What is Your Desert Island Game? 409
1up has a feature today asking games industry heavyweights what their 'desert island game' would be. Games from the Civilization series are backed by the likes of Sony's Phil Harrison, David Jaffe, and Bethesda's Todd Howard, while Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion has waiting-for-rescue fans among a number of the list respondents. Bioware CEO Ray Muzyka has an interesting answer to the question while talking about his pick: StarCraft. " It's an unusual choice for me in that I'd normally pick a role-playing game. But StarCraft has a strong campaign editor to make new content (including making either combat-oriented or story-based campaigns), plus you can play both the solid single-player campaign and against the A.I., and -- here's the trick -- you can play on a LAN or WAN (you said no Internet, but didn't mention local or wide area networks...my goal would be to build a WAN -- I'd explain how, but that would be telling -- connecting other folks similarly dropped onto nearby desert islands by other videogame online sites, who are equally eager to play some competitive multiplayer RTS or try out the campaigns I've created to kill time on the long days where there's nothing else to do but collect coconuts and build rafts." So, assuming that you have everything you need to play, what game would you want to take with you into seclusion?
Re:NetHack (Score:1, Informative)
But that's the whole problem with NetHack. I used to love it - a lot - but having to start over from scratch, time after time, was just frustrating after a while, especially when you've got a good game going. When I'm playing Quake, or Unreal, and I know I'm getting to a difficult part, I'll save my game. If I get killed, I can pick up from my last save. I'll never understand why that's not possible in NetHack, without hacking the source. I can't stand to redo a level, much less a whole game.
If you don't want to have to start over, there's always explore mode -- which is the acceptable form of 'cheating' and is encouraged for newbies feeling frustrated. It's all in the guidebook, which every nethack player ought to have read.
The thing is unlike Quake, you don't want to wait until you're about to be killed to realize that you're in "a difficult part." You can't just fancy-shoot your way out of many nethack dilemmas. This is point (B) above -- you should always be thinking ahead, planning contingencies. Once you get past the early game, a skilled player's characters ought to be essentially unkillable.* An unskilled player will die even if he rigged the dice, gave himself a dozen wishes, and had as many do-overs as he could want. The primary difference between a skilled and unskilled player in Nethack is A) caution and B) planning.
If you do something and it kills you, don't do that anymore. If you didn't do something and got killed, think about what you could have done to avoid or escape that situation. That "falling into a room filled with monsters" bit? I can think of about eight different ways to get out of that, excluding "run like hell" and "just bash 'em until they're dead" -- the latter of which would probably also work if you're playing a well-equipped Valkyrie, Samurai or Barbarian. A stealthy, invisible character (say a ranger or thief) could probably just waltz out of there, but those are special-case solutions.
* See marvin, who managed to ascend 22 out of 25 games in the 2003 tournament.