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Communication and Teamwork in Overwatch

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Watching the Overwatch League has made me want to play the game more than ever. Watching teams pull off these amazingly well-coordinated plays makes me want to assemble my own team. Not in order to compete at even the amateur level, but to play with that level of communication and trust. That being said, the league is still rife with examples of people doing their own thing, including both times that it pays off and times that it does not. Single DPS players have, with minimal support from their teammates, either crippled or halted an entire enemy advance. In juxtaposition, tanks have recklessly charged and players of all kinds have wasted ultimate abilities that would have been more useful if they’d saved them for a minute or less later. Often, the reckless tank and wasted support ultimate ability have led to the team collapsing. Interestingly, half of the team collapses I’ve seen have turned into times when a single DPS found the right moment and help the enemy team off.

The best teams, though, are the most coordinated ones. New York Excelsior, Seoul Dynasty, and London Spitfire are all the most coordinated on average and they’re all the best teams in the league in a general sense. Having actually tried to build a 6-player team in Overwatch, I can definitely say that team coordination matters. To be fair, you don’t need to have six people in order to see that, it just makes it easier to see. I love playing with one of my roommates the most because we’ve played together long enough that our play styles complement each other, we trust each other to know what we’re doing, and we can anticipate each other’s needs and movements in a way the really streamlines communication. He also plays DPS (damage per second) characters and I play tanks, supports, and filler characters (swapping around to meet the team’s current needs rather than sticking to one character in particular). Comparing our play to me playing with only one of most of my other friends highlights just how important that almost unspoken communication is to our success as a team.

I’m hopeful that, if the 6 of us play together often enough, we’ll eventually figure out the communication stuff. I have a hard time verbalizing my thoughts in generic specifics because I’m so focused on what is going on in front of me, so my ability to call shots and direct the team is at its best when I can either get the words out properly or when my teammates are aware enough of what is happening in the battle as a whole to interpret what I’m trying to say correctly. It can be annoying, to have a shot-caller who has trouble saying the right names for characters and coming up with the right word while it is still relevant, but I’ve got the best battlefield awareness of the group right now so working on communication is out top priority. For now, I am grateful that my roommate is one of the six people and that I can count on him to interpret and then translate what I’m trying to say.

As much as I try to relax and have a good time when I’m with a large group that isn’t communicating, it is incredibly frustrating. As a tank, a lot of my ability to do anything effectively, aside from soaking up bullets, is contingent on having the rest of my team performing their duties and following the called shots. The other day, I kept telling everyone to group up with me since I was using the other team’s expectations against them, by setting up patterns that I’d subsequently break. It was working great except that most of my team wasn’t following me. I’d call them over to me, see them around me, start moving into position, and then they’d all be gone, getting cut down somewhere else because their tank is off trying to set up a flanking team-fight that would pick off the enemy sniper and supports before the enemy DPS could be brought to bear against us. We were so close to winning so many times that match and we had no good reason for losing, only that we were never all together and focused on figuring out how to circumvent the enemy traps and defenses. That was kind of the theme of the night, really. Knowing we should have won and being unable to say that we just got outplayed is frustrating to me because I’m trying to become a better player than I currently am and those kind of losses don’t do anyone any good.

It isn’t all of my teammate’s faults either. If I’d followed them in and stuck with the grind-y team-fights they kept running into, we might have won. We might have come out on top with enough ultimate abilities left to hold off the inevitable second wave when they re-spawned and pushed to retake the final point they were defending. I played a little more aggressively than I strictly needed to, winding up with all of the gold medals for enemy kills, enemy kills around the objective, enemy damage, and time spent on the objective(s). No tank should ever have all of those. A good tank can often wind up with gold medals in objective time and objective kills, but the DPS should always have the other two.

I’m going to focus on trying to be a better communicator when I’m playing with less experienced players and people who don’t know how to interpret my non-specific exclamations. That is something I can work to improve in every match, regardless of whether or not I’ve got a team skilled enough to help me improve as a tank. As long as I’m improving, I think I’ll be able to accept and number of wins or losses.

Tabletop Highlights: D&D 3.5 Versus Pathfinder

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To be entirely fair, there isn’t a big difference between these two rule sets at a macro level. Pathfinder was intended as the next step of D&D 3.5, trimming down the rules to remove complications and re-balancing the game’s power so the often under-powered martial classes could stay relevant during higher levels. As a result, it is fairly common to adapt things from one version to the other. For instance, most of my D&D games incorporate the character sheets and skills of Pathfinder, along with a few other rules–such as cantrips (the most basic, lowest-leveled spells) can be cast without limitation and all combat maneuvers are performed using the rules from Pathfinder rather than 3.5.

I find that combat runs a little more smoothly, skill allocation is easier, and general player satisfaction is higher when I incorporate these rules. It allows me to bring in a bit more power to skill-based characters without running into what I believe is the biggest problem of bringing Pathfinder rules and character stuff into 3.5. As a whole, the core components (character classes and racial abilities, mostly) of Pathfinder achieved a state of balance by increasing everything’s power. There are exceptions, of course, but it can be frustrating to try to balance a character built using 3.5 rules with a character built using Pathfinder rules.

3.5 can also be hard to adapt to Pathfinder because it has a similar problem. The core components may be weaker, but 3.5 has a wonderful array of extra feats, class variations, racial features, and poorly balanced errata that make breaking the game much easier. I can build character with limitless power in 3.5 and I’ve yet to find a way to even break the game on the same scale with Pathfinder. I can make a character that can easily move a mile every two minutes (and I know I can get it higher if I try) in 3.5 and that’s just silly. I can create cell towers and rail guns. I can do pretty much anything, if my GM doesn’t know to stop me and I’m feeling perverse. The only thing that redeems 3.5 is that it takes very specific knowledge (which anyone can now find online) to build those things and your average player doesn’t want to break the game.

When it comes down to determining which variation you want to play, 3.5 or Pathfinder, I find it breaks down fairly well. Either works great for role-playing and story-telling, but 3.5 works really well for players who want complex builds or have more experience. Pathfinder is great for people with less experience or if you want to keep your campaign simpler and more focused. I can’t count the number of times I’ve had to remind a player in one of my 3.5 campaigns that, just because he found it in a rule book, doesn’t mean his character knows about it or would even be able to obtain it. This has been happening a lot in my weekly campaign, which can be frustrating at times because he keeps accidentally trying to min-max his character. If we were playing this campaign using Pathfinder, I doubt he’d be able to get up to even a quarter as much crap as he does.

The few times I’ve played Pathfinder, it worked really well for introducing new players. The abilities were much more clear and I didn’t feel like I needed to spend a few days browsing books, PDFs, and forums to figure out how I wanted to build my character. Every time I’ve gone and done a pick-up-and-play campaign at a game store, it has been a Pathfinder campaign. I’m certain the latest edition of D&D (5.0) would be just as easy to pick up and play, but I feel like Pathfinder has more depth to it for the people who want it. You can still get multipliers to your power level instead of just adding to it.

I really want to play more Pathfinder, mostly to learn more about it. I don’t own any of the books and everything I’ve read about it has been what they released online as part of their System Reference Document (search the version you want to learn about and “SRD” and you should wind up with all the rules you need to play). I’d like more experience, both as a player and as a GM. It can be fun to experiment with different rules and see how far you can go, but there’s also strong appeal to playing without all of the crazy extra stuff. Just like when I want to play Skyrim without any mods sometimes, despite loving what the mods do to the game.

I thought I was Overwatch-ing Sports on TV

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I’ve never really been one for watching sports. Sure, I’ll keep up with the big-deal games and news, but more as a desire to participate in society than from actual interest. I’ve got nothing against sports or people who enjoy watching them, I just only really enjoy them as a way to interact with people. Watching the game with some friends is fun, but mostly because I’m with my friends. This has held true during the rise of e-sports, which have captured the attention of many of my friends who generally shared my apathy toward professional sports. Only this year has that changed. With the advent of the Overwatch League, I’ve finally started taking an interest in a professional sport.

Which it totally is at this point. There’s a league, a code of conduct, privately owned teams, merchandise, specialty merchandise, and publicly broadcast matches you can watch. Heck, you can ever get into twitter arguments about whether or not you think a team should have won. Thankfully, there are fewer moments where a loss can be blamed on a referee since software is the final arbiter of truth and anything you disagree with is a result of the tiny bit of lag between the server and your computer/display. The players make a bunch of money and the popular ones make even more, there are licensing deals in the works, and we’ve already had a few scandals that temporarily disqualified people. Finally, the most important part of determining whether or not something is a sport, ridiculously young people have already aged out of the professional scene. For e-sports, that seems to be somewhere in the early to mid twenties.

Every time I go to watch an Overwatch League match on Twitch, I remark to my roommate (who watches them all with me) that the players are all babies. I mean, sure, they’re required to be at least 18, but that’s still practically baby age. I recognize that I’m getting older and I don’t have to go back that far in my Facebook photos to find pictures of me looking like a baby, but it still feels ridiculous to see how young they all look as they sit on top of the world. Well, as they sit on top of this particular portion of the world. I feel kind of bad for them, honestly. They spend their teenage years getting good enough to qualify, lose their early adult years to professional gaming, and then age out by the time most people are graduating from college. That’s gotta be rough, you know? I don’t envy them their positions or problems. I doubt I’d do that even for the amount of money they’re making from streaming and merchandise. I want to enjoy my gaming.

Honestly, though, even for a first-year sports league, Overwatch is a lot of fun to watch. I’m a good enough player to recognize the flow of the game, key tipping points, and what a player did that resulted in their death or a big kill-streak. It is a lot of fun to sit on my couch with my roommate and discuss the matches as they’re going. I’ll admit I still maintain a certain degree of apathy, but I prefer to watch and dissect when I can. My roommate watches all of the old matches on YouTube once they’re over, if he misses a broadcast, but I’m content to just look for highlights and cool plays. I don’t have a favorite team yet, since I don’t really follow any of the streamers, but it has been really cool to see how much some of the strong solo-players have shined. I prefer my tanks, and really enjoy seeing a good tank play, but those are relatively rare given the current accepted strategy for the professional scene. I’ve still gotten to watch a few nice tank plays, though.

The popularity of the Overwatch League has brought a lot of players back to the game and I’ve enjoyed the wider variety of players. I’ve also enjoyed that pretty much everyone is trying to emulate the professional team compositions and play styles, because it makes it easy for me to work around them or take them down. Professional-style play only really works if you’ve got the skills to back it up. One person who knows what they’re doing can easily disrupt an entire group of people who are trying to emulate something they saw on Twitch and don’t have the skills to do. I was able to place in the top 45% of players, world-wide, for the current competitive season by almost solely playing to counter professional team compositions. Backup from a group of competent players who knew what I was doing was integral, of course, since it was up to them to actually do something with a disrupted and disorganized team.

I think I enjoy the professional e-sports league so much because I enjoy playing Overwatch. I don’t really enjoy playing most sports and most other games in e-sports, so I’ve never really had the chance to see something I’m good at and enjoy on my TV like this. I’m looking forward to how the Overwatch League grows and develops over the next few years. Maybe we’ll even start to see our first e-sports bars pop up around town! I’m willing to bet one already exists somewhere. An Overwatch-themed one would be a lot of fun!

Tabletop Highlights: Exploding Kittens

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I’m a huge fan of The Oatmeal. His comics are wonderful, he tackles some very difficult ideas in his stories, and he helps create wonderful games. I’ve been following him for a few years and have really enjoyed most of what he’s created. When I heard that he was doing the art for a tabletop game and had helped create it, I immediately ran to Kickstarter to check it out. True to form, the Kickstarter for Exploding Kittens was chock full of The Oatmeal’s particular art, wonderfully depicting all kinds of ways cats could accidentally blow you up through cat-like behavior.

Eventually, I backed it. I got the full edition of the game along with the hilarious (and very) NSFW version of the game. Since then, I’ve stayed up to date on the game. They eventually created an expansion called “Imploding Kittens” and another game called “Bears vs. Babies” which was not quite as fun and charming as Exploding Kittens.

In Exploding Kittens, the object of the game is to be the last player left alive. There is a deck of cards that everyone draws from at the end of their turn. If they draw an exploding kitten, they die unless they can play a diffuse card (like a laser pointer or kitten therapy). Before you draw, you can plan any number of other cards to do things like skip your turn, give your turn to another player (forcing them to take two turns), steal another player’s cards, or look at the top three cards on the deck.

Once you’re out of usable cards and you draw an exploding kitten, you’re out. Don’t worry, though, it wasn’t personal. The cat was just walking on a computer console that just happened to have a nuclear launch button on it or they were playing with a hand grenade and accidentally pulled the pin while tossing it around. I’m going to avoid going into the NSFW cards because that’s not something I want to write about on this blog, but I encourage the interested parties to check it out.

The game is a ton of fun when you’re having a game night with your friends and it only gets more fun if you’re drinking a little. Don’t drink too much, though. The game is a little more complicated and strategic than you’d expect, so too much alcohol is just going to make it easier for your friends to set you up for an explosion. Which is exactly what you should be trying to do, since you can place the exploding kitten wherever you like in the deck if you play your cards right.

The biggest downside to the game is that it can really drag on for a long time if there aren’t very many players. The game has instructions on how to tailor the game to the number of players, but I’ve followed the instructions with a small group before and wound up sitting around for almost half an hour while the last two players tried to end the game. Even in larger groups, where people get eliminated faster, the first player out can wind up spending a lot of time waiting if they were just incredibly unlucky. You can always cut the deck down for smaller groups, of course, but that can be difficult to get right as some cards only work when paired with similar cards.

Either way, as long as everyone’s relaxed and participating, the game is ridiculous amounts of fun. If you want a new game that will last around an average of 15 minutes per game, I suggest picking up Exploding Kittens.

Horizon Zero Chill

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I’m going to preface this by saying I really enjoy playing this game. No matter what else I say, and I’ve got a lot to say, I really enjoy playing this game and can’t wait to keep playing it once I’ve finished creating my blog buffer.  The combat is rewarding, all of the action moves feel incredible, and the lore is just waiting for you to stumble over it. The skills you can unlock by leveling up feel diverse and any one of them can have an incredible (positive) impact on my play style.

I’ll admit my first impressions weren’t super positive. Having never owned a PlayStation anything, I consistently bear a minor grudge against all exclusive games on a platform I never intend to buy. A grudge that grows in size depending on how cool the game looks. Sure, I have access to one now since one of my roommates owns a PS4, but the game looked so cool when it came out that I made myself wait about four months before I bought it. Somehow, I managed to avoid all spoilers for the game, so I was essentially going in blind other than what turned out to be a few unfortunate comparisons to Breath of the Wild.

I say unfortunate because the comparison does Horizon Zero Dawn no favors. HZD is much more focused on lore and story-telling. Characters will constantly tell you all sorts of really interesting information about the world and what has happened in its recent history. Also, and this was the biggest problem for me, you can’t climb everything. There were so many times I had to settle for hopping up a pile of boulders or finding a way around the cliff rather than just being able to scale it. It isn’t really a problem given HZD’s preference to make you feel like there’s danger around every corner, so being forced to walk around more requires you to get really good at sneaking or decent enough at combat that you can eliminate several robo-beasts as you’re trying to find a path that leads up to the top of the cliff. Or ruined skyscrapers (which are so freaking cool).

Probably the best comparison between HZD and BotW is in their atmospheres. I absolutely love the atmosphere of HZD. Both maintain an air of neglect, decay, and loss but BotW veers toward melancholy and then focuses on what is now gone forever while HZD turns toward attempts to understand the mysterious and forgotten past. Around every corner is some relic of a past that is slowly revealed through text or audio dumps that hint at what was going on in the world before civilization collapsed. Everything from the various machines you encounter to the remnants of cities or bases you can explore works to paint a picture of a world that was headed toward the collapse you know happened.

One thing that I’m still on the fence about, which is the reason for the title, is how every robo-creature you kill lets out a keening scream as it dies. It is a really nice effect, making each of the kills feel rewarding and real, but stealth kills also result in loud noises and nothing seems to notice the death cries of anything. If you stand around and gawk once you’ve killed something, THEN something might notice you. There seems to be almost no concept of noise and some of the line-of-sight stuff can be confusing, too. You can walk within a dozen feet of something and it won’t notice you, but it’ll watch you from a mile away if it noticed you and ran away, no matter how much you attempt to sneak or hide.

I have a few other gripes, but it’s mostly stuff about what I prefer in video games. Stuff like particular movements the character models make, word choices and personality stuff, the way they wrote some of the lore. Nothing of importance. Any negativity is far-outweighed by how much fun it is to sneak around and look for new lore. I can’t marathon it the way I could marathon BotW, but HZD is definitely something I try to play for at least a little bit every day. If you haven’t played it yet and have the means to do so, I suggest picking up the complete edition and playing your heart out.

Tabletop Highlight: Tak

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I love strategy games. I was in the Chess Club during high school and enjoyed learning to play Go in college. I ran out of people willing to play with me before I ran out of willingness to play either of these timeless classics. I’ve always been on the lookout for new games like those, but most of them wind up being fun but lacking in complexity. I’d wind up with one or two winning strategies I could pretty much rely on and I would soon start to miss the variety of play that Go and Chess afforded.

One the other loves of my life is books by Patrick Rothfuss (Primarily the Kingkiller Chronicles, since I feel his “children’s” books lack the narrative complexity I prefer). In one of his books, Wise Man’s Fear, the protagonist (Kvothe) is introduced to a popular strategy game and taught at least a little bit of the larger strategy of it by repeatedly getting his ass handed to him. His tutor, a noble who has been kind enough to also teach him some of the rules of the particular high society Kvothe has found himself in, wants to play a “beautiful game” rather than simply win and highlights the differences for Kvothe. Unfortunately, the book doesn’t actually go into enough detail to learn to play the game. Fortunately, Patrick Rothfuss teamed up with an excellent game creator so that we could all learn to play it and buy really cool board/piece sets.

Tak, as the game is called, is conceptually simple. Build a road of your tiles from one edge of your game board to the opposite. The board can be any size beyond 4×4, and the number of pieces available to each player changes accordingly. The larger the board you’re using, the more complex the game you can play. In addition to the horizon “road” tiles, you can place them vertically for “standing stone” pillars that prevent the other player from moving or building their road through that square. On your turn, you can choose to move any tile or pillar you’ve placed to an adjacent square, placing it on top of anything but standing stone pillars. Once you’ve made a stack, whoever controls the piece on the top of the stack controls the stack. Once you get beyond 4×4 boards, you get a piece called a “capstone” that is like a super pillar capable of flattening standing stones into road tiles.

The strategy required to build your road grows in complexity and potential cleverness as the size of the board increase. While I can see how some brutal math and efficient use of tiles and pillars could easily net anyone a win, I can also see what Patrick Rothfuss’ characters spoke about in his book. I want to play a beautiful game, with clever tricks and a victory that snatches a win from the jaws of defeat. I have already played a few games that saw me win by unforeseen means, completely shocking my opponent as I unfold my route to victory. I’ve also played the brutal, fast matches. If either player starts playing like that and is halfway decent, there’s no way you can win other than to play just as brutally. A beautiful game requires two participants and I’ll admit I’m lacking in a good foe.

Not because I’m better than everyone else–I’ve got about a 60% win rate, so I’m hardly undefeated–but because I’ve yet to find someone who is willing to put in the time and effort to learn the game to the degree one would need to in order to start using some of the more clever strategies. I’ve yet again run into the issue of not having enough willing opponents to enjoy an excellent strategy game.

Which Tak certainly is. I don’t know if it will remain as timeless as Chess and Go are, but I can definitely see myself enjoying this game for years to come. You can play it with pretty much whatever pieces you want and an imaginary board once you know the rules. Or you can buy yourself one of a variety of very nice Tak sets here.

Tabletop Highlight: Concept

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I hope that you’re having a wonderful holiday season and that those of you who celebrate it are having a wonderful Christmas. My family does most of our celebrating on Christmas Eve, so I’m already home and bundled up in front of my computer, preparing myself for work tomorrow. I’m also starting my search for deals and bargains on a few post-Christmas presents to myself, and one thing has jumped to the top of the list for me as a result of this past weekend.

Part of my family’s Christmas ritual includes time for board games and this year, we played a wonderful game my sister brought called “Concept.” Concept is, as Wil Wheaton describes, “like pictionary for writers.” You can get a nice summary of the rules in the video I linked there, so I’m going to focus on a few of the higher concepts of the game. Unlike similar games, where it is a player’s job to communicate something to the other players, such as pictionary or charades, Concept limits your communication to only placing little plastic items on a board covered in icons. You aren’t allowed to communicate using pictures, gestures, or any of the other ways available in pictionary or charades, which means there is often less for the players to go on when they’re guessing. At the same time, the variety of items and icons means you can sometimes say more. Both of these things can be severely limiting.

If you put down too many items on too many icons, it becomes hard to tell what concept you’re trying to communicate and the people guessing can guess a wide variety of things that may not be related to what your concept is. If you have too little, its possible the players will get stuck and be unable to made the intuitive leap you’re trying to nudge them toward. Hard concepts, such as people or movies, are generally easier to communicate. Soft concepts, such as phrases, are much harder. That being said, that’s not always the case. My brother and I spent ten to fifteen minutes trying to guess what our sister had picked and she got so frustrated with our inability to guess that she accidentally let her concept slip when she was berating us.

To be fair, neither of us had seen that movie in a long time. To continue being fair, it shouldn’t have been that hard and I feel almost ashamed of how dense I was in retrospect. The intelligence of your players is the only real limitation on the game, so you should probably be careful when considering playing it with young children and adults who have been drinking. I’d like to say the alcohol clouded my wits, but I hadn’t drunk enough by then to use it as an excuse. Also, alcohol is really only limiting when you’re the person who is trying to convey the concept. Guessing just gets easier and more fun the more you drink.

You can play it with as many people as you like, so long as they can all fit around the board, and all the concepts are family friendly, so no need to worry about upsetting Grandma or Grandpa. I definitely recommend it if you’re looking for a new party game to try.

 

 

Pokemon Through The Ages

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I’ve been a fan of the Pokemon games ever since the first one came out. I have dim, partial memories of standing on the deck at my parents house, looking at my brother’s Red Version cartridge, and deciding I wanted blue version because I liked blue more than red. I remember how amazing it was that you could have your Pikachu follow you around in Yellow version. I even still have the game guide and Pokedex my brother got for Yellow Version so he could complete his Pokedex. Back in the days when there was only “Special” instead of “Special Attack” and “Special Defense,” breeding wasn’t possible, IVs were unheard of, and Pokemon abilities weren’t even on the horizon, I built my team in Blue using the Pokemon I thought were the coolest and my Yellow Version team as a match to Ash’s team, since I watched the Pokemon Anime religiously.

As I grew and more games came out, I played at least one of every version up until the Black and White generation. I tried to convince myself that I didn’t want to play new Pokemon games at that point since I was in college and there’s no denying they’re basically all the same game, but the reality of the situation is that I was too broke to buy them. To this day, they remain the only generation I haven’t bought or played. Pokemon games don’t really lose value and they’ve been coming out with new ones at a pretty regular frequency, so I’ve never really been left wanting a new Pokemon game.

I primarily play Pokemon as a way to relax. For me, it is all about having something easy and calm to do that I can use to deal with stress or anxiety. If I’m playing Pokemon, I’m too busy to be stressed or anxious, but not so busy that I can’t quietly work through stuff in the back of my mind. The games can be kind of boring at times, if you’re going for Pokedex completion, but it can also be rewarding to come up with plans, look at models for the appearance frequency of various Pokemon, and to calculate which Pokemon will make for the best addition to my team.

Unlike some of my friends, I’m not into the competitive scene. I have no interesting in fighting Pokemon battles against real people via online competitions. I’m not super interested in the strongest Pokemon and maximizing their stats,  but I definitely enjoy Pokedex completion more than they do. I’m the only one of my main group of friends who actually takes the time to collect or works on creating a full Pokedex using the “Pokemon Bank” service, something that allows me to store Pokemon from the more recent games on a server somewhere. This allows me to transfer them between games whenever I so desire and is not limited by in-game storage capacity.

Due to my penchant for starting the games over multiple times (mostly so I’ve got actual objectives beyond just catching Pokemon, because that can get kind of boring at times), I’ve now got enough evolutions of the Pokemon in the recent games, Sun/Moon and Ultra Sun/Moon, to complete my Pokedex simple by moving Pokemon from the Pokemon Bank to my game. I’m still working on getting ALL of the 800+ Pokemon now, since a lot of the rare ones are event-specific and I suck at going to the events or even turning my game on at the right time to get them.

I would say my favorite generation was Gen 2, the Silver/Gold/Crystal generation and their remakes, HeartGold and SoulSilver. I prefer the remakes since your lead Pokemon follows behind you and I’ve always enjoyed that. Generation 2, especially the remakes, had the most story elements in them, though the recent ones probably have the largest story (though it is a lot more straight forward and less complex). I also really enjoyed being able to get more than 8 badges and was really sad when Gen 3 didn’t continue that trend.

I can understand that a lot of people aren’t always enthusiastic about each new Pokemon game and I’ll admit that I rarely play the older ones now, but I can’t deny that they hold a special place in my heart. They were the first video game franchise I ever bought into and my longest-running. Half of my handheld games, if we exclude the Switch, are Pokemon games. I’m constantly on the lookout for cheap copies of the games so I can complete my collection. My love for the games also instantly provides common ground between myself and other people as most people my age have played at least one of them.

Aside from the easy identifiers such as apparel and knickknacks, Pokemon fans are usually easy to identify. All you have to do is drop the name of a less-popular Pokemon. If you get a look of confusion, you know to avoid Pokemon. If they recognize the name, the conversation will usually take at least a momentary aside to talk about Pokemon. With the advent of Pokemon Go and its continued popularity, the game is reaching more and more people. I’ve got a coworker in his early 50s who likes to talk about Pokemon as a result of the app, even though he never has and never will play any of the console/handheld Pokemon games.

I can’t even criticize the games for being money grabs because I’m happy to give the studio and Nintendo my money so they can keep making more of these games and other wonderful stuff in the future. The games bring people together, they help me relax when I’m stressed or can’t sleep, and they’ve been a part of my almost as long as I can remember. What more can you ask of a game franchise? I really hope they’re still making these when I’m 80 and enjoying my retirement in a space-station retirement hold. Don’t have to worry about breaking your hip or falling if there’s no gravity!

Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Sweet Scent of Rain on a Damp Morning

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In a game that keeps on giving some nine months after I started playing it, one of my favorite random occurrences is the occasional rain storm. As I play through Hero Mode (enemies are stronger and regenerate health, plus there are more of them), I’ve changed my settings to get rid of as much of the Heads Up Display as possible, using the “Pro” layout. Gone is my clock, my sonograph, my thermometer, and every other indicator that I’m playing a video game aside from my health bar and occasionally my stamina wheel. If I could hide those, I’d do that as well. Not to make the game harder, but to bring me closer to the game. That way, when it begins to rain, my only indication is the growing cloud cover or the first tell-tale drops as I ride through an area occupied by a storm.

I feel a certain amount of anxiety at times, not knowing what the weather will be before I decide to climb a mountain (you will slide down the cliff you’re climbing if you move at all during rain storms), but it quickly fades once I actually get absorbed into the game. I climb and either hurry if it gets cloudy or resign myself to being rained off the cliff. I also don’t know if it is a rainstorm or a thunderstorm until the first lightning strike, so that means I have to avoid using any metal weapons or armor. If I can climb or fight most enemies, there’s not a whole lot left to do if I don’t want to teleport away and do something else until the rain ends.

I’m quite patient. I’d rather set the controller down for a few minutes while the rain storms itself out than warp away and lose track of what I was doing as I get distracted by some new quest. When I first started doing this, I’d grab my phone and browse Twitter or Imgur for the storm’s duration. As time went on, I paid more attention to the storms in the game. There are things that only show up in the rain, certain bugs and flowers, and AI characters, both enemies and NPCs, behave differently when it is raining. There are parts of the map that flood when it rains. Rain and thunderstorms aren’t just a detriment to your ability to climb or a barrier to work around when you’re fighting, they’re actual players in the world that cause everything in it to respond. There is so much to do during a storm that I’ve stopped setting my controller aside and spend the four or more in-game hours exploring my local environment to see what changes.

The more I played, the more I noticed that I felt similarly during a game rain storm compared to how I feel when I sit in a real rain storm. Now, I split my rain storms between exploring and finding a nice sheltered place, out of the rain, to have Link stand while I look out at the rain-soaked world around him. My inner pluviophile has taken control and now I love nothing more than a surprise rain storm so I can watch the water drip off of link’s clothes and the weapons he’s holding in his hands. I love to watch the world go soft and grey as it rains during the day and then dim as the sun sets and night begins.

There are particular places in the game that are always raining. I like to go to them sometimes, usually when I need to relax, so I can have Link light a fire and stand next to it under whatever shelter I could find while it rains. The world falls silent except for the sound of rain on the ground, the moan of the wind as it whips the rain around, and the crackle of the fire. When I close my eyes and listen, I can almost smell the sweet scent of dirt churned into mud by rain and the fresh tinge to the air wafting in my window.

Eventually I open my eyes, pick up my controller, and go back to playing. I chase Koroks to expand my inventory, find new shrines, collect everything I can so I’ll be able to upgrade my armor, and find new ways to tackle multiple enemies at once when freezing them is no longer an option (the gold ones can’t be frozen, I guess? That’s super annoying). It may be a few days between play sessions or it may just be a couple hours, but I know I’ll eventually go looking for the rain again, just so I can spend a little more time bathing in the silence and peace the rain brings.

 

“Ich Bin Euer Schild:” How to Reinhardt in Overwatch

Chris Leave a comment

One of my favorite games to play these days is Overwatch. I don’t normally go for player-versus-player games since I dislike that toxicity that PVP environments usually generate, but Overwatch is just so much fun that I’m willing to deal with the toxicity when it comes up. I love those moments when a team comes together, communicates, and winds up kicking some serious ass because everyone is exactly where they need to be.

Unlike a lot of other online PVP games, Overwatch lets you change your character as often as you like, provided you return to your base to do so. That means that a good team can play fluidly, adapting to the changing demands of the match and picking characters to suit. In most games, this does not happen for one of two reasons. The most common reason is that people aren’t very interested in playing strategically and are either messing around, learning a new character, or unwilling to accept the fact that they are the one who needs to change (most commonly seen in players who are either snipers or regular DPS). The other reason, much less common, is that you’ve got a strategy that works and the other team isn’t adapting to it.

I had an amazing match that fell into the second category the other day. I, as I often do, played a Tank. Reinhardt, specifically. For those who do not know, Reinhardt wields a giant hammer, has a massive shield that his allies can fire through, and has an AoE stun as his ultimate ability. The main problem I usually run into when I play him is that I rarely have the support and DPS I need to make him a viable attack tank. The other problem is that I need my teammates to know what I’m going to do and to commit to doing it with me. People rarely use voice chat outside of ranked games unless you’re a part of a group and a lot of players will either ignore or make fun of people using the text chat to communicate. Not because its archaic or slow, but because trying to make plans shows you actually care about winning and the only people who care are the loners who try to carry the whole team by myself.

I still like to try, though. It is easy to ignore the typed replies, report the people who get abusive, and always worth it the time it works out. Like this time. I told everyone that I planned to march right through the first choke point, take out as many of the enemy tanks as I could, and then soften up the enemy DPS before I died so they could sweep in behind and clean up. After I got a DPS and a healer to back me up, I marched out the door and did exactly what I said. I was the only person to die on that push and we swept the enemy team right past the first capture point. It was everything I ever wanted as a tank.

Further on, as we escorted the payload through the map, I managed to stay in front of all of the enemy damage and one of the DPS characters on my team just danced through enemy lines as a high-mobility character, Genji, killing them as the rest of the team pressured them to stay facing us. Just when it looked like they were going to stall us, I managed to use my ultimate ability to stun four of them, three of which were killed by the Genji. Between my tanking on the payload, the Genji’s constant damage behind enemy lines, and the unwavering support and additional damage of the rest of the team behind my shield, we managed to push all the way to the end of the route in what was the fasted Overwatch match I’d ever played. I wish I’d recorded the whole thing so I could post it and show you all exactly what it was like.

I like this match, and the video I shared, because it highlights the power of a good team playing alongside a decently skilled Reinhardt. There are a lot of applications of Reinhardt’s ultimate, all of which look the same in initial execution, but all of which have different goals. There is the denial ultimate, which is supposed to either negate someone else’s ultimate or prevent the enemy team from killing allies. There is the straight attack ultimate, meant just to stun and hold a bunch of easily killed DPS characters while I kill them. There is the hold-the-point/payload ultimate that is supposed to chase enemies away from the point or punish them for sticking to it when they should have left.

Generally speaking, Reinhardt is one of the better team-player tanks, since his shield and high HP pool allow him to act as an excellent defender to any DPS or support characters that follow him into the fray. Alternatively, once the largest group of the enemy team is occupied, his massive hammer swings can steadily damage everyone in front of him rather than just one person. Flipping between shielding your allies and hammer swings is integral to any kind of group fight and there are no tanks do it better without using their ultimate abilities. There is an artistry, almost, to knowing when to change between defense and attack. I like to describe them as tipping points. A good Reinhardt can charge into a battle and, at the right moment, change a grinding fight into a route. A good Reinhardt can also turn what is starting to be a route into a grinding fight or a slow retreat.

One of the reasons Reinhardt gets a bad reputation and why DPS and support players don’t like to stick with a Reinhardt is that most Reinhardt players couldn’t see a tipping point if it hit them in the head with an over-sized rocket-powered hammer. They charge in or focus on attacking. Others just walk around with their shield up all the time and immediately hide as soon as it is gone or they stick to one spot like moving away is going to get them immediately killed. Neither one of these styles plays to Reinhardt’s strengths and both usually wind up getting the Reinhardt’s team killed. Reinhardt is never defensive or offensive, he is always both. He has an ability that shoots a slow projectile through everything, barriers and players both. This is his only ranged ability and most Reinhardt players couldn’t hit anyone with it to save their life.

A good Reinhardt can nail a fleeing foe with a Flamestrike. They can use a charge not just to pick off the most troublesome enemy, but also to scatter a group that’s threatening to overwhelm their team. They know when to keep the shield up or jump in front of the bullets and when to just wade into the fray, hammer swinging. They know when to use their ultimate for greatest effect, even if it doesn’t get any kills. They’re the team babysitter, protector, and the last line of defense in a route. They also know when to throw convention to the wind, swing around the back, and come charging in so they can take down the whole back line as the tanks turn and get shredded by the rest of their team. A good Reinhardt knows what the team needs from their primary tank and can deliver it with an extra side of pain for the enemy team.

There are any number of things I could say to help people learn how to play Reinhardt, but most of these things are best learned for yourself, by playing him. Trying him out as your next tank and keep in mind the dual nature of a good Reinhardt. Attacking and defending, each in their own time. Keep trying long enough and you’ll start to see exactly what those times are. Once you can see that, you’re 80% of the way there.