play.create.connect

On Game Informer's insufferable tone and Activision's spiteful behavior

2008-05-18T17:41:00.004-07:00

The latest game Informer explains that Guitar Hero 4 will change music games forever, but the whole article seems to be how it's copying Rock Band. Can someone help me with this? I'll give the highlights for those of you who can't be bothered to skim a copy:

On GH4 having drums, bass, vocals, and guitar: [I]"The natural evolution of the game is to add more instruments," observes Neversoft co-founder Joel Jewitt. "It's not like [Harmonix] even invented that. That's been out there for years in the arcades."[/I]
Can someone please link to such a game, where a song is played simultaneously on two different instruments? I've been to arcades from Las Vegas to Kyoto, and never seen such a game.

Then the article goes on to talk about a "Create-a-Rocker" mode like it's going to change the industry forever. Themes like goth and glam? Check. Facial paint/tattoos? Check. Custom designs using the exact same system as Rock Band? Check.

[I]Perhaps sensing that it's folly to fix something that isn't broken, the onscreen HUD for multiplayer is essentially identical to that of Rock Band.[/I] Does this sound like it [I]might be the next great step forward in the genre[/I]?

OK, the addition of Jam Over mode - each fret being tied to a certain note, and the notes following the chord progression, allowing improvisation - sounds pretty cool. But the tone of the article, lavishing praises of talent and originality, on what in the content of the article looks like a big "ME TOO" sticker, just plain pisses me off.

What pisses me off even more is that Activision continues to be obstructive by making sure that RB and GH controllers are mutually exclusive in compatibility. There's barely room in a home for one band set, and now they expect us to get another drum set? Even with cost out of the picture the logistics are daunting.

Not only do I ahve no interest, but for their obstructivism I honestly hope Activision is shooting itself in the foot. Unless they pull a miracle out of their ass (say, a dozen Led Zeppelin songs), I don't see myself caring about GH4 at all.

On Stardock, EA, and Vegas 2

2008-04-25T23:51:00.006-07:00

Imagine if heroes were an even bigger part of WarCraft 3.
this article has a brief on Demigod as well as Stardock in general.

I have had a huge appreciation for Stardock since they avoid bullcrap DRM and provide a good digital distribution platform. The recent success of Sins of a Solar Empire commercially gives me some hope that the market in general shares a lot of my own personal sentiments on how and what we enjoy.

I never understood the "pc gaming is dead" thing since a solid 80% of my game purchases have always been for the PC, but I agree with what they say about the industry being fundamentally broken. Like the bureaucracy civic of Civilization 4, the games industry in general but especially PC gaming has grown into an unwieldy beast of corruption and waste. Sadly, there's no one small group to which all the blame can be delivered; fortunately, it seems that the industry is fed up with having gamers migrate to the 360 and is actually starting to do something about it.

In other news, I maintained some small piece of respect for EA, understanding that most of the hatred is just because they're large, and because of the inherent problems with largeness. This has been more or less shattered by the decision to release the creature creator for $10 (or a limited "free" demo thereof). This is detestable.

I've read some commentary and the discussion always migrates to microtransactions, but listen: it's not a microtransaction if you don't get anything. This tool is useless without the full game and it comes bundled with the full game. EA is offering to give you some of the game a few months earlier if you're willing to pay more for the total game. This is a critical distinction from actually getting something new or unique or otherwise different from the standard box. Shame on EA, and shame on any rubes that end up actually supporting it.

What's worse, they want us to use it. They need content generated by a large and diverse team to pack with the game when it ships, to properly populate the galaxy at launch. They're leveraging the internet, using us to help make their game better. And they expect us to pay money to do so.

Screw you EA. For the first time since 3DO went defunct, I'm going to start caring who made the game on those should-I-or-shouldn't-I purchases. Ironically, or perhaps predictably, they were founded by the same person, Trip Hawkins, who last I heard is now making mobile games. But I digress, so let's move onto other matters...

Rainbow Six Vegas 2 for the PC is pretty abominable. For the love of all gamers everywhere, please, people, when you make a port from a console to a PC, don't just remap the controls onto a keyboard. IT DOESN'T WORK. Things that are intuitive on a console controller aren't on a mouse and keyboard and vice versa. Please stop.

Also absurd is the inability to change guns while reloading. If someone is shooting me in the face, I don't give two PSOne memory cards about putting in a new magazine and chambering a round; I'm dropping that mofo and taking out my sidearm.

This wouldn't be a huge problem except that hitting fire with an empty gun makes it reload. This is a great example of decent mechanics not mixing well. No weapon change while reloading? Reasonable, if annoying. Fire to reload when empty? Quite helpful! But both? I'm in the middle of a fire fight, I'm firing my weapon frantically, I don't have time to watch my bullets. I expect to run dry and switch my weapon, not start reloading while I'm still peeking out of cover. The mixture of the two elements simply doesn't functionally make any sense, and I'm ashamed of the oversight.

Furthermore they hacked the XBox LIVE system of online play to the PC, with the individual PC owners as the game hosts. The entire system is laggy and absurd. As I was led to understand that the true joy of Vegas was the multiplayer, for them to completely botch it on the PC port makes me feel like I payed $50 for a $30 game.

The rest of PAX

2007-12-06T22:32:00.000-07:00

Already December! enough procrastination; I'm going to dump the rest of what I've written here, unformatted, with no photos, for better or worse. This is the rest of PAX:

America's Army: True Soldiers for the XBOX 360 is an UbiSoft title greatly assisted in development (but not financially supported) by the U.S. Army. It promises to be, though not totally realistic (it's a little more forgiving about death than real life), at least the most realistic game I've ever seen.

By realistic, I'm not referring to graphics, but game mechanics; If you want to know what it's like to be in action in the army, you like FPS, or you simply appreciate realism in games, you need to pick this one up. For the truly hardcore, there's even a "Super-Real" mode, which will remove all indicators, maps, and numbers from your display.

Gameplay is squad-based, with the best squad AI I've ever seen; you can't command your squad's movements and YOU DON'T NEED TO. Single-player seems to keep everyone into one fire team, but online or over system link you can play 16-player co-op, and split up however you like. The game features stat development where you can choose which aspects of your solider to upgrade, and it's presented not so much in an RPG-insane-magical-power way but more of a learning-from-your-time-on-the-field way. The training carries over to online play, so you'd probably do well to go single-player first.

Eidos was featuring just one game, but it's a doozy. Kane & Lynch is a 3rd-person shooter in the style of Gears of War, from the health system to the squad-based play to the "revive teammate" mechanic. What it doesn't do, however, is carbon-copy the style of any game you've ever seen. This game mixes ten parts Reservoir Dogs, Three parts Pulp Fiction, and one part Max Payne and drenches the tried-and-true gameplay with an atmosphere of pure badassery. For this reason I'm giving it the "Most Pleasant Surprise" award of PAX 2007.

This game is GORGEOUS. If you think that high-contrast graphics and over-used shaders can only look amazing in environments as fantastical as Quake 4 or Gears of War, you're in for a rude awakening, because walking down the street in a Japanese metropolis, guns blazing, will rock your eyeballs.

Controls are smooth as butter too. The game eschews complicated "hold this then tilt that" controls by assigning one action to each button and automating the rest. Familiar functions in Gears of War like "cover" and "reload" are replaced by squad commands such as "follow" and "attack".

"But wait," I hear you say, "putting all the squad commands into a menu on one button works fine. How can a game work without a reload button?!" Trust me, it does. Having a seperate button for each squad command isn't harder to learn, it's actually easier, since the other buttons don't have yet more crap for you to memorize. I've never had such an easy time giving so many orders to an FPS squad in my life. It works. Reloading works too. When do YOU reload? When you're empty or when there's a lull, right? Well the game does that FOR you. If you're not firing, iron-sighting, or performing some other action that implies combat, your character will put in a fresh magazine so you don't need to worry about a thing. The same goes for combat. If you fire your weapon and then stop firing/iron-sighting or moving, your character ducks behind the nearest object, be it a pillar, dumpster, or car. It works beautifully and you can finally spend more time thinking about how to beat a group of enemies than how to control your maneuvers around cover. Spray-'n'-pray from behind cover seems to not be a complete waste of ammo as well, a nice change from Gears of War.

Harmonix was expected to show off Rock Band, but I doubt anyone was prepared for how it turned out. People were OBSESSED with this game. It was totally impossible for me to play the game without waiting in line for half an hour - something I opted out of, for better or worse.

The songs are UNBELIEVABLE. The one thing above else that turned me off to guitar hero (especially the first) was the music. The covers were terrible, and most of the songs weren't that great to begin with. With Rock Band, the songs aren't known for their interesting guitar, but for being... you know... "good". The few covers there are in the mix also completely blow GH 1 and 2 out of the water in terms of musical quality; you'll truly WANT to rock out to this stuff.

The popularity was so massive that I have to objectively grant this the Best in Show award. What's so amazing about the game is that it doesn't do anything unique or new, but simply perfectly fits together the various pieces of all the other B- and C-list console music games into a complete set.

Nintendo & Jam Sessions

To say Nintendo's booth wasn't exciting might give the wrong impression; rather, from Nintendo, nothing is ever surprising because you always know to expect goods of a very high quality and polish. I wish I had spent more time with the new DS Zelda game, and my apologies to anyone I let down by not writing about it. Erm... you can draw on the minimap, notes and things. That's all I know.

Metroid Prime 3 was such standard fare I similarly was tempted to ignore it. The decision to buy it is a no-brainer, really: if you like the Metroid Prime series, you'll get it, and if you don't, you won't. It looked like a fantastic game, and it'll be on my Christmas list, but there's so little different-looking about it that it, like everything in the Nintendo booth, is hard to write about.

One thing I've never played (but always wanted to) was the Fire Emblem series, and the new one for Wii looks like a good ol' Tactics-genre romp, so I'll probably give in and buy it, if only to say I've played the distinguished series. Everything about the interface was very clean and easy to understand, and at no point was I stuck guessing, "Uh, well I guess that number's my accuracy, or maybe damage," a trait that seems exceedingly rare in the genre.

The only truly shocking things about the booth were that my mother fell in love with brain training, and that the Nintendo reps were obsessed with preventing people from taking video. Bear in mind that this is a public event, with an open booth, and thousands upon thousands of people streaming by. Nothing in these games is exclusive knowledge. MP3, the most hotly guarded, was set to release in mere days. The idea that you can prevent people from taking video would be insulting if it wasn't so ludicrous. After a time of repeatedly stopping my video-taking, they started targeting ME SPECIFICALLY, and I STILL captured plenty of video. In the end all it accomplished was lower my opinion of Nintendo of America, both in their common sense and in the lack of explanation over why video was forbidden (hence why I chose to ignore the restriction).

Jam Sessions, the DS acoustic guitar chord simulator, was not represented by Nintendo, nor even on the exhibition floor; rather, a music stage wandered about, moving each day like an elusive nomad. Part of the UbiSoft crew, I was fortunate enough to have a long interview-style conversation with a knowledgeable person, and here's what I learned:

It's got smooooth controls. You have a down-strum and an up-strum, which with their own sound, and if you strum from a line on the screen right next to your "strum bar", you make a very crisp and short "hit". The guitar tabs provided cover a wide range of good songs, so if you're not much of a writer, there's plenty to work with inside. Something everyone will be pleased to hear, the controls are customizable for either hand and for either way to be "down-strum". Recording of your own songs isn't that terrific, only about 1 minute, so this is more of a live-performance thing.

In summary, I'll try and get jam sessions, as it should prove a far more-convenient (if more-expensive) substitute for my harmonica as far as portable music goes.

Microsoft (mostly hellgate)

Microsoft's booth was mostly about Mass Effect, with Rock Band (yes they were in multiple booths), PC ports of XBox games, and lesser names take up the periphery. I still don't really know anything about mass effect because I completely ignored it in favor of one terminal alone: Flagship's Hellgate: London demo.

For those of you out of the know, Flagship studios is formed of a large chunk of the team that developed Diablo II, and it shows. A spiritual sequel in gameplay mechanics to D2, Hellgate is going to provide players with all the hack-n-slash dungeon-crawling they can handle when it hits shelves on Halloween.

With even simpler skill sets and a daunting inventory system, this game is definitely all about the loot. Basically, if you wasted a month or more of your life spending every evening playing Diablo II, this is a no-brainer. For those who still need to be convinced, I assure you that the game is beautiful and handles very will with keyboard movement in the 3-D world, freeing up your mouse for combat - allowing you to, for example, move backwards while firing your gun FPS-style at a charging demon. Laying the smackdown with a sword is perfectly acceptable of course; The game moves into 3rd-person for melee combat and features different attack motions based on which way you're moving when you attack.

The game will be an up-front priced game like its predecessor, and then also feature free online play with an option subscription. After hearing nothing about what precisely subscription would offer players, I was unhappy to find that the Hellgate reps were equally dodgy. I think they honestly didn't know at PAX-time.

In the end it looks a little too simple for gamers who want a game with more meat on its bones, satisfying a wealth-gaining response in the brain rather than a system-mastery response. Players who are looking for intense adrenaline-pumping battles will be a little hard-pressed, while players who live for the grind will be in heaven when they play Hellgate.

Fury is that type of game that is so esoteric that almost no one will play it and yet so perfect at what it does that every true gaming aficionado will have heard of it. Imagine if you will a game devoted to the PvP of such games as Everquest and World of Warcraft, and a dash of Diablo-2-style loot (that is, an orgy of the stuff), without all that silly xp grinding, re-rolling, and waiting for peak hours before you can find a PvP group. Fury is MMORPG PvP percolated down into its rawest and purest form, right down to taking all the numbers from the game and obsessively calculating your DPS down to 45.8 seconds after the beginning of engagement, resulting in the transposition of two abilities in your attack chain.

There's a massive number of abilities; I'm talking hundreds. Each ability has many levels and you can choose your abilities and levels at will (there's no stone-set classes in the game). Do you take two abilities at level 3 or a single one at level 4? You can spend literally all day at this.

Of course, the game, perfect as it is in its role, is totally, %100 unappealing to those who are unable to spend an idle day in MMORPG PvP and feel satisfaction at bedtime. I myself am among such folk, so while I enjoyed the beta copy I snagged on and off over the course of about 10 days, I was more than happy to let it fall off my desktop when Valve's Team Fortress 2 beta went live, as it was far better at filling my PvP appetite.

Far Cry 2 & Crysis

2007-10-29T02:21:00.000-07:00

One thing I was happy to see was the first glimpse the general public got of Far Cry 2 - No photos, they made damn sure of that. However I took notes as best as one can with literally no light to write by, and I'll try and piece together what I jotted down:

For those of you still confused, Far Cry was created by CryTek and published by UbiSoft, at least that's how I understand it, and then they went their seperate ways. CryTek teamed up with EA to make Crysis, a sci-fi near-future-themed game, and UbiSoft maintained the Far Cry name and is making Far Cry 2, a more realistic take set in Africa.

First off, don't think that Far Cry 2 has suffered from lack of CryTek; the game is still gorgeous. The best part is that there's not a lot of faking, thanks to some clever optimization tricks; the detail fades off quite naturally with distance, as opposed to the various "detail level" distance cutoffs many of us in MMOs suffer through.

The game takes place in Africa, in a 50-square-kilometer space surrounded by desert, with no loading screens as you travel from one corner to the other. As you go back and forth on a quest for vengeance/assassination of a criminal boss figure, you must combat a very advanced AI with mobile stockades/ammo dumps with the help of buddies. Buddies are NPCs with their own looks and personalities, but they're created as necessary by the game. If you murder a buddy senselessly (and shame on you for turning down the help), sure enough by the time the script calls for a buddy, you'll have met someone new. The game tries to do cinematic tricks behind the scenes, like, for example, building up a storm so it might start raining at a particularly dramatic point which you may be approaching.

Speaking of storms, boy howdy, the weather system is a beaut. From wind effects that can tear branches off if they go fast enough to brushfires that follow the wind direction and realistically grow and die, this game doesn't need anything fancy to wow you; the run-of-the-mill stuff like fire is that good.

The AI also seems to be much improved. When the demonstrator fired a sniper rifle at an encampment, hitting a guy in the leg, he dropped to the ground clutching his leg, and everyone else scattered for cover. Halfway back in the darkened room, I almost rolled my eyes; the animations were good, but this was how he was showing off his "amazing" AI? But then after a long moment, maybe 6 seconds, someone rushed out to their comrade - and started dragging his buddy to safety. The demonstrator put one in the head of the would-be rescuer, then one in the head of the bait. The crowd erupted into applause and cheers.

Finally, the game takes realism to a whole new level not just in graphics, but gameplay mechanics as well. Rather than just say, "OK, you're in the gunner's seat now", or "OK, you used a first aid kit", your character actually goes through the motions of swinging out of the driver's seat, or prying a bullet out of your leg with a knife. Catch fire? You'll pat at your sleeve to put it out. Weapon jammed? You gotta fix it. Want a look at your map? Your character literally pulls out a folding paper map and a compass. There's even an option to turn off all HUD indicators for maximum realism. This is UI immersion I've rarely, if ever, witnessed.

Crysis, sadly, didn't make an appearance at PAX. However, the single-player demo is available for download, so if you have a decent PC you can check it out immediately. Sadly the top-end graphics would make for too big a download I guess and aren't available, so people with champion PCs can't open up and see what it can do. Regardless, it's a good deal of fun for such a short demo, but there's a few things you need to know, at least on Normal difficulty and above.

THINGS YOU SHOULD KNOW WHEN PLAYING THE CRYSIS DEMO:

The gunboat can see you. No, it doesn't matter that you have your cloaking device on, are halfway behind a tree, immobile, prone, in tall grass, and was last spotted or did something noticeable 300 meters away. The gunboat can still see you.
Do not ever, ever, ever use strength mode in combat. You will die, and everyone will laugh that you tried to throw a crate or another person at them instead of using your perfectly good guns.
This is still, spiritually, a Far Cry game. Even after you've made a massive debacle of an objective, if you go unseen for a minute or two everyone will assume you probably left. Similarly, if your commanding officer tells you to keep a low profile on an upcoming area, feel free to take off the silencer and go wild, then waltz in while everyone is 100 meters away, investigating the site of your firefight.
No, the gunboat can still see you, it's just not firing because there's 4 feet of solid rock between the two of you. You are not going to sneak away from this thing in the grass, Predator-movie-style. Run.

Penny Arcade Expo, Part 1: Introduction

2007-10-15T13:14:00.000-07:00

PAX is a conference for gamers. And yes, the gamers I said didn't really exist as a demographic. Maybe they do.

At any rate, it's a conference for people who play games: This year it lasted 3 days, filling up the entire Seattle convention center, with not just a convention center but entire floors devoted to console, PC, portable, tabletop, board, and RPG free play, including a rental system for board and video games, as well as tournaments and over 80 overlapping hours of talks, public demonstrations, and concerts. Despite being attended by close to 40,000 people, it was easy for me to feel at home, even though it was the first event of its kind I had ever attended. It's difficult to describe just how friendly everyone was. They were friendly in the spontaneous, "let's play a DS game" way that transcends good manners and is simply impossible without knowing everyone in the building is as passionate about something as you are.

While many players would have (and did) take fully enjoyment of the freeplay areas and the tournaments, most of my weekend was spent in the exhibit hall, where companies like Nintendo, Microsoft, Sony, Wizard of the Coast, UbiSoft, WizKids, and even the U.S. Army were showcasing games, services, merchandise, and peripherals that were either already on sale or hopefully would be before the end of the year. I got to play demos, talk to company reps, and grab the occasional beta key. I also attended many talks on the state of the industry and saw a few exclusive demonstrations - many of the games at PAX had never been shown to the general public previously. Overall, it was - to put it simply - good.

And I'm going to tell you all about it.

Seattle is identical to any big city in the U.S., with the exception that it seems fairly slanted; I was reminded of San Francisco and needed, on occasion, to marvel at the automobile's ability to go up and down these steep inclines every day.

Like any large American city, it's full of shops, malls, offices, and people; similarly, like any large American city, there's no place to eat, nothing's open late at night, and there's nothing worth buying. By the end of the trip I saw Seattle as more of an obstacle, a mission objective that must be overcome to earn the glories and fun packed inside its convention center. The city was beautiful - for a city - and quite clean - for a city - but in the end that's all it was, and it had to be tolerated more than enjoyed.

The convention center itself was 4 stories tall, with the fourth floor actually crossing the street via a "skybridge" - fancy-talk for "this building keeps going beyond the street" - leading to the exhibit and concert halls, where I probably spent more time than even in the hotel room (including sleep). Level 1 was small and was basically just an entrance; level 2 was devoted to tabletop gaming; level 3 to consoles; level 4 to the PC. Scattered across all floors were conference rooms, handheld areas, restaurants, bathrooms, and Penny Arcade comics which had been enlarged, printed on banners, and hung from balcony railings. All in all, the environment of the expo was clean and comfortable.

Sorry to anyone who's into tabletop or card games, because I didn't pay any attention whatsoever.

As far as video games are concerned, there were generally two categories: New, cool stuff and old or rehashed for-the-love-of-God-please-support-our-families stuff. The latter is neither interesting nor were the employees nearly as willing to speak frankly. Gametap, EVE Online, Dell, EA Mythic, and others were relatively easy to ignore, when one wasn't forced into a moment of pity.

The stars of the show, in my opinion, were America's Army, Eidos, Flying Lab Software, Harmonix, Microsoft, NCSoft, Nintendo, and Ubisoft, so I'll be sure to cover them.

Check the bottom of this post for a tour of the exhibition hall just a few minutes after the first people started walking in. I made the film as I entered it for the first time, and I got a few wierd looks; here the place was open for all of two minutes, and some wierdo was walking around filming instead of stopping at the nearest open booth to play a game.

PAX 2007

2007-08-30T14:04:00.000-07:00

I went to Penny Arcade Expo, and it was awesome.

Full write-up pending.

Steam to be the true LIVE of PC

2007-06-22T19:08:00.001-07:00

Watch out Microsoft - there's a new LIVE in town. True it's only for steam apps, but from what I've heard, any competition is good enough.

Why WoW players complain so much.

2007-05-19T20:38:00.000-07:00

This is not a very "deep" article; if you know the first thing about MMOG social dynamics, you can move on, because this is quite literally that first thing: The phenomenon of MMOG complainers. It's not an explanation of the "how", since not even the greatest minds in the industry can come up with a satisfactory answer in my opinion as to the root causes of such behavior... just the "why" this behavior manifests itself in WoW the way it does.

Never before has an MMOG reached such a mass-market. People who are very casual game-players - the console-loving "HALO crowd" for example - play WoW in droves. Many of them have never given an MMOG a second look since everquest, and most have no idea how the social dynamics of an MMOG work. So, you have a huge proportion of the players not knowing how things generally go in an MMOG community, and a huge number of players.

What all these people would know, if they played MMOs, is that the vast majority of the bitching and moaning - and basically all of the bitchy, moaning rebuttals to said bitching and moaning - is completely ignored by everyone except for other bitchy moaners. We all have bitching and moaning to get off our chest once in a while, and when it's well-thought-out, poignant, and grammatically consistent, it can maybe, just maybe, change a small piece of the game forever. Mosty of the time though, it's drowned out in the official forum's shouting matches - and raising your voice only makes you more indistinguishable from the rest.

Without the slightest veterancy in the genre, WoW players are more likely to treat the internets like Serious Business, and wax despairing over their squandered 15 dollars a month, which in the USA probably wouldn't buy enough dog food for a single dog to survive. As Penny Arcade's Tycho has often attested, the difference between free and paid-for changes the percieved entitlement a ridiculous amount in the average gamer.

So, in general the tendency is for people who don't like MMOGs to have really loud voices - remember, these people wait years for that one MMOG they think sounds the best to come out, then are expected to shell out money for as long as they shall play - and to boot, WoW players haven't learned from history, so in terms of community it's more like a sequel to EverQuest than EQ2 can ever be.

DRM is a money-loser.

2007-05-08T15:52:00.000-07:00

Yes, I have more to say on DRM. No, I haven't said everything.

Digital Rights Management (DRM) as we know it today - that is, highly interfering of legitimate uses - is severely damaging all media industries, from movies to music to games. Granted, it's not damaging the status quo, or they wouldn't do it; it does indeed prevent piracy. The problem is that the most profitable companies are often the ones that invest the most in DRM and their legal department, rather than on their actual product.

It's the same issue as putting all those ridiculous restrictions on satellite radio; any industry based on modern technology has come to hinge on how well the big companies can manipulate the federal government - full of aging people almost universally too backwards and too busy to fully understand the ramifications of something that never existed when they were learning how to govern.

Fortunately DRM hasn't done much to stop anyone except the most casual of harmless copiers (yourself included). Sadly, it is ONLY the most casual users who are thwarted, the major international commercial pirate rings often not even needing to circumvent the technology in order to make their copies (as is the case with, say, HD-DVD).

The Good News: They're losing money.

You read me right: The companies that seem to be gaining the most money for themselves are doing the most damage.

First and foremost, there's people like me, who will choose the lesser of all evils (the one with the least DRM) when making a purchase. Don't underestimate what can happen when you get on the average Joe's bad side. People start joining the list of safe houses for the underground railroad. Suddenly, even digg has to keep an eye on its PR.
Second, DRM costs a huge amount of time and money to design, and only a fraction as much to crack. The only thing that stops DRM from going out the window entirely is that many people don't feel like investing the least amount of time to find the cracks on the internet. The people who want to crack it do, the people who don't care enough don't.
The really juicy part?

When DRM is at full effectiveness, they lose money on it.

Mull that one over a second. It's a pretty hard connection to make, which is understandable since the bigwigs keep using it. The secret is long term vs. short term.

Short term, the companies spending money on DRM and legal action are maintaining high profit margins and protecting their interests. It's impossible to differentiate on a grand scale between creative-if-rare uses for content and illegal-and-reckless copying of content, so you attack it across the board, and it works.

Long term, people hear about your products less, more and more people turn into people like me (see point 1)... You'll even lose content providers: who would want to be a musician in this corporate environment? Maybe the homogeny in modern music has more causes than we give it credit for.

The biggest threat, though, is how it stagnates your entire industry. This is subverted by the fact that technological industries, if they grow at all, grow rapidly and with fortitude. DRM-using industries continue to grow, so why take a chance on DRM-free methods if you're making a healthy profit anyway? Nevermind that the industry would grow faster still.

Wonder how massive companies would use DRM if it hurts them overall? Me too. I have a few ideas, from management treating it like any other company rather than a digital-content-based company, and accountancy based on sound lessons from totally unrelated ways of doing business, like, oh, handing over an apple and getting money in return. Mainly though, I think it's just a network of confused causes and effects. A simplified example:

If you don't use DRM, the whole industry grows. "Everyone's making money hand over fist, but piracy is a big issue."

If you use DRM, the industry grows, albeit slowly, but you come out ahead of the competition. "It was a bad year, but on the plus side, DRM boosted revenue!"

DRM perverts our legal and governmental systems, stagnates the industry, sows disrespect for large corporations, and retards the cultural growth of mankind.

What can you do to stop it? It's easier than you think.

Do whatever you want with content you paid money for, so long as you're not just acting as a giant distribution hub for others to take an artist's work of heart and soul.
When sites doing things that should be legal submit to cease and desist orders, write them and complain, and/or organize new avenues to keep things going elsewhere.
When it comes up in conversation, make well-reasoned arguments against DRM to convince people one at a time.
Vote however and whenever you can to stop unjust legislation on media.
And the most important thing you can do: Don't buy it. Whenever convenient, stick to non-DRM or light-DRM products.

Believe it or not, every little bit does count. Big companies may look invincible, but they're not. A little bit here and there from everyone can bring a company to its knees.

This means we also have a responsibility to protect honest companies who are providing meaningful service. Don't "stick it to the man", he has a wife and kids to feed. Just show them as much as possible that you don't want anyone fed for using DRM. Also remember the artists; paying for their stuff is the biggest mark of approval you can make, and fosters superior growth in the art.

I leave you with the clever 60-second video which inspired this entire article: Adieu.

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess - First Impressions

2006-11-21T14:18:00.000-07:00

I've now played through the second major dungeon in Zelda: TP for the Wii, and I think I've got a good handle on the overall game now. What follows is first the Wii-specific impressions, and second the overall game impressions.

The Wii:

This game is very nice on the Wii because unlike say, Wii Sports, you can actually calibrate the pointer to have some semblance of 1:1 relationship between the pointer's vector and the actual cursor on the screen. This makes aimed items, like the slingshot and boomerang, much nicer than it would be otherwise. I'm still new to this interface (vs. 8 years aiming Zelda games with an analog stick), so I'm a little worse than I would be on the GameCube, but this is no problem: When I miss, it's fun because I feel like I missed. You can either look or move (by holding Z) with an aimed item out, and getting in big, high-mobility archery fights with half a dozen out-of-reach enemies is an absolute blast thanks to the Wii pointer. It's also nice to be able to drag around the map like you can in many PC games with the middle mouse button.

Unfortunately, the accelerometer uses of the Wiimote, especially swordfighting, are rather shallow. It's clear that there's an "attack" button in the GameCube version that they simply slapped into a Wii motion: any accelerometer hit of enough energy counts as a "button press" of the attack button. Hence, no matter how you swing it, you do a horizontal swing in-game. Hold Z and any motion whatsoever is a vertical slash. Hold Z and forward on the stick, and any motion whatsoever is a stab. Shame on you, developers. Shame.

Does this mean that it works poorly? Not really; it just means that the Wii version's typical combat situations are no better than the GameCube's. The Wii can play both GameCube and Wii games, and I would still recommend anyone with a Wii get the Wii version for the few moments where it really counts.

The Game:

This is the best Zelda game ever made.
It starts off a little slow, even for someone who hasn't played Zelda in a long time, but if you're patient the first hour or two, you'll be well-rewarded. The game is so ridiculously chock-full of unique control situations I have no idea how they packed it all in. Heck, you play as not-Link for a good chunk of the game, with roughly the robustness of Link with 2 items. The sheer amount of variety is amazing, yet while WarioWare is a bunch of minigames, the short diversions in Twilight Princess feel like one small step in your journey of a thousand miles, because you're so driven to get to the next objective.

And driven you will be. The story is compelling at every turn, giving you both a long-term goal on the horizon to save the world, and imminent crises in the here and now that give your play a sense - however false - of urgency. Dungeons are the most brilliant ever made because the puzzles are never mind-bending nor tedious; You will never be stuck for long because a puzzle is too hard, nor will you be bored because you're solving the Nth variation on a puzzle you've already completed. Everything is brilliantly constructed and it's amazing how satisfied you feel after solving even the simplest of puzzles.

Finally, I've eh, spoiler removed, it's better as a surprise), and I don't know if it was the Wii controller or the presentation, but it was perhaps the most immersive moment in my entire video-gaming history. I was in the zone, man.

If you don't play Nintendo, pick up a second-hand GameCube and get this game... it's that good.

Battlefield 2142: this is nuts.

2006-10-24T13:34:00.000-07:00

So, I bought Battlefield 2142 a week ago. I bet it's pretty fun, but I haven't played it. As far as I know there's no technical issues. Why can't I play it? insane copy-protection.

See, you're only allowed to register an account if the CD-key currently in use has never made an account. They don't tell you this, anywhere. They also don't tell you that BF2 account names can't be used again for 2142, either as an old account or as a duplicate name. (update: apparently you can sign up as a BF2 "veteran" to get a special icon, a free unlock, and a unique taunt. This was marketed poorly and probably would have prevented my name-guessing issue entirely.) So, the game is 24 hours old, and I'm trying dozens of names, none of which work, and I suspect some error might be at work. I fill the name box with gibberish I'll never be able to remember for the life of me as a "baseline" account I never plan on logging into. It works, which elates me, so I go back to trying names. About 4 more trials and instead of the "already taken" error, I get one that tells me the CD key has already made an account. Crap.

I immediately contact tech support. I still haven't received a response. (update: for the record, it was roughly 5.8 business days before I got an answer - a request for information.)

The Battlefield series has always been known for ridiculous copy-protection but this takes the cake. I'd like to know why on earth I can't make unlimited accounts, even if they are deleted after a period of inactivity. One can make players (with unique unlocks) at will within an account, so why the 2-tier account/player system anyway? One has to connect to the internet to play (well, play the game proper at any rate), so it's not like duping offline installations is possible. Just what the hell are they up to?

What they're up to is growing the market for illegal dealings. EA has a long history of treating game copying like a cold war arms race, but this approach is flawed. Beyond a certain point (and we reached that point about 10 years ago), copy-protection doesn't discourage stealing, it encourages it. The baseline crime only decreases a certain amount based on how easy it is to steal. Beyond that limit, the people who steal games will go to the ends of the earth to steal your game. For many, it's a challenge which must be met; it's fun. It's a purely reactive effect and so the mutual escalation is all coming from EA's side of the table. They look at the correlation and treat it like an ever-looming threat that they have to keep up with, and all it does is cost them time and money.

I'm so fucking tired of being caught in the crossfire. I just want to play my fucking game that I payed $50 for, pretty please.

Never alone.

2006-10-11T13:47:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I think that I'm alone here in Tucson, AZ, and that all the game developers are on the east and west coasts, in Europe, in Japan. This is a silly thing to think though. This is an excerpt of what was at the top of the business section in the Daily Star today. It's an article about the limited supply of PS3s (putting the final nail in my coffin prediction in light of the massive number of units Nintendo has).

Robin Marshall may qualify as coolest mom in the world.
When her 15-year-old son, Colton, said he wanted to camp overnight outside a computer game store to make sure he could reserve the soon-to-be released PlayStation 3, she said he could skip school the next day.
She even lent him her cell phone and sent him off with some Goldfish crackers and juice to wait outside EB Games, 9525 E. Old Spanish Trail.
"We only live maybe five or 10 minutes away. So I packed him a bag and gave him some snacks," Marshall said.
"He wants to be a game designer, and that's pretty much all he's ever wanted to be. He's a techie. He's just so excited, he can hardly wait."

The article goes on to give a little info on the limited supply of PS3s. It doesn't discuss the PS3 hardware itself or mention competition.

I've met (on the internet) and heard of people like me, people who have wanted to have a hand shaping video games their whole lives, but they've never lived in Tucson. I don't think I'll find and contact him; I'd be pretty creeped out as a 15-year-old if someone four years my senior called me at home and said, "Hey I read about you in the paper. Let's talk games." I don't consider myself shy or socially awkward but that's a little much even for me. I'll just take the story at face value and breathe a little easier that I'm not alone in this.

I've been doing a lot of thinking over this article about a young man I'll probably never meet. It makes me wonder, how many lives do we touch without realizing it? How many times might an offhanded comment I made led to someone re-thinking their lives? What deeds have I done, insignificant and instantly forgotten, that stayed with someone witnessing it for days, months, forever? But of course, we can never know.

First-person shooters need more interactive environments.

2006-10-10T19:53:00.000-07:00

And here's where you say, "You idiot, they've had interactive environments for years! If you want anything more you're just being a dreamer who isn't willing to face the harsh realities of game limitations!" Well... not quite.

We've made good progress so far, with Half-Life 2. With the Havok engine and the gravity gun, physics have been taken pretty much to their limit as far as interactive environments. Mini-games which require special input, puzzle-solving and the like are pretty much at their limit too. Take a look at something like Prey, or if you're old school something like Marathon. Rigid puzzles have been an example of the interactive environment for a long time.

But these take the avatar out of the picture. There is a strong disconnect between the player's avatar and the environment, one that has become more and more striking as the rest of the genre has fleshed out.

I was inspired to write this because of a preview video I saw of Red Steel. In it, the person trying out the game was peeking out from behind a wooden beam, trying to shoot someone at a distance, when most of the bullets just went into the beam. There was no physical way to get closer to the beam he was shooting. Could you make this kind of mistake in real life? There's a problem here. Curiously enough, the answer has been around for years and years, but everyone figured it was something that could be done a better way, if only games became (impossibly) more advanced.

And so this possibility was left to gather dust and eventually forgotten. There is a certain drive to make everything about a level as dynamic as possible to keep the players immersed. They don't want to see the exact same obvious event happen exactly the same way every single time they try to get through an area, so AI pathing and scripted story/cinematic events are concealed as much as possible, when the developers are unable to do away with them entirely. But there's one scripted thing in the levels of an FPS no one wants to get rid of, and for good reasons: the ladder.

The ladder has never been and will probably never in our lifetimes be completely a dynamic aspect of a game's physical rules except in the most rigid of contexts. In every shooter you've ever played, the ladder has an invisible aspect to it, a cleverly-disguised surface or line which is totally imperceptible to the player, but tells the game, "Treat this area of space, indistinguishable to this dumb game engine from all the space around it, like a ladder, so the player can climb it." This is the solution we've been looking for. I'm not the only one to realize this. Slip Call of Duty 2 into your XBox 360 and walk up to any low ledge away from debris. An icon appears; a button press stalls your action for two seconds as you heave yourself over. The invisible, imperceptible ladder, in horizontal form.

The method is proven; grab a Tony Hawk game and start scoring grinds and lip tricks. Obviously a decent game can be manufactured from these invisible player-environment connectors alone. So I say, next time you give a player a wooden pole, put that pole in the center of an invisible area, a small post, that tells the game, "Treat this area of space like something the player can brace his gun against." Not only will the player not fire into the pole like a retard, but in fact be more accurate and far, far more immersed.

Some say that re-iterative development can only take a genre so far. Some of those even say the FPS is dying. It's not; this is not a plea over what can save the genre. It's a prediction of the future. Like all mechanics, it will be in some popular FPS games and not others, but FPS still has an ace up it's sleeve, and it's not ready to fold just yet.

More on the dangers of realism

2006-09-29T15:59:00.000-07:00

The goal of this post is to cover in excrutiating detail anything negative that derives for greater realism that was not explored in my earlier post.

Go here, download the issue 7 preview, and read pages 16-19.

Wow, that was easy.

Uwe Boll, example: sleazy businessmen, not artists

2006-09-25T01:02:00.000-07:00

Read this, will you? You can even read how he decided to show up his detractors by inviting them to fight him in a boxing match. That's seriously mental.

This guy doesn't understand games and doesn't understand films. He only gets releases because he's funded outside of Hollywood.

Games were once a black hole of suckery when it came to licensed IPs; people who complain about how bad they are now didn't play any games before the release of GoldenEye. We are slowly pulling ourselves out.

Films based on game IPs on the other hand are only just budding, and making all the same slip-ups as before; they're being done by businessmen who don't ask, "What can we do with this IP which will kick ass?", they ask, "How much cash could I wring out of this IP if I made a film based on it?"

It's a big problem, money in the arts. There's a careful balancing act between crap so deep and meaningful that the average person hates it, and crap so blatantly mass-produced and uncared-for that everyone on Earth hates it. Movies based on video games are - for the moment - the latter.

Realism in Games

2006-09-24T18:55:00.000-07:00

Realism is often sought-after by game developers, reviewers, and players, yet poorly understood by many. A rather elementary principle that a budding game designer soon learns is, "realism doesn't necessarily help a game", yet the reasoning behind it is usually murky.

The key is not to look at realism as a value-adding aspect like graphic quality, sound fidelity, screen resolution, etc., but more as a carefully-balanced aspect like progression of difficulty or overall complexity; too little and too much are both undesirable.

The dangers of realism are a lack of fairness (or overabundance depending on how you look at it), and an overload of complexity:

Fairness:
No one wants to watch an action movie in which the hero goes up against 3 armed opponents and is lucky to inflict a single casualty before being killed. Media manipulates the acumen and luck of all parties involved to portray something fantastical; in this case realism would make the game too difficult, or, assuming the player can possibly win by taking realistic courses of action, too boring.

In Counter-Strike, we could realistically expect the Counter-Terrorists to have better munitions in more ample supply than the average Terrorist squad, as well as considerably more manpower, especially on hostage maps where the CTs have presumably had plenty of time to gather their forces and form a plan of attack. In this case, realism gets in the way of a fun competitive game by stacking the odds severely against the terrorists; after all, the goal of terrorists is to sow terror and avoid direct confrontation in order to make up for their inferior strength, and as such are almost by definition weaker than the CTs.
Complexity:
Imagine a game like Trauma Center with about 30 antibiotics and dozens of types of forceps. There's a reason that doctors spend years in school learning how to treat the human body, and as a result any game based on medicine needs to be simplified in order for a layperson to play it at all.

The same goes for flight; which is more popular, Star Fox (a.k.a. Lylat Wars outside U.S.) or all flight simulators combined? I don't even need to check the sales charts; my money's on McCloud. The reason is that the complexity of a realistic aircraft requires a person spend a great deal of time learning in order to get off the ground, let alone engage in heart-pumping combat.

The benefits of realism are immersion and common-sense mechanics:

Immersion:
Immersion is the holy grail of gaming. The reason realism is so touted, along with high-resolution 3D graphics and surround sound, is immersion. Immersion is the only thing which a mass-market game can always use more of, regardless of its nature or its genre, and so the push for realism that follows is understandable; The issue arises when more realism adds less immersion than it does unfairness and complexity.

In some rare cases, realism can reduce immersion. In a medieval game, speech from even the English would be quite difficult to make heads or tails of. Going back to counter-strike, the guns are all left-handed, even though they are used, by default, in the player's right hand. The only reason for this seems to be to show off the gun's realistic machinations, such as bullet-casing ejection - things that would go unseen if the gun were right-handed or held properly in the left hand.
Common Sense:
This point seems to be lost on many developers, and so was the inspiration for this article: realism is important to common sense. When a player first picks up a game, e is using all of eir knowledge, common sense, and perceptions to put the game into a logical context. Without this context, the game seems to make no sense, and is no fun.

Let's use Counter-Strike one last time. Let's say that for an assault rifle, the gun fails to fire every so often. Imagine two different expressions of this failure:
The gun makes a kazoo sound and fires confetti for a few seconds.
The gun jams and the cartridge is forcefully ejected by the player's avatar.
They both operate on exactly the same gameplay principles, yet the former makes little sense while the latter is perfectly understandable. When a player plays the game for the first time under the "confetti" presentation, the random failures of the gun will not make sense to the player. The player will become increasingly confused and frustrated as e attempts to explain the cause of the failures which are getting em killed so often. Unless other players in the game explain the gun's operation to the player, e will quit forever.

On the other hand, with the "jammed gun" presentation, there may be some confusion as to what causes a mechanical malfunction in the gun, but there is no confusion as to why the gun is not firing; guns do not fire confetti, they become jammed. In this case a player is far more likely to be more understanding of the situation, and is immediately closer to being fully acclimatized with the nuances of the game that need to be understood for effective and fun play.

Possible examples abound. For one, imagine a flight simulator that responds to a certain failure by instantly pointing the aircraft at the ground and teleporting it within 50 feet of the earth's surface. Even in a game emphasizing arcade-style play, such a response would only be perceived as a bug.

What to take away from this is that there are easily-understandable reasons behind why realism can be a bad thing - despite these aspects usually being acknowledged but glossed-over in much game design commentary - and that realism can help to make game rules intuitive for the player, making realism about more than immersion.

The follow-up to this post is here.

An article on DRM

2006-09-14T16:16:00.000-07:00

Here's an article that uses plain English to explain copyright's historical origins and reasonings, why we have copyright problems in this day and age, and what's wrong with the software copy-protection fad of the last 5 years or so:

Read it, and be wiser.

Among other things, I blame the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, which makes it illegal to teach others how to circumvent copy-protection, while saying nothing of teaching others how to make explosives.

Also thanks to this page for helping me to remove the (read ...) links from posts that have nothing more to read.

43 Things

2006-09-13T03:09:00.000-07:00

This is a fascinating site. I thought it was stupid at first... pedantic, even. I was wrong. It reveals many things.

It reveals I've done way more in my short life than I realize, things that other people want to do, and how fortunate I should feel. I can even chime in with my 2 cents on getting it done.

It reveals how people want things. Some people want to grow as people, others are comically superficial regarding appearance or fitness; some goals are bold, others are down-to-earth; some goals are possible, others are fanciful; some goals are uplifting, others are dangerous. It's a fascinating insight to the human condition.

You can also find amazing things and coincidences. You'll find out someone who's beaten you by a week to all the "things" you are reading about and commented in them lives in the same city. You'll send "cheers" to people's entries and goals, and they just might cheer you back; these can appear at a glance to be out of nowhere. Why am I being cheered by this person for wanting a job in video games? Does he like games? Does he like that I'm so confident in what I want to do? I have no idea.

You'll learn that people want things you didn't know people want. You'll learn just how common some wants are ("stop procrastinating" is astoundingly common).

If you just poke around here and there, it will seem like a pointless waste of time where each person is totally self-centered on what ey want to do; you need to actually join, poke around, and leave comments on things you've done and want to do, to get the full experience.

That said, here's my page. Be warned, seeing the desires of a fellow human being, laid bare for all the universe to see, can be embarrassing and/or terrifying just as easily as it can be enlightening.

Wired Magazine / On "Gamers"

2006-09-03T20:10:00.000-07:00

Wired Magazine's site crashes FireFox frequently. Attempt #3 is just a link to a list of other links from this guy who actually more or less knows everything he's talking about. I don't read Wired and I'm not about to start for one column, but this is good stuff.

Go read, if you care about gaming.

Speaking of gaming, who are "gamers"? I would never call myself a gamer; would you? Most of my leisure time is spent playing games, thinking about games, talking about games, or writing about games. You might think this qualifies me as a "gamer", and I might wear this label with pride. In fact, I don't quite understand why anyone would describe eirself as a gamer. Let's think a little more deeply about this.

If you love books, you might call yourself a "reader". Yet even at first glance, we see that this word has very different connotations. There's no reader "culture" or "lifestyle" to speak of; reading is just something you do as a hobby and in no way identifies how you culturally identify yourself. You can find a T-shirt on the internet with the Konami code emblazoned on the chest quite readily. You'd be much harder-pressed to find a shirt with, say, the definition of an intransitive verb.

The same goes for movies. If I go to movies often, I'm not a "movie-goer" in a strictly cultural sense; I'm a guy who loves movies. If I like music, am I suddenly part of the "audiophile culture"? I could make up terms and shove them into quotation marks all day, but I think you get my point.

So, why "gamer"? I have a couple of ideas, and I'm going to list them from least- to most-compelling:

3. Gamers are stereotypically awkward in social situations.

I get the impression that the idea of a nerd who plays video games and has no social skills was fairly accurate in the days of ye olde gameing when compared to a sample of similar non-gamers. If those that have laid the groundwork for the culture don't get along with non-gamers, a desire for soldarity follows. Suddenly that T-shirt with the controller input for a hadoken greatly resembles the rainbow accessory for homosexuals. They're both subtle but unmistakeable declarations on the respective identities of each wearer: "Yeah, I'm one of you, and there's nothing wrong with us. I won't call you a [nerd/queer] or make a crack at how you [don't know the names of atheletes/are attracted to your own sex]; strike up a conversation."
Given that the concept of being a gamer is becoming more and more familiar to the public at large, and not many people find moral issues with games in general, this is becoming a continually less-compelling hypothesis as time goes on, but the the concept of "gamer" is growing, so we need to move further down the list to build a complete answer.

2. Gamers are competetive.

If you play games enough to wear a T-shirt with hylian text, you like winning, even if it's against an AI or just an environment. The shirt becomes a statement of acumen: "I know what this means and you don't, because I'm more 1337 h4x0r than you." The wearer of such a shirt eats up the confused stares of non-gamers. The in-joke or esoteric reference is not specific to gamers, but as far as presumably-mainstream entertainment, it is; books aren't popular enough with the young people who love to be hip and in-the-know, while movies are too popular for any joke to be very "in".
This might single-handedly explain the T-shirts, but not all the people who call themselves gamers, nor the gamer "lifestyle", which seems to amount to - aside from playing games - cursory habits, like drinking Bawls or Mountain Dew instead of Red Bull.

1. Gamers are viewed as a clearly-defined marketing segment.

This is my pet theory. Let's say you want to market something, and your target audience is less than 30, not specifically female, and - this is critical - may or may not be a party animal who likes to drink plenty of acohol and use products with "X-treme" in the name. How do you identify with and appeal to this wide, vague group? They may be 15 or 25, male or female, dull and plain or wild and always trying new things, or responsible and polite or edgy and in-your face. What can this group, from a general perspective, have in common?
Games, of course. Lots and lots of these people play games, while relatively few people outside this demographic play games. Tell them they're "gamers", and sell them "gamer" products, and they'll buy them. They'll buy them because the product is for gamers.
It's not really for gamers of course; it's for the demographic which just happens to also often play games. A high-performance network card might be desirable for someone who opens his computer to vast numbers of unconventional connections, for some information-age utility. But these people are gamers, so they sell you a gamer card. It reeks of young male rebellion, but manages to duck out of actually putting "X-treme" on the label.

So, there you have it. If you ask me, no one is actually a "gamer" per se; it's an illusory group implied-at by marketers to sell things to a demographic. There's no sin in this type of marketing; it does indeed give people the correct impression as to who would want or need the product, and so I can't pin the blame on them.

The problem arises when people who have never worked as marketers call themselves gamers, and think that it in any way defines or clarifies who they are as people. If you tell me that you're a gamer, I still know nothing about you except that you play lots of games, not all of them sports. They might even be only one kind of game; maybe you only play non-squad-based first-person shooters. There are people who have only played half a dozen games regularly at any time in their lives and call themselves gamers, because of their devotion to that half-dozen. Calling yourself a gamer means you are involved in games a lot, but it doesn't imply scopes, degrees, or qualities, so it carries very little meaning, and thus is not at al la useful term. In fact, if you go so far as to call yourself a gamer, I get the vague (though not at all definite) impression that you don't have enough interests or hobbies to be a mature person; you're not so much a "gamer" as a "loser".

Don't call yourself a gamer except to say that you play games.

GDC radio

2006-09-02T12:47:00.000-07:00

Got podcasting software like iTunes? Great, copy this url:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/GDCRadio
...and then paste it into your software. (In iTunes: Advanced -> Subscribe to Podcast...) And behold, much game dev goodness. If you plan on listening to it in a limited-sound context, be warned that the volume is way, way below a typical song etc. (at least in the current episode), and doesn't spike, ever, making me wonder why the volume is so low in the first place... Whatever, my point is, you might want to manually up the volume before heading off to whatever aforementioned context.

On Vanity Points

2006-08-21T14:55:00.000-07:00

"Vanity points" is a concept I touched on a while back. The idea is, in a typical game, and especially in online team games, you typically have scores, points, and awards which are not absolutely critical to victory: e.g. the numbers on the stats screen at the end of a game of WarCraft 3, or the number of kills in a capture-the-flag shooter. Usually these points do indeed imply contribution to the end result. They rarely, if ever guarantee it; in Counter-Strike, one man might die from gunshots that expose the locations of enemies to allies, who then get the kills. The dying man deserves little credit, to be sure, but he gains none; meanwhile all the credit is given to the killers. This is compounded by the fact that killing the enemy is not necessary to win a given round of Counter-Strike.

So, you might think I'm opposed to vanity points; nothing could be further from the truth. In fact I think they are critical to directing the attention of the players. A movie director or cinematographer will ensure that a concept is expressed to the audience by directing the attention of the audience. Example: if one half of the shot is a conversation far away, and the other half someone's face up close, one will plainly see the close-up character's feelings regarding the content of the distant conversation. The same goes for games with their vanity points. In Counter-Strike, one does not need to get kills to win, and yet this is the overwhelming strategy to attain wins. Thus are new players browsing the scoreboard instantly aware of the critical role that killing takes in the game, if they didn't know already.

If you got rid of the death count in Counter-Strike, would nothing happen? More likely, you'd see a small drop in camping, more aggressive charges from non-campers, and more of a tendency for unskilled players to stick with a server as their kills stagnated while their deaths skyrocketed. The death count gives the players a greater sense (impossible as it may seem) that dying is, in fact, bad.

Further, a community might get the wrong ideas in its head about how to accomplish something without the proper vanity points. In Battlefield 2, one gains points for healing and reviving players as a medic. If this was not the case, players using medics would no doubt be more combat-oriented. In this case, vanity points have influenced how players play the game, by telling the players that, in the opinion of the developers, healing and reviving is a critical action to benefit the team, just like killing; so critical, in fact, that it deserves vanity points. Thanks to vanity points and "most/best" rankings each round (i.e. "Most revives"), newbies self-tutorialize by running blindly for any dying persons they can see in order to resuscitate them. Those that learn to play properly eventually cease over-compensating and integrate the medic-specific aspects of play into the overarching game. Thus vanity points can influence a player to not only play differently, but learn how to play properly without any sort of explicit guide.

What to take away from this is that vanity points and awards are usually an incomplete and poorly-understood mechanic in the vast majority of games that employ them, but they can also be a powerful tool for influencing the flavor of your game by influencing how the community at large plays it.

Affirmation

2006-08-08T03:16:00.000-07:00

Read about Tabula Rasa's "Designer" jobs. The similarity to how I describe my appreciation of games and the things in their bios is, to be honest, a tiny bit frightening. I might have to re-think my opinions on destiny.

On musical games

2006-08-06T13:51:00.000-07:00

"Musical games" are henceforth defined as games where the player's input depends on rhythm, and that input is assisted/rewarded with music. Dance Dance Revolution, Beatmania, Guitar Freaks, and Frequency are all examples of musical games.

I have long been unable to put my finger on why I find some musical games compelling (DDR, Amplitude) and others humdrum (Beatmania). Recently I played Guitar Hero which allowed me to recognize a key difference.

OK, some background. I adore Amplitude (by Harmonix), and was greatly looking forward to Guitar Hero (also by Harmonix), only for months I didn't have enough money. Well, I go over to a friend's house, and his sister happens to own it... And it was a huge letdown. This led to a greater analysis and eventually the short essay you're reading now.

The difference is the existence of "game" mechanics. DDR's input in no way resembles a popular instrument, and missing a step does not miss the note. Amplitude has a number of tracks such that playing the entire song in real life is impossible, and to boot has a number of powerups that affect more than score. Meanwhile, other games have the logical conclusion of being able to play a complex song note for note. Guitar Hero is much the same way. These don't do it for me because one has to wonder why one doesn't simply learn to play the actual instrument.

I have and still do dabble in creating music on the computer, electric piano, harmonica, and ukulele. When I can actually produce music of my own whimsy, however humble, it is far more gratifying than performing a song well in, say, Guitar Hero. Whereas Amplitude uses music as its cornerstone and then builds game elements on top, most musical games merely use the music alone and do their best to ignore the "game" portion.

So, after I worked this out, I started wondering: Why are "performing" musical games popular? It's obvious why one might pick up and play a few times; instantly the music is better than it would be on a real instrument, so there's more feedback. But what about when you start looking like this? Why not just learn to play the piano?

The answer, I decided, is inertia. Just before writing this I saw a fascinating YTMND site, whose content was nothing more than a one-edged, one-surfaced torusoid, but what made it amazing were the comments made by users. The vast majority of comments - and there were a lot of comments - was about how amazing the shape was. I was stunned; it's an interesting shape, yes, but could so many people have never really seen such a shape and examined it?

It's inertia; People tend not to be very inquisitive. They don't bother learning about topology on their own even if, when shown a strange shape, they think it amazing. They stick with their Bemani game instead of moving on to a real instrument because it's familiar. People have a great deal of inertia.

So, this is my call to everyone reading this: KILL YOUR INERTIA. Go forth and do stuff; go forth and learn stuff. If you play a lot of shooters, go take a gun safety class and rent a gun, take it for a spin, see if you like it. If you like this blog, go research game companies and the history of the industry and game theory. Explore the interests you don't know you have.

Oh, and before anyone brings up the "money" argument, most musical games are played in the arcade at a substantial "rental" price, to the tune of 15-20$ an hour; If you can afford to play the game, you can afford to save up and spend some time with the instrument. And don't forget about friends! How many people do you think have absolutely no friend with an instrument in the house? Surely, they could borrow it or just tool around on it at their friend's house.

Anyway, thanks for reading. Hopefully this sheds some light on why I think musical games I dislike are popular and why, unlike other games I dislike, I actually believe they shouldn't be popular in a more perfect world. To me, no matter the genre, it's mostly about "game" part.

Excerpts and Asides: An Intermission.

2006-07-30T03:20:00.000-07:00

(before you ask, no, we don't actually type out perfect sentences and long monologues. The timestamps offer the perspective of how off-the-cuff this was.)

[21:08] Jordan: I just wrote about it in that blog I have in fact: I'm no programmer; I'm no artist... I dunno.
[21:08] *****: You're just a bum with good ideas, heh.
[21:08] Jordan: It's like, I feel like I have this talent, this knack for stuff, and I can't figure out how to turn it into a marketable skill I so I can make money.
[21:08] *****: More like the need to create.
[21:09] Jordan: Yeah, it's like, I feel like I have this time in my life, to nudge civilization a little further along, and that I have the means.
[21:09] *****: It's not something that one produces for money.
[21:09] Jordan: But I've got to pay the bills, and it feels like a real contribution to society is one that's worthy of paying for, you know? You pay to be entertained, and so it feels like, "Yeah, that entertainment, it's not frivolous; it enriches those lives."
[21:10] *****: Heh... Yeah, you should find a job that you love. You may have to take a few crappy ones to begin with, though.
[21:10] Jordan: Yeah, I'm looking for a minimum-wage thing... But it's hard to see where I'm going, because I look at all these careers for a while, a year, maybe two, and it doesn't pan out and I always go, OK well what else is there, but now I'm running out of [doors].
[21:11] *****: You claim it's art that you're going to create
[21:11] Jordan: I think all entertainment is art; I think they're really synonyms even though people don't usually think of it that way. [blog note: If art is science and entertainment is art... What's my point? I'm defining science as human understanding of the universe, and I strongly believe that entertainment and art relates to it.] I never thought of myself as an artist, but art is what interests me. I think I could be a good engineer; I think I could be a decent teacher; But, those don't feel like what I want to do. I would probably make a great film-maker, a writer or director; I have this kind of instinct for the delivery. But it's not what I'm really into.

This is getting a little heavy for a blog supposedly about video games. You owe it to a 30-second loop of Boards of Canada's Over the Horizon Radar, which I found on the site of sites, YTMND, long ago, and can no longer find (sorry). I just sort of remembered it and dug it up, and it's really an amazing piece I think, in how it has a sense of fulfillment and foundation, but also some bleakness and melancholy (attributable to the subdued timbres and the wind sound effect, respectively). If you don't know what I'm talking about, google up a free sample; Boards of Canada is very repetetive and ambient, so any sort of sample's fine. So ambient in fact, that I can't imagine many people who don't smoke pot buying the album. I know I never did.

Anyway, the entry. My situation right now is proving to me that in every game, in the right circumstance, you can find a good analogy to life. Many have hypothesized that it's the only reason we play games at all. So, how's my life like a game, you ask? In many ways it's a little like an online RTS game, right at the start. I have no army (skills or job) to rely on and the whole world is blanketed by the fog of war (uncertainty of the future). I feel a little like I did seven years ago, give or take, when I couldn't bring myself to play those games online. It seemed like a lot of work and I didn't feel like I could do that well... but eventually I did play games online, and it turned out that, it didn't even matter if I won or lost. I think my life is a little like that. Right now it feels as if my life hangs in the balance, but it probably doesn't matter.

Or maybe that was just an excuse to turn a monologue on (predominantly electronic) gaming into a fucking diary. I'm trying to get a post in every 5-7 days minimum, but the muse hasn't struck me so... This post serves to keep the blog fresh in my mind, so I know to write here.

In other news, I recently realized that were I able, I might be a mathematician, but I don't have the mind for it. It's an odd thing to hear, isn't it? But it's true; I'm not very good at math but I love to hear or read others explain it. Some proofs, presented properly, are a thing of grace and beauty. Perhaps even of art.

DRM is bullshit.

2006-07-25T16:25:00.000-07:00

Digital Rights Management, is what it means. It's bullC.R.A.P.

I want to take 20 seconds from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, for a YTMND site. This is technically illegal, but is of no real consequence (in fact, I specifically rented it - and hence got the inspiration for a YTMND - because of the clips used on YTMND).

A long time ago, DRM was more commonly known as copy-protection, and was fairly unobtrusive, unless you wanted to do something illegal and didn't know what you were doing. The problem is, lots of people did know what they were doing. The result is an arms race and an escalation of hostilities which has spilled into the streets of innocent users like me, who want to do a trivial but unorthodox thing with their content.

So, I have to download the movie illegally. The problem is, most illegal downloaders are assholes that don't give a shit about the creators or their pay, so I can't even find the movie alone; just the entire Indiana Jones trilogy. So I want 20 seconds of video, to be modified and released without profit (and if others are like I was, increased profit to the right people), and thanks to DRM, I have to illegally download three entire films.

YTMND is hilarious and has only boosted rentals of films like Finding Forrester and Indiana Jones, both of which I never would have rented without YTMND as an influence (remember, rentals pay royalties to the film companies). Because of this ridiculous arms race, people like me have to resort to questionable methods to do harmless (even beneficial) things with the content in our hands.

YOU CAN'T WIN, guys. Obviously your DRM doesn't work because someone foiled it and I can download the films on the internet, even though I can't get them from a video capture from my DVD player. And you know what? It never works. DRM is always foiled in a ridiculously trivial amount of time compared to the effort you guys put into setting it up. It's now invading innocent people, like iTunes users and people who put CDs from sony into their computers, which installed rootkits. It's got to stop guys.

Art like music, film, games, alledgedly frivolous stuff like that... Yes, people should get paid for it, but it's not a necessity. If you go out of business because you have no profit margin and/or buying it is so much harder than stealing it, boo hoo you're out of business; don't let the door hit your ass on the way out.

I will make one exception: Steam, from Valve. Steam is awesome. Instead of restricting my use, Steam expands it by letting me download my games to any computer in the world, without a disc or text code. This is a DRM that works especially well for online games, and is prevalent in single doses in many MMOGs already. It's the way of the future.

So, there's a bright side to everything.

On MMORPG "endgames"

2006-07-25T08:43:00.000-07:00

The WoW endgame was the whole point, or so they said before the game released. The idea was, yes you take a long time to reach max level, but once you do that's when the huge majority of the game opens up to you. It sounded fishy at the time and from what I've heard here and there, it indeed is.

I mean, if someone reaches 60, they're addicted to the grind. That's a new game waiting for them, one they likely don't want to play, and no one else can; another example is serious PvP in Guild Wars. It just doesn't make a lot of sense. Meanwhile, Spore will potentially allow you to jump to any game you want (presumably after reaching it once), if the latest e3 demo is any indication.

I'm very familiar with the whole issue as my brother is a record-setter for grinding (reached 60 in WoW far faster than anyone in his huge guild could name), and meanwhile I'm only about 4/5 max level in City of Heroes after more than 2 years (the general concensus among grinders being that it takes =< 2 months). I've concluded that, if you give someone a game and they play it to grind, it has to logically end or peter out somewhere, and then they're done with it, and they move on. This isn't necessarily a bad thing even for subscription-based games, as most people will eventually get bored of any game, and it adds a degree of predictability to when that occurs, allowing you to better plan your expansion release or whatever. But what you shouldn't do is presume you can add a bunch of content and say, "hey there's an endgame guys!" There's no such thing as an endgame to a grinder; make a game where the endgame is only accessible to grinders, and no one will ever stick around for the endgame.

Since non-grinders are likely on-staff saying, "yeah that endgame sounds sweet!", it gets implemented, but the target audience just doesn't want it, even if you hand it to them on a silver platter. This doesn't mean that nobody appreciates the endgame of a given MMORPG - in fact, a lot do - but from a cost/benefit point of view, you have to be extremely wary of working too much on content there, rather than making repeating the grind from level 1 increasingly rewarding, or moving on to a new game project.

Time: the ultimate RTS resource

2006-07-24T16:10:00.000-07:00

Do you know the greatest reason that most people lose at RTS? I don't mean on a professional scale, I mean among the proletariat ranks of newcomers. It's time. Either they do roughly the same thing, only more slowly, as their opponent, or they can't control their units quickly enough in the heat of battle, or they can't spend all of their income before they are defeated.

It comes as little surprise; when Civilization feels a little like Chess, people play real-time strategy for the action. Still, wouldn't it be interesting to see a RTS where micro-management speed has little value? It's been tried, of course, generally by taking control of the battlefield away and leaving the player with the clerical work of the production... hardly engaging for most people.

In the end, I think stances and formations are the key. In mainstream RTS, stances and formations have never failed, not once, to only increase the complexity of micro-management. What if you were to add that layer, then strip away the norms? Could it work?

On doubts

2006-07-22T22:37:00.000-07:00

Why do people doubt themselves? Is it a self-protection mechanism?

Lately I doubt myself daily. It's not something I ever did, once upon a time, when I was wiser. Lately though, all the time. If I should relent to my doubts, I will fail both myself and the world, and consign to a life of mediocrity. Where is the protection in that? I've long decided that I do not live for that. I live to enrich the world. My avenue is games.

Ah, but there's the problem, you see: I can't much contribute to games. I mentioned earlier that game design is a career. There's 3 problems though:

Designers have paid their dues in another avenue of the industry.
Designers are usually payrolled for a blend of design and other talents.
All the jobs are in California.

For your convenience I've ordered them in descending insurmountability. My main issue is, how do I get in? I've tried and failed to learn to program, I've tried and failed to gain true insight and interest in graphic arts, and I've tried and failed to have the patience for a university degree (more on that another day). I've never been one to be discouraged by failure, but to quote Max Payne, I'm running out of doors here.

Given enough time, the pieces of a pocketwatch - shaken together in a box - tend to miraculously end up a fully assembled pocketwatch. Yet my mind continues to doubt.

A lack of control of one's mind is an intriguing concept. I wonder if it could be transformed into a game mechanic of more depth than existing examples, as per possession or MMORPG crowd control. Maybe a literal switchboard of synapses, resulting in unpredictable reactions to the environment? i.e. A minigame wherein you literally switch the poorly-labelled connections player->enemy and NPC->friend, and presto, you have a squad member.

Jordan's Computer Day

2006-07-18T02:46:00.000-07:00

I hereby declare July 17th "Jordan's Computer Day". True, the effort spanned 2 hours into the 18th, but the spirit is the 17th.

On this day, I have powered-on a computer I built myself.
On this day, I have overclocked said computer.
On this day, I have run Far Cry with all the settings maxed out on 1280x960, at full frames.

And it was good.

The dichotomy of publication

2006-07-16T16:05:00.000-07:00

You can say anything you want about the gap between big-budget games and "indie" games, but the fact is, it's about to get worse. Not because of a lack of avenues for indie games, but an increasing and less-populated gap between big-budget publication and underground hits.

You might be optimistic about the future of indie games; I don't blame you. The PC has long had the internet as a viable distribution on the cheap, and it's coming to all the next-gen systems. The XBox 360 has exploded the possibility for games with a high fun-to-kilobyte ratio to be sold at a reasonable price.

But, what about the moderate games? What about those games which are hit or miss, the non-blockbusters that are still decent and come in a box? The people have spoken: Americans have more money than they do time. They only have time to play either a quick fix or the best of the best. The middle-range might be dying soon, and I'm still undecided on if it's a good thing for the art.

Console prices are way up for the sake of graphics, meaning that there's fewer consoles per home. To sell a game well, it has to be ported on both the 360 and the PS3 (Wii is forging a new niche market and so I expect the same game-isolation as before between Nintendo and other systems). The indie games have low production cost and can be distributed via the interwebs. The big games can port across platforms. The middle-range doesn't have the budget. They'll scale back to indie level or go big into debt to get on both consoles.

One might argue that this is an inevitable step near the end of the cycle that separates big-time publication from indie; you can claim it's more or less what happened in music, movies, magazines/newspapers, books, etc., but I don't know if it's necessarily something we should accept. In some cases this has worked out great, as movie sets are expensive. In others, such as music, it's killed creativity and it's harder than ever to find quality music. Since more people are trying to make it in music than there's a market for it, companies only sign 1 band per "sound", and you miss a lot of good similar stuff. But, there's an entire post in that, and I still haven't gotten to my strategy game thoughts.

I'll leave you with this idea: Art, all art, anywhere, everywhere, is science. It is the most empirical of sciences, true, but science is all around it and in it. Science as we normally think of it is very rational and has a more visible pay-off, but just look at say, the last 300 years of music, and then tell me that we aren't approaching a better understanding of ourselves. Art's a roundabout science, to be sure, but in little ways it pays off... And I have a hunch that someday, long after I'm dead, it'll pay off in a few big ways.

Many things indeed.

2006-07-15T17:59:00.000-07:00

Boy, do I have a lot to write about. My cousin got an Xbox 360, I've caught wind of a bunch of gaming news, and to boot I've been doing lots of thinkin'.

Well, to start, I should say that the supergroup didn't work out. No one else of the dozens that joined the group knew quite how to handle it, so they did the opposite of what I do: they stayed out of it. they just kept playing like the SG didn't exist. Like a language that only I speak, no one else was in on it, so no one did anything with it. This much confirms my hypothesis that if I made up a language in Endless Forest, no one would bother figuring it out. Artsy types that might like the program don't see a synthetic language as artistic most of the time, the hypocrites.

I've been playing some Civilization 4, since I just noticed the big patch. It got me thinking about tech trees that don't have bottlenecks and are very open-ended: how do you provide a very accessible interface for such a tree? Civ IV did it by limiting all techs into a simple data structure: a AND (b OR c OR d), or something such like that. Thus, no tech requires more than 2 other techs, and one tech is alone on one side of the AND, meaning it can be displayed differently in a reliable fashion. Diablo II on the other hand, just did away with telling players anything most of the time, hoping it sufficed to say that a "recieves bonuses from" b. That sort of a solution works for an RPG I guess, but for a strategy game I need more concrete numbers. I have more on strategy games, but I'll save those for later.

The 360 is a very nice machine, but as I said before, the business plan suffers, and it shows. Marketing a "core system" box was a big mistake on their part, I think. Yeah, they'll sell more units, but it hurts the brand by confusing the market as to what they're building their games for. That's for the PC world; consoles are supposed to be simple.

Something is amiss in the gamerzone/reporting systems. Gamerzone is an awkward system since I play with all 3 mindsets at one time or another (the excluded one being "family", which is a generic zone for non-swearing and kids). Do I change my gamerzone every time I turn the system on? They don't make it particularly easy (you have to manually go into your profile settings and hunt it down in a menu), so I doubt it. Maybe MicroSoft knows something I don't; if I ever understand why so many people can play just one or two games obsessively (as opposed to games in general like myself), I will probably know all there is to know about game design... and maybe that is reflected in the gamerzones which cordon off my many moods into different "zones".

As for reporting, our favorite thing for me and my cousin to do is to introduce an unexpected element in the game, i.e. a totally unexpected form of mic spam. Yes, this annoys people. Occasionally, some people love it, and we still have a great time exploring the concept, so it's not just about pissing people off and ruining their fun; it's about challenging what the players of a given game can do in the game-space to have fun, and as it happens, that usually pisses those people off. Anyway, we were playing call of Duty 2, and one game we managed to get everyone to fight only with pistols, which was cool, but in one night we got reported 7 times, which is probably a record for us (maybe CoD players are more uptight than HALO players). The reason I bother mentioning this at all is the content of the reports:

We are always polite and nice, if annoying, when we do these things we do. Sometimes to rile people up, when they swear at us, we will be overtly verbose about how rude they are. Very high-society you see. We don't insult people and we don't get mad. Yet somehow, of the 7 reports only 2 were for being disruptive. 1 was for trash-talking (ironic since we were in the trash-talker gamerzone), 1 was for swearing, and 3 were for being "agressive". How report-worthy aggressive play in a FPS differs from trash-talking and swearing, I'll leave to you the reader to figure out.

My point is, if people don't understand how to use the reporting system properly, but do know how to report people, what sort of community can we expect when all the open-minded - if eccentric - people have been banned, in favor of people who persistently and explicitly describe the fellatio that others perform routinely? (And no, those people won't be banned, because it was the majority - we were trash-talked and sworn at by more than 50% of the people with microphones.)

We owe it all to Mr. Gabriel's GIF Theory.

Social Engineering, Part 1

2006-07-01T04:01:00.000-07:00

This is not a game per se so much as a 3d chat client which only has emotes. I think it's an interesting idea.

(The Endless Forest)

I think we do think of our work mostly as games and not so much as art, but in the sense that art film makers consider their work to be cinema first and foremost. We have a similar attitude: we make games, yes, but they are artistically more interesting than most commercial games.

Basically they're batshit-insane artsy fartsy types who don't know the first god-damn thing about games. It's mildly interesting as a show that people are continuing to stumble about the unlit corners of the medium, which is heartwarming. "The medium" being interactive 3d technology, not games. I've seen this thing described as an MMORPG, and one way or another the creators insist on calling it a game. Accidental misnomer though it may be, I'm tempted to feel insulted, that they would call this a game. This is to games what a song is to amplitude; it's all well and good, but please don't call it a game. Yeah, you can interact with it, just like you can pause a song, or play it backwards, or at half volume, or whatever, but games need objectives, at least implicitly. Even all the Maxis games have implicit objectives.

So anyway, naturally as soon as I got my bearings, I wanted to totally destroy the "game" mechanics (in this case that would be to socially engineer), so I figured, "well what if we had chat, wouldn't that be hilarious?" I'm thinking of a few methods, most easily decipherable being a morse-code-like system of stringing emotes together.

The problem is that the player base doesn't seem quite big enough to have a few bad apples to spoil everyone's fun, even fewer ones who will go on the forums and see a guide I post which might be deleted, or figure it out for themselves. In the end I think I can have more impact on City of Heroes, and here's how:

I've made a hero called The Leader-Guy (just Leader-Guy to / commands) on Virtue. Once he hits 10, I start a supergroup with a name implying chaos and/or randomness, then I invite everyone I see, all the time. Everyone who joins will be immediately made into a random rank, aside from #1 - which will be mine alone, at least at first, so I can observe the supergroup.

True, I will miss the many folks who decide to /gignore me outright, banishing my account from ever playing or speaking with theirs, but after 2 years I figure I'm on enough people's shit-lists.

Every day or whenever, I'll totally change the permissions of what ranks are allowed to do what. People will be randomly promoted/demoted/kicked. I need to set up a full system that works on d2 and d6 (the in-game number generators), and I will follow it rigorously.

I have no idea what to expect from this, which is why it interests me. I'll let you know how it turned out, and what lessons I learned, if any.

Fight Club

2006-06-23T23:43:00.000-07:00

I tend to be bad at chopping these things down to a reasonable length when I'm tired; it's bed-time but I wanted to write this with the movie fresh in my mind. I apologize if I ramble. If you're not interested in an extensive movie review, and you're not worried about spoilers, don't read the full post. If you're not interested in a movie review and you are worried about spoilers, maybe you should skip this entry entirely.

So, at a friend's reccomendation I went out and rented Fight Club. It's spinning here in the PS2 under the TV next to the computer where I'm typing this. I wanted to quote the commentary (not sure whose) of what I found one of the more powerful and dramatic scenes of the film:

This is the kind of scene that uh, I don't know... only people with no sense of humor saw as... negative.

This is a pretty good way to illustrate that I don't "get" these films, especially given that people find my sense of humor almost absurdly broad. When I say these films, I refer to Fight Club, Jarhead, and Full Metal Jacket; for brevity I lump them into the "pointless antisocial" genre. Antisocial films feature a main character who tends to have a sort of disillusioned outlook on life with antisocial tendencies. This character serves as the center of the action and plays the role of narrator (as these are adapted from books and tend to convey a lot of information via literal narration). At his side is a violently antisocial person who has a rather radical, extreme view of his environment. At the periphery are normal folks like the boss, the drill sergeant, the squad leader, etc., who are at the same time "the man" who doesn't get it and a very personal character who can act as "the everyman" who just as much doesn't get it. A critical irony of the genre is that this type of film doesn't lend itself to explaining anything to the everyman moviegoer, but instead making sure that he continues to not "get it":

Most films um, do tend to wrap things up thematically in a bow and, and let you go out in the theater, knowing exactly what the message was that you were supposed to take from this... and when films that muck around in these kind of ideas resolve, in some ways ambiguously and, and dump a lot of it in your lap and say, "You have to sort through some of this this yourself and figure out what it means to all of you; what components of it you agree with, what components you disagree with," you know people get very uncomfortable; people don't like it.

Great, you admit to doing something people don't like, and you don't actually have a point of your own. See why I use "pointless antisocial" as the genre title? It's not only the main character, it's the film motivation. There's no point and it's not supposed to be entertaining. This is a bad mix for a film, I think.

What bothers me is that I never see a clear motivation or goal for all the hubbub. Max Payne, he loses his family in a rather brutal and overtly traumatic manner. His entire outlook for the two games is suspended on the premise that his life took a turn just a little too sharp for him to handle. These films start with the symptoms in full swing: the protagonist shows up to military training with no real desire to serve, or hasn't been able to sleep for 6 months, and that's the start of the movie. Looking further back might be boring, perhaps, but I just can't tell a motivation without something more concrete. A movie about how someone is unhappy because they are clinically depressed and/or insane does not meaningful drama make. That's like making a real-time 2-hour movie about a fender-bender that occurs at the 40-minute mark; good for you Mr. Artist, that's sorta like real life I guess, but what's your point?

Spoilers for the rest of the post.

I was also thrown off by all the gender-related implications, under the surface; things about how Fight Club is for men only, how dissenters within and without to Project Mayhem are castrated, how the one, tragic casualty of the movement is Bob from the testicular cancer support group - the guy with the "bitch tits"; how it could be worse: a woman could cut off your penis... I just know that being from a book, this is some huge statement about society.

People. Writers. Authors. Enough with hinting about gender roles and shit. It was interesting with Freud, it was done by the 70s, and it's old. If you want to say something about gender roles come out and say it and don't make a god-damn riddle out of genitalia references.

I'm also no chemist, but I could tell the recipes for explosive materials were bullshit, and it was a little distracting from the immersion. Apparently they talked to a bomb squad who wanted them to change it so people wouldn't do it in their own homes, so I guess I understand. =
One thing I have to give the film is, like Max Payne 2, you need to watch the film a second time to recognize details like the bullet-hole in the van windshield, or waking up on airplanes.

You might argue that, after all the above, I can't deny that the movie made me think. Thing is, I think all the time. I'm a big ol' box o' thinkin'. The problem is, I didn't come away from all of this with any sort of interesting conclusions. I managed to squeeze something out of Panic Room, and I got nothin' here. Overall it was a typical movie that pulls up to moderately cool with its awesome style.

OK, so there's the film, but it reminds me of a very unique conundrum for a game: unintentional roleplaying. Let's say, the big hook of the game is that the protagonist is schizophrenic, and the goal of the game is to figure this out. How is this possible? Remember, the goal is to figure something out. Like an adventure game puzzle, the solution (the player's condition) cannot be known, or the game is moot. So, how do you make it compelling?

Your hook is a secret. It sounds totally unmarketable, doesn't it? How do you sell a game where the goal is to discover what makes the plot interesting? This is distinct from split-personality games like the third new Prince of Persia game (wow I mentioned all 3 already) or any game where you swap characters during play. This is a mechanic of plot, you see.

I think if anyone wants to put a meaningful story in a game, they have an obligation to make the plot itself a mechanic or an aspect of a mechanic; otherwise, why use games as the medium?

So anyway, if anyone reads this and has a good idea to tie this game mechanic into something more immediately compelling, please comment. If you can remove the above aspect and still have a fairly complete game/story, it doesn't count; the hook then becomes whatever you make up, and the mental condition is just a surprise ending (doesn't affect the game mechanics at all).

Yes, game design is a career.

2006-06-18T18:14:00.000-07:00

I've read a lot of things, from people both inside the industry and out, that game design is not a career. I find this sort of thing very naïve. What about all the people credited as designers; what on Earth did they do, if not that?

People who claim game design isn't a job take a very specific definition, which is almost always implicit for the listener: Someone who comes up with overarching game concepts. This is akin to saying that "photographer" isn't a job because anybody can take pictures with a camera. There's more to it than that. There's lighting and positions and color balance. There's digital re-touching and printer settings and ink tones versus RGB computer tones. Have you ever been to a tourist spot, and someone asked you to take eir picture? Did you think about any of the above? Aside from keeping everyone inside the shot, not likely.

So, can people make a living being a game designer? Well, now we start getting into trouble, because there's not structure in games like there is in hollywood. When most people think of a game designer, they envision a movie writer/director 2-in-1. This is accurate in many cases, but it's actually a very dynamic area (as all creative sides to any multiperson production are):

In many (most?) circles, they go the film route; the writer is called the "designer" and the director is called the "producer". In others, the producer did both, but is called the designer. Or, he did both and is called the producer; in many cases, no designer is credited.

The bottom line is: I don't have ideas for games very often. Give me a design doc for YOUR game, and a team, and I'll turn it into a good game. Most people would say this means I want to be a producer, but if you talk about "game production", people think you're being vague, so I have to default to the term, "game design".

So, yes, people, no matter what company you work for, the design is tucked away there somewhere. Even if no one is payed to do only that (i.e. they're also the scriptwriter), or you design by commitee, there's game design in there somewhere. No design, no game. The existence of the game necessarily means that a person or persons designed it.

This is not something anyone can just do; you can't go up to someone on the street and get a solid game. That's going up to someone on the street and asking them to take your picture. It might be fine on the whole, but don't expect anyone to buy your vacation photos.

There's more to it than that.

HL2 was a very unique experience for me.

2006-06-16T01:18:00.000-07:00

You may read this if you are so inclined, as to why someone didn't like HL2. My response is more or less something I've been meaning to put into words for a long time about that game, so I decided to post it here as well. It's too late at night for me to be doing copy-editing, so the raw response-form follows.

The word "cinematic" gets thrown around a lot, but for HL2 and its Episode 1 expansion, I think it is more appropriate than for any other game I've ever played. Though it lacks cutscenes and doesn't play out like an interactive movie, the general style of story-telling is so much like that of a film that I never became embodied as Gordon Freeman; that's just where the camera happened to be.

In a typical 3rd-person game - let's say a platformer - the character's attitudes and motivations for the story's development are more or less independent of what the player would choose. The expectation for a first-person shooter is usually different, because seeing out of the character's eyes makes it immmediately unlike what one usually experiences in a book or a theater, and instead what they experience as their own selves.

In HL2, however, I see it as more of a device to hide the plot from the player. To hide details of a plot just beyond the reach of the audience has time and again proven itself a powerful and engaging storytelling mechanic, and HL2's camera achieves it in a way that a film cannot without getting a little nauseating. By putting the camera on Gordon's nose and keeping him silent, there's no telling what he's thinking in any given situation. The end result is that - aside from his credentials as an MIT gradutate, what he's accomplished as a scientist, and what has happened to him in the course of the games - we don't have any clue about Gordan Freeman as a person.

I think Valve is brilliant to make a "genre king" out of a story whose main character is someone we still know basically nothing about. No one has ever mentioned that Gordon regularly drinks coffee, or is prone to changing his hairstyle, or has a bad relationship with his father, or any other such detail. Alyx has mentioned in HL2, "You don't talk much, do you?", but this is as obvious after an hour or so of gameplay as his goatee. The character defies development.

The critical difference is that other FPS games with silent player-characters, like DOOM 3, F.E.A.R., QUAKE 4, etc., give the player a premise and a generalized template upon which they may go out and blast things as appropriate to the genre. The story plays out much like it would in a hollywood blockbuster, and the player-character himself is more of an observer on the narrative. In HL2, because the surrounding cast makes so few assumptions, the player-character no longer necessarily shares the player's status as an observer, but we can't tell if he is or not. The typical gameplay is there, seperately, but the single greatest tenet in the FPS - so great as to make up the first two letters in the genre's initials - is used as a mechanic to turn the storytelling on its head.

The most critical details of the story are that which we least have the capacity to observe, while the supporting roles are more visible (and thus more important to plot development) than the protagonist. I wasn't told how to feel; I was told how the surrounding actors feel, and expected Gordan (not me, Gordan) should also feel. The lack of confirmation in Gordan's feelings is what really kept me spellbound. For all we know, Gordan is an asshole; he could be a racist who secretly hates Alyx and her father; we have no idea.

Other shooters are married to the idea that the player-character is a roleplay of the player himself. I'm inclined to believe that HL2 was intended in much the same way, but for me, Gordon remains as much a uniquely non-self character as Mario or Solid Snake.

MGS3 is one of the worst games ever.

2006-06-09T10:21:00.000-07:00

Metal Gear Solid 3 fails on many points, but why don't I just give you the play-by-play?

First, Snake. This #1 big-time American super-spy is like a regular spy, only badass. He smokes cigars and won't put on his oxygen mask when the plane is about to depressurize.

He gets on the ground and that's when he discovers he had no equipment. He didn't bother asking about his loadout BEFORE he was in the middle of cold war soviet territory. Also, the mission is planned to be 4 hours, max, and he has a calorie bar... and a few minutes are spent explaining that he'll have to kill wild animals and eat them. Oh, I forgot to mention: this is all taking place in a swampy jungle in Asia. In radio range of the arctic circle. Something doesn't add up.

Once you thoroughly hate the plot, characters, and script - which is just great, considering this game is so full of cinematics as to be worthy of the title "interactive movie" - you finally get to the gameplay. Here's how it went down:

Area 1: No enemies. Snuck up on crocogator of some sort. Shot it with tranquilizer. Moseyed on up at a leisurely pace with knife to skin and cut out meat for later consumption. 10 seconds or less after tranquilizer hit - as soon as I got in melee range - captain toothy wakes up. He is not groggy at all, I can assure you. I almost die in the knife fight. These are the best fucking tranquilizers ever.

Area 2: Tried to sneak up on someone to neutralize. Got caught. Died. Tried again. Got caught. Ran past everyone to the next area. Soon died, but restarted in the next area, as though I had by any means completed this one.

Area 3: Read Area 2; exact copy.

Area 4: Actually was heard and managed to hide until the person thought he was hearing things, which was satisfying at this point. Snuck a ways into the area past a few people. Carefully looked around for 20 seconds or so to ensure no enemies were about, before leaving cover to get over a wall. Detected the instant I stand up. The game has made it clear that running past everything is no longer an option, so I try to run and hide a few times, but they see me more or less instantly in every single hiding place. I manage to tranquilize one person near the start of this area, then I die. As I "continue", I take 5 steps and see the tranquilized person, still asleep.

This is when I turned off the console. Aside from missing the point of video games - that you need to play them, not watch them - what game that is there, is an absolutely terrible one. This is the sort of gaming you expected in the days of the NES. And not even from the good ones.

Let me return to the point of games vs. movies. In paper and film, the more detail in your story, the better. This provides immersion. The opposite is true in games; if you want to immerse the player, make the plot vague. Give him side quests. Let him wander around doing whatever. Don't have every single character fully establish their every aspect before the player does anything. Don't force the player to operate by stealth in a jungle area that is, at the largest, the size of a living room. Immersion in non-interactive medium is about details of plot. Immersion in interactive ones is about details of environment.

You can't achieve the perfect amount of dramatic effect when the timing (and ideally the responses) are up to the player, and I wish developers would stop trying. Same goes for anime-RPGs like Suikoden and Wild Arms. It's not a TV show, it's a game. Let me play my character how I want to.

Examples? Half-Life 2 + episode 1. Now that's a charged story... and the player's character never talks. Not even at the player's discretion. There's no list of options of what to say, no talk button... he just never talks. Despite this, the story is more compelling than these other cinematic games. This is because the player character's head never says something that the player himself is not thinking. This is a rather critical aspect of an immersive shooter, in which the plot necessarily revolves around the player character's head. In other games, having the player character speak is fine. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time is a good example. But keep this stuff to a minimum. In the aforementioned, the Prince and his accompanying Princess give a huge chunk of their dialogue shouting to each other across the room, while the player continues to solve puzzles or do whatever he wants. This way, the dialogue can progress and the characters can develop, without forcing the player into some scripted set of motions that remind him: this character isn't you. We can take control away from you any time we want and there's nothing you can do about it. We'll let you know when you can play your game again.

Finally, skippable cinematics have their place, but it's more of an admission that you can't think of any good mechanics to progress the story, without going into movie-mode. The truly great games do not need skippable cinematics, even when played by someone who doesn't want a more detailed plot than "shoot; kill."

Just who plays medics, anyway?

2006-06-05T07:56:00.001-07:00

I can understand why people like warriors, but give me a priest any day. The more power is put into healing, buffs, debuffs, etc., the better. I suppose you could work out a game where everyone was a hybrid of support and solo combat, thus everyone would get about the same number of kills, but that's just not my bag.

If I want to go around killing stuff blindly, there's the shooters from id software, or console action games. It gets old fast and, while it has a certain amount of visceral entertainment, it lacks a certain strategic quality. Warcraft 3's Blademasters and the like lack a certain underhanded, dastardly element. If I have 7 allies and we're facing 8 opponents, I don't want to be the guy who evens it out - I want to be the guy who adds 50% power to those 7 so that we wipe the floor with them. Evasion and distraction are the hallmarks of the support player - self-heals, hiding, shielding, what have you - that's the sort of sneaky, cunning gameplay which - ironically - you just can't get out of an RPG rogue or a unit that makes itself invisible. Hiding and back-stabbing is easy when you can turn invisible and then backstab for +50% damage. Hiding when your own power is to protect and heal others is the kind of PvP that gets my brain working.

Other people are only dissuaded from this because they can't take on other people face-to-face, and aside from perhaps making them feel cowardly, that always, always hurts their score. Thankfully we're beyond the point in the history of games where kills are the only thing that got points, but if you go pure defense, there's usually little chance of topping the rankings, depending on the game. This I can understand, because defeating the enemy is the bottom line... but when so many people in closed games pray that a lagging opponent will disconnect - adding a free win and removing the point of playing the game at all - it suddenly becomes very clear that vanity points put a large skew in how people choose to play.

I say "vanity points" because the game records one person as the "best" player on the team, but without the support actions of some of the lower scores, the overall victory of the team might not have been possible. The bottom line is the total score of the team, regardless of who gets what portion of that score. In some games, the "score" can even be partially or totally independent of the winning objective!

Mission Statement.

2006-06-03T18:43:00.000-07:00

Last updated August 24, 2006

I think that there's really not enough resources for good commentary about game development except what you get from interviews with actual developers. This kind of bothers me because, well, I'm not a developer myself... For the time being, at least. I love to read what other people think about game creation, and there are sources for that, but I always want more.

Thus, this blog. My hope is that somewhere, some day, someone just like me will waste an entire day of their life going through the 2 years of archived entries here. If that happens for just one person, on top of the permanent record it provides me for later review, it will have been well worth-it. (In this regard, it's already some of a success!)

My commentary and opinion tends to side with Will Wright and Penny Arcade's Tycho, with surprisingly few exceptions, so perhaps you know where I'll usually be coming from, unless you don't know those people. I have to warn you though: as you are probably an average person, this blog might too cerebral for you. Not cerebral in the sense that you're too dumb, but in the sense that your enjoyment of playing games versus analyzing them is probably much higher, proportionally, than mine.

This blog will have game reviews, but they will be a little unlike what you are used to, unless - like I said - you read Tycho's PA news posts. These are expositions about mechanics and industry, and don't typically have numerical ratings. More often, this blog will talk about interesting things in games, mostly on the horizon or current, sometimes looking back. Be it mechanics within the games, industry trends, development news, what have you, if something catches my eye, I will comment here. That's the goal for the overall body of work... But I'll digress periodically, should something engage me in a similar fashion.

Though I have no practical experience in the industry (psst... that means where money is invovled), I have a long history of interest in game playing and game development. More info about me is sprinkled among the rest of the blog, but suffice it to say that I'm a very easy-going person, except where my principles are directly challenged.

At any rate, you can know why I act like I know so much about this sort of stuff, having never worked a day of my life in games: it's all I ever do. I love games. I don't love games like most people love them; I love them like a devoted beta tester loves them. Choose, if you will, for some X game purchases to be free, or to have some quality time with a developer or studio of your choice. If you choose the latter, you are probably, probably in the right place.

Why "play.create.connect"? Well, the formatting just looks cool, really. The words are my interests with regards to this blog: I play games, I like creating game content, and the internet is nearly my sole connection to gaming news and resources. The name is a little obscure in that regard, because all of the more direct names are taken on *.blogspot.com by blogs with terrible grammar and two entries (just like most blogs, no doubt).

The start of something new...

2006-06-03T18:24:00.001-07:00

I always like undertaking new proejcts, because for every 99 that don't take off, there's always one that does. All posts prior to this one were written on a forum of like-minded people without any intention of being published to a blog, and have undergone little editing. I think they show a good sample of my writing year-to-date.

From here on are writings that may or may not have been written specifically for the blog, but probably had the blog in mind.

Battlefield 2142: The not-model/textures are actually not too lame!

2006-06-03T18:24:00.000-07:00

Unlocking has been massively increased as a game feature, which ROCKS. They dabbled in it and I guess the player base was smart enough to tell them it was awesome, which seriously endangers my general boredom with the series. In addition to long-term unlocks, you must unlock your unlocks on a per-game basis by scoring points. Thus, the function you provide you team or squad is defined in a limited manner each game, without limiting the overall gameplay like an MMOG. This is an "unlock anything" sort of deal which remains balanced as far as I can tell, unlike HL2's Age of Ascension mod or HL1's Natural Selection mod (Combat mode), both of which suffer from "first to level 2 gets teh highest scorezor of the game" tendencies because unlocking is sequential and necessarily more powerful than the previous unlock in almost all cases.

Unlocks are NOT just weapons; in fact, there's a huge number of weapons and items for each class (in BF2 terms). There are 2 items, 1 primary weapon, and 1 other sort of item (I think this slot is only for squad leaders, maybe), and they can all be mix-and-matched within the class you are playing in any combination you wish. There's 4 classes: Recon, Engineer, Assault, and Support. Recon is typical sniper with a freaking cloaking device (better than most games but no-fire while on) which will make climbing ladders WAY less risky; Support probably has both medical and ammo; Engineer probably both mines/repairs and anti-tank munitions. Squad leaders have unique items like recon cameras that float around, and destructible squad beacons which replace the leader-spawn system of BF2 squads and don't force the leader to play so defensively.

One new fascinating game type involves two MASSIVE flying aircraft carriers; travel is facilitated by pods that freaking rocket you around the map or up to the enemy titan (carrier). This is a huge improvement over finding out that your spawn point is no longer critical and spending 5 minutes running to the next area with no vehicle. Less running, more gunning.

This titan game mode involves familiar control-points which are 2-minute-timed missile luanchers which weaken the enemy titan's shield. Once the shield is down, the titan can be boarded (primarily via pods but also aircraft), at which point 4 control panels or something has to be blown up, which leaves the "core" open to attack. Core go boom, team go lose. Looks very cool, especially with the squad beacon mechanic of spawning.

Also of interest is that there's a (permanent?) record - globally accessible - of who a given player has killed with the knife, and how often. Apparently there's TONS of medals and records available like that (player look-up was recently added to BF2:SF - an expansion I never bothered buying - but it's just a patch add-in and can't be well-implemented outside of a game's real development cycle). I have no doubt that people with big e-balls with provde me with lots of kills by trying to sneak up behind me with a cloaking device for that permanent record of having knifed me.

My Half-Life 2 Episode 1 review: buy it right fucking now.

2006-06-03T18:20:00.000-07:00

(Written June 2nd, 2006)

Basically take whatever you thought of HL2 and apply it to Episode 1; that's the rating for the game. Unless you never played HL2, in which case you should avoid this until you have, since you should be familiar with the weapons and enemies and such. (There are no new weapons and only 2 or 3 new enemies, so overall it's just an extension of the original game.)

However... Immediately after playing you should play again with developer's commentary on... HOLY SHIT. This kicks so much ass I can hardly believe it.

It provides a detailed look at the challenges faced and you come away with a lot of info. I just finished the first setting (4-6 maps, wasn't counting), and already this is some of the most fun I've ever had with a game.

Included are problems/benefits/solutions/stories about: graphics, level design, NPC interaction, character development, timing dialogue so as to give a sense of urgency elsewhere when Gordon might be most likely to respond (if he actually ever spoke), potentially gameplay-invasive exposition, cinematic sequences, getting the player to notice events at critical times while retaining freedom of movement and camera, working with playtesters, the balance between dynamic and scripted AI and events, and making scripted events seem less-so.

Of particular interest is how problems arose in play-testing which either ended up being a benefit (DOG's head movements), or led to different level design (3rd Ball-socket bridge). The ball-socket discussion is especially fascinating to me because, except for Journeyman Project (a short and - today - rather uninspiring game), I have never finished a single commercial puzzle-adventure game in my entire life (ok 2 or 3, but with LOTS of cheating), because no matter how much I look around the same areas and manipulate the same objects over and over, I never think of the one critical solution. The commentary about ball-socket puzzles shows both a unique approach to puzzle-building (building up complexity slowly with unique emphasis), as well as the massive importance of play-testing. Many changed aspects I found myself thinking, "Yeah, if I were a play-tester, I'd have assumed the same thing!", or, regarding both ball-socket and ball-tube sequences, "LOL That's the approach *I* thought of, I didn't know about the other ones!" Play-testing yielded all likely approaches by the player, and Valve then made all likely approaches either possible, or explicitly impossible (to which the player was immediately aware). Impossible solutions were never allowed to be ambiguous (i.e. "Well, maybe it's possible how that I have access to this new X..."), which I think puzzle games severely lack.

Another interesting thing to me was Alyx's behavior. In most games, your partner constantly urges you forward when a sense of urgency is called for. As might be expected, playtesting revealed that players found Alyx's urging absolutely f***ing annoying. Eventually they changed her attitude to one of trust in Gordon to set the pace, which makes far less sense from a traditional story-telling perspective and far more sense from a player-operated-story perspective. I'm sure you can think of examples (Like the faerie Navi in Orcarina of Time) of the nagging NPC, and I'm glad Valve decided that, no matter how awkward the behavior seems, it's better than saying something about what to do every 20 seconds for 10 minutes. On the other hand, when a specific event is expected of the player rather than linearly progressing through the level, Alyx is quick to remind you ("Go back and get the next group!"), which is hardly annoying when you know what you're doing and saves loads of aggrivation when you don't.

For people who are likely to read this, who are interested in game development, this thing is a must-buy. Valve is a company of uber 1337 pr0s (they don't even read resumés - that clan is invite only lolololol), and if their products didn't already shine brilliantly with the quality of their work, the description of their perspectives and processes certainly does.

Long live Valve. Someday, most all major games will have developer's commentary, jsut as sure as they have difficulty settings and save files. The abundance of DVD Director's Commentary audio tracks is a predictor of things to come in games.

Spore Info.

2006-06-03T18:13:00.000-07:00

(Written May 17th, 2006)

Will Wright at GDC '06 keynote speech - full speech costs money to download. Not about spore but it provides a small bit of insight to how Wright works. Overall I find him a very kindred spirit, even if he looks a little creepy. =P The "communication of interest" and "content wars" topics were especially interesting to me.

The page above mentions that Spore got the "Game Critics Award for Best of Show when the game debuted at E3 2005. Spore was also named Best Original Game, Best PC Game, and Best Simulation Game." Apparently they could have released it a year ago and it would have kicked total ass. Maybe they spent the last year on this trailer (and they didn't even bother to make new creatures). On the plus side, there's some way-cool sceenshots of possible creatures on the official site, including the vary first creature 2.5 years ago: the Debug Squid. =P The non-screen info is sparse and only useful if you never watched the Google video of spore at GDC last year.

edit: I got an e-mail advertising a free game trial (more in new topic), which coincidentally led me to this. Apparently a new high-level PvP zone in City of Heroes/Villains is an alternate dimension of the most densely-populated zone (which is only of non-social interest to brand-new characters): Atlas Park. By controlling "temporal nodes", players can retroactively claim past victories for good or evil, changing the features of the zone (i.e. whether the person holding up the globe in Atlas Plaza is the hero Atlas or the villain Lord Recluse).

another edit: I got an e-mail from Dark and Light just now. Apparently it's getting to the end of its development cycle and the big ol' establishing beta is coming to a close. I call it establishing because this is a very "open" sort of game which would be utter chaos if they went commercial with no community. although we're not talking total freedom, there's a lot involved in the craft and political systems, which definitely catches my eye. In a nutshell, there are aspects of society which players directly create; in older online games this has been merely part of the economy through loot and later crafting; now there will be (they hope) a huge amount of political conflict as well as physical and economic, using a sort of feudal hierarchy system Which roughly equates to lords, knights, and serfs (although the serfs maintain autonomy and liberty; they merely pay tax to him whose land they are using at the moment). I might have it a little wrong because I mostly skimmed the linked page and other related pages.

Those who have played class-change-heavy RPGs will have a good idea of the class system: citizen, then 4 branches (warrior/archer/healer/nuker, I forget the names), which each have 3 or 4 branches, each which themselves have 2 branches, making something like 20-30 final classes. To their credit, each final class is about as unique as they can possibly be; for example, there's one which is devoted to providing area buffs to allies, while doing some tanking. I'm disappointed though that there's no classes which specialize in mercantile or politics; they've kept them seperate so that your class is independent of what you can craft how well or what holdings you can have. Though it's a charming concept, I find it touches a little too close to reality; at some point gamers are going to admit that real life is not as much fun as games and they want some of their skill on paper as a number, instead of what they can actually do themselves.

What, you thought I was done editing? hell no. I was browsing the Penny Arcade archives. In retrospect, I now understand how Jesus got confused. Well, time for bed.

But I still haven't tried my Auto Assault free trial yet, so you know what? fuck bed. FUCK BED.

More E3

2006-06-03T18:09:00.000-07:00

(Written May 12, 2006)

Apparently lucasarts has been working on pwn technologies for the past few years. Be on the lookout for:

A Star Wars game which has "molecular physics". The emphasis was that based on the material, stuff busts apart super-realistically. From the way he was talking about it, it sounded like there was a lot more to it than he was telling. From a purely speculative stance, I picture it working, based on his rought description, something like re-building a model whe it's destroyed, putting a new vertex at the point of destructive impact, then busting it apart. Again, I just made that crap up. But it sounded like the end result is what you'd get with the preceding method. The short clip they showed had 3 spaceships blowing up, but it looked just like every spaceship that's ever blown up in a 3d game ever.

An Indiana Jones game wherein all animation aspects, rather than being merely tweening from animation to ragdoll and back, are actually operated by an AI "nervous system". A ragdoll could try to protect its head while smashing into something, for example. I saw a very short clip on TV (10 seconds or so) wherein Jones threw a mobster against a car, and he was falling as a ragdoll, but at the last moment shoved his hands out to the ground to catch himself, and then got up. It looked very cool. He was shved against the car again and was dazed. He remained slumped against the car for the rest of the clip, clearly still in ragdoll mode but slightly lolling is head around and sort of tensing around his body like you'd expect a suddenly injured person to do.

Regarding Super Smash Brothers: Brawl, what do they do with the series when they run out of synonyms for "fight"? lol. As for characters: We need some SquareENIX dudes in there. Crono with Cyclone, Lightning, and Spin Cut would rule (I don't remember Spin Cut much because It's so totally obsolete with the rainbow sword and confuse, but IIRC it adapts well to a typical up+B recovery move). Confuse would make a good throw, too. Although, Pikachu already has a Lightning that acts exactly the same. Whatever, Robo would kick ass too.

E3 2006 (Mostly Wii)

2006-06-03T18:08:00.000-07:00

(Written May 10th, 2006)

QUOTE

The most impressive moment for me was the tennis match between Nintento Executives and Scott Dier, a fan who won an AOL-sponsored contest to play the Wii first. This was impressive because if ever there was a moment where Wii had to work, it was here. They showed tremendous confidence in the Wii controllers and systems to put their executives in the position of playing it live before the world. The fact that Scott, a newbie to the Wii system, could pick it up instantly and play it fairly well, was a powerful testiment to the wisdom of Nintento's disruptive technology, and their assured continued success.

That's called CONFIDENCE. I also hear Sony's price tag is 500-600 US$. The gist of their statement was, "We can charge any fucking amount we want and you fuckers will buy it, because we rock your shit like that." In light of that, and the fact that I dont' like the XBOX360's business plan, I'm definitely getting Wii ASAP.

Here's the show on the new Zelda game from their stage time: lol internet
If you want to watch in windows media instead of quicktime, change the last 3 letters in the URL from "mov" to "wmv".

Also of interest at E3 from what I gather tonight is Battlefield 2142. Sadly, it looks like they're pushing their "omg graphics rush kekeke" strategy from BF2 to the limit, meaning my current machine won't be able to play it well enough to be any fun.

There's a new Super Mario Brothers for DS, called... New Super Mario Bros. How creative. It uses a lot of wacky new stuff. Think less like the original and more like SMB3 or Super Mario World. It's going to have very nice, crisp 3d graphics that look great on the DS, with classic 2d scrolling gameplay. Definitely something to pick up if you have a DS.

The Wii offering is Super Mario Galaxy. It looks really lame but I've been wrong before (Super Mario Sunshine), so we'll see. It seems like Miyamoto can do no wrong.

Not enough Mario? Three words: Super Paper Mario.

There's a new game for 360 called Sonic the Hedgehog. SEGA's got big balls re-starting the sequel count over a 3d game which also features Shadow and an even lamer-looking newcomer. All signs point to suck.

No news on it so far, but this has me VERY EXCITED:

QUOTE

"Project Wiki" is a casual, fairy tale based MMORPG with intense levels of cooperative interaction. The relationships and actions of each individual player directly influence the entire "Project Wiki" world and all of its elements. "Project Wiki" incorporates an adaptive system enabling the decisions players make in quests and missions to contribute to the individual personalities of characters, including what they wear and their facial expressions. "Project Wiki" will deliver a lively, creative and interactive online game play experience in a whimsical and charming environment for PC.

I'm sure I don't have to tell most of you that this sounds like a dream come true for me. No hardcore gaming, casual only, but that's a safe plan: less encroaching on existing MMO player bases, and easier to make the Wiki format work in a new medium. We'll see what happens. The same company is also producing an MMO shooter based on UNREAL3 called Huxley and "Soul of the Ultimate Nation", which from their bragging, sounds like something close to either guild wars or diablo 2. read: fantasy RPG, online, very fast getting a group and getting to the action.

I don't know anything about it but there's a game called WTF: Work Time Fun. lol

Speaking of odd games, ever played The Ship? It's a Half-Life mod. On the site was their hopes for someday, somehow, turning it into a commercial product. They got their wish. The ship comes to steam June 21st. If you like "murder mystery" war3 maps, you owe it to yourself to check it out. There's a lot of gameplay factors, but basically each player has to kill another random player. Your goal is to find your target and kill him discreetly, trying not to be found and killed first by your hunter - who you can't identify except by your wits.

I used to clean out arcades with my skillz in Tekken Tag Tournament, so you can imagine my disappointment in Tekken: Dark Ressurection. From the 2 gameplay trailers of 6 or 7 battles, it looks like Tekken 5. It has extremely minor graphics improvements, new levels, Armor King, and some chick with a terrible fighting stance who got her ass kicked without pulling off any full move animations, but all in all it's just like Tekken 5. Many of the levels were re-hashes of 5's levels, no returning characters (even armor king) displayed new moves, there's no new mechanics, and Roger Jr., although a great one-shot character, shouldn't be around anymore. NAMCO's never been afraid to transfer Tekken move lists to new characters, so why not someone that makes sense, like the original Roger?

Neversoft has finally done what it's promised for years and made a new Tony Hawk engine which I presume doesn't have the corner-exploit bugs of the last 4 games and will ruin all my fun. Most glitchers were dicks about knowing more than other people though, so no great loss. They said they would have to skip a year to get the engine done. Instead they spent 3 years on it alongside their other games, so now they have a new engine and still have their annual release. I don't know how they managed it all. So far I've sent 3 annual letters about how I'm not buying their games anymore until they put back in the option for a game host to observe (currently only clients can observe). That really makes or breaks the series for me. An odd quirk, but from my limited knowledge, I don't see how it's a technical problem. I mean it was there and then they took it OUT. Of course, it might be a problem now that they have a new engine.

Jesus is here

2006-06-03T18:06:00.000-07:00

(Written May 14th, 2006)

My Uncle is in pulmonary (lung medicine) and just told us this story:

An old woman, 90 or so, falls unconcious in her nursing home and ends up in the emergency room. They get her stabilized but she's in a coma and no one has a good idea why other than the fact that she's really old. They get a tube down her throat and hook her up to a respirator and she's stable and whatnot.

An indeterminate amount of time later, my uncle is called in to check up on her breathing, so he drives over. As he approaches the room he hears a woman finishing what sounds like a big old long-winded prayer, and sure enough is a woman by this old lady's side. After finishing the prayer and my uncle comes in he's checking the respirator and the woman starts saying, "Jesus is here (old lady's name), don't worry, Jesus is here. Don't worry Jesus is here. Jesus is here (name), don't worry." On and on and on and on and on in the sort of high-pitched, sing-song voice you'd use to reassure a young child. So my Uncle's now using his stethoscope and trying to listen to her lungs to make sure they're OK, and this woman is going on and on, "Don't worry, Jesus is here."

Just then the old lady's eyes start to flutter a little and eventually they open. She looks up at my Uncle. The first thing she hears is "Jesus is here." The first thing she sees is my Uncle, holding a stethoscope to her chest. My uncle doesn't look much like the stereotypical Jesus but, out of my whole family, he looks far and away the most like Jesus.

I lol'd. My uncle is Jesus.

Yay for control

2006-06-03T18:03:00.000-07:00

(Written April 19th, 2006)

I love controlling stuff. If something is not mine (neutral or another player's), and I make it mine, I get a huge kick out of that. Cities in Advance Wars DS. Gold mines in War3. You name it, I love controlling it.

This goes way back to a demo disc on my old mac. There was this game called Chaos Overlords that I fell in love with, but I could never buy it because the company went out of business or merged or something. Anyway, I found it a while back on Abandonia (windows), and I swear I almost cried with joy. This game is genius.

(EDIT: oh, installation. It's easy: just unzip anywhere and right-click->Properties the program and set to run in Win95 compatibility mode. Run as-is.)

You and 5 opponents run crime syndicates in a city split into 8x8 sectors. The goal of the game is variable but you always benefit from controlling the sectors as well as influencing extortion money/benefits out of the 3 sites per sector (condos, clinics, arboretums, research labs, etc.). To accomplish this you hire various gangs and order them around. The complexity of gang actions and statistics is spot-on; just complicated enough to get your noggin working without making you go "aw screw it I'll just hope I'm not missing something major".

There is a full manual with the game, which is nice since I didn't have one in the demo and had to figure it all out by trial-and-error. The 6 players can be any permutation of human (hot seat, direct networking) or AI, with 4 difficulties (goon is great for learning; criminal will be beatable every time by the time you have a good handle on the game).

The most important thing to remember when learning is: double-click icons. You can double-click any item, gang, or sector site, and it will pop out with statistics and a sometimes-useful description. Early in the game your combatants should have marks in Fighting or Martial Arts, so that they can come into play immediately able to fight without expensive equipment, while later in the game you'll need to research advanced equipment and have gangs with high marks in Blade or Ranged. If you can't afford to equip them yet, go for only cheap gangs and Martial Artists! Do that and you'll have a solid foundation to learn the ropes yourself without being obliterated.

Oh, you can hire gangs by dragging them from the lower-right onto any sector you either control or have a unit in. You can swap a potential hire for a new choice by clicking the red X by their picture. You can only make one hire/X per turn. You can drag stuff around a lot; to easily move gangs, to change your player color, to order gangs to influence sites, or what have you.

1337speak in games

2006-06-03T18:02:00.000-07:00

(Written April 15th, 2006)

In City of Heroes there's a mission boss called "Teh PwNxx0rz!" (spelling mught be off), who has the exceedingly rare (for all I know, unique) trait of saying something when he defeats a hero; namely, "PWN3D!"

Now I'm playing Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time, and fairly early on I run into a pair of turtles, evidently mind-controlled by their helmets. One states: "AREA RESTRICTED. ALL NOOB INTRUDERS 2 B HAXOERED BY US L33T HAMM3R BROZ.!", to which the other follows: "WE R TEH SHROOB [shroobs are the bad guys] ALLIES. WE ROXOR U AND THEN ROFL. THEN U AM CRY. WE RECIEVE ORDERS THRU ANTENNAS ON THESE L33T HELMETS. THEY R HOTNESS. WE MUST OBEY ALL ORDERS. WE LIKE 2 PWN NOOBS 4 TEH MASTER SHROOBZORS. U = NOOBS. BROZ. = L33T. PREPARE 4 TOTAL PWNAGE. WOOT! WOOT! WOOT! WOOT!" They then abduct adult-Mario and adult-Luigi with a machine, leaving the babies behind. They move into attack position, and one says: "NOOBZ STILL R NOT PWND. CONTINUE PWNERSHIP UNTIL ALL NOOBZ R PWND." The other recaps the conversation: "TEH ESCAPE IS IMPOSSIBLE. WE R 2 L33T. WE OWNZ JOO. U WILL GET FLATZORED BY R L33T HAMMERS."

Now, besides the fact that one is an MMO and the other is quite possibly the hardest RPG I've ever played, I think they stand as solid examples at the pervasiveness of internet culture; it's one thing for people to know it, it's another to have such confidence in it that you include it in your game in an extremely overt way, to the point that players could be hypothetically befuddled by an entire character introduction, as above.

wikipedia GIF

Sony is fail at MMORPGs

2006-06-03T18:00:00.000-07:00

(Written March 26th, 2006)

OK let's see... EQ2, matrix online, and star wars galaxies are all infamous for sucking balls... panetside is not infamous, but nevertheless sucks... and EQ1 is old.

Oh, lookie here: they're selling the 5 of them for forty dollars. That's right; they admit that each of these games for 1 month isn't worth ten bucks apiece. That's not marketing for subscriptions; that's desperation.

Additionally, EQ2's classes are getting hauled over so that you don't wait until level 20 to start being unique. Instead of saying, "shit we need to make the early game more compelling," they said, "shit we gotta pull another star wars galaxies and lose any unique aspect we have over City of Heroes, World of Warcraft, and even our own fucking old EQ, which is still running."

Pathetic.

Mega Man shooter...?

2006-06-03T17:53:00.000-07:00

(Written March 7th, 2006)

So I've been 1. Playing Star Wars Battlefront II, in which a franchise is turned into a battlefield-style FPS, and 2. Watching a few Mega Man game speedruns, and I was thinking, I can see why megaman hasn't been an FPS, but maybe it's not being looked at from the right perspective.

Rather than break the good mechanics by converting the platformer to first-person format straightaway, perhaps the mechanics should be shifted from a single-player story-driven game into something more like the Battlefield/Battlefront games. Maybe "Robot Wars" pitting the 2 robot forces of the "X" series against each other? NPCs could litter the battlefield as non-master robots that defend the team's base as well as occasionally dropping powerups as in Battlefront. Meanwhile players would choose classes as per BF games to fulfill certain roles.

Power absorbtion is one outstanding issue. On the one hand it's a critical factor of the MM games, but on the other, that's because it was Mega Man's unique ability. There are several options, my 2 favorite I can think of being:

Players all have unique abilities based on their class, which can then be augmented by hitting a button to absorb either the last defeated enemy or the one whose corpse you are near/facing
As per battlefront, a player is periodically selected to become the "hero" of their side (mega man, zero, sigma, bass, etc.), mega man being the only one who is actually less offensively powerful than a typical player, but becomes more powerful with each kill

I think a lot of the mechanics in MM would translate well into FPS format. Imgane sliding to cover feet-first in first-person perspective... I bet that would look cool. E tanks have already proven to be one of the most tactically engaging assets FPSs have, in the form of TRIBES 2's med packs. And unlike most platformers, there are precendents for limited ammo, pits/spikes to force players to watch their step, and complex architecture, usually focused around furturistic urban or fortress environments.

Make no mistake, I have no intention of starting a Battlefied 2 mod or anything, just thought it was an interesting idea.

LOL @ megaman 1 ending (saw a speedrun of it)

2006-06-03T17:51:00.000-07:00

(Written March 06 2006)

Gotta love any game that informs you that a never-ending battle will continue until X happens.

MMORPG ideas

2006-06-03T17:47:00.000-07:00

(Written February 7th, 2006)

First an old idea of mine: turn-based strategy.

Those who've played Final Fantasy Tactics have a good idea what I'm talking about here; Battles are distinctly seperate from the normal world (perhaps in their own tiny instance), and during your limited-time turn you must not only carefully consider your attacks, but also your movement and position as well; there is no lag interfering with measuring positions and so it is not only possible but critical to strategy that you try to stay out of the enemy's range or line of sight while setting yourself in a good position, i.e. higher accuracy from the side and higher still from behind. This has barely been explored in single-player games, and I think streamlining the process to an MMO-style character development and skill set would do much to expand the genre to be more accessible to people who aren't big fans of planning things 3 turns in advance with 5 characters.

Speaking of 5 characters, the second idea just occured to me and spurred this topic: parties. Typically in MMOs you play one person and form into short-term parties that never accomplish much together on the grand scale. BUT... what if you controlled an entire party, similar to classic single-player RPGs? The danger is that this would make teaming (or even pairing) with other players obsolete, but by limiting choice so as not to let the party be too well-rounded (i.e. it is socially forbidden for warlocks to long-term party with paladins), it's *possible* that this could be overcome. At any rate, at least it wouldn't be almost impossible to solo, as is the case in several games. Possibilities abound; you could hire/rent and release party members in towns, you could have a "base" where all your members wait in reserve for you to swap them into the party, etc., etc...

I think it would be fun to manage a simplified version of 3 or 4 MMO characters and be able to develop them all at the same time. Even better, just by teaming with 2 people, you can have a dozen little people all taking on a giant beast or swarm of enemies. Obviously both the graphics and interface would have to have much less depth than a typical MMO in order to make it manageable, but IMO the depth in multi-character development/combinations would make up for it.

Civic Duty: my favorite driving game.

2006-06-03T16:16:00.000-07:00

(Written January 23rd, 2006)

This has been a good month for Civic Duty; my record is 7, but aside from that my scores all range 4 or less, but this month I scored 5 twice. Plus, I got 4 + a fat middle finger.

But what is Civic Duty?

It's a driving game. I used to do it for fun long before I developed it into a precise game and way, way before the game was called anything. To play Civic Duty, you need the following:

The ability to drive a car
A popular road for longer-distance travel through that area of town, with 2 lanes going your direction
moderately light traffic w/ a car next to you going no more than 5 mph over the speed limit
a complete asshole driver behind you (in the US, I estimate 10% of cars)

So, you can't play it all the time, but often enough that I made a game out of it.

The goal of Civic Duty is to make the car behind you change lanes as many times as possible without passing you. This is achieved by forcing the driver to percieve you alternately as the "slow" and "fast" car compared to the car next to you. At first this is a very simple game, but as your score increases it becomes a very delicate balancing act, as eventually the car behind you will not change lanes unless you make a huge gap between you and your chosen ally.

The name was eventually chosen when I was joking with someone that it was my "civic duty" to ensure that people were not speeding and thus endangering other motorists.

The terminology:
Any third-person noun, any derogatory name, or Target: The car behind you.
Counterpart: The car next to you, by which you are tempting the Target to change lanes.

Also note that if the Counterpart turns or changes lanes you must accelerate extremely rapidly to gain another Counterpart before the Target passes you. This is especially difficult in my 4-cylinder small SUV, especially since nearly all potential Targets get the most high-performance vehicle they can afford, often at the expense of all interior comforts or cargo space.

The game is basically over when the Target passes you, as they will risk life and limb to ensure they never see you again, however the game is not technically over until you park your car; if you are extremely lucky, circumstances ahead may slow down the Target and allow you to pass him in the faster lane, extending the game; but this has only happened once for me.

Whatever happened to FPS endings?

2006-06-03T16:12:00.001-07:00

(Written January 6th, 2006)

WARNING: Spoilers about several FPS games.

So I just finished Quake 4 and it doesn't have an ending.

HALO 2 didn't have an ending. Half-Life 2 didn't have an ending. F.E.A.R. didn't have an ending. And now Quake 4 has no ending. Guess what fellas, it's only cool and unexpected if, say, 20% or less of big-budget shooters do it... i.e. not all of them.

I'm so tired of spending 8-12 times as long on a game as on a movie and still have no conclusion. For the record, all these non-endings (except HL2) sucked in their own right, besides the fact that it's overdone.

Even Lord of the Rings ended after 9 hours. If I spend double that on a game, I don't care what loose ends you leave open but the game's not fucking over if the ghost-villain-chick is on the helicopter, or if you give me a new assignment before the screen fades, or any BS like that.

This is ridiculous.