Review of Pitfall on iOS

Rather than write a regular review, I will present my experience of playing the game as I played it. I was chatting with some friends as I played, and here is the chat log, with their comments removed for brevity:

Sirlin uh what is up with this

Sirlin a while ago I happened to read reviews of iOS Pitfall

Sirlin and everyone hated it, saying it was a fairly good game but the method of charging was totally terrible and way too much, way too required to progress, everyone said avoid

Sirlin right now it has 9,759 ratings, almost all of them 5/5

Sirlin ok I played the Pitfall game, I have a report

Sirlin it seems to be made by professional makers of games

Sirlin good controls, good production values, good art style, polish

Sirlin seems to have integration with various social medias and some sort of elaborate progression scheme or something to keep you playing

Sirlin hmm, if I reach a checkpoint (I didn't reach a checkpoint yet. Thanks) then I can spend a macaw token to start from there

Sirlin I can buy macaw tokens in the store

Sirlin Macaw token is gold.

Sirlin it costs 6000 silver bars + 10 diamonds

Sirlin oh man, this is so made by professional game makers

Sirlin I wondered how much diamonds cost to buy. In the store, one item is 8 dimaonds and it's FREE

Sirlin so that I get used to using the store

Sirlin I am amazed yet again by another thing

Sirlin I have a feeling this game is full of amazement

Sirlin Another store item is "2x treasure" and it costs $1.99. The picture is a silver bar transforming into a gold bar

Sirlin if you buy it, then all the silver bars you pick up as you play (there are tons, that's like the point) are gold bars instead, worth 2x as much

Sirlin "A great long term investment"

Sirlin I mean if I'm going to play the game, the earlier I buy this 2x gold upgrade the better!!!

Sirlin every time I play without buying it, I wasted something basically

Sirlin wow I can buy all sorts of barely different t-shirts for my guy, costing like $1 each sort of

Sirlin oh, this is confusing on their part

Sirlin actually the outfits are really different, but the icon for each outfit is a barely different t-shirt

Sirlin hmm how about 3d models of characters in Yomi, and you can buy alternate costumes

Sirlin I can buy consumable anti-venom tonics to cure bites and stings

Sirlin more amazement, it just does not stop

Sirlin today the bear outfit (one of the many you can buy) is the outfit of the day

Sirlin so it's free?

Sirlin no

Sirlin If I wear it, I get poison immunity today.

Sirlin So they could have made a poison immunity thing to buy, but this is even better because they can take away poison immune tomorrow.

Sirlin "Unlock the ability to get free diamonds in 5 more runs!"

Sirlin I get free treasure by liking them on Facebook, from within the app

Sirlin do you think it's even more incredible now, or the same level of incredible?

Sirlin if  you guessed more incredible, you're right

Sirlin I leveled up or something, twice. Also I passed a checkpoint

Sirlin and it tells me that now I can use Macaw tokens to start from there. To see how that works, press the store button

Sirlin already wow, but get this: you have to press the store button. You can't do anything else until you do

Sirlin then you can buy macaw tokens for 10 diamonds, by pressing the large pulsating button for that

Sirlin it's not optional!

Sirlin they give you some free diamonds to get you started

Sirlin and there is no way to do anything other than buy the macaw tokens right now. so again, they are training you to use the store.

Sirlin it's just never ending, the tricks

Sirlin now I died and there is a blue button restart

Sirlin OR

Sirlin a bigger, golden, gleaming, animated Macaw button to continue from last checkpoint

Sirlin By unlocking the checkpoint, I got 5 macaw tokens for free, but I can always buy more from the store!

Sirlin that's a line it said

Sirlin I clicked the blue restart button

Sirlin I would expect this to restart

Sirlin "ARE YOU SURE? Sure you want Harry to go all the way back to base camp, when you could use a *Macaw Token* to start at the last activated Checkpoint he passed?"

Sirlin I forgot to mention that each time I do a run, it starts with a sad horn honking sound as a t-shirt icon comes up that says "Outfit of the day: No Match"

Sirlin how do they keep topping themselves

Sirlin Now I unlocked the ability to get free diamonds!

Sirlin this sounds like a fantastic deal, who wouldn't want free diamonds

Sirlin I can click on "show me" to see how it works

Sirlin and it says by signing up for various offers, I can get the free diamonds now

Sirlin like sign up for discover card and freecreditscore etc

Sirlin I UNLOCKED the ability to do that lol

Sirlin wow I got a free diamond

Sirlin I completed one of the offers of watching a 30 second video

Sirlin I could get 106 diamonds for getting a free trial membership at freecreditscore.com though

Sirlin Playing this game feels like if Disneyland said "hey come to Disneyland free! As part of the experience, we will have a professional thief hold your wallet the whole time."

Some of these things are probably just good busines practice that I should consider for fantasystrike.com. More revenue means more ability to reinvest to make the site better. But taken all together, it's just so over the top in Pitfall, and the focus on money over actual game design is kind of frightening. It seems players are voting that that's what they want, as Pitfall on iOS has made a whole lot of money.

UPDATE: Hours later I turned on my iPad on the home screen, Pitfall notified me that my burst tonics have refilled, so it's a good time to get playing again.

Diablo 3's Ability System

Diablo 3 comes out in a couple weeks. I'm giving it the coveted award for "Biggest Comeback In System Design." Diablo 2's ability system was so bad that it's almost unbelievable, while the way Diablo 3 handles ability customization is one of the very best systems I've seen.

Diablo 2

Diablo 2 had talent trees where you spend points to unlock new abilities, very similar to how talent trees work in World of Warcraft. Also, you could allocate stat points into various different stats however you wanted as you leveled up. At first glance, these seem like ok things, but let's look at just how deeply problematic they really are.

Don't Use Points!

First, the best way to play Diablo 2 is have this big red "+" button on your screen almost the entire time, the one that says you have extra points to spend. The reason that will be on you screen for weeks is that you'd be a sucker to actually spend the points as you get them. You counter-intuitively (and unfunly) should stock up on those and spend them much later on. So the simple and fun thing to do (spend points as you get them) is just a trap for noobs.

Next, the whole system of allocating points in the first place didn't really customize anything. It was just a giant test of if you did your web research enough to know the only reasonable way to spend those stat points. You don't have to take my word for it either, let's see what Jay Wilson has to say. He was an avid Diablo 2 player, and the Game Director of Diablo 3 for the last 5 or 6 years.

Here's a written transcript of the relevant part, in case you don't want to watch the vid:

"You usually take as much strength as you need to get the armor that you're targeting, and that's usually around 120 or 220, depending on what type of armor. You take 75 dexterity because that's the amount you generally  need for good block percentages. You take NO energy at all unless…there's like one type of build you can make on a sorceress that uses energy shield. And then you put everything else in vitality. That's a shitty customization system. That's just not a good system." --Jay Wilson, Diablo 3 Game Director on Diablo 2

Talent Trees

Next, there's the talent trees. There's two problems here, one medium sized and the other is one of the most mind-blowing fumbles in design out there. First the medium problem: it's pretty hard to make talent trees that give any real choice. They sure seem to allow choice,

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Soul Calibur 5: First Impressions

I didn't follow the development of Soul Calibur 5 at all. I got the game and played it one evening so far, so I'm coming at this fresh. I thought I'd give my first impressions.

Overall, I like the game. It's fun, and it's simplified in a good way. So when I give you this long list of complaints, keep in mind I would generally recommend the game.

Button Config

Yeah, button config. Yes it matters. And it's the "wrong way." It's the bad way where you have to scroll through a list to change anything, and know the names of which buttons are which on your controller, instead of the good way where you press the button you want. This is a very real concern for running events, as it slows down events for no good reason. It's absolutely *embarrassing* that any company would release a fighting game in 2012 with the bad kind of button config. Seriously Namco, never ever do this again.

By the way, even though there are several default configs, none of them match what you'd want on the MadCatz TE stick, which is the standard. Have fun setting your kick button before every match (as you scroll through a list to do it). Letter grade on this feature: F.

Online

For some reason, it seems to default to searching for users with a good ping who in the "other" region, meaning they are NOT in North or South America, or Europe, Asia, or Japan? Wtf? I don't know, every time I start up the online I set this to North America. Another case of weirdo defaults, I guess.

After playing someone online, I think it's like only 2 clicks to get another opponent. This is great! I got an endless stream of a opponents who couldn't beat my Mitsurugi, without any clicking around in between matches.

As for the netcode, you know the thing you care tons about, it seemed great? I forgot that I wasn't playing locally, really, it all just worked. There was no

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Star Wars Players Banned for Dancing

Happy New Year everyone! I hope you celebrated, but not by dancing in the Star Wars MMO, as that got a lot of people banned. Doing the "group dance" command by typing /getdown apparently messes up enemies targeting you. You get to be basically invulnerable.

It's kind of mindblowing that a developer would ban people for an exploit like this. I thought we've been around the block over and over and over and over on such things. Fix the problem, and don't BAN people for taking advantage of advantageous properties in the game. I mean really. BioWare has instituted this squishy rule: "dancing is currently not permitted outside of special Dance Zones." Sounds kind of like living in a dictatorship, which I guess it is, but that's just really eerie. What are the special Dance Zones? I think it means "dont' do this in combat," but I honestly don't know. How about a hard coded rule that doesn't make me guess if I'm doing ban-worthy dancing?

If fixing the problem is some hard thing, then remove dancing entirely for a brief time, or disable the /getdown command. I'm disappointed that banning players was the response here.

UPDATE: BioWare says that the e-mails telling people they were banned were fake e-mails. If so, the fake e-mails skirt dangerously close to what seems standard practice in MMOs, but maybe BioWare is off the hook, if they just fix the dancing thing.

Double-Sided MTG Cards

The Magic: the Gathering world is flipping out over the new double-sided card mechanic.

I admire that they are trying to do something new and splashy, but this just seems so full of problems. You can't shuffle a deck that has a card with no back, so you'll have to either use opaque sleeves and actually take the card out of the sleeve during gameplay when you need to flip it, or you'll have to use the "checklist" card in place of the real card when it's in a hidden zone like your hand or deck. The checklist card looks like a joke to me, I thought it was maybe April Fools when someone linked it.

It's also pretty problematic in draft if you open a pack and decide to take a double sided card. Everyone can see that, and also everyone now has reason to scrutinize you as you look through your possible draft picks, just to look for this.

There's a lot of confusing interactions too. Imagine your double-sided guy interacting with this, this, or this. And in case you're wondering how double-sided cards work when things copy them, here's a quick explanation for you:

If a double-faced card becomes a copy of something else, the copied values will overwrite its characteristics for as long as the copy effect lasts, even if the double-faced card transforms. If a double-faced card that's copying something else is instructed to transform, it will do so, because the physical card has two faces, but its characteristics will still be those of whatever it's copying. This is true even if the object it's copying is one face of a double-faced card.

I almost wonder if these cards will end up banned, all of them, for some sort of logistics reason. I think a LOT of what MTG has been doing in the last couple years is really great, so this stands out as pretty wonky. It looks like the community of MTG players--people completely used to their game constantly changing--are even saying that this is just too much.

The theme and flavor of the new set looks great, at least.