The Gameless Game

Mundanity paralysis

2009-12-12T09:58:26Z

Here's some facts that I noted on my gaming.

I played somewhat less games on GameCube once I got Animal Crossing.
I played somewhat less games on DS once I got Animal Crossing: Wild World.
I played somewhat less games on Wii once I got Animal Crossing: Let's Go to the City.

And now, I'll just say that I've played less Halo games when Halo Waypoint came out.

Now, I'm not saying that Animal Crossing series is that bad. (Complete waste of time, granted, but not really awful, and heck, video games are supposed to be about wasting time.) I sort of like Halo Waypoint too. (Not as kickass as Halopedia, but still.)

It's still weird. I'm kind of paralysed by the fact that games can turn into mundane existence. It's as if I really need some hook to go on - like the music collection or the statue in Animal Crossing, after which I sort of quit playing those games. I'm playing The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion like a "mundane" game, and have over 100 hours in the clock, yet I'm not bored - there's actually stuff to do in the game.

Bleh, I guess I just needed to ramble about something in a beautiful Saturday morning. =)

Neverwinter shyness and roleplaying as love

2009-11-30T15:39:09Z

The weird thing about me is that I've always been a little bit shy. I'm getting much better, but even now, I'm sometimes a bit shy when trying something new. If anything, I just nowadays find out much faster that this stuff isn't killing me and I'm worrying for no reason - the only hard part is getting around to try something social. I can do just fine, if I get started doing something.

In a last few years, I was a bit shy when I tried Second Life for the first time, but I was fine once I figured out how the application works. I was shy to try out Halo 3 multiplayer, until I figured out that wise people just don't even try the voice chat thingy. (No, I was not scared by the Halo 3 multiplayer. It was the brand new notion of voice chat that scared the bejezus out of me.)

But there has been times when I was completely paralysed by the idea of interacting with strangers in online games. It took me over a year to seek out other people in MUDs. I was kind of shy in Neverwinter Nights persistent worlds back in their heyday.

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I used to play at a NWN persistent world called City of Arabel, back in 2003-2004. I don't know how active the world is these days, but the City of Arabel web site seems to be still up. It was a rather active PW, dozens of players logged on all the time. It had tons of scripted quests, and people actually roleplayed. I haven't talked much about what I did there. Um... I once graphed how well I did.

I was scared to roleplay, scared to do things at the time, but I tried. I was smiling on the outside. I was pained in the inside, because I was so worried that I might screw up and I was, in a way, doing better than my mind could handle the time. It was weird and incomprehensible: I once managed to participate in a multi-player mission, shot a zombie thingy with a bow, and the guy near me said "good shot!"... and that was a response from a real human. And I didn't die or anything. Wow.

And I did flub up some things, and was scared and pained and tormented afterwards - but I probably overreacted the hell out of things. Luckily, in retrospect, I think I'm the only person who was affected by that. Maybe. My memory is hazy.

But here's the thing that I regret most about being in Arabel: I didn't participate in the game that much.

I remember one incident vividly. I regrettably couldn't find screenshots that would have more details. That is pretty unbelievable in retrospect - I just went through a few CDs full of tons of NWN screenshots from single-player mods (which still run in NWN just fine, thank you for asking) - and there's ridiculously few screenshots from multiplayer games (which are ephemeral and gone now). Damn! I focus on wrong things!

One day, a druid (I can't remember much of the player aside of the fact that the character was a druid) sent a public message that said that he was giving a free lecture on how to properly care and handle animals. He told everyone to meet him in front of a roadside inn outside of the city proper.

I waited for the guy. As the time drew near, I chickened out. I left the area because no one was there. No one was coming.

When I was heading out, I saw the guy on the road, heading toward the inn.

And for the rest of my life, I'll probably regret for not going there. I'll regret that I was not there. He may have been there alone, and since I was going to be there, I might have been the reason for his disappointment. Other people might have been there, but I missed all of the fun. If I had had the mental strength to be there, it might have been a fun presentation even when it was going to be just two of us.

But I didn't get to see it. I was a coward.

And now in retrospect, that has led me to a realisation: roleplaying is an act of love. It is an act of kindness toward other person or persons.

Druids giving presentations on care of animals didn't have any function within the game. People could have gone killing monsters or doing other things and got benefit from that. But the druid in question was just doing something that was appropriate within the world and appropriate for the character he was playing and piqued interest of at least one person within the game who liked animals.

Hence it's the duty for the other players to respect that kind of expressions of love and return them. I let my own mental frailty take better of me, even when I knew it was completely natural for my ranger character to be interested of proper care of animals and be there and learn together and have great roleplaying time. And outside of the game, I still like animals. It would have been awesome. People expect roleplaying sessions to work the way they work. If the player goes batshit insane in middle of the game and does something that's completely inappropriate in that scenario, that's bad form. It's wrong.

So that is my big dark roleplaying secret: I broke the character and felt sort of crappy for that for 5 years afterwards. I feel very stupid for not thinking of that incident earlier, because I've been thinking of roleplaying from the point of view of love and friendship for a while now. I've gotten over it. I understand what roleplaying is supposed to be about now. I really do.

I had to get this off my chest.

Your Humble Abode in Neverwinter Nights

2009-10-24T15:25:01Z

Long before I was adoring some awesome-looking houses in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and waxing teary-eyed over how frigging awesome the Deepscorn Hollow is (please don't laugh), I was already working on some high-quality player character housing in my favourite games. Specifically, Neverwinter Nights.

Would it have been awesome if you could just return to your character's home after a long and challenging adventure, and drop your loot in the chests or put them on the shelf, then head off to another exciting adventure without worrying about your character's encumbrance limits?

Oh yes, you can do it! You could do just about anything in NWN, except achieve any sort of persistence. Once the module starts, all you have is the ability to save/restore games and export your character; you can't restart the module with another character and expect everything in the module to be exactly as you left it with another character. You needed external hacks to do that. And oh boy oh boy, did people ever hack in all sorts of weird persistence hacks using the scripting API and some more evil methods like latching another program on the server process (as far as I understood it). Since we're only doing this for single player, we can probably do some more gore-filled methods instead.

So, here's an article that's long overdue. I was going to post this to my crappy lil' Neverwinter Nights site when tons of people were still actively playing the game (they probably still are, I just haven't been checking on them), but I never got around to. I probably did in some form, but never posted the guide on the site and I'm not going to start looking.

Without further ado: a guide on how to create your own persistent houses in Neverwinter Nights.

]]> Chris-chan isn't quite as original as he thinks he is" articles. In case people haven't watched Chris's antics online, about a year ago, Chris was posting videos about his LiTtL3BiGPLaNet "Collector's Case", and how one can overcome the limitations of one's player profile (you can only carry up to so much crap, it seems) by creating custom levels and storing all that crap there.

PS3 fans will probably scream that this idea is kind of obvious once you notice that it's possible to do just that. The rest of the people can just scream that LittleBigPlanet sux0rtz® and PC folks did that AGES ago in other games, so LBP still is, and shall remain, something that just doesn't convince us to rush out and buy PS3s. Excuse me while I go back playing Oblivion on Xbox360. With the DLC.

So yes, the idea is old. Very old. I had the same idea years ago. How many years ago? Wellll...

% ls -l "modules/Ilmryn's Home 0005.mod" -rw-r--r-- 1 wwwwolf users 568276 22.3.2003 modules/Ilmryn's Home 0005.mod

...and it wasn't even my idea. I had seen that people did the same thing in MUDs. I wanted that in NWN.

I have to remind you that the following guide is a hack based on the original NWN capabilities. In 2003, this was the only sane and easy way to achieve persistence. Nowadays, when NWN also supports true persistence via database (including GetCampaign*(), SetCampaign*(), StoreCampaignObject(), RetrieveCampaignObject(), etc), this could probably be done more elegantly with a little bit of scripting. This one doesn't require scripting, just dead-stupid recklessness and good backups.

First, we need a few programs. You obviously need the Aurora Toolset. You also need an editor for NWN files. TlkEdit is pretty damn good.

First, construct your amazing home using Aurora. For a rhetorical example, 'm building an shop for an alchemist character of mine from my short stories. You obviously need a bunch of shelves and crates and whatnot - just remember to remove their scripts and make them "Plot" so you won't accidentally blow them up.

Then, just save the module! Now, you can just go and play the game. Adore your home, set things up, put your loot in shelves, and then comes the crucial part - save the game, and save your character.

After this, you can easily open up the module in TlkEdit. Here's how the module looks like when opened in TlkEdit:

Your save game appears in "saves" and has a bunch of files. There's "screen.tga", "player.bic", "portrait.tga", "saveinfo.txt" and a file that's basically a copy of your module file, except with the file extension .sav. You may notice it could be a big bigger than the original file.

The "area" etries have changed, obviously. The biggest change happened in module.ifo. Yep, if you extract the "module.ifo" entry from both, you'll notice there's a whole bunch of new stuff:

Mod_PlayerList
Mod_TURDList
EventQueue
VarTable
Mod_Tokens
...and lastly, a rather interesting and tell-tale change: Mod_IsSaveGame is set to 1, rather than 0.

The most spacious part is, of course, the module's current player list (Mod_PlayerList) which tells where you are and what the characters are. This may look familiar if you've opened up an exported character in an editor. You don't want to have player list around in a .mod file; The game got really confused last I tried. Who knows what it'd try to do now!

Make a copy of the .sav file (And call it "My Home 0002.mod"). Extract module.ifo, and remove all these new entries from the file - and change Mod_IsSaveGame to 0.Delete module.ifo from the module and import your new module.ifo in. Save the module. Copy it to the "modules" directory in NWN. For extra sanity checking, you may want to open this new module in toolset and run the verification thingamabob and save it again.

Now open up NWN, and start up the game, pick the character you exported, and the new module. Shazam! All of the stuff in the module should still be where they were when you saved the game.

Hopefully this guide is helpful.

Recursivity from Nintendo

2009-10-10T18:04:03Z

"Yo dawg, I heard you like animals so we put animals in your Animal Crossing so you can enjoy cute animals while you enjoy cute animals."

Sorry for not posting much to The Gameless Game lately, but major developments are potentially in air.

Commodore Wii games on Commodore hardware

2009-08-24T10:46:39Z

In summer, it's always fun to play the old games. In my parents' home, I don't have a television in my old room, but I still do have two Commodore 64s, 1541 disk drive, and the Commodore 1802 monitor.

And since Wii has Commodore 64 games, what would be more logical than try seeing what they look like on a real Commodore monitor, right?

The annoying thing is, the copy of California Games for Wii is the first legit copy of the game I've had. I was going to post a comparison screenshot of California Games running on a real C64, but I could only find the Side 2 of the heinously illegal copy. (I didn't Copy That Floppy. I got the stack of disks from the previous owner of the machine, back in the day. Even when I was a kid, I had no idea why the hell these highly competent buccaneers couldn't put the game on two sides of the same floppy.)

Still, my highly unscientific opinion is that California Games on Wii is not quite the same as California Games on a real C64. Even on a real Commodore monitor, the picture qualify far surpasses the real C64. And, of course, the load times are far shorter. And there's no floppies that can be lost. Maybe the folks doing the Wii ports of C64 games could do something similar to the "PAL emulation" modes from VICE...

Final Report: Assassin's Creed

2009-05-10T11:39:34Z

I played through Assassin's Creed in 17th April - and overall, I think the experience was making me nervous and joyous at the same time. Now here's a game to which I could really develop a love/hate relationship on; it's also a game that is not super-stellar, but I have great expectations from the sequel. Simply put, Assassin's Creed was a paradoxal game.
]]> good thing this time. In my opinion, Assassin's Creed was a refreshing game because I could see from far away that there was absolutely no reason to quit playing because the game was turning overwhelming. True, it's probably often a good idea to build the game on a slight incline: Start simple, leave the hard parts to the end. It is good if my own skills will build up over the game, but sometimes, I've just had to quit playing because the thing just kept getting too difficult for me. But Assassin's Creed was refreshingly on the level: Things just didn't get that much easier or harder. When I was mid-way through the game, I just knew that I'd beat the game eventually.

Though not without controversy. I beat every single information gathering task, which was... a sanity-challenging choice. There wasn't much variety in the mission types; the sequel is said to make things much more interesting in this respect, so that will make me much happier. The missions were fun... as long as they were untimed. I loved the untimed missions, but the timed missions drove me nuts. I didn't even run out of time. I was just a nervous player. "Do this stuff and don't blow your cover" is nice enough; "Do this stuff, don't blow your cover, and be damn fast too" was what made me fail often and loudly. I even had nightmares that the last chapter of the game would be nothing but timed informant missions... fortunately, not true.

The real weirdness of the game was the fact that it was a reasonably immersive game experience while it felt like, well, a game. The theme of the game was already about questioning what was real and what was not. Similarly, one could look at the game scene and just look it in a two different ways: Here we have bustling streets of the crusade-era cities in the Holy Land; squint a little bit, and you see Guards and Benches and Hideouts and Hand-holds and People Carrying Stuff and Those Lepers That You Want To Punch In The Nose and whatnot. On one hand, the game has an immersive world, easily masking the feeling that you are just playing a game. On the other hand, it doesn't really even try: The environment is pretty, yet the immersiveness is just there to mask how basically simple the game is.

But the good thing is, the "mask" isn't there to try to hide an awful truth about the pointlessness of the game. No, the game itself has just the right amount of stuff to do to feel complex enough and interesting enough, without - yes - spoiling it with too much detail. The game is there. The plot is there. Everything is in its place; the whole game is a giant analytical exercise. Just not as much as, say, Thief series; at least this time the game does the crunching and filing for you. You're not piecing 2+2 together and painstakingly getting the 4; you're just playing the game this time, and leave the math to Altaïr.

In short, I felt Assassin's Creed was a game experience unlike the games I've usually played, yet I'm definitely waiting for the sequel - this game was just on the easy side. The game was just fine, it just needs some variety.

OK, I'm not being very analytical today. Perhaps my rambling about Halo 2 will be better...

K.K. Slider sings some more!

2009-03-24T18:30:39Z

Sooo... a guy called Pieter synthesizes relatively simple MIDIs to wave files. No big deal, right?

It is, if he first ripped the SoundFont from Animal Crossing: Wild World... and painstakingly tweaked the MIDIs to sound exactly like K.K. Slider's songs.

Not only we have here excellent renditions of Nintendo tracks, but also some other game tracks and indisputably classic songs of all kinds. I was in tears when I hear K.K.'s rendition of Eagles' "Hotel California". (Or is it "K.K. Hotel"?) And I was struck by both the epicness of the Mii choir and the mindblowing harmony of K.K.'s interpretation of DragonForce's "Through the Fire and Flames". (Or, since the picture features K.K: in Smashville, is it "Through The Fire and Foxes"?)

Final Report: Halo

2009-03-21T12:43:10Z

4 days ago, I beat Halo: Combat Evolved (The Xbox Originals release, available from XBL).

I'm a Metroid guy, so the general immature gaming public probably expects me to rip the game to pieces with the sheer hate of the Other Platform. I'm picturing myself as a bit of an intellectual and a snob, so people would probably expect me to hammer the game heavily, verily, for being an Average And Overhyped Example of its Kind.

You know what? To hell with all that. I had fun.
]]> Metroid fan like Halo? For all these long years, I've been a big fan of Metroid Prime games, and all these long years, Metroid Prime has been contrasted and compared with Halo, and rabid fan-masses have been going at each other's throats. If we ask fans, we'll never an impartial analysis of who would win if Samus and John-117 (or any other Spartan) fought.

I can now pretty definitely say that I liked both Halo and Metroid Prime - though for different reasons. There's just too many differences between the two series to make a meaningful full-on comparison. However, if you pick a random representative moment of gameplay from both games, you'll probably see me shooting up baddies with same sort of joy and enthusiasm. They aren't that difficult in that respect.

But there are so many little differences. A lot of fanboys get stuck on comparing which series has better music. In my opinion, Halo has an excellent soundtrack as far as incidental music goes; the composers apparently decidedly made the entire soundtrack situation-based rather than going to the "Peter and the Wolf" direction (...though what's wrong with wolves and horns? nothing! Absolutely nothing!). Metroid Prime, however, revels with leitmotifs; music is largely locational rather than situational, and only bosses tend to get their own themes; the musicians purposefully reuse old themes.

The ways the games present stories, and how the missions are laid out, are vastly different. Halo uses what I'd describe a "tried and true linear media approach". The story is organised into levels that are dotted with scripted events and cutscenes. The story is told to you in form of direct conveyance; you're essentially watching a film where sometimes you have to do something. Metroid Prime games, however, decidedly don't organise the story in any way: The only times when story is directly conveyed to the player is where the environment really needs the player's attention. For vast majority of other material, Metroid Prime uses similar technique as is used in the Thief series, just that instead of random letters and books, you get random data analyses in form of scan visor scans; you'll get the backstory bit by bit and need to put the pieces together in your own head. In my opinion, this makes MP much more game-like what comes to narration structure; you can watch films and cutscenes all you want, but you're not really doing anything new and "game-like". This could be a matter of taste, but one must always remember why you are playing the game; one could chastise Halo for the same syndrome that some people accuse the newer end of Final Fantasy series and especially the Metal Gear Solid series of: they're pretty good as interactive movies, they have great stories if you are just there to follow the story, but nothing to write home about specifically as games... You could say the game is nothing but a few epic SF story cutscenes plus a few severely cloned pipe-run levels. Metroid Prime, on the other hand, treats the major points of the story and further details as something that's pretty inconsequential and can be ignored; I'm sure the mating habits of Sheegoths is quite an interesting topic, but that sort of stuff is better relegated to the data banks and requires further study when you're not being currently mauled by one.

As a final note from preliminary Halo/MP comparisons, I have to say that Metroid Prime developers kept the graphics style admirably consistent; MP1 had very good graphics (much better than Halo, in my opinion - everything polished, more neat little effects), MP2 had similarly good graphics, MP3 kept the style despite the higher CPU power in the Wii. By comparison, Halo: CE looks horribly dated compared to Halo 3.

Then to the snobbery claims - is Halo an actually good game that deserves the title of a definitive classic?

Not necessarily, but it's definitely in my list of really fun games that accomplish their goals and surprised me.

The early levels were good examples of this. The basic premise is the same as always: Go shoot the bad guys. Then you get teammates. You get vehicles. Camaraderie. Adventure. Steel on steel. The stuff of legends.
Then you get spookies that scare no one and basically a remake of Doom for the last few levels. *sigh*

In conclusion, I think Halo looks like a game that I like. I'm now playing Halo 2, and playing Halo 3 on multiplayer.

Godot or Matlock?

2009-02-15T20:39:56Z

...or an experiment of how many copyrighted properties you can cram in a single picture. But I've never needed more than 20 cups of coffee to snap a single picture from a video game. That's one of my rules.

The screenie is from Animal Crossing: Let's Go to the City. My characters in this series have usually been formed through the ardourous process of "whatever starts making sense". The other day, I picked up a nice head-mounted display, got some detective gear earlier, and today, I managed to somehow turn the hair white. And to complete the thing, went to get some damn coffee.

Though since the Shampoodle girl misunderstood my "CRAZY" direction, I'm not sure if I ended up with Godot (as intended) or Matlock. Well, at least it's got plenty of that lock!

(Originally posted in my deviantART scraps)

Xbox 360, one month later

2009-02-01T17:27:10Z

I got my Xbox 360 in December 30, 2008, and it's now February 1, 2009 - when my Xbox Live Gold trial was supposed to run out (but didn't, because I obviously renewed it =).So, (puny) 460 gamer points later, it's a good time to ramble a little bit on how a self-professed Nintendo geek has so far survived in the Microsoft world.

The short answer, of course, is that while it has been a little bit bumpy ride, in the end, I'm very happy.

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If there has been one thing that I haven't liked, it's the user interface, of which I'll probably post a long comparative rambling later on. While NXE is not really that bad and it's probably one of the better user interfaces Microsoft has designed, it's got a whole lot of weird sides. I guess it's just the same old thing the geeks say: Never trust a company that puts "Shut down" under "Start" to design a user interface.

I've so far liked the Xbox 360 games because they've given me very different games than I usually play. Specifically, the kind of games I've always wanted to play, but since I'm a Nintendo/Linux geek, there's just no opportunity to play them any more now that the multi-console stuff isn't coming that easily to Nintendo side. Getting Soulcalibur IV, for example, was a no-brainer; I liked SC2 on GameCube. Wii would be a perfect thing for hardcore players, if there only were more core-gamer-friendly games for that thing - oh boy, multiplayer strategy games would rule, and if they used Metroid Prime 3 engine for a net game, that would be amazing...

I've started playing the Halo trilogy, and I'm almost half through the first game, if the level selector is to be believed. It was hard for a Metroid fanboy to hit the reality and try expand the horizons, but hey, we're all here to nobly learn some tolerance for differing systems and other crap like that. And after the month is up, I can safely say that while there's differences in the games, the fan wars are unjustified and they're both game series that worthwhile gamers really should try out. But perhaps I'll still love Metroids more at this time. We'll see how this develops after I actually try the multiplayer modes. =)

Xbox Live Arcade gets one tip of a hat, at least for "OMG THEY HAVE DOOM AND WORMS FOR CHEAP, BUY BUY BUY". Any service that effortlessly lets me buy games that I've always wanted is good. (OMG I SWEAR I'LL BUY ALL C64 GAMES FROM WII SHOP CHANNEL ONE DAY =) ...

So so far, this has been a great experience. I hope having both Xbox 360 and Wii will also mean that I'll post more stuff to this blog in this year. Only time will tell...

The enemy of my enemy...

2009-01-02T15:22:00Z

The last few days have been quite interesting. The end of the year is the time of cheap games, for starters.

My new year's celebrations were held this time in Animal Crossing: Let's Go to the City. This game seems quite interesting so far, though I have to say the game doesn't hit me like the previous parts did. Wasting time is starting to feel like wasting time!

Aside of that, I have, right at hand, a brand new system that was, to say the least, quite WTFy to get (to abuse innocent commas). It seems that this generation of consoles is really full of weird acquisitionary WTFs!

So here I am, a new owner of an XBox 360. I figured that simply having a Wii won't cut it, and a serious gamer needs two next-gen consoles: Wii gets amazing interesting games and XBox 360 will get many of the remaining massive multiplatform megahits, since Wii doesn't necessarily have the marbles to run the bigger titles. Oh, to get Soul Calibur IV! Oh, to get a smooth-running TES4: Oblivion!

The first big WTF moment was the package contents. You know the stereotype: "Nintendo is for kids, the $alternateconsoleoftheday is for Real Men." Well damn! If they want to enforce that stereotype, maybe they should pick the pack-in titles with a bit more care.

On the left: The totally hardcore rad-to-the-max pack-in game bundle (from late 2008).
On the right: The flimsy kiddie pack-in demo (from early 2005).

This was all the game store had. I may eventually try these games. Eventually.

Back to the two-platform approach for a bit. While on the holidays, I was joking to my sister that maybe they should make hardcore gamer bags that would carry both Wii and XBox 360. But when I saw the unpacked console, I had a very distinct sinking feeling. I had been under the impression that XBox 360 was going to be smaller and sleeker than its predecessor, but never in my life I could have anticipated how - pardon for not coming up with a more apt description - f*ng huge this thing is. F*ng metal chassis. F*ng huge connectors at the end of the cables. F*ng gigantic "please insert the plug in a power outlet fed by a medium-sized nuclear reactor" power supply (and I thought Wii's big power supply was a minus). I'm afraid no bag on this Earth can possibly carry this thing. (Or maybe I'll use my iron-reinforced camping backbag on my next holiday trip...)

Then, the connections. My eyebrows rose when I saw that Wii only supported WLAN out of box, but so far, this has worked pretty well practically. Thus, my eyebrows rose even further when I saw XBox 360 supported Ethernet out of box, but not WLAN! ...and came with an Ethernet cable that was way too short for my use. The store had 5 m cables, which were probably adequate but could be too short, so I got the next, longer one - a 10 m cable. Sold pre-knotted. Yay.

But aside of these little quirks, I've so far enjoyed XBox 360. I picked up BioShock, and aside of a few promo shots and a gigantic bunch of playing Thief and a nearly encyclopaedic knowledge of System Shock 2 (well, as encyclopaedic as anyone can have after about half a hour of playing...), I had no idea what to expect. A very pleasant and positive surprise indeed! I got Soulcalibur IV for pretty cheap, waltzed in the Xbox Live, was surprised by the somewhat low quality of the voice chat (but I suppose it's much better than no voice chat at all!), was amused by the fact that the first voice chat comment that I could make sense of from another player was something along the lines of "this lag is killing me", and pwn't the first match I could actually play in. (SC2 experience probably helps.)

Speaking of BioShock, I've long been a big sceptic of dual-stick controls - I've been a mouse-and-keyboard (or lock-on-the-target or lock-and-wiimote-zap, in case of Metroid Primes) kind of a guy. Now, it seems to me that the system doesn't entirely suck. As a gigantic Metroid fan, I obviously grabbed Halo 3, and was again somewhat positively surprised. A couple of pages of manual and one page of backstory explanation doesn't really help me a whole lot, but who cares, I got the basic idea pretty fast - just shoot whatever's trying to shoot you and run to the next room. ...and I ran out of ammo and it autosaved and basically I needed to grab weapons from a room with giant load of enemies and dodge and shoot and die a lot. Damn, if they want me to save the world, they should at least invest in some freaking energy guns! Oh well, I guess this will turn much more fun in time!

New year: step forth, step back

2009-01-02T14:54:16Z

A new year, and not much to report! Well, yet, anyway.

The new theme was practically picked at random, because I needed to rebuild the blog templates after mistakenly assuming Sandbox would not f*#%&k up the entire contents of the blog. ("Surely", my reasoning went, "this will not mess up my permalinks for good?" Nay, the theme works on a completely different premise and does mess up everything.) Aside of the fresh colour change, the sidebar has a new curious widget called "My Gamercard" - yes, I have Xbox 360 now. More on that shall be forthcoming!

But aside of that, it's a nice fun year ahead.

Trick bosses are annoying

2008-11-30T17:50:02Z

(A bit of a lull, and back to our ordinary scheduled blogging... more backlogged stuff coming soonish?)

Yesterday, I had was commenting on a rather ridiculous video and said a carefully weighed opinion. In case the video disappears, it's basically Chris-chan's ode to Playstation 3, a "life enchancement device" as he affectionately calls it. In case the video disappears, here's what I said:

I have had an occasional tendency to go in obsessive fanboy mode, but after this, I'll never ever feel bad afterwards - because I've never had even the slightest inclination to call my favourite things "life enhancement devices". My life's not ipso facto any better after pwning Mogenar today, dammit...

Well, actually, that Mogenar thing... that Mogenar thing... I think it's pretty much safe to say that games are just something that you buy to get more challenges and intellectual stimulation. They don't enhance your life; they make it harder and more interesting.

And Mogenar, if anything, is exactly the sort of thing that makes your life a hell.
]]> (Note: May have spoilers for Metroid Prime series)

In case you aren't following the links, Mogenar is the first "real" boss fight in Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. There's always a point in Metroid Prime series, it seems, where you get seriously stumped by an annoying Trick Boss. In Metroid Prime, I got stumped by, er, Flaaghra at first, because I was a newbie - and then, Thardus. The rest of the game was relatively straightforward. Metroid Prime 2: Echoes ramped this up by making the subbosses much harder than the real bosses: Boost Guardian and Spider Guardian were just hell.

And now, Mogenar. Basically, the annoying thing about the fight is that the boss has one damn way to damage it, and it's not easy. In fact, the boss is specifically designed so that as soon as average person shoots at it, they immediately realise they should have been a little bit faster. There's no unofficial way to whittle down the enemy's strength, just the tricky one. And obviously, the moment you get any damage done, the boss will stop doing whatever the hell it was doing and hint that it is about to regenerate all of that hard-won damage right back, and you have to stop trying to pathetically damage it and deal with that problem.

Okay, in the end, the boss fight wasn't really all that super hard. But it just depressed me for a while - especially when I was stuck with another trick boss fight in Tomb Raider: Anniversary!

(Note: ...and potential spoilers for Tomb Raider: Anniversary)

I managed to get a little bit less stressed about the Mogenar boss fight because I managed to look at the guides. After MP2, I'm much more inclined to look at walkthroughs again.

TRA's centaur boss was similar - less stress thanks to guide perusal. The trick to winning that fight was to do an adrenaline-rush shot, grab the centaur's shield with grappling hook, and use that to one's advantage. I figured out the shield part without any assistance. Too bad I didn't figure out the adrenaline rush part - because it was weird.

Basically, the adrenaline rush thing can make the centaur freeze - in two different states. If you succeed, you can grab the shield. If not, it's possible to make the centaurs collide and make one of them freeze in a state where you can't grab the shield.

*sigh* Bug or glitch? Oh well, it's all over now - and both bosses have been dealt with. I'm having fun again! My life is better!

Wii for Real: Yes, it works

2008-10-25T16:10:47Z

So, for the last few months, I've enjoyed Wii as a... um, new platform for playing GameCube games. Then, I got Super Smash Bros. Brawl, which was ultimately just improved Melee and the Serious Players could just stick to GC controller.

And this week's new highlights for me: Metroid Prime 3: Corruption and Tomb Raider: Anniversary. Both will need more rambling in due time, but here's some rambling on the topic of Controlling The Games. Of course, I was a little bit sceptical about how these much-raved-about Wii controls really work in real life, but my fears have subsided.
]]> Wii Sports (albeit quite well-done and entertaining technology demos...) and whole another thing to do "real" games.

Here's what I figured: In today's multi-platform-driven world, is there room for funky controllers? Sure, the world wants innovative ways to control the games, and Nintendo does this pretty well, but would the game companies forget about that and just do bog-ordinary ports of the games for Wii? Also, will the new and so far unusual control schemes actually work in old kinds of games?

Metroid Prime 3 and Tomb Raider: Anniversary are both quite certainly rooted in "old kinds of games". I've beaten the first two Metroid Prime games and, gameplay-wise, they've always felt to me like fairly typical FPSes, when you really get down to it. I had beaten Tomb Raider 1 and Tomb Raider: Legend; what really new can I expect at this point?

Well, I can now definitely say - even after a relatively short bout with both games - that the games are definitely in the "new but old" category.

The newness of the controls comes primarily from the method itself. The gameplay of Metroid Prime 3 is pretty much the same as before - just that now you actually have a pointing device and an old Quake-hand can keep doing the same ol' thing, it just took a little bit time to get used to use a proverbial stick instead of a proverbial lump of soap to control the game. There's a few "gimmicky" things (wow, actually workable door locks - colour me surprised), but overall, the control scheme is rooted on the same old principles... finally used in the proper manner.

Likewise, after beating Tomb Raider: Legend (twice), I was a bit worried how the controls work in Anniversary, but there's little to no worries... just that I need to point at the stuff I want dead. Stick says where I go! Pointer says where I point and look! It can't get much easier than this.

...oh well, this is one of those "I got a good idea and ran out of steam" type posts for this blog. I'll just say that the stuff has worked acceptably and I'm not worried what the future will hold.

Wisdom in Weird Places

2008-10-11T15:42:48Z

I grew in a fairly ordinary Lutheran faith, but if you want a honest analytic opinion, I've always considered myself an "eclectic believer". Intricacies and slavish following of the Scriptures matter less to me - what really matters to me are the Good Ideas.

Yet, for a long time, I have had this weird mental condition that prevents me from being open-minded. It's one of those weird things that have to be demolished if I'm really going to accept Good Ideas from around me.

The mental block is simple: Are computer games a valid source for religion, philosophy and ethics? Can the same thing be said about fiction in general?

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Perhaps it would be best to start from a long, long, long time ago - when the computer games could first expose me to things that are different from the Plain Old Boring Christian Ideals. That was way back in the Commodore 64 era.

Believe it or not, the first game to expose me to non-Christianity was... Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Okay, perhaps it was not just the game that did that. But the fact is, the Great Ninja Craze of Late 1980s/Early 1990s was the one got me interested of the Eastern philosophies - for real. I remember reading some of the eastern tales and thinking how profound that stuff was.

(Oh, and Shadow Warriors and The Way of the Exploding Fist and International Karate and someone even warez'd me PC Budokan and...)

Yet, here was this tiny little thing that conflicted with everything. Being a kid, it never occurred to me that it was actually okay to think for myself. I was learning about eastern philosophies kind of in secret. Yet, I'm pretty sure no one around me at the time would have minded if I had suddenly gone Zen Buddhist, it's just that it's not exactly conventional in where I lived.

Yet - no, conformity or peer pressure did not kill that budding clue that I had. What killed it was the plain ol' John 14:6.

Yeah. Here I was, learning all sorts of interesting and profound and completely harmless things about some very wise things other people had been saying about the Way of Things. And someone reminded me that the Wise Guy had said that no, his way is the right one and that way is the wrong one. Stated as plainly as possible. It didn't make any freaking sense, but there it was, written in the pages.

That kind of hurt, but I got over it with a shrug. Oh well. Time to strive for boring life, then.

But the episode left me one important lesson: It's okay that there are other cultures, there are other ways of thinking, and they can be pretty darn wise too. I feel I learned a lot of interesting things from that episode, and I am happy I did.

And most importantly, wisdom can be found from everywhere.

Now, flash forward to the 2000s. I'm playing very good old games, like the Ultima series and Thief: The Dark Project - and the odd thing is, I've noted that I really like game worlds with depth. The game worlds that I've enjoyed the most are the ones that put also thought in the religious and philosophical side of the world, because I like games that make us think.

I absolutely love Ultima VII Part Two: Serpent Isle's Ophidian dissection of virtues, for example. Summarised, in each of us, we have tendencies toward order and chaos, and these are best left balanced. Order likes ethicality, discipline and logic; chaos likes tolerance, enthusiasm and emotion. From balancing these pairs, we find harmony, dedication and rationality. Favouring order over chaos leads to prejudice, apathy and ruthlessness; favouring chaos over order leads to anarchy, wantonness and insanity.

This was well put! The designers spent a good while thinking of a really nice system of virtue for U7SI. Wouldn't that make sense as a belief system for real people? The game also delightfully explores what misunderstanding of these virtues means: the Ophidian civilisation is gone, and one of the reasons for that was a great war between followers of Order and followers of Chaos. The Avatar, who has had to deal with misunderstood virtues before, takes the quest to figure out what really should have been done in the first place - understand the Balance.

What does this all have to say about us? We all know people who seem to favour one direction over another, even dangerously close to reaching the bad end of their scale. I'm a Chaos person, pretty clearly; looking at the game, I know that without self-restraint and common sense it'd be terribly easy to slide to anarchy, wantonness and insanity. Time to tiptoe back and look at the Order side for inspiration, it seems.

But this is not why I'm rambling here. The real reason is this: People can dismiss this as fiction.

It's a work of fiction.

It's a brilliant piece of thinking, but it's fiction.

That's the awful part. And my realisation, and New Good Guideline that I'm probably going to damn follow well, is pretty simple: Human culture - bless its vivid hues, its complex textures, its expanse and just plain brilliant complexity - can come up with profound wisdom every-damn-where.

I'm sorry, syncretism can creep up on you. But it doesn't change the plain facts.

I've been following Fundies Say the Dardest Things for a while now, and I've found out one thing: some Fundamentalist Christians tend to be annoyed if someone suggests the Bible is written by people. Yet, they wouldn't spend a second thought calling someone else's holy book a work of fiction. They certainly wouldn't spend a second thought calling a fictional book of faith a work of fiction (except when it's Necronomicon, which is obviously not, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary).

It's a problematic situation, all around. The Bible is written by people, that has been proven, and despite of not exactly being up to standards compared to what passes for brilliant prose these days, it has a few good bits in it. As, I'm saying, is the case with many other holy books out there.

Even fictional ones.

For example, I've kept reading the Principia Discordia for a while now - yet again, heavens know how many times it has already been - and, you know, it's hard to dismiss the whole thing entirely as a joke. It just proves what I've said above: You can find wisdom - touching wisdom - in weird places.

If a piece of fiction makes you think, for God's sake, don't stop thinking.

If it makes you laugh and think, for God's sake, pass it on and don't crush it as heresy.

We need to celebrate human culture. Not just our culture, but everyone else's, too.

At the cost of being a heretic, I have to say I made a small mistake of being restrained too much by a single freaking verse. I want to be a part of the world. I want to know its wisdom.

[Image from Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, by Retro Studios / Nintendo. Someone else is being political. Are you thinking about that possibility?]