Max Payne film appears to be coming after all. The teaser is here.

My first impression of this something along the lines of "it doesn't seem to have a shred of the famous Finnish melancholy". One of the reasons I liked MP1 and MP2 was that they were depressing in a positive way - this place is f'ing dark, life sucks, but if you look at the stuff around you you'll also see funny things (starting, of course, from the very concept that the whole games are so angsty in the over-the-top way).

And, uh, the music is wrong.

Oh well, I guess I'll end up watching it anyway. And I hope Payne and Redemption, if it eventually comes, will do a Maxpaynesque film a bit better. =)

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

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

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

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

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

The patch following the reinstall fails spectacularly, however:

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

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

Well, no...

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

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

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...

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

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

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

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...

Well, seems like I was so very wrong. Lately, people have been saying that stock Wine is actually much better and good enough for most people. So, um, I installed Debian's Wine 0.9.31 (the latest they have - .35 is out), and tried installing The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. Followed the instructions online to delete the Music folder.

Okay, it didn't work. Then I noted it tried to create near-empty Morrowind.ini in the current working directory. Scratched head, concluded that I had ran into this problem before. Tried launching the game from the correct working directory.

A bit of messing around, and... okay, a random appropriate Nehahra quote: "I've got one word for you guys. Boom."

The minimap doesn't work, the intro vid and some speech are choppy (something about lacking sound buffer underrun detection or something). The game crashes right as I try to read the papers that were handed by the clerk guy. Shadows get rendered pure white, so I had to turn them off. But the point is: Holy cow, it actually runs and I can play it. Kind of.

And note: This is stock Wine. That is to say, no native Windows DLL hacks whatsoever. No Microsoft magic. Just Wine magic.

And apparently, people have figured out a way to get Oblivion run! Guess what goes to my games-to-try list soon. Oooh! And NWN toolset! Perhaps I could get that running! Oooh, the possibilities are limitless.

But oh boy oh boy, what have we here?

Max Payne 2 runs almost perfectly! Slight sound quality issues, and one slight image bug. Though, I'm not sure if it showed up when I cranked up the quality levels, maybe it disappears when I crank them down again. I experienced what I call the "giant elevator effect": People behind doors appear to get in a giant "elevator", which "comes down" when I get closer to the door or face sideways to it. It probably has something to do with the way the engine renders different rooms. So far, this oddity has not really impeded the gameplay though, and the game works amazingly well.

I have to continue. For some reason, I feel extremely invigorated now that I have an actually working games and stuff. The future is bright!

For some reason, I feel there is nothing sadder than the fact that some people take pains to produce something beautiful... and then, some little-minded ungrateful person decides to proverbially flatten the thing completely.

It was only last week when I got my copy of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess for GameCube. Now, I'm already nearing the end of the game. I've enjoyed the game a great deal.

But there was one big issue that put a great big dent in my enjoyment.

Basically, The City in the Sky had one big design flaw that's rather common in modern games. I was banging my head on the wall: I knew exactly what to do next to proceed, but I had no idea how to do it in the game. My day was growing long, I had almost finished the game without any spoilers at all, and now I was here and had spent good five hours trying to figure out how the hell to proceed.

In the end, I had all the information in my head. I just couldn't connect them.

(SPOILERS IN THE FOLLOWING)

Basically, just before the end of the level, there's this disco-ball you need to latch on using clawshots. The thing is too high to reach from the floor. Just too high.

I had arrived to some logical conclusions BEFORE looking at the FAQs:

1. To get to the north tower, I had to activate the giant big fan on the main structure. It just sat there, and the turning panes on the way leading to the north weren't turning, and the turning panes could be climbed on but it was impossible to get to the north tower that way.
2. There's no obvious way to start the thing on the way leading to the north tower. It had to be elsewhere.
3. The fact that the fan on the ceiling of the main room can be turned off has to be significant, and the fact that there's a clawshotable wine going to the second floor is significant.
4. There's no obvious way to turn the thing on the main floor, apart of the disco-ball which I hadn't tried because I couldn't get to the disco ball.

I tried everything: Figuring out how to get on top of the nearest colums by jumping from the above using the birdmen. (Aggravating - the birdmen move and are always out of the clawshot range). Tried hanging from all possible places to get somewhere to the clawshot range. Tried scouring all places. I tried crossing the north way without making the panes turn. Tried hopping on top of the walkway from the roofs of the main building, which was a bit far-fetched.

The FAQ explained the lead on point 4 was the key: The idea was to latch on the grating on the room above the fan, lower down, then clawshot to the ball on the roof of the main room.

In retrospect I had ignored one major clue: The room above the fan had grating ceiling that I had not used before, and using clawshot to hang from there was, at this point, still counterintuitive...

(END SPOILERS)

So what went wrong? Basically, there was not enough clues, and some of the ones that were present were misleading.

Now I hate myself for reading the FAQ and not trying hard enough. I hate myself for getting annoyed at the whole map and cursing the creators of the level to the third generation. I hate myself for hating the concept of the level - if there's one thing I dislike in games, it's the "crumbling floor" or "no floor" levels. I hate myself for letting anger take better of me.

I should have rested. I should have went to some forum and ask "am I on the right track with this?" Because that's another flaw of this game, and modern games in general, and heck, all game FAQs in general: Lack of InvisiClues-like approach to hints, lack of some protocol through which I could get information on how to get forward without getting the complete solution.

I also hate myself for having to rationalise this. Or do I need to? Should I hate myself for saying "Well, it's not bad, I would have figured it out in 5 more hours"? Do I need to get over the "GAMEFAQS = DEATH" line of thinking? Should all Serious Gamers™ accept "okay, you're allowed to look up a spoiler from the FAQs once, and it's not that bad"? Do I set my bar of seriousness too high?

It also brings me to the point of this article: The folks at Nintendo made an interesting level. I hate myself for hating them for making it aggravating at times. It's a fine dungeon. I should be grateful for them for making such a nice dungeon and putting a lot of thought to that.

So what do I think of the game? At first, I was thinking of calling it better than Ocarina of Time, but because the end dungeons seem to be considerably more aggravating than the ones in OoT and The Wind Waker, I'm not so sure. I'm not saying the game is fun; it's just spectacularly frustrating when you're not moving forward. At least in TWW, you could roll around in circles and hope things would get better (okay, I also had the walkthrough at hand for TWW, but I mostly consulted it for locations of the heart pieces). Here, on the other hand...

And what do I do now? Well, I'll finish the game WITHOUT any spoilers at all. My enthusiasm is gone the way it is now, but I hope I'll regain it. I just hate it that there's so few games I've finished without any spoilers; Max Payne comes in mind, as does (within recent years) Phoenix Wright: Ace Attourney, Star Fox Adventures... and I think I haven't looked at plot spoilers for Baten Kaitos yet, though I did look at the card descriptions and checked that yes, there's Lupus constellation in the game.

I could have sworn I wrote something about this earlier, but it appears I didn't. So, here's a few words.

I played about half of the game (up to the point it became actually hard), and all I can say it is that it's not a great game technically... but it's the thought that counts, and that's definitely what makes it tick.

I'm not objecting to the subject matter. A "proper" game about Columbine massacre would be interesting. The only thing that made me squeamish was the fact that the player characters were the two killers. If this would have been a game about some innocent bystanders with the same recounting of what happened in the fateful day, it would be a real big praised classic by now.

People objected to be placed to the role of the killers. My "Ordinary Human Being" verdict is that I didn't enjoy the school shooting part - I found the technical execution amusing, the combat system was funny when applied the way it was applied, but the actual massacre part of it was just grotesque - and it didn't really work as far as gameplay was concerned either.

However, it proved that Columbine massacre could be treated in a medium. It also proved that such a difficult subject matter could be discussed in a game.

It was also an extremely touching game. It was an odd thing to see those cartoony people killing or getting killed... and then, all of sudden, the two killers kill themselves and the game goes photographic. You could almost say "So, you thought those two were cutesy pixely manga characters who were killing other cutesy pixely manga characters? Nope, they were real people. I'm telling a tale about real events. Horrific real events."

The game made a great point, right then and there.

Games are a serious medium. This game proves that games can be thought-provoking one way or another.

And, of course, it also proves that people are uncomfortable with fiction where the protagonist is the villain. I've been irked by that for a long time. This game was not weird in that respect.

Perhaps one day people are making a game that tells another side of the story, from the point of view of the victims and how they overcame the situation. I'm sure people would have less problems with that sort of treatment of this difficult subject - after all, that's how the issue has frequently been discussed of...