themosse.net/blog

I believe it was the Christmas when I was seven when me and my big brother Mats got a Commodore 64 from Santa Clause. Although I was a bit of a nerd even before this, it was this contraption which sealed my path into geekhood. At ten years old I was “programming” games in BASIC, and I have a lot of games like the Ultima-series to thank for at least some of my skills in the english language. One of my all-time favorite games though was always M.U.L.E.

In M.U.L.E. (Multiple Use Labor Element) you play settlers on the planet IRATA (Atari spelled backwards) settling land plots on which you either grow foods, gather solar energy, mine for smithore (the source material for the aforementioned M.U.L.E.s…) or the rare luxury mineral Crystite. Shortness of food will seriously handicap your abilities to perform functions, and if you don’t have enough energy your M.U.L.E.s won’t be able to perform, i.e. produce/harvest/mine goods. If the colony doesn’t receive smithore there will not be enough M.U.L.E.s to go around. Crystite? Well, that’s for making money.

Games are played in either six, nine or twelve months (rounds), each month identical. It starts with a land grant, where all players (always four of them, either human or A.I.) have the opportunity to claim one land plot for free. Additional land plots may be auctioned off at this point as well. After this players (in order of rank) take turns doing their actions. This may include buying M.U.L.E.s, outfitting them for work either harvesting food, gathering energy, mining smithore or crystite, and then taking them out to their land plots. M.U.L.E.s can be moved around or refitted for other duties as well. You can mark your land plots for sale in the following land auction or buy an assessment of how much crystite is found in any plot. You can carry out as many of these actions as you can in the amount of time given. The amount of time depends on how much food you have. If you have time over you can always end your turn by gambling in the pub. The final phase of the round is the auctions phase. Now goods of surplus food or energy, as well as smithore and crystite can be bought and sold to either other players or to the colony itself.

After the selected six, nine or twelve rounds the colonist ship returns whoever has the most points (money, land and goods) wins the game. Simple as pie! Well, not really. There’s a lot to keep in mind. If you’re producing food (more than the others) you want the colony to run out of foods, so that you can control the price, as everybody has to buy from you. If the colony doesn’t get smithore it can’t produce M.U.L.E.s. The less they have, the more they cost, naturally.

A few days ago, a Twitter-contact let me know about a new development in the world of M.U.L.E., namely Planet M.U.L.E.. This is the answer to several of my long-lived prayers, and I’m not a praying man… I’ll get it out of the way immediately, it’s free, it’s cross-platform (Windows, Mac and Linux) and it’s online. In a sense I think M.U.L.E. was always meant to be played online, it was just twenty-or-so years ahead of it’s time…

So far I’ve registered (username: Mosse) and played only one training game (against bots) but it seems very truthful to the original, with the exception of revamped graphics. The game has only been live since the 6th of December (Finland’s independence day, by the way…) so there aren’t that many active players yet. I don’t know, and honestly actually doubt, if it will ever grow huge, as this M.U.L.E. fandom is a bit on the über-geeky side, but I’m a happy camper! I’ve waited for this for a long time, as M.U.L.E. is one of the games I always make sure to play every time I dust off ye olde C64 and start it up, which I do about once a year.

Sometimes you find a gem. Browsing through the Steam-store (an online shop where you buy PC games as downloads) I stumbled upon an ad for TrackMania United, which they were selling at half price for a limited time. It looked semi-interesting, and when I found out you can download a free light-version of the game I was sold. The TrackMania Nations is not a demo, but a fully playable, non-restricted game. I downloaded it, installed and played it. I liked it. I sent the file to my brother Jens, he installed it and we played. For hours. Then we bought the “full” game, and played. For hours.

The Game
TrackMania is a racing game. You race on imaginative tracks with bends, turns, jumps, hills, pillars, tricks, traps and loops. The game comes with twohundred-and-some tracks and a simple-to-use track editor – so an unmeasurable amount of home-made tracks. And it's all about time. How fast can you get from the start to the finish?

What sets this game apart from other racing games is that your opponents are only ghosts on the track. No bumping, no overtaking, no streamlining. This has the very positive effect that your races aren't destroyed by sudden lag on the server. This was what got on my nerves the most when playing for example the otherwise excellent TOCA Race Driver 3 online. You're driving perfectly fine, then a sudden lag and you have an opponent halfway through your passenger's seat and you're flung off track in high speed, destroying your race. Sure, you play TrackMania online, and you can see where the opponents are (if you so choose) but your race against the clock is the only thing that matters.

How it's played
Most tracks are short, between fifteen and thirty seconds, so competing on that scale means it's all about hundredth of a second. Where can I shave off another tenth of a second, how can I take that one tight turn a hundreth of a second faster? On the most popular game mode, Time Attack, you have a pre-set amount of time, say five minutes to perform as fast a track-time as you can. At any point you can hit delete, and start again instantly from start – so if you blow the first corner, you don't have to finish a lap you know won't improve your time. It's all about getting that one, perfect time.

Another mode, Rounds means all participants start at the same time and do a single attempt – no restarts. Fastest time gets a certain amount of points, usually 10 and following cars a decreasing amount. All cars who finish the race within usually 10 seconds after the winner will score one point. First car to a pre-set victory condition (usually 30 points) win the race. There are other modes, like Laps and Teams – but I haven't tried them out yet. I'm having too much fun with the first two, which are the two most popular online.

Driving is outrageously simple. Throttle, brake, left and right turns. Nothing else. No handbrake, no turbos. The trick is hitting every turn perfectly, sweeping every apex at absolutely the maximum speed that turn can be taken in successfully. Every player online is ranked using a system of LP (Ladder Points) – right now I'm ranked about 300 000th in the world, with 4.8 million registered users according to the website.

What Does it Bring
…besides one kick-a**-game? The game comes with a track-editor and car-paint-editor. Yes, you can paint your car anyway you like. Add stickers, write stuff on them, and paint them in all the colors of the rainbow. You need the bought game to actually upload them and have them when playing online so that others can see them as well. It also had a setting I found strangly interesting. “3D glasses“. Yes, by enabling 3D-glasses mode, the red and green channels are horisontally separated, so using 3D-glasses (the kind you used to get with the Donald Duck-magazine in the days of yore) you could see the game in 3D.

Well, I couldn't not very well not try that out, now could I!? I found a cheap set online that wasn't made out of cardboard and bought them. And yes, in case you are wondering, I am insane. The 3D-effect is cool, but not useful. Just what I expected. The 3D-effect is at times very believable – but with the colored glasses all colors are distorted, and because the color channels are separated – everything is naturally a bit blurry. And with a game demanding absolute precision, blurry is bad m'kay.

So if you are a perfectionist who likes to really try to get a track to go perfectly, instead of the Need For Speed-kind of balls-to-the-walls push-the-other-cars out-of-my-way kind of brawler-racer, this might be for you. Or if you like making your own tracks – which in this game is about as easy as building LEGO:s. Give it a shot, it won't cost you anything – just go to trackmania.com and download the completely free Trackmania Nations and give it a go. Then find me (username themosse.net) and let's race!

My kid brother Jens turned 26 on saturday. Congratulations, and stuff! I guess neither one of us is the party-party type, as there was no real birthday shin-dig. “…but come on over, there's always coffee“, I was told. That is common courtesy when living out in the woods. (even though Jens does live in the “town” center). Well, I didn't need to be invited twice. When Jens offers “coffee” and his fiancé Linda adds in “food” and “pie”, one clears the schedule. We ended up adding “boardgames”, “computer games” and “wine” to the mix.

Hot Lava Death!
With hot coffee in one hand we all played a game of The Downfall of Pompeii. It was a first for me, and I ended up liking the game very much. The game plays in two phases. In the first you play cards to add people into buildings in the city of Pompeii. If you add people into a building where there already are people, you get to add further “relatives”.

In the second phase (triggered by drawing a specific card) the volcano Vesuvius erupts, and you're in a hurry to get your people out of the city safe and sound. From this point on, instead of playing cards you draw Lava-tiles and place them on the board. The Lava spreads and naturally burns everything and everyone in its' path. In addition you get to move two people per turn, trying to get them out the city gates. The people move as many squares as there were people in the square in which they began their turn, themselves included. Whoever gets more people out is the winner, the tie-breaker being who got less people thrown into the volcano.

This causes interesting gameplay. You need to get a lot of people in to be able to get a lot of people out. You need to spread them out as much as possible, so that a single Lava-tile doesn't kill all of your people at once, but still keep them close enough to the gates. And even though you don't want to give good spaces to your opponents, you actually want opponents in the same houses as you, because that means they don't want to see that house burn either.

It's a very fun game even though it's vicious. It was a very tight race, Linda got more people into the city, but lost more to the lavaflow. In the end, I won the game with 13 people out, Jens following with 12 and Linda managing 10.

Hokus-bogus
Linda sat down with a book so we took it upon ourselves to get a 2-player game going. I thought Shazamm! had a shiny box (hey, it's as good an excuse as anything else!) and Jens immediately said “okey“. Again, it's a new acquaintance for me. In Shazamm! you play mighty wizards about to cross a bridge. However, the bridge is only wide enough to pass one person, and neither wizard wants to back off. To top it off, there's a fire in between, and the bridge is crumbling from both edges. Yeah, don't even try to find any logic there…

For every round you have 50 points of Mana (magic power) to use. You also have a deck of spells (identical to both wizards which you can use. Both players secretly choose how many points of Mana they want to use, as well as which, if any spells you want to cast right now. The spells are gone once you've used them, and you only have a few of them to use (the initial hand is five cards) Then both players reveal how many points they've used, as well as which spells they will cast. The amount of Mana they've committed is their attacking strength.

The spells are then dealt with in numerical order. The spells do anything from canceling out opponent spells, to raising your Mana, to increasing their attack strength, etc. Whoever has the higher attack strength once all spells are cast wins the turn and the fire moves one step closer to the loser. Then you do another round. Remember that you only have a total of 50 points of Mana to use for the entire round. You play rounds until either player runs out of Mana, the fire reaches either player or any spell states that the round is over. At that point Mana points are reset, and both wizards are moved to three steps from the fire. In addition the first step of the bridge on both ends crumble to dust. And then you keep playing until either wizard falls off the bridge, leaving the other… well… trapped on a burning bridge that leads to no-where.

…which is kind of how I felt about this game… It's got all the things I generally hate. It's second-guessing, blind-bidding and cards that break the game. I don't hate all cards, some spells are really good. There's one spell that lets you adjust your attack strength up or down by five points, for example. With that, you can add to it if you'll be able to win the bout, or lower it if it's lost anyway – so you'll have more Mana to spare. But there are worse spells. There's one which reverses the result of the bout. So the one with the lower attack-strength wins. So you commit one point of Mana, play this spell – win the bout and lose only a single point of Mana as well… This is so much stronger than all other cards that it almost breaks the game alone. I really, really, really hated the game. Jens won it, but I consider myself a victor because the game ended.

Zombies on Steam
At this point Jens and I hooked up our laptops and went for some LAN-gaming. A few races of TOCA Race Driver 3 and a few races of 1nsane, both of which we've bought from GOG.com (Good Old Games). We are both fans of the company, who sell a bit older games as downloads. We don't have high-end gaming PC:s, so these older games are often the only ones we can play, and these are games which can be difficult to find in the shops.

What GOG do so brilliantly with the games they sell are two of their main selling points… I've written about it before, but I'll mention them again. All games are tested to work both on XP and Vista, and all and any DRM (copy protection) is removed. But we've bought all the games from GOG we want right now, so we looked at Steam, which I've heard a lot about lately. They sell a lot of newer games as well – games which our computers just can't manage, but we found one in particular which we both bought, downloaded, installed and played whole-heartedly.

Steam works a bit differently, and I'm not too fond of some of their mechanics. You download the game to your local computer, and you can download it again if you switch computers etc. But every time you want to play the game, you have to be logged in to Steam. So you probably can't play it without an internet-connection, I guess… And what happens when/if Steam goes out of business? Are all my bought games non-useable!? Well, although I prefer what the boys at GOG do, the game we bought was fantastic. Being logged into Steam has it's advantages too, as it becomes a social site – where you can have friends, and you see what games these friends have and what they are playing. (Btw. I'm themosse (Mosse) on the Steam-community)

We bought the co-op horror first-person shooter Killing Floor. Although we generally prefer the thinking man's tactical shooters, like Rainbow 6, Ghost Recon or SWAT 4 – this is nothing like it, but very fun. Hordes of Zombies are attacking you – and you'll just have to survive waves of hungry undead. Between waves you run like crazy to the “Trader” to bulk up on new weapons, ammunition, armor and first aid syringes.

There's very few tactical choices to be made here. Mainly choosing where to make your stand, welding up doors (a temporary solution to keeping out zombies…) and maybe deciding one player should have a fire-arm whilst the other sports a melee weapon, like the handy chainsaw for example. So why do I like this even though I usually prefer more clever and tactical shooters? It's all about the atmosphere, baby! This is like being in a zombie-movie…

Problem is, my PC-laptop is getting older, and there has long been a problem which I think is the graphics card, meaning although my machine exceeds the minimum requirements, and I draw back on the graphics detail etc., it still crashes every now and again… Maybe time for a new gaming laptop? A birthday present, from Mosse to Mosse? Happy birthday, Mosse? (although I would really want to wait until Windows 7 is released before I buy a new Win-PC – don't want that crappy, crappy Vista…)

So happy birthday, Jens – it was fun killing Zombies with you.
More fun than strawberry cake and juice.

Ever heard of a little game called Bejeweled? A legendary little time-sink that pretty much started an onslaught of switch-two-to-connect-three-games. Well, the folks who made that – PopCap have released their newest “big” game, with the very promising title Plants vs. Zombies (PvZ). I heard the reviews (for example, on Rev3:s Co-Op) and I have to be perfectly honest – I didn’t have high hopes. PvZ is a kind of weird mix between a tower defense and a real-time strategy game, neither one being a genre I particularly enjoy…

But you can download the game (both Mac and PC!) for free from PopCap:s website, and play it for 60 minutes for free – which I did. Sixty minutes later I grabbed my credit card and paid the twenty American bucks for it… It’s not that it’s that good, but much like Bejeweled – it’s addictive.

So what’s it all about, then? Well, zombies are attacking your house and you need to defend yourself. With plants! It feels a bit like some strange form of collectible card game, as you have different kinds of plants to use. In the beginning you only have two kinds, but for (almost) every level you complete you acquire a new kind of plant to use, each with a special ability. There are different kinds of zombies as well, and some plants are better equipped to handle some zombies.

The in-game currency is sun, which you collect from the sky (during day-time levels) and from sunflowers, which you need to plant. The more sunflowers you have, the more sun you acquire, but every sunflower takes up a spot from an attacking flower, such as a pea-shooter, which naturally shoots peas at zombies. And of course, zombies don’t like peas, but you all knew that? There are potato mines, which explode in a big SPUDOW! There are, in total, 42 different kinds of plants to unlock and try, but you are only allowed a limited amount of them for each level. At the start of the level, you get to see the yard and what kinds of zombies will be attacking you, and then you have to choose six kinds of plants to use in your defense (more slots are available to purchase later on in the game), so you might have to choose between using those Cherry bombs or Wall-nuts…

The zombies all walk in a straight line towards the house. Normal garden-variety zombies walk slowly, Cone-head zombies have found traffic cones to put on their heads offering a little better protection, pole-vaulting zombies carry poles to leap over the first plant they encounter, newspaper zombies carry a paper which gets destroyed from a few shots of a pea-shooter. When this happens, they get really, really mad because they were very close to finishing their Sudoku puzzle – so they start running. All in all there are 26 different kinds of zombies… If a zombie-dude reaches a plant alive (well, dead, but not… uhm… dead again) they start munching on the plant eating it up. If they reach the house you lose the game. There is a last line of defense, being the lawnmower but that’s a one-time savior…

So the game feels like a card-game, plays like a real-time strategy game and works like a tower defense game. Why do I like it then? Unlike most RTS:s the whole game is on screen all the time, so you don’t have to scroll around like you’re high on ultra-caffeine all the time. The levels are short so there’s always time for “one more level”, and the humor – ah, the humor. When you click the “HELP“-button in the main menu, you get a hand-written note which says: “When the zombies arrive, just sit back and do nothing to win the game. (Written by the zombies)“. Your friendly next-door neighbor Crazy-Dave shows up in between levels with a pot on his head (latest in haute-couture!) to ramble on about nothing at all.

Go ahead, download the freebie trial game, I dare you!

Wishes, it seems, are sometimes granted.

I have long now wanted a place where I could buy older computer games legally. I enjoy occasional gaming on my computer, but I do not have the interest nor the money to continuosly upgrade my PC. In fact, since I am on a laptop, I don't even have the possibility to do so. But reality remains, there are a sh*tload of fantastic games whose only flaw is that they are a few years old – and are therefore difficult to find. But have no fear, Good Old Games is here!

Good Old Games (or gog.com for short) is a new service – officially still in “beta“, but already sport an impressive catalogue of games. These aren't obscure, bad games nobody's every heard of either – but true classics. As if this wasn't fantasic enough for us who enjoy those games which were made in a time when the actual gameplay was more important than photorealistic graphics and movie-quality cut-scenes, the delivery is above anything I've ever even dreamed of.

The Price is Right
Every game is either USD5.99 or USD9.99, payable with either Visa, Mastercard or PayPal. Differently to other services where you can buy downloads, once you've bought a game, you don't get a download link. Instead, that game is added to your list of purchased games, and you can download it as many times as needed. So even if you need to wipe your computer clean, as I had to do, you don't have to fear losing your game even if you don't have a physical copy of the game. (provided gog.com don't go out of business…)

Will it Work?
The games aren't just directly sold as they were way back when. The gog-team actually goes in and do a few tweaks to the games before adding them to their catalogue. First of all, any and all DRM:s (copy protections) are removed. You can install it on any amout of computers you want. This naturally opens the door to buy it once and then give copies to all your friends, but service like this, especially for this price, should be supported and I hope their openess doesn't come and bite them in the behind.

Secondly all games are tested and guaranteed Vista and XP compatible! This is an issue with even the newest of new games, and it's a great comfort to know they're pre-tested. The hardware requirements are printed separately for each game, but generally a 1.5 GHz is enough to run most games. Which means laptop gamers like me don't have to look for entertainment in the kiddy-section.

The Buffet
Even though I said these games were made when gameplay and innovation was more important than graphics, that doesn't mean we're talkin about Pac-Man or Super Mario Bros. These are the real deal, with classics like Conquest of the New World, Fallout, Flatout, MDK etc.

I immediately bought a copy of the first true FPS I ever bought (for the Mac back in the day), Unreal Tournament and bought the upgraded Unreal Tournament 2004 (Editor's Choice Edition). How does it look? On my HP 6715b I can run this puppy at the full 1680×1080 resolution! Do I have to say it looks beautiful?

The Little Extra
Most games sport a few extras which you can download once you've paid for the game. Naturally there's the manual, but also high-definition wallpapers and avatars, some games have soundtracks or walkthroughs and strategy guides.

This is a fantastic service, I think – both for us consumers, who can now (legally!) get our hands on fantastic games that don't force us to buy a new graphics card every fortnight, and don't cost a whole days' salary, and for the game companies who can now get an income from the older games nobody could buy earlier. Looking over their wishlist where registered users can vote on which games they want to see on the catalogue I had to concentrate not to drool over the aforementioned laptop…

Give us System Shock, give us Little Big Adventure, give us Baldur's Gate, give us more great games! If you code it, I will buy!