Chronopia

"There is no way I will ever actually play one of these goddamn games, I am just painting the models" That is what I said when I started painting some table top gaming minatures with a friend at work. You can probably guess that I did eventually play one of those games and that game was Chronopia. Sitting round on a Sunday afternoon drinking beer (hrm ... reading this over I have noticed many of my gaming experiences involve beer) and playing a table top wargame is a lot of fun. Chronopia had a great, if somewhat depressing, background and an elegant, consistant combat system. Unfortunately later supplements to this game broke the balance that was there in the initial release. Since Target games has gone bust I guess I wont be playing this game again, but I have fond memories of it nevertheless.

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Crush Deluxe

My friends tell me that the table top fantasy football game Bloodbowl was some of the best gaming they had ever experienced. The fantasy football niche in the gaming comunity had high hopes for the computer version of this popular table top game. Unfortunely, their hopes were dashed when the disapointing computer version eventually came out. Stone Jackal Studios took the fantasy football concept and created something much better, Crush Deluxe. A simple premise, three teams search for a ball in 8 ball bins. Once the ball is found they struggle to carry it to the designated goal area. Players clash, are brutally injured and killed. Over time they gain experience and can learn new skills. Illegial equipment provides special abilities, but risk your player being sent off. A group of friends and I gather on Tuesday nights to play this simple yet compelling game. We may be the only people left in the world who still play, but we love it. Apparently someone who worked on Unreal loved it too, with the Slith monster and the kurgan skin (both races from the game) popping up in the first version of Unreal. I enjoy this game so much I reverse engineered the data format so we could get more stats than the basic ones that the game provides. The stats program I wrote can be downloaded here.

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Quake Deathmatch

My first programming job and the first time I had access to a lan of decent computers, introduced me to Quake deathmatch. A friend and collegue of mine, Nick Maher implemented Quake world local a LAN version of ID Software's quake world server software. It logged frags and deaths and ranked the players in the office in the same way the Internet quake world server did. We were very serious about our Quake for a long time, Nick often kicked our butts but eventually we improved and had some awesome competion going. We would have beers and watch demos of Thresh in the Red Annihlation finals and comment on his playing style like we would any other sport. That is what deathmatch first person games are for me, a sport, fast reflexes, accuracy, skill, tactics and strategy all make or break a deathmatch player. It proves, for me, that a simple concept for a game can create complex behaviour in players.

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VGA Planets

VGA Planets is a turn based, play by email, space empire building game. Up to 11 races (which seem strangely familiar to factions in various popular science fiction films and TV shows) battle for galactic supremcy over months and possibly years of real time playing. Each week, my friends and I would process our respective turns, give orders to ships, manage resources and send abusive subspace messages to each other. The turns would be submitted by all players and processed by the host. This simple system worked very well and created the kind of political and military machinations that I have not seen in any other game. Alliances were made and broken, fleets changed sides mid conflict and many galactic warlords were stabbed in the back by their trusted allies.

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System Shock

I played System Shock about 2 years after it came out, you would think that the game would have dated a little, it hadn't. This is the first computer game I played that had such an incredible atmostphere that it gave me nightmares. This game totally avoided the problems of stilted NPC characters by killing everyone before the player arrives. Despite the untimely death of all the Citadel station employees, character development is created with the logs of the dead npc's scattered around the station.

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