Bad at Games VII – Brick by Boring Brick

Last entry of “Bad at Games” I proclaimed my love of Rock Band. Seriously, I still love Rock Band in all of its incarnations. The sheer gorgeousness of The Beatles: Rock Band has to be seen to be believed, and Green Day: Rock Band is a real blast. But there were dark times on the horizon, and the band split up – it happens to most bands, even the Beatles. I found myself going solo, and that’s when I had the revelation about my gaming.

I was bored.

While I love Rock Band, the DLC stopped, and playing solo (or even singing and playing guitar as two players) wasn’t enough. I returned to the games of the past, at least the newer incarnations, and found them all the same. I bought games second hand, and found the same old formula. It was like a classic D&D dungeon crawl.

For example, I loved Halo. But I still haven’t finished Halo 4. Partly because I’m rubbish, but partly because I became bored of the formulaic way they play – it’s the same with Call of Duty, and dozens of other FPSs. Go into a room, kill all the bad guys, move to the next room. Or maybe they’ll shake it up a bit, and it’ll be – go into a room, shoot all the baddies, throw a switch or find a key to open the door to the next room, more baddies will appear, kill them, open the door, rinse and repeat.

And there was something about the themes of the games too – kill, kill, kill, kill, kill. With Halo, at least, you were shooting aliens, but modern shooters are all about killing people. With the events in my real life I was finding myself valuing life a lot more.

My lovely wife tried to expand my gaming horizons, and knew of my love of all things Lego (especially as I played Lego Rock Band until everyone became sick of playing the Ray Parker Jr.’s “Ghostbusters” over and over again), and she bought me Lego Indiana Jones 2 one Christmas.

The fantastic and peaceful Lego Harry Potter

I enjoyed it, but found it a bit frustrating that I couldn’t do everything on every level, and when I’d completed the game it said 28% complete. I figured that was it, and I couldn’t be bothered doing the whole thing again to find bits I’d missed, so I gave up, and later traded it in…

It wasn’t until I’d discussed this with Alex, one of the Rockathon players, that I’d been approaching the Lego games in completely the wrong way. I’d bought Lego Harry Potter for my Potter-obsessed wife, and inspired by Alex’s advice put the game in knowing what to expect this time around.

The Lego Harry Potter games became a bit of an obsession. Every brick, every character, every secret, every possible part unlocked in a pair of fantastic games. 100%’d them both, and 1000G’d. I’d found gaming again. Mostly because of my love of Lego, and my love of Harry Potter (there’s a whole blog post there, coming soon – “How I learned to stop muggling and love Harry Potter”), the XBox had never seen so much activity.

While Debs was playing “serious” games like the new Tomb Raider and Assassin’s Creed, I was casting my little Lego patronus charm in Hogwarts.

-

That just about brings my videogaming history up to date. I’ve been lured back to the non-Lego games by the amazing powerhouse that is Grand Theft Auto V – with Rockstar once again proving they are the masters of storytelling and open world design, but it’s going to be a long time before I try another first person shooter, and even longer before I purchase a new generation console.

I mean, seriously, what is the point of a console that isn’t backwards compatible? All those Rock Band instruments, the DJ Hero turntable, and the downloadable content. All the games you love. Just cast aside for a better processor? Thanks, but no thanks.

Bad at Games VI - We’re putting the Rock Band back together

Last entry I wrote on “Bad at Games” I talked about Halo and how we quickly became a bit obsessed with the game. We hosted LAN parties, created our own multiplayer variant games, and I continued to demonstrate how rubbish I am at most video games.

Lips video game cover

Sunday night was always Halo night. Friends from work would come to our place, often loaded with an extra XBox to network and we’d shoot the hell out of each other. However, our circle of video gaming friends was growing, and Halo was not everyone’s game of choice.

In the winter of 2008, I was hogging the TV again and I’d put on an episode of GamerTV or something similar that played on the obscure cable channels, and they were demonstrating a game called “Lips”. Possibly one of the worst names for a video game ever, but the wife saw the feature and she was intrigued. It made a change from the usual shooting, and seemed to be a great excuse to jump around the living room, singing along to various songs. The thing that seemed to sell it for her was the idea that you could import your own CDs into the game and sing along to any song you liked.

She put it on her Christmas list that year, and I bought it for her with a pair of motion sensitive microphones.

It was great fun, even if the choice of songs were not exactly our usual choice of music. We tried the import feature, but it seemed like a hastily tagged on extra to the game with very little skill. You could mumble any nonsense at it and it seemed to score – it was only on the songs that had been programmed in on the game disc that required some singing ability. It was either that, or I shouldn’t have tried importing Limp Bizkit.

That was the problem with the game really. Only two players, and the mainstream pop selection of songs. However, the game did have a bit of a blast during one of our Sunday night Halo gatherings, and everyone had a bit of a go. While it wasn’t the hit it could have been, the thing it did do for us was get us over the initial embarrassment of singing in front of a group of friends. We racked up the achievements, went through all the songs, and then Matt suggested the following week that he’d bring around his Rock Band kit and we’d give that a try.

I’d seen clips of Guitar Hero and Rock Band on TV, on similar video game TV shows that introduced us to Lips, and I have to confess I thought they looked pointless. To me it was just timed blocks coming down the screen, press a button, or bang the drum at the right time. What was the fun in that? But I was game, and as promised theGuitar Hero controller, and Rock Band.
following week Matt appeared on the doorstep with microphone, drumkit, guitar and a spare

It seemed to take a while to set up, but eventually the game was ready, the disc fired up,

We were all initially cautious, not having played something like this before except for Matt, so we played on Easy. Even then I was still having difficulty on the guitar (admittedly, I did opt for Enter Sandman for the first track we played), but we got the hang of it, and I was starting to see the appeal.

We swapped instruments and I ended up on drums. Obviously, none of my father’s drumming talent was passed on to me (he used to play in the work’s band when they had dances. I later discovered that he had a number of certificates in piano from a prestigious London music college!) I could drum with my hands, or one hand and one foot, but putting the three together was a bit of a disaster. Luckily, on Easy Rock Band seemed to know this and alternated between the two. I was drumming.

Rockin' in the free world. Charles, Matt, Me and Adam

There’s something about Rock Band that you just don’t get until you play it. Maybe it’s the physical position you’re in – you’re not playing a video game with a controller, the Rock Band controllers are instrument shaped so you feel like you’re actually playing an instrument. The game cheers at you, you feel like you’re in a band, and if someone falters and fails your bandmates can bail you out and help you along.

It’s the difference between playing Risk and playing D&D. Risk is all about defeating your opponent, and sometimes even making false alliances that you quickly betray for an easy victory. D&D is about working together for a common goal. And in Rock Band no one was suffering. Even in Halo when we played as a team you could get picked on or feel like you were letting the side down. Rock Band there were no opponents to badmouth you online. It was about playing gigs, entertaining a virtual crowd, and getting through the songs intact.

The evening flew by, and Matt packed up the kit and headed home. I sat with the wife afterwards and we just looked at each other with massive grins on our faces. She felt it too. The adrenaline of the game, the roar of the crowd, the feeling of making music. We were hooked.

That week I got the credit card out, bought Rock Band 2, the drums, the guitar and microphone. Then visited our local musical instrument supplier and bought a microphone stand, and drum stool.

Months passed, the Sunday evening Halo nights became Rock Band nights. We toured the world, downloaded new songs, and rocked the planet.

Rocking in public for Charity. Me, Adam and Alex

We took it a stage further – the Endless Setlist was challenge in the game to perform every song on the disc in one “concert”. There was also the “Bladder of Steel” achievement for completing the Endless Setlist without breaks or failing. We saw this as a challenge we couldn’t pass up. We’d progressed to a fairly good ability with the game, some of us were playing on Hard-Expert by now, and we figured we’d do the Endless Setlist in a different way – in public.


We’d round out the setlist to 100 songs, and with the help of a particularly cool venue – Fusion, a giant digital gallery that would project the game on screens behind us, we would play in public, without breaks, and raise money for the Brain Tumour Trust. Harmonix, Rock Band’s creators, sent us T-shirts. We were mentioned on Inside XBox. We were in the newspapers. Fame beckoned.

It was exhausting, but awesome. We were rock gods. Nothing could stop us. Or so I thought.

Bad At Games V - Follow the Master Chief, he'll know what to do...

I purchased Halo for the original XBox second hand and loaded it up. I knew I was rubbish at first-person shooters, but there was something about Halo that was different. I don’t know whether it was the ease of the controls, the intuitive design or just how cool the whole darn thing looked, but I loved every moment of it… except maybe the driving at the end, which was frustrating as hell.

The best thing about Halo was the two-player split-screen. It meant that the wife and I could play through the campaign co-operatively and experience the game as never before. I’d drive the warhog while she blasted the crap out of the grunts. We were a team of awesome.

Halo had become such a phenomenon that everyone we knew seemed to play it. People we were at work with (this was back when the wife and I worked together at the same bookstore) knew of the game, and some were avid players – it was just a matter of time before some of our work colleagues were invited back to our humble abode for a little four-player split-screen action.

There was something addictive about it, and Halo night became an almost weekly affair. And it grew on occasion, where we’d invite many people around and we’d experiment with ethernet cables and network multiple XBoxes together to grow to 8, 12 and even 16 player battles. These LAN parties were not as frequent, as they’d involve the transportation of television sets and XBoxes, and placing them around the house in multiple rooms.

But it was fun. We enjoyed ourselves. The neighbours may not have enjoyed it quite so much – this was before we had headsets to communicate and “teams” would end up shouting at each other tauntingly from one room of the house to the other. And we discovered that our XBoxes had names (strangely, ours was called “Goat”).

There were a couple of players who were particularly good at Halo, who dominated the playing field, but that was okay. We had fun, despite reaffirming my belief that I was inherently bad at games.

We instantly snapped up Halo 2 upon release, and the Halo night continued. Our favourite game (“Rockets on Prisoner”) was replaced by a variant of Crazy King of the Hill on Coagulation we called “Arg! It Moved!” (as the place you needed to stand to gain points and win would move every 30 seconds, usually just as you were about to stand there).

How I usually looked online in Halo3

And then something stupid happened. We gained broadband internet access, and I hooked up the XBox. The trial month of XBox Live was activated, and I sampled the world of Halo 2 online.

While the regular players who visited would repeatedly and frustratingly kick my ass at Halo, it wasn’t until I had access to online gameplay that I really sampled the nerve-wracking bloodbath of my continual fragging.

We still loved Halo, and the games we played were still fun, but when we found out that Halo 3 would be on the newly launched XBox360, we upgraded and were introduced to a far harsher sport online. The abuse would flow - the taunts and the colourful language - until it became necessary to plug the headset in for game-chat, turn the volume right down and leave the headset on the sofa next to you.

Halo night continued weekly, sometimes with a simple 2x 360 LAN or just meeting up online and connecting with private channels to team up against the constant onslaught of “Pro Gamers”. We had our moments of glory, but I was just too bad a player and I was obviously bringing everyone down. The frustration was starting to set in, and that seed of being bored by shooters had been planted.

Sure, there were other games out there that I loved – GTAIV and Red Dead Redemption to name a couple, but it was getting to the pitch where my interest in video gaming was dwindling, mostly due to being generally rubbish at it. I’d have given up right there and then if it wasn’t for one game. A game I’d initially discounted because it just looked silly. A game called Rock Band.

Bad At Games IV - Joss Whedon killed my Playstation

Let’s get this out there straight away – I used to hate Microsoft. Okay, maybe not Microsoft as a whole, but I have never owned, and probably will never own, a traditional PC. It comes from my education background going through Art College and then to the “University of the Arts” as they now call the college where I did my degree. Doing graphic design lead you down a very specific route in my day, and that was purely Apple Mac. We have an old Centris in the loft, a G4 carbon tower that hasn’t been switched on in years, and had a variety of Mac laptops from the “wall street” upwards. Bill Gates was not welcome in our house - we were very much Mac-whores.

When it came to gaming, the Macs were never really gaming machines. All you really had was Marathon, so we did all of our video gaming on the PS2. Final Fantasy dominated most of my time, along with the legendary GTA: Vice City with its uber-cool soundtrack of 80’s pop and Miami Vice colour scheme. The wife continued through the various incarnations of Tomb Raider, but all that would change with a simple competition entry.

Buffy the XBox Game (2002)

Wifey and I are huge fans of Joss Whedon. This came originally from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, first with the movie, and then with the TV series. The pop-culture referencing snappy dialogue, the cool action, the great plots. We were hooked. I spotted a competition online on one of the larger UK sites to win a copy of the XBox video game of Buffy and I did what everyone would do in that situation and clicked enter without really thinking about it. It was Buffy. So what if we couldn’t play the game, we were devouring all things Buffy and it would be nice to add to the collection.

Typically, we won. The game arrived in the post and we were unable to play it for months. Months and months. The idea of owning an XBox really hadn’t crossed our minds, but we had this game, and the urge to play it grew and grew. Again, the offer of a second hand console cropped up and as it was cheap we thought we’d get it so we could finally play the game. 

Buffy kicking the vamps in the XBox game

And what a game it was! Brilliant stuff, running around decapitating ghouls with a shovel, staking vampires, and running around our beloved Sunnydale. Neither of us actually finished the game though, as the final levels decided to try to become a 3D platformer and it really was not built to be the next Tomb Raider. We just couldn’t get over some of the jumps, and in frustration the game was cast aside. 

But the local Game store had an XBox running in the shop with a demo of a particularly popular FPS called Halo. I’d not really heard of it before, and I had a few minutes to waste waiting for wifey to finish her shift at work, so I had a quick blast…

I didn’t know where I was or what was going on, but I was in a dropship just like Aliens again, jumping out onto a sunny beach with other troops running around. It was intuitive to control, looked fantastic, and I knew there and then that something was different about this game. Little did I know it would change my social life completely.

E3 Special II - "I Got Your Open World For You Right Here!!"

A bit of a follow up to this week’s earlier E3 post (“I got your backwards compatibility right here!”), I’ve been following the big announcements from E3 to see if there was anything that remotely made me excited for video games again. On the whole, it’s just been shooty-shooty-shooty.

There was the surprising announcement that Microsoft were launching a new Xbox360 and were dedicated to supporting the console for the next twelve months. Lots of new games coming out for it, but it’s really just putting off the inevitable – when the 360 has become a thing of the past and all my old games are redundant. Microsoft were not doing themselves any favours with their comments about the 360 being their product for people who don’t want to be connected to the internet all of the time, and Sony’s potential library of back catalogue being available may give us some hope that older games are going to be available to keep in some form or another (though probably not).

But on the whole, besides a couple of interesting exceptions to the rule, the whole of E3 was about carrying a gun, and shooting someone. Or carrying a sword and stabbing them. Or maybe just punching them in the face.

I’m not the only one bored by it all. 

Variety reported an interesting panel at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, where the biggest names in cinema – George Lucas and Steven Spielberg – discussed the future of movies and video games. Lucas said, “the games industry can and will create empathic characters, but it hasn’t so far because it’s been driven by hard-core gamers who enjoy onscreen violence.”

I’ll come back to that panel in a future blog post to discuss Lucas’ theory of entertainment taking to controlling your dreams.

However, in amongst all of the bloodshed, shooting, fast cars and the inevitable zombie plagues, there was one phrase that kept being repeated over and over again.

Open World Environment.

They’re taking it to mean that you can go anywhere, and do anything you like. 

The first one I really remember being like this was Grand Theft Auto, though (in my opinion) this was truly perfected in Red Dead Redemption. But let’s stick to GTA shall we? 

GTA IV - Gorgeous looking isn't it?

Before I start, let’s just get this clear – I LOVE GTA. GTA IV, and Red Dead Redemption are possibly my favourite video games ever. Sure, you could say they’re the usual men-shooting-each-other games, but certainly in Red Dead’s case, the shooting was done reluctantly, and there was an emotional plot that would but many blockbuster movies to shame. 

Grand Theft Auto IV is another work of genius. The “open world environment” is huge, the whole of Liberty City (though this is tiny compared to the open plains of Red Dead). Once the plot had opened up all of the islands of Liberty City, you could drive around everywhere. Get in a boat and go out in the sea, or take a helicopter around the city. Fantastic. You could do lots of cool and crazy stuff, like jump out of helicopters, drive cars off of rooftops or through the subway system, or just take in the sights. Go to the bar, have a few drinks. Go to the golf driving range, play darts, or just cause mayhem and wait for the police to take you down.

Seems pretty open world doesn’t it?

Let's look at this...

It’s an image of the game, looking at a borough of Liberty City. Fantastic isn’t it? The detail, the size of it all. 

However, can you go in the buildings? Well, you can, but only a select few. You can go into the shops, the bars, the houses that you own, and ones that are either locations of prearranged action scenes and missions, or the houses of the filthy crims you’re working for. But that's it. The rest are just blocks that have graphic images of fake windows and doors.

Suddenly, your open world isn’t quite so open.

You can drive into the airport, but you can’t book a flight on a plane. You can steal a helicopter, but you can’t leave Liberty City. You can hijack a boat, but you can’t sail off into the sunset. 

Your open world is a snowglobe, filled with fake plastic buildings with fake doors that don’t open.

This is not a criticism against Rockstar Games. As I’ve said, I love GTA, I love them all with a passion, and I still play GTA IV now, many years after it came out. I can’t wait for GTAV, though I get the feeling that I’m going to be rubbish at it (because, as I discuss elsewhere on this blog, I’m bad at video games). No, this is the limitation of the console, of the computing power, and what it can do.

My wife is brilliant. I’m not just saying it because she’s my wife, but she has this knack – this ability to think outside of the box. She loves video games too – she plays a lot more than I do. She’s actually finished Assassin’s Creed (all of them), the new Tomb Raider, and all of the Halo games (I still haven't finished 4 yet). But while she’s playing video games, you can see the frustration there. She doesn’t want to run into the next area to start shooting at the next wave of pre-destined goons. She wants to have a look around, see the scenery, look for any little areas she may have missed, look for secret passageways, and find the cool stuff.

This may come from the first couple of Tomb Raider games where you could take your time, find new ways around, find secret areas and investigate. But this seems to be lost with modern games and their “run in blasting and don’t look at the surroundings” mentality.

If she was playing GTA, she’d be off wondering why she couldn’t go into the neighbour’s building, go into that shop, climb to that roof… all of the things you can’t do. 

In order to be able to go into every house, to leave the city, to talk to random people, to go off on new adventures that are spontaneous you'd need a computer the size of a college dorm, or to get into MMORPGs.

But you know what does have a truly open world environment?

Tabletop roleplaying games.

Yes, we’re back to that argument again. Want to go into the neighbour’s house? No problem. Talk to the neighbours and ask if there have been any strange happenings recently? Maybe the neighbours have been having a problem being hassled by a cruel and manipulative landlord in an unexpected plot that the gamemaster is making up on the spot. A plot that’ll lead to a whole new adventure going off on a tangent that’ll last weeks. Who knows?

That’s one of the wonders of tabletop gaming. No limitations. Sure, the GM may have put a lot of work into an adventure or setting, but the option is certainly there for the player characters to do something different, leave the area, and find something new to discover.

Not only is wifey brilliant at questioning the logic of games (not only video games, but also roleplaying games – certainly keeps me on my toes when game designing) but she’s great at doing the unexpected. I remember we’d been playing Kult quite intensely, and I’d just purchased the epic and gorgeously designed Judas Grail adventure for it. I set the game up, tweak a couple of the characters so it fits with our current storyline, and start the game… only to have her lead the entire group to a completely different location, and end up in a nightclub full of vampires. 

But it didn't matter. The game was still awesome, and everything that came out of it was just as unexpected and cool for me as the GM as it was for the players. And that's something video games cannot do. At least not yet. Not for a long while.

Speaking of game designing though, I should get back to that. WILD isn’t going to write itself.

Until next time, stay multi-classy.

E3 Special: "I Got Your Backwards Compatibility Right Here!"

It’s E3 again this week, and this has to be the first year when I really don’t care what they announce. As I started covering in my “Bad at Games” features, I used to love video games. There was a time when I did little else except watch little pixels fly about the screen. My childhood was filled with video games, playing in my little room, headphones on, listening to music because the bleeps of the game didn’t really matter - well, they certainly didn't when you had a ZX Spectrum. 

All that changed over the last couple of years when I realised what I was doing. The big releases were all the same – run into a room, shoot everything, move onto the next room. The only thing I found interesting to play was Rock Band, and that time has passed for most of the world.

Then along comes the new console releases from the big-boys – the Playstation 4, and the XBox One. And you know what? I don’t really care at all. New hardware that isn’t compatible with anything I have – what a great idea. All those games I’ve kept because I love them – GTAIV, Red Dead Redemption, and even Halo. Can’t play them on the new console thanks to a new operating system.

And the hardware I’ve bought. Rock Band guitars, drums, microphones, drum-stools, mic-stands – every incarnation of Rock Band… The Kinect sensor, the Lips mics, the Scene It buzzers… all hunks of useless plastic when the new XBox comes out. They’ll all be worth about £2.50 when you try to trade them in as well, because no one will want them. The hardcore shoot-em-up gamer will have bought the new consoles without thinking and they’ll have no need for these peripherals anyway.

So I guess I’ve been well and truly XBoned. 

Backwards Compatibility

You know what IS backwards compatible though?

This…

Okay, so there are always new versions of games coming out. The market leader of the roleplaying game hobby is previewing its Fifth Edition at GenCon this year. But still, five editions (well, more than that if you count revisions an 0.5’s) in forty years is pretty good. The other biggies like Vampire has revised once or twice (if you count the recent nWoD update), and sometimes game systems change altogether – I’m one of the biggest culprits of this both in my GMing and professionally (after all, I was behind the massive change to the game system of Conspiracy X, stripping out the old game system and plugging in Unisystem). 

But you know what? You’re not forced into the changes. Because the game’s operating system is the most powerful one on the planet – your brain. If you were a hardcore Conspiracy X player and didn’t like Unisystem, but wanted the updates to the setting – you buy the new books and keep playing with the old system. Nothing is stopping you. 

You want to play D&D but prefer 1^st Edition to 4^th, but quite like the adventures and the settings of the newer games? You keep using 1^st Edition rules, and with a little tweaking by the Dungeon Master, the new information can be plugged right in. 

Campaign Length

One of the regular gripes about roleplaying games is the price. It’s an odd one, really when you think about it. Let’s look at a couple of examples (and excuse the UK pricing).

The core set for the 11^th Doctor edition of Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space is £39.99. Sure, that’s a lot, but it’s the same price as BattleCall of Halo 4. Let’s look at one of the heavy hitters of the games industry of the last few months – Bioshock Infinite. There main game itself takes around 10-15 hours to complete, so that’s already double most of the shooters out there (your average Halo / Call of Duty campaign is around 6-8). And then what?

GTA Multiplayer lobby.
To quote Nine Inch Nails - "Where is everybody?"

It’s kinda over. Most of the shooters have the online multiplayer that’ll give you hours and hours of the same rooms, and repetitive gunfire, or watching the screen while you wait to respawn if you’re as good at FPSs as I am. And if you find a game that you really love, there’s a good chance that the rest of the world may give up on it and leave you behind. My favourite multiplayer video game? Grand Theft Auto IV, especially GTA Race. Sure people still play it now, but I have to sit in a lobby for ten-twenty minutes until the few people around the globe who still play the game decide to log on. 

Once that wait becomes too much, or if they retire multiplayer servers for that game, it’s over. You can play the campaign again, but the villains appear at the same moments, you know what’s coming and it’s all a bit linear.

Tabletop gaming however, going back to the Doctor Who core set, you’re given a main adventure to get you going that’ll take about three or four sessions to play (so you’re looking around 9-12 hours for the basic adventure). Then you have a couple of smaller adventures that you can run, or expand into something bigger. There’s 6-12 hours there on top. And in addition to of all that, there’s a host of little story ideas that you can turn into adventures that’ll last you another… oh, I dunno… you could run a 4-6 hour game a week and still have a year’s worth of gaming there. 

Then, when you run out, you can just make up your own! Go onto one of the many fan sites and download some free adventures, and you don’t need to buy anything else!

You can stop playing for a year, put it on the shelf, and if you fancy a game with some friends, you can dust the game off and play any time you like. The servers for it aren’t going to be shut down from lack of use. You won’t have to go onto a new system or download countless updates. You can just play.

On that subject…

Downloadable Content.

DLC seems to be a big part of the video games industry. The big companies have realised that you don’t need to give everything to the gamer in one package. You can hold some of it back and release it for more money later.

Sure, this happens in RPGs too, but in most cases the additional material is being held back purely because of the cost of producing the game. Imagine if Doctor Who was all in one game – every possible creature from 50 years of Doctor Who… the game would be massive. And cost so much that you wouldn’t want to buy it. Or be able to carry it...

It’s another thing when video games companies put the content on the disk and just not let you access it until you’ve coughed up some extra cash. That’s just not on.

Anyway, back to the point. If you want to download a new map for Call of Duty, that’s fine. It adds a bit more multiplayer. In some cases, there are expansions to the single player campaign – and in some rare cases this expansion is huge and fantastic (I’m looking at you GTAIV – Lost and the Damned, and The Ballad of Gay Tony showing you how DLC should be done).

The same can be done with tabletop RPGs. Expansions, with new rules and settings are common, as well as extensive campaigns and adventures. But you know what’s controversial? You don’t have to buy the expansion for the game you’re playing.

I know, it’s a surreal concept. But imagine you’re playing World of Darkness and fancy something a bit different. You could buy a Call of Cthulhu supplement, or adventure, and run that with it with just a few system tweaks. I own many supplements for games that I don’t have the core set for. It’s a bit like downloading a map pack for Halo and being able to use them in Call of Duty.

Radical, huh?

Anyway, the first big seminars from E3 are about to start, and I'll be watching - hoping to be surprised. I'm not saying roleplaying games are better than video games, or vice versa. But when you're frustrated by the new announcements from E3 or from the new console launches, just remember tabletop gaming. It gets your brain working, it's social without just being a mass of insults on headsets, and it survives the tests of time.

Until next time, stay multiclassy!