Category Archives: Games

How to Get Better at Stacraft 2

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The best way to improve at Starcraft 2 is to play a lot. It sounds silly, but it’s simply true. When I started playing, I was originally placed in gold league and stayed there for a full three months. Then, slowly but surely, I rose up until I was in the top 50 Grandmasters in America.

Obviously, not everyone can become a Grandmaster (it requires, amongst other things, exceptional reflexes, reaction time and coordination), but I firmly believe that, with practice, everyone can become a master at Starcraft 2.

The first thing to work on is understand the game mechanics, namely: armor vs non-armored, range, attack speed, damage reduction, hidden bonuses, splash damage, etc. For instance, one thing that makes the Terran siege tanks so powerful is the fact that they might hit not just one unit, but up to 8. Obviously, the 70 damage they can quickly become 300-400, making them one of the highest-damage units in the game.

Every unit has its particularities and becoming intrinsically familiar with them will greatly improve your play. Any Protoss player, for instance, knows how to individually blink their stalkers to save them as they are about to die. Likewise, a Zerg player knows not to group their mutalisks during a raid if the enemy has air splash damage, such as a Thor.

The second thing to improve on is your knowledge of group battles. Almost all Starcraft 2 games are decided by one large confrontation, where the loser will be left on the defensive, rolling back, while the victor will keep pushing and destroying the economy and production capacities of the loser. It is better, in my opinion, to retreat from a battle that is clearly lost rather than lose every single one of your units in a lost defense. There are such things in Starcraft 2 as pyrrhic victory, where you somehow manage to hold a magnificent defense, but lose so much time and resources in the process that your other bases are left defenseless.

Another key trick to improve at Starcraft 2 is to utterly master the art of macroing, i.e. producing units, mining bases and, most of all, expanding. If you watch professional games, you’ll notice all of them expand very quickly, sometimes dangerously fast. While risky, an early expansion can bring him double the amount of minerals and gas you’d grab on one base, giving you a decisive advantage in the mid-game.

Lastly, take the time required to define and improve your style, whether it is micro-aggression, economy or turtling. Learning which race suits your best will also help you develop as a Starcraft 2 player and slowly grind up until you reach master. In my mind, with one or two hours per day, any player can become a master within 6 months if he practices correctly.

Civilization VI – How Will They Improve on the Previous Version?

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Civilization V was released in 2010 and went on to be a big success story. The franchise has sold over 33 million units over the years with Civilization V being the best-selling version having sold around 8 million units sold worldwide.

And the gamer reviews for Civilization V were pretty good too. G5 gave it 5 out of 5. PC Gamer gave it 98 out of 100, and Game Informer 9.75 out of 10. And Civilization V took the ‘Best Strategy Game’ award at the 2011 BAFTA Games Awards.

That’s not to say there weren’t a few gripes with Civilization V though. One major quibble was the quality of the AI game opponents and their lack of smarts when conducting negotiations and diplomacy.

So how have Firaxis Games tried to improve on the success of Civilization V?

The latest version, Civilization VI, is due for release on October 21 2016. The same team that developed Civilization V have also worked on its successor. And it’s already been named ‘Best PC Game’ and ‘Best Strategy Game’ at the Game Critics Awards.

So what’s new? Well, the developers have suggested in various interviews that research found many gamers had come to find playing Civilization V one-dimensional.

The big aim with Civilization VI has been to create a game that makes gamers think on their feet a lot more. A more reactive experience is what the developers have tried to achieve.

And with that in mind they’ve made some big new changes for Civilization VI. For a start city development has been overhauled. Now when you’ve built a city centre you have to specialize the function of that city. It can become a specialist military, industry or science city, say – but it can’t contain elements of everything.

And that means terrain is much more important than in previous games. You have to think through and match up the function of your city with the landscape around it now for the best results. If you’re building an industrial city you’re going to need natural resources, for example.

That will impact on how you have to think about strategy too. There will cities that you’ll need to identify as being vitally important to your opponents’ infrastructure that you can attack, and cities that you’ll need to place extra emphasis on defending yourself.

The AI opponents have been upgraded too. So the historical figures like Gandhi and Teddy Roosevelt that you’re playing against will be more intelligent and cunning. Each has their own particular personality for you to read and monitor, but also hidden agendas that you’ll have to work hard to decipher.

And unlike in previous Civilization games there are much greater rewards to be had for developing the culture of your empire. In past versions of the game you will have found it much harder to succeed with an emphasis on cultural development compared to, say, science or your military. So for the first time developing drama, philosophy and poetry could be your route to victory.

Should Games Skip Cutscenes Altogether?

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Videogames as a medium for storytelling have often taken cues from movies, and the clearest example of this is the use of cutscenes. Pac-Man is quite often said to be the first game that used cutscenes rather than transitioning directly from level to level with no intermission. After the player beats each stage, it would play a short vignette depicting simple scenes of Pac-Man and ghosts chasing each other.

Whilst these little scenes are quite obviously a long way from how modern cutscenes are used in games, the core concept is the same.

The game takes away control of the character from the player for a sequence to introduce some sort of new information. The duration of these sequences can vary widely – Konami’s Metal Gear Solid series is infamous for having lengthy cutscenes, with Metal Gear Solid 4 clocking it at more than eight hours of cutscenes – and can be used for a wide variety of purposes.

They are used to introduce characters, develop established ones, provide backstory, atmosphere, dialogue and more.

However, despite their ubiquity in modern big budget games, cutscenes are not necessarily the best way to tell a story in a game. There have been many highly acclaimed games that used few cutscenes, instead preferring to allow the player to control the character throughout the whole game.

Half-Life 2 by Valve Software is currently the all time highest scoring game for PC on review aggregation site Metacritic, and it only has one cutscene at each end. Control is rarely taken away from the player for more than a few moments – excepting an on rails sequence towards the end – and much of the background information that would be shown in a cutscene elsewhere is instead shown through scripted events or background details in the environment.

But are Half-Life 2’s unskippable, scripted sequences that different from cutscenes? After all, the player often cannot progress until other characters finish their assigned actions and dialogue – so why not just use traditional cutscenes and be done with it? To get truly unique experiences, we mustfirst look at what makes video gaming unique as a medium for storytelling. Unlike film, where the viewer has no control over the action, or traditional tabletop games, where players actions have very little in the way of visual outcomes, video games provide an unique opportunity to merge interactivity and storytelling. Games like Gone Home, Dear Esther and other games in the so called ‘walking simulator’ genre have been lauded as great examples of the sort of storytelling that can be unique to games.

However, to some gamers, these games are presenting an entirely different problem – although they rarely take control away from the player, they also offer very little in the way of gameplay themselves. Indeed, Dear Esther has no way the player can affect the world around them – the only action that can be taken is to walk along a predetermined path to the end of the game. There is no way to ‘lose,’ no interaction with the environment, just what amounts to a scenic tour with some overlaid narration. So, despite the lack of cutscenes in the game, the almost complete lack of player control and interaction in the first place means that there is little to differentiate it from an admittedly quite protracted cutscene.

As video games are currently exist, there seems to exist a sort of dichotomy between traditional storytelling and gameplay. For a game to tell a story to a player, there must be some degree of limitation in what the player can do – either a temporary one in the form of a cutscene or scripted sequence, or by limiting the players actions for the course of the game. Perhaps future games will be able to integrate a great deal of player interaction with compelling storytelling. But that won’t be accomplished by taking the players control away and forcing them to watch a short movie instead of letting them play the game.