At twelve years old, I was already long since steeped in the world of video games. Hand in hand with that, the sounds of those games were also intimately woven into my memory. Someone only needed to hum the first note of the Mario or Zelda themes, and they would instantly flood to mind. I could whistle through the entire soundtracks of Mega Man 2 and 3, and then switch over to a stirring rendition of the first stage of Contra.

The music was an essential part of the gaming experience, but not something I had ever given much thought to beyond that. It was what it was, and the best of it was worth hearing over and over and over. That all changed in 1991 when a friend of mine loaned me Final Fantasy IV for the SNES.

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From the moment the first strains of the Prelude came flowing from my television, it was obvious that there was something different about this game. The more I played, the more that feeling was crystallized. Here, suddenly, was music that meant something. This was not a game with simple repeating tunes for each level; this was a game with an honest-to-goodness score. With the improved sound capabilities of the SNES, here was a game that moved beyond the (still fantastic) chip tones of the NES, and was using it to make music that was intertwined with the game itself, and not simply background decoration.

Final Fantasy IV was an amazing game for many reasons, and changed many of my expectations of what games could be. The music, though, worked its way even deeper into my mind. The dream of making games was already one I aspired to, but suddenly I wanted to know how I could create music that could make those games something even greater. While I had taken piano lessons when I was younger, my musical knowledge was minimal, at best. Yet, armed with what little I knew, I would sit at the family piano and work on plunking out the songs from the game. I started very simply, picking out the bass line of the theme from the Tower of Bab-il. Once I had that down, I started working on the melody.

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Unfortunately, I was still not a very good piano player, so getting them both out at once was a bit of a challenge. Fortunately for me, I soon discovered MIDI composers for the computer that let me work with sheet music directly, and a whole new world opened up. I would fiddle around, experimenting with different chords, not really having any sort of sense of how music was actually supposed to be composed. Over the next few years, Uematsu scored even more amazing games, such as Final Fantasy VI and (parts of) Chrono Trigger, and his music remained enthralling to me. Even if I couldn’t write my own with any sort of success, I would get the sheet music of his when I could and try to figure out what exactly it was that he was doing.

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When I went to college, one of the first classes I took my freshman year was Introduction to Music Theory. Now, at last, I was learning the secret code that explained how those notes could come together into something wonderful. Through my music classes, I was convinced to start singing, and joined a local choral group. From that, I ended up in the school’s Early Music Consort, where I ended up getting the opportunity to sing renaissance Christmas carols at the National Cathedral in Washington D.C. I learned how to play a few instruments and had some jam sessions with a few Japanese exchange students, which in turn led to them convincing me to study abroad in Japan for a while. There, another exchange student hooked me up with some friends of hers who were looking for somebody who spoke English and could sing to head up their Smashing Pumpkins cover band.

If you are expecting this to be the part of the story where I reveal that we were discovered by a Japanese record label, and I became rich and famous, you would be incorrect. We only ever had one performance, and it was in the basement of the university student center. I came home from Japan, finished up with a minor in Music, and did not seek out stardom. The memories that I have of those times, however, remain with me always.

So while Nobuo Uematsu did not pick me up from the streets or turn me from a life of crime, the impact he had on my life is undeniable. I still, to this day, enjoy sitting down and working on a musical composition just for fun. I will always cherish the experiences I had because of the time I spent studying music – experiences I probably would not have had otherwise.

No matter where you may stand on the “games are art” debate, there is no denying that they can have an impact on our lives. Just as books or films can change our view of the world, games are equally as capable of opening our eyes to new thoughts, or setting us down unexpected paths in life. As I looked around at the hundreds of people gathered in Stage One that night, looking up at a man who was a hero to me, I knew that I was not alone in that. As Tim Lydon, guitarist for Year 200X said in his introduction to the Earthbound Papas, Nobuo Uematsu is “the man who wrote the soundtrack to our childhoods,” and for one glorious night, we were all there to cheer him on together.

First, there was Uthgerd, who I met in the inn at Whiterun. She had a fiery temper, and insisted that we get down to fisticuffs after the briefest of conversations. I gave her a sound thrashing (as heroes are wont to do), but her toughness impressed me. She was happy to find a travelling companion, so with that, the two of us set off into the world.

Our first few weeks together were spent merrily exploring the lands around Whiterun; slaying bandits, dispatching wolves, that sort of thing. Eventually, I decided it was time for us to push our horizons a little further, and we set off to the west to see what adventures lay there. All was well and good until the fateful day I agreed to check out some Dwemer ruins buried beneath Markarth, for it was there that our adventures came to an end. A might spider, far greater than it’s pathetic kinsman we’d been purging from caves across the land, confronted us in its lair. Seeing this foes power, I fell back into the tunnels, using the rocks to my advantage to pepper it with arrows. Uthgerd, on the other hand, did what she always did: ran directly up to it and began hacking away. The spider had her on her knees in a few moments, clinging to life. Mere seconds after that, its deadly poison finished the job and she was gone (or perhaps it was an errant arrow of mine; let’s not dwell on the past).

I felled the mighty beast shortly thereafter, and knelt by Uthgerd’s side to mourn her. Also, to take her armor and weapons so I could sell them back in town. With that brief bit of ceremony out of the way, I returned to Whiterun to find a new travelling partner. Fortunately, I knew I had a housecarl named Lydia more than ready to take the job…

You Don’t Have to be a Doctor to Have a Companion

The concept of the companion is not anything new in gaming: a computer-controlled character that travels with, and fights for, the player. And in most cases, for as long as I can remember, I have never been able to care about them. On the surface, the idea seems sound: provide the player with a character that is out of their control, but that they can begin to feel responsible for. In that manner, the player should begin to connect with them, and thus have a deeper in-game experience.

The problem is that AI companions are usually have about as much depth as the puddle of spilled coffee I inevitably step in on the train. Take Wasteland, for instance, which offers several potential NPC companions through the course of the game. Beyond whatever initial situation you rescued them from/hired them in an alley/agreed to help them with, they really have nothing going on. Once Ace convinced me to go deal with the problems in Vegas, he pretty much just sat around and wasted ammo if I gave him the opportunity. For the most part in Wasteland, you handed your companions a melee weapon and treated them like a glorified pack mule. Now, I know what you are thinking: Wasteland came out over 20 years ago. And yet, here comes Skyrim.

Much like Wasteland decades earlier, Skyrim offers an array of eager companions through its world. Much like with Uthgerd, the player usually has to accomplish some minor task before earning the devotion of these followers. Once that’s out of the way, however, they don’t have much to say. All it took was a few swings of the fist to earn Uthgerd’s eternal loyalty, and as we travelled Skyrim together, about the only thoughts she could muster were that she had  bad feelings about places.

My second companion, Lydia, was no better. Quite literally assigned to me by the jarl, Lydia was – to quote herself – “sworn to carry my burdens.” And carry them she did, back and forth across the lands of Skyrim. She too spoke often, but had little to say. In a fight, she was more than ready to run ahead and get herself hacked to the edge of death. And, much like Uthgerd before her, met her unfortunate end in some forgotten ruin when she caught the wrong end of a fire burst scroll.

No Tears for the Fallen

Now, I know many Skyrim players have become obsessed with their companions (Lydia specifically), but I think that has more to do with being able to remove her armor than any sort of depth she possesses.

The thing is, it doesn’t take much to make me, as a player, care about my companion. In the original Fallout, the player could pick up a handful of NPC companions to travel with them. While Tycho might not have been the most talkative guy in the world, when he did choose to speak up about a location, it gave me glimpses into who he was. Upon entering the Deathclaw lair, for instance, Tycho states: “Note the lack of any animal life for quite a distance. And the piles of bones. Whatever lives here is a real beast. Keep your weapon handy.” Based on Tycho’s already established history as a Desert Ranger, this simple comment helps reinforce that he is a knowledgeable traveler, and someone you would want at your back while navigating the wasteland. A simple thing to add, but with a powerful impact on the player.

On top of that, Fallout – even with its simplistic companions – at least let me give them some combat orders along the lines of “stay back” or “charge forward.” In Skyrim, while I can give them some basic instructions about waiting for me or pulling levers and things, when it comes to combat they pretty much seem to do whatever they feel like. If I’m hurling fireballs down into a pit of draugr, they seem more than happy to dive right in the way. Not to mention their perverse joy in setting off every trap we come across.

With no personal connection to these companions, I can’t really feel that bad for them when they hurl themselves into the line of fire and suffer the consequences. That being the case, I’ve left a lot of dead travelling partners in my wake.

I bring this up because, as with most of the flaws in Skyrim, it stands out so starkly against so much of what is done right. In such a lush, detailed world, why is it that the people that can accompany me on the journey are so shallow?

Bredth, Not Width

In Skyrim’s case, the experience would be better served with fewer potential companions, but more richly developed ones. Rather than just plunking down another 500 gold for a new mercenary, or working my way up to another housecarl, why not trim the fat a bit and give me a more richly-developed Lydia? Skyrim is a huge land with a rich history, so how does Lydia fit into all of that? She must be from somewhere, and surely a skilled fighter such as herself has done some travelling before. Much like the example of Tycho from Fallout so many years ago, Lydia must have some opinions on the places we’re travelling. Even if it is something as simple as telling me that Markath is famous for its dwemer ruins, or even that she really, really hates necromancers. Just a few little touches to give her some personality beyond her penchant for sounding sarcastic. Or Uthgerd could have a habit of insisting we visit every meadery we pass, or of picking fights with giants. Anything, really, to give me some reason to feel something for these walking loot stashes.

I fully understand that in our current world of having to have every single bit of text in a game spoken, adding dialog is not as easy as it used to be. However, I think eliminating some extraneous lines elsewhere, and refocusing that time and money into creating a few richer companions would be well worth it.

In terms of combat, we’ve seen that AI companions can in fact be smarter than a bag of hammers; Alyx Vance managed it over eight years ago in Half-Life 2, so I would hope that we could see some more advancement in that area.

That Special One

Again, I focus on Skyrim here because it does encapsulate how little we’ve advanced in twenty-odd years, but by no means is it an indictment of the game as whole. The developers took a look at the massive world they wished to create, and they obviously put some priorities ahead of others. From my vantage point, though, if it comes down to Skyrim having 10 more semi-identical caves vs. better travelling companions, the choice is pretty clear. A player is far more likely to remember the way Jordis overcame her fear of spiders to bail you out of a tight spot in a Frostbite nest than they are that one fort up on that one hill.

You know, the one with the bandits?

Yeah, that one.

THE BEST

Joel’s Best of the Year: Ghost Trick

I know some of you are probably howling right now, wondering how I could overlook the late-year deluge of big titles like Skyrim and Skyward Sword in favor of a little-known DS title from last February. Well, I haven’t actually played Skyward Sword yet, so you can take that into consideration. But beyond that: I really do think Ghost Trick was that good.

As I said in my reaction to it back in February, I picked up Ghost Trick with a complete misunderstanding of what I was getting into. Expecting a physics-based puzzler, I instead found a charming, engrossing mystery with a unique set of puzzle mechanics unlike anything I’d encountered before.

The puzzles of Ghost Trick are all elaborate, mind-tweaking affairs, centered on the player’s ability to manipulate simple objects to change the fate of the people around them. While some can get quite tricky, the game never really allows you to fail thanks to the player’s ability to travel briefly through time. On top of that, the designers took the rather ingenious step of actually creating some puzzles that can only be solved by failing first, thus giving the player some critical information they wouldn’t have gotten otherwise.

Most importantly, though Ghost Trick spins a fascinating story with plenty of twists and turns to keep you guessing until the very end. Add to that some stunningly detailed 2d artwork, and you’ve got my Best of the Year.

Jeff’s Best of the year:  Your PC is your game console now.  Bow before your new game console.

In each console cycle there comes a point where the PC hardware available not only outstrips the hardware under the hood of our beloved consoles (it actually does that pretty regularly), but the PC hardware becomes cheap enough that getting a PC that is twice as powerful as your console costs the same amount as buying the console itself.  Toward the end of last year and the beginning of this one, we’ve reached that tipping point and gone headlong off the other end.  PCs that run games at the graphic equivalent of XBox 360 games can be had for a reasonable price, and if you want to spend a little extra, you can add on video cards that can up the level of detail and visual fidelity far beyond what today’s consoles can offer.  Add to this the fact that 360 controllers are compatible with PCs (they’re just USB), and the fact that almost every videocard nowadays has HDMI out, and you can treat your gaming PC like it’s a brand new console.

Given this fact, the game companies themselves are starting to pay more attention to the PC once again.  Pretty much every major release that’s multi-platform has a PC port, usually with graphical upgrades that weren’t present in the console version.  Put the PC and 360 versions of Skyrim side by side, and there’s no comparison.  Same goes for Arkham City, as well as Assassin’s Creed: Revelations.  I’m hoping this will signal a new trend of games being developed on PC, with higher quality assets, and then ported down to consoles, rather than the other way around.  At least until the next generation of consoles comes around.

Last but definitely not least, the proliferation of indie games opens up the PC-as-console gamer to an even greater wealth of content – indie marketing has gone completely crazy, and almost every other day there’s a new indie bundle to be had, with multiple games going for a pittance.  It could definitely be argued that these bundles aren’t doing as much for the indie devs as individual sales would, but in terms of word of mouth, they’re doing wonders.  Games such as Really Big Sky and ARES  wouldn’t have even been on my radar without promotions such as Steam’s indie bundles, or Desura’s “Indie Royale”.  Having more games to play can never be a bad thing, and getting these indies exposure only gets me closer to the next great game they’re going to create.

Mike’s Best of the Year – Zelda: Skyward SwordEven though I still have not finished the game, Skyward Swordhas been the most enjoyable gaming experience I’ve had this year. Miyamoto always gets it just right when it comes to introducing new things, but keeping enough of the familiar around so that players aren’t completely lost.The controls take some getting used to, but with the inclusion of the Wii Motion+, wielding the sword actually feels right. Link actually mimics the sword motions you make on a nearly 1:1 basis. This however can get frustrating sometimes since certain types of enemies require a certain type of attack to kill, but when you do hit correctly it just feels so satisfying.Graphics are a welcome blend of Wind Waker and Twilight Princess. I actually liked both styles, but like seeing Link as a young adult more-so than a child, but the faces remained just as expressive and the world is brilliantly colored. And lastly the music, as per Zelda standard, is amazing.

THE WORST

Mike’s Worst of the Year – 3DS Launch Botch“I stood in line at midnight and paid full price and all I got were a few lousy downloadable games for free” – I should have gotten a shirt with that on it. Nintendo has always been king when it comes to handhelds. Even when facing serious competition from the PSP, the DS just blew everyone away with its library, price, and functionality.The 3DS launched at a price point that was too high, without much in the way of titles, and at an odd time of the year. Truth be told it took the DS about a year to get some really good titles out there, so I may be eating my words, but not having something like Ocarina of Time ready on launch day was really a disappointment. The first really good title that wasn’t a remake, Mario 3D Land, didn’t hit until November, so if you didn’t want to shell out for Starfox 64 and Ocarina of Time again, there really hasn’t been much to play.I will give Nintendo some credit for dropping the price point to something more realistic, and at least giving early adopters something so it was slightly less of a slap in the face. And the system itself is nice, having 3D effects that don’t require glasses is key for any adaptation of the tech, and the improved Wi-Fi is also welcome for any players of Black & White.It’s possible that the 3DS will pick up steam next year, it almost has to with the Vita on the way, and with mounting competition from increasingly sophisticated smart-phones. Nintendo needs just a few more ‘hit’ titles to push the system forward, hopefully something good from the Phoenix Wright or Professor Layton series as well as an exclusive Pokemon title (Gray or Rupy/Sapphire Remakes) and the platform will start running on all cylinders.

There were a lot of pretty big balls dropped this year, from EA’s decision to create Origin, to Ubi’s creation of sixteen layers of crap between starting one of their games and playing it. But for me, the one that dropped the most loudly was Nintendo’s rather uninspired launch of the 3DS.

I have now owned three DS’s since they were first released, and second to my PC, it’s the system I far and away spend the most time on. I have lost count of how many DS games I own, and I have finished almost every single one of them. So when I heard about the 3DS, I was excited that there could be another portable wonder system coming my way. Unfortunately, at launch, I could not find a single compelling reason to pick one up. The game selection was incredibly limited (and not particularly appealing to me), the price was high, and the online portion seemed to be chock full of issues. It was tough, but I made the decision not to buy one. For many months, my decision seemed completely justified.

Now, long after launch, I finally see enough promise with the system to pick one up. Still, if it took this long for Nintendo to snag a dedicated DS’er like myself, that’s a sure sign that something went very wrong at launch.

THE _______

Jeff’s Most self-aware, gamiest game of the year:  Saints Row The Third

In a year where you have new iterations of the latest “gritty, realistic military game #4″ hitting the shelves, as well as new competitors entering the fray in that genre, it’s hard to think that games have become anything but dour, ultra-realistic, ultra-nihilistic war simulators; games that eschew any type of lightheartedness in favor of gun-toting manly men screaming random military speak, and being “oscar mike” about just about everything.  It was downright depressing.  Even the games that were in a sci-fi setting were getting the same hyper-realistic treatment, and of course, were draped in buckets of dark grey and brown paint.  Enter Saints Row: The Third.  You’re still a gun toting manly-man, but as for the seriousness part….well, let’s just say that Saints Row doesn’t wear its’ seriousness on its’ arm.  To say the game doesn’t follow the standard progression of its’ open-world brethren may be the understatement of the year.  The game is roughly forty missions long, counting only the story missions.  One of the very first missions in the game has you robbing a bank disguised with a bobble-headed version of your own face, you’re armed to the teeth with automatic weapons by mission two, and can call in airstrikes by mission five.  This leaves you the rest of the game to gleefully cause chaos in the most over-the-top way possible, and not worry about the dour tropes hanging over other similar games in the genre.

Gaming just plain needs more of this.  While games like Battlefield are lamenting man’s place in the world, and reciting battlefield poetry over the din of the latest human atrocity, Saints Row is screaming “OH HAY GUYS I’M A GAME!  LOOK AT ME!”.  While Call of Duty is committing terrorist acts on civilians just trying to get to work, Saints Row is flying down the street on a rocket-powered bike, and hitting pedestrians into walls with a baseball bat shaped like a phallus.  I’m not saying that every game needs to adopt this lack of seriousness, just that every once in a while, games needn’t take themselves so seriously.

Joel’s Disturbing Trend of the Year: The Loss of Player Agency

While it is no secret that over the past decade, many designers have started leaning more and more towards the idea of games being “interactive movies,” it felt like this year saw this idea move to a new level. Almost all of the year’s biggest releases – Battlefield 3 and Modern Warfare 3, for example – were full of some of the most amazing visuals ever produced in a video game. Watching the first demo of Battlefield 3 at PAX East in the Spring, you couldn’t help but get excited: the graphics were incredible, the sound was thumping and visceral, and amazing things like buildings collapsing were happening all around you. When the game finally came out, however, while all those things were still in place, you quickly realized that – as the player – you had very little to do with them.

Scripted events have been around since Half-Life, but over the years they have become more and more pervasive. Uncharted 3, another of this year’s big launches, has been roundly criticized for some having fantastic movie-like scenes that the player gets to… watch. Sure, it’s amazing when your character kicks in a door, flips three guys over a table, and disarms a bomb just in the nick of time. It’s less amazing when all you did to accomplish that was press “X.”

There is a rule in creative writing called “show, don’t tell.” As you might infer, it means that is better for a writer to paint a scene in which the reader can determine that a character is depressed about his love life based on their actions, rather than simply saying “Dave was depressed about his love life.” I believe that, for games, we need a corollary: “Play, don’t show.” If you’ve got the greatest action sequence in the world scripted out, but the player has no input about how it goes other than a random quick-time event, you are not taking advantage of your medium. Go make a movie if you want every moment scripted out, or embrace that you are making an interactive experience with a player and figure out how to involve them.

With a new lease on life (for the moment, anyway), it was up to me to warn the people of Skyrim that death from above was on the way, and they’d best start finding some hidey-holes if they wanted to survive. Unfortunately for the people of Skyrim, there was a narrow trail leading off the road that I just couldn’t possibly pass up.

Clambering up the trail, I spotted an old mine tucked into the mountainside. As mines so often do, this one had a bandit standing guard outside of it. Clearly, there were nefarious things afoot within, and it was up to me to snuff them out (I was sure the dragons could wait).

Stepping forward, I met the bandit in heated battle. Her sword clashed against my stout shield, iron rang out against iron as our blades crossed, and blood mingled in the dirt beneath us. Shoving her backwards with a blow from my shield, I stepped forward and brought my axe down in a might strike. That’s when it happened: worn down to the edge of death, the bandit dropped to her knees and cried out for me to spare her.

This was not something I expected.

Here, at last, was a choice – to take the life of my enemy in my hands and snuff it out, or to show mercy. As I have said before, games rarely give us the option to not kill our foes. I thought about my time in Skyrim (which, granted, had only been about ten minutes) and about who I wanted to be. Did I want to be a Nord with a trail of death behind me, feared by friend and foe alike? Or, did I want to be a Nord who could hold his head high and know that he was doing what he could to make life better, not to take it away. I wanted to walk over to that bandit, stand above her, and hold out my hand. I wanted to tell her that she had been given a second chance – just like I had mere minutes before – and that she should run home to whatever village she came from and start anew. I wanted to show her that there could be some small light in this blighted world.

As it turns out, I couldn’t do any of those things.

Approaching the kneeling bandit, it turns out I had no options at all. No talking, no holding out the hand of mercy; nothing. Pondering what to do about that, I had the decision made for me: after a few seconds, the bandit stood back up on her own two feet and resumed attacking me. So close to death’s door, it took only the slightest flick of my axe to dispatch her. Her body strewn before me in the dirt, all I could do was wonder “why?”

For a few glorious seconds, Skyrim teased me with the potential to do something so few games do. Yet, shortly after, it showed me that it was, after all, merely a tease. I suppose Bethesda scripted near-death opponents to act in such a fashion to provide a little extra flavor to the already-rich world, but I feel they missed an opportunity in having it mean nothing. In a game full of so many choices for the player to make, this would be an incredibly powerful one for them to add. “Good” players could take comfort in knowing that they could spare their foes, while less personable characters could take great joy in lopping off the heads of their kneeling foes, ignoring their piteous cries.

As it stands, my first encounter left a bitter taste in my Nord’s mouth – from there forward, my mercy has been dispatched in the form of an axe to the back of the head for any opponent who dares fall before me.

It seems for now, the path of death is still the path game designers wish me to walk.

Thanks to everyone who supported us, and we’ll do our best to make sure we keep things going in 2012! And we’ll keep fighting the good fight to see if we can’t get the Sun to recognize video games as entertainment next year, too!

Experience, lifeblood of the RPG character, is handed out in Wasteland for one thing and one thing only: killing enemies. And here I mean that very specifically: characters ONLY get experience if they deal the killing blow. In practice, what this means is that even if Eddard deals 99 damage to an enemy, if Tyrion hits it for that final 1 point, Tyrion gets all of the experience and Eddard is left with nothing.

In the early part of the game, when characters are limited to single-shot weapons and enemies tend to go down in only one hit, it’s not much of an issue. During most normal fights, every character (unless they are truly terrible at combat) is likely to rack up at least a kill or two. It isn’t until you start getting stronger weapons and facing stronger enemies that you will probably start to notice some characters pulling ahead of others. For me, it first became clear with Drogo. One other important note about experience is that any melee kills are worth double. Drogo, who is a big fan of beating things to death, began to pull ahead of the rest of the team during our time in Quartz. With his increased leveling, Drogo began to have better stats than the rest of the party, which in turn meant he was more likely to be dealing killing blows, and therefore was likely to continue to get the lion’s share of experience.

The mitigating factor in Drogo’s case is the fact that we don’t always close to melee range during combat. As such, sometimes he just sits around and twiddles his thumbs. Where the experience gap starts to be more of an issue is with Daenerys. In our adventures in Needles, once we had our hands on some assault rifles, because of her stats or just sheer luck, Daenerys began to rack up a few more kills per combat than everyone else. When this in turn led to leveling her up sooner, again, that led to higher stats and more kills.

Where this experience gap really begins to rear its ugly head is now, during our Vegas adventures. During the first sweep through Vegas, we got our hands on our first energy weapon: a laser pistol. Now, any character can use any weapon, but to use it without the appropriate skill is an exercise in frustration. Without skill, characters will miss pretty much constantly, jam their weapons, and on the rare occasion they do hit, they will do almost no damage. Laser guns, as you might expect, fall under their own skill category: Engery Weapons. Energy Weapons are a high-IQ skill, and can only be learned from a few specific libraries in the game. Of course, energy weapons are incredibly powerful, so having somone skilled in their use is a must.

In our case, Daenerys (who was the smartest in the party to begin with) is the only member of the party currently eligible to learn the skill. Thanks to her slight lead in levels, she has a high enough IQ and enough available skill points. So, with Energy Weapons now a skill under her belt, Daenerys can equip that shiny new Laser Pistol and get to shootin’. This is very, very good, because once we get back to Vegas will be facing even tougher robots that can hardly be damaged by anything less than energy weapons.

I’m guessing at this point you can see where this is leading.

As the most “advanced” character, Daenerys is now equipped with the most effective weaponry, meaning that in most combats from this point on, she is the one earning the lion’s share of the experience. As such, she continues to advance at even faster pace, which in turn leads to sucking up even more of the experience. With the winner-take-all awarding of experience, she is almost always in the position to be the one doing the most killing. It’s an insidious chain of events, and one that the player may not even realizing is happening at first. After a steady stream of one or two characters being promoted while the others are still struggling to figure out which end of the gun to point, it becomes clear there is a problem.

For me, the answer to this problem lay in meticulous micromanaging of some of the tougher combats we faced on the road ahead. I would actively take rounds where Daenerys and Drogo would do nothing, simply to give Eddard and Tyrion a chance to start earning some kills. Obviously, this made combat slower and a lot more dangerous, as letting enemies hang around shooting back at you is always a risky idea. Ultimately, though, I was able to bring the boys up to a point where they too could wield energy weapons (though, spoiler: this didn’t happen for quite a while), and from there on out it was less of an issue.

With such a strict experience award system, such a disparity seems a statistical likelihood, and is the reason I suspect you never see any games using such a method anymore. Lump experience for the entire party, or proportional experience based on actions/damage are more egalitarian ways to divide up reward, and ways that are more likely to keep your party members on roughly equal footing. While it is a joy to see your characters grow, it can be equally as joyless to watch some of them fall behind through no fault of their own.

Now, don’t misunderstand: this doesn’t make the game unplayable by any stretch. Honestly, it’s quite possible to get through the game with only one or two super-characters and the “normals” backing them up. But, like I said, a proud player usually wants all his creations to grow up big and strong, and in Wasteland that can usually only be done with some either some very good planning from the start, or some very meticulous scheming towards the end.

Next Time: A Secret Base and a Shopping Spree!

At any rate, dropped at the southeast corner of the city, it is easy to see that Vegas is far and away the largest location we’ve seen so far. It is also, we quickly discover, the most deadly. Almost immediately upon entering the city, we are set upon by packs of killer robots. Apparently these robots are the “trouble” that Ace was speaking of. Some of them are easily defeated by our current weapons, but others, like heavily armored mini-tanks, send us scurrying for cover as we are barely able to dent them.

The most dangerous of all, though, sits smack-dab in the center of the city: The Scorpitron. This giant armored tank controls the entire downtown area, and getting near it at the moment is pretty much a death sentence. Avoiding the Scorpitron makes exploration much more difficult, and it also cuts us off from a large chunk of the city. Sticking to the edges of Vegas for now, we find a surprisingly well informed hobo who gives us some vital info about the city. It seems Vegas is mostly run by Ace’s boss, Faran Brygo. However, Fat Freddy – a ruthless gangster – wants to take Brygo’s place as top man in town. Freddy has gone so far as to kidnap Convenant, one of Brygo’s men. It seems Covenant is being held in the Vegas jail by Freddy’s men. It seems that Brygo’s best man, Max, is also missing, but no one seems to know what happened to him.

Continuing our loop of the city, we stumble upon the Vegas jail and decide to liberate Convenant from Fat Freddy’s clutches. Granted, we’re not entirely clear of the situation in town, and inserting ourselves directly into the middle of a power struggle might not be the best idea, but sometimes the long arm of the law needs to make snap decisions. Covenant, at any rate, is thrilled with our decision, and offers to join us. We take him up on the offer, as he is quite the formidable fighter, with high stats and lots of valuable skills.

After finishing our sweep of the outer edges of the city, we are beaten up pretty badly from robots fights, and still have no chance of getting past the Scorpitron. Deciding that discretion is the better part of valor, we limp our way back into the desert and decide to explore elsewhere in the hopes of getting our hands on some better weapons and armor. Doing as men have done since the days of old,  we follow the river to see where it leads us.

Coming up to the far north edge of the map, we push Eastward along with the river. Eventually we come to a bridge and are forced south by the map’s eastern boundary. Slipping though a mountain pass, we spot a town we hadn’t noticed before. It is fortunate we arrived from this direction, as an approach from the south would’ve taken us directly into a ring of radiation around the city. Stepping into town, we are informed that we have arrived in Darwin. Like most places in the wastes, we are immediately set upon by a roving gang of thieves and robbers.

This time, at least, they are nice and soft and fleshy.

NEXT TIME: Making Friends, Buying Guns

Some more digging tells us that the cultists are headquartered in the northwest corner of town. Heading up to check the place out, we run into a sporadic but insidious threat in the wasteland: radiation. At various locations around the map are pockets of residual radiation lingering from days gone by. At night, these spots show up on the map as little rad symbols that are easy to spot. During the day, however, they are completely invisible, and the only warning you get is from the insistent ticking of your party Geiger counter. You party starts the game with Geiger counter in hand, so as long as you don’t drop it or sell it at any point, it will always be there as your early warning system. That being said, even with that warning, if you are speeding around the map or simply aren’t paying attention, it can be pretty easy to wander into an irradiated area.

Fortunately, in the world of Wasteland, radiation exposure is not a death sentence: a trip to the hospital can clear it up for a few hundred bucks. Still, if you are far from a hospital, or deep in hostile territory, getting irradiated can turn into a pretty major headache.

The Cult of Blood’s temple is surrounded by a field of radiated tiles, so approaching at night is the far safer option. With the radiation illuminated, we are able to pick our way safely across the grounds to enter the temple itself. We are met inside the front door by a group of security robots, which are the first mechanical opponents we’ve faced so far. Turns out they deal out some pretty heavy damage, but after a hard-fought battle, we finish them off. Bloodied and wounded, we slip back out of town to camp. After a night of R&R, we make our way back in and deal with the next wave of temple guardians. Fortunately, the cultists themselves seem pretty oblivious to our presence, so we poke around the building for a while to see what we can find. Scrawled on the back of a pew are the words “MOTEKIM,” which I’m sure will be important later, so we make a note of that. A cultist locker room holds some ammo and other useful equipment, so we reclaim that in the name of the law.

The next room in comes as a bit of a surprise. Stepping up to a computer terminal, we are offered the chance to face a challenge from the cultists. Saying yes, my Rangers are suddenly teleported onto a giant chess board. A blood cultist stands waiting for us on the far side of the board, but we quickly discover that things aren’t so simple: taking a wrong step brings down a rain of laser fire from security turrets along the walls. It seems that there is a single safe path through the room, and we’re only going to find it through guesswork. After some trial and error, we make it to the gamekeeper who asks us how many steps are on the true path (30); if we’d gotten that wrong, we’d have to start over again.

Getting it right, however, dumps us onto a small dock by a blood-filled lake. Lovely. While much of the world of Wasteland has thus far maintained some realistic internal geography, I have to admit that the spatial organization of the Temple of Blood is a little iffy.

Regardless, using our Swim skill to get across the lake, we make our way to the fortress-looking island in the center. Once we reach land, we come under attack from a series of unseen snipers. We have to combat move our way forward to eventually expose each of them, at which point we take them out. It leaves us wounded again, but it also gives us our first M1911A1 Assault Rifles, which are the strongest weapons we’ve found thus far. I give one to Daenerys, and one to Tyrion. That leaves Eddard with the Uzi 9mm, and Drogo with his crowbar. Ace gets Tyrion’s old M19 rifle, and Mayor Pedros is still thrilled to be pounding people with his fists.

Reaching the main gate, we blow it open with some TNT Drogo has been lugging around, and get set to enter the heart of the temple. Now, my memories of the battle that await me through the door are of one of the toughest fights of the early game. My characters still have relatively weak armor, and I recalled getting swarmed by Bloodbeasts – nasty dog creatures – that would tear my Rangers apart. So this time, I make sure everyone is fully healed and ready to face whatever lay ahead.

Entering the room, we detect two pressure plates directly beyond the gate. The game gives us the option to jump over them or not. Had we not detected them, we would have triggered an automated turret that would make the fight even harder. Immediately, several groups of guards and bloodbeasts appear, ready to take us down. To cut a long story short, the first attempt at breaching the temple’s defenses does not end well: complete destruction of the party.  The guards are not the problem – they are fairly inaccurate, and their shots don’t hurt much – it’s the bloodbeasts. With multiple melee attacks per round, they swarm us and kill us faster than we can deal with them.

Reloading, I once again breach the temple doors and leap the plates. It’s then that I have an epiphany that never occurred to my past self: I, as the player, can get past these pressure plates… but can the enemies? Putting my theory to the test, I trigger the battle by leaping across the threshold, and then spend the first round executing a combat move to jump back across the plates and into the shattered remains of the gate. The next few rounds have us laying down fire at the advancing bloodbeasts in the hope of taking some of them out before they reach us. Then, after a round or two more, the first group gets to the plates and is stopped dead in their tracks.  Success! Thanks to this obstacle, we can freely fire on them, but those nasty dogs can’t get close enough to melee us. Suddenly, what was a headache of a fight is a walk in the park. Sure, Drogo and the Mayor are useless as well, but our gun-toters are more than able to deal with the beasts from afar.

Once the Bloodbeasts are down, we jump back into the temple core and finish off a few stragglers. Pushing around to the inner sanctum, we confront the blood priest and his final followers.

As you might expect from his surroundings, the demon-priest is an
utterly corrupt individual. A flowing blue robe covers his diseased body..
and a foul smirk twists his face askew. He smiles and teeth blacker than
ebony glint in the half-light. Palsey’s wracked hands grasp the Bloodstaff
tightly and threaten you with it. ‘”You will not have it,” he whispers
harshly. “You cannot take my life!”

Now, that sounds like a challenge if ever I’ve heard one. Taking him up on it, we enter battle. The blood priest hits pretty hard compared to his followers, but with some liberal use of auto fire, we take down him and his cronies without too much difficulty. Searching through the piles of loot they leave behind, we are able to restock on much of the ammo we just burned, as well as pick up some very valuable power packs (which will be quite handy later). Most importantly, we find the bloodstaff and pry it from his cold, dead hands.

Justice is served.

Next Time: Wrapping up in Needles, and taking a road trip to Vegas!

Really, though, when you get right down to it, what most of us are really looking for in a CRPG is some rock-solid combat.

In almost any RPG you can think of, you are going to be spending an awful lot of time killing things, so it’s vital that the combat system be one that’s capable of holding a player’s interest through the entirety of the game.

That combat plays such a large role in CRPGs is really no surprise. CRPGs grew out of tabletop roleplaying systems like Dungeons & Dragons, and those in turn grew out of the wargames of old. And let’s face it, you really can’t get much more combat-centric than a wargame.

In the early days of CRPGs, combat systems branched into two main types: turn-based, and what I will loosely call “real-time.” Turn-based systems were much as they remain today, focused on the idea of the player and the enemy each alternating turns in some fashion, taking their time to plan out their moves. The early real-time games, on the other hand, were nothing like the fighting-game-esque systems of the Tales series, or the AI-controlled teamwork of Dragon Age that we have today. Mostly, early real-time games involved smashing on the attack key as much as you could and hoping that you killed the monster before it killed you.

Wasteland, for its part, uses a turn-based system that hearkens back to it’s CRPG predecessors, but adds a few little twists of its own. Much like a multitude of other CRPGs from the time (and the many years before that), the fundamentals of the Wasteland combat system involve the player being confronted with an enemy (or groups of enemies), then issuing single orders to their party members to execute during a single round of combat. For anyone who had played a Wizardry game, or a Bard’s Tale, the whole system would look very familiar.

Where Wasteland starts to differ from those others is with the addition of positioning. All battles, once entered, take place on the exact same map the party has been traveling through all game; no separate battle maps, or abstracted spaces where the combat takes place. By pressing the spacebar during combat, the player can see the party’s exact position in relation to any enemies in the area. The distance between the party and the enemies effects both whether you can use melee attacks (only when adjacent), and how accurate your ranged attacks will be (pistols don’t tend to do so well at extreme ranges). On any given turn, enemy groups can move either closer or further away, and the player can choose to move their entire party, or to disband individual members and move them around the battlefield separately.

Again, disbanding can be a powerful tool when used properly, as you can allow your melee fighters to charge forward to meet the enemy while your ranged shooters hang back. The risk here is that if a character is caught by themselves without a medic to back them up, they could be dead by the time you move someone up to help them. Line of sight also plays a part, as any obstacles between the party and the enemy will effectively end combat. This makes hanging out near walls a good strategy, as you can always duck behind them and regroup if things start to look bad.

In terms of per-turn options, Wasteland is actually pretty thin. Characters can either attack, dodge, reload, move, or use a skill. Dodging, moving, and reloading are all fairly self explanatory. Attacks in Wasteland are broken down into two types: ranged and melee. Ranged attacks only happen once per turn, but depending on the weapon the character is holding can be one of three types: single, burst, or auto. Single shot attacks hit one enemy, and that’s that. Burst attacks use up three units of ammo, and can potentially hit up to three targets in a group of enemies. Auto fire burns an entire clip of ammo, and goes against every single creature in an enemy group. It has the highest damage potential, but at the cost of precious, precious ammunition.

Melee attacks, as I mentioned earlier, can only take place against adjacent enemies, but can happen multiple times per turn depending on the character’s skill level with their weapon. Drogo, for instance, can already attack twice per turn with his crowbar, even at this early stage of the game thanks to his high brawling skill.

In my experiences, combat in Wasteland travels in a wave throughout the game. In the early stage, it is pretty straightforward as you have limited weapons and fairly simple enemies. During the mid-game, it starts to feel a lot deeper as you take advantage of new weaponry, and engage in a little more tactical thinking against larger groups of stronger enemies. There is a point towards the late mid-game, however, when it slides back downhill again as your party is usually strong enough to tackle pretty much anything, and combats become a repetitive affair of hitting “Attack” over and over again. Fortunately, at that point combats also tend to go much faster, so at least you don’t feel like you are getting too bogged down. It’s not the greatest system in the world, but it works well, and it keeps things moving.

Next time: We get back to the action, and discover that cultists are sometimes bad people!