Blain's Gaming Life

Pretty Brainless

2012-05-27T06:00:00.002-07:00

written by Blain Newport on Thursday, 24 May, 2011

Last week we had the simulated pretties with Assassin's Creed 2. This week we have imaginary pretties with Avatar.

Even on my older computer, the foliage looks pretty good. And if I was playing the game in 3D, that plant on the right would probably stick out and give the scene a lot of depth. But that's a double edged sword because while other games would make that tree transparent so that I could still see my character, enemies, etc. Avatar will let you block the camera with it, even if you're in 2D mode. :P

But there's more to Avatar than just pretty graphics. There's also weighty moral choice.

If you shoot the guy on the left, you're friends with the guy on the right, and vice versa. That's weighty, isn't it?

I suppose this would make the game replayable at least once so that you could see the different outcomes. But the tasks in the game are so repetitive that even a single playthrough was more than I was interested in. Meh. It was pretty and as part of my expiring GameTap subscription I feel like I didn't pay anything for it, per se.

Brick Killed A Guy

2012-05-20T06:00:00.001-07:00

written by Blain Newport on Saturday, 19 May, 2011

I'd heard that Assassin's Creed 2 fixed many of the initial game's problems, so I gave it a whirl this week. For me the game was an improvement, but still felt very repetitive.

Maybe I'm just burned out, but the traversal and combat felt even duller than I remember them. I would let out a groan every time my next mission objective was halfway across the map because that meant another few minutes of my life wasted. Supposedly you need to stay on your toes so the guards don't attack you and so you can spot hidden treasure, but the guards are never a serious problem and I had over a quarter million excess florins by the end of the game.

The charms of the story were similarly lost on me. The characters felt lifeless enough that I didn't care what they were going through or want to piece together any of the silly sci-fi conspiracy surrounding them.

For me the star of the game was the setting. I was fortunate enough to get to visit some of the game's locations some years ago. Here are a couple comparison shots.

This is the Duomo of Florence, the city's largest cathedral. There's a tower next to the cathedral, which is where this picture was taken from.

Here's a similar picture from higher up inside the game's version of the tower. They didn't model the interior all the way down. The cathedral looks similar enough to give the right impression, I think.

Here's the game's ground level view of the tower and the cathedral. The bench the player is sitting on isn't actually there in real life. In fact, I think he'd be sitting in the middle of the street in real life.

As you can see, if the player is sitting basically in front of the tower, where he's sitting should be empty space. There are a lot of reasons you can't have that in a video game. For one thing, that much open space is uninteresting from a gameplay perspective. If the guards are chasing you, there's not much to do with a big open space except run. Also, big open spaces mean drawing a lot of buildings at once, which can be a performance problem.

That said, I missed the Baptistery, the smaller building that sits in front of the cathedral in real life. It predates the cathedral by two hundred years and has amazing bronze doors by Lorenzo Ghiberti that Michelangelo said were suitable to be the gates of paradise. I was told that Michelangelo wept when he saw them for the first time. I suppose the developers had their reasons for not including the Baptistery. But I remembered those doors from my trip and was looking forward to seeing them. I mean, they're pretty awesome.

A Tumbleweed Rolls By

2012-05-13T13:00:00.001-07:00

written by Blain Newport on Sunday, 13 May, 2011

Real Life has been taking precedence over gaming. I still game a bit socially. But that's hanging out with friends time, not thinking about games time. But even though I don't have first hand experiences to tell you about, I can point you towards an experience worth sharing.

Arma 2 is a military simulation more than a game. So when users modified it to make a zombie simulation, it became something strange and wonderful. I recommend checking out part two of this video series. The whole thing is pretty great, really. My favorite line is probably "He's Russian, but he's not that Russian." :D

Still With the Crickets Mostly

2012-05-07T02:00:00.001-07:00

written by Blain Newport on Sunday, 6 May, 2011

I played some Phantom Dust. It's still good. And replaying old missions lets me experiment with different decks and buy new cards at the same time.

I played through the entire first chapter of They Hunger. I recorded it. But it wasn't good, which is probably equal parts me and the mod. Neither of us have aged well. :)

They Hunger spends a lot of time forcing you to kill zombies with what is effectively the Half-Life 1 crowbar. It's tedious. But once you get a gun, it's mostly trivial. Then they add zombie police with pistols which are difficult to kill without taking damage unless you encounter them at range and have ammo for your sniper rifle, in which case they're trivial. There are a few decent set pieces, but nothing that leaves much of an impression. I have no idea how I'll make this not suck, but I can't put it off any longer.

All Quiet

2012-04-29T06:00:00.001-07:00

written by Blain Newport on Sunday, 29 April, 2011

I have played some games but nothing of consequence. And E3 is coming up pretty soon, so the gaming news scene is also very quiet. Publishers want to save up their big announcements for when the most eyes turn towards the gaming business. That's a double edged sword as everyone else is doing the same, but people like to delude themselves into thinking that their clever marketing plan win out over everyone else's clever marketing plans.

I will start my videos for They Hunger (a mod for Half-Life) soonish, probably next Monday. I keep putting it off because I'm not really fond of They Hunger and I have no idea how playing something I don't particularly enjoy will be entertaining. Other people get frustrated, which can be fun to watch. But I just get sad. :(

But I will start They Hunger because that's the only way to finish it, and I am eager to get started with Phantom Dust. That LP could be a giant mass of fail, but the mechanisms I'm building to support it are strange and possibly wonderful, and I want to see how it turns out.

It's good to want things.

D3 Beta and Phantom Dust

2012-04-23T06:00:00.004-07:00

written by Blain Newport on Monday, 23 April, 2011

Diablo 3 had it's open beta last weekend.

Yep. You still hit guys until candy comes out.

Blizzard's done a great job of making me feel powerful. In Titan Quest, it takes a few hours before you can do enough damage to really throw skeletons and beast men around. In Diablo 3, almost every hit results in a pain animation and nearby bodies and debris flying about. The amount of physics involved means the frame rate sometimes takes a nosedive on my older hardware, but that's to be expected.

For the most part, the Battle.net integration worked fine. But every now and then I'd get snapped back because my input didn't make it to the server. Once I even manged to click on two enemies, wait a second, then watch them both take the hits and fall over. As long as I'm playing on normal difficulty, that's probably fine. But Diablo 3 has a hardcore mode where if your character dies it's erased on the server. I'd hate put days of play into a character then die due to an internet hiccup.

I tried all five classes and my favorite was the Barbarian (pictured above). The monk was cool but so powerful that I could just hold down the left mouse button and tear up everything on the screen most of the time. The other three classes were various flavors of pew pew and effective enough. But hitting things is just so much more satisfying. :)

I also played through an OXbox game called Phantom Dust again, in anticipation of doing a fairly ambitious Let's Play. Phantom Dust is a third person action game, but the player's abilities are dealt out like cards. I'm working on putting together a web application that will let viewers build decks for me to use.

I'm thinking I may run the LP on the Something Awful forums. They're probably the biggest LP community on the net, and I'm guessing maybe one in a hundred viewers will be into it enough to actually make decks. And since the game has roughly 100 missions, I'll need a lot of decks.

Keepalive: Meh.

2012-04-15T21:00:00.002-07:00

written by Blain Newport on Sunday, 15 April, 2011

My semi-hiatus continues. I even stopped logging on to Star Trek Online to keep my duty officers busy. At some point it just becomes Progress Quest, watching pretend numbers get bigger for no reason.

What I have been doing is spending some time with Devil May Cry 3 and 4, doing some comparisons. It's impossible to be fair in these types of judgements. Do I still like DMC 1 the best because of nostalgia? Do I like DMC 3 less than 4 because I have the original super hard edition?

For those who care, here's where my current feelings lie. I'll see the rest of you next week.

DMC 1 is still the best. Critical kills make you feel large and in charge. The atmosphere is the best in the series. And I may never get tired of fighting Nelo Angelo.

DMC 2 is not worth talking about.

DMC 3 is a victim of its own ambition. It adds a lot, but everything comes with a drawback.

DMC 4 has the horsepower to pull off more of what DMC 3 was trying to do, but falls down with less intense combat, a new, annoying protagonist, and a huge amount of backtracking.

Devil May Cry: A Medium Reading

2012-04-08T20:00:00.003-07:00

written by Blain Newport on Sunday, 8 April, 2011

THIS ARTICLE CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR DEVIL MAY CRY. DEAL WITH IT PINK BOY.

I've never been big fan of "close readings". If you have something important to say, just say it. Communication is hard enough without hiding a message behind symbols. But that may be because I was forced to do close readings of works I had no love for in school.

As melodramatic and poorly translated as it is, I do love Devil May Cry. And while I was playing it for my latest video series, I started noticing elements of structure and symbolism that I hadn't seen before.

I'm not claiming these elements give the game artistic merit, or somehow "make up" for the shoddy bits. But there was thought and planning and work that I'd never noticed before. That work deserves to be recognized.

I believe Devil May Cry is a game about balance. There is a demon world and a human world. Dante, who is himself half demon, is not seeking to destroy the demon world. He's just trying to maintain the balance. The main villain in the game is Mundus, mostly represented as a three eyed statue with angel wings. I suspect that the three eyes and angelic affectations represent Mundus' pride. He believes he can transcend balance and rule all.

I don't think it's a coincidence that the game's history puts Mundus' birth within a year of Christ's. I'm not saying DMC is intended to be particularly Christian or anti-Christian. But it does seem to reference it, almost mirror it, in its construction. In Christian belief, an angel rebelled against God and corrupted humanity. In Devil May Cry, a demon rebelled against Mundus and saved the human world.

But Devil May Cry has no heaven or ultimate victory. It seems to believe in eternal, cyclical coexistence and conflict. It's a very natural belief system for a fighting game's world. :)

The idea of coexistence even extends to Dante not killing his major opponents. Trish sacrifices herself. Phantom gets carried away and falls through a window. Griffon is killed by Mundus. Vergil overloads on his own power. Even Mundus himself, the target of Dante's vendetta, is only forced back into the Underworld, with Dante asking Mundus to pass on his regards to his son in another thousand years. The only major opponent Dante destroys is Nightmare, which appears to be a magical construct and displays no sentience.

I could go on, but I'll wrap up by saying that pairings are also a very important motif in DMC. Male and female, parent and child, siblings, and possibly even race relations (as represented by Dante's twin pistols Ebony and Ivory) are referenced. There are mirrors, reflections, and representations (paintings) that can physically be traversed. In Devil May Cry connectedness is the driving force.

Full of Sound and Fury

2012-03-24T06:00:00.000-07:00

written by Blain Newport on Friday, 23 March, 2011

The Mass Effect 3 ending furor continues. And the furor about the furor continues as well. It's mystifying to hear people on podcasts go on for twenty or thirty minutes about how upset they are about other people being upset, apparently completely unaware of the irony.

What I don't hear is dialog between reasonable people of differing perspectives. What I don't hear is the one thing that might be illuminating, possibly even useful.

As an additional note about Mass Effect 3, I'm also not playing it because there's a bug that doesn't allow you to import your character's appearance. With a series that puts so much emphasis on an epic continuity, that's inexcusable.

Gaming-wise, nothing's going on. I check in with the crew of the U.S.S. Moogie 5 a few times a day to make sure they're keeping busy. I play Devil May Cry for my videos. I look at the occasional indie game, but none of them leave enough of an impression to write about.

That One Word

2012-03-18T22:00:00.000-07:00

written by Blain Newport on Sunday, 18 March, 2011

What is the most common word in the titles of my blog entries? I don't know. But I'm betting ennui ranks pretty highly. That's where I am with gaming right now.

Mass Effect 3 came out, and while I'm sure it's decent enough, there are so many little ugly bits surrounding it that I'm just not interested. EA refuses to sell it on my digital distribution platform of choice. They were selling so many DLC codes with comic books, action figures, and collectors' editions that if you wanted everything, it would run you over eight hundred dollars. And less than a week after the game came out gamers donated over forty thousand dollars to charity as an expression of how much they hated the ending. (Don't ask me. I don't get it either.)

Additionally, the game has scanning missions ripped directly from ME2, only worse. And if you don't want to do them, you have to grind in multiplayer to get the "good" ending which much of the internet apparently doesn't like.

I imagined great things for ME3. And right now I'd rather keep those fantasies than tarnish them with the reality I've been hearing about.

Star Trek Online is amazing, as time sinks go. The ship combat is all right, but the one time I tried hard difficulty I just died immediately, with no feedback about what I was supposed to do differently. Like most MMOs, you either turn it into a part time job, or go to the internet and read strategies from people who turned it into a full time job. It's not rewarding.

What I've mostly been doing is traveling the galaxy, sending my duty officers on missions, occasionally playing the game to kill time while I wait for them to get done. My pretend crew's exploits are more important than mine. It's multiple levels of sad.

Devil May Cry is still cool. I'm having some issues with the targeting, though. I finally learned how to kill the lizard men with style. But Dante insists on changing targets at the last instant, killing only my buzz. :P

That said, after recording Saturday's installment, I found myself playing and playing and playing, until I finished the game. It was an experience, and I worry that breaking it up over weeks will lessen the impact for my viewers. But it's a little late to change to a livestream format now. :P

Keepalive: Nothing To Report

2012-03-06T15:00:00.000-08:00

written by Blain Newport on Tuesday, 6 March, 2011

I missed my normal Sunday posting date. There just isn't anything exciting to write about. I've been playing a bit more Star Trek Online, studiously avoiding ground combat missions.

That's it.

Oh, and I started the Devil May Cry video talkthrough (YouTube / MediaFire). The combat is still great. And I'm actually beginning to see more symbolism and meaning than I realized was there. I don't know why it's there. So much of the game is just ridiculous that I don't see why they'd put this much effort into the trappings. Perhaps that's how game developers keep themselves interested.

Slow Week

2012-02-26T06:00:00.003-08:00

written by Blain Newport on Saturday, 25 February, 2011

Star Trek Online ground combat sucks past level ten. Apparently you have to have a particular party configuration or it just becomes unplayable. Every Klingon ground party I encounter has a freaking Dahar Master in it. Dahar Masters are legendary Klingon warriors. The Star Trek wiki lists three names.

I could continue venting, but it's pointless. I might go back to the ship combat, but I might just delete it.

It is also worth noting that at some level, the premise behind STO is that the quadrant has gone to heck in a handbasket. Everybody is fighting all the time. I understand why they did it, but Star Trek had higher hopes for our future than endless war.

Other than that, I played a little more Wolfenstein and did some pre-production work for my next set of videos, which I hope to start Monday. It wasn't a gamey week.

Pleasant Surprises

2012-02-19T13:00:00.003-08:00

written by Blain Newport on Sunday, 19 February, 2011

Call of Duty games rarely go on sale. But Amazon is trying to gain traction with their digital download service, so they're selling Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (which registers on Steam) for $5.

WARNING: There is a major spoiler in the picture below.

FURTHER WARNING: If you care about the plot of this game, you're a silly goose.

I figured a game version of a Michael Bay movie would be fine for five dollars. And it was. It was especially fine when I turned off Depth of Field and could see the enemies again. I swear the only two words out of my mouth during the first two hours of playing the game were "FROM WHERE!?" with the "did I just get shot" implied. Turning off Depth of Field also drastically increased the frame rate, which made lining up shots much easier.

As for the game itself, it's good. People talk about the endless streams of bad guys and how heavily scripted the CoD games are, but I just played through FEAR and Half-Life, and I respect Infinity Ward for not making their enemies bullet sponges just to show off their fancy AI. If you shoot them fast, good! You'll be fighting enough of them that you'll still see the fancy AI sooner or later. My favorite behavior was seeing enemy soldiers taking two steps out of cover, getting shot at, and falling back instead of making a suicidal run for the next piece of cover.

Also on special for $5 (though this time from Steam) was Raven's 2009 version of Wolfenstein. I've already talked about enjoying Singularity (Raven, 2010), and Wolfenstein is unsurprisingly similar. But the hub areas of Wolfenstein make it feel like the more mature game. Though the geometry is constant, the different encounters you have make it feel like a changing place, as Nazi dominion and resistance determination increase.

The soldiers in Modern Warfare 2 are more interesting to fight. But Wolfenstein adds classic pulp elements (the occult and Nazi super science) to spice things up.

The one thing I would change about Wolfenstein is to add a New Game+ mode where you can go through the game again with all the upgrades you got in your first playthrough. There were a lot of weapons and upgrades I barely used and probably would have enjoyed, especially if I had enough extra money that I could blow it on the more exotic types of ammo without feeling irresponsible. Also, the whole mechanic of encouraging the player to scour the levels for Nazi gold hurts the pacing of the game and the feeling of being a freewheeling pulp action hero. New Game+ could have fixed that. Oh well.

UPDATE (2012 Feb. 25): I saw a pop-up after the credits that said you could start a new game with cheats enabled, but when I started a new game, there were no cheats. I finally noticed that when you select the difficulty for said new game, there's a small cheat option in the bottom right corner that defaults to disabled. So while it may be poorly implemented, the option to give yourself all the weapons, powers, upgrades, and money does exist. Also, you can turn people's heads into giant, featureless pumpkins for some reason, perhaps a reference to the ancient joke about id calling their follow up to DooM "Smashing Pumpkins Into Small Piles Of Putrid Debris".

I tried Star Trek Online and have had some good fun with it. I am Lieutenant Fiza, captain of the U.S.S. Moogie. (Regardless of rank, the person in charge of a ship is called captain by the crew.)

Being a female Ferengi Starfleet ship captain tickles my crazy bone. It's too bad I can't visit Ferenginar in the game. :(

Sillyness aside, I'm actually enjoying both the ship combat and away missions so far. The ship combat is the stronger of the two. Maneuvering to keep your weapons on the enemy while keeping up the fire and adjusting shield strength is enough to keep me occupied. And when I fired a last phaser blast to knock down an enemy's shield just before launching the decisive photon, I felt like I was having a classic Trek combat moment.

The away missions are more fighty than any Star Trek outside of the Dominion War, but so far I've enjoyed that. I've been using the squad controls to set up crossfires (since attacks from the flank actually do more damage) and beaming in mines to soften up patrolling enemies.

Shooterpalooza

2012-02-12T06:00:00.000-08:00

written by Blain Newport on Monday, 6 February, 2011

For no apparent reason, I've been on a shooter binge. Half-Life 2 and the episodes, Crysis 2, Fear 1 and it's two expansions, Fear 2, and even Half-Life 1 since I figured if I was doing a comparative study, I should head back to the first shooter with well regarded enemy AI.

Overall, I'm not a fan of "good" AI. The AI itself isn't the problem, it's that developers feel the need to make enemies super durable so that they live long enough to show off their behaviors. When point blank head shots can't down a foe, the power fantasy is suddenly less powerful than real life.

Crysis and Fear have stealth clauses where if you shoot an unaware opponent in the head they die immediately, but that mostly serves to highlight how bizarre it is that they don't die from the same bullet in the same head on other occasions.

Games did used to be harder, but that wasn't a good thing. Half-Life 1 was far and away the hardest game I played. And Fear will kill you in a flash on normal difficulty. It's good that this mostly went away. The fun in these situations is adjusting on the fly, making new choices. Dying only gives you the choice of repeating everything since your last save or quitting. Neither of those is interesting or fun.

Once you turn it down to easy, Fear and it's expansions can provide some pretty great firefights. Moving from cover to cover, tracking enemies to avoid getting surrounded, and matching all of it to the rhythm of shooting, reloading, and switching weapons is pretty great.

The expansions also added in the ability to bash open doors, and the feeling of barreling through everything in your path, being unflankable because you're bashing and shooting and jumping and running so fast you can't be caught is ridiculously great.

The second expansion (Perseus Mandate) also added in monsters that pull you into the ground. Fear has tons of blood puddles and pitch black shadows, but these monsters made them scary.

The expansions had their problems, but there were good additions that I miss when I go back to the stock game.

Co-opting Cheating

2012-02-05T06:00:00.000-08:00

written by Blain Newport on Saturday, 4 February, 2011

On a recent co-op night, Chris and I decided we had played enough Minecraft, and it was time to shoot some mans. We tried Battlefield: Bad Company 2. But the cheating in that game is hideous. And it's easy to tell who's cheating. They're the ones who are instantly popping their aim from one target to the next without ever looking around like a normal human. Plus Battlefield keeps historical data, so it's painfully obvious when someone's skill level suddenly jumps through the roof.

It's so easy to tell who's cheating that it appears EA, DICE, and Punk Buster aren't really trying to stop them. This may be because they've simply stopped bothering with Bad Company 2 now that Battlefield 3 is out. You never really buy an EA multiplayer game, anyway. You only rent it until they shut down matchmaking.

But if you can't beat them, why not join them?

If you can't be bothered supporting the game, turn off all the anti-cheat stuff and let people go nuts. The only reason cheating is appealing is because it gives you an unfair advantage. Once the playing field is level, the good players are still going to mop up because they know how to use cover, prioritize threats, and decide which weapons to use in which situation.

The gameplay will certainly devolve, but watching how the game devolves could be informative. Why ever carry an SMG if a sniper rifle can get you one hit kills at any range? What classes aren't useful anymore when the rules change?

In fact, I'd love to see a game designed like this from the ground up. Build something that's all cheating all the time and see what that experience teaches.

Used Games

2012-02-04T16:00:00.000-08:00

written by Blain Newport on Saturday, 4 February, 2011

Microsoft recently floated a rumor that the next Xbox won't allow for used games, probably to see if the threats Gamestop made to them would be ugly enough to make it a bad idea. Well, maybe Microsoft didn't float it. The internet is pretty good at making up its own rumors. But the result was the same, a lot of pontificating about the nature of used games, most of which was a waste of time.

For one thing, digital distribution doesn't allow for used games, so the point will be moot in a decade or two. For another, and I don't think I've heard nearly enough discussion about this, we've had used books, music, and movies since the things were invented, and all of those industries have done fine, at least until they ran up against the aforementioned digital distribution.

Long story short, as markets move to digital, the shrinking amount of retail dollars will be fought over more and more viciously, more and more wastefully. In the meantime, I'll be playing games (Crysis 2, for example) that I bought for $5 online.

Keepalive: Demos and Such

2012-01-31T02:00:00.000-08:00

written by Blain Newport on Tuesday, 31 January, 2011

It's pretty quiet on the gaming front.

I tried the demo for The Darkness 2. I own the original game for the 360, but haven't bought the 360 to play it on yet. The games are about a gangster who shares his body with an evil entity that is not entirely under his control. It's an interesting combination of melee and gunplay. You can flip an enemy into the air with a tentacle, then shoot him with a shotgun. It's not entirely novel, but it's not old hat, either. For now I'll just say that the sequel runs well on PC and I look forward to playing it someday after I have a 360 and have played the first installment.

I also tried the demo for Kingdoms of Amalur: The Reckoning. There's way too much travel time in the game, and the combat isn't enough to carry it. I'm not saying it's a bad game, but I'm old and have run through enough fantasy forests already. It takes something more for me to part with my time now. Plus all the characters speak in the same "dramatic narrator" tones, which kills the potential for personality and gets monotonous very quickly.

The most fun I've had this week has been Nations at War single player. I've been messing around with the jets and the helicopters some more. Also, since it's just me and I don't have to be concerned with crashing the server I've been playing maps we can't play at the LAN party.

I had forgotten Wake Island. That was a rough map back in Battlefield 1942. And it's still a bugger in Nations at War. Destroying enemy armor convoys with a Comanche helicopter while contending with enemy helos and jets is a very different experience, but the basic dynamic is still intact. I wish the editor worked so I could fix / recreate some of these maps.

Also, possibly because there's been some clamoring for a sequel recently, I replayed Half-Life 2 and episodes. I found myself waiting for people to open doors a lot. Yeah, yeah. You have a lot to say. Finish and let me out of here. It's symptomatic of me not really caring about the struggle or the characters in the game. It's not really a world worth saving. Part of me wishes I'd never played episode two a second time.

Keepalive: Immigrants and Aliens

2012-01-23T01:00:00.000-08:00

written by Blain Newport on Sunday, 22 January, 2011

The main games for the week were Tropico 4 and Aliens vs. Predator, with a little Prototype because it's awesome.

Tropico

I enjoyed Tropico, mostly. The challenge of the game escalated in ways that made me explore different parts of the game for a while. But by the time we got to level sixteen out of twenty, I felt like they had run out of ideas and were throwing constant natural disasters and artificial restrictions at me because "games should get harder".

Also, as the game gets harder, you're forced to spend more and more time micromanaging and poring over the various data screens to figure out your next move. Basically you have to spend more and more time with the least interesting parts of the game. Plus the closer you look, the more broken bits you find.

I had an island with a large enough population to keep two grade schools completely full. But I had no students going to high school or college. Maybe that was my own fault for keeping enough low level jobs open to keep people employed, but there's no part of the interface that will tell you that. And that would basically indicate that my charges have so little ambition that they'd rather work on a banana plantation then spend four years in high school to make half again as much money and not have to toil outside. Meh. I've probably given it too much thought already.

Aliens vs. Predator

I watched Alien the other night and felt like being a sneaky, wall walking monster. Aliens vs. Predator 2 is probably the better game, but I didn't feel like digging around in my old box full of CDs. The new AvP is fun. But, like Tropico, it gets less so as you go along. By the end you're fighting combat androids with built in motion trackers. As an alien you can do a ridiculous move where you use a light attack to put them off balance then whip around behind for the "stealth" kill. But that's pretty cheesy, and probably wouldn't even work with a game pad. And as a predator, you're not even fast enough to do that, so you pretty much have to throw spears, which is very easy and very very boring.

Still, I remember loving the atmosphere when the multiplayer demo for the game came out. Plus it strikes a nice balance between the ridiculous twitchiness of AvP 2000 and the somewhat plodding multiplayer of AvP2. Basically, I wish they would make AvP cheap enough that we could play it for one LAN party. :)

Nations @ War

Speaking of the LAN party, I tried downloading some editing utilities in the hopes of being able to fix / create some Nations @ War maps. I'm not sure the resources to do that are available anymore, though. There are files that the editor needs to know what's what, and I can find those files for other BF2 mods. But the BF2 Nations @ War forums appear to be gone at this point. Since that means I can't place vehicles (even the default BF2 ones), I think I'm stymied at this point.

This stinks because Nations @ War is basically the only game of its kind. It's arcade combined arms fighting with bots. Arma's too realistic. BF3 and Bad Company have no bots. Ghost Recon is all infantry. :(

More Holiday Leftovers

2012-01-15T19:00:00.000-08:00

written by Blain Newport on Sunday, 15 January, 2011

Sequence

Sequence is to DDR as Puzzle Quest is to Bejewelled. Basically it's an RPG, but instead of making matches to fight your opponent, you're completing DDR step sequences (Get it? Huh? Huh?) using your keyboard. Since I like DDR better than Bejewelled, I found it much more engaging than Puzzle Quest. The writing is also a lot better. I also enjoyed the credit sequence where all the voice actors got to say thanks for playing.

A big part of my enjoyment also came from being able to rebind my controls. I changed them so that my right hand was using J, K, L, and semicolon to input arrows. And my left hand was selecting which note track with D and F and selecting spells around the spell wheel with W, S, X, Z, A, and Q. Using "JKL;" felt a lot more natural than trying to remember that the third column is the up arrow and the second column is the down arrow.

Hard Reset

Hard Reset is a game where you shoot robots a lot. It's pretty repetitive, and the main gimmick, transformable guns, is cool to watch but doesn't really add much. Also this picture is of me shooting a metal robot with a shotgun, which isn't very smart but works fine for some reason.

Tropico 4

Ah, Tropico 4, the the game about ruling a banana republic. No wait. That picture's from Tropico 3. Let's look at Tropico 4.

See how different?

Tropico 4 is basically the same game, which is fine if you just want to mess around. But I can't imagine trying to really dig into the gameplay side of Tropico. The interface does a terrible job of highlighting important information and has probably needed a major overhaul for half a decade now. I generally just play the first few missions until I start failing without knowing why and call it a day.

I wouldn't have bothered with Tropico 4 at all, but it's free with my GameTap subscription. Technically it's my defunct GameTap subscription, but I was paying by the year, so I'll still have access to GameTap until sometime in the fall.

GameTap

GameTap was one of the first services that you could pay money to in order to legally play old arcade games. The companies that owned the rights were happy to pretend those games simply didn't exist, and I didn't feel right about just downloading them off the internet. So GameTap made it legal. But they laid off most of their staff and sold the business to another company and stopped updating their software to work with any browser besides IE, so it was well past time for me to give them the boot.

I'm still a little sorry to see it go. I tried some games I wouldn't even know about because of GameTap.

Magicka DLC

DO NOT PLAY ANY OF THE MAGICKA DLC! EVERYTHING PAST THE BASE GAME SUCKS!

Steam Backlog

2012-01-07T14:00:00.000-08:00

written by Blain Newport on Saturday, 7 January, 2011

I rarely have a backlog, but a ton of games I was curious about hit sub ten dollar prices during the Steam sale.

Prototype (4 of 5)

(ridiculous violence not pictured)

Prototype is great fun. It's not Hulk: Ultimate Destruction. You can't catch missiles and throw them back. You can't hammer toss tanks. You can't smash a bus flat and surf on it. You can't rip a car in a half and wear the halves on your fists like gauntlets. But there are still piles of awesome things you can do, and it looks better. And second best to Ultimate Destruction is still more fun than most other games.

And playing on New Game+ with all the powers unlocked is extra great. The game almost feels like Magicka, where the speed of your brain is the main limit on your power.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution (2 of 5)

I think this is a high tech military installation near the end of the game, but it could be Detroit, China, or pretty much anywhere in Human Revolution because the vents are the same wherever you go. Even on normal difficulty, you die super fast and there are large bonuses for going through segments unseen. But I dislike stealth in most games, and Human Revolution's is no exception. Late in the game I would see a new area, with enemies patrolling and cameras all over, and make the sigh of the damned.

Hunted: The Demon's Forge (3 of 5)

Hunted is basically trying to be Gears of War meets Lord of the Rings. It's okay. Your AI companion often gets in your way. Aiming isn't so great. The color palette is so dark and samey that you can't even see the giant gargoyle statue in the above picture. But shooting orcs with arrows is still pretty fun.

Alice: Madness Returns (4 of 5)

My computer wouldn't load any save games of Alice, so I had to play through it all in one twelve hour sitting. So while a lot of the segments (especially the China one) went on way too long for the way I was playing, Alice has more variety than all the other games on this list put together. So while the story felt contrived and the collecting elements seemed a huge waste of time, it was still an experience I was glad to have had.

Keepalive: The Holiday Sale

2011-12-25T10:00:00.000-08:00

written by Blain Newport on Sunday, 25 December, 2011

Steam's having it's usual holiday sale. They've recently added coupons to the service, so they've folded those coupons into the promotion. Unfortunately, the way they've done it is awful. If you perform a holiday task (by completing special holiday Steam achievements), you get an item in your Steam inventory. You might get a game. You might get a lump of coal which acts as an entry in a contest to win games on your wish list. Or you might get a coupon, which is worst of all. The vast majority of coupons are useless during the sale, and worse than that, provide lesser discounts /than the sale/. I can certainly imagine circumstances where the coupons will be better than nothing, but for me, they're worse than nothing because they clutter my inventory with garbage. I couldn't even give them away to other people in the Steam group I hang out with. :(

The contest lets you take seven lumps of coal and turn them into a guaranteed "gift" of a coupon or game. If I could make just one lump of coal from a coupon, I would have a clean inventory and wouldn't see coupons as worthless. OCD whinging aside, I have picked up some games during the sale (though not all from Steam).

Dark Void

I would have put up a picture, but Dark Void tends to crash my computer so badly that the screen goes away and I have to restart via memorized hot keys. Saints Row 3, Bulletstorm, and Dark Void fail spectacularly while Rage, Singularity, Killing Floor, Orcs Must Die, Psychonauts, Magicka, and everything else I've been playing work fine. I have no idea what's going on.

Anyway, Dark Void is only $3 during the sale, and when it works has pretty lousy mouse and keyboard controls, but for $3, I had fun. The best part is definitely the flying. The way you can never quite control your direction on blast off and the way your limbs dangle around in the wind give me the sense that my character is being hurled through the sky by his crazy little rocket pack. But with the controls as bad as they are I'm grateful the designers didn't put any stunt flying challenges in the game. This is pretty much the only game where I actually used my gaming mouse's ability to adjust sensitivity on the fly, cranking sensitivity up so I could actually turn my jetpack without dragging the mouse across the pad four times, then cranking sensitivity back down so I could aim at something without doing a 180 in the on foot segments.

Payday: The Heist

Since the game was patched and my Steam compatriots have taken it up again, I tried some Payday multiplayer. It's better than playing with bots simply because you don't have to do all the objectives yourself, but it's still a pretty bad game, with cops magically shooting you through hostages you get penalized for shooting and solid objects. Supposedly the patch reduced the number of cops and made them hit harder, but when we saw over a dozen of them spawn in front of us on a section of Heat Street with very little cover, I knew that mission was effectively over. And we also lost a couple maps to one hit kill Cloaker enemies coming around a blind corner. It's not a good game.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution

Amazon was (and still is as of this writing) selling the downloadable version of Human Revolution for $10. You can then get the key from your download inventory and add the game to your Steam account. You also get a $5 credit for any future Amazon downloads, so it's a really nice deal.

So far, it feels like the Deus Ex I remember, which is kind of good and kind of disappointing because it's over a decade later and the gamier elements seem more ridiculous as the production values go up. I'll say more when I'm done with the game.

Prototype

Prototype is an open world super power game. When it came out, it was frequently compared to Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, which was made by the same developer (Radical). The feeling was that Prototype wasn't quite as good, but hopefully the sequel would be better. Activision fired half of Radical after Prototype came out, so I don't know about that, but I do know that so far a lesser Ultimate Destruction is still better than most of what I've been playing lately. Plus all the different combat modes I can switch to have put me in hot key heaven trying to master all this power, a tiny bit like Magicka.

Also, I'm finding myself having all these weird memories of virtual New York. I've been here so many times. Grand Theft Auto IV was the most recent trip, and at a similar level of graphical fidelity, so that's the game I most often remember. Those were the projects where Dwayne lived. Here's a section of walled street that stuck out in my mind so I start looking for the nearby bowling alley that Niko had to go to so many times.

Some of the buildings in Central Park immediately take me back to Alone In The Dark. Pretty much every structure in the park had to be investigated and cleansed in the eternal night of that game's midsection. I had to use a rope to climb around the burning part of that silly castle in the middle of the park. I think that castle was also the entrance to Alone In The Dark's underworld.

And even though it was much lower fidelity, I also get flashes of Spider-Man 2 once in a while. I'll remember swinging down a particular street, or think I know which building Doctor Octopus' penthouse lab was in.

I may never go to New York, but I feel like I've been there a lot.

And I know there are a lot of cabs in New York, but this is ridiculous!

Keepalive: Various And Sundry

2011-12-17T15:00:00.000-08:00

written by Blain Newport on Friday, 16 December, 2011

Public Service Message

I probably should have mentioned these earlier, but the fourth Humble Indie Bundle is available for the next ten days. I've usually owned the games I cared about in the bundles already, but they're a good, cheap way to try a lot of indie stuff.

Pay what you want, and if you pay above the average (which was $5.33 when I wrote this) you get a couple extra games. This particular bundle also includes soundtracks to all the games. Also you can decide how much of your money goes to the game developers, bundle organizers, and / or charity.

There are other bundles trying to cash in on the success of the HIB, but they tend to include inferior games. Buyer beware. Public service message over.

Orcs Must Die

I want to like Orcs Must Die. It's got personality and looks. But it never gels. When I succeed, it's often boring. When I fail, it's usually because I made a bad decision picking abilities at the very start of the round, and that's the worst kind of trail and error gameplay. And the progression of the maps, abilities, and difficulty never seems purposeful. Nothing builds on anything else.

Limbo

That's Limbo. It's got good art. The gameplay is pretty much designed to have you die in different ways as you learn what you're supposed to do to progress. The dying is often more fun than succeeding, and there's not enough variety, but it's okay.

NightSky

NightSky is a physics based platformer. I do not like every other physics based platformer I have ever played. I would never have played NightSky either, but it came with the HIB.

NightSky is simple and varied and joyful and mostly easy. I recommend it for everybody and everybody's kids. :) Actually, that's not entirely true. People who enjoy soul crushingly difficult physics games like Trials 2 might not get much out of NightSky.

And for no reason, here's how silly it can look when you pull an enemy into barbed wire in Bulletstorm.

Recidivism

2011-12-11T18:00:00.000-08:00

written by Blain Newport on Sunday, 11 December, 2011

Saints Row 2

After the disappointment that was Saints Row 3's story, I decided to go back through Saints Row 2.

Here's the character I made. He's a cheerful, portly fellow. But he takes no guff.

He does look a bit out of place leading the Saints.

But thanks to the Gentlemen of the Row mod, I was able to give him a gang of his peers as backup.

Killing Floor

Killing Floor held another holiday event. For a few weeks you can fight elves, reindeer, and gingerbread men instead of the usual zombies. I'm not sure which is creepier.

I also heard that the current nVidia drivers (the 280 series as of this writing) were lousy, so I went back to version 275.33. Bulletstorm works now. Oh PC gaming. :(

I also dumped some time into Terraria because they had a huge content patch. The new content was mostly cool, but the new ore types took too long to find, the new bosses were too difficult, and controlling the outbreaks of "corruption" and "hallow" never seemed practical or worthwhile.

Everybody Loves Pirates

2011-12-02T14:00:00.000-08:00

written by Blain Newport on Friday, 2 December, 2011

CD Projekt Red recently talked with PC Gamer about piracy. I normally tune out piracy talk, but CDPR is the only triple A developer not using DRM, so I thought their CEO, Marcin Iwinski, might have an interesting perspective. He really didn't. He walked through a very rough calculation of how many people pirated the game and talked about how educating consumers and offering extras like soundtracks, making-of videos, and books are the only way you can compete with pirates.

You can imagine how disappointed I was when Joystiq and GamesIndustry.biz chose to run his off the cuff piracy figure as their main headline.

Then GamesIndustry.biz ran an editorial on the subject. It was very strange to see an editorial criticizing "the media [for] breathlessly reporting the results of his paper napkin calculations as cold, hard fact", when that site was one of the offenders. Plus the editorial ignored how CD Projekt had beaten the pirates, which seems like what its audience would want. But the editorial was trying to point towards getting better numbers so that we can finally have a proper discussion instead of mindless hand waving.

(You can skip this bit.)

Then the comments were a bunch of mindless hand waving. (Aren't they always?) GamesIndustry is a British business site. Consumers aren't, to my knowledge, even allowed to comment. And the amount of ignorance coming from industry people, especially Chief Marketing Officer Bruce Everiss, was amazing. First he claimed that piracy was the reason publishers stopped working with certain companies. He basically said Commodore and Atari died out due to piracy. There wasn't piracy on the IBM-PC!? This has to be a joke.

This is from a man who worked for Codemasters, a company that moved on from Commodore and Atari computers to the NES, then built a lock-out chip bypass so that they could cheat Nintendo out of licensing fees! So they love piracy when it lines their pockets. Not only that, but he goes on to state that "20% of the workforce were made redundant because of PlayStation 1 piracy".

While I'm sure piracy played a part and layoffs are never cool, isn't it more likely that it was simply easier for management to scapegoat nebulous pirates than to be truthful about their own mistakes? Codemasters created zero intellectual property on the PS1 that I can find. Everything was licensed: sports, toys, even a clothing license, so they were always splitting profits. Plus Codemasters had dumped the budget titles that earned them their success, so they were a budget brand selling full price products.

But that's the real key here. Piracy is a bogeyman. While it is a bad thing for sales, it's a fabulous godsend as a lie.

Publishers have to make PC versions of their games. Shareholders see how much money World of Warcraft and The Sims and Starcraft 2 and little indie games like Minecraft are making on the PC. Publishers have to tell shareholders they have a plan to get that big money, even if they don't. And when they don't, they blame the pirates.

The GI editorial is trying to call out for better information about how much of piracy is really lost sales. It's a nice idea, but why would a publisher pay money for a study that could evaporate their best excuse?

Everybody loves pirates.

Steam Autumn Sale

2011-11-27T18:00:00.000-08:00

written by Blain Newport on Sunday, 27 Rowvember, 2011

I picked up a couple games during the holiday sale and was gifted a third. Thanks Chris! :)

Payday: The Heist

Heat was a pretty awesome movie (if you don't find Pacino's yelling too ridiculous). The idea that "someone should make a game like that" has been floating around for years. And while Payday cribs so much from Heat it should probably be paying royalties, I didn't find it to be that game. It's basically Left 4 Dead but with law enforcement as the zombies and a lot more "stand still and defend this area" objectives, which aren't really so fun. They might be on to something, but this first effort isn't that great.

Bulletstorm

I was hoping Bulletstorm would be a high production value version of NecroVision. But since the game crashes reliably at the start of act two, I'll never know.

Rage

(not the best picture, but meh)

Between Saints Row 3 crashing, Minecraft hitching, and Bulletstorm plain not working, I was beginning to think something was wrong with my computer. But Rage runs and looks so good that that scenario is now hard to imagine. I know they were shooting for sixty frames a second on the consoles, but with my aging rig I didn't really expect to see that kind of performance out of a game this pretty.

Yeah, it's not sixty frames a second all the time. Yeah, there's a lot of texture pop-in. Yeah, the game is like Borderlands with less loot addiction and no skill tree futzing. But I think my expectations were set low enough that just shooting dudes and driving around in these pretty environments at sixty frames per second is very satisfying, comforting, even.