The Gameless Game

Final Report: Alan Wake

2010-05-30T09:01:53Z

After years of waiting, Alan Wake is here. And like all other such games in past, the power of Patriotism compelled me to pick it up and rejoice and play this magnificent, obviously flawless game. (Well, yeah, it's always good to support Finnish game development, but I still have to say this: Nothing interesting happens fast in this country.)
]]> So, is it any good? Yes. The atmosphere of the game is set almost perfectly. I also thought the release was perfectly timed: when I started playing the game, the weather outside was almost a perfect match for the mood in the game. This is the first time I've ever played a game that included smell. (And no, I got my copy of Leather Goddesses of Phobos from the Masterpieces of Infocom collection which didn't include the scratch 'n' sniff extras. Luckily.)

Alan Wake is yet another writer who is about to get devoured by dark creatures beyond human understanding, and he's going to keep pounding the keyboard through the whole ordeal, fully in accordance with the traditions of H.P. Lovecraft. Actually, that's not exactly how the game goes, but you can't deny that it's the intention. Plot-wise, Alan Wake seems to continue the same trend that Max Payne games started. Max Payne obviously started with the premise that attempts to create obvious originality isn't the path to success: In the ordinary everyday creative formula, making an enjoyable work of art is all about creating an interesting mixture of conventions and clichés. The fun comes from totally seeing what will happen, but not quite knowing exactly how the situation develops and how it all ends. Just like Max Payne, Alan Wake has, at the same time, an interesting an original plot, and a plot that heavily relies on conventions of the genre. Like Max Payne, Alan Wake spices the grim and gruesome cliché pot with some well-needed humour.

You just don't mind the fact that some of the things you encounter seem familiar when you've got evil monsters to mash. Game mechanics work well. When the night falls in the town of Bright Falls, the Taken, hollow shells of men touched by evil creatures beyond human understanding (...yadda, yadda, yadda...) come out of the shadows. Alan kills them with ye olde boomstick or other suitable weaponry... and with the assistance of the thing that the evil creatures beyond human understanding (...yadda, yadda, yadda...) really hate - light. Light from flashlight, car headlights, or flares makes the Taken vulnerable; bright light from flashbang grenades, flare guns and floodlights can destroy them outright. Places with light act as safe havens - and checkpoints. The use of lighting is beautiful, and it works particularly well in this game; bright lights harm the enemies, but also make it more difficult to see things that lurk in the dark. Flares annoy the enemies, but you have to be prepared for the fact that usually you can't see a damn thing either in the bright light. In short, light works just like you'd expect it to work.

I only have one big complaint about this game, and it's got more to do with the recent trends in general. The game was six years in the making, and I completed it in less than a week. I'm all for shorter games, but there is such thing as too short. Earlier this year, I picked up Assassin's Creed II and Mass Effect 2, and I hoped those titles would keep me busy for the rest of the spring. Nope! Assassin's Creed II had tons to play, but I've already got 1000 gamerscore out of it. Mass Effect 2? The number in the end stands for the number of weeks. Longer games, please.

There were some smaller problems in the game. People keep complaining about the screwed-up lip synch in cut scenes, but the makers only completely dropped the ball in a few scenes - not Earth-shattering, yes, but definitely noticeble, and I can understand why people are rightfully annoyed. The levels are interesting, but perhaps there's a little bit too little of variety. If you like a widely varied asskicking arsenal to choose weapons from and a gigantic varied bunch of different monsters to take out, this isn't your game - I didn't mind it much, but I couldn't help but to notice the fact. First encounters with the Taken could be worth a small clap, but after that, it doesn't seem too surprising any more. This is also the first game I've ever seen that made me notice how ridiculous the physics engines are: it feels as if the physics had been tacked on because Havok marketing department paid for it, and it adds very little to the actual gameplay. You can push crates and chairs over in this game. Exhilarating.

Also, the game was originally designed as a free-roaming sandbox game and it's now divided into episodes (and yes, they're really "episodes" in TV sense, complete with recaps in the beginning). I think that the use of cars in this game still reflects that, because the cars aren't used for anything particularly interesting. There's cars lying around, and you can grab them and drive to various places, but they're just that, random cars lying around. The cars don't even handle too well with the default controls; fortunately, the alternate control scheme at least feels sane. (We've played this Xbox thing. We know how to drive a Warthog.) Cars feel like a somewhat underutilised aspect of the game.

Overall, it's not the Jesus-game we were expecting, but it's a generally competently made game that was a lot of fun... while it lasted.

Ryzom opensourced

2010-05-08T09:49:55Z

A few days ago, I was a little bit surprised - though not much - by the open source release of Ryzom (actually even propped by the Free Software Foundation).

This is remarkable news. Art assets are included; this will hopefully mean less crappy-looking open source games. Game server and client source code will probably further the growth of open source MMORPGs and further the research on this field.

This was not entirely unexpected, because Nevrax folks did make some open source thingies earlier.

On a personal level, I find this rather weird, because I had some sort of weird, unexplainable affection for Ryzom, even when I've never played the game. I once had a weird dream in which I bought the game and went playing.

(Eh. Looks like me getting back to blogging just isn't working too well...)

Anyway - this looks great, and I hope we'll see a Linux client and Ye Olde Open Grinding Server. =)

Some notes on Halo: Reach beta

2010-05-05T14:27:37Z

I'm desperately trying to get back to blogging rut... so here's some observations on the Halo: Reach beta.

I'm usually not into demos, especially if we're talking about demos that eat up a gigabyte of disk space. But this is not a PC game, and I had bunch of free space on the Xbox 360 anyway. I had actually waited a long time to get this demo, and it has so far been just as awesome as I suspected.

Only thing is that it makes me post weird crap in screenshot filenames.
"MASTUR CEEFS FR1ST SNIEP EVAR" - yes, Arby 'n' the Chief is just this awesome.
"A PORTHOLE SNIEP rofl" - I swear, this thing is doing a number on my spelling abilities. That, or the game needs less Powerhouse. Less portholes = less rofls.
"OMG BEST SNIEP EVER" - I can actually snipe a person from across this tiny room and make them fall face down on the floor! I must be the best Halo player ever! It is decided, I shall make a montage or something.

Another thing is that the playlists have so far had too much of game modes that I've seen in Halo 3, and the new game modes appear too rarely. Dammit, I hope there'll be more Elite stuff and Invasion and Headhunter and perhaps even "if your feet touch the ground you're dead, so keep using those jetpacks". Team Slayer is still awesome, but it'd be sweet to see more of these new modes. If you have to test old modes, at least put in Grifball.

Also, there are a few minor irritating deficiencies that I'm concerned about. I expected a lot more based on the multiplayer trailer, and these deficiencies are very blatant.

Allow me to illustrate.
]]> Halo Reach Multiplayer Trailer.

Just look at that lighting - really moody! And look at this:

This is pretty damn spectacular. And then there's this:

And they even show an awesome close-up in the end of the video:

Now, what I'd really want to know is this: Why isn't this in the actual multiplayer beta? I know it's not really a multiplayer feature per se, but still, it's prominently used in the trailer, so I expected it would be in place. This is actually one of the features I really look forward to, because it's implemented in so few games these days. The last game I saw this in was the original QuakeWorld version of Team Fortress, and that was just there for opening cinematic, and it was entirely sprite-based - modern computers and consoles can handle it in 3D just fine. I'm sure machinima folks would love to see more of this. It would make life easier and all that.

Please, Bungie, put floating 3D letters in the final game. Floating 3D letters are frigging awesome. And the Reach font is pretty sweet too.

###

Update: I spoke too soon! The same afternoon I posted this, I was able to see a weird Forerunner code floating in the air in one game. Okay, it's not 3D, but I pray and hope floating 3D text will be added to the final game!

My knowledge of the Forerunner texts is a little bit limited, since I don't really know all that much about the backstory (besides of what I saw in Halo Legends and the games), but based on the familiar symbols I'd say it says something like "The Bomb is the Crazy King [Forerunners used weird word orderings, so this probably means something along the lines of "Crazy King is da Bomb"], and it's demanded Loudly, but the Lockers [a minced oath, probably] who Crossed us and Targeted us with Bitterness [lozenge shape referring to salmiak] demand that we play a shitton of Capture the Flag." Then comes a bunch of really bone-chilling swearing and rants, which boils down to "we had to play 7924159 games of 1 Flag CTF and got to play only 364 games of all of the fun game types". Gee! History repeats itself in this beta!

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.

]]>
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.