Where it all began.

Back in the day when I as a kid first played the Wolfenstein 3D demo, I had no idea how influential this game would be. Concepts like first person shooter wasn't in my vocabulary at all. Later titles like Doom and Doom II were massive favorites of mine, and then later on games like Duke Nukem 3D and Blood were likewise games I spent hours playing. This is the start of the entire first person shooter genre. 

But where did this all come from? Today's video takes a look at idSoftware and where the 3D first person shooter began. So please enjoy this documentary about old school gaming.

Direct link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIuCOsB4nHs 

That's that and all that. Join me again next time and until then, have a great week!

 

 

From War to Games.

I have a distinct memory that I have mentioned Kriegsspiel before, but I'm not sure so here we go.

A friend recommended a video about the subject, and it was so good I wanted to share it with you all.  

The video will explain it all in detail, but let me give you a bit of a teaser. Kriegsspiel or wargame in German, was a way to simulate battles on a table before actually fighting them in real life. Countries that adopted Kriegsspiel saw a marked increase in success on the battlefield compared to those who believed they didn't need such nonsense. 

In time, civilians got into it, and thanks to that, we eventually got things like Dungeons & Dragons, the Total War games, Warhammer and much much more. Kriegsspiel even in a sense invented hit points. A huge portion of modern gaming came from generals trying to rehearse battles in advance. 

I highly recommend this video if you've ever played any of the games I mentioned or indeed anything even remotely similar, or if you just like history. 

 

That's that and all that. Join me again next time and until then, have a great week!

First time fun

Hello and welcome back to Eccentric Spheres. Today in the interest of  keeping it short and sweet, I'll get to the point. Yesterday, I live-streamed for the first time, and I loved it. It was a ton of fun and I'm going to do it again at some point.

I played Fallout 4 with a bunch of minor mods together with the Whispering Hills mod overhaul pack. It essentially transforms Fallout into a foggy hellscape a la Silent Hill. Unsettling to not see where you're going to say the least.

If you want to watch the VoD, here it is: 

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1192321709

Be aware though that it will disappear after 14 days, so if you're planning on watching it, do it now before it's too late.

 

That's that and all that. Join me again next time, and until then, have a great and safe week! 

  

 

Gaming Quiz

 

Hello and welcome to Eccentric Spheres. Last week we did general trivia and this week it's gaming. I decided to go for multiple choice this time, as I think it'll fit better.

So without further ado:

1. Which was the original D&D setting created by Gary Gygax?

   1. Forgotten Realms

   2. Dragonlance

   3. Greyhawk

2. What is the green crystal the hovers over the Sims called?

   1. Plumbob

   2. Life Gem

   3. Spinner

3. In the Fallout Universe, what is the small computer worn on the left arm called?

   1. Infotron

   2. Pipboy

   3. Personal Communicator

4. Conan the Barbarian hails from which country?

   1. Cimmeria

   2. Aquilonia

   3. Hyrkania

5. What year was the Super Nintendo system released?

   1. 1990

   2. 1991

   3. 1992

6. Which game series features the evil Umbrella Corporation?

   1. Alone in the Dark

   2. Fallout

   3. Resident Evil

7. Which movie inspired The Silent Hill franchise greatly?

   1. Jacob's Ladder

   2. Videodrome

   3. Pan's Labyrinth

8. Which classic arcade game caused a coin shortage in Japan?

   1. Pac-Man

   2. Space Invaders

   3. Asteroids

9. In the Elder Scrolls setting, what race are Orcs?

   1. Dwarves

   2. Humans

   3. Elves

10. What is the name of the most common currency in the Zelda games?

    1. Coins

    2. Rupees

    3. Chunks

And there we have it. Look below for the answers and as last time, you win nothing by answering the questions except fun. Join me again next time, have a great week and stay safe!

 

Answers: C A B A B C A B C B

Game News

 

Alright, it is time for some game news.

Blizzard has been in the news again, this time for financial reasons. It has been a know fact for over a decade that Blizzard pays low wages compared to other companies in the AAA industry. They have always pushed the passion line, i.e. people are such fans its a bit of a privilege to work there, so you don't need as much money.

Staff has now started comparing salaries and are furious at how little they are earning. Seeing how Blizz HQ is in Irvine, California, it's no wonder their workers are broke. Irvine is not the most expensive city in the US, but it is still pretty eye-wateringly expensive. Anyone who works for a living knows that landlords and grocery stores don't accept passion instead of money, but now it has hit a bit of a boiling point.

Stories have been shared about how staffers are forced to skip meals, how they have to do extra work as Uber drivers, how they even have to give up even talking about having kids as they know that can't afford it. At the same time, Activision-Blizzard keeps reporting record profits and their CEO Bobby Kotick has apparently earned about $40 million this year. Some shareholders have tried to stop Kotick from earning his obscene bonuses, but failed. Kotick has even been called the most over payed CEO in the world...

The bottom line is that Blizzard may well see an imminent brain-drain, if too many of their seasoned talent find better payed positions elsewhere. There seem to be a golden goose moral in here somewhere.

Bioware are still trying to get Anthem fixed. After a... lets call it lack-luster initial performance, they pulled the game in an attempt to fix it.

Back during the 6-8 years of development time Anthem had, the production leads refused to even look at what the competition was doing, and now it seems they are just copying their competition wholesale.

When you are designing something like a game you have to take in to account what the competition is doing. Otherwise you may end up creating cheap knock-off or even committing theft of intellectual property. You can't create in a vacuum. We'll see if their efforts pay off, but for my part I doubt it. The very name Anthem is now a poisoned pill and few gamers are going to want to swallow it to see if it tastes good.

Finally there have been talk of a new method of revenue generation in the AAA industry: In-game ads.

It's all in an early brainstorming stage, but there are elements who wants to integrate ads inside PC and console gaming much like in mobile gaming. Off the cuff I think it's a reprehensible idea, but to be fair there are a couple of minor ways I could possibly accept it. If it is an option you can turn off, if it does not handicap the player and you earn something extra for watching the ads, then maybe? If you could offset a subscription by seeing some ads in loadscreens, then maybe?

The problem is that the greed of these executives is beyond control and I have 0% trust in their abilities to rein themselves in. Look at the lootbox drama for an example.

Speaking of lootboxes, this may be a reaction to the increased ban on the addictive little boxes of doom. Either way, time will tell, but I don't think this will go over well at all.

That's that. Join me again next time, and until then, have a great week and stay safe and healthy!

Game News

Both of the next gen gaming consoles have been revealed and predictably, the console war immediately kicked off again.

If you are not in the know, the console war is the pointless argument between (mainly) Playstation and Xbox fans who argue on and on about which console is better and why the other person is an idiot for supporting the other system.

The new specs are incredibly similar this time though. I mean crazy similar. If anything, the Xbox Series X looks slightly stronger, but some tech people speculate that the Xbox specs don't take into account the machines operating system, which could make the two machines practically identical inside. The biggest difference I can see so far is in backwards compatibility, where Xbox reaches back further. But as always the big selling point is the game catalog. Sony will continue to put their games on their console, because of course they are.

The prices haven't been announced as I'm writing this, so do not believe any prices you see. They are place holders at best or just speculation. There is still plenty of time, as the planned release for both machines is the holiday season 2020.

This is all pretty academic to me personally as I'm a PC player. But for the first time in ages (or indeed ever) Sony is putting some of their titles on PC. Horizon Zero Dawn, the game both fans and critics loved is already on the Steam store as coming Summer 20, and a sequel is in the works for Playstation.

For years now, there has been a rumor that Bloodborne, the Dark Souls like game of gothic horror would come to PC, but it has always been just that: a rumor based on wishful thinking. Now, the rumor is stronger than ever, and man do I wish it would come true. But we do not yet know.

One announcement that made pretty much everyone scoff in unison is that GTAV is coming to the next gen consoles. This game was released in 2013 to Xbox360 and Playstation 3! Then it moved over to PC, Xbox One and Playstation 4 – and now to the new generation.

Look, everyone knows that GTA Online, which is a part of GTAV has made over a billion dollars, but come on, how about GTAVI? No? Okay.

It been tricky to follow game news this year as everything in meatspace has been canceled, but here at Eccentric Spheres we keep trying. This is all I had this week, but join me again next time. Until then have a great week and stay safe!

The bigger they are...

The last few weeks have been an interesting time in the AAA game industry. Interesting as in the ancient Chinese curse, “may you live in interesting times.”

EA releases Battlefield V, and most gamers barely notice. It's lousy sales numbers compounded by their former Executive Vice President in charge of Worldwide Studios, Patrick Söderlund, who stated “If you don't like it, don't buy it”. Then he took his multimillion dollar bonus and quit. Well, it seems that's what gamers did. They didn't buy it. EA's stock price has plummeted by almost 50% this year...

Blizzard, now Blizzard-Activision, dropped the ball twice in a row. First during their own conference, BlizzCon, where they announced a Diablo mobile game after leading fans to believe they had a proper game in the works. The devs on stage then double down and sarcastically asked the crowd: “Don't you all have phones?” Blizzard was booed at their own con...

Then, the announcement breaks that Diablo 3 is being released on the Nintendo Switch, Nintendo's new console / hand held combo device. To celebrate, Blizzard announces a competition where you can win a Switch with Diablo 3. Nice prize, the Switch is fairly expensive. To enter all you had to do was take a picture and upload it, but the picture had to be of you playing Diablo 3 on the Switch... So to win the prize, you already had to own the prize.

Now on to Bethesda, dear Bethesda. Their last couple of months have not been good. First Fallout 76 launches to less than positive reviews, then a furor erupts when Bethesda refuses to give refunds on digital versions of the game. But, there are no physical copies. Even if you went and bought it from a physical store it was a case with a download code in it. So people start talking civil suit, as in several places (like the EU) it's illegal to withhold a refund within reasonable terms.

Then the bag controversy pops up. The Collectors Edition (or power armor edition) of Fallout 76 was advertised to come with, amongst other things, a sturdy canvas bag. People got a cheap thin nylon bag instead. When they complained to customer service they got answers like, “Sorry, the canvas bags were too expensive to make,” and “We're not planning to do anything about it”. To no ones surprise people were furious. To make matters worse, the Collectors Edition was left on the Bethesda store unchanged for days after the story broke. Now, if it had truly been impossible to make the canvas bags, they should have changed the ad, but it remained.

Of course this is blatant false advertising, which is extremely illegal. Some lawyer at Bethesda must have gotten through to the decision makers because they announced that everyone who bought the collectors edition will get a canvas bag as soon as they are produced. All they had to do was contact customer service with their details so that Bethesda can send them the new bags. Simple, right?

Well, no, because Bethesda's CS pages apparently flipped completely and allowed a small number of random people access to the personal information of everyone who responded. Eight pages of real names, addresses, screen names, type of credit cards (but not complete CC numbers), etc. In internet parlance Bethesda doxxed a lot of their already angry customers. To make it even worse, these people could affect the tickets, as if they worked at Bethesda. The problem is fixed now, but there's a saying about barn doors and bolting horses.

All this leaves me wondering what is going on in the AAA game space? How can companies like this screw up so monumentally? What's next?

That's me for this week, join me again next time for more Eccentric Spheres and until then, have a calm and successful week!

The power of a voice

Voice actors. They make a good game great and a great game, epic.

But many of them still work in relative anonymity, despite their amazing talents and the invaluable work they do bringing our favorite characters to life. Some, like the great Jennifer Hale are well known, but many toil in relative obscurity.

Then there are those who are also full on actors, and who mostly do voice work on the side. It's broad spectrum of people.

The first game that really made me sit up and take notice when it came to voice work, was Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. The main character (you) is voiced by none other than Ray Liotta. This alone makes the game amazing. It's like playing Miami Vice and Goodfellas all rolled into one. But he wasn't the only big name to voice that game. Oh no, I bet there will never again be a cast list for voice-over work that is as star studded as GTA:VC.

Apart from Ray Liotta we have William Fichtner, Tom Sizemore, Dennis Hopper, Burt Reynolds, Luis Guzmán, Philip Michael Thomas, Robert Davi, Danny Trejo, Gary Busey, Lee Majors, Fairuza Balk, Danny Dyer, Kevin McKidd and Debbie Harry. And that's just the first page on IMDB.

If someone was to produce a film with a cast list like this, every magazine, blog and entertainment channel in the world would be following the production like crazy.

Then we have talent like Mark Hamill. You may know him better as Luke Skywalker, but he has done sterling work as none other than The Joker. Both in the long running animation show and the recent video games. In fact, his resume has more voice work than face work. And it makes sense. Unlike Harrison Ford, Hamill couldn't get out from under the shadow of Star Wars, at least not in the same way. But as a voice-over actor, your face is irrelevant. Your voice, (obviously) is what counts. And just to be clear, I'm not saying voice work is easy or that it doesn't take talent, alright? It's hard work.

A talented voice-over artist can make you care about an otherwise unimportant character, or likewise make you hate her. Quests that might be a bit lackluster can shine if the voice-over people are allowed to do their thing. But since speech is one of the most, if not the most, important way we communicate, we also tend to take it a bit for granted. Unless you are mute, you talk every day. And to somehow make that exceptional, isn't easy.

An interesting note, is the fact that our brains tend to “save” voices. Some years ago, my wife and I used to watch morning TV before going to work. It was something to rest the eyes on while drinking coffee. One certain weekdays, we were shown The Powerpuff Girls, a silly cartoon about a trio of sisters in kindergarten who happened to be superheros. The episodes we watched were expertly dubbed to Finnish, but when we tried watching it in English, we couldn't. It sounded all wrong. That's the power of a voice. It's arguably worse than when a “regular” actor is changed. A new face automatically means a new voice, but when the face is the same and the character sounds all wrong, it's unbearable. It's the same problem when a band gets a new vocalist. Right sound – wrong voice.

If you care to find out more, I found a Youtube channel, that's all about this, at least who plays who. I only found it an hour ago, so I don't know much about it, but I'll link it anyway.

https://www.youtube.com/user/TeddyKGaming/playlists

That's that. Until next time, have a lovely week!

Party Time

This weekend past, I went to a LAN party. We barbequed, sipped drinks, laughed ourselves silly and most prominently, played games. After all, that's' what a LAN party is for. A great weekend all in all.

Naturally the best laid plans never work out as intended, and although we had a list of games to play, we spent way too much time trying to figure out exactly what to play.

The standout game for me has to be The Ship. Imagine a luxury cruise set in the 1920's, just like on Poirot. Now imagine everyone is trying to kill someone else. This is The Ship.

The tension comes from trying to find your target in an unobserved area, and then brutally exterminating them with a plethora of weapons from candlesticks to Tommy-guns.

Since everyone is hunting someone, it means you are also being hunted, and on several occasions, I was just about to murder my victim when I was viciously massacred from behind. Very tense and absolutely hilarious. Although if you are super competitive, I think you might find The Ship more frustrating than fun. I absolutely loved it.

I also tried Project Reality, a modern military shooter. Now, I'm not partial to this genre, but PR is free so I thought I'd try it anyway. I'm still not partial to the genre, but I get what this game is for. It's not a twitch reflex FPS, it's a slower paced tactical shooter, but even so, it's not for me. The learning curve on PR is very steep, and I lack the passion needed to mount the curve and get good at this game. For me it's running around for five minutes and then getting killed by an enemy I didn't even see. But if the modern military shooters are your cup of tea, go check it out.

Having stayed up way too late the entire weekend, I'm naturally pretty damn tired, so I'm cutting it short today.

Until next time, have a fantastic week!

Rumors and petitions

As I mentioned last week, the internet is buzzing with curiosity about Bethesdas announcement that they'll be hosting their first ever press conference at E3 this year. Next month in fact.

The money seems to be on Fallout 4, which would be great, but many are hoping for Dishonored 2, which I also wouldn't mind. There is an outside chance of Elder Scrolls 6, but I think that's really unlikely since it's only been four years since Skyrim, but you never know.

However, I read – or watched – I can't remember which, an interview with Todd Howard, the executive producer and game director at Bethesda, and in it he said that they're not really interested in making sequels just to make them (cough Ubisoft, cough). And he used Dishonored as an example of a game they're not going to sequel. Of course with established franchises like Fallout and Elder Scrolls, sequels are not only inevitable but really sought after.

If they do make Fallout 4, I hope it will take place in a city environment like Fallout 3, rather than a desert like New Vegas. I do like New Vegas, don't get me wrong, but ruined cityscapes really speak to me far more than mere wilderness. F3 had a good blend of wasteland and ruins, but it's old and done and I'm ready for something new.

In other interesting game related news, I have heard that EA have actually managed to turn their Origins store into something worthwhile. Good customer service combined with money back guarantees have gone a long way to make Origins a good place to get games. I haven't tried it yet, but the buzz sounds promising.

Likewise Good Old Games, or Gog.com have launched a beta for their store client, which should be familiar to anyone who uses Steam. Gog have gotten a lot of good press lately with an ever increasing catalog of games both old and new that they actually quality check. Again I have not yet used their services, but it seems that Steam is getting some healthy competition and not a minute to soon.

Finally for this week, I started watching a let's play for Bloodborne, a Dark Souls style Gothic game. Dripping with dark, gloom and blood, this game looks amazing, but it's PS4 only... I can really honestly state that I hate the practice of only releasing a game on one platform. The number of people who'd go out and buy a 380€ console just to play one game can't be that high, so it's like throwing away money.

And I'm not alone in wanting Bloodborne on the PC. There have been rumors since launch that it would come to PC, but I don't believe it. In fact a petition to bring this game to PC has been going around for a while and garnered quite a few signatures. But we'll see. I won't be holding my breath though.

Oh yeah, an anti Bloodborne to PC petition has also been going around if you can believe it. Some PS4 owners have actually signed this in order to try to keep Bloodborne PS4 only, and I quote:

PC gamers are bunch of elitist douche bags. They don't deserve this PS4 exclusive. If they want to play Bloodborne they should buy a PS4 like gentlemen.

How childish can you get?

Until next time, have a great week!

Accidental Education

Yesterday, I took a break from playing Assassin's Creed 2. I never finished it previously, but since I found the next game in the series, Assassin's Creed 2 Brotherhood, cheaply on Steam, I thought it would be fun to finish number 2 first. And it really is fun, it's a great game on so many fronts.

But I'm slightly off the point. As I was taking said break, I came across this thread on Reddit, where the original poster wonders whether the cities in Assassin's Creed 2 are modelled on the original, historical places. Now it turns out that as far as anyone can make them exact, they are faithful replicas.

Then the thread creeps off a bit, and a teacher explains how much he admires games like this. Not because he plays them himself, he doesn't, but many of his 9^th graders light up when he talks about the area and the time period, because they have “been there” so to say.

Several other games such as Crusader Kings II, the Total War series and Europa Universalis 1-3 are also mentioned, and the thread really brings out how much history and geography anyone who plays these games can learn without even trying!

Back in the dim mists of time, when I was in school, there weren't really any games like this. Sure there were plenty of games, but the technology required to make games like the once mentioned above was ten-twenty years away.

That was however, the era in which I discovered role playing games. And what a discovery that was! Before, I absolutely hated geography, loathed it's very existence, but RPG's changed all that. All in all I can honestly say RPG's and computer gaming have taught me English, Geography, a lot of History and even Math (which I also despise), and best of all; without even trying!

That's the actual point of this post I suppose. The art of not only making learning fun, but making it invisible as well.

So before you accuse a gamer of wasting his time, make sure they aren't actually studying...