I spotted my copy of The Ultimate DOOM this evening and decided to run through it again.  What a fun game!  With the exception of Descent, which was a rockin’ good multi-player game, I have yet to find another game that has grabbed me the way that DOOM did, and the game’s 8 years old!  Why?  It’s obviously not the graphics.  Today’s 3D shoot-em-up games have much nicer graphics than DOOM.  No, it’s the game balance and level design that make the difference.  I think game developers these days spend way too much time worrying about technology and too little time on level design.  Every new game has to have a new graphics engine that adds some new visual feature but adds very little (if anything) to game play.  Why?  Do the people who buy games for the cool graphics really outnumber those who buy for the game play?

I think a company could make a very successful game by hiring a small team of programmers to create a level editor and the basic game logic to tack onto an existing game engine.  Take half of the money saved on game engine development and hire some experienced level designers to create a couple dozen well-planned and balanced levels.  Complete the project in half the normal time, release a half-dozen levels as shareware to suck people in, and make a killing on full registrations.  Possible?

I received an email today from somebody who has been playing the game TriTryst that I wrote for Virgin Interactive back in 1995.  He was looking for the solution to one of the game’s levels.  I probably can’t help him, as it’s been years since I played that game and I’m sure I only solved that level once during play testing.

So I fired up my browser and asked Google to search for all occurrences of the word “TriTryst”.  Of the 400 hits, most of what I found were reviews and links to the time-limited demo that we released shortly before the game was published.  Two people mentioned it in their online journals, both in reference to wasting time “playing solitaire and TriTryst.”  The game has even made the abandonware sites.  You can download the entire shipping game (5 diskettes) from http://old.theunderdogs.org/Puzzle4.htm.

I learned a lot writing TriTryst, my first game, and have enjoyed playing it over the years.  Although it didn’t sell well, it appears to have developed a small cult following–from time to time I get email from people who are still playing it.  I’ve actually cobbled together a clone of the basic game in Delphi and Kylix (I no longer have access to the original C source), but haven’t put the effort into trying to duplicate all of the game’s functionality.  Perhaps it’s time.  It’d be a great game for the Palm.

GameSpot has published an interview with Sid Meyer and Jeff Briggs of Firaxis games discussing Civilization III, which will be shipped to stores on October 30.  I’ve been something of a Civilization fan since I was working at Microprose on the second Civilization III team.  (The first team was horribly mismanaged and the project was canceled.  I quit the second team [also horribly mismanaged] just a few months before Microprose ceased to exist.)  I previously posted some of my thoughts on Civilization II (albeit in the context of the game Alpha Centuari–see June 26), and had given up on ever finding a resource management game that wasn’t tedious, so when I saw that Civ III was upcoming, I was hopeful that they’d fixed those problems.  Sadly, there’s nothing in the interview to indicate that.  They’ve added flash–more and varied units, nicer graphics, and more gameplay features–but they don’t say anything about having fixed the automation problems.  The game looks compelling, and if they fixed the A.I., I’d be all over it.  But I don’t think I’ll be able to bring myself to shell out the $40 or whatever it’ll cost just to get ticked off having to micro-manage 200 cities.  I guess I’ll have to find some other form of entertainment. 

If you liked the game Civilization II, you might be interested inFreeciv–a Free Software knock-off of the game.  According to the website:  “Freeciv is a multiplayer strategy game, released under the GNU General Public License.  It is generally comparable with Civilization II, published by Microprose.”  Linux and Windows versions are available, and since it’s released under the GNU GPL, full source code is available too.  I haven’t tried it yet.

I wonder if they’ve solved the micro-management problems that drove me away from Civilization II.  I suspect not.  But since the source is available perhaps I could get in there and add some more intelligent automation.  It’s an interesting thought, and would be tempting if I had the time for it.  By the time I finished, though, I’d probably be so sick of the game that I wouldn’t want to play it.

The first video game was conceived and written by MIT students on the PDP-1 back in 1961 and 1962.  Spacewar was a two-player game in which players tried to shoot each other’s ships.  The link will take you to a Java rendition of the game.  The Java program is a PDP-1 emulator.  It’s running a version of the Spacewar program that was compiled by a PDP-1 assembler written in PERL.  See the Readme link on the Spacewar site for more information.

I found the Java version difficult to play because it kept missing keystrokes.  It did bring back memories of the old arcade game that I put way too many quarters into back in the late 1970’s.  That game was called Space Wars, by a company called Cinematronics (not to be confused with the other Cinematronics, my former employer and creator of the Space Cadet Pinball game that Microsoft shipped with the Windows 95 Plus Pack and now ships with Windows 2000).

I discovered the addictive quality of turn-based strategy games in 1981 with a game called Santa Paravia and Fiumaccio on the TRS-80.  Not much of a game compared to today’s standards, back then it was captivating and I spent almost an entire week of my 3-week summer vacation playing it with a friend.  You can find a free Windows version of that game at http://www.jeffrey.henning.com/app/paravia/default.htm.  A couple of years ago I found a TRS-80 emulator for Windows, and was able to download the BASIC version of the game.  You can find anything on the Internet.

I avoided resource management games for the next 15 years, until I was hired by Microprose to work on their Civilization III project.  Figuring I’d better learn something about the genre, I immersed myself in Civilization II.  Fascinated at first, I quickly became bored with the game’s limitations.  I played Railroad Tycoon II for a while when it came out, but I prefer turn-based rather than real-time strategy games.  I burned out on gaming, and didn’t play much of anything for a couple of years.

I saw Sid Meier’s Alpha Centuari in the bargain bin ($9.99) at Best Buy last week, and picked up a copy.  This was being developed about the same time Microprose was killing Civilization III, and I remember looking forward to its release.  It looked like my dream game:  a follow-up to Civilization II with more unit types; unique personalities, strengths, and weaknesses for the different factions; and some automation to help relieve the drudgery.  I spent a few evenings last week and most of the weekend playing the game.

The game is beautiful.  The terrain is nicely rendered, the units look great, bases actually expand as their population grows, the menus look great, and the music and sound effects are wonderful.  Beyond that, though, there’s not much to differentiate it from Civilization II.  Each faction has strengths and weaknesses, but they’re not anything that other factions can’t acquire.  The game A.I. is still entirely too apt to start a war, and the automated city managers are mindless automatons that rarely guess correctly which improvement should be built next.  Automated transformer units seem to randomly transform terrain rather than take into account the needs of a base, and they often start transforming squares that aren’t even within any base’s perimeter.  Very little has been done to relieve the tedium of having to micro-manage bases.

In the late stages of a game, it’s not unreasonable to have dozens of cities, many of which will build new improvements or military units at any given turn.  If you’re waging a military campaign, you’ll want to move those new units to a base that has a transport so you can get the units across the ocean.  With dozens of bases, it’s difficult to remember where the new units are and where the transport is.  Rather than present you with a list of new or active units and their associated locations so you can batch select and order them to the transport base, the game activates each unit in turn and expects you to tell it where to go.  The result is a tedious and frustrating game.  I can understand micro-managing a handful of bases and units, but the game’s automation facilities should grow as your civilization grows and becomes more advanced.  I want to manage an empire, not single-handedly construct every building and fight every battle.

It’s as if they took the core Civilization II code (a nightmare, believe me–I’ve seen it), wrapped it in a new user interface, added some units and other cool stuff (build your own unit types, big freaking deal), and called it a new game.  They concentrated on flash rather than game play.  SOSBNB (same old shit in a brand new box).  Don’t waste your money on this turkey, even if you find it in the bargain bin.