to be honest, i’m posting about this just because i want more people to play it with.
five minute mmorpg is just that: the massively multilplayer online role-playing game experience compressed into five minute sessions, and what the game identifies as the critical elements of the mmorpg is online play, levelling up, and lag. the lag (between your input and your avatar’s performance of it) is what makes strategy in this game interesting: you’re trying to slay the other players, but because of the delay you have to make predictions about where your opponents will be a few seconds from now. everyone is acting based on their knowledge of an out-of-date game state. it’s like how the stars in the night sky are actually the positions those stars occupied ages ago when that light first started travelling towards us.
4 comments
I tried it out with some friends there – I really enjoyed it, especially once I got the hang of the controls (such as they were).
I played three times. The first time I lost. The second time I won! The third time I realized that both previous playthroughs, as well as the current one, had no other human players. Oh, well.
I wish there were a way to specify when creating a new game that you’d like to wait until at least one other human player has connected.
Very neat design. It reminds me quite a bit of Robo Rally – a board game in which all players “program in” their moves at the beginning of a turn. Once a turn begins, you can only hope that your robot continues on a set path without being interfered with by another player and falling off a cliff/into a hazard/etc…
I’m a musician, and recently moved to somewhere where I’m cut off from anyone I know to play music with. As such, I’ve turned to something called NINJAM – a service that does to improvisational music what this game seems to do to MMORPG’s.
NINJAM lets you play music in real time with people world-wide. The catch is that when playing music, lag is not something you can just cope with. You have to hear your self playing in time with everyone else.
So NINJAM basically let’s you modify the lag, instead of trying to minimize it. When playing on NINJAM, you set a tempo (say 120bpm) and a number of beats (say 16). This is the “interval” by which the audio will now lag – so at 16 beats of 120bpm, you’ll be hearing what everyone else played exactly eight seconds ago, as they will you and each other.
The end result is that you end up sort-of predicting where everyone else will be in the jam before it happens. And it allows you to play in pseudo-realtime with people around the world, which is pretty awesome for a musician.
-Andy
post a comment