Battleforge: The amazing game that nobody has ever heard of

So a few years ago, EA decided to work on shedding their image as a money-grubbing corporation or fund some titles that were unique and interesting. The most often mentioned of these are Mirror's Edge and Dead Space, but the best one by far is a game that nobody ever seems to even know about.

In a nutshell, Battleforge is what you get when you cross Warcraft (the RTS, not the MMO) with Magic: The Gathering...except better. Instead of being tied to a few strict faction choices, you have interesting and dynamic decks that you build yourself. Almost all of the conventions of RTS's have been dropped, and the mechanics that were built up provide an amazing amount of tactical depth, even if you're just using the free-to-play starter cards.

It is, in fact, the only RTS where I've ever been able to get into PvP. All of the others simply have a narrow range of "best" strategies that everybody uses, to the point where you get more variety playing skirmishes against the computer than fighting other people. Battleforge, on the other hand, has a deck building system and low-tier tactics that keep PvP games varied. Every time you think you have a feel for what you'll be up against, somebody else will come out with some bizarre tactic that completely throws you off and makes you reconsider what is possible in the game.

Really, everybody reading this should try it. The free to play game is well worth the time, and after spending a bit of cash on the game ($40-$60), you'll really have something amazing.

Why shooter survival modes are so successful (and how to apply the principle to other games)

I'm not sure who started it, but over the past few couple years, every shooter adds in a survival mode, and player response tends to be extremely positive. In my own case, I'm a huge fan of Gears of War 2, but I've never touched the campaign: I just play horde mode.

If you analyze these against prevailing viewpoints on what makes a game good, you would expect them to be generally uninteresting: No story, no character development, no puzzles, unchanging landscape, etc. So how is it that you can cut most of a game out and find something that many people like even better than what you originally created?

First, survival mode is pure core gameplay. All of the things I listed above can be fun, but they can also be a distraction from the fun (if the core game is good enough). If you want to sit down and shoot some stuff, you don't have to wait for cutscenes or play "Simon Says". Further, instead of trying to learn new landscape, you're focusing on developing tactics for an environment that you're already familiar with. Basically, survival mode just focuses on the best part of the game and tosses out the rest.

Second, survival mode is less scripted. Many of us don't feel much satisfaction from following the pre-planned track that the designers came up with. In campaigns, vehicles, weapons, cover placement, and many other things are carefully placed so that each player runs through roughly the same experience. In survival mode, sure there's careful placement, but there isn't a clear path or much of a "best" method. It falls on the player's shoulders to find the method that works best for him in a given situation.

Finally, survival mode has unlimited (or at least absurdly high) difficulty potential. Shooters tend to do a better job of implementing high difficulties than most games do (though you always have that crowd who wants something harder), but even in those, the situation is often so scripted that there's not much room to formulate new strategies (i.e. if you can't get headshots off faster, this part will always be impossible on top difficulty).

With that in mind, there's no reason that similar gameplay modes couldn't be made for different genres. Viewtiful Joe could have had an amazingly cool survival mode for a minuscule amount of development time. Zelda could have a carefully crafted room that allowed you to make use of all of your gadgets in some wild, long-term fights.

Finally, this would be an awesome feature to add to RPGs, particularly those with a higher tactical potential. In games like Baldur's Gate, Final Fantasy, or Fire Emblem, I'm constantly working to develop the perfect, super-powered group, but the only thing I can do with it is play out the script (with the occasional side-quest thrown in). In fact, if I'm successful in making my super-party, the game becomes really easy.

When you've finished carrying your party through a 40+ hour scenario, it would be cool to have a gameplay mode simply designed to test how awesome you managed to make them. Heck, I'd probably replay some RPG's in their entirety with my entire focus devoted to making a group that could get as far in this special mode as possible.

Overall, I believe that in nearly all games (at least good games), there can be a lot of added value for little cost by adding in a pure gameplay mode. I just hope that more designers start to see the potential.

Study: A Ford Escort will accelerate at more than twice the speed of a Ferrari F-50

According to a study performed by the Michigan Institute of Engineering last fall, a Ford Escort's acceleration capability exceeds that of many expensive sports cars. A few key phrases from the study follow:
1. "Despite conventional wisdom, the Ferrari took 2.34 times longer to reach 30 MPH than the Escort and a shocking 3.45 times longer in the quarter mile race."
2. "Beyond those stats, drivers consistently said that the Escort also handled better at every speed."
3. "It's clear to us that a Ford Escort with 4 wheels is a much better buy for a customer seeking performance than a Ferrari F-50 with 2."

Okay, yes, I made this study up (I'm not even sure if the Michigan Institute of Engineering exists). However, studies of this style are disturbingly common. In fact, I just read one today: Study: Single Parents May Do as Well as Two

The headline is effective in making people believe that the study showed that a stable, two-parent household isn't significantly superior to a single-parent house, in defiance of common sense.

However, if you actually read the article, the comparison is between a single parent who stays single vs. one who starts single but starts shacking up or going through failed marriages. In other words, the study started with a headline that's meant to surprise people but moves to actual details that anybody with half a brain already knew. Basically, it follows the exact same format as my car study above.

Okay, so readers of this blog might wonder: "How does that apply to programming or game development?" Well, this is kind of a stretch, but it applies to everything. The point of this post is to tell people: "Think", "Use your brain", and "Don't blindly trust the 'experts'". The world around you is teaching you to shut off your brain as movies get stupider, schools replace problem solving with rote memorization, and people who dare question the 'experts' are ridiculed.

Take a little time every day to shut off all of your machines and think. Make a point of reading material that challenges your current points of view. Learn to listen and understand before you even begin forming your response. That way lies wisdom, and we can all use more of that.

Quotation marks: Why the English rules are Wrong.

For those of you familiar with the English language rules regarding quotes, you know that you are supposed to put punctuation inside of the quotes. This is bad.

I'll start with a simple sentence; consider this example: Did you read the article "How David Beat Goliath?"

The meaning of the question mark at the end is ambiguous. Is the sentence a question, or does the article have a question as its title? In the English language, these are punctuated the same way.

What if you put that question mark on the outside of the quotes like this: Did you read the article "How David Beat Goliath"? Here, we've made it clear to the reader that the sentence is a question and the article title is not. According to the English language, that's wrong. According to me, the English language is wrong.

Where this gets messy is in nested questions. Try this sentence: The teacher just asked, "Which students read the article 'Why do we forget things?'"

I'm not even sure how that should be punctuated. The article and the teacher's statement are both questions, but that isn't clear from the punctuation. Given the choice, I'd use two question marks (one for each), but I'm pretty sure that doing so violates the language rules.

"So what?" you think. "I can still tell what's being said."

Yes, you can in this example. Let's modify it a little bit with a shortened quote: "You read 'Why do we forget things?'" Is the speaker informing the listener that they read the article, or are they saying it with a questioning tone? When writing dialogue, punctuation such as question or exclamation marks empower the writer to show the tone in which something was said. When the language makes it ambiguous what your punctuation belongs to, the writer's hands are tied.

It gets even better, though, when you get into the fine rules for quotes because not all punctuation is supposed to go inside of the quotes. A semicolon, for example, is supposed to go outside of the quotes. Why? What is accomplished by making arbitrary rules on what goes inside and what goes outside for people to remember?

All of the rules about quote punctuation placement could be entirely encompassed by a single rule: "If it's part of the quote, place it inside of the quotation marks. Otherwise, place it outside of them."

Thus, I've chosen to do all of my writing according to that rule, unless it's absolutely necessary for me to please some English professor. Join me, and perhaps we can turn the English rules into something more sensible.

Blog, which art my creation: I command thee to live!

Well, this brings forth the existence of my first blog. Basically, my nefarious scheme is to use this to post my latest thoughts on the creation of entertainment (books and video games, primarily).

Essentially, writing books and designing games of all sorts have been my lifelong hobbies since I was a young warthog, and I'm highly opinionated on both. I'm also highly opinionated on politics(libertarian), religion (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints), education (homeschooling), finances (live cheaply and stay out of debt), food (sushi, though that one tends to conflict with my previously mentioned finances theory), and water (definitely H2O). However, this blog will be primarily devoted to my hobbies of writing and game programming/design.

So, onto my first game-related post:

XNA is (almost) awesome.

For the uninitiated, XNA (stands for XNA's Not Acronymed) is a programmer's framework that allows them to create game for the Xbox 360. The philosophy behind XNA is to let the game's creators focus more on designing their game and less on the exact behavior of the hardware. Thus, a lot of long and difficult tasks that are normally part of game programming are basically done for you or at least made a lot simpler. The trade-off is that you lose performance, so the XNA games are never going to be as visually impressive as their C/C++ counterparts.

Now that that's out of the way, the question is "How good is it?" First, the positive:

XNA code is written in C#, which I find to be more sensible, easy, and straightforward to code in than most other languages. On top of that, XNA itself is fairly straightforward (at least, as much as it is possible to be in game programming, which is inherently quite difficult). I got more done in a few hours on XNA than a week on DirectX. On top of that, most of the same code will run on both Windows and the Xbox 360, which is quite pleasing.

So what are the negatives? First off, 3d animation. While trying to create my first meaningful 3d game, things were going fairly well for the most part. I had my objects in the game, my physics, my collision detection, etc. Then I tried to animate one of the models...

Instead of finding a nice Animation class that could look into your 3ds max files, find animation data, and convert it to something XNAish, I discovered that animation was practically a cut feature (at least as far as any web searches went). I found occasional third party libraries that were confusing as heck and even more confusing when I tried to understand what they were actually doing, but the whole theory of "Let the programmer focus on creating his game" seemed to be completely lost. The code samples I found seemed to be re-creating in code what the artist had already done in his modeling program. If you're making a 3d space shooter or puzzle game, I guess you don't really need animation, but otherwise...Well, animation is actually the reason that I shelved my 3d game and started on a 2d one. I'm actually making progress, now.

Well, there's my wall of text for the day. Fare thee all well