intention of asking my friend for the patch in the morning.

The next morning, I sat down at my computer to do my usual daily routine and noticed something that I had left up the night before. It was the VMware documentation for setting screen color depth. I'm not sure why I hadn't noticed it the night before. According to that documentation, VMware Tools would enable only 16 colors, 256 colors, and whatever color palette the host operating system was using (in my case, 32-bit). With this information, I set my Windows 7 color palette to 16-bit and restarted VMware Workstation. No change. But I wasn't ready to give up yet because now I knew what I was looking for. After a few more searches, I found a small app that would automatically change the virtual machine's operating system's palette to a specified color depth. I downloaded it and set it to 16-bit color.

Star Trek: Borg installed and ran.

I was so excited. It worked, it had sound, and the I did it without modifying the game at all. It was a wonderful feeling.

You might think I'm insane for all of this, but that's okay. It was worth it.

On to the next project.

An Open Letter to Valve Software

Dear Valve Software,

Please stop saving me money on games.

Seriously. Stop it.

It's weird really, because when Steam was first released, it was difficult to find someone who was more opposed to the entire concept than me. I liked having the physical copies of my games, I thought that having to download games was bothersome and took way too long, and I hated the fact that I had to be online to play my offline single-player games.

Man, how times have changed.

These days, if it's a PC game and it's not on Steam, I probably won't buy it. All of the old physical copies of games that I loved so much are now backed up on my hard drive. The physical disks gather dust in my closet. I believe that the last boxed PC game that I bought from a store was Fallout 3 (more than two years ago), and I have no idea what the last one before that was. The time spent downloading is still annoying, but for big releases, I'm able to preload the game in order to play it the second it's released. And I don't even have to leave my house! Being online to play my games is no longer an issue for two reasons: first, I am almost never without an internet connection, and second, if I am without an internet connection, Steam has a fully functional offline mode. Steam is wonderful, Steam is simple, and Steam saves me money on games.

Stop it.

I do not need to be spending $90 for a pack that contains every Star Wars game since 1995. Deus Ex: Invisible War was not that good. I do not need to spend $10 on a digital copy just in case I ever want to play it again. I do not need a $5 copy of every new innovative indie game (of which there seem to be hundreds). And for God's sake, I do not have the reserve capital to keep up with your ridiculous sales.

How do you people make money? Honestly. Today on Steam, you can get Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, a game with a Metacritic score of 93%, which cost a full $50 when it was released in 2003, and is to this day one of the finest RPGs ever made, for a meager $2.49. That's ten gumballs from a gumball machine. That's less than half the price of a ticket to a movie. A Big Mac from McDonald's costs more than one of the best games ever. Of course I'm going to buy it.

You can't pass up on deals like that. It's almost unethical to pass up a deal like that. But that's where I get into trouble. Because all of those $2, $5, and $10 purchases add up. I frequently find myself not being able to afford the big blockbuster games because I couldn't pass up the deal on the Space Quest collection. In addition, I don't buy a lot of the big blockbuster games when they come out because I know they'll go on sale at some point. I'm pretty sure I'm the only gamer I know that hasn't played Call of Duty: Black Ops yet because it's still $60 on Steam.

It's relentless too. Just two weeks ago, Steam had a great deal called The Great Steam Treasure Hunt. Every two days there were four new challenges that could be completed through Steam. One usually had to do with something within the program itself, (like have ten friends in the Steam community), one was usually for a blockbuster game (like recruit a companion in Fallout: New Vegas), and the other two were usually for indie games (like get a score of at least 3,770,488 in Beat Hazard). All of the games associated with the challenges were on sale, and every time you completed a challenge, you got one more entry in the raffle. Every two days, Steam gave away five games (the top five games on their wishlists) to twenty people. This went on for two weeks, so a 140 people got five free games. Not terrible odds.

It was fun too. I went in knowing I probably wasn't going to win anything (I didn't), but still did my best to complete as many challenges I could. Of the 28 challenges, I completed 16, and tried out a bunch of great games in the process, some of which I otherwise never would have tried (except Just Cause 2. I did not like that game. It was not worth the $7.50 I paid for it). In the end, I played quite a few new games for the price of one. Not too shabby.

The day the Great Steam Treasure Hunt ended, a new Steam sale started. This time, every day there were thirteen new deals, and for the whole month most of the publisher game bundles were anywhere from 55% to 88% off. The Square Enix/Eidos Complete Pack contains 35 games plus DLC worth a little over $700. Usually, the pack on Steam costs $606. Until January 2, you can get the The Square Enix/Eidos Complete Pack for $75. Again, you can't pass that up. In addition, there's also the eleven indie packs each for $5 that contain 5 games. That's a dollar per game. Right now, you could be playing VVVVVV (which I highly recommend) for the same price as a taco from Taco Bell.

And when you think about it that way, sure. Go ahead. Buy it. Heck, buy all eleven packs, but oops! Now you've spend $55 on 55 indie games that you're never going to play, and you still haven't played Call of Duty: Black Ops.

Argh!

Valve, you have proven to me that you are the master and I am your slave. You do not need to prove it any longer. Please release me from this agony. Please don't make me do stupid things like buy Neverwinter Nights 2 for $10. Please stop saving me money on games.

Sincerely,

Alex Ingraham

P.S. The money that you have made off of me alone should be enough for a new Half-Life game. I'm still waiting, you know.

Stranger in a Strange Land

In July of 2000, PC Gamer, in place of their monthly demo disk, released a CD-ROM containing thirteen classic games from the late eighties and early nineties. Many of the games were not new to me. I had already fallen in love with The Secret of Monkey Island and King's Quest,  I had watched my brother play through quite a bit of Descent, and Terminal Velocity was really pretty much the same thing as Fury3. However, there were three games on that disc that I would say truly changed my perspective on gaming: X-COM: UFO Defense, Duke Nukem II, and Ultima I.

I would love to talk about X-COM and Duke Nukem and how they shaped how I think about games today, but that's not what this post is about. This post is about Ultima.

Ultima was not the first Western RPG I ever played. In fact, as I mentioned before, I was pretty well-versed in games by that time. Monkey Island had taught me that video games could make me laugh, Final Fantasy VII had taught me that video games could make me cry, but it wasn't until Ultima that I felt like it impacted me. Before, games were stories about other people, and while I was certainly immersed in some of them, I never felt like I was part of the world. Ultima had this huge world to explore with so many things to see and do. You could steal, and fight, and explore, and go to space, and go back in time, and cast magic, and save princesses, and it all felt like it was something that you were doing. I never referred to The Stranger in third-person. I was the Stranger.

The reason I bring this up is that last Tuesday, I saw Richard Garriott (Lord British; The creator of the Ultima series) speak on a panel called The New World of Gaming hosted by the Rice Alliance at UT. Now, it's been a pretty crazy couple of weeks for me, since the Tuesday before last I saw Neil Gaiman, Adam Savage, Paul and Storm, and the Red vs. Blue guys at W00tstock 2.9, and this weekend I'm going to get to see Billy Dee Williams, Adam West, and Lou Ferrigno at Austin Comic Con [Note: This post was written before I went to Comic-Con, which I can now say was totally awesome.]. However, I have to say that getting a chance to see Lord British in person really takes the cake.

But I really had no idea what I was signing up for.

I went with two friends, neither of whom had played Ultima, but were interested enough to go. They both wore polo shirts and at least semi-nice pants. I wore an over-sized Playstation 3 T-Shirt and a pair of dirty black jeans. For some reason, I thought I would be the one to fit in more. The first thing that we noticed upon arriving was just how many old people there were. Now, granted, Ultima I came out thirty years ago, but even then, the age gap didn't work out. Most of them were also wearing suits. I also found it strange that they would give us vouchers for two free drinks at the bar, though I certainly didn't mind. There was also a buffet included with the price of the ticket ($10 at the door) that had a rather impressive assortment of things to munch on. The vegetable wantons were quite tasty and there were some sort of Italian-fried-cheese-somethings that were absolutely delicious. It was actually while I was eating that I heard a very loud voice directly behind me talking about NASA and space exploration. I didn't really need to turn around to verify that it was, in fact, Lord British standing no more than two feet away from me, but I did anyway.

It was surreal.

Richard Garriott's was the first name I ever heard connected to gaming. He's really an icon in the gaming world, and most of that is due to his real-world persona. He's grotesquely rich, was the first second-generation astronaut, was the first mainstream video game developer in Austin, owns an awesome mansion  with secret rooms, and in 2009 he officiated the first-ever wedding on the zero gravity plane. On top of that, he made Ultima! The man just exudes cool. You can imagine how I felt standing right next to him. I nearly choked on my Italian-fired-cheese-something.

I didn't go up to him because I truly had nothing to say. All I could do was sit by the door to the auditorium and wait for the panel to start. When the panel did start, I discovered that there were three other Austinites joining him, none of whom I had ever heard of. One was an investor, another was the CEO of a social gaming company (the creator of Qrank), and I can't really remember who the other guy was. It didn't take me very long to realize that this panel was not at all what I thought it would be. In his opening statements, Richard Garriott split the video game timeline into three segments. The first was an era single-player games, mostly played by nerdy males in their mom's basements, the second was a shift towards multiplayer games which incorporated a bit more of a mainstream audience, and the new dawning age was one of social casual games like Farmville and Qrank. He talked about the fact that games are "reaching all of humanity" through Facebook and mobile devices, and about how that was where the money was. He said that the "Great Equalization" that everyone was hoping that the Internet would bring about didn't happen, and that the only way to succeed as a gaming company was with capital, superior numbers, and top talent; Not necessarily good game design. "Big companies win," he said.

I was a bit taken aback. This wasn't the Richard Garriott I thought I knew. This wasn't the man who took me to Sosaria, has a dead guy in his basement, and fought off a deranged fan with an uzi. This wasn't Richard Garriott the dreamer. This was someone else.

Now, I'm not a starry-eyed romanticist. I know that if you're going to be successful in business, you need to have some sort of business sense. In addition, I know that you need to follow trends and patterns to see where the money is. In this sense, he's right. Social, casual games are making a lot of people a lot of money. But he's right about another thing too:

Gaming is reaching all of humanity.

Call of Duty: Black Ops sold 5.6 million copies on its launch date. More than 10 million people play World of Warcraft. There is a reality TV show called the Tester about people vying for a video game testing job that is being renewed for a second season. There have been video game weddings, video game proposals, video game museums, video game concerts, and extensive video game-related communities with people of all ages, races, genders, backgrounds, and beliefs. Gaming is finally being accepted as a legitimate art form. This is the era of gaming in which it realizes its true potential. Games are now able to tell their stories and share their experiences with a massive whole new congregation, and the man who could be at the forefront of that wants to make another Farmville?

The rest of the night went on in a similar fashion. Questions were asked by the audience, but none of them were about games. At one point Richard Garriott mentioned that he had never employed a game designer that he felt was better than himself, and it took pretty much all I had not to mutter, "Well, that explains Tabula Rasa."

I hate to sound bitter, and in all actuality, I had a great time. The food was great, I learned a lot, and I got to see a childhood hero in the flesh, even if he was a bit different than I expected. I still have an enormous amount of respect for the man, and if he ever decides to do a repeat of the '94 Descent Into Darkness Adventure at Britannia Manor, I'll be first in line, but if I need someone to help me push the boundaries of gaming, I think I'll ask Edmund McMillen.

Bad For Thinking

In light of my previous post, a friend of mine asked me to post the original list of my top ten favorite scary games. Here they are:

10. Amnesia: The Dark Descent
9. System Shock 2
8. F.E.A.R.
7. Aliens versus Predator 2
6. Doom 3
5. Silent Hill 3
4. Half-Life
3. Eternal Darkness - Sanity's Requiem
2. Resident Evil - REmake
1. Silent Hill 2

Note that these are my "favorite scary games," rather than "games that have scared me the most." I found Doom 3 to be a much scarier game than Half-Life, for example, but Half-Life is definitely my favorite of the two.

A quick anecdote about a game I feel should get an honorable mention:

One of the very first real games I ever played as a kid was Star Wars: Dark Forces, a Doom-style first-person shooter. It was passed on to me (along with the CD-ROM version of the first two Prince of Persia games) by my brother when I was eight. I had never played a first-person shooter before, so it took me a while to even beat the first level, but when I did, I really got into it. In the third level, however, Kyle Katarn (the main character) visits the sewers of Anoat City to track down an Imperial weapons designer. With the exception of a couple of interrogation droids, the only monsters in the level were the dianogas that lived under the water. You couldn't see them, you couldn't go under the water, and the only hint that you had that they were there was the occasional eyeball stalk that would pop out of the murky water to look around. The sewer would be quiet for a while, and then suddenly you would have have this in your face:

Okay, so kids today may have their Flood and their Locusts, and I'm sure that they all make the dianoga from Dark Forces look laughable today, but to an eight year-old in 1996, this was what terror looked like.

So, I had this problem. I loved the game, and I wanted to continue, but I was too afraid to even start the level, let alone finish it. So I got this brilliant idea: I would get my mother to play it. After all, any other time that I was afraid of something, I would just get Mom to take care of it. I remember quite vividly what it was that I told her to convince her to come upstairs to see Dark Forces. I said, "Hey Mom, have you ever wondered what the monster that dragged Luke under the water in Star Wars looked like?" And my poor, sweet mother who, at the time, was lying on her bed, peacefully reading a book and drinking tea, looked up at me and said, "You know, I always have." 

To my knowledge, as of today, my mother has only ever played two video games: Dance Dance Revolution (a completely separate, yet fun story) and the third level of Dark Forces. I would stand behind her, facing away from the screen and she would describe her surroundings. It took us a good chunk of the summer, but together, we navigated the labyrinth-like sewer, and while she never actually beat the level herself, she got me close enough that I was able to make a mad dash for the exit.

It is one of my most cherished summer memories.

Of course, Dark Forces isn't a horror game. In fact, while Anoat City is still pretty horrifying to this day (I had to play it in order to take the above screenshot. I won't lie, my heart was racing a bit), the rest of the game is pretty tame. It's for this reason that it only gets an honorable mention, but it has a very special place in my heart.