The Gameless Game

A lot of people have published a “my favourite mods for game X” list. I’m being innovative by, uh, not really doing anything particularly interesting in addition. This is, simply put, just a bunch of really mods for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. For some of the initial footwork, I have to thank Pelit magazine, but I basically picked my favourite ones and looked at some latter mods. Besides, they specifically excluded mods that just improve the graphics — games that strive to be experiences, graphics are important. This post is primarily a “list of Cool Stuff I’ve downloaded, in case I need to remember all that again” - so it could be later supplemented…

Limbo of the Lost is one of those game releases that confuse the heck out of me. How should I react?

I've seen the review, and it looks like an interesting little game - the creators had a decent enough concept to start from, and it looks at least some things were pulled off properly. The trailer was a bit cheesy but it had its good moments - a bit funniness, very cute cerberi (or how the hell you pluralise those)... and both good and very very bad animation and voice acting. A typical indie production, it seems, based on a freeware engine and tons of additional tweaking... I'm more of a RPG guy and not really an adventure game person (for a good reason), though I've enjoyed a few adventure games a lot.

But then, it turns out most of that tons of art assets have been blatantly ripped off from many games; The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion rip-offs are probably the most blatant, and I was alerted through the TTLG forums where people obviously paid most attention to Thief: Deadly Shadows rip-offs... and all of this is just the tip of the iceberg, because there's a giant huge big pile of this stuff.

I have to say I'm a bit confused, because in theory, I'm on the side of small developers and the game as a concept seems interesting. But on the other hand, ripping off assets from other games is not good, especially if it's a massive gigantic wholesale ripoff like what's been happening here. I have to apologise for working a "modern game development trends suck" angle to this thing, but I have to say that if the game had been published with, er, less impressive graphics that had been 100% homespun, this crisis would have been averted. But now, someone absolutely felt we need Leet Modern Graffix... and because the developers couldn't control themselves, we have a mess in our hands. What I'm trying to say is this: Yes, it's really awful that expectations about modern games are so high that independent developers have difficult time creating stuff that impresses modern gamer crowd. But I'm also saying this: if you feel the same, just screw the demographics and make the best-looking, best-sounding game that you can make with the available resources - copyright infringement will only make you the laughingstock and get you in trouble.

A sad affair, this one...

Life of the Party is the tenth level of Looking Glass Studios' Thief II: The Metal Age.

The level is just about perfect in two respects. First of all, it's a great example of how Thief series gameplay works, and is an example of an outstandingly put-together level that has tons of goodness. The level has everything that makes Thief great: Humorous dialogues between guards and other NPCs, lots of nooks and crannies to explore, lots of stuff to steal, and interesting architecture...

Secondly, it's almost an iconic example of a genre. If you wanted to make a game about thieves in a mediaeval fantasy world, Life of the Party is just about the greatest example of how to do it. Thieves dancing through the rooftops!...

Okay - so what I have done lately? I have been playing the game that is probably right up in the somewhat shortish list of "games I absolutely felt I had to beat."

Thief: The Dark Project, which I started playing late last year and finally beat yesterday for the first time - probably the first game I've started playing and completed in Wine - has been an extremely intense experience. It has had everything: cute lizards, Tombraideresque lost cities, verily hammerething fanatics, weird ratpeople, things that go *GONK* in the night, mysteriously disappearing piles of treasure, strange feeling that everything in this game has been made on purpose, gothic darkess, sheer horror, strange feeling that everything in this game makes sense for some reason, fumbling, humour, and...

...well, let me put it this way: This game is art. Usually, when people say some game is a work of pure art it means it's hard like hell. I think great artful games should not be just amazing and finely crafted, but fun too. Thief is certainly not amazing by today's standards - heck, to release a game with Quake's graphic details in 1998 was pretty weird, probably - but all things considered, this game has great atmosphere and even greater soundscapes. But the cool thing is, it's probably playable by a layman. I had great fun at the normal skill level; I think I'll have a blast at the higher skill level next!

But before that, Deus Ex. =)

Yup, I switched again. In other words, here we are, switched from Hobix to Movable Type Open Source. Third (God my memory is leaky) FOURTH blogware (Blosxom, Typo, Hobix and now MTOS) - hopefully the last blogware ever, too.

I hope having an unified web access to multiple blogs on same host will make me much more productive. You can also comment again - not that any people were commenting before, but now you really can. =)

Too bad I lost all of the tags in the process - not that tags were even documented in the MT export format docs in the first place. Oh well, at least it's pretty easy to edit this stuff retrospectively...

An amusing bug in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.

I wasn't happy that when I first visited Kvatch, a wolf had followed me and proceeded to attack the people encamped outside the city. The people killed the wolf effortlessly. A very sad affair indeed.

However, when I later visited the camp, the bored villagers had apparently taxidermied the wolf:

The thing still acts like a dead wolf, but at least it is now standing! How goo-ood that the sad-looking wolf corpse wasn't just left lying there!

Once upon a time, there was this game company called Loki Games. They made some nice Linux ports of games and then went bankrupt. Luckily, most of the games still work.

However, I got this weird idea today: Does Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri really need the CD? Well, I went and uninstalled the game, reinstalled, and after some patching, turns out that if I install the whole 600-whatever-megabytes of stuff, yes, the game works just nice and doesn't need a CD at all.

The patch following the reinstall fails spectacularly, however:

loki_patch: dynamic-link.h:57: elf_get_dynamic_info: Assert-makro "! "bad dynamic tag"" ei pidä paikkaansa.

Soooo... the program used by the patcher uses a dog-ancient tricks or something. The patch is just a mysterious executable full of binary crap? Are we doomed?

Well, no...

Stripping away the first few lines of the smac-6.0a-x86.run file, it turns out the file itself is just a .tar.gz file. Blowing that away, I get a small bunch of files: a few shell scripts, a file called patch.dat and what seem to be replacement files. The replacement files turn out to be in "xdelta" format. The patch.dat file is straightforward: Just look at the file name, old MD5 checksum, new file's MD5 checksum, run the xdelta, compare the checksums with patch.dat just to see if it went right, and move the new file over the old file. Tadah!

Still, I'd prefer something a bit easier next time...

(Warning: This post is hardly groundbreaking or newly-insightful in nature. I'm definitely late in the party; yes, it's taken this far until the Oblivion modding tools work reliably for me in Linux. =)

In May, I rambled about how this newfangled need to do physics modelling makes games sometimes less intuitive.

Now, I might go ahead and ramble how new more advanced game technology makes modding harder.

When creating newfangled adventures in most games, creating talking animals has traditionally been extremely easy if you have the modding tools. Just plop a copy of a creature to the game, make the thing non-hostile if necessary, and add a dialogue. Right? That's how it works in Neverwinter Nights, at least, and from what I know, in most older games. Sometimes the "copy of a creature" entails some extra work, but it should be doable, right?

Wellll... The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion respectfully disagrees. You see, in Oblivion there's difference between "creatures" and "NPCs". The biggest difference, of course, is that creatures cannot engage in dialogue.

So we're deep in the "'copy of a creature' entails some extra work" territory: In theory, we should be able to copy the meshes, stats, stuff, etc to a new NPC. Not so! No! Apparently, you need to do some odd extra legwork to make the creatures talkable.

And when you really think of it, what's the big reason for not allowing this at engine level, right out of the box? Why, the new improved dialogue system, of course, the facial animation system in particular. So, the engine designers went for a trade-off: Talking things need to be redesigned to use the new improved system, while non-talking things can use the old boring way of doing things, which needs less overhead.

No talking mudcrabs here...

Yay, a lot of Windows games work really nicely in Wine these days. I've even got TES4: Oblivion to work. That's got to count for something.

Anyway, here's the absolute cutest thing that has happened in my new-found Wine gaming so far, in Diablo II (with the expansion). I feel compelled to tell about this.

Yep: "Wolf Head of Self-Repair". This is just about the cutest animal-related concept I've seen lately. Wolf heads! That self-repair! Awww! Even though I'm playing this game as a boring amazon, I swear I keep this cute Wolf Head of Self-Repair in my stash until the very bitter end. =)

Awww. I can't stop thinking of that thing. Wolf Head of Self-Repair. Awww.

Note: May have spoilers on Tomb Raider Legend.

The only Tomb Raider game I've actually beaten was the first one. Now, I'm struggling with the newest incarnation, the GameCube version of Tomb Raider Legend. I'm having fun.

There's one big problem with the game, though. Modern world has its bad sides.

The biggest difference between the first Tomb Raider and Legend is that nowadays, physics seem to actually work. On the first level I ran into a physics-related problem: How to get a block from a pit to the upper level? There's a nice new swing that I was supposed to use; I can use it to make blocks fly. Just drag it on the other end of the swing and jump on it.

Hm... maybe it' has something to do with stacking the boxes atop one another?

Yep - position the boxes carefully, run to the end of the swing, and ta-dah, you have two stacked boxes. With careful tweaking, I could use it to scale the wall.

Except that I couldn't do anything when I got up to the wall. Hmm.

Turns out the physics problem is a bit different: I'm supposed to drag the box on the other end of the swing, jump on the other end from height, thus sending the box flying in a nice big arc to the upper level.

And herein lies the problem: Back in the day, the game was, uh, gamelike. Nowadays, with physics modelling, the options are a bit too limitless.

In TR1 the choices were appropriately limited: If you couldn't drag a box to some place, it's pretty clear that it is not used in that place. However, with a little bit of painstaking effort, in this game, you can take the boxes to a weird location where they can be of remote use. So the problem, from a game design point of view, becomes this: how to give the player some leeway and make the world seem real and without arbitrary barriers, yet make the game "gamelike" enough that they will figure it out easily?

Just a random thought...