I almost transitioned completely into the multi-player mode of StarCraft II. There is hardly anything more the single-player mode has to offer for me. But it delivered in spades. Maybe not so much in terms of storytelling. However it is an amazing example of a incredibly well design campaign and a fascinating campaign structure. I believe there might be a game design review in it or two.

The thing I did last were the challenges and I love this idea as well. In case you don’t know what I’m talking about, they are small, isolated mini-game-like missions that are designed to teach some skills that help in multi-player. Each of the challenges comes with some way to keep a score and there are various rewards associated with different levels of progress. As already mentioned, a tiered system of achievements uses the challenges to help teach players how to transition into multi-player.

The challenges themselves are also quite fun and well-designed. The first 3 are about unit counters. You need to distribute an army among 3 separated battles. You have all the time in the world to prepare. You can even see what type of enemies you will fight against. When you are ready, the battles take place one after another so you can concentrate on each one. This exercise is purely about learning which units have an advantage over other units.

Then there are some challenges where you need to use a small army of specialized units to eliminate as many enemy units as possible in a huge but quite passive base. This one is timed but you can see exactly where enemy units will be waiting so you can plan ahead on how you want to proceed. The one I found most fun is called “Infestation” where you need to use the Zerg unit Infestor to wreak havoc to a Terran compound. This unit take control over enemy units. It’s visualized by a hilariously campy tentacle jacking into the brain of the victim. The entire scenario plays out like something out of Starship Troopers. And on top of being funny, it’s challenging as well.

The ones where I have learned the most are Psionic Assault and Opening Gambit. In Psionic Assault you need to defend yourself again incoming waves of units, not unlike Tower Defense. Instead of towers you have only a handful of quite unseeming Protoss units: High Templar and Sentries. Neither of those do a lot of damage. Actually, High Templar can’t even attack. I was stumped when the game told me to kill 250 units with this tiny, puny army. It turns out the trick is to use various abilities and the environment to neutralize and eliminate the attackers. It’s a great way to learn to use those units efficiently. I actually use Sentries more frequently in multi-player now and just today I pulled of a trick I got from that challenge. It was immensely satisfying. Just I wished there were more Challenges that focused so intensely on the various ways you can use an specific unit type.

The other eye-opener was called Opening Gambit. It asks you to build up a Terran base as quickly as possible and produce a certain amount of units before the timer runs out. The AI will attack a little bit so you need to expand quickly but reasonably. Doing this with a sliver rating was pleasantly challenging and a great lesson. But doing this on gold was REALLY hardcore. The build order needs to be just perfect. Slacking of for just a blink of an eye will have a disastrous impact on the final results. I got some help and finally did it with exactly 0 seconds to spare – James Bond style. Again, after doing the gold run, I can actually see how my build order is much more tight and aggressive. Again, it would have been great to have the same challenge for other races to. Maybe even for other units so you can practice different openings.

I will now continue playing StarCraft 2 on a regular basis. Not too intensely – maybe a game or two a day. I was slightly disappointed when the first league I qualified in was bronze. From the reports I heard from other players I expected to do better. I’m not a total n00b to StarCraft after all. I have three theories. It could be that there are local differences in opponent quality. I can imagine the average playing level to be quite high here in Europe – especially in Cologne. Indeed I was mostly matched against Gold or Platinum opponents. The other explanation would be that I’m simply late to the party and the barrier of entry is considerably higher now than a few weeks ago. Finally, I may simply be not quite as good as I thought.

But actually, I’m looking forward to try to rank up. If I was in a higher league it would be much more difficult to improve. If you are interested in playing with me, simply add me on BattleNet. My nickname is “Krystman” and my code is 811. It would be a pleasure!

Despite of all that praise, StarCraft II has also some really horrible parts. I received the full brunt of one of them doing the single player achievements: the top-down shooter Lost Viking.

At fist sight it’s a cool feature. If you click on an arcade machine in the adventure part of the game you can play a StarCraft-themed arcade game. It’s called Lost Viking (a reference to The Lost Vikings, an old Blizzard game from the time they weren’t called Blizzard yet) and it’s an old-school top-down shooter. I think I heard somewhere that it might have been done completely with the StarCraft II level editor which would be quite astonishing. Whether it’s true or not it uses exclusively assets from the strategy game and it features some quite funny tongue-in-cheek humor. The game has 3 levels and even shows some polish. There are 3 huge boss battles, a power-up system. Levels also increase in complexity when you re-play them after beating the game.

This would haven been peachy if it was a little bonus that you could check out, laugh about and move on. But then the developers came in and spoiled it by introducing achievements. So now there are 4 achievements associated with it. They are categorized as campaign achievements so they are a legitimate part of the single-player experience. One is awarded for completing the game which is somewhat tolerable. The other 3 are associated with getting a certain high score. Especially the last one requires you to get 500,000 points which means beating the game 3 times in a row without running out of lives.

And this is where the joke turns sour. Because once you start playing the game seriously, some quite annoying flaws turn up. The collision detection is horribly fuzzy and unforgiving, the controls are clunky, the power-up system seems unfinished and the levels get boring very soon.

Take the the collision detection for example. Japanese shooters have evolved a very interesting philosophy of hit-detection. The player’s sprite is often a lot larger than the area where collisions are registered. The collision box is actually very small in general while bullets are quite large. This makes up for exciting moments where players miraculously graze bullets that seemed like they would have hit them. Ikaruga is a prominent example. The hitbox in Lost Viking is as big or even slightly larger than the player sprite. All this does is creating moments of infuriating “WTF!! How did that hit me?!?!”.

I eventually got so frustrated that I hooked up a gamepad into my PC and used Xpadder to map the gamepad onto the Lost Viking keyboard controls. The rapid-fire functionality of Xpadder and the improved usability of the gamepad helped to get through but it certainly wasn’t something I look back at favorably.

All in all, Lost Viking is inferior even to most no-budget indie shooters. It’s no wonder. I don’t think Blizzard set out to make a great shooter with StarCraft 2. They focused on creating a great RTS. It’s funny and impressive that the game engine can also handle a top-down shooter but it should have been be obvious that such a mini-game would be far cry from the cutting-edge. The game design mistake is that they expected too much from it. Instead of focusing on the strengths of the game, the achievements needlessly emphasize a weak part of the game. What could have been a cool bonus turns into a obnoxious chore.

I recently watched the new A-Team. There was one strikingly bizarre shot that movie. Something I’ve never seen executed that bluntly.

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If you aren’t aware of the problem: the movie is supposed to take place in Germany, especially in Frankfurt. This shot is supposed to show an areal shot of the Frankfurt train station. It clearly shows a shot of Cologne instead. How do I know? Because of the ginormous Cologne Cathedral RIGHT NEXT TO IT!

To give you some more context. The Cologne Cathedral is the very symbol that city. It is an official World Heritage Site of the UNECSO. Building high rise buildings in the city is actually forbidden by city authorities in order to retain the Cathedral’s prominent status. The fact that the train station is right next to it is deliberate as well as extremely unique. It’s an overwhelming experience to arrive at Cologne and being greeted by the breathtaking image of the cathedral. The Cologne cathedral is one of the most iconic and best-known architectural monuments in Germany. It’s Cologne’s Eiffel Tower, Space Needle, Emipre State Building, Tower Bridge – you name it.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg. The movie is full of the most horrible blunders and mistakes. This article lists some of them. The buses on the streets are the wrong type and wrong color. The taxis are wrong. The license plates are from a different city. They even got Germany’s emergency number wrong (911 is 110 in Germany. In A-Team it’s 109). Some of the supposedly German policemen are actually speaking Norwegian. One of the main characters is brought to a U.S. Embassy in Frankfurt that simply doesn’t exist.

And those are just factual mistakes. One scene shows an old German geezer dynamite fishing. It’s not factually wrong but it’s unheard of and highly unlikely in Germany. Explosives are extremely controlled here and there are practically no secluded, uncontrolled waters. The only instances where I heard from such practices are U.S. TV Series and Movies.

But you know what? I would accept all of this. It’s a Hollywood movie and clearly they weren’t able to shoot in Frankfurt. At least they made an attempt to make the shots appear somewhat German. But that areal image of Cologne being sold as Frankfurt is where I draw the line. It’s stupid, careless, lazy and simply insulting. The filmmakers should have known that people would be able to instantly identify the iconic Cologne Cathedral on that shot. They clearly had areal footage of Frankfurt. Frankfurt actually has a much larger train station than Cologne. In the end, the movie isn’t significantly improved by that shot so there was no reason to misrepresent Frankfurt to such an extent.

And it’s not like the movie has redeeming qualities either. It’s a very weak attempt at monetizing on an old franchise. The characters have hardly anything in common with the team that made the original so successful. Face was busy showing off his pecs rather than being a smooth-talker, Hannibal wasn’t cocky, Murdock was neither crazy nor funny and BA was simply a pansy. Any attempts to inject some half-assed messages failed horribly. Hannibal talks about “fighting for the right thing” or something along the lines but their mission is to recover stolen stupid plates for printing money? How is that supposed to be something worth fighting for?! I remember the original A-Team was always helping innocent individuals in need. It was shallow but at least emotionally and morally unambiguous.

Here is what sums up how bad that movie was. After seeing Jessica Biel in that movie I found myself looking back more fondly on Stealth. Nuff said.

As many noticed a recent comic by Penny Arcade ignited some very silly discussion about the morality of the used games market. Apparently, there are a lot of misconceptions about how the market works. Let me address some of them.

Comic is here

First of all, the comic implies that if you bought a game used, you aren’t a customer. This is pure, condensed bullshit. By purchasing a copy of a game you also purchased all rights of a genuine customer. The original customer gave up said rights in return for your money. He transferred his customer status to you. This should be a perfectly valid and acceptable transaction. It was one for decades. Yet suddenly it isn’t?

The argument that PA uses is that by buying a game new, you give money to the developers. Back in the real world, it rarely works this way. There are at least two middle-men between a developer and the customer in the store. The most important players here are the publisher and the retailer. The publisher pays for a game UP FRONT. So the developer gets their money even before the game hits the shelves and regardless how it sells. In most industry contracts the developer only gets an additional cut of the sales revenue after a certain threshold of sales has been reached. The publishers often make sure that threshold is high enough so that they never have to share any profits with developers. This is how they make profit on their initial investments. This is also how they ensure that developers stay dependent on a publishing contract.

Of course, when a game flops this usually means that the publisher makes loss on that particular game. This is the downside and the risk they are taking. That’s why publishers invest in many projects in paralell. The extra revenue on some games should pay for the loss on others. When developers get closed down by publishers it’s not necessarily because that particular developer’s game didn’t make any profit. It often just means some of the publisher’s other, previous projects didn’t make enough profits to sustain the current projects. When a game makes less profit it can even be the publisher’s fault. After all, it’s the publisher who takes care of marketing and PR. The studios that get closed aren’t necessarily the unprofitable ones either. They may just as well be the most expensive ones or the ones where the next release is furthest away. That’s why you sometimes see studios get closed right after they release a successful game. If sales went directly to developers this shouldn’t happen.

As you can see this is a very complex equation. Yes, loss of profits for used games play a role in this but the connection is very indirect. Don’t think that the money you pay for a game will go straight to that developer’s pocket. It fuels the entire system. A system that does benefit the developer but quite far down the line.

So what about GameStop? Well, they are the retailer. They are part of that system just like publishers are. Without retailers, developers would also make much less money. Retailers get games from the publishers, put them in their stores to re-sell them to customers. Actually, they don’t even buy them from publishers. There is a complicated contract going on. They basically borrow them and split the revenue when they manage to sell them. That’s why there can be so much price variation over time. The problem with video games in particular is that the profit margin – the fraction of the money that the retailer is allowed to keep in order to pay for the staff and the rent – has become very, very low. Retailers have to give most of their revenue back to publishers. I know this because I know an owner of a mid-sized toy store chain. Some time ago I was invited to a German congress of toy store owners that dealt with exactly this problem. Most other goods in toy stores have twice the profit margin. In order to run a game store successfully you need to be selling a lot more items than other stores. What GameStop did was a very aggressive but a smart move. Used games have much higher profit margins. For many game stores this is the only way to stay alive these days. Internet shops and digital delivery basically made sure that this situation is going to get only worse.

Considering all this, this discussion of badmouthing used games is an attempt of publishers to re-claim their part of the profit. Sadly it doesn’t really benefit developers or customers. The ugly part is that they exploit the emotions of game enthusiasts. If you love games you are emotionally attached to the people who make them. Propaganda like this is trying to guilt you into giving up your rights as a customer.

For a long time now the industry has been trying to have their cake and eat it too. In an attempt to suck out more money out of customers they are transforming physical products into intangible licenses. They want to arrive at a point where basically rent air. It’s a business utopia – infinite scalability with arbitrary profit margins. In case of games this started by reducing the elaborate boxes of the past into compact, empty DVD cases we have now. This paved the way for digital distribution. What they forgot is that they created a product that is easily duplicable and doesn’t age. As a customer, don’t let them persuade you into taking away your rights. You will lose them soon enough when everything moves on-line. Until then enjoy them and do with your games whatever you want. You paid for them. You own them. You are the reason why all these other people have a job.

Disclaimer: I rarely buy used games. I have only sold a couple of games and regretted it afterwards. I never used a store like GameStop for selling used games. But I have a steady income and I turned playing games into my job so don’t expect other people to behave like this.

One of the new technologies I was looking forward to experience in person at GamesCom was stereoscopic 3D for gaming. Just like Move and Kinect it is an experience that can’t be conveyed by any kind of established means of mass communication. The device I was looking forward to most was the Nintendo 3DS. Unfortunatly, Nintendo didn’t exhibit it at the show floor. Apparently there were demonstrations behind closed doors but I didn’t manage to get in. So I was left with what Sony prepared this year.

Off the bat, 3D wasn’t really very prominent. I saw a total of 3 (!!!) 3D-enabled demo stations. They say that this was because Playstation Move was Sony’s focus this year. It left a bitter aftertaste of Sony not being really confident with that technology. And if this is true, I can tell why.

Speechless on how bad this is…

The first 3D station was the remake of Sly Cooper. I put on the 3D glasses, looked at the screen and wondered why the image was gone. It took me a few seconds to realize that the image was still there but incredibly dim. Apparently, the shutter glasses reduce the luminosity of the screen by half. What looked like a decently lit TV screen before became a large equivalent of a 1st gen GameBoy Advance screen. You know, the one without back-light. But hey, at least it’s 3D right? Well, kind of. Sure, there were scenes were the 3D effect really worked. In one sequence you had to crawl though a ventilation shaft. That looked fine. In the normal 3rd person view, the 3D effect was barely noticeable. You got used to it very quickly anyway and forgot all about it.

I thought maybe the screen was mis-configured. I wasn’t looking forward to Sly Cooper anyway. Next up, I tried GT5 which is a game I am REALLY looking forward to. The station was a cool racing seat with a steering wheel and the screen installed really close. I thought that would blow me away. It didn’t. Again, the screen got a lot dimmer with the glasses on. Even that close to the screen, the 3D effect was barely noticeable and didn’t affect gameplay in any way. The feeling of speed wasn’t more intense as I have hoped. I wasn’t able to grasp the track geometry any better than in 2D. The most disappointing thing was that the cars didn’t even look very plastic. They seemed almost like flat billboards. I have no idea if this is a limitation of the 3D technology or an artifact of some weird trick they are pulling off to get the 3D effect working. And as with every stereoscopic 3D I’ve seen so far, parts that move quickly tend to flicker a lot. Not the best technology for a racing game. The top it off, the head tracking we have been promised didn’t work either. Thank you, but no thank you.

There was a Killzone 3 station as well but it wasn’t working on that day and I haven’t bothered to check up on it later on. Killzone gives me narcoleptic attacks anyway.

All in all, this was a quite sobering experience. At this point, 3D TVs are WORSE than 2D. Having a bright, vivid 2D image is way more impressive and immersive than a dim, low-contrast, flickering sorta-3D. Again, I have no idea if the TVs were badly configured. But if this was indicative of how stereoscopic 3D is supposed to work, 3D technology is something I’ll gladly skip.