Xbox Live, however, did not fail. As it grew in importance, EA’s lack of support became a hindrance to them as their biggest sports competitor at the time, 2K, was implementing online features that EA simply couldn’t do. So a deal was struck: third party servers and accounts were allowed on XBox Live, to a degree, and EA was on board. They could now allow people to play their games online (and sell them stuff directly) while still authenticating through a centralized EA account. Both parties were happy.

Customers, however, were a different story. Enter Battlefield 1943.

Having played Battlefield 2 a fair bit, and with my recent shooter binge (Team Fortress 2, occasional Halo 3 again), I was looking forward 1943. A new, but relatively light tactical shooter experience on XBox Live? And one that I can just download at home for a few dollars without having to deal with snooty EB Games employees? I was sold. So when I saw that it was available on Wednesday, I immediately logged in to XBox Live with the intention of buying it. EA had my money. It was theirs to lose.

And lose they did! As I checked the XBox Marketplace, I noticed that the game wasn’t showing up. Not in new arrivals, not in the directory, not anywhere. I checked back on Shacknews and, indeed, I did have the correct date. It was out. People were playing it. Where was it?

I checked XBox.com and noticed that it was there and available and the web interface allowed me the option to queue the download without having to turn on the XBox. I did that and turned on my XBox 360 and it was downloading. Weird, as it still wasn’t showing up in the Marketplace, but successful. I attributed it to a regional bug.

I launched it, sat through the barrage of logos, and upon hitting the main menu was greeted with a wonderful Failed to connect to EA servers message. Oh. Try again: same result. And another time. So even though I was connected to XBox Live and online and even though I had the game and was ready to play (and pay for) it, I could not do anything because I couldn’t connect with EA’s third-party servers.

I tried again on Thursday afternoon, after the intial hub-bub died down, and was greeted with the exact same result. Though XBox Live was working flawlessly and pretty much every other game released on the console was online, I couldn’t play Battlefield 1943 because EA’s servers were overloaded.

So I remember those halcyon XBox Live days when third party servers were not allowed and I think: maybe they were on to something! But money changed that and along came EA introducing a new point of failure. My motivation to play Battlefield 1943 has now subsided.

And even if it is fixed, the blunt EA MAY RETIRE THIS GAME AFTER 30 DAYS NOTICE POSTED ON www.ea.com warning that comes with Battlefield 1943 isn’t helping. Team Fortress 2 it is, then.

Much like “Poison,” the game is mechanically simple. There are ten estates, 5 uncoloured ones numbered 1 to 5 and five unnumbered representing five colours, in the middle of the playing field that two players vie for. Each player is dealt eight knight tokens, each one representing a colour and a number. Every turn, the active player has to place one of his knight tokens on a matching estate (either colour or number.) A new knight is then drawn and the game continues until the last one has been placed.

At the end, players score one point for every estate in which they have a presence, no matter how many the opponent has there too. The real scoring benefits come from every estate in which you have more knights than your opponent. Each coloured estate is worth five points and each numbered estate is worth its value. Additionally, the first player to control two estates, counting up, gets a crown worth five points. It’s an important game balancer that makes ignoring the least valuable estates a perilous choice.

It’s always dangerous because the AI is competent enough to punish you. The easiest difficulty, squire, which acts as a tutorial, is a pushover, but the other two, knight and king, locked until you beat the preceding level, provide a heady challenge. It’s not much, but the limited progression towards beating the king level adds to the replayability of Knights of Charlemagne. Although equally portable, in the best of ways, as Poison, Knights feels more rewarding because of this design. When you don’t have human opponents to play against, or even physical cards, these little additions are essential to keep a game engaging.

Best of all, the level of strategic thought and planning that Knights of Charlemagne requires is engrossing enough to be fun but simple enough to never be frustrating during brain addled morning commutes on the train. For $2, it’s a great little strategy game to have in your pocket.

Poison was made by Griptonite Games and at $2.99 is the more expensive of the two (as opposed to $1.99) if you consider three dollars “expensive.” It’s also the more polished overall since it’s produced by a full-on game studio (Griptonite is a part of Foundation 9, which also has the fantastic Backbone Entertainment) and not by one guy.

Poison iTunes link.

Poison’s premise is simple. Four to six players are dealt specially designed cards spanning three colours and covering the values 1,2,3,5,7. There’s also a green “wild” card that is valued at 4, but I’ll get to that later. During each turn you are required to play a card into one of the matching coloured cauldrons. If, after placement, the total value of the cards in that cauldron is greater than 13 that player claims all cards from it save for the one they just played. These cards are removed from play and counted, each is worth one point. The goal is to have the lowest score at game’s end, after the last card has been played.

Having the lowest score does not, however, mean having the fewest cards. There are two special conditions: first, the player with the most cards of a specific colour negates that score. In other words, if you have 8 blue cards and everyone else has 2 or 3, you score 0 while everyone else scores 2 and 3, respectively; secondly, each green “poison” card, which can be played into any coloured cauldron, counts as two points. You definitely do not want to be stuck with these.

That’s where the give and take of the game happens. Depending on your hand, you can either try to take nothing or try to take the most of one colour (maybe two if you’re ambitious, but this too is harder) since neither of these scores you points. But if you try to focus on one colour, and if anyone else was eyeing it, chances are the other players are going to poison that cauldron. Each turn you have to decide what high or low card to play and which to hold on to (you don’t want to get stuck in a situation where you have to take something you don’t want; always try to keep safe outs), and manage the risk and reward of the poison cards. It’s a fairly simple game but a very well balanced one and one that has a decent amount of strategic thought. In some ways, it’s reminiscent to Hearts.

The iPod version does a good job with the actual card playing, and the drag card to a cauldron interface feels fine, but it offers very little on top of that. The only available options are a mute button and the choice of how many computer controlled opponents to play against. That’s it. The AI is competent and puts up a good fight, but with only one difficulty level it does start to feel a bit same-y after a few games. The absence of any multiplayer, local or otherwise, further adds to the repetitious nature of Poison. I believe that games like this would benefit greatly from even a basic goal, aka. achievement, structure. The added incentives those provide might be minor but they do encourage a little more play variety.

Poison feels very temporary. It doesn’t keep a record of past games, or any play history, so it feels a great deal like a quick distraction. At $3 that’s not a problem, but you can’t help but wish that there was more to it.

Knights of Charlemagne pseudo-review to come, but it’s worth saying, slight spoiler, that it is the game that I return to more often.

Also, those interested in App Store boardgame versions should note that award winning game Zooloretto (iTunes link) is now available.

The last of those is the most notable as I’ve been fascinated by what people can get out of the Korg DS-10. Apparently, it’s quite a lot. For example, there’s this album (”Aliasing”) by Russian sound production firm The Sands and, from a ways back, two releases from Receptors. I received a nod for the latter on Offworld back in January and, through a confluence of events, including the above mentioned Tumblr, I am now an occassional contributor to Offworld.

Keeping with that theme, I posted two DS-10 YMO covers on Offworld. That seemed to mesh well with the kind of content they’re typically going for there. But when I came across another DS-10 related musical work on YouTube I didn’t know where to put it. It was not musical enough for the Tumblr and probably too ironic for Offworld. Then I remembered I have this thing, here, so I might as well use it more:

John Cage’s 4′33″ performed on DS running Korg DS-10.

Bonus: a jam session involving the DS-10, some tiny piano, and a theremin made out of a Famicom: the FamiTheremin.

As I plunge deeper into the world of (mostly German) boardgames I develop a new perspective on my long entrenchment in the videogame world. Their game designs and themes are a breath of fresh air relative to the constant frustrations and repetitiveness that competitive videogames are providing. The highest rated and most popular of these games (according to BoardgameGeek), Puerto Rico and Agricola, are especially profound because they are highly competitive without ever having direct conflict.

Take Agricola for example. This is a game about growing a seventeeth-or-so century farm by planting grain, breeding livestock, having kids, and taking on side jobs. This is a solitary job. You mind your own business. The closest there is to any interaction with any other farmers is when each of your family members does an “action” that claims a resource or ability from a shared, global supply (basically, the town.) Once something is claimed no other player can take it for that turn, but they can do anything else that is available. This is what I mean by a lack of conflict. You can’t go into the other player’s farm and burn their crops, or poison their cows, or have sex with their wife. Their farm is theirs alone and whatever they build or do there, with those common resources, is theirs and theirs alone. This might sound like a boring rule-set for a multiplayer game, but it is surprisingly competitive, strategic, and fun.

While there is no direct interaction between players, everyone is competing to create the best farm in the allotted number of turns. The challenge, and all the strategy, emerges from how you use the shared, and limited, global supply. As an Agricola player you need to be aware of what everyone else is doing, what you think they are trying to do, and, more importantly, how this might affect what you need to accomplish your goals. If everyone is constantly accumulating wood to build pastures and stables and new rooms for their house, it might be more beneficial to change your plans towards growing grain and gathering the clay that everyone else is busy ignoring. Of course the nuances of Agricola are far more complex than this and require a lot more writing to properly explain, but the basic idea is just that: manage the resources you need to grow your farm and feed your family amidst a dynamic market, trying to anticipate other player’s needs and the demands they create. It’s, basically, an economic game without the money. It’s also really fun.

I try to think of equivalent designs in the modern videogame world, especially in the commercial spectrum, and I can’t think of one popular, competitive multiplayer game that is strategic with no direct conflict. Not a one^[1]. The genre is dominated by shooters (war, violence), fighting games (violence), real time strategy games (war, violence), and turn based strategy games that, too, are often war based. If there are equivalents, they are obscure. It’s a single-minded market.

Amongst some people, there is talk of so-called Ludonarrative Dissonance, about how videogames have a hard time conflating the mechanics of a system with the narrative elements behind the motivations in it. It’s a fine challenge to tackle, but it seems to me to be a lesser issue than the overall thematic bankruptcy that is present. As technology advances, allowing for improved dynamic situations and presentation and control, the vocabulary developers have at their disposal increases. But if it’s applied to nothing but more elaborate ways to shoot people in the face, what’s the point? You are still using the exact same metaphors as one of the oldest videogames: SpaceWar!

This is why boardgames are so fascinating. Free of those technological advances they’re forced to explore mechanics and rule-sets and player interactions rather than new ways to present the same thing. Granted, it’s a specialized market with an audience (and publishers) that’s seemingly willing to try new things. From the boardgamers I’ve met, it’s also generally an older market, one that’s not obsessed with the blockbuster fly-by-wire explode everything attitude that permeates every pore of the videogame biz^[3]. That’s not to say that boardgames are without their own set of problems, but not having billions of dollars at stake every year certainly minimizes them.

Market demands and audience considerations are good excuses for a little while, but videogames already are big enough to allow for diversity. There are developers, and scenes, that focus on niche markets and do so with success. So why is it that even they, when creating multiplayer games, stick to the same metaphors of conflict?

Perhaps the general consensus amongst videogame publishers is that non-violent multiplayer games can’t be as exciting, and can’t sell as well^[3], as their war-mongering counterparts. Maybe they think there could never be enough competition, excitement, betrayal, surprise, defeat, skull-daggery, and general griefer-worthy assholeishness in a game without direct conflict. But the last year’s worth of news out of Wall Street tells a different story. It’s a tale of a system corrupted from the inside by the scheming, cheating, gaming of a few powerful and greedy individuals. If this is not prime material for a videogame, I don’t know what is.

So all this might have been the build-up for a self-serving question, because this is something that I want to play, but I have to wonder: in this economic climate, where are all the economic games?^[4]

1. Not counting things like global leaderboards and indirect competition like that. I’m talking specifically about multiplayer games based on such mechanics.
2. There’s a culture of one-upmanship that occurs in the battle for those dollars: every big million seller needs to be topped by an even bigger one.
3. Settlers of Catan has sold over 15 million units over its life. Suck on that Killzone.
4. This is why I’m curious and excited about Cities XL.

Connection problems, though most had less amusing timing than the above, were frequent. I managed to get a few full games in and I did well in those, but I think I spent as much time clicking through error messages as I did making my avatar dance.

This, on its own, isn’t that big of a deal. Multitrack audio like this is heavy and bloated and not really of interest to the average listener. These are of interest to obsessive completists, fellow musicians, and/or mash-up artists. For them, there already exists a shady underground network trading original master recordings (this is how those SongSmith versions of popular songs were created) so, for them, the Rock Band rips are actually low quality. The only thing of interest is new multi-tracks for songs that might not have had masters leaked, but I don’t know if this is the case here. That’s a community I don’t know much about.

But combine “rip multi-track audio from Rock Band” with The Beatles Rock Band coming this September and, well, things seem a little more notable.