'Games Britannia: Joystick Generation PT 3' - my thoughts

And we're back with Benjamin Woolley with his third part of his series of 'Games Britannia'.

In this episode Benjamin talks about the latest consoles which has led to the development of today's games, starting from the 70's as video games started to become more popular and in the 80's people were able to play them in their living rooms at home.

I was really interested whilst watching this episode, I am really into how early consoles such as the ZX Spectrum and the BBC micro were invented and what games were available on their markets. One game worth noting on both consoles is the game 'Elite' which the player had to buy and sell goods by flying around space to different areas. What you bought and sold made the game easier or harder for the player.

There was one moment which stuck in my mind clearly which was the part on the game 'Carmageddon' which is where the player must run over pedestrians to gain points during a race against other opponents. The game sparked an outrage in social media due to the murdering of innocent people (and grannies especially, as they gave the player more points!) Eventually the developers changed the pedestrians to zombies which caused the outrage to simmer. However, I do remember playing the game when I was younger with the zombie version which was why I did smile when I saw this game come up.

Another very popular game which was mentioned was GTA which also involved driving around and (although not necessary) allowed you to run over pedestrians. 'Rockstar' (or 'DMA' as their old company was known as) who are the creators of GTA originally called the game 'Race and Chase' and had only the cops chasing the player through streets in 1995. Comparing that version with the latest version which is GTA V shows how much development has gone through into making this franchise. To start with, GTA V actually hired prisoners to voice some of the characters to make the game more realistic and before it was released for the latest console of Xbox One and PlayStation 4, the amount of copies sold made it reach the 6th spot of the most sold copies of games whilst holding 7 world records. (Mentioned on Top10Memes YouTube video on GTA V facts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwIhn9Ljeqo )

In all, this episode of Games Britannia is definitely worth watching as there were many more games mentioned and lots of info to take in from only watching it once.

'La Decima Vittima' - My thoughts

'Okay, now what's going on?'

That was the most common sentence I said during this movie. 'La Decima Vittima' (English name: 'The 10th Victim') is a rather unusual movie which is about a game of chase where people sign up to take part in and are assigned a target, they must then find their victim and kill them. 

The story goes with a man who ends up falling in love with his victim, rather than shooting her they start building up a romantic relationship between them. Although they confront each other many times throughout the movie to kill one another, they always fail to do so due to their interests in one another.

Since the original was in Italian, the movie did seem quite humorous, whether this was intentional or due to the films age (when we watched the trailer of the movie the class were laughing through most of it, the trailer we watched here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uiJ6oghRqKY ) however the film overall wasn't that bad, and also did remind me of 'The Hunger Games' which is a book/movie about groups of people fighting one another for sport. Plus it also reminds me of gladiators during the Roman era where people fought one another for sport and some people became gladiators for fame and wealth, much like on 'The 10th Victim' where once they get their 10th victim they also game fame and wealth.

Let's tweak - The Royal Game of Ur

Earlier in my blog I wrote about an ancient board game called 'The Royal Game of Ur' which was a board game that was discovered in the South of Iraq in Ur (hence its name)

Our last two lectures were spent looking back at the board games we had chosen to write about in our assignments and to tweak/iterate them however we wanted to. For my tweaks I came up with 2 tweaks:

Use a 6-sided die

Rather than using the stick dice or the triangular shaped dice, I decided to use a more commonly used die which is extremely popular in today's date of playing board games: a 6-sided die. Despite being the most mainstream way of tweaking a board game I wanted to see whether allowing the player to roll a 5 or 6 could actually change how the game plays through and if it's any better or not.
I played a few games with some of my class mates and did pick up on two interesting points:

- The traditional dice highest roll was a 4 which would be quite exciting for the player to get, especially if their piece was on a star or not on the board yet. This meant they could get another go and if they roll another 4 are able to move onto another star for another go. 

-With the introduction of rolling a 5 and 6 this meant there were less 4s being rolled and players were looking to get a 6 instead, after all, it's the new highest number to roll and thus you'll get further with a 6. However, I felt more excited than before when I did roll a 4 and got to move my piece straight from off the board onto the star for another go. 

Overall however, the 6 sided die made the game lose some of its originality alongside todays more recent games and thus I prefer to use the original dice.

Any roll allows you to take your piece off the board

Rather than aiming to try and roll the perfect amount to finally get your piece off the board, I tweaked it so that you can roll any number and if the amount of moves is less than your roll, you can move your piece off the board. This was to try and make the game faster as the player is not trying to aim for a perfect roll (which believe me, happened a lot). Depending on what you're position on the board, this worked well as well as badly:

- this tweak worked well if your pieces are near the end and you only need to roll to get your piece off, especially if it's your last piece. It is relieving knowing that you'll know the next roll guarantees a victory rather than building up stress as the luck of the roll is working against you, allowing your opponent to catch up.

- however, this tweak also works against you if you're on the other end of the game, being the one trying to catch up to the other player. I did start to feel a sense of defeat even before the game ended when my opponent only needed to roll a few more times to win the game as there was no way I could catch up with the amount of pieces I had left (cursing my luck on the rolls, everyone blames it right?) Therefore this tweak could lead to some players quitting way before the game ends as the rule where you must roll the perfect number to leave the board acted as a last hurdle to allow the opponent to catch up.

Overall

I do enjoy playing The Royal game of Ur, I also have thought up of lots of different iterations and tweaks such as:

- allowing the player to move more than one piece in a roll (e.g.: roll a 3, move one piece two spaces and another one space)

- bring in a second set of dice which the player must control two pieces during a turn

- Modifying the game so much to allow up to 4 players (a very ambicious idea however, but could be possible in my eyes)

However, I never got to implement or test these ideas out...yet. But I hope to do so in the future.

Experimenting with 3DS Max

So, what have I been up to lately?

Well, during my course we've been taught 3D modelling on a program called '3DS Max'. A useful tool, and fun to experiment with. Lately we had to create 5 3D models of objects or furniture in or around 150 polygons which was quite a challenge. I don't think I did too badly and the results of each of my models were impressive, however for my next assignment I will use textures that were made for modelling and not the textures from the pictures I took of my soon-to-be models...

My 3D models, not bad for a first time try (there's 6 as I made the bottom right table but decided to scrap due to too low poly count but kept it as it looked nice)

Then afterwards we were taught a few more skills with 3D modelling, namely the line tool which can draw shapes straight away and can trace around a picture allowing you to model it further. This combined with the lathe tool allowed me to create all sorts of different shapes and object. We were then tasked to create chess pieces during a 3D modelling lecture. I decided to give myself the goal to re-create every single chess piece and even put them on a chessboard just to see if I could do it.

It took me a few hours (and a lot of patience) but I was able to recreate the board and all the pieces, the hardest piece to create was the knight chess piece due to the amount of curves and points you had to put in when tracing the horse. Below is a screenshot of my finished chessboard with the chess pieces:

Sadly, I didn't remove the green seams going around the board when I took this picture.

So what now? I hope to carry on messing around with 3DS Max, hoping to make more complicating objects and just test my skill with creating 3D models, after all, about 6 months ago I had no idea how to use 3DS Max and yet now I'm creating these.

And I'm back!

It feels like forever since my last post which I apologize for. Not only have I been caught up with my work and getting a bit too happy with my leisure time (plus I forgot what my password was which is a bit embarrassing!)

Anyways, to show what I've been up to I'll be making another post shortly after to show what I have been up to and hopefully I can keep to a schedule of posting.

'Games Britannia: Monopolies and Mergers PT 2' - my thoughts

Benjamin Woolley is back in his second series of 'Games Britannia'.

This time, Woolley talks about the social and political impacts board games have made in Britain, specifically with the more known and played games such as 'Monopoly', 'Cluedo' and 'Scrabble'. These games were the most popular in Britain and remain so today.

This episode of the series was good, but not as good as the last epsiode 'Dicing with Destiny'. This was because on 'Dicing with Destiny' there were so many new and different games that I've never heard of before being played after so long. However, on 'Monopolies and Mergers' the main focus is around board games we know very well, but also on their predecessors.

I think the most intriguing (and somewhat amusing) part of the video was when Woolley went to play in a competition of Monopoly where the prize is to go to Las Vegas to play in the Monopoly competition there. I did find this amusing how a board game which can be played by anyone has turned into a big event. The best part was Woolley even managed to win on one of the tables against some members who were taking part in the competition.

I think Monopoly is more down to being lucky with your rolls and landing on the right squares more than the skill of buying the right properties/housing your properties which Woolley showed in the Monopoly tournament, after all, during his game it would have taken just one roll onto an opponents square to make you lose the game.

'Games Britannia: Dicing with Destiny PT 1' - My thoughts

Games Britannia (presented by Benjamin Woolley) is a documentary on very old board games which date back to as old as the 1st century of Britain. He shows that the board games they made during their times were very important to most people, either due to their fun nature, their significance in religion, or the way some games can be gambled on to make lots of money.

It's quite surprising watching this program and see how people in the Medieval era to the Victorian era would gamble so much that laws were actually passed to ban die as they believed they were evil and gambling was evil. Yet despite this law passing people would still play these games either in secrecy or by using an alternate type of die such as a spinner (which was acceptable, yet its mechanic is the same as a die).

Another surprise was the amount of games that had some religious meaning behind the game, usually embedded into the game on the squares themselves. An example being the original game before snakes and ladders, where the players were looking to try and find enlightenment whilst travelling around the board in the religion Hinduism. From this I can see that most people had a very strong faith towards their religion in the past to not only pray for religion, but also play for religion.

Unfortunately I am unable to provide a link to the program.