Nov 18, 2012

Dota 2 Diary: How to learn a hero in two hours

Dota 2

Water: essential

I've played 183 hours of Dota 2. Some of you will be saying "Whoa dude, that's time you could have spent making a mean batch of marmalade." Others will be saying "Rofl, l2play noob."

But Dota 2's depth means that despite me having played longer than it took Apollo 13 to fly to the Moon and return to Earth, there's still heaps of heroes that I never played a single game as. This is a problem that faces many new players -- how to get up to competence as quickly as possible with a hero you haven't played before. Here's how I learn a new hero in two hours.

First, go and get yourself some paper, a pen, and a big glass of water -- ideally a pint glass or bigger. Good hydration is essential for learning - it's necessary to maintain the tone of your cranial membranes for optimum neurotransmission. If you're dehydrated, you won't learn a thing.

Enigma is definitely one of the shiniest heroes.

Go to the Dota 2 wiki and search for your hero. I'm going to use Enigma as an example, because I've never played as him, and I've rarely seen him in battle. Look at the page, and write down three things. The first is whether they're a strength, agility or intelligence hero. Enigma is an intelligence hero. The second is whether they're ranged or melee - Enigma is ranged. Finally, write down the list of recommended roles -- initiator, disabler and jungler, in this case.

Now go to Dota Cinema's Heroes page and find your hero. There are no names here, but learning how to recognise heroes from their portraits is useful. Click through, and watch the Spotlight video to see how your hero's abilities work. Make notes, if you want to, of things to remember - the idea is to create a cheat sheet you can glance at while you play.

Now stop for a second and think. When are you going to use each of your abilities to best effect? For Enigma, I'm thinking I want to use Malefice to get ganks in early game, and when chasing later on. I want to use Demonic Conversion when jungling and pushing. I want to lay down Midnight Pulse early on in a teamfight, and want to combo that with a Black Hole. To make that work, I'm already thinking I'm probably going to need to build a blink dagger. Again, write down some brief notes.

Very funny.

Okay. We're ten minutes in, and you already know how you want to play your new hero. Load up a bot-match. Grab the recommended items, and put points in skills wherever you think you should based on how the game is going. DON'T LOOK AT A GUIDE YET. Blindly following a guide is a bad way to learn a hero, because you'll get dependent on it and get ganked while you're trying to read.

How did that go? Did you win? It actually doesn't matter. What matters is whether you used your skills. Go back to the notes you made and see whether you got the most out of your abilities. Make some more notes based on the game you played. In my case, I was pretty happy with my skill use - but I found they were powerful but very mana-intensive in the early game, so I made a note to buy more clarities and go for a quick soul ring. One thing I wasn't too good at was being present in teamfights, so I wrote "teamfights" and underlined it. Twice.

Go make a cup of tea to get a screen break, and think some more about the game while it's brewing.

Don't use these until you've played at least one game with a hero.

Now you're allowed to read some guides. Head over to Dotafire and see what others have to say about the hero you want to learn. Now you've got some experience yourself, you can judge whether a guide is on-the-money or not. You'll almost certainly learn some new things about your abilities too, and some tips on how to use them well. Make more notes, grab more paper if you need to, but try and keep all the information on a single sheet if you can - it's easier to take in that way.

For Enigma, I learnt several things. I learnt that I can use Demonic Conversion on friendly creeps, which is useful for tower pushing. I learnt that I should hide before teamfights so that my black hole can be more of a surprise. I also learnt to stay the hell away from silencing heroes.

Time to hit a real game. Make sure you've got "all pick" selected, and find a match. In any downtime (pauses, waiting for loaders, etc), glance at your notes to keep them fresh in your mind. Godspeed.

I always get heaps of assists, damnit.

Oof. I got demolished in my first game with Enigma. How did you do? I got unlucky with jungle spawns, and I couldn't quite get off ganks on the long lane, even with the help of Lion -- we didn't have enough damage early on, and another of our lanes was getting demolished so they slowly snowballed us.

But that's okay. I didn't play too badly, which after just a single bot-match with a hero isn't anything to be ashamed of. The key is knowing the hero's strengths and weaknesses, how best to use their abilities, and situations to avoid in the future. And keeping those at the front of your mind.

Now go, I hereby graduate you from the two-hour-hero academy. You're no expert, but you're well along the road. Good luck.

Nov 17, 2012

The 10 best Portal 2 co-op maps

Portal

We recently gave you our selection of the best Portal 2 single player maps and campaigns available on the Steam Workshop. There's some great feats of level design in that list, but if you really want to see mapmakers skills stretched to the limit, you have to turn to co-op.

With two brains and four portals available, the levels must be exponentially more complicated. They need to emphasise teamwork, provide an inventive challenge and be tightly crafted so as to stop players exploiting their way through. With that in mind, I enlisted the help of my Perpetual Testing Partner to dig out the ten best co-operative maps around. As always, if you've a favourite that's not listed, let us know about it.

1. Six Extra Seconds of Trust

The title refers to this Cave Johnson sales pitch for co-operating robots. It's apt: Six Extra Seconds of Trust takes place in a room full of buttons and switches, with each player on either side of a glass wall, trying to figure out how to help the other. The work gone into creating such a labyrinthian series of connections is truly impressive. Download Six Extra Seconds of Trust here.

Notes from the Testing Partner: "I've got it! Just take that cube to... wait... no. That won't work for all sorts of reasons"

2. Buttons, Elevators and Goo

...And funnels, lasers, jumping puzzles, blind leaps of faith and those damn emancipation grids. B,E&G contains a large room full of corridors and side-chambers, each concealing a cube needed to complete a collection of buttons. Each area contains or requires a different puzzle element, and its the variety of challenges and their enjoyable solutions that make this a great map. Download Buttons, Elevators and Goo here.

Notes from the Testing Partner: "NOOoooooo..! *splash* Balls."

3. Camtasia

A clever little chamber comprised of two rooms, one on top of the other. While neither player can reach the other directly, laser guarded holes in the ground allow you to share the limited resources back and forth, and buttons allow you to deactivate obstacles in your partners way. There's not much portalling to be done, but co-ordination and teamwork are still key. Download Camtasia here.

Notes from the Testing Partner: "I'm stuck in this hole again. :("

4. Fortunate Buttons

A super-contained single room challenge with plenty of black walls blocking your progress. Fortunate Buttons is an order of sequence puzzle in which every step seemingly throws in more complications and leaps of logic as you move towards your solution. It always feels like you're on the edge between completion and completely messing it all up as you attempt to stretch a limited number of cubes further than seems possible. Download Fortunate Buttons here.

Notes from the Testing Partner: "Just go and- NO, NOT THE FAITH PLATE! Idiot."

5. There's No I in Team, 01

Part of a series of co-op maps made by mapmaker LPChip. Part one starts with a tricky excursion funnel challenge that requires you to really think through the positioning of each player before you make a move. But it's the finale, in which you share a sphere back and forth between each other, that really exemplifies the "accidental" comic slapstick at the heart of the the best Portal 2 co-op maps. Download There's No I in Team here.

Notes from the Testing Partner: "I know how to do this! I have to die!"

Hit the next page for more vents, ramps and tactical suicides.

6. Co-op Vents

It's pretty easy to complete, but there's a lot to like about Co-op Vents. You and your partner split off into two separate corridors (or vents, I guess), which intersect at rooms designed to put one player's life in the hands of the other. The difficulty lies less in the puzzles themselves and more in resisting the urge to blow up your friend. Download Co-op Vents here.

Notes from the Testing Partner: "What is it about lasers that turns you into a homicidal maniac?."

7. Rampage

Rampage heavily explores the possibilities of hard light bridge based puzzling. The three rooms use a mixture of ramps, bridges and emancipation grids to create interesting and unique challenges that require some seriously involved portal co-ordination. Also smart: It allows respawned players to easily make their way back to where they died. It's a problem in some maps, thanks to a level editor that doesn't allow checkpoint placement. Download Rampage here.

Notes from the Testing Partner: "Wait, STOP! Not yet! *splash* DAMN IT!"

8. Quest for the Edgeless Safety Cubes

In which you must find three spheres to unlock the exit, each hiding behind some difficult puzzles in sub-chambers that themselves can be hard to access. The main puzzle room is full of buttons and laser-activated switches, and just deciphering what controls what is a challenge. Despite that, the level has some well crafted puzzles that require inventive portal work to complete. Download Quest for the Edgeless Safety Cubes here.

Notes from the Testing Partner: "I meant to die there. It was tactical."

9. Mazed

Mazed casts you as lab rats, working through corridors looking out onto a large, unreachable cube. Each player must help the other to progress through their respective routes. What at first starts out as simple switch activation soon becomes an involved series of timing challenges and backtracking in order to make a small bit of progress. It's a strangely claustrophobic experience. Download Mazed here.

Notes from the Testing Partner: "I should have picked your route. There's less pissing about with turrets."

10. Super Happy Fun Time

Finally, a one room puzzle that features lots of thinking through the use of an excursion funnel as it pushes and pulls cubes and players through four portals and a variety of improbable obstacles. The division of labour is a bit off balance, with one player required to do little more than push buttons at the right time, but the central problem requires plenty of discussion to overcome. Download Super Happy Fun Time here.

Notes from the Testing Partner: "Sure, the bit with the funnel was fun. But super happy fun?"

Bonus: Geolocity Stage 2

As with the single player maps, some creators prefer to use Hammer, the Source engine's level editor, to create more detailed works. Hammer's co-op selection is less focused on custom campaigns than the solo stuff, but its use still enables handy additions like visual variation and player checkpointing.

It can also be used to reimagine Portal 2 as something else entirely. Something like a racing game. Geolocity Stage 2 abandons puzzles for a track covered in orange speed goo. You have to run, jump and portal your way through the course, avoiding plenty of obstacles and thinking on-the-fly to get through some tricky sections as quickly as possible. While the first Geolocity is also a lot of fun, Stage 2 adds in the ability to screw over your opponent with targets that, when activated by the ping tool, can reverse excursion funnels, create barriers or activate crushers. Download Geolocity Stage 2 here.

Nov 14, 2012

Investigation of TF2 Earbud trading may have uncovered major organized fraud

Team Fortress 2

A user on the SteamRep forums who goes by base64 has potentially uncovered evidence of organized Team Fortress 2 market fraud. On Sunday morning, the community investigator noticed an unusual jump in the price (in TF2's common currency of Keys) and volume of Earbud trades. Earbuds, if you're not familiar, are an especially valuable TF2 item. Further investigation revealed that the Keys used to purchase the Earbuds at an above-average price had consecutive or regularly alternating (odd or even) original ID numbers, which indicates they were likely purchased in bulk directly from the Mann Co. Store.

That brought up questions, like, say, why would someone purchase thousands of Keys for $2.49 each, trade 28 to 30 of them at a time for Earbuds, and then sell those Earbuds for 700 Russian rubles, for a loss of about $47 each? Base64's thorough investigation can only lead to educated speculation, but it's all very suspicious.

The big drama version of the story is that Russian mobsters are using Team Fortress 2 to launder money. Since this isn't a Neal Stephenson novel, the more likely story is that someone's sitting on a few stolen credit card numbers. Some SteamRep posters say base64's research reveals "nothing new," suggesting that this activity is commonplace. Whatever the case, credit to base64 for uncovering so much via Valve's API and interviews with Earbud sellers involved—if nothing else, it's a fascinating study of digital forensics. Check out the post for the full investigation.

(Via PCGamesN)

Nov 13, 2012

Sci-fi platform-puzzler Deadlock seeks crowdfunding, demands Portal comparison

Portal

It's become a cliché to compare every first-person puzzle game to Portal, but Deadlock sort of insists on it by spotlighting a floating AI cube which speaks in vocoded tones that very nearly replicate GLaDOS's disharmonious voice...except with a French accent. But hey, Portal's not a bad inspiration, and Deadlock's sci-fi platforming is promising. A team of French developers created the prototype as a 7 Day FPS Challenge project, and recently began seeking funding via Ulule to spin it into a fully-realized game.

The goal of Deadlock is to ascend a high-tech beanstalk while avoiding the wrath of its AI security system by A. jumping, and B. using your "Switch Gun" to turn the tower's systems on and off. The Unity Engine is artfully used to render sleek gunmetal and neon architecture, and the gameplay concept has legs. Or, at least, you have legs. To jump with, because jumping and air control are important in Deadlock. The gravity feels a bit strange, like the parabola of my jump plateaus for a moment at its vertex, but it is nice to use double-jumps again. I want more double-jumping.

But as LeVar Burton would say, don't take my word for it: a demo of the game can be downloaded from the official site. The developers are only seeking €3,500 (~$4,448/£2,799) to polish the existing 7 Day FPS game, but hope for €32,000 to fund full solo game, and plan to add multiplayer if they reach €66,000. The campaign has currently raised 63 percent of its minimum goal with about a month to go.

Nov 12, 2012

Let’s stop calling games “too repetitive”

Half-Life 2

Hotline Miami is all about learning through repetition, then executing a perfect murder-spree.

Hotline Miami is all about learning through repetition, then executing a perfect murder ballet.

Tyler Wilde, Associate EditorThe word "repetitive" commonly has a negative connotation, and it's especially used negatively (all the time, every time, forever and ever) when talking about games. And often it's followed by a bunch of no elaboration at all. That doesn't make sense. I'm sure I've done it before, but criticizing a game for being "too repetitive" and leaving it at that is—strictly speaking—meaningless. A game might lack variety, but every game is repetitive. We repeat some pattern of input—running and shooting, stacking blocks, bouncing balls off blue dots—over and over, and expect uniform feedback. Then the problem changes slightly, and we tweak our input pattern. And then again. And yet "too repetitive" is lobbed at games all the time.

Alright, I know that sounds a bit pedantic, and I do recognize the difference in tone between "repetition" and "repetitive." Lack of variety is a fair criticism, but "too repetitive" is an extremely vague way to say it, and it dodges the truth: when we criticize a game for being "too repetitive," I think we often mean that we just don't like what we're doing. "It's repetitive" is shorthand for "this isn't fun (for some reason)."

If we like what we're doing, repetition is desirable. I like solving puzzles in Portal, and once I solve one I want to solve more. I don't want to solve the exact same puzzle again, but I don't want to stumble into a surprise Sudoku chamber, either. So Portal gives me increasingly clever arrangements of portal-ey logic problems. The puzzles get harder, but they're all just iterations of the same basic spatial problem I solved in the first puzzle. So after all my twisty, knotty figuring arrives at a solution, it always seems just as simple as the first time. That sense of clarity comes from repetition.

Super Meat Boy replays your failures, illustrating your own learning process.

Repetition is also how we learn, and both Super Meat Boy and Hotline Miami succeed by embracing that power. They present problems in small chunks—a level in Super Meat Boy and a floor of thugs in Hotline Miami—and rapidly reset them every time we fail. Each attempt gives us new information to apply to the next, building layers of experience on the way to that one perfect run. And that perfect run feels good: it's an accomplishment, like unknotting an especially tricky puzzle in Portal. Except in Hotline Miami there's more brain-stuff and skull chunks lying around afterward.

The same goes for Counter-Strike, StarCraft, and the rest. At their most basic levels, they're about repeating and mutating input patterns to solve variable, but not totally unpredictable, problems. The variables in Counter-Strike, for example, are the guns, maps, and opponents. That's been enough variety to keep us repetitively shooting at each other for 13 years.

Repetition can be pretty damn fun, so we've got to be specific, and always ask ourselves if it's really the repetition of a theme that bothers us, or the theme itself. I can shoot bad guys all day, so complaining that "the shooting is repetitive" in Medal of Honor: Warfighter would be confusing. Further examination would reveal that the guns, maps, and enemies have specific traits I don't like, which has nothing to do with repetition (except that the more I do them, the less I like them).

Fearing the dreaded "repetitiveness" may even be bad for games: that's probably how we end up with off-key phrases at pivotal moments, like a boss fight which takes away the gun I've been using the whole time and sticks me in a surprise platformer. It's variety, but it screws up the whole composition. A performance of Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto No. 2, for example, would not benefit from an unexpected dubstep interlude. No, I wasn't talking to you, Skrillex. Are you drunk? Go home, dude.

Anyway, if at first glance this looks like an ostentatious rant about a personal pet-peeve, then you may have seen correctly. But maybe not: try Googling any game name with the phrase "too repetitive." It's everywhere. I get what's meant by it (sort of, kind of, some of the time), but it says very little. It may not even be a criticism, because games like Hotline Miami wouldn't be fun without repetition. If dying and respawning didn't reset the level, and our prior kills stayed bloodied, it would be ruined. Maybe then we'd say that it's not repetitive enough?