Always a Cynic

A Silly Game

2010-10-12T18:03:00.000+03:00

Let's face it, Minecraft is a silly game.

It's full of busywork. Chop down wood. Then make some planks out of that wood. Then consult a wiki to learn to make some sticks. And an axe to.. chop down some more wood. To spice things up, you could also make a pickaxe to mine some stone. Or a shovel to dig some dirt. And with the many blocks you cut/mined/dug, you can build something that looks worse then your kid's first Lego building. And then you get to do it all over again. All that hubbub over some blocks. It's silly. It's Farmville 3D, if it was made back in the 80ies.

But it's also an incredibly immersive game. You're locked into first-person perspective and there's no automap or arrow to show where to go in the huge, procedurally generated world. You will have to navigate via landmarks and celestial objects. And as soon as you witness the sunset, you will get a very compelling reason to build something, even just a small shelter in some small cave. The world of Minecraft is dangerous. Aside from self-inflicted deaths like falling or drowning, the sunset heralds the appearance of the various monsters that roam the landscape. Staying out in the open is suicide, so the natural reaction is to build a shelter. And because you're going to spend the night there, you might as well expand it a bit. Add a workshop, then a forge.. some windows and a nice roof. And as the first rays of light clear out the monsters, you emerge from your small shelter, dedicated to make it better, larger and make the most out of the limited safety of the day.

Eventually, you'll get tired of the skeletons taking potshots through your windows and the zombie moaning outside your door. You want revenge. But the stone sword ain't going to cut it, you need iron. And where do you get iron? From a mine, of course.

So you start to dig. Because you don't want to trap yourself, you make sure that you can climb out of your mineshaft and make an incline, just because it feels natural. You make some torches to keep the zombies away from your corridors. And then you puncture a wall of a cave and find an incredibly deep complex, filled with dangerous pitfalls, mazelike corridors, underground rivers and countless dark corners that could hide unimaginable horrors. You start to smooth out the floor, dig out the various metals whenever you see some and set up some more torches. And when you inventory gets full you start to head back towards the surface.. only to realize that you have no idea where you are in the complex. You try a few corridors, only to hit deadends, double back to where you started or be afraid to go in deeper into the unexplored and utterly dark corridors. Just by the virtue of the procedurally-generated world, you're in the middle of your own adventure. There's no map to consult, no walkthrough to read. If you were on a multiplayer server, you could ask someone for help. But they'd probably have no idea where your mine is, let alone where you are. And even if they did, they couldn't reach you anytime soon. And that's assuming that they would want to help you. They could seal you in, forcing you to dig and risk discovering an another cave complex. It's up to you, and the stakes are high. You'll respawn if you die, but you'll lose everything you're carrying and appear in some part of the world you've probably completely forgotten by now. You don't want to accept defeat and start over, so you soldier on.

To get out of your predicament, you start thinking. Can I really keep all this in my head? Should I mark the corridors? Do I have enough torches and food left? Can my pickaxe last long enough? Eventually, you'll make it out alive, and use your newfound iron ore to make yourself a nice suit of armor, a decent sword and some tools. You'll also expand your now-comfortable home and build yourself some luxuries, like an observation platform.

As the day breaks, you embark on an another adventure, picking direction and starting to walk towards the horizon, just to see what's there. You learnt from your previous predicament, and start to make your own mark into various landmarks to find your way back. Eventually the sun sets but you don't worry, you're prepared now. You'll dispatch a few zombies with only taking a few minor scratches. But as the reinforcements close in, you just have to pick a direction and leg it. You have supplies, but they're not infinite and you want to save them until you really need them. It just feels natural to do so. In your hurry, you go over a cliff that was steeper than you thought and get a few more bruises. The monsters are a genuine threat now, so you have to dig into your supplies, grab a bite of crudely grilled meat and eat it without looking behind you. Judging by their chittering and clattering, the enemies are again closing in, and you're left with no choice but to leg it towards the mountain in the horizon. They can't climb as well as you, so it should be safer than out in the open. As you climb, the monsters from various directions make a beeline towards you, cutting out your escape route. You set up an another landmark and wait for the morning with your sword at hand, ready to strike at any enemy that does make it to the top.

And as the morning sun vanquishes the horrible night.. you look around, trying in vain to find familiar landmarks. You're lost. Again. An another compelling adventure created by a ridiculously small amount of code in a silly, ugly and pointless game, amplified with a liberal helping of human nature. The hierarchy of needs, wanderlust, the fear of the dark and the fear of the unknown are quite potent forces to harness and very few games manage to do so.

It Just Doesn't Feel Right

2010-04-10T21:37:00.001+03:00

This is what playing Assassins' Creed 2 feels like.

Ezio can litter a busy street with half a dozen corpses, and the townfolk just shrug their shoulders and go about their business. While it is in every other way a massive improvement from the original, this is one facet that regressed. My favorite parts in Assassin's Creed 1 were the intense getaways through a panicing city. Stopping to fight for more than a few seconds caused a rapidly escalating street brawl, forcing you to flee. In Assassin's Creed 2, there are no consequences. Plot-related assassinations always reset the state of the world, and random kills are simply ignored. There's no point in using the new tricks like throwing money, using smoke bombs or hiding in dynamically changing crowds. Even the old hideouts like seats, stacks of hay or curtained enclosures on rooftops are underused, because you can always just keep running and the guards will lose track after three city blocks or so.

Great Moments in Customer Service, DRM edition

2010-03-26T06:21:00.001+02:00

I bought Assassin's Creed 2. It's a great game, even if Ubisoft's service level is abysmal. But now they've made a peace offering: A free copy of Tom Clancy's HAWX, Heroes over Europe, Tom Clancy's EndWar or Prince of Persia.

I clicked on Prince of Persia.. and was greeted by a 500 error page. Several hours later, I tried again. This time I got into the product information page, mentioning that it costs 29.99€ and there's "No need to be online to play". Clearly, whoever came up with this offer at Ubisoft hasn't thought this through. If you're sorry about your poor service level and the game requiring to be online, it's not smart to remind the player of games back from the time when you didn't treat your customers with such disdain.

Because the "We're sorry" email came with a promo code, I click Download, and I'm greeted with an another 500 error page. Several hours later, I try again. This time I get to enter my promo code and the price drops down to zero. I enter my email address, click submit.. and I get a 500 error.

On the next day, I try again. This time I get a "You(sic) payment has not been accepted" error message. Say what? I click the "Please choose another means of payment" link and pick Paypal. Nope, not accepted. Mastercard? Not a chance. Visa? I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.

Let's just say that I'm not completely convinced of Ubisoft's goodwill and competence at this point.

Update:
The e-retailer had run out of activation keys for PoP, and had to resupply from Ubisoft several times. I did finally manage to download and install my copy, but unfortunately it is incompatible with Windows 7. Trying to run the game triggers an auto-update and a driver(!) install, which fails even with admin privileges and Vista/XP compatibility mode.

Ubisoft, if you're sorry for indirectly preventing legitimate customers from playing your games, then you might not want to apologize by directly preventing legitimate customers from playing the game you provided as an apology.

Update:
Windows 7 to the rescue! It had logged the unsuccessful driver installation attempt and phoned home to Microsoft to see how it could be resolved. The driver in question was the TAGES DRM driver, which nowadays does have a x64 version, while the PoP auto-updater only offers the 32-bit version. Via the Action Center, Windows 7 provided a download link to the x64 version, which installed without any incidents. Noticing that TAGES was already installed, the PoP auto-updater allowed me to enter the game.

A Plumber advising a Doctor

2010-02-21T08:44:00.000+02:00

Once upon a time, there was a surgeon:

Let’s take it a step further. What if you where a surgeon, and someone’s life hung in the balance by your very actions? Imagine the same person trying to operate in the middle of a room of crowded people. The doctor, normally completely composed, is performing delicate surgery – a laser scalpel stands poised above someone’s eye. The operating room is so quiet you could literally hear a pin drop when suddenly…
“NO, NO, NO, YOU IMBECILE YOU ARE DOING IT ALL WRONG!”

Don't these people know that armchair doctors are wrong? They should be ashamed of endangering the life of the patient in such a reckless manner.

Why to argue on the Internet

2010-02-11T21:46:00.000+02:00

So I hear there's a blog war going on. The opening salvos have already been fired, strategies and battle lines are being drawn and other pundits weighing in. While sharp confrontations can be occasionally amusing, they do little to move the discussion forward.

Maybe I'm just too idealistic for my own good, but I don't follow the scuffle because I want one or the other win. I want argument for the sake of advancing the understanding of MMORPGs and games in general. I want different viewpoints, logic, reasoning, examples, theory, analysis, critique, refinement and synthesis. I want ideas that I can use to refine my own line of thinking.

Driving the level of discussion further downwards with ad hominems and other fallacies, sockpuppetry, fanboyism, editing wars and the silent treatment will not do that. At best, we'll get that bitter flame war, but most likely it will just fizzle out as a cold war, both sides firmly entrenched in their own bunkers. They'll see only what they want to see and hear only what they want to hear. And we'll all be stupider as a result.

Great Moments in Game Maintenance

2010-02-03T00:38:00.000+02:00

Mythic has decided to make 18 of the 24 scenarios inaccessible in Warhammer Online. I'm sure that this just one part of their master plan to make their customers happier than ever and I see no way this decision could ever backfire.

In all seriousness, removing 75% of your most popular content does sound like a boneheaded move. Loss aversion alone is probably going to cause an outcry. Even if Mythic is busy at work improving said scenarios, they should leave the old scenarios in place until the new ones are ready. Even if it's subpar content it's still better than no content.

Tell us how you really feel

2010-01-18T17:20:00.000+02:00

Sometimes a self-demonstrating article is the best way to get your point across. It's as if someone suicide ganked her Hulk or something. Maybe there's just something about PvP that gets people all emotional, because the last time I saw such passion was with Darkfall.

VVVVVV, the Half-Cut Diamond

2010-01-13T22:07:00.000+02:00

After reading the review of VVVVVV on Rock, Paper, Shotgun and watching DeceasedCrab's LP of the demo, I had to try it myself. Is it worth trying? As always, it depends. For me, the excellent soundtrack was a good enough reason to buy it, but the game itself is better than I expected.

The backgrounds are atmospheric, the platforms are fine and the main characters are downright adorable. However, the single-color, zoomed-out enemies were a bit too much. They make the whole game look like the very first C-64 games, which were mostly ports from the Atari 2600 and thus barely used the C-64's potential. If one's trying to aim for a certain aesthetic and thus invoke the nostalgia factor, one should aim for the very best that the "platform" can provide, not the worst. Less River Raid and more Creatures, please.

What about the gameplay? VVVVVV imitates the early platformers, and thus requires pixel-perfect precision and sub-100ms reflexes. In other words, it's Nintendo Hard. However, it does have a checkpoint system to minimize frustration after fumbling a tricky section, allowing infinite retries. Naturally, the game starts playing tricks with the checkpoints when the player is trying to complete the optional objectives. The game does have optional slow-motion and invulnerability modes for those that just want to experience the game, so the challenges are really self-imposed ones.

The game mechanics themselves are quite interesting. Captain Viridian, the main character, can't jump. His only ability is to reverse his own gravity when standing on either the ground or the ceiling. When airborne, he can only move left or right. Later on, the game introduces concepts like conveyor belts and trampolines. The difficulty curve is very consistent. The game always starts with a simple example of the game mechanic in question, and then starts making variations all the way to the fiendishly difficult. And I'm not talking just about the pixel-perfect execution. The game also requires the player to think ahead. No amount of reflexes are going to help if you mistimed your approach, your trajectory is all wrong or you're in the ceiling when you should be on the floor.

Unfortunately, VVVVVV is very short for it's price. Even with the optional objectives and my very poor reflexes, it provides only a few hours worth of gameplay. While the levels proper are packed to the brim with challenges, a large part of the map is filled with boring caverns with hardly any hazards and as many checkpoints as the levels themselves. With the gravity-reversing mechanic it's way too easy to just zoom through them. Other indie games like the Untitled Story handle the exploration aspect much better, remembering that the terrain itself should pose a challenge as well. Just like with the graphics, the contrast between one subpar part and the others is too great.

All in all, VVVVVV is a very enjoyable game, but not as good as it could have been. The important parts are polished to a mirror finish, but the enemy graphics and the terrain is sorely lacking. The game would have benefited tremendously from an additional developer/tester, helping to identify and smooth out the rough edges.

It's not the fool who asks..

2009-11-11T08:27:00.000+02:00

Apparently Bobby Kotick is not the only honest game company executive out there: Zynga CEO Admits to Being a Scammer. Techcrunch has all of the dirty details.

This reminds me of the cell phone gaming/ringtone/accessory boom that is still ongoing in some forms. If you see an ad for cellphone ringtones, it's probably one of these: The ringtone is marketed as a standalone product, but the small print reveals that it's actually a subscription service and you'll be billed for a monthly service. But if you don't read the small print, you didn't realize that you subscribed to anything and find out the ugly truth if you ever decide to take a hard look on your credit card/cellphone bill.

There's only two differences here: First, the scammers skip the small print because the underlying authority (MySpace or Facebook) don't actually enforce truth in advertising clauses in their terms of use. By contrast, a cellphone company could get sued or fined for misleading advertising. The second difference is that the initial incentive is not actually the product they're selling, but the "free" giveaway tied to an already RMT-heavy game.

Of course, I should be appalled by this, but the gall of the scammers is awe-inspiring and it's funny to see history repeating itself.

Pardon me, but your attempts to kill me are awfully distracting

2009-10-31T22:08:00.000+02:00

It's been a while since I've had time to play XBox 360 games, so I picked up two from my local store. BlazBlue is still not available in Europe, but surprisingly enough Guilty Gear 2: Overture was. Finally.

Granted, I knew that Overture is not exactly a beat-em-up game, but I sort of got one anyway. You're still playing as Sol Badguy and have your Gunflames and Volcanic Vipers, but it's all 3D and there's an entire strategic aspect to consider as well. Basically, you have an infinite number of minions that spawn from your control points, which then start to move towards the enemies' control points and fight. You're undoubtedly the strongest unit in the field, but you can't be everywhere at once. It's not unlike playing Onslaught or Warfare in the Unreal Tournament series with only one human player per side. So you're constantly issuing orders whenever the battle quiets down and then run to wherever you're needed most.

I also bought a certain no-brand game called Brutal Legend. Traveling in the troperrific metal world is fun, but I'm not yet completely familiar with the control scheme, and feel like that the occassional troops you get are more of a hindrance than help and need to be babysit lest they succumb to the enemy mooks. It's like playing a post-nerf Necromancer in Diablo 2. I'm not yet entirely sold on the beat-em-up RTS genre, mainly because they make me feel more like a babysitter than a general. And I don't particularly like being in the middle of combat because it divides your attention and thus reduces your situational awareness. If you focus on leading, your troops will have to make do without your damage output, and you might even get picked off by enemy mooks when yours are busy elsewhere. If you focus on fighting you get blindsided due to the lack of situational awareness. Sure, any RTS game will also require you to multitask, but even Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander don't force you to mind your commander unit at all times. Even Sacrifice, perhaps the first modern representative of the genre, avoided the problem by making common units powerful enough so that you weren't in constant danger when you were surrounded by your own troops.

Because Rerolling Is "Fun"

2009-10-22T20:29:00.000+03:00

As a former Diablo 2 player, I find this more disappointing than surprising: Respeccing in Champions Online costs almost as much as a month's subscription.

A Glorious Dawn

2009-10-16T22:20:00.001+03:00

Sometimes even I feel optimistic.

A Part of the Problem

2009-09-22T23:11:00.000+03:00

Today I went to see an climate change documentary called the "Age of Stupid". I turns out that the title does accurately describe it, although not in the intended way.

My first warning sign was the local chapter of Greenpeace camped in and around the theatre. Suffice to say, I'm not a fan of their attention-seeking acts of vandalism. But they were behaving themselves, and when they announced that they had managed to get the minister of environment to talk about the recent and upcoming climate change meetings, my apprehension dissipated a bit. Upon entering the theatre proper, there was a leaflet and a DVD waiting at the seat. Fair enough. Although the leaflet included semi-astroturf form letters to mail to politicians, it was in general somewhat reasonable.

On to the documentary itself. It's told from the viewpoint of a guy in the dystopian future who's maintaining an archive of plantlife, animals and information, and is compiling an infodump on the environmental disaster which (among other things) flooded London, scorched Taj Mahal, caused Las Vegas to be swallowed by the desert and.. set fire to the Sydney Opera House. He focuses on the "Age of Stupid", the era from industrialization to the disaster in 2055. And more specifically, from 1980ies to 2015, which is the supposed cutoff date when the climate change is still preventable and even reversible. The majority of the story is told via the video clips he's compiling. There's an interview of a retiring oil seeker, a trip to the melted Alps with the oldest active mountainclimbing guide in the area, the story of of a fisherwoman in Nigeria who wants to become a doctor, a couple of Jordanian kids refurbishing and selling shoes, a New Orleans resident who lost everything to Hurricane Katrina, a Brit who wants to build wind turbines on an abandoned WW2 airfield and the (fictional) CEO of an upcoming Indian airliner. These segments are padded with the future archivist insulting the audience and some animations and graphs highlighting the problems and solutions. And there it all goes downhill.

To say that the animations are anvilicious would be an understatement. Among other things, there's a segment about consumerism narrated by a kid and a giant robber baron with a cigar billowing out smokestacks crushing wind turbines under his feet.

Some of the video vignettes like the one about the New Orleans guy, the Jordanian kids and the Nigerian doctor wannabe can be classified as social porn: Wallowing in other people's misery. Fair enough, but for some reason this copy of the film did not have subtitles or dubbing. The impact is lost if you don't understand both French and Arabic. The segment about the air turbine-building Brit is the best one. Not only is he polite and reasonable, but the segment also rebuts some of the opposition to the turbines. For example, they interview neighbors who complain about the view.. of an abandoned and partially grown over airfield. And neighbors who complain about the noise of the turbines.. but not about the drag-racing strip close by. He loses the city council vote to get the permit to build the turbines.. and there's where the film reaches it's apex. They interview a citizen who campaigned against the turbines.. and says with a straight face that she's doing everything she can for the environment. Not In My Back Yard, indeed.

But then it's time to go downhill again. It turns out that the CEO is actually a David Brent-type character: Cheerful, polite, a master of sugary prose.. and a clueless, mean boss nitpicking about irrelevant things: an useful idiot who thinks he's doing the poor Indians a favor by making affordable flights available. The problem is that the film just finished making a point on how flying is incredibly costly in terms of carbon emissions and how emissions need to be rationed fairly: Industrialized nations like the USA and the EU first need to reduce their emissions because they consume much, much more than their share of the total population warrants. Meanwhile, developing countries can gradually increase their emissions so that they too get a properly proportional share of the "cake". But the film completely forgets the latter point, and focuses on only the cost of flying. The CEO is treated as the villain, the proverbial horseman of the apocalypse whose diabolical plan is to get the train-using Indians to fly instead.

While preaching to the choir might get the faithful to the barricades, resorting to cheap, anti-corporate stunts only strengthens the opposition. The environmental movement cannot defeat the corporations, they need to convince the corporate people as well if they want to get something done. To that end, Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth works much, much better. Like a veteran politician he is, he avoids offending anyone and provides a consistent message that's easy to agree to, even if a few facts get fudged in the process.

Greenpeace, for the love of the environment and mankind, please stop shooting the message.

Purity of Motion

2009-09-01T20:05:00.000+03:00

Canabalt is what Mirror's Edge would have been 15 years ago. But because of the simplicity, it captures the rush of doing dangerous jumps at the edge of your ability better than Mirror's Edge.

Indie games march on

2009-08-25T20:43:00.000+03:00

I've been playing Spelunky and Untitled Story after watching Raocow's LP videos, and I was pleasantly surprised.

Spelunky is a roguelike 2D platformer with procedurally generated levels and seems fairly easy at first.. until you realize that there's no saves, no continues and there's plenty of instant-kill traps. This brutal difficulty level gives weight to the numerous judgement calls the player has to make in the course of the game: Do I risk dying to get some extra cash to buy more items? Do I waste potentially crucial time trying to get the unique treasure from this level? Should I throw a rock down that corridor just in case? Can I keep the panicking damsel in distress alive all the way to the exit?

Untitled Story is an another platformer in the style of the Castlevania and Metroid series. Little or no railroading, plenty of rewards for exploration and a huge world to explore. Some of the zones are well-hidden and completely optional, and most of the time there's several zones available. The graphics and sound are nothing to write home about, but do their job.

While mainstream games are afflicted with sequelitis (although I am playing Prototype at the moment), indie games do seem to offer quite a bit in terms of innovation and gameplay. If they just had an artist or two we might have an another Braid or World of Goo lurking around there somewhere.

Personal Bullet Hell

2009-05-11T06:15:00.000+03:00

Oldie, but a goodie: Warning Forever. It's a free shoot'em'up equivalent of Shadow of the Colossus, only with a boss that evolves based on the way you fight it. Eventually, it's a screen-filling, tentacle-flinging, ramming Giant Space Flea From Nowhere that will spank you six ways to Sunday. If you want your personal Bullet Hell, this is the game that has it.

Crying Wolf, Eurogamer style

2009-05-06T08:19:00.000+03:00

While I'm not a fan of Darkfall, my symphaties are with Adventurine. Kneejerk reactions disguised as a review don't do any good. Adventurine won't get any constructive criticism, prospective gamers don't get an accurate image of the game, and this "review" will be used as an ammunition against EuroGamer on any subsequent review of a controversial game.

Free Game Spree

2009-03-22T14:00:00.000+02:00

Even though I have plenty of retail games to play (GTA IV, Armored Core: For Answer, Gears of War 2, Left 4 Dead), I've found myself on a free game spree.

Eversion. A simple and cute platformer at first look, but the disclaimer is there for a reason.

Iji. An action/adventure game in the style of Out of This World and Abuse. While the story, gameplay and music are good, the most notable factor is that it's entirely possible to complete the game without killing anyone and the story changes to account for the main character's pacifism.

Cave Story. I haven't completed this yet, but it does have the potential to sate my hunger for a proper Metroidvania game.

Pure Beauty

2009-03-06T15:02:00.000+02:00

Let it not be said that contemporary lyricists do not have a poet's soul.

Arachnophilia

2009-02-07T11:30:00.000+02:00

WoW. Just.. wow.

Armored Core: Anime Edition

2009-01-30T08:24:00.000+02:00

I got Armored Core: For Answer yesterday. The last Armored Core game that I played was AC2, so I was a bit surprised to see that the game mechanics are still the same. Not that it's a bad thing. I'm just wondering how well it'll hold up, because the art style and maneuverability have definitely gone towards the Gundam/Knightmare style, with AC2 being Battletech-like. The huge amount of customizability is still there, though. Everything from paint jobs and decals to body parts, guns and other functional parts is modifiable.

Parasite? Me?

2009-01-26T23:35:00.000+02:00

Grimmtooth's been angsting about raiding guilds and people who apply to them. He asks:

What constitutes a raiding guild? Does it welcome new players and help them come up to the level that they can raid? Or does it exclude all but those that are a certain level, and a certain spec, and have certain equipment already?

Because I've seen the issue from several different perspectives, I think that I may have some insights on the matter. I've been a member of a nonraiding guild, a starter raiding guild, an intermediate raiding guild and finally, a member of a bleeding edge raiding guild (within our server's community, that is).

To answer the initial question: It depends on whether the raiding guild is after short-term success or long-term success. A parasite will kill the goose that's laying golden eggs. A symbiont empowers the goose, benefiting both.

I like to think that my raiding guild was of the symbiont variety. We did train&gear some people. We never poached from other guilds. If you wanted to join us, you'd have to leave your old guild first on good terms. Our recruiters would contact your old GM and ask questions. If you burned any bridges, they would know. A disloyal person would just create avoidable drama and detract from the whole guild's raiding experience. We also organized nostalgia raids, ranging from Molten Core and Zul'Gurub to Zul'Aman. If someone needed a raid-only craftable epic, we'd help. And if someone had questions about a boss or other game mechanics, we would offer some advice.

Of course, I'm not saying that the temptation was never there. I'm just saying that poaching is a bad way to run a raiding guild, and can ultimately be a contributing factor to the guild's demise.

Relationship Issues

2009-01-24T10:23:00.000+02:00

Just imagine what these two could accomplish..

(via Rock, Paper Shotgun)

The Scariest Thing in the World..

2009-01-10T09:58:00.000+02:00

..is an another human being. I recently watched the Martyrs, which was surprisingly good. The first half of the movie in itself is decent survival horror against a monster with some fairly realistic-looking gore. But the movie also builds up the psychological terror aspect gradually. The viewer starts to wonder whether the dead actually deserved their fate by having the protagonists switch between being victims and being merciless killers. Eventually, a point-of-view shot establishes that one of the protagonists had only imagined to monster, and all of the physical wounds were a result of self-mutilation. By this time, the other protagonist is pretty much convinced that her friend was insane, and that she got goaded into being her accomplice. And she's right.

But then the movie changes gears. The remaining protagonist finds an another girl trapped in the house, a victim of unimaginable cruelty. As a result, she sees all of the events in a completely different context, making her much more sympathetic towards the other (now deceased) protagonist. Yes, the victims had it coming.

And then.. the movie finally gets into the concept of the titular Martyrs. The people responsible for the aforementioned cruelty show up, and explain to both the protagonist and the viewers what they're about. And at first, the response is disbelief. Do they really believe that? The protagonist is captured and is forced to go through treatment that her deceased friend and the girl she found were subjected to. The torture is systematic and efficient, and the viewer begins to wonder how long the protagonist (and the movie) can go on. Which ultimately is quite a long time. And finally, the answer is given: Yes, the antagonists really are doing what they said they would so, and do believe in what they are doing.

The Martyrs is one of the best horror movies I've seen. It accomplishes a lot with very little resources (two locales, and about a dozen actors), and the multilayered approach gives plenty of food for thought. And it accomplishes most (if not all) of it without resorting to the supernatural. We humans have no need for monsters and martyrs, we can make our own.

Four Billion %

2009-01-01T00:38:00.000+02:00

Wow, just wow. Everything that's right (and wrong) about Japanese gaming culture is distilled into this one video:

The word "epic" does not do justice to this piece of art. Don't blink or you'll miss some of the homages.

Catching Up: Avatar and the Importance of Respecting the Audience

2008-12-24T00:16:00.000+02:00

The second item on my entertainment to-do list is Avatar: The Last Airbender. After being saturated with Avatar references while reading TV Tropes, I finally decided to give the show a try. To my surprise, it's not an anime, but a western cartoon drawn in anime style. And although I've only watched a few episodes so far, I start to see why it's been praised.

If I had to sum it up in one sentence, it's because the writers treat their intended audience with respect. Kids are not idiots, and neither are the initial three protagonists. They do have identifiable childish qualities, like teasing of siblings or goofing off, but those are not their only defining characteristics. For example, Sokka acts like an overcompensating teenage boy, being brash, arrogant, misogynistic and picking fights. In an early episode, he keeps insulting and ridiculing the local Amazon Brigade.. until the brigade's leader goads him into a duel. He is utterly defeated and humiliated. But instead of getting even, he swallows his pride, apologizes sincerely and asks to be trained. He even wears the "girly" uniform (Samurai uniform with Kabuki facepaint) and keeps his cool while the humiliation continues during the training. As a result, he is noticeably more effective in the next battle. The leader of the brigade even offers him a counter-apology, saying that she's both a warrior and a girl. Definite character development, and the show's just getting started.

And even the villains get the same treatment. The primary antagonist chasing the titular character has anger management issues and has no qualms of threatening innocents in order to get what he wants.. but seems have very good reasons for acting the way he does. The protagonists (and thus the audience) just don't know them yet. His mentor, on the other hand, seems utterly oblivious at first.. but acts decisively when necessary. An another character is clearly unhinged.. but has a definite method to his madness, and shows glimpses of sharp wit hiding in plain sight among the madness.

Most of the time the cast and the setting in other shows is fairly homogenous, but so far I've spotted influences from Inuits, Mongols, mainland Japanese and various ethnicities within China and India. And none of them are blatantly good or evil. Even the various fighting styles have a very distinct feel and match the elements (fire, water, earth, air) being manipulated. The writers definitely did their research and quickly rise above and beyond a certain other series *cough* Naruto *cough* which is quite similar.

Catching Up: Fallout 3 and the Uncanny Capitol Wasteland

2008-12-23T22:05:00.000+02:00

Now that I'm on a winter holiday, I have ample time to catch up on my entertainment to-do list.

The first one on the list is Fallout 3. After updating it, I found out that my savegames were gone. Again. Oh well, I've practically memorized the Vault 101, Megaton, Springvale School, Super-Duper Mart, Arefu and Meresti by now. The more I see the Capital Wasteland, the more I like it. It's incredibly detailed, and provides ample opportunity for good old-fashioned exploration. It's entirely plausible to just gather some supplies and head out into an uncharted part of the map and be entertained. Sightseeing in itself is fun (especially in Washington DC itself, which contains all of the landmarks), but every nook and cranny is filled with goodies, plain old junk or nice sidequests. For example, not far from the Vault 101 resides Vault 106. I didn't have any official reason to go there, but went anyway. At that point, the only points of reference for me were the relatively-normal Vault 13 from Fallout 1, the unsealable vault that turned into the Necropolis, and the leader-worshipping Vault 101. While I have read through some list that contained every vault's gimmick (Vault 13's gimmick being the sabotaged water chip), I never knew how well the other gimmicks were written into the games. In Vault 106, the writing is quite subtle. The vault looks perfectly normal to the outside, and seems that the vault door was never opened until now. But as soon as you step in, you see the same decay and chaos that mars every other locale.. and the remaining vault dwellers try to smash your face in. If you find one of the few working terminals, you'll find a log entry about a gas release into the air filtration system. The vault itself tells the rest. The first time your vision turns blue.. nothing happens. But the deeper you go, the more disturbing the visions get. For example, there's one vision where you see the vault as pristine.. and trying to access a computer gets you into a conversation with your own mind, trying to convince you to stay. In the end, you're emptying clips at visions, not knowing which enemies are real and which are not. Of course, it's all scripted, and as soon as you've killed every real enemy and triggered every vision.. the Vault is as safe as Megaton or any other city. (There are addons to fix that.) Combine this with the fast travel option and a packrat like me can grab everything that isn't nailed down. You can strip down in Megaton to maximize your carrying capacity and empty the whole vault. I miss random encounters from Fallout 1, which required you to keep at least some means of self-defense with you. There are some addons that do exactly that, though.

On second thought, I don't miss random encounters. After I negotiated a mutually beneficial agreement with the citizens of Arefu and the vampires at Meresti, I was just exiting Meresti when I was ambushed by three Talon mercenaries. I had spent most of my supplies in getting to Meresti, so I was wounded and facing the three heavily-armed mercenaries.I had only seconds to prepare before they aggroed and the autosave forced me to either fight the Talons or go back and try my luck with a Mirelurk-infested cave. A whole lot of loading and VATS-abusing later I had even more stuff to carry back to Megaton. While trial-and-error gameplay is bad, a worse option would have been to leave the player (me) in a completely unwinnable situation.

On the other hand, a game so heavily focused on exploration should retain some sense of dread. That is very hard to do if the player knows that they can brute-force through any and all encounters. So far, only fast and hard-hitting melee enemies like bears and deathclaws provide any difficulty. Mirelurks are similar in enclosed spaces, but most of the time running is a perfectly viable option. After unsuccessfully trying to get to Rivet City through the ruined Washington D.C., I finally decided to wing it and just run. None of the dangers in the city could touch me, while moving slow and steady turned even simple raider encampments into genuine threats. And once I reached Rivet City, fast travel provided me with a 100% safe return trip, even though I probably pissed off half the city getting there.

My first foray into Fort Constantine was a bit better. The creatively-ruined landscape provided it's own challenges in order to avoid swimming through radiated water, and the slowly-but-certainly dwindling supplies started to invoke that vital sense of dread and I had to do some risk-reward assessment in whether to investigate detours in hope of finding more supplies. Mostly this was caused by the frequency of bears and deathclaws, but even plain raiders managed to discourage me from cleaning out their camp by using crossfire and pinning me behind a rock. In the end, they successfully chased me away. Of course, I could have just abused quicksave/quickload, but that would have spoiled the experience. Traveling on foot through lands infested with mutated wildlife, raiders, slavers, mercenaries, mutants and landmines should feel unsafe. And like many others have said, that feeling kind of vanishes by the time you reach level 12 and start headshotting your way through everything.

The game may have tried to create some kind of a rock-paper-scissors system with different damage types and weapons, but some of the weapons are simply ridiculous. I carry seven different weapons, but 99% of the time I use only two: The Shishkebab (homemade flaming sword) and a plasma rifle. The former is just brutal against all humans and small animals, and the latter tends to disintegrate more of then than not. I do have the Bloody Mess perk, but it's sometimes simply ridiculous. I thought it only provided a small bonus to critical hits and some extra eye candy on killing blows. Instead, with a plasma rifle the killing blows are ridiciously frequent, even when you're firing from the hip to not-so-vulnerable body parts like fully-armored torsos. Two shots is pretty much enough to kill anything and everything. And because there's a perk that refills your AP whenever you kill an enemy, I can see a point where you can kill an arbitrary number of enemies without giving them any chance of retaliation.

But all of this is basically nitpicking. I even liked the Tenpenny Tower quest, where the road to hell is indeed paved with good intentions and the Broken Aesop can be quite jarring to people who expected a Win-Win solution. Or that sometimes doing what's right and doing what everyone expects you to do are two different things. But I think that good games do suffer from a kind of Uncanny Valley: The things that they do wrong stand out from the things that they do well, so naturally you focus on the flaws. Yahtzee even lampshaded this in his review: He jokingly tried to end the review before it really started, just saying that Fallout 3 is good. But since everyone expects him to nitpick and rant, he did exactly that.

Darkfall Ain't Like You

2008-12-21T19:09:00.000+02:00

Finally, a MMO for the ~~hardcore~~ ~~alternative~~ counterculture people:

Now you can all be a part of the culture that you mock. Resistance is futile.

Finally, here's some food for thought for the true rebels:

(via Nyuan)

How to motivate employees..

2008-12-07T11:59:00.000+02:00

..the Mythic way. Chew one of your employees out in front of the whole Internet, and then say it was just a joke. A "ha ha, only serious" joke.

Seamless (almost)

2008-12-05T12:27:00.000+02:00

One of the reasons I bought an XBox 360 was to use it as a Media Center Extender.. but even Media Center's codec support was very limited, and the XBox version's codec support is even more limited. After googling, and then googling some more, I found out that Microsoft considers this a feature, not a bug, and that while audio could be re-encoded on-the-fly via DirectSound, video could not due to overwhelming hardware requirements. Point taken, but that was probably written back in the day when XBox 360 was new, and my quadcore system could probably encode at a tolerable speed. I then downloaded the Windows Media Encoder and tried to manually transcode some video clips.. only to have the encoder flat out refuse to read my videos. I abandoned the project in defeat..

..until a co-worker mentioned a program called TVErsity, which promises transcoding for a large variety of devices, including the XBox 360, PS3, Wii, PC (Quicktime or Windows Media) and even my iPhone. I installed it, added my videos to the memory library and..

..it works. The very same video clips that Media Center refused to play started in less than a second with TVErsity, and used the default XBox 360 video UI. I fired up a new browser window on my laptop, and could start watching a different video clip with no discernible performance problems. Even the IPhone works with TVErsity, although there's is a very noticeable delay before playback starts. I don't know whether it's due to a different codec used or lack of streaming, though. The website also promised pauseable streaming video from the Internet via a lot of different sources, but I haven't tried that yet.

Dynamics of Storytelling

2008-11-24T22:09:00.000+02:00

I've recently started watching a short anime series called Narutaru, which is about preteen child discovering a starfish-shaped semi-intelligent symbiote called a Dragonet.

The show starts off on a very cheery note, and the symbiote seems like a yet another strange pet in a standard-issue school drama.. until a friend of the main character sees it.. and the look on her face is of complete terror. As soon as she gets home, she whips out the razor blade. Her reaction is explained soon afterwards. Apparently she has one of the symbiotes herself, and her first encounter with that particular one involved her having a waking dream about falling.. and feeling the pain of the impact. The flashback ends with her lying curled up in a fetal position in her own puke.. and being mocked by her classmates. It gets worse from there.

I have to say that I'm intrigued by this. I've watched some grim anime before.. but none of them were this effective in provoking fear, disgust or sympathy for the characters. For example, the titular character in Monster makes a sociopath like Dexter look like a saint. But you as a viewer start to expect him to outdo himself every time and thus dulling the impact of whatever atrocities he's done before. Just like in music, maintaining proper dynamics in storytelling is important. If the scale of the composer starts from forte and goes up from there, all you're going to accomplish is to make your listener turn the volume down.

Large-scale Begging

2008-11-16T23:59:00.000+02:00

Today I received an email that started like this:

My name is Valentin. I'm 26 years old and I live with my mother in Russia.

My mother is disabled and she receive indemnity from goverment which is not enough even for food.

I work very hard, but due to the financial crisis in our country my salary was reduced and our situation became very difficult.

The price for heating our home is very high and we cannot afford it anymore.

We worried and don't know what to do. I finded several e-mail addreses and thanks to free internet access in our local library I decided to appeal to you for help.

If you have two old sleeping bags, warm blankets, warm clothes and shoes, electric water-boiler, canned and dried food, vitamins, medicines from cold, any hygiene-products, I will be very grateful to you if you can send it to our address:

Looks pretty legit, right? He explains his situation and doesn't ask for money, he asks for stuff that would be useful for a person in his position. And while the examining of headers showed that the email originated from Austria, there wasn't anything too suspicious. If I encountered someone on the street making the same plea, I might even go and buy them some of this stuff.

But of course, this is the Internet, and the answer is just one googling away. I particularly found the recounting of his antics against his denouncers quite enlightening. It's actually quite clever. Why beg from one person when you can beg from a few million? Even if the response rate is at the level of other spam, he's still going to receive a lot of stuff. Better yet, some of his victims believe his excuses and opt to send plain old cash via Western Union instead.

A Distracting Mirror

2008-11-13T22:24:00.000+02:00

Because Vista is FUBARed (again), I'm not playing Wrath for now. I did get Mirror's Edge, though.

Mirror's Edge has been advertised as a parkour game. Most of the time that's very much true, and literally jumping from rooftop to rooftop is quite fun. One of my old favourites, Metroid Prime was very good in making the player feel like he's actually in the action by modeling Samus Aran properly, Mirror's Edge goes above and beyond that. If you look down, you see your legs. If you lean towards a wall, you see your hands. If you're about to fall from a pipe, the camera tilts. If you land with an ukemi, the camera spins vertically. Too many games treat the player like a floating camera protected by a forcefield. Mirror's Edge shows how it's supposed to be done.

Because parkour has been called "the art of fleeing", jumping from rooftop to rooftop while getting shot by the graduates from the Imperial School of Marksmanship is also fun. There's also the delightful growing panic when you're stuck in a room and you need to find a way out now. Sometimes it even felt like I was in a Jackie Chan movie (hint hint). However..

..sometimes the only option is to fight. And that's when Mirror's Edge misses the jump and ends up as a pavement pizza. The combat system in Mirror's Edge is designed for quick, one-shot fights. It's great when you just need to disarm or knock out a single guard on in alleyway. But then there comes a point where the game slowly lifts you into a wide open arena while several guards keep shooting at you like the proverbial fish in the barrel. Not fun. To add insult to injury, you can't even climb obstacles that were trivial before. Climbing on top of a shipping container? No problem. Climbing on top of a construction worker's apartment? Impossible.

But all in all, it's a good game. I admit that I got a bit lost once or twice (my fault, I wasn't thinking vertically), and there were times when I longed for Braid's rewind feature. But in fact, the overwhelming sound of wind in your ears and the out-of-focus view of windows whizzing by adds to the atmosphere and makes you want to survive that jump next time. In fact, the death mechanic could have even been more visceral, and use some ragdoll physics to show what really happens when you miss a jump in parkour.

If you could keep yourself entertained in Assassin's Creed by just running around on the rooftops, you'll love Mirror's Edge. It's beautiful, atmospheric, thoughtful, and most of all, fun.

A Backup Plan

2008-11-13T06:42:00.001+02:00

After a certain unnamed store couldn't even confirm my preorder of Wrath even after they had shipped some of the orders, I decided to join the midnight event at the local store.

I'm among the first dozen, so I'm somewhat hopeful about my chances with the collector's edition.

Most of the people are simply chatting and sitting, but some brought folding chairs and even poker sets.

After around two hours of waiting, the store finally opens it's doors.. And there's a promisingly high stack of collectors' editions visible. And after a few more minutes of waiting, one of them is mine.

Geolocate this post

Posted with LifeCast

Quantum of Audacity, please!

2008-11-08T11:19:00.000+02:00

Yesterday I watched the latest Bond flick, Quantum of Solace. While the initial car chase was nice, things started going downhill from there. A large part of my gripes is related to the plot, so stop reading here if you don't want to get spoiled.

To me, the Bond series has always relied on refuge in audacity. The men are manlier, the cars are faster, the explosions are bigger, the women are all femme fatales.. and the villains are very ambitious. Granted, Casino Royale toned it down somewhat, but Le Chiffre was definitely a Bond villain. Orchestrating terrorist strikes to cash in on futures is something that is in the realm of conspiracy nuts. It's something that Quantum of Solace lacks. The plot is straight out of a leftwing newspaper. CIA collaborating with anticommunist dictators? Check. Multinationals taking over natural resources of poor countries? Check. Said multinationals price-gouging the former owners of said resources? Check. What were the scriptwriters doing? Reading Noam Chomsky? The plot is not something that requires a Bond villain to pull off, and definitely not something that warrants the attention of Bond himself. It's simply too ordinary.

While having continuity is nice, Quantum of Solace feels like a filler between Casino Royale and the next one. Some loose ends are tied up and SPECTRE version 2 is introduced.. but Bond never goes after them, making the story strictly about personal revenge. That would be OK if there were any inner struggle going on. Bond knows he got script immunity. He even pulls off a Karma Houdini trick when confronted about his insubordination. The scene goes something like this:

M: You're a loose cannon. Relinquish your weapon and follow these burly men.
Bond: Ok.
Bond proceeds to beat up said burly men.
Bond: M, trust me on this.
M: Oh, okay.

Unlike in Casino Royale, Bond is always 100% correct, and M's quip about not knowing the difference between friends and enemies rings hollow at best, hypocritical at worst.

Quantum of Solace is average at best. Granted, the previous installments in the series were not stunning masterpieces either, but at least they had that audacity. If you can't make the plot or the characters interesting, at least give us eye candy. And no, a hotel made of Explodium doesn't count.

Saw 5: The Red Herring

2008-11-01T14:40:00.000+02:00

I watched Saw 5 today, and I'm sad to say that the Saw series is no exception when it comes to the declining quality of films as the series gets longer.

The underlying idea behind the Saw series is decent: Grimm-like morality tales coupled with grisly and appropriately ironic traps. As the series progressed, they did some variations around this basic theme. Saw 2 emphasized that Jigsaw tells you everything you need to know about the trap, and you really don't want to try to cheat. Saw 3 was about giving people second chances and about the fairness of Jigsaw's traps. Saw 4 was all about re-evaluating yourself instead of blindly continuing on your path. Saw 5.. well..

Saw 5 tells that none of the above actually matter, and it's all about the gore and personal satisfaction. For example, there's a trap where the introduction says that the trap is about not being selfish. Except that it isn't. You can win by either working together or backstabbing people around you whenever you have the chance. That's the morality aspect out of the window. Unlike all other traps where the only way to save yourself was to atone for your own personal shortcomings through self-mutilation, here you can get out by embracing those same shortcomings and mutilate other people. And the traps lack imagination. There's drowning, a pendulum, nail bombs and crushing walls. And the less said about the morality "lesson" of the last trap, the better.

Naturally, it's not all about the traps. There's yet more backstory and subplots, and there's a scene where Jigsaw's wife receives a mysterious box, which.. turns out to be a red herring and is never mentioned again in the movie. Of course, it could be a very slow Chekhov's Gun for the inevitable sequel. But the series has already used flashbacks to create reverse Chekhov's Guns. Leave out the details that are irrelevant in the current movie, and when you need them in the next one, just do a flashback. Why couldn't they do the same here?

Yes, you killed off your main character in the third movie and dealt with the issue of sidekicks and copycats not being as good as the original, but could you please stop repeating the same point with your movies?

Waiting for Quantum Rise

2008-10-31T13:16:00.000+02:00

Because work is keeping me busy, I've found the playstyle of an industrialist in EvE very much to my liking. Changing skills, adjusting orders and launching new jobs takes just a few minutes each day, and the steady income lets me do whatever I want. A Nomad is still out of my price range, so I've started training towards the Rorqual and the upcoming Orca. According to my corpmates, the Rorqual can, with proper fittings, have quite a lot of cargo space, can transport industrials and most importantly, can cloak. All that with a much smaller price tag. And because I have all of the jump drive skills already, the training is not prohibitive. The biggest roadblocks are Mining Barge V and Advanced Spaceship Command V, and the later will also help with freighters. Still.. that's a month-and-a-half of training. Not a lot by EvE standards, but I need to do something else in the meantime to increase liquidity in my import business. I have two billion in assets waiting to be sold, and big sellers like heavy drones have a small profit margin and a relatively high volume, which makes hauling costly. Quantum Rise will help with that when I can use my own blockade runner to haul small shipments past gatecamps, but in the meantime I'm stuck paying for carrier jumps.

Recently I've been doing some light missionrunning with a Drake, which requires surprisingly little concentration. the passive tank can sustain a whole lot of damage, and the missiles don't care about optimal range or falloff. Just pick your targets, avoid the trigger ships and let the money flow in. Of course, EvE happens to hang during certain missions (like Damsel in Distress), you can still die. Ouch. My next shipment costs around 400 million, so I can't hemorrhage money too much.

Listening to player concerns, what a novel concept

2008-10-29T08:10:00.000+02:00

The new EvE developer blog is out, and the big news that mining barges, exhumers, blockade runners and deep space transports are getting looked at. I play a trader, so I'm using both deep space transports and blockade runners quite frequently.

Currently, blockade runners have a +2 warp strength bonus which is nice for low-sec, but irrelevant in nullsec, where interdictors make it impossible to warp anyway. And because any self-respecting gatecamp has several ships, the bonuses to shield boosters are also irrelevant, because the alpha strike is enough to pop you. So good blockade runner fittings ignore these bonuses and focus on stealth to get out of the bubble and quick align time to warp away before getting locked. Lo and behold, CCP is giving blockade runners exactly what they need: Access to the Covert Ops Cloaking Device, which allows the ship to move at full speed and warp while cloaked. With the current fitting, my blockade runner moves at 200m/s normally and 2000m/s with a microwarpdrive. With the covert ops cloak, nothing but an attentive interceptor pilot will catch me, which is how it should be. The other new role bonus is the ability to use covert jump portals made by black ops battleships. And as the dev blog says, this is a fringe benefit. If black ops battleships were to be changed to allow infiltration of cynojammed systems, then this role bonus would be useful in resupplying a guerrilla operation preparing to take down the enemy cyno jammer.

Next up is the deep space transports. These are clumsy beasts, and despite the description, flying one in lowsec or in nullsec is a deathwish. The current bonuses boost resistances and shield boosting/armor repairing, but if you had to use those bonuses you were already dead. You can't keep the tank up indefinitely even if you get jumped even by a single interceptor, so if you get locked you are dead. To prevent this, you can fit warp stabilizers and inertia stabilizers.. which chip away at the large cargo hold which is the only benefit of a deep space transport right now. And the end result would still be more vulnerable than a blockade runner. To fix this, CCP will move the +2 warp strength bonus from the blockade runner to the deep space transport, which alleviates the need to fit warp stabilizers. In addition, the booster/repairer bonus is being changed to shield extenders/armor plates to help sustain the burst damage you're taking while sloowly aligning for warp.

Listening to player concerns and giving them exactly what they need, what a novel concept.

No, you can't have his stuff

2008-10-25T07:34:00.000+03:00

Ezra Chatterton, who many readers got to know in May 2007 when Blizzard Entertainment granted his wish, died this week after a nearly 20-month struggle with brain cancer.

No, you can't have his stuff.

World of Goo and Evil

2008-10-14T22:22:00.000+03:00

Rock, Paper, Shotgun has been touting World of Goo for some time now, and after finding myself playing it for the whole evening, I can see why.

World of Goo is a puzzle game where the objective is to move the required number of semi-sentient blobs of goo from the start to the end pipe. Just like in Lemmings, the blobs tend to wander around and you have to find out a safe path for them, but in this case the the blobs construct the path out of themselves. You can grab a blob and attach it to an object with one or more connections to form a structure. When you do that, the rest of the blobs start randomly traveling along those connections. If you keep connecting blobs, you can build towers, bridges, ropes, nets and even vehicles. And because there's a physics engine in the background, you need to make sure that your structures are well-built. The constantly moving blobs shift weight from side to side, so you need to make sure that your structures stand firmly or they'll eventually topple. Which is sometimes exactly what you want. For example, you can start building a bridge from the ground up, with supporting arches and everything. Or you can build a tall tower and topple it to cover the chasm. The game doesn't railroad you to the one true solution and you're fairly free to experiment.

As seen from gameplay videos and trailers, the graphics style and the atmosphere is fairly unique, sometimes serene and ethereal like a fairytale, sometimes even heroic or imposing. What the trailers don't show is that there's an actual backstory and the designers have a fairly black sense of humor. For example, there's a level where you have to shred wrong-colored blobs to fill a pit of spikes with body parts. And when you eventually get the right-colored blob past that pit.. it too gets shredded and the body parts are used as beauty cream. Brilliant. The helpful signposts scattered around also give you bits and pieces of the backstory, and the writer may indeed have ulterior motives. The designers have certainly played Portal. For example, there's a level where a signpost suggests you to smell a flower by getting a blob close to it. If you do, the resulting disease will quickly spread to all of your blobs, killing them and making the puzzle impossible to solve. Fortunately, the game does give you a limited amount of undos to save yourself from fatal mistakes.

World of Goo is independent game design at it's best, and definitely worth every penny.

Playing Both Sides Against the Middle

2008-10-01T17:23:00.000+03:00

I also got the PC version of Mercenaries 2: World in Flames recently, and I'm actually having fun with it. It's basically GTA with destroyable buildings and big explosions.

Sure, it lacks polish. Rushing into melee range is a bit too powerful, there's parts of terrain where you can get stuck, some graphics issues (including mismatched cinematics and Hall Of Mirrors effects) and you can't really be run over by enemy vehicles, but all of those are relatively minor issues.

The game is very tongue-in-cheek and the gameplay is appropiately cartoony as well. You really have to do something stupid to get yourself killed, but the game won't punish you too severely for minor lapses of judgement. The faction system has a GTA2-style feel to it where you have to piss off someone if you want to please someone else. Unless nobody lives to tell the tale of your mischief, that is. To advance in the main plot, you have to work for several different factions, and maintaining the diplomatic balance is quite interesting.

The vehicle disguise system is a lot of fun, although I tend to forget to grab one of my allies' vehicles when I'm done dealing with their enemies. For example, there are several oil company outposts deep in the jungle, but most of the jungle is held by the left-wing guerrillas. If you approach their checkpoints with a matte-black SUV with oil company logos, they will shoot at you. Similarly, you can sneak into army bases by hijacking a tank and just driving through their main gate like nothing was wrong at all. However, while the vehicle system is quite good, the enemies tend to be omniscient when you're on foot. After you've been spotted once, they know your every move until you kill all enemis in the vicinity, including that last guy who was hiding in a corner, facing a wall, and constantly yelling your location to his friends.

All in all, a quite enjoyable package. It could use a patch, but it's worth buying as it is.

Star Wars: The Force Leashed

2008-10-01T16:55:00.000+03:00

I recently got the Wii version of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, and I have to say I'm quite disappointed.

I realize that Wii is not as powerful as a XBox 360, but.. wtf? This game looks like a mix between Jedi Knight 1 and Tie Fighter. For example, the Rogue Shadow has 50 polygons at most. Fortunately the physics seems to be there, even if you get a quick fade into black when you bend open a door. Then the game resumes at the point where the door is already bent. Sneaky.

Ok, the graphics sucks, but at least the game has proper controls and good gameplay, right? Nope. As far as force powers go, Force Throw seems to be the only decent one and the rest are for showing off. One could assume that the proper way to throw would be to hit a button to grab and then swing the Nunchaku to the direction you want to throw the object. No. It's just like in the XBox 360 version: Grab an object and then use the analog stick to start moving it and release the grab. Using the lightsaber is not much better. You hold down a button and turn the wiimote sideways to block, but if you just hold the button you throw the lightsaber. That leads to plenty of inadvertent throws especially in situations where you would plausibly need to swing at something. Not that you usually do. The levels that I've seen so far have vast open spaces, so trying to get into melee range is a fool's errand. By the time you reach one enemy, the other fifteen are busy shooting at you in the back. The best way so far is to grab anything handy, throw it at someone and repeat. There's always plenty of junk around. And because you're completely vulnerable while using the force powers, you really don't want to do anything that takes time, like using Force Choke or Force Lightning. Grab, throw, repeat. And yes, the camera is as bad as everyone says. The quicktime events are vastly simplified, and seem to contain only 4 variations: Shake the Wiimote, shake the Nunchaku, turn the Wiimote, turn the Nunchaku. That's it.

So, the graphics sucks, the physics is mostly hidden away, controls are substandard and the game play is repetitive. What does that leave us? The plot. I'll try to complete it for the plot and then see whether I can resell it. Get the XBox 360 version if you can, the Wii version is not worth it.

Judging the Invisible Pink Unicorn

2008-10-01T10:10:00.000+03:00

Oxhorn, a machinima author, recently explained one of his more controversial pieces, where engineers who are mocking a person for believing in an invisible pink unicorn.. and getting killed by the said unicorn. Although I feel that something is lost from art when it is explained by the author, he chose to do so:

The IPU, in my movie, is very loosely analogous of God, a supreme being who created everything and owns everything, including those engineers. Since they are his property, he can do whatever he pleases with them, even kill them.

You can do whatever you want with your property. Fair enough. Or is it?

Let's start with a few generalizations. Personally, I think that a sufficiently advanced being is indistinguishable from a god. Or The God. We, who command roaring metal beasts, fly with our metal wings, control the uncontrollable fire and provide food without hunting must seem like gods to dogs. There are several scifi series that explore this idea, with Stargate at the forefront. Both the Goa'uld and the Asgard pose as Egyptian and Norse gods, respectively. The difference is that the Goa'uld manipulate and kill humans whenever it suits them, while the Asgard refrain from killing and tell the truth to sufficiently advanced humans. So that show's answer is that it's not the status that dictates the morality of an act, it's the act itself. And generally, I think that western society agrees with that basic principle.

The western justice system is anthropomorphized in the form of a blindfolded woman, holding a set of scales and a sword. Lady Justice cannot see who stands before her, so her justice is “meted out objectively, without fear or favor, regardless of the identity, power, or weakness”, and her judgement, represented by the sword, is rendered solely on “strengths of a case's support and opposition”, represented by the scales. Emphasis mine. The idea of someone being powerful enough to be beyond judgement is incompatible with the idea of the western justice system.

Finally, there's the question of whether a sentient being should ever be considered property. I don't think so. Slavery is illegal in most civilized parts of the world, and even though we "own" our pets, there's laws against animal cruelty. But should a god (or The God) be exempted from judgement because “he created everything and owns everything”? I don't think so. We humans create life all the time. It's even called procreation. But we do not receive rights to do whatever we want with that life. There's a long list of responsibilities, and avoiding those responsibilities results in the society forcibly taking away and and all rights a creator might have on his creation. There are even harsh penalties for things we cannot do with that life under any circumstances. The idea of owning a sentient being is fortunately being phased out of the western justice system.

So, if we evaluate the machinima from a western justice system perspective, it definitely “condoned murder of those who disagree with you”. That's not what the author had in mind, but here we are anyway. :-(

Later on in the piece, he concludes his description of his beliefs with:

I hold it because it is the only way the question, “Why do bad things happen to good people?” can be answered by a Christian with a straight face, in my opinion. You can be a true and honest Christian and not hold this view. But I believe it is reality.

While I could cynically reply with "shit happens", that would miss the point. I do symphatize with the sentiment of believing something because the alternative is too horrible to consider. In my opinion, the core of Christianity is hope. Belief that things will be better, plain and simple. The opposite of hope is despair. That the world is an unjust place, where the wicked prosper and the righteous suffer. That all that awaits us is a downward spiral leading to the bitter end. In that mindset, everything is allowed because we'll be dead anyway. Widespread belief in that.. can disintegrate societies.

An Ocean-sized Wading Pool

2008-09-19T08:12:00.000+03:00

After some compulsive saving, I've finally reached a point in Spore where my corner of the galaxy is pacified, I've filled the ascension-o-meter and gotten most of the toys. All that's left is the voyage to the center of the galaxy, and I already know what I need to do to get there. I can pretty safely say that I've seen most of the game now, and I have to say that I'm not terribly impressed.

The trouble with Spore that it's an awfully shallow game. It's like an ocean-sized wading pool. Sure, there's a huge number of stars to visit, countless species to encounter and enough planets to customize to keep me busy for the rest of my life. But it's also all the same. Aside from appearances, one religious species is a carbon copy of the other. Sure, they might speak of wind chimes and the spirits instead of the Word of The One True God, but they're always going to react the same way. And because no NPC will lift a finger unless you're there to help, it's also awfully grindy. Yes, grindy. Even more than the much-maligned WoW. It doesn't matter whether you're getting a Baarzle instead of a Foozle this time, you're still doing the same mission. 90% of the time your target is a flyspeck anyway, so you don't even see what a Baarzle looks like.
When you terraform and colonize a planet, you always go through the same motions: For each level of terraforming, you always get three types of plants, two herbivores, one omnivore/carnivore and a colony. It doesn't matter whether you get sabertooth tigers to hunt gophers, the ecology always works the same. Sure, you can keep a collection of your favourite species around and customize a planet to look exactly like you wanted, but in the end there's no difference. It's still one planet that does exactly the same thing as every other planet: Produce spice to sell and serve as a refueling/repair station.

It's the same with warfare as well. You fly past the defenders, destroy the turrets with your plasma and bomb their town hall. Once you've done that, the defenders are easy pickings or leave outright. You repair your ship and go to the next planet. And that's what awaiting at the center of the galaxy. I've played the space game for about 20 hours, and my empire is about 1/5th of the empire of the Big Bad that's awaiting at the center of the galaxy.

Micromanaging even this empire is a lot of work. I can literally keep myself busy doing nothing else than collecting spice from each of my planets, because it's produced faster than I can collect it. Add in the repeating events such as ecodisasters (which always are solved by disintegrating 5 sick animals) and pirate attacks (which are either single pirate ships stealing spice or a tiny pirate fleet bombing a colony) and you can become overwhelmed by busywork. Sure, you can avoid some of that by purchasing spice storage facilities, turrets and anti-ecodisaster domes, but those cost money, which you get.. by more grinding.

Like Yahtzee said, Spore imitates several different games, and does it poorly. And the "glue" between the games is not meaningful enough to keep the whole package interesting enough to provide replay value. Body part positioning that was vital in cell phase is irrelevant in creature phase, the skills and stats that were everything in creature phase are meaningless in tribe phase and so on.

False Positive Overload

2008-09-16T06:21:00.000+03:00

Okay, maybe I was wrong. The threat auto-detection part of the newest TIA boondoggle involving virtual worlds does deserve to be ridiculed. Not only are they trying to auto-detect threats, they're also trying to decipher terrorists using WoW as a metaphor while referring to real-life plots. The problem is that WoW is full of real-life references already and people do talk about them, so misplaced lingo like in the example isn't going to help much. Hopefully they don't alert Chuck Norris every time someone makes a joke about the Unstoppable Force and the Immobile Object.. (via Terra Nova)

The Fine Line Between Parody and Reality

2008-09-12T00:15:00.000+03:00

There's a fine line between parody and reality, and some of the best parodies can skim that edge. Such is the case with antispore.com, which claims that Spore is a darwinist plot.

You know, the game where you assume the role of.. shall we say.. intelligent designer, a creator if you will, and where the the only changes the creatures undertake are those that you explicitly make. It's kind of like protesting against a demon-killing game because it's satanism, or a nazi-killing game because it has, surprise surprise, nazis. Or claiming that a game that has one optional scene that's as risque as a scene in a PG-13 movie contains "virtual orgasmic rape".

In a sense, it doesn't matter whether antispore.com is real or not, as the subject it's covering will be (deservingly) ridiculed. Some people are their own worst enemies, and don't need anyone's help to undermine whatever they were trying to accomplish.

Casablanca

2008-09-08T23:56:00.000+03:00

Stratics provides some news about the Ambulation expansion currently in the works for EvE. While the artwork alone is good, there's also some talk about being able to create your own shops and design discussion trees for the NPCs that man those. However, the CCP representative dodged the question about in-station PvP:

Stratics: So, what plans do you have for players in stations in zero-zero space? Will there be active pvp combat there and will players be able to be killed?
Ward: Basically what you are talking about at that point is perma-death for the player. I think the death penalty is harsh enough without adding perma-death.

Note that the reporter did not ask about permadeath. The player characters in EvE are capsuleers, and thus are unable to die permanently unless their cloning vats are compromised. Character PvP could work in the same fashion as ship PvP: The loser wakes up in a new body in his/her cloning vat.

Personally, I think that while Ambulation may be a testbed for technology intended to be re-used in a different game, putting in character PvP might be a too big of a chunk to implement, test and balance in the same expansion where you implement a completely new part of the game engine. And I admit that there's certain allure of space stations being neutral territory where the only cloak-and-dagger shenanigans are the proverbial kind. An environment where overt and covert compliments and insults are traded, and the escalation from smack talk to bloodletting is discouraged by a heavy presence of corporate security forces, ready to dish out harsh retribution at the slightest excuse.

Spore first impressions

2008-09-08T21:56:00.001+03:00

My little locust had fun hunting everything to extinction, including weakling locusts. The graduation to being an interplanetary menace did not go as planned, though. The space game is basically racing from planet to planet to put out proverbial fires. Only you can sell spice and stop the pirate attacks and ecodisasters, so there's little time for planet customization, exploration and/or war. It's like playing real-time Master of Orion 3 with less spreadsheets. Instead of menus, you zoom in/out like crazy.

Warring in the space game is a bit pointless at first. Your peashooters barely have enough power to shoot down ships faster than they respawn, and if you don't circle-strafe, you'll be dead in seconds. And by the time you finally have slooowly grinded the enemy colony down, there's those proverbial fires waiting on other planets. Only YOU can stop forest fires.

Oh, and the space game is quite unstable. There's nothing like getting a black screen in mid-fight and hearing your ship getting shot down. Well, except remembering that there is no such thing as autosave, and you'll have to re-play both the civilization and space games to get to the point where you were before the crash.

Of Red Herrings

2008-09-08T11:56:00.000+03:00

Seven Samurai points out that it might be prudent to look at World of Warcraft and other MMORPG games to see whether terrorists are communicating using through them. He has disabled comments, so I'll have to use my own blog to do so.

He's absolutely correct that terrorists could be using WoW to communicate. But that's not the part that got ridiculed. It's the virtual training camps. Nothing in WoW has any relevance to the real world when it comes to tactics or strategy. Training for intrusion countermeasures in a hostage situation in Rainbow Six? Could happen. Familiarizing themselves about US weaponry and tactics in Rogue Spear, Full Spectrum Warrior or America's Army? Could happen. Using flight simulators to train flying? Sure. But all of those games try to portray be realistic (some less so than others). WoW does not.

But all of that was a red herring. The more interesting part of the government project in question was training the system to automatically detect and identify suspicious activity. That's a continuation of the Total Information Awareness doctrine/program, which is all about filtering through massive databases. Second Life's or WoW's logs certainly classify as massive databases.

However, the problem with auto-detection is the unattainable precision required to be effective in that scale. Quoting Bruce Schneier:

Let's look at some numbers. We'll be optimistic. We'll assume the system has a 1 in 100 false positive rate (99% accurate), and a 1 in 1,000 false negative rate (99.9% accurate).
Assume one trillion possible indicators to sift through: that's about ten events -- e-mails, phone calls, purchases, web surfings, whatever -- per person in the U.S. per day. Also assume that 10 of them are actually terrorists plotting.
This unrealistically-accurate system will generate one billion false alarms for every real terrorist plot it uncovers. Every day of every year, the police will have to investigate 27 million potential plots in order to find the one real terrorist plot per month. Raise that false-positive accuracy to an absurd 99.9999% and you're still chasing 2,750 false alarms per day -- but that will inevitably raise your false negatives, and you're going to miss some of those ten real plots.

In the end, it comes down to resource use and effectiveness: Is TIA the most effective thing you can do with those resources? If not, then it's just security theater.