The Gameless Game

Hearing voices in the darkness

2012-01-23T20:22:19Z

[First, a procedural note: I think this is the umpteenth time I need to assure you that I’m going to blow away the dust from this blog and keep babbling, etc etc etc. I won’t waste much time on that. I’ll just briefly assure you to that I’m going to put some stuff here that I’m posting on Playfire. Some people there seem to like my babblings. Might as well put them here too. Expect epic Skyrim diaries and random whining on various topics.]

This is a really pointless and a geeky tale, but it probably should be told. Game blogs must have to have pointless and geeky tales, after all.

Yesterday, my head didn’t quite work. My head only somewhat cleared by midnight, as I was sort of expecting my friend to show up for a round of Halo Wars.

And what an anticipated game session it was. A friend of mine was playing Halo Wars around the time I got my Xbox 360 a couple of years ago, so obviously I rushed to get a copy so we might play the game together. That didn’t happen, unfortunately, and he’s been too busy to play many games at all. But recently, he got Gold and we played tons of Halo: Reach. Obviously, it was time to make up for the lost time.

Which is easier said than done, because as far as I can tell, neither of us are real-time strategy geeks. I’ve been a bit less enthusiastic about Halo Wars online - the folks in XBL matchmaking seem to eat noobs for breakfast.

]]> So, midnight came. 1 AM came. A kettleful of Earl Grey, Hot, became Not So Hot, then Somewhat Coldish.

Some loopiness started to creep in my head. There had been an update to the optional media components to the Xbox 360 lately, so I managed to test what Sintel looks like on 360 nowadays. Previously, the 1280×544 version didn’t work, and I had to settle for the 1024×436 version. Nowadays, the 1280×544 version seems to work fine… except for the fact that the download page only has a link to the 5.1 version, which doesn’t work. Stereo version works, and apparently still exists in the mirrors, albeit unlinked.

And the loopiness continued.

I decided to put the loopiness to good use while waiting for my friend to show up.

(A side note, which in no way spoils the story: My friend was cheerfully dozing and didn’t show up until well after 2 AM. Dammit, seems like everyone has problems sleeping these days! I swear, I was that close to checking out whether or not I have a DVD of Dark City - turns out yes - and deciding whether or not to watch it while waiting for him to show up. =)

Before I venture any further to my madness, I would like to mention a curious detail, which is often overlooked.

“Wireless controller”. That’s what the package says. “Wireless”. With symbols that denote wirelessness, and all that rot. Please keep that in mind.

Now, I have had this curious audio setup with my Xbox 360 for a while now, and now it was time to expand it.

I have a nice set of headphones. I thought it would be cool if I could route my Xbox 360 headset stuff through them.

Xbox 360 headsets are weird because they actually use a standard headset plug. I can actually plug it on my cellphone and it works.

(…yes, a year-old Nokia phone. Compatible with Microsoft hardware. This was a grim spectre of things to come.)

Of course, that’s just about the only other port I have that can take headsets - my PCs and whatnot take standard mic/headphone jacks, and I don’t have a headset adaptor.

Or do I? Turns out I have. Specifically made for 360, no less.

I originally bought this thing because I thought it might route the audio from the 360 directly to the headset, but I had ignored the part of the instructions where this huge obvious bundle of cable gets plugged to the television headphone output. (I’m a software guy. I have an annoying tendency to assume that the hardware is omnipotent when in reality it’s the part of the system that’s always too slow and always too painful to kick.)

Now, maybe many the television sets in the space-year 2012 do have headphone jack receptables, as nowadays customers aren’t entirely dumb anymore, but my television is a bit older and was bought, on the cheap, by my parents years and years ago. (This is never stated too often, but it’s too frequently forgotten - you don’t let your parents do electronics shopping, kids.)

But I realised that thanks to my awesome new sound routing setup that allows me to actually use headphones with my 360, I might actually be able to use this adapter.

I could actually plug the thing to my amplifier device, and it works just fine with the headphones. But I also needed a microphone. Let’s see…

Uh, yeah, it’s a microphone all right. A microphone with telescope setting for video cameras. Definitely studio quality. It’s bloody battery-operated. If this isn’t good enough for gaming, I don’t know what it is.

…and I didn’t even have to pay for it.

However, the microphone does have a small problem.

Remember what I told you to keep in mind? Yes.

The connection itself is quite clean.

Yeppers. It’s connected nicely, it’s bulky as hell, there’s bloody wires going everywhere - oh, I completely forgot to mention the play&charge cable - but it is not quite difficult to use.

And I could still hear all of the stuff from Xbox 360’s sound output. It’s a shame you can’t directly hook up headphones to the 360, but it’s not really a big deal. You just plug the Xbox 360 to your existing amplifier.

…except I didn’t have my amplifier ready. The old amplifier wants DIN plugs, and no one uses DIN plugs in this advanced decade of ours. So instead, I used…

…my sister’s old PowerBook, now acting as the world’s most awesome Wi-Fi enabled amplifier.

I’m generally ambivalent about Apple (as in “they’re pretty okay, I guess, just wish some of the policies were different”), but the laptops are bloody amazing. This thing is half a decade old, and it still serves perfectly well as a lapto—- um, the power jack is broken so it’s better not move it too much. It’s a stationary small-profile computer. Ahem, it works perfectly well as a net browsing machine and a writing comp—- …pardon me, the keyboard is finally dying after all these years. OK, USB ports definitely work so all is not lost…

…The bottom line: It runs Audacity. Unlike my new netbook, it actually has both line-in and headphone jacks. With Audacity up and line monitoring enabled, It can route audio between these ports just fine. I can just plug in this contraption of mine to the headphone jack and—-

…bloody hell, the headphone jack is getting finicky too. (*sigh*)

…We may yet get a few more years of service out of these parts. We must do our utmost.

Well well. Time to game.

Finally, my friend arrived and we had an awesome game. It just turns out that the mic has to be set to the telescopic mode and I need to hold the mic really close to my mouth for it to register the speech. It gets really awkward.

Too bad I’m not that much of a chatting person. Slightly awkward and all that. I’m not very talkative, especially when I try to focus on the actual game.

Like so:

So it does work, but not very stellarly. I need a microphone stand or something, which I actually don’t have at hand. I think I need to somehow figure out how to use the headset mic instead of this ridiculous thing.

Perhaps… I need some kind of a mixer.

…I think my father has an old 4-channel mixer in the closet. I could just route the netbook’s sound output to the amp so I could have independent mixing of game sounds, instant message notifications and all tha—-

—-somebody please stop me before I get more ideas.

The point is, you can have awesome time setting up crazy stuff like this without spending too much money, even. Won’t help you play better, but it gets fun soon.

Game Boy runs again!

2011-09-15T11:59:28Z

Time to blow some dust off of this blog. I at least hope to update the blog more often nowadays - I’ve fully upgraded the blog to use Melody features now, it’d be shame to let all that go to waste.

In 21st August, there was an interesting thread in reddit on dead Game Boys.

Nintendo builds surprisingly resilient hardware, and it’s fairly odd that the Game Boy is so far the only Nintendo product that failed on me. I got my Game Boy shortly after its launch in early 1990s, and played many games on it.

I felt I sort of grew out of Game Boy. My GB library consisted of platformers, and I started to dislike platformers. (Nowadays, I just dislike some platformers. I rather enjoy Castleroids.)

But I got my interest in Game Boy back - my sister started playing Pokémon and got her own Game Boy Color. RPGs on Game Boy? Awesome. In 2000s, I was actually inspired to get a Game Boy Advance, which still remains my favourite Nintendo handheld of all time because of the awesome game library. RPGs on the go!

Of course, with the GBA, I didn’t really need my Game Boy for anything. In 2005, I tried to use my old Game Boy again.

No luck.

]]> It wouldn’t turn on.

It happened to be shortly after John Paul II died - I just concluded that Game Boys don’t work during a papal interregnum. Or something like that. Or there might be some other reason that a mere software guy like me cannot possibly understand. The Hardware works in mysterious ways that mere mortals cannot comprehend.

But now, I just followed the advice of an user in the thread: Open it up, see if the cables are loose. I opened it up. Nothing seemed to be out of place. I put it back together.

It worked again.

These are not exactly the freshest batteries, so I didn’t just leap out and play through Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Fall of the Foot Clan. (I did fire up my GameCube and played the game on Game Boy Player. Got to the fourth level. Very disappointing, because I prided on ability to play the game through easily enough. Guess I’ll try swapping the jump and attack to proper places next time…)

But still - with a bit of cartridge blowing, Tetris and Super Mario Land fired up just fine. Yay.

Hmm, maybe I should finally beat TMNT2 and Super Mario Land 2…

Minecraft got me

2011-05-05T12:17:54Z

I don’t usually bother with PC games these days, aside of really old titles. The reason is that all newer titles tend to have a horrible, horrible lag. And I’m speaking of “newer” as in “contemporaries of The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.” Old computers. What I can say. If it can run Doom 3, it can run anything. Currently, I’m mostly playing games on my Xbox 360, because it can actually run Oblivion at a constant playable framerate. I don’t need to drag down the difficulty. I don’t need to make precise, calculate and conscious movements. I don’t need to swear at the enemies who circle me just because turning around will cause gigantic bunch of lag while the enemy stabs me to death.

So, it may be come as a surprise that I actually bought Minecraft - thought I should get it while it’s cheap. I thought that I might be able to play the game well, but it turns out that on default settings, I’m experiencing just as bad lag as I do on Oblivion. Quite an achievement!

But it turns out that running the game on my sister’s old PowerBook G4 with over a gigabyte of memory is actually possible. Using normal render distance is pretty futile, but using short or tiny view distance helps.

That, or I can do what I did in Oblivion and just set the difficulty to Peaceful and not worry about combat. Though, that is what sucks in PC games.

So, it’s time to follow in the footsteps of one of the great literary heroes…

…and construct a crude dwelling.

In the dead of night, my pickaxe keeps swinging as I mine iron, coal and pure humbug. Aboveground, the lights flare in the night, a shining beacon that indicates that civilisation has once been here.

What remains to be seen? The future is truly open.

(“King of the Klondike”, by Don Rosa, © Disney.)

Bonus: Today, I came across reason #3212 on why I can’t wait until I’ll actually meet wolves in this game. =)

Stopping the snake

2011-04-29T10:33:31Z

Or “Some of my earliest geek-out memories, part n”.

Without going too far into specifics, there’s one person in my family who likes video games.

So much, in fact, that it sort of annoyed me when I was a kid. Using my Spectravideo SV-318 to play my games. (Boooohooo!) Specifically, my copy of Boa. Kids these days probably know this game as “that old snake game that has been cloned umpteen times”.

So, being a proper geeky computer kid, I added password protection to the game.

]]> This was pretty simple, because Boa was written in BASIC.

Of course, Spectravideo’s BASIC being a Microsoft product, this meant that the interpreter was notoriously easy to use, and notoriously insecure. Or deliberately “exposing” the “dangers” of open source. Or something like that.

Specifically, the interpreter helpfully labelled all function keys, so that even the other family member who doesn’t really know all this computer programming stuff guessed that list command, on F4, shows the program listing. With a little bit of figuring out, they could find the part where the password is asked, and find the password from the program listing. Password found. Game on.

So one day, this other family member was showing the game to some other people. Of course, I had changed the password, so the game didn’t run. Never worry, just look at the listing… though that probably turned out to be far more puzzling this time.

…raw source code is here, in case you have VB.NET and you’re curious if this still compiles:

110 SCREEN1
130 DATA 86,73,67,79,78,72,89,86,65
140 DIM A$(9)
150 FORI=1TO9
160 A$(I)=CHR$(C)
170 NEXT
180 DIM B$(9)
190 FOR I=1TO9
200 B$(I)=INPUT$(1)
210 NEXT
220 FORI=1TO9
230 IF A$(I)<>B$(I)THEN RUN
240 NEXT
240 SCREEN 0

It appears that my programming style had no consistency at the time; the spacing is pretty confusing. Now, with a couple of decades more worth of programming experience, I’m also aware that security through obscurity isn’t probably the best possible strategy, but it did work at the time. Too bad I had saved an unprotected version on the other side of the tape and had told the said family member where this version is available, but at least I heard an admit of defeat. Yeah, honour-system security definitely isn’t a good idea either. Or security measures that basically just exist to show how smart you are.

But still, this was really fun.

If you can’t read BASIC, the program basically interprets the stuff on line 120 as ASCII codes, reads 9 characters from keyboard, and compares them to the characters in question. So, if I just whip out the ASCII table (I don’t have the SV-318 manual at hand, so I’ll just pop out the OS X terminal and type “man ascii” - glad ASCII hasn’t changed that much), the password turns out to be VICONHYVA (“VIC on hyvä” = “VIC is good”). I suppose this was after I had gotten my VIC-20. And again, a bit of idiocy - I have no idea why I said it’s so good, it’s definitely not as fun as the Spectravideo… Rooting for the underdog, I guess. I’m pretty sure it was not a case of picking a password that’s completely contrary to what I was thinking and thus throwing people off.

Dragon Age II or Torchlight? Which is it?

2011-03-15T10:08:51Z

March 9 saw, at least for me, one of the most anticipated video game releases this spring: Torchlight, for Xbox Live Arcade. It is a surprisingly well-crafted action RPG featuring tons of fun monster slaughter.

March 10 saw, at least for me, one of the most anticipated video game releases this spring: Dragon Age II. It is a surprisingly well-crafted action RPG featuring tons… of… fun… monster slaughter. Wait a second, where did I hear this before?

]]> First of all, let me say that I’m incredibly happy that we get awesome action RPGs for consoles - even when these days, drawing line between action RPGs and turn-based RPGs is becoming fuzzier and fuzzier. I have to say that I didn’t really consider “damage per second” a RPG statistic before. Now, I got two games that basically use that exact statistic.

But still, this has been really a great huge series of deja vus. When I heard that Torchlight is basically a Diablo II clone, I was excited - randomly generated dungeon crawlers are a criminally underrepresented genre these days, especially on consoles. But my word, does Torchlight ever rip off Diablo II. When I hear the word “clone”, I think of taking the best ideas and putting them in the stirring pot and coming up with something unique and interesting that still seems familiar to the fans of the inspring game. But hell, Torchlight is a clone. Ooh!

There’s a much odder thing in this soup, though: I have trouble remembering which game I’m playing.

It’s funny, really, that both games are essentially the same. Both games feature killing monsters in interesting real-time combat system and grabbing loot that gives you plusses. Yay. Sure, Dragon Age II has much higher production values and every environment has been constructed by hand, as opposed to random generation. Still, Dragon Age II, so far, has also suffered from Mass Effect’s biggest problem: side missions in cookie cutter environments. Yet, these missions are still fun and interesting and hand-made, as opposed to Torchlight’s “Go to dungeon level X and kill monster Y”.

And somehow, I have severe problems remembering which stats I needed to put points in… and which character needed those stats. Which character in which game.

Still, they’re both awesome games, even when my coffee-addled brain can’t sometimes tell the difference. I just have to follow obvious clues. “Oh, this game has a plot. It’s got to be DA2, then.”

Dragon Age II further cemented one odd thought in me: dammit, the west is definitely getting back its coolness. As much I’ve liked Final Fantasy series, Bioware and Bethesda have pulled me back to western RPGs. Why? Fun gameplay. Compelling storytelling. Don’t get me entirely wrong, I’ve sort of enjoyed Final Fantasy XIII so far, but the underlying mechanics still seem fairly antiquated and while the story is definitely passable, it lacks a bit of giveadamnitude.

And speaking of Final Fantasy VII… In Dragon Age II, you can go around whacking monsters in the head with a bigass two-handed sword of epic leetery. And I’ll try to avoid spoiling either game much, but I think one of the characters managed to out-badass Jenova. In the first chapter. Not an easy feat, that.

And before you mention anything about crying in Final Fantasy VII, let me just say that I didn’t. But I did cry in the end of Mass Effect 2’s Overlord. Bioware wins again!

It's not a very social network, is it?

2011-03-03T13:08:00Z

We live in a rather strange era where social networks seem to be on the rise, but where nobody seems to know how to properly build one yet.

Years ago, before the hubbub about Web 2.0 stuff, we had people thinking of how to make money out of the websites - and this invariably meant that no money was made out of the websites, because you can’t make money out of nonexistant websites. Now, we have websites, but development is still hampered by people who want to figure out how to make money out of the situation.

Sometimes, you just can’t make money off of core functionality. And this is the annoying truth behind social networking. This is not a problem in itself, because you can make money out of other things. The problem is when people say “we can’t make money out of that” and refuse to build the core functionality to begin with.

This is almost like having a power company refusing to sell electricity because they’re still busy figuring out how to profit from selling wiring services. The real power companies wouldn’t worry about wiring; they get profit from selling power to the consumers. They don’t need to care about who wires the houses as long as they’re wired according to the standards.

]]> And that brings us to the social aspects of videogaming.

One of the biggest events in gaming world recently was the fact that a rather prominent website, MyGamerCard.net, went down.

MyGamerCard was an unofficial site for accessing Xbox Live data. It was supported by Microsoft. Life was good. This is what Web 2.0 stuff is supposed to be about, right? We have data sharing between sites and people can do unofficial things with their own information.

Of course, the problem is that Xbox Live isn’t an entirely open system. Microsoft has a community developer program, but if XBL was fully within the spirit of Web 2.0 things, they would give us - everyone - full access to publicly available data. And, as MyGamerCard alleges, things didn’t work too well even if you were an official community developer.

Let me guess: Somewhere in Microsoft, someone is busy trying to think how to monetise core functionality. This leads to stagnation. That’s why services like MyGamerCard have trouble operating.

Incidentally, when I had to update my sites to get the old xbox.com-based iframe gamercards back, I could no longer find the instructions on how to embed the gamercard on the xbox.com website. The instructions used to be there and the service still operates as it did before, but it seems that they’ve been mopped out after the update. Are they trying to make the system dwindle down like this? Or were they also sort of relying on MyGamerCard.net?

In any case, one of the fundamental things in systems development is that data access services get developed as a natural byproduct of developing systems in the first place. We have systems that house data; it’s obvious that we also need to access the data somehow. The social web services, these days, are just about accessing the data from further away and doing interesting things with the data. People and businesses who charge access to the data are usually doing it because that’s the only form of business that they can think of. Yes, I know, I’m calling phone companies parasites here, but that’s basically what they are; they’ve laid down some wire and given you a number and now they’re charging you money for using the lines just because. The city I live in offers net access for free. I guess they’re using taxpayer money in good ways.

You can justify selling access if the data to which you’re selling access actually has some monetary value, but does gameplay data actually have monetary value to ordinary citizens? In general, looking at times when people play games or seeing achievement details has social value, but little monetary value. And this social value is what companies like Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo should stop trying to monetise for the sake of monetisation.

In short, we can’t build social networks until we’ve realised that some things have only value for social interaction. If someone figures out a way to make money out of it, that’s good, but don’t hold back until someone gives us some sort of a half-arsed money making scheme. We’ve seen those fail before, and if we keep on going on that road, we keep seeing them fail.

Quake Arena Arcade: Weirdness incarnate

2011-02-20T14:02:00Z

I’m a long-time fan of Quake games, but paradoxically I’ve not played that much, because I’m not much of a PC gamer. There’s also the big problem that I suck at FPSes. I’ve fired up Quake games now and then just for some random fun. Quake III Arena remains my overall multiplayer favourite, though the original Quake was, in my mind, one of the most remarkable games ever. (And the original Team Fortress for Quake was my initial eye opener for the idea that multiplayer Internet games just might be the thing of the future.) I liked Urban Terror, but haven’t played that for a while either. These days, I mostly use Q3A to reset the Linux X11 display if some full-screen app crashes and leaves me with a weird resolution after locking up the key combos for changing resolution.

However, over the recent two years, I’ve been acquainting myself with FPSes again - this time through Halo series. Halo 3 and Halo: Reach have been very nice experiences to me, because nobody gives a damn if you suck and there’s a good chance that there’s always someone who sucks more than you do. I’ve usually bounced around the mid-scorelist; sometimes I’ve sucked, sometimes I’ve done much better. Everything is fine!

But Halo is “Quake for retards”, right? Surely you can’t learn anything about real gaming when playing Halo? This is strictly speaking not true; I had not played Quake series for ages, but when I checked in Quake Live after a long Halo streak, I noticed that my FPS skills had, in fact, gone a little bit up. Practice appears to be practice, no matter what the form it takes.

…and then Quake Live went out of beta, added advertisements, and made my not-exactly-ancient-but-perfectly-adequate-for-Quake-III-Arena computer time out of games. Wonderful. The days of Quaking were gone forever. Or were they?

Nope! id Software sure had priorities straight when they actually released an Xbox 360 version of Quake III Arena, nowadays titled Quake Arena Arcade. As soon as I heard this thing was actually released, I had to grab it.

I think it’s just appropriate that I list some of the Sunday Quake Gamer’s Initial Experiences on Reuniting With the Almighty Quake III Arena.

]]> Day 1: Weird - there weren’t actually any multiplayer games going on when I started the thing up for the first time. Unbelievable. I mean, even Shadowrun had some games going and people popped in to play Perfect Dark Zero almost every day I tried it. (OK, it’s not so outlandish: I have had severe problems finding Gears of War 2 games too.)

I had to start up the single-player campaign. The first real thoughts about the game proper: HOLY SHIT, LOOK AT THE FRAMERATE.

After some time reminiscing about good ol’ times in Q3A/QAA’s not particularly impressive “campaign”, I managed to find some actual games. And coming almost straight off from Halo Reach, I had to say one thing: it’s not the speed that kills, it’s the speed difference. HOLY SHIT LOOK AT THE GAME TEMPO.

Speaking of Halo: Reach, one thing that people might notice immediately are the controls. Remapping was the way to go. Owing to the WASD-and-mouse roots, QAA’s controls weren’t as smooth and console-like as Reach’s, and there’s no auto-aiming but the thing is obviously balanced by the fact that every other player has the same problems.

Much to my surprise, I found myself replicating some of the techniques I had picked up while on planet Reach. My gut reaction, which I had learned from random Quake game sessions and which I had when I started playing the Halo series, was that the spawn weapons are always completely useless and melee is for chumps. The games quickly proved me wrong; I’ve actually learned to use Halo’s pistol in some situations. I had incredible fun running around and mowing people down with the Gauntlet. The machine gun is still pretty damn weak, though.

Day 2: Time for more games? Uh, yeah, I logged on, started looking for more games, and the only game that I found had a bunch of people sitting in the game lobby and having a civil, mature and orderly discussion about… something. Genetics and and what the hell. I didn’t really want to listen to it too long, because while I am glad that Xbox Live users can stand above the stereotype of being annoying loud-mouthed homophobic 13-year-olds, and that existence of timeless computer game classics like Quake III Arena on this newfangled platform can attract mature crowd to the game, this shit is not what the game lobbies are for. OK, maybe I shouldn’t complain. Guess I was just slightly peeved that that was the only QAA session running and they certainly weren’t, you know, playing the game. I’m not angry. The world can, and should, accommodate such flukes of emergent gameplay.

Dammit, who cares. MORE EXPLOSIONS!

Day 3: So, I can’t always find people. Can I host games myself? …nnnnno. Apparently, I can only host 2-player matches. I’ve seen this happen on Quake 4 on my rather “outdated” PC (look, if it says 3000+, or “3 GHz”, or whatever the hell, it bloody well runs Firefox and LibreOffice and that’s all that matters), but even that computer was able to host older Quake matches years ago. And, hell, I just played a custom Halo: Reach game with gobs of players, and it ran very much adequately, so I guess bandwidth and processing power isn’t an issue on Xbox 360 either. So how the hell does the game think that I need beefier connection for this? Is it trying to ping a server in US, or something?

Another few games. I had the opportunity to play one match on a server… with fraglimit set to 5. That’s not a lot of frags in modern games. That’s definitely not a lot of frags in caffeine-fueled spazfests like Q3A. The games may feel like they last forever, but they’re over in minutes. Wallclock time. Timelimits were helpfully set to 60 minutes… as if any of the games could last that long.

I also have this weird tendency to use female characters in a lot of games, but heck, in Xbox Live, I’ve still tended to pick male characters. Yet, in Quake Arena Arcade, I picked Hunter because I’ve always used Hunter in Q3A - it was part of a stupid in-joke misunderstanding thingy. (Basically, I picked Hunter originally because I like wolves and wolves hunt and the character appeared to have leet headgear. So, um. That was my story.) Now, I switched my character to Ranger. I have to say I had a very strange feeling of nostalgia, seeing a character from ages ago rendered in awesome HD quality, even using the same sounds I first heard in the first Quake. I had my first low-poly player guy running here in a modern-day game!

The most promising thing about the game so far is that I don’t entirely suck. I’m fairly often in the mid-range. This is pretty awesome.

Anyway, I guess I’ll play far more of Quake Arena Arcade in the future - especially if they somehow fix the weird bug with bandwidth detection so I can actually set up games myself.

Metroid silliness

2010-11-18T18:11:22Z

Since I like Metroid, my sister gave me a poster and some stickers that apparently came with a recent issue of NGamer. The poster was fairly cool, but unfortunately, they just don't make posters like they used to. We demand huger posters. This is one of the fields where print media could definitely compete against the onslaught of the Internet sites. Better posters. Dammit.

The stickers - well, I'm not sure if I want to tune up the controllers, owing to wear. But the Metroid sticker is really cool for making the Wii look a little bit more intimidating. "Grr. Go play Metroid Prime or I'll suck your brains out."

However, the most useful use for the stickers was in a completely unrelated front. Specifically, to significantly improve the already brilliant games that were released around the same time.

It's fairly obvious that the Noble Team got damn nowhere without tons of help from the Mini-Samus.

Quick review of the new Xbox 360 dashboard

2010-11-01T15:13:11Z

The new version of Xbox 360 dashboard is here. The new graphical style is fairly good, and the only thing I was really psyched out - the new voice chat codec - turned out to be a good improvement. Instead of completely garbled speech, I can make out individual sentences sometimes. Solid improvement, there. Now all Microsoft needs to do is to teach people to speak clearer and understand that incoherent roaring sometimes doesn't take the point across. But that's hardly Microsoft's worry.

However, what really baffles me is that the overall design of the other parts of the Xbox 360 UI haven't changed. They actually took a few steps back.

I think Wii's user interface gets one rather important issue seriously: Important things in the user interface should be right at hand, while the less important things should be buried in logical and comprehensive menus. Xbox 360 dashboard, by comparison, seems to assume things are good as long as they're found somewhere, in somewhat related place. Grouping things that are related sounds good, but that's not the same thing as making often used things easily available.

When using Xbox 360 dashboard, you think in terms of what goals you're aiming for, what group of actions the action you're going to do is in. The next step is that your brain develops a pattern and you no longer look at the menus: "To get to the cheevos, hit up, right, A, then keep pressing right...."

User account management group is a good example. Why do most people use that group most of the time? Maybe change their avatar or theme, or see their achievements. So adding a new entry in the first damn menu in the lists that says "Change Gamertag" isn't very helpful; there's already a bunch of entries I don't use regularly in this menu, and adding one more just doesn't help the situation. Sure, people change their gamertags all the time. Like, every day. They definitely need that function much more often than viewing their achievements. Rrrrrright. Before you can browse to your achievements, they added account management as a new freaking page along with online safety. That's three pages you need to flip through before you get to your achievements, as opposed to one general menu. Online Safety isn't even something you need to muck with often; I imagine most people pick their settings and they're done with it for life.

Which leads to an interesting conclusion: Things aren't quite as customisable as you imagine they should be. I like looking at the achievements more than I like twiddling with my online safety settings - I guess I should be able to move the online safety settings out of view so I can get to the achievements easier.

The lack of customisation is almost laughable in My Community. They added a new entry called "Video Kinect" right on the beginning. Kinect isn't out yet. After that, you get to avatar store, Facebook, Halo Waypoint, Twitter and Game Room. It's hilarious because that's just about the exact opposite order of frequency what I actually use; I don't use Facebook and use the avatar store somewhat rarely, but I use Halo Waypoint and Game Room, and Twitter to some extent. Why can't those three bubble to the top, because I actually use those things more?

In conclusion: Stuff is still broken, and adding more stuff in the problematic areas is exactly the opposite of what should be done to fix things. But thank you, Microsoft, for the new voice codec. Voice chat might actually be usable one day.

Next-genning Tempest too far

2010-10-27T13:42:27Z

I'm one of those weirdos who thinks bloom is just awesome. It's the single best thing in video game graphics these days. For all I cared, they should stop improving graphics hardware, because it's fairly self-evident that nothing will ever displace bloom as the most awesome advance in video game graphics. Take any boring ol' scene, add a little bit of bloom, and boom! Instant awesomeness.

I just like subtle but effective effects.

]]>

"Thanks, bro. We need to keep these sparklyzombies at bay. Those who say sparklyvampires are bad ain't seen no sparklyzombie horde with their flashin' swords. For the bloom!"

But I have to make a small exception in case of Game Room.

I like Game Room on principle. It's a nice, cheap way to get some really cool arcade games. With a rewind button. I've so far gotten Centipede, Battlezone and Tempest, and you may start to notice a pattern emerging. (Won't be getting Asteroids. Always thought that was boring.)

But here's the thing: The vector games (Battlezone and Tempest) have an annoying side to them. Guess what it is? Bloom. Or, more accurately, "some additional Gaussian blur for the antialiasing".

Now, I'm all for antialiasing if it's done right. I have tried playing Tempest on MAME (boo, hiss, I don't own the arcade PCB, but I bought Microsoft Arcade back in the day and now have the game on Game Room, so sue me), and the OpenGL antialiasing works just nice. Nice, easy-on-eyes lines. Awesome stuff.

Game Room cranks the antialiasing too high. I know, they were probably designing the games look awesome and authentic on HD televisions, but I'm playing these on a normal CRT television which already introduces its own softness. The end result is a bit of a mess.

Here's how Tempest looks like (courtesy of KLOV):

And here's an Artist's Interpretation™ of what it looks like in Game Room:

The major difference is in the bottom of the well. See these little red dots?

In Tempest, those little pixel-sized (but vectorised) thingies that mill in the bottom of the well represent the remaining enemies. Seeing them is kind of crucial for playing the game; you need to be aware of how much stuff you still need to blast through and when is the optimal time to use the superzapper.

But with the blur that the game introduces, it's almost impossible to see what the hell is going on in the well.

Sometimes, I really wish there was an option to turn this next gen rubbish off...

Am I a threat? I am a threat.

2010-10-25T12:24:39Z

Time to blow some dust off this blog!

The most recent huge game that I beat is, unsurprisingly, Halo: Reach. I've got only one big gripe with the campaign, and it's kind of annoying because it made me realise most of the other games suck.

The problem is this: In most games, the noses of the enemies point directly at you. In Halo: Reach, the noses of the enemies can also point at the squadmates, unless you're closer to the enemies than they, in which case the noses of the enemies point directly at you.

Oh yeah, there's probably a perfectly rational in-universe explanation. The Covenant really hates the Spartans and knows you're a high-priority target that must be stopped at all costs. But that's still a pretty lame explanation for the fact that you're basically still trapped in a great big shooting gallery. In every game ever, you're trapped in a great big shooting gallery.

I'm trying to be a modest guy. I don't want the enemies to think I'm the most dangerous threat to them ever. Just a boring old soldier. Don't mind me. You know, think tactically. There's a big-ass tank behind me, that thing kills people. Warthogs are pretty damn deadly because the machine guns never run out of ammo. Nuke them instead. I just have a crappy assault rifle that can almost kill an enemy if I fire three magazines.

So I'm sort of asking the game designers to make a little bit more convincing AI. I tend to notice that the enemies think too much about me, when they clearly should have much pressing concerns.

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. =)