(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.

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.

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?

The weird thing about "games as art" debate is that everyone agrees that games are an art form, but when you really think about it, it's hard to say what really makes games a form of art of their own.

Games have the distinct feature that they are interactive. They have some sort of definable gameplay, and that is just about one of the distinct features of games, now that we really think of it. Games are an art form that stand on top of other art forms - motion picture, visual arts, music and literature, to mention just a few things.

But is there an excuse to call games a form of art that is truly separate from others?

This post might need a little bit of explanation to go with it, first. I've sometimes had to post jaded observations on how some things are awful. This post is not intended as a flame; the point is that this is an observation.

And the observation is that I've grown tired defending the Ultima series. Now, don't get me wrong... I'm just admitting excess zealotism, and is a part of healing process.

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

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

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

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

A sad affair, this one...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No talking mudcrabs here...

Note: May have spoilers on Tomb Raider Legend.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just a random thought...

People who have beeen following the drama unfolding at GamePolitics are undoubtedly familiar with a fellow by the name of Jack Thompson, a lawyer with nothing to lose and hell-bent to destroy every "pixelante" on Earth. I'm probably not alone in my opinion if I say that even if JT is "certified" sane, that should be somewhat re-evaluated.

Let me do a little bit of digging.

Now, GP doesn't allow anonymous users to post anymore, thanks to Thompson's interesting antics. I have a LiveJournal account, so that doesn't touch me, but it probably annoyed a lot of other people. Strike one: If your comments are bad enough to inspire a policy change, that should be a good time to reconsider what the heck is going on.

Secondly, Thompson posts a lot. Really, really a lot. And obviously, not even remotely related to whatever the heck GP is posting - well, sometimes it is related, generally to show off his great trigger-finger itching and overreacting ability.

Thirdly... well... Bear with me, here's some rambling from a random user:

Back somewhat over ten years ago, when I started to use the Internet really seriously, the place to be was the Usenet. In the Usenet, all you had for authentication was really your name. You could identify other users by their name and email address, and that was that. And everyone engaged in civil discussion; even if there were clueless newbies, even they got clue eventually. If you didn't like to see some discussion threads, or comments from some people, you just added that to killfile - which is a brutal way of saying "list of people whose comments you don't want to see.

Now, there was always some kind of group of people for which none of that applied. They had no civility and pushed their own gibberish wherever they went, no matter how inappropriate it was, no matter how annoyed it made people. If people started ignoring them with killfiles, they started morphing, changing their name or email or even ISP to get around those.

They were called trolls.

Now trolls are very common even to this day, they have just spread frigging everywhere.

Some might draw attention to the fact that Jack Thompson is a certified lawyer. Okay, so he is an educated troll. They're the worst.

One thing I don't get is this: Since the anon policy came about, Jack Thompson got an user account. He's been repeatedly banned. I mean repeatedly. Apparently free LiveJournal accounts can now be got without invite codes, otherwise I might have labelled him as a rich troll too. Now I'm just labelling him as a troll who also wastes perfectly good space in the database. Yay.

People are calling for a ban, and I would too. Thompson's stuff was first interesting, then it got just annoying, reminding me of the dark, uncivilised bits from the Usenet's otherwise fun history.

Jack Thompson's case is getting continually weirder and weirder and weirder. I guess the next logical step would be a crusade against Wikipedia. Shame I won't probably be reporting more on this guy; I don't want this blog to turn into a (shiver) Political Blog™.