Star Comma Eight

Screenshot of the day: Bejeweled Twist

Ahhh, the Mega Fruit Bonus. Say what you will about casual games, you have to respect the polish and craft that PopCap put into their titles. Bejeweled Twist wasn't as successful as the mainstream Bejeweled titles -- perhaps the rotation mechanic was too confusing for some, or the stress of all those bomb gems was offputting. But it's a brilliant little game, full of finely-sustained tension and tough decisions. And when you are fortunate enough to strike exactly the right four matches in a row just after you've detonated a 'fruit' gem, you get the above song-and-dance number. Here's the full version on YouTube. It's one of the great endorphin-delivery moments in gaming.

Screenshot of the day: The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind

As here and here, another shot of characters in a CRPG admiring the view in a lake. This time, the lake is pretty enough that the user can admire it too, rather than projecting imaginatively into the heads of characters who are themselves consist only of a tiny icon and a few alphanumeric stats. I'm not sure which experience is the more evocative. There's a particular frisson to the mental work that takes place when you convert a primitive grid of iconography into an alluring vista. That work, here, is impossible in the user, as it's already been done by the game artists. If the goal is "you-are-there" immersion, there's no contest. But I don't always play games to be immersed, at least not in the naive sense of fooling myself about what physical space I'm actually occupying.

The game is Bethesda Softworks's 2002 CRPG, The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, albeit modded to within an inch of its life to make it prettier for modern consumption. ("Modern" -- as though 2002 weren't modern. But time seems stretched in gaming as in nothing else.) I'm thankful for the legions of talented fans who periodically brush and shine this game. It's like none other, and I want to keep returning to it from time to time.

Screenshot of the day: Ultima Ratio Regum

 Is it not lovely? Once again we have a view by a lake in a tile-based CRPG with the word "Ultima" in the title. The game in question this time is not, however, "an Ultima," but rather a work-in-progress roguelike called Ultima Ratio Regum. It's being developed by a one-man team consisting of Mark Johnson, a postdoctoral fellow and game developer and world-record-holder in various twitchy action games. He may also be working for MI6; I don't know. There's a very interesting interview with Johnson on Rock Paper Shotgun.

I have spent only a short time mucking around with Ultima Ratio Regum, but I admire its clean, accessible interface, and the evident ambition of its procedural world-generation. Civilizations, religions, even the other worlds in your solar system, are all worked out before you set foot in the place. You can wander about in the world to your heart's content once it's been created, but it's all a bit barren as of this writing. However, Johnson claims computer-controlled non-player-characters (NPCs) are to be implemented this month. I'm excited to see what that will be like.

I love the idea of roguelikes. I love that there are idiosyncratic developers out there crafting worlds of incredible depth, and pushing procedural generation as far as possible. The recent release of No Man's Sky has engendered debate -- some of it rather heated -- about the value of procedural generation as a method of creating games. I have seen it argued that without a hand-crafted story, it's all for naught: a procedurally generated game is doomed to be a mile wild and an inch deep, essentially empty, dull as ditchwater, all variety merely a superficial reshuffling of impersonal elements. Setting aside Minecraft -- which seems to be doing quite well despite the lack of any story at all -- I hope the anti-proceduralists don't carry the day in this design debate. Whether a purely procedural game, or a hybrid, is the way forward, it's a technique that has always excited me because of its capacity to create unique content and to create virtual settings and objects that are simply there, shorn of authorial intent.

All that said, I must admit I spend more time thinking about the potential of roguelikes than actually playing them. I'm always hopeful that I'll find the one that really clicks for me, though. Perhaps it will be this one.