I love Bollywood movies. It’s a lucky Sunday that I catch the four-hour Bollywood music video show on my local cable company’s “international” channel.
So I’m very excited that Bollywood3d is experimenting with game tie-ins to Bollywood movies. What they’re doing actually sounds a lot like what Google and Universal are doing with the Ultimate Search for Bourne. The games will come out before the movies they’re tied to, to build up hype and interest. But unlike the Search for Bourne, players will buy these games, and it sounds like real development may actually go into them.
Apparently, the Indian computer game market is slow, but Indian culture and history and its awesome movie industry make fertile ground for fascinating and fun video games. Will I be able to participate? I don’t know. I don’t speak one whit of any Indian language, and I probably wouldn’t qualify for the prizes even if I can participate.
But I’ll be watching in December, when the first game is scheduled to come out.
July 26th, 2007
Today, Tobold wrote about what may be the death of turn-based strategy games, pointing out that even though technical limitations don’t force game developers to opt for a turn-based model, in some cases a turn-based model can offer greater depth of play.
Attempts to move tabletop gaming online have mostly failed. For instance, I ran a campaign in Neverwinter Nights that didn’t work for two key reasons. First, it took an enormous amount of time for me to create the game world between sessions. Even if I’d had more and more time to practice developing the world with the provided toolset, I’m sure I would always be spending more time creating scenarios than running them.
Second, as soon as combat began, the players were hopelessly outgunned. I kept lowering and lowering the difficulty of the fights in the game, but the players couldn’t keep up. Dungeons & Dragons and other tabletop roleplaying games are designed to simulate combat to some degree of accuracy, but the all depend on a turn-based model.
Sure, this means a few seconds of battle can take an hour to play out. Sure, in a real fight people don’t have time to make such decisions. But it allows people pretend they actually have combat skills. No one’s ever penalized for not remembering a keyboard shortcut and losing because her war-hardened combat veteran character forgot to raise her shield at the right moment.
(Neverwinter Nights actually was a turn-based game, though by default set to simulate real-time action. In a multi-playered, game-mastered game, though, allowing all players to pause was impractical. It simulated D&D reasonably well for the solo campaign, but failed for group play.)
Porting board games to computers has been more successful simply because no one’s trying to change the rules. No one wants to play speed-Monopoly, with button-mashing magnates making a Trump-like killing in the real-estate market simply because they can roll their dice the fastest. (Okay, maybe that’d be fun, but only in a weird way.)
But something breaks down with roleplaying games. Computer RPGs are an almost completely different genre than tabletop RPGs, even if they’re built around the same ruleset.
I asked before (in the context of voice chat) about non-MMO online roleplaying. But I’m thinking about it even more, now, ’cause I’ve got a friend from college who wants to start a campaign up again.
How can I get the tabletop roleplaying experience with remote players? Now that video conferencing is effectively free, we can at least talk to one another. And I’ve mentioned Gametable before, which provides a shared map and die rolling.
But are there any tools that really take advantage of web-connected computers to simulate the game itself while still giving the richness of turn-based play? Any tools that can handle the intricate interplay of a multi-character fight—with positioning, fancy moves, conditions that persist from turn to turn, all the number crunching—while still giving the players freedom to choose at (at least moderate) leisure their characters’ next actions? If so, I very much want to hear about them!
Has anyone successfully moved a tabletop campaign online? If so, what tools did you use? If it failed, what didn’t work?
July 26th, 2007
Yay! Caught a shot of Bourne with my Waterloo Station camera yesterday. Did anyone get a shot of him with a camera placed at a different location?
Now on the the complete spoiler for today’s puzzle in the Ultimate Search for Bourne.
We’re instructed to contact Simon Ross again using yesterday’s contact information. In the instant messenger, we use handle CRUYFF74 and passphrase don’t silence the truth.
Simon tells us: “Taking the day off to visit these places I found on a Google Groups. If you can’t reach me on my mobile, I’m most likely on the Bakerloo Line on the Tube.” The Google Groups phrase is a hot link to a specific “Sightseeing in London” group, obviously created for the game. You can find it here: http://groups.google.com/group/sightseeing-in-london?hl=en.
Poking around at the site reveals two discussions about sites in London—including Big Ben, Buckingham Palace, the Tower of London, and Saint Paul’s Cathedral—as well as a map that helpfully outlines the brown Bakerloo Line Ross referred to in his IM. Of the sites mentioned in the Sightseeing in London thread, only the London Eye stands out as a landmark anywhere near the Bakerloo Line.
So submit London Eye in the communications panel and the challenge is solved.
As for placing the cameras, I’ve decided to leave my first camera at Waterloo Station. Sure, it seems silly to put it in the same place, but other clues in the Google Group make detailed mention of it. For the second, well, why not go with the London Eye? If I get two shots of Bourne before tomorrow, I’ll be happy. If I get only one, I’ll be left wondering which nabbed him. And if I get none, well, then I really won’t know where to look for clues.
In the end, I found today’s challenge significantly more fun that the last few. Sure, it’s still easy, but there were other possible clues and red herrings at the web site. In the end, only the London Eye made sense, but you actually really do have to look to multiple resources to work this one out.
Go, Simon Ross! Now you’re acting like a spy!
(Incidentally, what happens if you put in the wrong answer? Would it be possible to sledgehammer your way through the puzzle by just entering site after site till you got a hit? Or are you penalized for mistakes?)
July 26th, 2007