Day: August 30, 2000

Microsoft Buys NetGamesUSA – Bring on the Game Stats

I know I am supposed to hate Microsoft, but I am really geeked at the recent
announcement that MS is buying NetGamesUSA.
NetGamesUSA makes a couple products called ngStats and ngWorldStats that track
statistics in computer games. One of the few products the system had been fully
implemented in was the first-person shooter, Unreal Tournament. Because I am
a geek, I have my ngStats report from UT online, and you can read it here.
The report tracks everything from total frags to the average amount of time
it takes me before I get killed (I rock in CTF, but Last Man Standing leaves
me empty . . . and dead).

I am not sure why a feature like this is not already in most games.
The 3-D Diablo clone, Darkstone, tracks some lifetime stats such as number of
monsters killed, etc., but an expanded stat capture and reporting function would
be awesome for strategy games such as Civilization or Age of Empires II (which
is an MS product, so maybe that will be added).

The acquisition by Microsoft is a great move since it plans on adding the software
to its development kit for PC games which means this technology should start
showing up in more games over the next few years.

Another Feature All Games Should Have

Another feature all computers games should have is a demo feature. There were some pre-cursors before, but this feature really took off with first person shooters such as Quake. Turn on demo mode in Quake or Unreal Tournament or Tribes and the game records the action onscreen to a file so the users can go back and view the action again. For most games there are editors available so you can go into these files and extract particular parts so you could make a greatest hits demo. There is even a whole subculture of folks who use the demo features to make movies.

I was pleasantly surprised that Age of Empires II also has a demo feature, and I wish more computer game companies would include such a feature.