Tag Archives: casual games

Munchausen by proxy server

Posted by under game design, magnum opus press

The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen (the Difference Engine no.3 edition) is now available for download exclusively from e23, the digital warehouse of Steve Jackson Games. This is the revised and expanded facsimile version of the game that I’ve been blathering about for the last two years, and which is finally seeing the light of day two hundred years after its original printing was entirely destroyed before a single copy could be sold.

For those who don’t know or who haven’t been paying attention, The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen is a role-playing game. In it you play the roles of a group of drunken eighteenth-century nobles after a very good dinner, trying to out-boast each other with stories of their astounding adventures. Steve Jackson says, “The original edition of The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen was unique and marvellous. This new edition is even better. If you are a clever person with clever friends, you will enjoy reading and playing it. Let’s not consider the alternative.” John Kovalic calls it “utter brilliance in RPG form” and even though I failed to convince Gary Gygax that it really was an RPG and not some newfangled story-whatnot, he did say that “the premise of the Munchausen game is very clever, and the system is likewise”.

If you are not yet convinced, a PDF of the first eight pages of the game is downloadable from the Magnum Opus Press website. If you are, then the Baron Munchausen download page of e23 is here.

I am very interested to learn what you think of it.

Beat It

Posted by under Uncategorized

It’s twenty-five years since the release of Michael Jackson’s Thriller, the best-selling album of all-time. There’s a big article about it on the BBC News website. Sixty-five million copies sold, according to Guinness, which must make it arguably the best-selling single piece of popular culture ever. It’s certainly several times more than the best-selling DVD (reports vary but generally agree nothing’s sold more than 20m).

Of course, that’s not quite fair, because when we say ‘copies of Thriller‘ we’re not talking about copies in one format: we mean vinyl, cassette, CD, minidisc, MP3 and all the various esoteric music formats that have fallen by the wayside since 1982. So to compare it to a movie, really we’d have to add the DVD and VHS sales together, and since nobody seems to bother compiling either it’s a bit of a moot comparison.

So comparing it to video games is going to be even more moot. Video games are tied to a handful of platforms, and when those platforms become obsolete then the games disappear, at least in retail terms. According to Wikipedia the best-selling video game is Super Mario Brothers, which had a retail lifespan from 1985 to 1995, or in other words as long as the NES was available (though it was also released for the Gameboy Color and GBA, and is now downloadable on the Wii). And it notched up just over 40 million copies in those ten years, which is pretty impressive, though of course a large percentage of them were bundled with the NES itself. Still, it’s not even close to 65 million. What would it take for a game to reach those kind of…

Stop. Tetris, in its various iterations, incarnations and reboots, has sold 60 million copies.

Or at least it had according to this press release, which you’ll notice is dated five years ago, or in other words before it had been ported to mobile phones. And like Thriller it’s still selling.

Which means our best-selling title is almost exactly equivalent to the music industry’s best-selling title, despite being three years younger and rather more expensive per copy.

So why isn’t it as feted as Thriller is?

Several reasons. Music is ambient, pervasive and persistent. To experience it, you simply need to be near an audio device that’s playing it. You don’t have to be concentrating on it; in fact you can be concentrating on something else. None of these things are true of video games. Which means that even though the sale levels of the two titles are close to each other, many more people have experienced Thriller than have experienced Tetris. I mean, I don’t think I’ve ever held a copy of Thriller in my hands (what a very last-millennium concept, eh readers?) but I believe I would recognise every track on it within ten seconds of the song starting up. Would a non-gamer be able to name the pieces of Tetris (or alternatively be able to say what LOSTJIZ represents)? They might recognise a screenshot of the game, they might even be able to remember its name. But what percentage of them wouldn’t recognise a photograph of Michael Jackson?

Put it this way: video games are by their nature not a pervasive part of human culture. Anything that demands actual interaction requires focus and concentration, and while you can record a game of Tetris you can’t record what’s important about it: the experience of play, of interaction, and you can’t reproduce it without having a copy of the game and whatever you need to play it on. What I’m saying, fundamentally, that—the Tetris effect notwithstanding—you can’t hum a video game.

So while Tetris and Thriller may have sold about the same number of copies, Michael Jackson has touched many more people than Alexey Pajitnov.

Allegedly.

Out and about

Posted by under street games

Mr D. Hon has already done the honours on this one, but since I booked the pub I feel I should also publicise it a bit: the third monthly London Gamer Geeks pubmeet will happen on 20th June (Wednesday), 6.30pm, downstairs in the College Arms on Store Street WC1. The focus is mostly but not entirely talking about the kind of video-games that make sales people break out in a rash. Sometimes we also talk about other types of games. The most-played game last month was pool, though Lee did get me into a head-to-head battle on the Pokemon match-three-tiles title whose name escapes me, and gave me a predictable thrashing. Anyway, it’s a good laugh.

On a not entirely dissimilar note, spurred by a blog post by Mr A. Hon a while back, I have fulfilled a long-promised pledge and mapped out a fifteen-hole frisbee golf course for Clapham Common. (The main similarity with the games night is that it ends up in the pub.) There’s more information on my Flickr page if you want to try it for yourself—yes, hole 9 does go through the bandstand—or if you fancy a get-together for an informal tournament then give me a shout and we’ll arrange a time.

Not much about storytelling in games or stirring players’ emotions this time, I’m afraid. Too busy thinking about cricket.

Got a match?

Posted by under Uncategorized

A footnote to the post on cheating and Puzzle Quest: Jesper Juul has just posted a fantastic overview on the history of match-three-tiles games, tracing it back as far as Chain Shot in 1985. It’s not complete—it doesn’t mention Puzzle Quest or, more bizarrely, the much better known Columns (Sega, 1990)—but it does contain a lot of really meaty information on the nature of innovation vs plagiarism in the casual games field including a close examination of the whole Puzzloop/Zuma/Luxor confusion in terms of who brought what to the table. There’s also a discussion of whether and how it’s possible to examine the history and heritage of a game that mentions a paper on the history and spread of Mancala, which I have to track down.

Recommended.

(“A punk stopped me on the street. He said, ”You got a light Mac?” I said, ”No, but I’ve got a dark-brown overcoat.”—from ‘Big Shot’ by the Bonzo Dog Band)