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GeekNights Tuesday - Nidhogg
Nidhogg is a fantastic, simple, two-player orthogame that exemplifies the "genre" so well defined by games such as Pong, Spacewar, and Outlaw! Local multiplayer and simple direct competition are seeing a renaissance that will only continue throughout 2014. In other annual news, Nintendo is suffering heavily from the Fiscal Year of Luigi (and their corporate culture that creates excellent hardware that almost no games actually use), and Torchbearer works wonderfully via Google Hangout. In personal news, we've all but stopped playing games that require teaching others, and encourage tabletop gamers everywhere to actually read the rules to games.
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- I want to extend your thought about board game rules teaching. The oral tradition is pushing the hobby in a direction I don't like. Since everyone is used to sitting down and being taught a game before they play, they expect a rules teaching session, and therefore wind up becoming these players that are always chasing the new games. Board games are different! They are much less likely to become outdated, and I really want to spend more time playing the classics and tight competitions.
- Nintendo has obvious leadership and culture problems. It is with shocking ignorance that they were caught pants-down unable to develop HD content in a timely fashion. This punted their ENTIRE first party development schedule. Combine that with a tablet controller that will never be a core gameplay element, and a lack of understanding about US online play culture, and you're NOT going to get Gamecube quality games. At least not out of the gate.
The only thing you need to read about Nintendo is Chris Kohler's editorials on Wired. His latest is great.
Now every time I play, always 1 new person that you have to teach. UGH. Fast draft! Fast draft! However, I don't ever expect everyone to remember all the new symbols on the newer expansions.
Everyone needs to read the rules some of the time. More than one person needs to completely read the rules to any given game. All players need to be capable of reading a rule book, and also quickly referencing a rulebook without needing any outside help.
Take 7 Wonders for example. I never remember all the cities, leaders, wonders, and weird symbols. It's inevitable that I have to look them up. Especially since I'll go months without playing, and then it suddenly gets busted out at a convention. But when I have to look up a leader, I can grab the book, and very quickly read the rule. Not only that, but I understand what I have read, and I get the rule right without any outside help. This prevents the game flow from being disrupted if I had to force someone to explain something to me.
A game with even one player who needs their hand-held is a game that is not fun for the other players. To be that person who needs hand-holding is quite selfish. Those people are demanding that others read the rules for them, and teach them. They also require that other people suffer through one or more shitty games with them until they get the hang of it.
I don't want to not introduce someone to the wonders of tabletop gaming. But I also want to be able to enjoy those wonders myself. That means I want to play games with other people who are also experts at the game and fully know the rules. If board gaming is biking, I'm going to be very upset if someone sits in the back seat of my tandem bike and doesn't pedal. Everyone has to pedal.
Also I've had this discussion with Jeremy and told him the era of Game Cube was the best, while he disagrees and states N64. This is only because we mainly spent time playing the one system more than the other.
But as I've stated before: Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles, Four Swords, Mario Kart: Double Dash were some of the best multi-player games I've played.
They fell short with the sequel to FF:CC. Sigh. I want to play FF:CC again as a different class but at the same time I don't.
N64: Mario Kart 64, Snowboard Kids, 1080 snowboarding, goldeneye, perfect dark, Duke Nukem 64, smash bros, star fox 64, gauntlet legends, goemon game, tony hawk game, etc.
GC: SSBM, Phantasy Star, soul calibur
I can't even think of other games I liked multi on GC
Two people! Because Homesteaders and Fairy Tale are relatively simple to teach.
... Actually that may have been the Homesteaders game where I realized gold can be 5 silver for any purpose, which would make you correct.
For all of the failure (and let's not treat it lightly, Wii U is beyond your wildest nightmares bad when compared to any prior Nintendo console sales), I still can't count Nintendo out. They can have several more false starts and still eventually hit another home run.
I spent my snow days yesterday and today beating Super Mario 3D World on Wii U and damn that game is so good. That's why I'll never count Nintendo out. They obviously still have genius-level talent in game design, they just haven't used it properly as of late (the lack of a valid follow up to GC WarioWare is a GREAT example). Until they no longer even have the potential for greatness, I'll still follow Nintendo and care about their games.
They dumbed down Mario Tennis.
If they can get it together with this next Smash, I have a feeling the Wii U is going to go have a nice library when people look back at its failure, years from now. I can see that their design strategy for 1st party games is going back to no-bullshit GC days. No more stupid motion controls, no wedging the tablet in as a must-use feature where it doesn't make sense. The dumbing down is my only fear.
But yeah, Sakurai doesn't really like competition or any of that stuff. It's pretty obvious from interviews.
There have been stirrings that Nintendo have looked at Project M and the Smash scene but it's all conjecture at this point.
I really don't care about the true competitive scene. I have very little patience for the wavedashing Fox-only, no items, Final Destination bullshit. I exist in some mid-range competitive zone, where we keep the items on, but take the worst offenders out, and have a rotation of 5 or 6 "generally fair" stages. This is how my friends and I play, and we immediately were put off by the floatiness and the tripping in Brawl (as well as the non-functioning online play).
I checked the specific rule after the game.
I played a game of Puerto Rico a few months back in which another player was teaching the game to a new player. During the game the teacher player told me I had to choose my plantation before I got my random hacienda tile. I reached for the rulebook and as I had read it before I turned straight to right section and showed the guy I was playing correctly by taking the random tile first.
That's the difference right there.
I don't own Seven Wonders but I know there are places to freely download rules so that's not the best excuse.
Man, I really wanted more of SMW2:YI action. Assholes. All of them!
For all the virtues that this game was blessed with, there were many comments on spawn positions, complaints about jumping and running, one person having more knowledge than the other, how one player was recovering faster there was even a frame data comment.
It looks as if it has the same complexity as any other 1v1 competitive game, it's just simplified to to 2 buttons.