Some Retrospective Thoughts on Westwood's Command & Conquer

 Ah, Command and Conquer. The father of the RTS. The grandfathers were of course Dune 2, Herzog Zwei and Cannon Fodder. Nevertheless, C&C is one of the driving forces of the genre's popularity through the 90s. It had a mix of thumping soundtracks, great sound effects (who hasn't got the HEEEEY sound of 50 men burned alive playing in their memories) and outrageous weaponry. It had delightfully cheesy cutscenes that grew in camp as much as they did ambition over the years. They're an excellent example of good game feel. It feels good to build stuff, order stuff and watch people die. There's a strong atmosphere that really makes you feel like a heroic leader saving the world. Or perhaps a moustache-twirling supervillain enacting a plan to conquer it. But those happy things aren't what I want to talk about.

I want to talk about how goddamn bad the multiplayer of Command and Conquer was.

I played a ton of C&C 1 and RA1 at LANs. I played even more TibSun and RA2 online when ISDN was offered in our area for the first time. I learned a lot about how Command and Conquer works in practice, and even more about how terrible Westwood were at designing maps. I'd say that C&C is the RTS equivalent of Killer Instinct. Fun at first glance, but as soon as you sit down with a friend and actually open the pandora's box known as "deeper understanding" you realise how terrible things are. Let's open it up once more so we can lay the series to rest in a way EA will never let us.

The Basic Metagame is Incredibly Simple
To understand the meta we must first understand C&C's input scheme. Right click deselects units and cancels construction orders from the production bar. Left-click handles everything else. Want to move? Click anywhere. Want to attack? Click on the unit. Want to select a unit? That's click too. If you want to destroy terrain or remove specific units because they're in the way or what have you, you press ctrl+left click to force fire on that spot. If you want to force a unit to move anywhere, alt+click.  This last input is what starts to control C&C's meta.

Infantry do poor damage to vehicles, but often surprisingly well against buildings. Tanks are also good against buildings and other vehicles, but do poor damage to infantry for some abstract gameplay reason. However, if a tank runs over a soldier, in an interesting turn of events the soldier is run over and dies. Why is this important? Because I just mentioned alt+click. In other words, the way to kill a squad of infantry isn't to make infantry of your own or anti-personnel weapons. It's to make your tanks drive over them.

Well then. How do you beat tanks? The answers may seem to be aircraft and static base defense structures. However, tanks beat those as well for one simple reason: economic value. For the price of an anti-tank defense structure you could've made one and a half medium tanks. For the price of setting up airfields and their aircraft you could have made four or five tanks. Static structures are good, but tanks can move. Tanks don't chew up power.

So you see all these cool late-game tech units. You see teleporting lightning tanks or nuclear suicide trucks or laser towers or tanks that are pretending to be trees or men that can teleport and remove you from the space-time continuum. They all lose to your cost-effective medium tank. All of them. Even the bigger tanks lose because they cost more to you than the damage they deal to the opponent.

Thus, the metagame is simply this:
1. Get money
2. Build tanks
3. Build more war factories to build tanks faster
4. Build refineries then sell them instead of making harvesters. Making harvesters from the war factory means you aren't making tanks.
5. 50 tank platoon footsies!

Every Westwood game wound up like this if you wanted to win. Anything beyond that is horribly overpriced and purely for style.

2. Faction Imbalance
These games have atrocious imbalance for the most part. Often for pretty simple reasons. Here's how they go:
Command and Conquer: GDI gets the medium tanks. NOD gets invisible light tanks that stop being invisible when they shoot. GDI runs over NOD's rocket men with tanks.
Red Alert 1: Allies had Light and Medium tanks. Soviets' basic tank was the Heavy Tank. Do the math.
However, if you were playing on an island map it completely switched. Allies had a wide variety of naval units while the soviets only had sea-to-sea submarines. The Aftermath expansion gave them sea-to-land subs as well, but the Allied ships were more cost effective.
Tiberian Sun: Honestly, this is the most balanced the games ever got. Both tanks are pretty equal in power this time, so you can actually do more shenanigans. NOD had easier economy to protect though thanks to harvesters that dig.
Red Alert 2: Soviet harvesters brought in twice the money of their opponents per load. They had machine guns. Their tanks were slightly better. However an Allied player could make IFVs with engineers inside to repair. I'd say that the balance in Vanilla wasn't too bad for the most part.
Then Yuri's Revenge happened. I could write a whole piece just on how hilariously busted Yuri's army is. I think I'll do so tomorrow.
Emperor: Harkonnens could destroy your spice and force your enemies' harvesters into your land for easy pickings. They also had nuclear missiles. In the Dune universe. Goddamn.

3. Maps
If you ever played online, there were roughly two or three maps in each game played. The problem with most of Westwood's maps is that they simply didn't have enough money on them to fuel the furious pace the game is most enjoyable to play at. The build order in the games is:
Power
Refinery
Barracks
Factory
Refinery
Factory
Power
Ref
Factory
Ref
Factory
Power
and so on, with you selling each refinery so you got a discount harvester without choking up the tank production. Most campaign missions were designed assuming you'd have two or three harvesters at most. Multiplayer play assumed that you'd have anywhere between 5 and 15 depending on how long it went and how much money there was to grab.

Westwood needed more money on their maps, better regen options (Tiberium growth didn't happen in the Red Alert games since it was Ore, not Tiberium) or more alternative sources of income. Red Alert 2 made a step in the right direction with oil derricks, but didn't place enough of them on maps. The series works best when economics are about how fast you gain money rather than who controls the remaining money, and they just didn't click onto this fact.

Their map-making utilities were pretty bad to boot.


So that's the core of Command and Conquer multiplayer. The genre learned from some of the series' mistakes and improved itself. In other ways it tried so hard to not be at all similar that it lost a lot of the simple charm that made the games so fun. Perhaps I will go on a big grump about how bad Red Alert 3 is some time. That'll probably turn more into an analysis of comedy though.

This Show Aired A Decade Ago: Paranoia Agent

If you're a first year film student who's just heard the word "Auteur", Satoshi Kon is a man whose works you can have a ton of fun with. His films and single TV show he directed ooze with recurring visuals, techniques and storytelling. He often hired certain actors, and in some cases gave them similar relationships. It could be easy to describe the man as simply being a director of dark satire, but let's take a quick rundown of what the stories he told were:
Perfect Blue - Girl goes crazy
Millenium Actress - Guys interview old actress while filming a documentary about the studio she worked for.
Tokyo Godfathers - Homeless people looking for an abandoned baby's mother.
Paranoia Agent - Serial attacks by a kid with roller blades and a baseball bat.
Paprika - Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.

Having watched the show again recently, I feel that Paranoia Agent is the middle ground of his works. Perfect Blue and Paprika sit on the pessimistic extreme of his ideas and stories. Millenium Actress and Tokyo Godfathers sit on the lighthearted optimistic end. Paranoia Agent is right in the middle.

Back when the show aired all I can recall people talking about is how strange, creepy and confusing the show seemed. Looking back, it's the most satirical, and possibly the most... flamboyant work he did. There's questions of the supernatural and the looming sense of inevitability to each attack by the kid doing the thumping, but it's used to create comedy as much as suspense. The irony of people using serious injury to resolve their own faults is a joke. The way that people poke fun of the attacks over time as they get more frequent is a joke. Suicidal people chase the attacker through towns trying to get him to kill them. Old housewives run competitions to see who best weave him into their daily gossip. People ignore murders if it means they can get a thrilling story or a completed cartoon production on time. Sometimes the joke will be delivered through straightforward visuals and an ironic situation. Sometimes a serious explanation will have goofy designs and silly palette choices. Sometimes the show becomes a videogame. It takes serious subject matter and makes fun it in whatever way will entertain best. It does what good satire should do.

The show's an excellent example of how to pace a weekly broadcast with a fixed episode count that is expected to have a beginning, middle and end. It establishes a formula. It runs with the formula long enough that it can make fun of it. It introduces new perspectives that change how you view the content. Then it rebuilds the formula from there, only to trash it another couple of episodes down the line again. The next episode previews are entertaining in their shameless obscurity.

There's a lot of things I could say about this show. There's a great deal of ways I could say it as well. I could talk about its shot composition and character designs that range from average attractiveness to ugly. I could talk about its themes. I could talk about its themes in relation to Kon's feature films. I could talk about its sound design. Its recurring images. I could do all that because all of those things are interesting aspects of the show. That's what it means for a text to actually have depth. It means there's ways to dive in and explore what's being presented for longer than 200 words.

In other words, the show is still great. Go watch it and enjoy a fun cartoon.

More Talk About Forums

Yesterday I talked about online forums using a language that on the surface is similar to spoken English but in practice has its own rules. Today I want to talk about a situation where I feel moderation staff can be prone to forcing down unnatural conversation rules that get in the way of ideas developing. I want to talk about that dreaded T word that rears its ugly head.

I want to talk about Topicality.

A couple of nights ago I drove a mate home as his car was having trouble. This was around 1am. At the start of the drive we were discussing how we felt the play we had performed a few hours before had gone. Two hours later when he finally got out of the car since we were both horribly tired we were discussing the incident in Ferguson. In between those two points had been discussion on matters of personal faith, economics, issues occurring amongst common friends, childhood memories, road rules and the 1970s live action Wonder Woman. This is what communicating ideas leads to. We construct labels to our knowledge in order to more clearly communicate concepts. This causes us to create connections between things for better mental sorting. This means that in presenting an idea we come up with other ideas that spawn different ideas and lead to more ideas. We then want to communicate those ideas to each other as well. Conversations flow in all sorts of strange ways.

Forum operators don't necessarily view the board as a medium for conventional conversations to take place in. There is a notion that all ideas must be neatly compartmentalised for reader convenience. You want to talk about politics? Use the politics board. Want to give an update on how translating the latest pornographic RPG/strategy hybrid game from Alicesoft is going? Use the translation board. Want to post fanfiction based on regulars in an IRC channel? Use the politics board. I've talked before about how a strength of forums is that we have a permanent record of ideas that we can refer back to when compiling the information elsewhere, so this seems a logical way to run things.

Heavily enforcing topicality breaks the natural flow of conversations. I don't like this. When people say things, there is always a chain of logic that led to what they said. If we are able to follow a freely moving logic chain, we can gain a greater sense of how and why people reached the conclusions they did. Sometimes a comment on how awful the latest Linkin Park album is might actually help us understand something about the management of a local festival. Sometimes we could learn something about the priorities of newcomer Guilty Gear players if they keep asking about which foods Sin likes to eat.

If we have a natural flow of talk, we learn things about the people who are speaking. We gain a greater sense of what attitudes are developing in a community. We might want a discussion board to be a place for specifics, but people are anything but that. Information trading posts are inevitably viewed as locations, and it's in locations that people create communities. Group identities grow. Cultures are created. Stamping our foot down just rains on everyone's parade and ultimately makes the world a bit more stale.

Some Musings on Forum Speech Acts

Suppose I were to ask you to tell me the rules of English. What would you tell me about? You would probably tell me about starting sentences with capital letters and ending with full stops. You'd discuss past, present and future tenses. You might talk about the use of the letter u in words such as colour or armour if you speak and write Australian or British English. There's plenty of things we don't think about when asked to immediately think about our language. Concepts that we assume are inherently the same in all languages but can in practice differ wildly for all sorts of reasons. One such example is the concept of turn-taking in speech.

In English, there is an expectation that when you speak to someone, they face you and listen to what you are saying. When you give an appropriate indicator, they are expected to give a response. What response they give determines who has the next turn to speak and so on until the conversation ends. If in a group environment such as a dinner with friends, the expectation is usually that one person speak and the others listen, speaking once something needs clarifying or the initial speaker has left the floor open for someone else to take over. Not all languages work this way. For example in Italian, it is perfectly polite to have 3 different conversations occur at once in a group. In Japanese there is a practice known as Aisatsu or Active Listening. The polite way to listen to someone in Japanese is to frequently make remarks such as "yeah", "is that so?", "ah, I see" and so on. If you quietly wait for your turn, they think you're uninterested in what's being said or possibly snubbing them intentionally.

Online communication has its own rules for turn taking that differ even from spoken English. Suppose I were to start a thread on a forum that uses English with a post like this.

"Hello."

 This is a perfectly normal way to use your first speaking turn in English. If you started a thread somewhere like a character matchup thread on a fighting game forum you'd be considered strange. You might be considered an advertising bot. The thread would likely be deleted, or locked and a moderator would leave a cautionary message scolding you for not following the board's topicality. Imagine trying to perform aisatsu in a place like 2chan. You can't because the asymmetrical flow of information delivery means that your "oh, I see" could be four posts below where you wanted it to be thanks to the time it took for the server to process your submitted post.

This language that I'll call Forum English has some other differences to spoken English with turn taking. If there is a moment of silence in a spoken conversation for more than a few seconds, the situation feels awkward. People cannot work out whose turn it is to speak, so someone will often break the silence with a joke or a different topic starter. In Forum English, a moment of silence can last anywhere from 2 seconds to years before the next remark is made. The permanency of text in a thread means that a conversation can be jumped into or left whenever a speaker involved feels like it.

There's no formality to leaving a thread either. Suppose that halfway through an argument on whether Guilty Gear Xrd Slayer is stronger than Guilty Gear XX Slash Slayer I had to leave to play cards with friends. I wouldn't need to say "sorry, we'll finish this up another time. Gotta go." I'd just not make a post until I had the time. This in turn is different to conversing over an instant messaging program. In that case I would be expected to give a farewell comparable to a spoken form of English.

So what I'm getting at here is that the internet has created and is still creating new languages that we aren't even aware are actually operating on rules that differ from something they appear to be identical to. They're also creating similarities between languages that previously had some stark differences. Forum English has similarities to Forum Japanese in turn taking that don't exist in spoken Australian English and Japanese.

Languages are weird.

There's a Steam Sale During this Comiket

There isn't much to talk about this Comiket for upcoming game releases. You can watch Edelweiss' trailer compilation here if you haven't seen what's popping out of the doujin scene this month. However, the small group of publishers who've been striving to get the scene more foreign exposure have cooked up a little Steam sale to acknowledge Comiket 86. Let's talk about the cool games you can get from it!

Here is what's on offer, for reference.

Exceed Trilogy (buy the bundle!)
Exceed: Gun Bullet Children is a perfectly acceptable scrolling shooter. It's very much your run-of-the-mill Touhou-inspired game, but works fine. It's a bit old and does have some compatability issues.
Exceed 2: Vampire REX is an Ikaruga-inspired Touhou-inspired game. While it doesn't have the terrain shenanigans or rigid yet elaborate enemy placements of Ikaruga, that game's mechanics get copied for a reason. It can lead to very fun patterns to navigate.
Exceed 3: Jade Penetrate Black Package is a solid runner for best title in some time. This is by far my favourite of the three. It opts for a much more generic system of "get power ups, don't get hit", but has great attack patterns to make you not care that there aren't a million systems to be aware of. It has auto bombing on death, which is always a handy feature when learning a new shooter. It has great music. It has little girls. Play it.

Astebreed
Edelweiss have been going nutso on their visuals for a while. Ether Vapour  was a good example of that, but the game was somewhat weak mechancially. Astebreed is more fun to shoot things in, lets you slash stuff with a robot form and gives that cheesy action cartoon feeling that not enough games do. I'd be willing to call this the God of War of shooters; perhaps the Marlow Briggs of shooters since it's not  60-100 dollars.

Mitsurugi Kamui Hikae
  It's a good action game. So is

Croixleur
Though this one has some painfully Anime writing.

Eryi's Action
It's from the guy who made Syobon Action back in the day. Simple platformer built around learning what all the gimmicks are and how to resolve them. These things have a certain charm to them, and it's well designed if you're into that sort of thing.

La Mulana (Remake)
Intentionally obtuse exploration and puzzle game. The remake put a greater focus on combat and does some very fun manipulation of people who have played the original version. A memorable experience to say the least.

Fairy Bloom Freesia
2D Devil May Cry with a nature-loving theme. Badass.

Satazius
Horizontal shooters are a bit of a rare breed these days. Particularly since Konami has no idea what to do with Gradius after Treasure beat them at their own game with Gradius V. This does what horis do best: obnoxious terrain movement and a slower pace to make you all the more miserable when you screw up.


So that's most of the list. The real question is: are there any games to not buy? The answer is yes. Two. Here they are:

Cherry Tree High Comedy Club
It's not very funny. Defeats the point of a comedy VN.

Vanguard Princess
I should probably write a post going into greater detail here, but let's summarise it for simplicity's sake. It's a freeware game. Eigomanga are charging for it. We're not sure if they even have the rights to do so, let alone are actually giving any money to the dev. They keep trying to cover up that it's made in 2D Fighter Maker and is a standalone title made with tools that will totally support robust netplay down the line. Honest. Please give us money. Buy our DLC save file hack as well.

 It's a shame, because Vanguard Princess is a great fighting game.

Understanding Blazblue Updates

So a couple of weeks ago, Arc System Works announced that they were adding two more characters to Blazblue ChronoPhantasma. Namely Celica A Mercury (time paradox ghost nun magician girl with robot buddy doing most of her attacks for her) and Lambda 11 (the most blatant art assets recycling ASW has done in quite some time). To accompany their additions, the game is getting a new patch, labelling the game as BBCP 2.0 (as opposed to the current version, which is BBCP 1.1). The changelog for the first location test last weekend was steadily nutted out through a combination of playtesting and ambiguous notes left by the devs for us to decrypt. From those we were able to get the impression that this is a full-fledged new revision, comparable to when Blazblue Continuum Shift was updated to Continuum Shift 2. There is a certain negativity in the community whenever a new revision of Blazblue is announced that contrasts with the usual excitement that a game update brings. To understand why, we need to understand what's different about Blazblue updates in comparison to just about any other fighter, and why they are done this way at all.

What's so different about Blazblue updates?
Suppose you've baited your opponent into doing something really stupid or risky like mashing uppercut. You go to punish them. Here is what Ryu does in each iteration of Street Fighter 4.

Forwards+Heavy Punch, Heavy Shoryuken, Focus Dash Cancel, Ultra 1. In AE2012 and Ultra I have to use Medium Shoryuken because the Heavy no longer can be FADC'd. As you can see though, it hurts a hell of a lot by itself to compensate.

Here is a set of bog standard combos Ragna used in the first Blazblue iteration.

And here is a set of his basic combos in the current.

Blazblue loves to completely rework its combo theory from the ground up each time. A lot of knowledge you've gained about what to do in certain situations, what's a good damage option vs one that carries further and so on get thrown out the window. The same goes for characters' tools in situations that have nothing to do with combos. In one game Jin can cancel his far-reaching 6C into a dash to do pressure with it. In another he loses it and Ragna gains it instead. One day Nu is a long-range character. The next day she's a close-range pressure character who happens to have projectiles. The next day she's a stance character. The next day she has the fastest standing overhead in the game. Don't get me started on how inconsistent they are with Tager. One day you don't want to hitconfirm with jabs because they'll scale the combo too much. The next they do nothing at all and may well be an optimal way to start combos. The next day they'll go back to reducing combo length, but only on some characters.

Whenever you get into Blazblue, the next iteration to come out might as well be a new game that happens to have some similar base system mechanics. That's assuming they didn't rework some of those as well.

Why do they do this?
 Arc System Works are fiercely dedicated to keeping Japanese arcades running. Their entire business model for fighting games is built around keeping money flowing into them as much as possible. Their current process for games releases is this:
1. Release a game in the arcades.
2. Maybe patch it if something's really busted (hello there Chie 5B causing fatal counter).
3. Release it on consoles a somewhere between 8 months and a year later.
4. Release a new game in the arcades at the same time.
5. Do the console release for that game.
6. Announce new update of the previous game. Release it at arcades.

It works excellently. There's always something fairly new to play in the arcades that you just can't experience at home. That doesn't quite explain why Blazblue revisions work the way they do in comparison to, say, Guilty Gear's though. So there must be another reason.

While GG and BB are both by ASW, they have different directors. Guilty Gear's early iterations were headed by Daisuke Ishiwatari, and taken over by lead programmer Pachi for Slash through to Accent Core +R. Both worked together on Xrd. Blazblue is headed by Toshimichi Mori, who is known to ignore others' feedback. So we can conclude that he has a certain business approach to how to keep arcades making money that differs a bit to the others at ASW.

You see, if people have to relearn a character's combos in a game that is only playable in arcades, it means they have to spend more money. Not only will they be spending their usual allotment of yen to play with others, but they need the extra lab time just to get their skill at the level they were two months before the new iteration came out. As well as giving a game a sense of new life and a more even playing field for newcomers, they're double dipping on the existing userbase. It makes perfect sense from a business standpoint.

 The game keeps trying to reinvent itself, so I think Mori may not be happy with the game's core. If a game needs to keep reinventing itself, it may well not be a very good game in the first place.

Players of other fighters, particularly the Capcom games tend to view airdash players as being a fickle bunch who jump from game to game as soon as a new one appears. Maybe it's because relearning Blazblue is in itself the same as learning any other game, so they're just trying to find one that's enjoyable enough to really stick with for ages. After all, the Melty Blood community stuck with its game from ReACT all the way through. It's just a shame Type-MOON tried so damn hard to prevent them doing so. That's for another time though.

The King of Singleplayer Multiplayer Gaming: Ligretto

This is Ligretto.





It is a game for two to four players. Each player is handed a deck with a unique back. They shuffle their decks and deal a 10 card high stack. Depending on how many players they also deal out somewhere between 5 and 2 cards next to the stack face up. The aim is to place the cards in stacks of their own colours (yellow, blue, green and red) in the order of the 1 on the bottom, going up to 10 at the highest. You obviously won't be able to do with the face-up cards in front of you, so you cycle through your remaining deck 3 cards at a time. In other words, this game is multiplayer Klondike.

Of course, Klondike isn't really a turn-based game as you're just playing with yourself to pass the time. Ligretto is thus not a turn-based card game either.

So let's go over that again: Place your cards in stacks in the middle, starting with 1 and finishing with 10. Get rid of the 10card stack to win. Use the rest of your deck to get the cards you need to get the openings needed to remove the 10card stack. When someone's done that, they yell LIGRETTO and you get a point for each card you'd gotten out on the field. You lose two points for each of your 10card stack that's still there. You do this all at once.

Did I mention that that's not the only box? There's this one too.


and this one to boot.


Why the different coloured boxes? Why, because they have unique deck backs of their own! You can buy all three and support 12 player real time Klondike.

This is the Quake 3 of card games. Or perhaps the Timesplitters. This game is brutal.

Multiplayer tactics in this game aren't about reading what's in other people's hands, making feints with discards or trying to communicate to a partner what your assets are through how you play like most card games. Multiplayer tactics are much grimier than that. You employ the sorts of tricks that you learn playing physical games outside like Storm the Lantern or British Bulldogs.  Tricks like holding back certain cards until someone lets you place three cards in rapid succession. Using twitch reactions to place a card before someone else can place consecutives. Talking smack to distract people from you slipping cards of the wrong order into piles. Demanding everyone pause to fix up piles that have gotten horribly messy and perhaps have incorrect sequences so you can delay an opponent from placing that Yellow 9 you've had clogging up your 10cards all round.

There are few card games (or indeed board games in general) that can get the blood pumping quite the way Ligretto can. I've seen people pop off hard when they win a round or lose one midway through placing their final card. It's the chaotic action videogame that doesn't need a monitor. I love this game.