Z Space Blog

My physical possessions are a little more tidy now. The shed has been prepped for the winter, everything of mine that's important is indoors and has a place. I bought a new hard drive a while ago to expand Windows to 2 TB. Sadly, Windows doesn't like being cloned. It's been quite a battle but it more or less runs correctly. If it goes to shit again, I'll wipe it before I reinstall. At any rate, Windows is setup and ready to be used if anything happens to my other OSes or I want to game. That's a major source of anxiety crossed off the list.

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Video games that teach without tuturials are superior and do more to engage and/or inspire the player. The first hour of a video game is often the most important; it's where the player learns how to interact with the machine, explore the rules and mechanics, and form an understanding of the game world. Games that effectively communicate this lead to a better-informed player that isn't slowed down or interrupted by verbose tutorials. The flow of the game remains smooth, and the player feels a sense of accomplishment or skill because they figured it out on their own, with the design of the game as their guide.

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Across the Internet and even in person, I find a lot of people claiming that RPGs are meant to be story-heavy and that's the main draw. Part of me wonders where that idea came from.

The original RPG could be considered Dungeons & Dragons or any similar paper-and-pencil games where you adopt a persona and go on an adventure, with a DM at the reins to guide you and your friends along. The core of those games is not story, however; it's about interacting with your friends in a made-up world. The story, while being in the lime-light, is nothing compared to the feeling of cooperating with your friends and vanquishing foes or telling ridiculous stories because your bard is drunk as shit.

D&D and other paper-and-pencil RPGs have a huge focus on the battle system. Each race has strengths and weaknesses. Ditto for classes. Each class has skills, which have use inside and outside of battle. There are feats. If the game was not meant to have a deep level of combat or world interaction, none of that would be there! You'd just toss a few dice to decide damage and trade blows with no-name mooks.

Even the original RPGs had battle systems, with depth and intrigue.

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Today, I'm announcing the release of vgstash, a command line program that keeps track of your game collection and progress in a small SQLite database. I'm happy to finally bring this to fruition. The story of its inception follows.

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In the past decade, the video game industry has introduced three things that change the way consumers interact with publishers and distributors to get access to the content they consume. Each of these brings with them a wave of change that, to many people that are part of the "old school" generation, encroach on various aspects of consumer rights and are turning games into services instead of objects that you can buy copies of. The three things that have brought this change are downloadable content, digital distribution, and DRM.

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